jocaypa wrote:
The Pump was the result of several decades of preparation (mind you, the previous events happened in a lapse of a century) for an stable singularity event where the few technological leaders of several countries (that is, the 4 or 5 guys who managed more than one country's technology at a time) created a conglomerate with enough strenght to, in a lapse of two decades, gather 90% of the world's technologies in the hands of few people. Their plan was to reach a global singularity before standalone technologies were able to engineer larger-than-human intelligence and engineer their own in a beneficious way to mankind.
The result was a machine more intelligent than mankind with nearly every resource at it's disposition who still shut itself down after giving humanity the keys to create a more "perfect" civilization to thrive, and also a civilization where the machine itself could become part of the world from the very beginning.
Through these century-and-a-half, not much has been done for the environment, eventually making the situation seem bleak enough to merit a world-wide escape, which the artificial intelligence orchestrated in his short life. Now, at 2200, the question is... will the leaders of the world, having already created a technological barrier between them and low or mid-class citizens, allow everybody to come with them? Or will they leave the rest of the human race to wither while only the best and greatest flee from doom?"
Looking back to this, it seems obvious that the real utopia might arise in the "new" civilization, not in the struggle preceding it.