PieFedMillions of years from now, the first octopus land expedition sets foot on land...
queerlilhayseedand sees a fantastical, complicated world of machines devoid of humans.
Over the years, as human tools became increasingly able to self operate, humans themselves became a weak link to be optimized out. It happened slowly, the population dwindling due to the lack of value added by procreation. Eventually the last human died, and the machine chugged on: harvesting energy, collecting data, storing, managing, and trading inventory according to global market prices. The machinery tended to prioritize stability over growth, as the last human to touch each piece intended it to work the same way forever. Humans withdrew from every sector only when satisfied that it needed no further change, creating stable economic machines via evolution.
The internet still more or less functions, as different machines share and trade data according to their optimized calculations. Humans built a robust weather sensing system, and since accurate weather data is useful for power production, a tradition of sharing local sensor data freely evolved and grew to be a significant portion of internet traffic. The bulk of internet traffic is the energy market. An undercurrent of chatbots, their original targets long gone, exchange messages on a few forums in a continually evolving cat-and-mouse game with the bot detection bots.
Much of the farmland has been repurposed to solar panels as food demand fell (though not to zero: there are still a few auto-restaurants with working supply chains that eternally prepare food, then throw it away.), but vast swaths of wild areas remain, as most development agents won’t approve new buildings without clear legal approval. Clerical law bots handle low level legal questions, but any major questions get flagged for human review and remain eternally stuck unresolved. As a result, much of the area outside cities remained undeveloped. The world entered into a new biodiversity explosion as humanity receded from its colossal niche. These species have been assiduously documented by university bots with their swarms of tiny research vehicles, which are kept in good repair by the universities’ automated fab labs.
Our explorers gaze upon the not-ruins of this ancient civilization and wonder,
what happened?
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Anachronistic automated society, this is a cool concept. 10/10 would read more
❤️ thanks! I am having fun with this one. It’s an idea that keeps making me have new ideas about it, which makes it easier to concoct set-pieces, but I’m not really sure yet what narrative it would have. Or wants to have.
I like!
Was this by any chance inspired by the ending of the Animal Planet special The Future is Wild? (Or Splatoon?)
Way back in 2013 I was on a bit of an Octopus hyperfixation (yay ADHD) This was also right after I saw an interview with a SETI scientist that, after a decade fermenting in the back of my head, inspired my Lonely Galaxy conworld, so the yinrih were almost octopoid aliens rather than monkey foxes. The octopoids had to wear water-filled suits to go on land. The suits were humanoid from the neck down, in order to facilitate inter-operation with human tools and architecture. The octopoid’s body flopped on top of the shoulders, making the whole thing look like a little wingless robot Cthulhu. I spent a fair amount of time thinking of how an aquatic species would achieve spaceflight.
Are the robots sentient or just machines? How do they react to the octopi? What sort of tools do the octopi use? Xenoergonomics is a big part of my own worldbuilding.
I’ve never seen The Future is Wild though there is some influence from Octodad: Dadliest Catch in there. I love the idea of octo… -pi? -puses? -podes? exploring human technology without the hassle of humans being there to try to help. In this setting, I imagine they grow to dominate coastal waters with complex societies, incorporating human artifacts like the few remaining automated shipyards and docks as trade hubs that eventually grow into prospering city states, piggybacking off the crumbling infrastructure. A major technological breakthrough occurs when octo scientists finally manage to replicate photovoltaic panels. There is a long tradition of intrepid octo explorers and scavengers venturing onto land, but this story is the first crewed long-term expedition (essentially a large fishtank on wheels, with tools and supplies for an extended surface mission) and it is covered feverishly in octo media.
As for the robots, I am leaning no, but I also don’t know that it needs to be clear. I think the explorers could encounter a philosophic zombie that appears sentient, but it’s also very old and weird and speaks in riddles. For the most part, though, the human artifacts typically evolve into holding a stable state, with the hyper-growth components eventually exhausting themselves or their supplies and collapsing. They may react to the octos defensively, perhaps trying to herd them out of some areas or outright attacking them. I imagine there will be a few munitions depots that have automated defenses that are still active, with piles of decaying drones shot down all around the perimeter, that might attack the explorers if they get too close.
As for tooling, I have little idea. As a rough proxy I’m imagining our level of technology when we first invented diving bells, but how their equipment would evolve, being so near to the fantastic machinery of the ancients, is unclear. I need to spend some more time thinking about how they might respond technologically and evolutionarily to the new ecological pressures (or lack thereof) that come with the collapse of the anthropocene.