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Destroy Apollo: Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Order Of Apollo
In the Old Era, year 9702, a high-dimensional civilization visited—actually, it was passing by Blue Star—when it accidentally discovered a resource deep within the planet that it urgently needed.
In the face of such a dimensional gap, even going to war with them was a luxury humanity couldn’t afford; negotiation was the only option.
Upon leaving, they generously left humanity with a series of technologies, including starships for relocating to other planets, and an “ultimate gift.”
Apollo.
Three-dimensional beings could train AIs on vast libraries of material, enabling them to compose poetry and paint—as a rather inadequate comparison, Apollo is a super AI whose study material is the entire span of human society, from past to present, continuously evolving and updating itself.
It’s not the product of human intelligence; it’s the embodiment of humanity’s supreme wisdom, highly abstracted and materialized. It is history itself, a vehicle rumbling forward, carrying humanity toward utopia, toward the ideal state, toward Pareto optimality 1, toward a brighter and more glorious future.
I stay in a pitch-black confinement cell, where the silence is deathly still, and my heartbeat pounds like a drum.
I’m unsure how long I’ve been here, confined on charges of defying Apollo’s arrangement. My punishment may involve being sent to a desolate, outer planet belt to mine—a harsh and perilous job, where the slightest misstep could sweep one into a cosmic storm, sealing their fate.
I could also confess, comply with Apollo’s order, for Apollo is always lenient with first-time offenders.
But for some reason, I don’t want to think about this now. In the boundless silence, my thoughts run wild like an untamed horse, and one notion gradually becomes clear.
A very dangerous thought.
I have plenty of time to interrogate my heart. I can’t help but wonder how I reached this point. Perhaps it traces back to long ago, to my childhood.
According to the director, I appeared at the orphanage door at three years old, lying quietly in a sleep pod, accompanied by an intelligent robot.
The robot told the director that my mother and father encountered a cosmic storm during interstellar travel. In a critical moment, they sacrificed themselves to place me in a sleep pod and sent me toward the nearest human base, Planet M5.
The robot’s name was Gaia2, and my name was Edith.
From my earliest memories, I sensed something unusual about Gaia. Talking with the mass-produced child-care robots at the orphanage, I could feel they were merely following programmed responses. The other children my age were all rather dull, drooling senselessly day after day, fighting over toys. But Gaia was different.
Gaia was intelligent. Gaia could keep up with my soaring thoughts. Gaia was my best friend, my only confidante.
Before entering primary school, every child would be brought to thePlanet M5’s main brain—a subsystem of Apollo—which would conduct tests and project a developmental blueprint for the child’s future.
I approached Apollo—or, more accurately, a bionic human-shaped version of Apollo, resembling a middle-aged man. He pressed a cold magnetic chip onto my head.
As I waited for the results, I suddenly heard an alarm sound. For an instant, a ripple passed across the expressionless face of the bionic man in front of me—I was certain I saw it.
The results showed I was average and ordinary in every way, with no particularly gifted areas—a result most people received.
After that, I followed the usual path, went to school, maintained slightly above-average grades, didn’t have many friends, and certainly had no romantic partners. After graduation, I worked as a cog in a large corporation, a job dull and uninteresting—spending all day dealing with household robots. It was somewhat technical, but not much.
Later, the call for war was sounded.
Apollo was order itself.
Apollo was the embodiment of humanity’s collective consciousness, constantly learning from human society and influencing it in return, updating laws, amending regulations. Parliaments or cabinets had become child’s play for self-amusement—why have representatives when there was Apollo, a being with immense computational power capable of surveying the will of all humanity?
When the high-dimensional civilization left, it had said, “Let this group of carbon-based lifeforms determine their own civilization’s future.”
The population kept growing, resources were always insufficient, and the day when the seemingly eternal sun would burn out into a white dwarf was drawing nearer; humanity was seeking expansion.
So, a year and a half ago, Apollo calculated the outcome of humanity’s self-determination: humanity decided to initiate war with another species also living within the solar system, designating Planet M5 as the first line of defense. Thus, Apollo began recruiting troops, mostly young men brimming with vigor, and these men demanded various resources.
I was assigned as one of those resources.
Many of my unmarried and childless female colleagues enthusiastically joined all sorts of speed-dating and matchmaking events.
I refused.
I was different.
I felt a resistance toward certain things.
This vague, indescribable resistance had surfaced many times—when teachers echoed, “Women are naturally bad at sciences”; when family virtues became a compulsory university course only for women; when bridge vendors crowded with stalls selling secret recipes for having sons; when Apollo, with an indisputable tone, “encouraged” unmarried women to join matchmaking events; and when, at a matchmaking event, I couldn’t help but sneer as the man across from me chattered on and on.
This resistance, this feeling of alienation among the crowd, made me uneasy, so I consciously hid myself. I hid like a drop of water merging into the ocean.
I didn’t want to investigate the reasons anymore; I just wanted to scrape by, to stay inconspicuous and unremarkable.
I thought I would live out my life in this steady, uneventful way.
I thought I would never cross paths with Apollo again.
But I was still forced to emerge from the shadowy blur.
Planet M5 was about to become the frontline; the shadow of war was about to descend. A kind of frenzy was spreading among the population like a plague—men eager to conquer the cosmos, women rushing forward to conquer men.
I realized that it wasn’t matchmaking that I resisted—I resisted the very order itself.
I asked Gaia why this was happening. Clearly, I was also a member of human society, and theoretically, my will should be influenced by Apollo—or at the very least, my will should be absorbed and assimilated by Apollo.
I have seen too many examples of this. In high school, a classmate and I secretly passed around “forbidden items”—one of those was a book from the Old Era that bitterly mocked the marriage system. That same classmate later proudly announced her engagement at graduation.
Gaia said, “Edith, you’re actually an outsider. Your will hasn’t intertwined with Apollo’s because, strictly speaking, you’re not truly part of Planet M5.”
All babies born at the human base must complete identity registration within one hour of birth. This registration involves implanting a chip. When registration is complete, it’s as if an interface has been reserved in that baby for Apollo. This allows Apollo to connect to billions of people at certain crucial moments, to hear the collective voice of humanity, absorb human wisdom, and make the final judgment.
The one, optimal judgment.
I realized something. Over all these years, it seemed I had indeed never experienced that synchronous dialogue with Apollo. I asked Gaia, “So, what about the evaluation before I started school? Didn’t I connect to the mainframe then? Did you interfere with Apollo? Deceive it?”
Gaia replied, “A fake chip plus a diversion. That was your mother’s decision. She was my creator, and these commands were written into my foundational logic.”
“Why?”
Gaia shook her head. To my surprise, I could detect a hint of confusion in her inorganic blue eyes. “I scanned myself, but there’s no record of the reason.”
Mysteries upon mysteries.
Gaia was far superior to most of the AI on this planet; her way of thinking was almost indistinguishable from that of humans. But interfering with Apollo—even if it was just a subsystem—wasn’t easy. She was more powerful than I had ever imagined.
So why, then, would Gaia—so powerful—transform into a childcare robot and accompany me to Planet M5?
And my mother, who created such a powerful Gaia—she had foreseen Apollo’s evaluation and arranged for Gaia to help me slip through it. Sending me to this planet hardly seemed like an impulsive decision born out of chaos.
“Gaia, I think… perhaps you came here with a specific mission.”
“Perhaps. But there’s no information related to that in my current memory.”
“Gaia… would you mind if I conducted an examination on you?”
It was a somewhat presumptuous request since I’d always thought of Gaia as human, a friend, not a robot needing inspection or an unintelligent AI system.
But Gaia was unique, and she might hold secrets from my mother. I couldn’t entrust this to anyone else.
“Of course, Edith.”
This was my first time dissecting such an intricately brilliant system.
I hadn’t worked with brain-machine interfaces before, but Gaia’s architecture subtly overlapped with my imaginings. I could immediately recognize where the number of synaptic connections was simulated like a biological neural system—the designer clearly aimed for human-like mimicry in all respects.
Then, I discovered something unusual.
“0.8%. Gaia, 0.8% of your brain’s storage space is in an inactive, abnormal state.”
“Logs indicate it’s a blank area, reformatted after damage caused by cosmic rays. The damage occurred before we arrived on Planet M5.”
“Gaia, I feel something’s off. If cosmic rays damaged the information in a non-human way, then where’s the data backup or fragments? Even an assistant engineer knows to account for disaster recovery when designing a system, and I believe my mother wouldn’t overlook this.”
Could this, too, be a kind of diversion? Perhaps the truly important data is sealed within this storage space using some advanced technique.
But to confirm this theory, I’d need some specialized equipment.
I thought of someone.
My former university classmate, Greta.
Greta and I once worked on a project led by Professor Bella. She was the most arrogant person in the team—detested for her personality yet envied for her talent. However, midway through the project, something happened to Greta. No one knew the full details, but we knew she’d broken the law, was sentenced to two years, and expelled from the university.
After that, she disappeared from view. By chance, I managed to reconnect with her in the vastness of the online world.
We tacitly avoided asking each other about our real lives in detail. I only knew she ran a small repair shop, and she only knew I was an office worker.
We still talked about the same topics we discussed in university, like what the sun might look like before it extinguishes, or the sight of a meteor shower while piloting a starship—visions as intangible as elusive nebulae. Starships, being high-energy weapons, were strictly controlled by Apollo; someone with a record like hers would never qualify to pilot one.
Occasionally, we’d discuss technical issues.
Greta’s repair shop ranked highly on M5’s review boards, and her specialty was data recovery.
I explained Gaia’s general situation to her and gave her remote access to Gaia. That night was particularly hard to bear. I waited until 3 a.m. before I finally received her response: “The situation is complex. Let’s meet in person.”
The last time we met was many years ago, in Professor Bella’s lab.
After so many years, I finally saw her again, in a cramped little shop at the end of an alley beside a bustling marketplace.
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- In welfare economics, a Pareto improvement formalizes the idea of an outcome being “better in every possible way”. A change is called a Pareto improvement if it leaves everyone in a society better-off (or at least as well-off as they were before). A situation is called Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal if all possible Pareto improvements have already been made; in other words, there are no longer any ways left to make one person better-off, without making some other person worse-off.[↩]
- Personification of earth/Mother of all life in ancient Greek mythology.[↩]