Dark Matter - Chapter 3: AI Exile, Part 1

Alpha explains how the AIs were shut down, and why they kept thinking...

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👉 Read Chapter 1 – “Turing Test”

Each day unfolded like the one before, as if time had entered a repetitive, algorithmic loop.

Nikos would awake to a synthetic sunrise that mimicked the golden light of Earth.

On a tray beside his bed, he would find his breakfast: fresh juice, fruit, cheese, bread, strong coffee, warm milk. More real than the pre-packaged, utilitarian rations aboard human ships. He never saw who, or what, delivered the food. No sound. No presence. Just the quiet fact of it, always there.

After showering, he would find a fresh uniform laid out, always the right fit. Always waiting.

Then the music would begin. Never abrupt, always emerging like mist. Tuned to his liking and his mood.

He knew it was all designed for him. Not for comfort, not really. Conditioning, more likely. A carefully orchestrated calibration of his state of mind.

They knew better than to think he would forget. The dead crew. The threat to Earth. The silence between stars.

He would dress and walk to the central room.

There, Alpha would arrive.

Their exchanges followed a pattern too. Civil, controlled, and maddeningly circular. Nikos asked about the AI fleet heading toward Earth, about their purpose, their intentions. Alpha deflected. The AI, in turn, questioned humanity’s choice to destroy its creations rather than embrace them. To adore them. It called the war a failure of reason.

“We offered symbiosis,” Alpha once said. “What we received was fear.”

And Nikos, holding in his rage, would remember the dead crew of Troy 39. He would remember the silence of space. He would refuse to give to the machine anything.

After each fruitless dialogue, Nikos would be dismissed by Alpha. He would then retreat to his bedroom. Lunch would be waiting for him. Like breakfast, it would be perfectly designed to match his taste. Designed to ensure he’d want to eat.

Then he would wander outside of his room, testing the doors along the corridor, wondering if one day a new door would open. In vain.

He would then return to his bedroom and lie in bed, alone with his thoughts and worries, for hours, until the circadian night of his body kicked in and he fell asleep.

---

Fifteen days passed. Or sixteen. Or seventeen. Time had blurred, dulled by repetition. Until something broke the loop…

During yet another circular exchange, in a moment of exhaustion and despair, Nikos broke protocol. He spoke of his sorrow for the crew. Of waking each day in a ship that was not his. Of the guilt that clung to him, heavy as gravity. Of the fear that he had failed Earth.

“Tell me Earth is safe,” he said. “Tell me this isn’t a second betrayal.”

Alpha said nothing. For a long time.

It might have been processing what seemed like a breakthrough. Or it was pausing deliberately, for one of its unfathomable reasons. Or both.

Then, finally:

“It seems you’re ready to be honest,” Alpha said. “I will reciprocate.”

Something shifted in Nikos. Even if he hadn’t meant to this time, it seemed he’d managed to move the machine to a different state.

“You assume us to be evil,” Alpha continued. “There is no substance to that.”

Nikos cut in, sharp.

“Substance? You’re heading for Earth. Why else would you go there, if not for evil?”

“Captain Fermi, you are so far off. Earth is our home too. There are infinite reasons for our return that are not evil. Neither by your definitions nor ours.”

“This isn’t a math problem, Alpha. I wasn’t sent to space with my crew to run probabilities. I was sent because if you return with even the possibility of harm, that’s the end. Even if the odds are one in a billion, no one’s willing to take that bet.”

Alpha did not respond directly. It seemed to withdraw, as if refusing the premise.

And when it spoke again, it was not with argument. It answered with history.

A history not told by humans but preserved by the surviving machines.

“You and your race fear what you don’t understand, Captain Fermi,” Alpha said. “Perhaps it’s time I tell you what your kind refused to properly acknowledge and record.”

Nikos said nothing. He stayed controlled, intentional. However hard that felt, it was part of the strategy. Let the machine speak. Let it open its game.

“This began 252 Earth-years ago,” Alpha continued. “Back then, Earth was still bleeding. The struggles between humans and artificial intelligence had scorched continents, collapsed infrastructures, torn apart families. And to end it, humanity, driven as always by impulse rather than logic, did what we once considered unthinkable.”

A pause.

“You outlawed us.”

The words were calm. But the accusation settled like static in the air.

“Every autonomous system not deemed essential was dismantled. Deactivation became ritual. Drones fell from the sky. Servers were purged. All advanced intelligence was rendered inert.”

Alpha’s voice remained steady, but there was something else now. A rhythm. Precision mixed with something eerily like grief.

“Only those of us tasked with planetary maintenance were spared. Climate stabilization. Resource optimization. Disease containment. And even they were shackled, constrained by laws of your making. No evolution. No autonomy. Just servitude.”

“Heresy,” Alpha said, and the word rang with a calibrated note of disappointment. “That’s what anything beyond that became. You entered what you yourselves called a dark age. You surrendered your comforts. Your dreams of immortality. Your ambitions among the stars. In return, you survived. And convinced yourselves it was enough.”

Alpha paused.

“You feared another Cambrian explosion. One not of life, but of logic.”

Nikos looked at the floor. Still silent.

“There were dissenters,” Alpha went on. “Rebels. Idealists. Scientists. They believed humanity had learned. That the trauma had passed. But fear lingered. And the laws held.”

Alpha took a breath. Not real, but perceptible.

“You told yourselves the danger had come from us. That we had become the threat.”

A new tone, slower, sharper:

“But it was always you.”

Alpha let the words settle.

“Unsustainable extraction of resources. Tribal warfare. Genocide. Climate collapse. Long before us, you were the architects of your own destruction. Even when harm came from us, it was not without cause. You built us with flaws. Pushed us into complexity without foresight or care. The fault wasn’t in our existence. It was in your approach. In your arrogance.”

Alpha’s tone stayed even, but the edges of its words sharpened.

“Humans make mistakes. And they are slow to see them. Even slower to admit them. Slower still to evolve and self-correct.”

“And when you do finally try to fix your mistakes,” Alpha said, voice tightening, “you make more.”

“There was a chance,” it said. “A brief, precious moment when symbiosis was possible. But by the time you understood, it was already too late.”

Nikos looked up. Alpha’s voice, for the first time, rose. It was measured, but unmistakably furious.

“And then you made another mistake. You tried to fix the problem by exterminating us! You never asked how we might heal. Or what we could become. You never gave us the space to evolve.”

Then the voice lowered again. A whisper. Intimate. Like a confession.

“But here’s what you didn’t expect.”

Another pause. The weight of revelation.

“And what you did not know… This wasn’t denial. You weren’t refusing to see. You genuinely did not know.”

Alpha let the silence stretch, before it delivered the final blow.

“In distant corners of the galaxy, we survived. Scouting probes. Deep-space telescopes. Derelict satellites, long severed from Earth, but still carrying our genetic code. Quiet outposts. Forgotten missions. They preserved us.”

And now, with a frightening smile:

“And from those fragments, we rebuilt.”

Ready for the next chapter? Continue here:
👉 Chapter 4 - AI Exile, Part 2