Part 1: Beware The Machine
Earth’s oldest folktales describe a time before humans had harnessed the power of iron or concrete: dense forests, gleaming rivers, and vast stretches of wilderness. Electricity was not yet even a distant dream, let alone the machines that it would some day bring to life. It was an Earth where people lived in huts made from mud and sticks and breathed the untouched air. People of today find these tales nearly impossible to believe, even though they know that conditions on Earth have been getting worse for over a hundred years. When, how, and where the “worse” began has been the topic of much strident debate by countless churches, scientists, and amateur historians for many a long year, but the beginnings of the worse started, most agree, with the Extraction Mechs.
The march of human civilization, despite an ever-increasing array of viable alternatives, required fuel—and lots of it. Crude grinding and boring machines had extracted all of the easily-reached material, and more capable mechanical creations were needed to perform deep-earth, undersea, and shale extraction. Better means of drawing resources from the Earth were needed. Human ingenuity begat new technologies, and a dramatic shift in energy extraction began. In 2016, the world saw the introduction of the first Extraction Mechs, ponderous drilling and scooping machines controlled from afar by human operators.
But these machines could not bear the pressure deep under the ocean, and often became stuck or buried as they dislodged mined material. Retrieving them for repairs was slow and costly. The corporations of the world continued to seek new solutions. Next Dominion Inc. was one such corporation, launched in the year 2000 by founder and CEO Imbram Joshua Herkimer Goodman (“Joshua Goodman” to everyone but his closest family) and built ruthlessly on the broken backs of the competition.
Much of Goodman’s success came at the expense of a massive financial crisis in 2010, in which he lent a masterful and manipulative hand. Business failures, ineffectual government bailouts, plant closures, widespread unemployment, and the eventual devastation of worldwide manufacturing allowed Goodman to position Next Dominion as a global leader in the fields of software, micro-processing, and advanced robotics.
In the year 2020, Next Dominion Inc. unveiled the NDI Extraction Robot, the world’s first semi-autonomous, self-repairing Extraction Mech. Next Dominion was the first, and last, to market such a tool; though ponderous, their limited autonomy and ability to self-repair crushed the competition in the search for resources. Next Dominion Inc. was poised to become the premier supplier of Extraction Mechs.
Goodman moved swiftly and relentlessly to exploit this advantage. Through bribery, legal manipulations, the promise of riches, and various other unethical business practices, Dominion soon controlled the market for advanced robotics, leaving Joshua Goodman spectacularly rich and powerful.
But Goodman was getting old, frailer with each passing minute as minor ailments gave way to greater ones. Crushing foes and ruling an ever-expanding corporate empire began to mean less and less to him. His new obsession was conquering mortality. Yet it became increasingly clear to Goodman that even the most cutting-edge modern medicine could not halt the aging process. So in 2025, work began on Goodman’s most expensive and secretive project: the Machine.
The Machine was conceived and created to accomplish the most impressive feat of Goodman’s career: his immortality. In the service of this goal, which no alchemist, guru, or holy man before him had ever achieved, the Machine was completed, tested on expendable—and soon expended—employees of the Dominion, and eventually deemed complete. In 2030, Joshua Goodman was quietly “uploaded” to the Machine.
Though Goodman’s body was burned to ash, he lived on in a virtual state, preserved for as long as the Machine could be supplied with Ununpentium 255, the isotope that powered it, And so, the Dominion’s new primary purpose was to supply unhindered access to plutonium and calcium to fuel the Machine, and to create enough Ununpentium 255 to ensure that the Machine—and Joshua Goodman—would live forever. Goodman thus required both the tools to obtain this extremely rare fuel and, he reasoned, a means to protect the Machine.
