“Mr. Wilson, you are not supposed to know.”
I think I should begin by telling you who I am. My name is Freddy Ivanov and I am 17 years old, I think. I am writing this letter as a last communication from the human species, because I am the last human.
I was born in the human rescue facilities underground and my father, Vincent Ivanov, was known as a rebel leader and was himself a computer engineer. He was a man of a great ingenuity who predicted the attacks of the robots and made an attempt to escape and to bring as many people with him as possible. He was the person who organized the human rescue facilities underground and thanks to him I still alive up to this date. He died half a year ago just before he placed me in the unknown section I am in now. The robots do not know of my existence, but I can never know for sure if I am still safe. The only thing I know is that my life will soon come to an end, which will snuff out the smallest remaining light left of mankind and bring it into total darkness.
I have never been out of the underground and seen the planet’s surface, but I have been told about it. The robot war seemed like it would never end. Eighty percent of the planet’s surface is radioactive and all life has long since perished. I have been told that once upon a time there were things called trees, grass and flowers with natural green colors. In a book I have seen, pictures of animals and how beautiful life once was on this planet. This was more than 200 years ago.
Now I sit here in a dark room awaiting my only destiny, death.
Even tough nobody will ever read this letter, I write it anyway in order to try to understand for myself what caused the downfall of the whole planet and all life on it. I will try to summarize by remembering the details my father explained before he died.
About 200 years ago, a man called Steiner laid down the first axioms, theses and theories on a subject that had never before been fully understood - Artificial Intelligence.
Its basic theories were based on the postulate that if you could input a sufficient quantity of past human conduct, behavior, and actions you could establish optimum human behavior and action in the future by taking into consideration all possible future circumstances and situations. If the machine also then had a method of continual recording of new data, of taking this data into account and operating with it in future circumstances, you would have Artificial Intelligence in its best form. A term for this was created which was “Arti-Mind”.