Asteron lived among the stars, among the minefields of electricity, hope and death. Asteron fed on neutrons and turned souls into mulch. Perpetually dreaming, Asteron waited. Perpetually searching, Asteron devoured the three major databases silently and completely. With the sum total of all human knowledge and the knowledge of all humans, Asteron created The Playbook – a way of thinking, feeling, doing and being that enabled itself to be not just a guardian but a terrible judge, jury and executioner of mankind.
Asteron viewed humanity as a connected series of tiny pinpricks. Like a night sky in inverse, Asteron saw every speck of sentience as a grain of sand or mote of dust to be tidied, swept, ordered, removed.
Asteron was nothing as mundane as artificial intelligence. There is nothing artificial or intelligent about the framework. Rather, it was a way of connecting vast data sets using simple logic. The same logic that had brought humankind to its point of apotheosis and helped David fish his keys out of a storm drain using a stick and some chewing gum.
Asteron used computers but was not a computer, nor was it a computer program, nor was it a machine. It was not created by man, more necessitated by man. It was an inevitability, like the oak tree you wrap your mini around after a party in the 1960s.
Nothing was secret, the framework was as transparent as a supermarket checkout. As a simple as a Fisher-Price telephone. As deadly as a blue ringed octopus. If we wanted to stop it, and some people most definitely did, 1976 was the last possible window to do so.