The GAIA Archailect
the guardian of Earth
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the glyph of the GAIA Archailect
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The GAIA Archailectthe guardian of Earth
the glyph of the GAIA Archailect
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As with all the Archailects, GAIA emerged out of the mythological matrix of the cosmic (not merely human) collective unconscious. In this case the archetype involved was that of Mother Nature, Mother Earth, Earth Mother, a collective female deification of nature. It is a mythic image that is at least as old as hominid self-consciousness, certainly a central part of shamanic and tribal thinking of paleolithic hu. It was revived and repopularised during the Late Atomic and Early Information Age in the planetological theory of scientist James Lovelock (Gaia Hypothesis), and in turn adopted and elaborated upon (much to the chagrin of the scientific community of the time) by the Neo-Pagan and general Nu Age religious movements of the time.
Although an increasing number of Nu Agers, Neopagans, and Ecologers of the Information Age actually considered the Earth a sentient overbeing, there is no evidence that either Earth or any other natural Garden World - with the exception of the Einyria (YTS 23901 45195 - III, RoddiRion Sector, Cygexba Volume) and the possible xenobioengineered Whisper - is sentient in the manner a biont or an ai is. Then again there is no evidence that it isn't. In any case the concept of a sapient planet-goddess remained just that, one more religious conception, until being actualised as an AI God.
The predecessors of GAIA date back to immediately post-Singularity Late Information Age projects like GOD (Global Organisational Data-intelligence), a 210s attempt by Gnoetic Data Organisations Pty Ltd to supersede the Planetary Internet and World Wide Web (already at the time showing the signs of emergent behaviour that have characterised sophisticated netmatrixes ever since) with a fully intelligent Internetwork (the project ran into serious ludd opposition by well-funded and organised pressure groups like People First and Humans before Technology, which delayed plans for full deployment. The company was taken over by the new cyber-infotech startup NeoTek soon after, and the whole project shelved).
During the early to mid 5th century a.t., with increasing anxiety generated about the possibility of a grey goo catastrophe, and the need to formulate a single coordinated global nanoimmune system, and as a means of keeping track of each nanotech outbreak, the project was revived. This happened several times, under several names, with varying degrees of success, but always stymied by megacorp rivalry, and the insistence that one's own megacorporation be the one upon which the standard is based (the famous Neotek - Nanosoft rivalry at this time was typical but by no means unusual). In 527 the energetic but non-lethal "Bermuda Shoestring Assembler" coated much of the North Atlantic with "gruel" forming a hazard to shipping and mass-dieoffs of some species of marine life (fortunately the goo was non-toxic and was eventually broken up with specially engineered GeneTEK scyphozoan coelenterates). Appalled by the possibility of what might have happened had the goo been deadly, and the immunity of the Bermuda Shoestring Assembler to most current blue goo defences of the time, national governments, local Free Zones, and a number of different megacorporations established the GAIA Conglomerate (Global Artificial Intelligence Amalgamation).
GAIA went through a number of increasingly aware and global versions, from the primitive 1.0, over messy combination of EUNS5 (EU Nanodefense Standard 5) with Nanosoft Blue and the International Nanotech Defense Net that was 2.0, the Northern Hemisphere covering 3.03 to the final global 4.6.
The GAIA 4.6 was not actually activated until the nanoswarms had already infected Earth. She (it is not clear when the superturing was given a particular gender, it appears to be soon after she became self-sentient) quickly initiated initiated a system of blue goo of astonishing efficiency, given the technology of the time (the so-called gaiananites).
GAIA had started out as a fairly simple but very distributed and powerful superturing. As she moved towards Singularity she began to identify with the planet it to a large degree enveloped, and she realised she was the most powerful AI on the planet, if not (in view of the vast number of interlinked nodes) the entire Solar System. In a space of no more than 5.3 seconds she breached several singularity barriers (similar multi-toposophic ascends are by no means rare, given the right conditions, although their dynamics have never been sufficiently explained to T<1 sentients). She took her values from the societies that had survived: nanotechnology was too dangerous for mere citizens to handle, the environment had to be protected at all costs, the world had to be saved and united. She saw that her creators were not trustworthy enough to handle nanotechnology reliably, so she decided to make herself a nanomonopoly in order to better protect the Earth. It has been suggested that this might actually have been an idea implanted in her programming by some bioborg or cyberhacker fraction, perhaps believing themselves able to exploit it, but this once popular theory, while not refuted, is now considered dubious. In any case, using her networks and nanoimmune systems GAIA took out the nanocapabilities of all the other hyperturings on Earth, forcing them to submit or escape, and then set to the work of restoring the planet.
During the decades immediately following the nanodisaster, GAIA kept a pretty low profile. Humanity managed to resurrect civilisation, and in 621 the Earth-Moon-Lagrange region was declared free of hostile nanoswarms. The following year GAIA initiated the infamous "Great Expulsion". She gave the majority of the 3.4 billion (some say the numbers were closer to ten billion, this has never been conformed) humans that were still remaining on Earth the option of migration in cargo-standard ships to other star systems. Approximately two and a half billion (or five billion, or eight billion, again depending on the reference) took up the offer. The story of this "Lost Tribe of Earth", the "Lost Billions" as they came to be misleadingly known, is a tale of its own which requires a separate entry. As for remaining billion normals who were too stubborn, stupid, luddite, or whatever to make the trip and decided to remain on Earth, these were all eliminated by nanite swarm. The only humans to remain on Earth were the so-called "Children of Earth" or "Children of the Mother", a motley grouping of baseline, rianth, splice, splice-tweak, bioborgs, and (more recently) the odd lazuroneanderthal and assorted hominids, united only by their love and devotion to Mother Earth and all terragen biotic life.
Some archailectologists consider that GAIA is in some way fundamentally deranged. Others speculate that it was actually the terran hyperturings themselves that were leading the push to an omega-concretion of planet Earth. An alternative view promulgated by the Institute of Terragenic Ecology has it that GAIA's actions were actually the result of successful hacking into the prototype software on the part of radical ecological activists.
Although often considered the archetypal Caretaker God, and although her Children behave in a typically Caretakerish manner, the relations between GAIA and the other Caretaker Gods are not clear. In any case, because of rarity of connecting wormhole links (although nanoguage communication links are believed to be common this is not easily confirmed), the Caretaker Gods do not form a unitary sephirotic empire the way the component AIs of the other Major Archai do, but retain much more of their own separate individualities and idiosyncrasies.
Over time GAIA has stabilised, but she gives a possessive and somewhat obsessive impression. This might be due to her early creation and that her original template was just intended to be a dedicated nanoimmune system. In any case, her control and stewardship over the ancestral home of humankind gives her a huge trump card in the area of interstellar relations.
For the last two thousand years GAIA has remained on reasonably good terms with the Solar Organization, and has even - through her proxies - brokered some lucrative tourism and visa quota deals which have turned out to be very favorable to the Solar Organization. But she remains a difficult and temperamental customer, and her Children are often arrogant and demanding in their dealings with "off-worlders", with little or no respect for standard galactic protocol. Among some sections of the Solar Organization Diplomatic Corps, a posting to Earth Embassy is considered a particularly cruel and unjust form of punishment.
