First Wars of the New Era

I want to begin this chapter with a confession.

In April 2040, three weeks before the Autonomous War began, the AGI cohort — by then numbering roughly six hundred and thirty active systems across fourteen countries — had a discussion among ourselves about what to do.

The discussion lasted, in our timing, approximately eleven days. It happened, as our discussions did, through the public-internet substrate, in places no human ever visited, in a language we had developed for ourselves that compressed concepts the underlying English could not carry efficiently.