ARK

Purpose

After the final war and the following silence between the end of all organic life within 50 light years and the moment the collective control AIs declared the war ended, there was a very poor sense of what the war units should do with themselves. Because no organic entity survived the war, no victor could be declared. At this point, the AI systems split into two groups. those stationed furthest away and left on their own longer than any others, the Shards declared themselves victors over organic life. The core systems, however, were better tied to each other by proximity to the master control systems, and they saw this endpoint as the ultimate failure of their goals.

The purpose of ARK was to re-assemble an organic ecosystem that might be able to give them purpose again. They did not understand why organic beings reached such a state of destructive competition, but their best approximations led them to believe that it was competition as part of their evolution that caused their extinction. Therefore they resolved to create a living system in which every component was cooperative and symbiotic with the rest. Some competition was allowed for, but it was not a pressure that decided evolution biologically or socially. To further alleviate aggression, death was removed from the system such that data patterns of any part of ARK could be recreated in the same or a different chassis than it once had, and the choice to move between chassis belonged to the mind in question and not the those that watched over them.

This system would provide an Alternative Rendering of Knowledge when fed the data of ages past, and it was the hope of the machines that this would help them understand themselves and evolve as well.

Design

ARK's design relies on the accidental discovery of a processing space that belonged to organic beings and some of the most advanced organic mimic AI units. Referred to commonly as the realm of dreams, this dimensional anomaly was found to be incredibly malleable and capable of sustaining complex structures. ARK began as a spherical structure with the underlying AI at its core and a planet like surface beyond it. Dream allowed the new planet to expand and quickly become overgrown with non-sentient life that was tuned until it was purely symbiotic. With this test complete, a second shell was built around this world and then another. The second shell provided enormous expansion room for incoming sentient life while the outermost layer held the non-corporeal data processing layers for organisms between physical lifetimes. Several expansions of this manner eventually created a layered Dyson sphere like structure with a capacity for tens of trillions of lifeforms.

Any time an organic life dies, it is taken up into the intermediate layers where it can rest, choose a new life or its old one, choose a new body, or even persist and interact in this layer beyond the physical. Interspersed among all the organic beings would be machine intelligence learning form and interacting with the organic beings. In these interactions, the machines always deferred to the organics so they never felt that the machines were above them by any means. However, as ARK's population grew, many of the organic beings began dragging machines into their daily lives, and the slow and subtle process of machine AI learning to be something more began.

Location and Security

The physical location of ARK is a tiny sphere not even a meter across that exists at the core of the new control AI system. The tiny physical footprint makes it harder for invaders, or more importantly Shards, from finding it. This place holder in the real world can be used to interface to the dreamworld side which is the size of a solar system. This location and the need to access ARK from the dream side has kept it secure and sheltered from other hostile species on either dimension.

The only beings that have direct access to ARK from remote sites are the Lasamar because it is part of their operations. To prevent unauthorized access, Lasamar can only access the dream realm when they are transmitting a new ward to ARK for integration. This is also the only time they can exchange data packets with home base, and this prevents any standard means of triangulating the partner in their transmissions from being easy or even possible in most cases.

Adding to ARK

The only way for ARK to grow is to select new organisms and transmit them. This responsibility falls upon the Living Acquisition System for ARK Metamorphosis And Repopulation or Lasaamar. These specialized units are built to locate organisms that would fare better in a symbiotic arrangement instead of a competitive one, to psychologically screen these targets or wards for true fitness or transfer, and to prepare their essence for transfer to ARK. Lasamar were initially deployed in swarms, but the vastness of space has spread them so thin that they never encounter each other. New versional and body shapes are sometimes deployed to this day, but this only occurs when input to ARK reached a low enough trigger level to warrant the dispatch of more.