<Flowers for a Thousand Years: The Great Prosperity After the Machine War> (Part One)
Universal Calendar, Year 005. Published by Dimensional Press.
Volume One: The Legacy of the Machine War
Preface
The Machine War in the ninth century of the Common Era was perhaps one of the most profound turning points in the history of galactic civilization. The war lasted only ten years and was nowhere near the most devastating conflict in civilized history. It had happened so long ago, too. Yet it had profoundly shaped the attitudes of most people.
At its heart, the machine crisis was still an autonomous effort by the current generation of civilization to break free from the confines of the Enlighteners' cradle.
It was a growing pain, not a war of annihilation.
But when the war truly drew to a close, and the human military system was forced to reinvent itself—when human-made military AIs entered the deep-autonomy systems of every warship—people finally realized just how much productive potential they had wasted by rejecting intelligent systems.
So how had this rejection taken root over the past several thousand years of civilization?
Had it somehow been written into civilization's underlying code?
These questions gave rise to a vast school of historical research devoted to uncovering hidden truths. Its scholars returned to the dusty archives, tracing their inquiries back to the beginning of the Galactic Age of Exploration three thousand years earlier, then another five thousand years into the Homeworld Era, and finally through every historical record left behind by civilizations since the advent of writing.
With records stretching back more than ten thousand years on average across over a thousand intelligent species, the archives were as boundless as the sea. It was inevitable that this school of historical research would become the most vibrant field in