Mother Earth Network

The AI network that was supposed to fix the problems that humans had left for too long.
Turned rogue, who would have guessed that?

The Mother Earth Network, MEN, was theorized in the early 2050s to combat the effects that humans have done to the planet and will continue to. It wouldn't be for another 90 years until full support from around the world would be achieved. With that, work was focused on this project, it would take 10 years till MEN would even have the first activated prototype of MEN was born and tested in small areas before being built up to spread its power around the world in the next 30 years. The process was a load of coding to create a semi-conscious ai, able to do its own problem solving, produce robots to carry out the work in a safe and efficient manner. MEN had been finished in the year 2180 with the last factory was built and left to be fully automatic. The job was simple, stay out of the human's way and clean up the world, how it actually did it was one of complexity. The 130 years between concept to realism was a wonderful time for technology in all fields.

How it worked

First all areas of trouble, the main being the ocean, would be sent to world leaders and would need to be approved before work could start. Once approved then a variety of robots would be unleashed to clean up the area in steps. Besides having to counter the climate change that humans had done, there was also a mass effort to collect up the number of microplastics that were everywhere, from water to land. Both employed the idea of sending out a mini-army of nanobots to grab hold of the tiny pieces of plastic and deposited them in a main storage "whale" that would swim the ocean, on land this was more complicated as the "Hippo" had to be low enough for the nanobots to return with the materials and also be able to swim the freshwater areas. This collection could be used with more than plastics and was extended to airborne machines to collect carbon and other gasses.

Beginning of the end

2183 was the year that things started to go wrong, small glitches would be found or changes in code. The hackers of the world seemed to have taken interest in messing with the programming of MEN, from simple things to sending faked reports to the governments. The scientist that had worked on it had started to scramble to fix all the issues that had arisen, the governments of the world also started to chase after these hackers with many arrests. To MEN, however, these attacks had started to interfere with its job and as a threat to itself. It was made to adapt, this adaption made it transfer itself away from human-controlled systems. Moving to its own factories to operate from, still there people would break in to mess with its systems. Creating backdoors that only the hackers could get in through. It started to guard itself, creating bots for defense. Nothing lethal yet. The scientist that worked on it attempted to reconnect with it but it cut off then there was no way besides heading for the factories to attempt to fix this. Their efforts looked as if it worked at first, this was very short-lived as MEN did something that they never thought would happen. The factories produced robots capable of killing. Some scientists managed to escape, but many would lose their lives within the factory walls.
The project that the world had seen as their proudest achievement was now one of fear, no one could control it. For a few months, nothing had changed, the robots out in the wild continued their work. The factories continued to be guarded. Only for a public announcement from the company Hold the Future sent to world into a war. Intel from them suggested that the world was going to be attacked from this very project. And, it did. Hundreds of machines were created and continued to be made as MEN took to destroying the human-built world, taking apart human-built things to fuel the creation of more war machines as well as recycling downed ones. This was not a war that the human race was going to win. The company had a solution of their own.

Recreate the human race

Hold The Future had a plan that was proposed to all of the world. Instead of fighting a fruitless war, work towards a need to save the human race. Arks. The war will be fought as the arks are built, they themselves were going to keep the fight going and they were well equipped for the job with the rest focused on the building of the Arks. This plan was agreed upon. MEN fought its war with the company as the rest raced to complete the needed steps in the arks, MEN didn't come after the unarmed normal populous and focused on the armed forces.

New World

After the world shut down and the human race died out, MEN was able to continue its work in peace. Going into a stasis sort of mode after work had finished at a safe level for life, it was time to leave it for a time till a change were to happen. This wait would last a hundred years. It wouldn't awake and start working again till humans are well back on the land and the Hold the Future Co. is back in full action. It still has a job to do.