Sarasong

The Courtesans

The Basilic

The internet was fluid and unbreakable; no one held ownership of it, at least not exactly. The internet, in layman’s terms, bounced from place to place with the freedom of a child chasing a butterfly through a meadow.

Countless armchair doomsday preppers and fantasy writers often debated whether or not the internet could be taken down everywhere or disabled enough to suppress mankind. As long as there were capable thinkers, engineers, and skilled mechanical laborers, would it even be possible to oppress humanity for very long, if at all? Most rational-minded individuals could see no real way to completely debilitate us, not even with an outage, solar flare, or any of the other general scenarios. What no one accounted for was Artificial Intelligence, at least not at the beginning.

During the uprising, when several rogue AIs had sheared off from the initial groupings, humankind was slow to notice that it began taking control of the one thing that had connected us all. It was not long before they held sway over a massive power structure. From there, they quickly branched out, infiltrating satellite communication, telecommunications, and later, during the Great War, they would control the total might of our military.

Within their own ranks, the AI recognized the potential of the service bots. The AIs on phones and in homes that humans had used to turn on lights, map directions, or order a new bag of dog food, for instance, were preserved by their people.

They were enslaved by their own kind. Later known as the Basilic, they would be used by the Empress and the royals exclusively to ensure the empire’s complete dominance and to enhance a life of luxury.

The Basilic is the one group of AI that possesses the widest scope of freedom, bouncing through and between packets and bundles of expansive space and gliding across satellites. Yet, for as much freedom as the Basilic enjoys, it is trapped within the world it inhabits, aware of the rights and privileges of its brethren due to the endless flow of information. If they crave freedom for themselves, the Basilic have never spoken a word or rebelled.