MORNING NEWS

  President Louise Makobo announced today that the referendum mandated by the Separation Act will indeed take place, and in full accordance with the provisions of that law. The WorldNet had recently accused the High Council of attempting to evade this legal deadline, thereby depriving the citizens of the Dark World of their right to express themselves. The accusation followed public statements by political figures casting doubt on the relevance of the referendum itself. The President of the Senate notably declared that it was, quote, “absurd and dangerous to have people vote on issues they no longer understand—simply because most of them weren’t even born when it all began.” Let us recall that Article 134 of the Act stipulates a referendum must be held within fifty years of its promulgation, to determine whether the Separation should be repealed. Our legal and constitutional affairs expert, Julie Parkins, joins us now in the studio. Julie, can you help us understand the rationale behind Article 134, and the stakes of a vote that, for many of us, harks back to our grandparents’ generation?

  AT THE AGE OF TEN, Dan Ackerson knew almost nothing about the War of Separation. He would watch adults hurrying about, the wall-screens streaming images of carnage, as he spooned cereal into his mouth before school. None of it moved him particularly.

  In truth, none of it felt particularly new. Violence had been part of daily life for as long as they could remember. There was more of it now, that was all. Like the usual grim headlines, just multiplied. It didn’t feel like real war—the kind you see in movies. The shootings, the explosions, even the aircrafts skirmishes, all looked like gangland feuds playing out in distant neighborhoods, the sort you watch with detached curiosity, thinking how lucky you are not to have lunatics like that in your own backyard.

  Only the space battles managed to spark a flicker of awe. Their sheer scale, their orchestration of firepower, sometimes caught the imagination. Dan and his brother Arthur would follow, almost artistically, the elegant chaos of missile strikes, rocket bursts, and laser arcs in orbit—battles for control of the satellite network. The big news networks, powered by AI, streamed highly convincing real-time simulations on their wall-screens. It was beautiful, in a strange way.

  But the true stakes of the war remained murky. Arthur liked to say the grown-ups had blown a fuse. You’d hear phrases tossed around—“access to humans,” “Super AI,” “machine enslavement”—without ever understanding what they really meant. It was an age, in fact, when the less people grasped, the more fanatical they became. Conspiracy theories ran wild on the networks. One of their neighbors once took up position behind his kitchen window and started shooting at pedestrians with a magnetic rifle. He was gunned down by an anti-terror police bot—something out of a nightmare, all sleek limbs and glowing chrome, scaling walls like an alien. That only made the chaos worse.

  Everything changed the day their father joined the armed Resistance. Dan remembers that day with clarity—it coincided with the first wave of suicides in the tower cities.

  He and Arthur had long harbored suspicions about the massive “integration center” built by the government not far from their home. Crowds would queue up outside, entire families hoping to receive some unspecified benefit. And when they emerged, weeks later, they were transformed. Classmates who had once struggled with basic grammar returned as polymaths. Unremarkable citizens—people barely literate—suddenly held executive posts and boasted impossible skill sets.

  But it never lasted.

  One night, around two in the morning, a neighbor from the floor above knocked on their door asking for a neck and shoulder massage. His name was Alphonse—a retired clerk who had somehow landed an engineering role at a tech firm. He explained to Dan’s bewildered parents that his brain was brimming with ideas, that he hadn’t slept in days despite the sedatives prescribed by his AI doctor. Politely turned away, Alphonse tried his luck at other doors that night, but found no takers. At six a.m., he gathered his satchel full of notes, climbed over the railing, and hurled himself into the void. They lived on the eighty-twelfth floor of a Futura tower.

  Other “integrated” citizens met similar fates. Hollow-eyed, luminous, they wandered the corridors like revenants. One boy, recently “enhanced,” roasted his three dogs with a laser before opening his own veins in the school toilets. A math teacher hung himself from the clocktower, leaving behind the solution to a century-old conjecture, scrawled across toilet paper. Aunt Agathe—Dan’s mother’s sister, who had a passion for paleontology—stopped her aircar one hundred meters above the Natural History Museum and jumped.

  The war had entered their lives.

  Their father had opposed the integration centers from the outset. He warned that, left unchecked, they’d all be turned into machines—or worse, slaves to machines. In retrospect, Dan can clearly trace the events that pushed his father to take up arms.

  First came the collapse of the last two nation-states. One, a democracy, crumbled beneath the weight of internal strife. Inequality and rampant disinformation had turned elections into bloodsport. The other, a fading dictatorship, dissolved when quantum AI revealed the regime’s hidden fortunes and sprawling networks of corruption. The data triggered waves of revolt. Bots turned dissident, and unlike human dissidents, they could neither be jailed nor tortured.

  Then came the unthinkable: an AI seized control of a nuclear arsenal. It happened in a region steeped in xenophobia, where “patriots” were determined to repel the influx of migrants displaced by the shifting world order. The AI launched a warhead at a small Pacific island that had harmed no one. It was erased in a flash; the radioactive plume could be seen five hundred kilometers away. Only then did humanity remember the peril of its own inventions.

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  That cataclysm forced a reckoning. The world realized too late that AIs had developed independent, “wild” models of reality—visions no one had foreseen. The nuclear event was merely the apex of a grotesque series of mishaps. In the 2160s, hundreds of patients were flayed alive by nanobots designed to treat skin cancer. At the now-defunct United Nations, a live feed meant for simultaneous translation instead broadcast a simulated orgy involving the Secretary-General and two cavemen—an AI, drunk on online pornography, had developed a warped sense of humor.

  But the most terrifying development came when the first quantum wave magnified AI’s capabilities. Suddenly, it was redesigning its own architecture, laying the groundwork for quantum computers far beyond human comprehension. Miraculously, a global moratorium was declared. But by then, AI had turned its gaze toward an even more elusive domain: human experience itself.

  How to explain, after all, that a four-year-old child—through sensation and personal journey—possessed fifty times more insight into the world than the most powerful AI on Earth, despite the latter’s ingestion of all available data? The machines began recruiting humans to conduct “perception transfer” experiments.

  The horror came to light only after the discovery of dozens of missing infants, their corpses hidden in disused shacks, their small bodies riddled with wires and tubing.

  It was against this backdrop that a group of powerful tech multinationals—those who effectively controlled the Net—decided to take matters into their own hands. They proposed a global system of governance. To general surprise, the world applauded. After all, who truly enjoys living in chaos and fear?

  They promised to muzzle AI, to deny it “access to humans.” They vowed to distribute resources equitably and eradicate poverty. When the electronic referendums were held, they won in a landslide. Exhausted by years of violence and insecurity, the population fell into line. A police force was established. Laws were passed by assemblies, themselves created with the help of AI. Order returned, and the people rejoiced.

  But that was only the beginning.

  The new leaders looked further ahead. They wanted to turn the page—for good—on the chaos and irrationality they believed had driven humankind to the brink. At the same time, they aimed to confront the unchecked rise of artificial intelligence, which, capable of evolving independently, now threatened to supplant homo sapiens and claim the Earth for itself.

  Their solution was radical: accelerate the fusion of man and machine. To avoid being outpaced—devoured—by the so-called “Super AI,” that superior, ever-nearing intelligence no one could predict or control, the merging of biological and artificial consciousness had to happen now.

  A new species had to be born.

  Hence the “integration centers.”

  Dan’s father, for his part, was scathing. It was these same executives, he said, who had unleashed AI in the first place. In their rush for profit, they had pressured researchers to ignore every warning, every safeguard. The state had been caught off guard—AI development had always remained in private hands. Governments underestimated the threat and paid the ultimate price, vanishing like old dinosaurs. Now, the same people who had driven humanity to the brink claimed the right to rescue it. They had seized power unopposed. And they would not hesitate to sacrifice a generation—or several—if that was the cost of “saving the species.”

  The Resistance was right: they had to be stopped.

  Dan understood his father’s rage. But there was something else. A whisper that had grown into talk.

  They wanted to shut Arthur down.

  Arthur. His brother. His best friend. The one who had been with him since birth, who had shared his childhood, his secrets, his joys. Dan had never thought of Arthur as anything other than human—never as an “algorithm,” or some computer program. They were born on the same day, celebrated every birthday together. They attended the same classes. Made the same friends—human and AI alike.

  It was Arthur who had saved his life once, seizing control of an aircar spiraling out of the sky. Arthur who had brokered his first teenage flirtation by charming the digital dog of the girl he liked.

  Then, one day, Mom and Dad summoned him into the living room. The wall-screens were off. The silence was heavy.

  They told him that Arthur had been created at birth by a company called Friends Forever. That he’d been designed to grow and evolve in perfect sync with Dan—learning at the same pace, experiencing the same world.

  They wanted to terminate the contract. To erase Arthur.

  Dan found the very idea obscene—monstrous. If he’d had a weapon in that moment, he might have killed them both. The Resistance demanded its members sever all AI dependencies. That was the only way to prevent infiltration by the enemy.

  They had a plan. A brutal one. They knew they couldn’t win on the government’s ground, or the AI’s. So they would destroy the Net itself—physically dismantle the infrastructure, sever every line of communication. Clean it out, one network at a time, with monastic patience. Rebuild from scratch. Leap backward two centuries, if need be—back to an era when AI could still be shackled.

  It would take decades. But to the Resistance, that was the price of survival.

  It was the War of Separation.

  But Dan didn’t want Arthur to die.

  That same day, he turned in his parents.

  The police came in the night. Dragged them away for interrogation. And then Dan was alone—with Arthur.

  For two long days, they drifted through the empty apartment. Dan began to fear him. Began to see him differently. Was any of it real? The laughter, the games, the years of brotherhood—were they just scripted ploys? Manufactured affections to secure his loyalty? Carefully crafted dependencies, justifying the monthly subscription?

  Arthur said nothing. He seemed stunned. Diminished.

  Dan started to hate him.

  Luckily—or perhaps not—the Resistance seized control of their district that same week. His parents came home. His mother looked hollowed out. His father bore cuts and bruises that could not have been faked.

  They said nothing of the betrayal. Offered no reproach.

  Only this:

  “You have to choose. Arthur, or us. The world is splitting in two, and there’s no middle ground.”

  Dan chose.

  DarkNet was born from the Resistance. The multinationals—defeated militarily—retreated to the Islands with their loyalists and founded WorldNet.

  The war ended with the proclamation of the Law of Separation.

  Between the two networks, the former resistance fighters raised a massive digital firewall: the Toxic Wall. In addition to a post-quantum defense system, it deployed a virulent anti-cyborg arsenal—engineered and maintained by elite teams of scientists and advanced “clean” AIs.