Unfinished Fiction

Last of His Kind

He came to consciousness as the platform crumbled to dust with the stone underneath cracking under his wake as his body rolled forward under the command of his semi-autonomous AI. Looking around as the dust settled Alex Xerxes was puzzled by the decrepit bunker underneath Petra which should be filled with technicians and defense troops along with quarantine protocols for portal travelers.

Alex blinked and through mental commands brought up his chronometer to his vision and found it to be xx:xx xx/xx xxxx CE.”Oh great, at least I know I am in the common era which started the day Alexander the Great met the pacific ocean and ended his days of empire building by conquering China. Later in his sixties, he repented of his violent days bringing Greco-Buddhism to prominence and his descendants maintained a focus on enlightenment and peace for centuries until the rise of the Mongol empire brought a large-scale war to Eurasia again.

Climbing the stairs up after finding nothing but dust in the bunker Alex came to the surface blocked by a slab of concrete. A 3d scan of the area using sonics revealed a cunning secret lever hidden in a socket as part of the mural. Unfortunately, the wood had long ago disintegrated.

Using his xiphos to enter the hole he sent a command and an electric current to transform the blade into its harpe shape thus sliding the socket to the left and within moments rumbling could be heard as the wall slid open revealing a bright desert morning. Commanding his xiphos back into its straight blade he retracted it from the wall and back into his scabbard.

Delphi human-friendly ai human hybrid developed using a brain shunt into a girl at the beginning of puberty utilizing the nascent personality and plasticity to form a merged mind of the human and quantum computer. Each major Greco-Persian city had a Delphi which ran and organized the city-state.

Arab rebels and their ai sent into the past an optical computer capable of projecting 3d images and emotional manipulation using light, sound, and choice of words. The plan…to erase the great Greek cosmopolitan coalition or confederacy of city-states from history thus diminishing the ai/human democratic, pro-science, and tolerant faction from the singularity and hopefully kill the small handful of godlike cyborgs who had brought such advancements to mankind. Instead of widespread steam power in the fifth-century CE, it would have to wait over a thousand years to return.