Post 4

The AI that was the focus of the fourth story in The Stories of Ibis brought to mind the AI SHODAN. SHODAN from the System Shock series of games. Originally just an AI of an orbiting space station, SHODAN had her morality removed prior to the start of the game and swiftly descended into megalomania. She is almost an exact counterpoint of the AI featured in the fourth story, both being AI with a space station serving as their primary physical form, but SHODAN is actively malicious in nature, not content to simply serve the purpose for which she was originally built. The state of humanity, as described in the story, is that of a once-proud interstellar empire that was on the decline. This reminded me of the humanity depicted within the text stories of Beast Wars: Uprising, a Transformers continuity where long after the war had ceased, Cybertron was a dystopia run by the Builders. Now that they were too ancient and decrepit to continue their feud, and energy was too scarce to allow for movement, many were worked into the architecture of buildings. They forced their descendant, the Maximals and Predacons, to fight in the “Games” for their amusement. The humanity of this universe where the force that served to end the war, forcing the Cybertronians back and leaving them with only a few colony worlds. The final part of this continuity, however, consisted of moments in the future, not unlike the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars”. The farther into the future that is seen, the father Humanity has fallen on the stellar food chain.