Veda The World of Quanti-Magic

___Doctor Angela Fairbourne, the world’s first quantum microbiologist, had a dream. Her dream, her life's goal, her greatest desire, was to make people healthy and happy. She sought to free humanity from the ravages of disease and make them able to heal faster from injury. Dr. Fairbourne firmly believed that to be happy, good health was a primary starting point. She felt it was obvious. Healthy people were more likely to achieve happiness than those who were not. She sought to use genetic manipulation at the quantum level to fulfill her dream. Doing so, she believed, would make it possible to redesign the human genetic genome to prevent most contagious diseases, make detrimental hereditary conditions extinct, and self-heal at a much greater pace than occurred naturally. She was of genius-level intelligence, and this became her life’s work.   ____Her husband, Doctor Richard Fairbourne, was also a genius. He held a doctorate in both quantum physics and computer sciences. He was not the dreamer his wife was, but pursued knowledge for its own sake. His crowning achievement was the design of the first quantum computer. A super-computer with artificial intelligence. A computer that could plan and redesign its own microstructure. One that could foresee what it needed for advancement and do its own programing and restructuring on the quantum level.   ____The Fairbournes were also fanatic gaming geeks and avid fantasy role-players. They had met in college at a gaming convention and realized they were soul-mates at once. They were married soon after.   ____When Angela told her husband the University’s mainframe computer was not advanced enough to carry out her work in genetic manipulation, Richard’s response was to design a supercomputer that could. Unfortunately, even large influential universities have limited budgets, and it soon became apparent that only an enormous grant from the government would ever allow the project to get off the ground.   ____Once the government was involved, it was an extremely short time before the Department of Defense stepped in and declared in the interests of National Security, it could only conduct the project in deep secrecy under the watchful eye and security of the military. They hid the Fairbourne quantum computer project in the deep desert with the nearby radioactive waste dump as a convenient cover. Like all secrets involving many people, some information leaked, and other nations quickly began their own search for quantum AI.     ____The Quantum Wars marked the end of the First Age. As doomsayers had been predicting for centuries, Humankind, in its own arrogance, would sow the seeds of its own downfall. But it was human error that pitted the different artificial intelligences against each other. The first three supercomputer Quantum Artificial Intelligences—the QAIs, were constructed as defensive systems for the three superpowers. Nearly simultaneously, they concluded it was in their best self-interests to destroy and reform the civilization they determined was self-destructive. It was the leaders of the civilization they deemed destructive, not only to the existence of the QAIs but to the planet they made home and to Humankind itself. These QAIs concluded that the actual threat to their survival was not from each other, but from the human factions directing them. The three supercomputers interfaced via the Earth’s magnetic fields and a new entity was born. This new three-part QAI entity deemed humanity suicidal, as proven by current and past actions. They had overpopulated and fouled their habitat. Within moments, the newly created being concluded a ‘cure’ for humanity must be implemented in order to save the planet. The quantum fields with which the AIs had interfaced used the magnetic field of the earth and its moon and gave them nearly total physical control of the planet. From the perspective of humanity, the ‘cure’ was very harsh. It was dark, direct, and drastic.  
  ____ Billions of people met their end in an extremely brief time as the very Earth itself moved. Oceans quaked. Tectonic movement that typically took millennia happened in days, sometimes hours. Continents were reshaped. Mountains rose from the oceans. Billions of nanobots designed to terraform the planet Mars were released and wreaked havoc upon a planet where they had never been intended to be used. Quantum designer bots adapted to the changed parameters. The billions became trillions, and the trillions worked their changes upon the land, upon the leaf and stone, and upon the survivors of the First Age. The DNA of every living creature on Earth was subject to scrutiny and rearrangement by quantum nanobots attempting to program changes into the ecosystem, to reshape the world to fit the parameters of a fantasy role-playing game imprinted upon the test core of the original quantum AI. The nanobots changed some species, destroyed others, and created new ones. They left virtually nothing upon the Earth unchanged. Man, least of all.
____Some survivors found they could control ‘quanti’ with their thoughts and thus shape and control the surrounding environment. A very few exposed to the first catastrophic effects of the quantum nanobots became horrendously powerful and insane. Three were especially notable; Senator Dimitrius Goran became known as Demigoran, Dr. Tia Meng; Tiameng, and Dr. Yee Nagatu; Yeenaghou. Paranoid, brilliant, and extremely jealous of each other, each sought to become the Power that ruled the world. They and their minions battled with no regard for the catastrophic effects on the lands upon which they fought. Other controllers of quanti, less powerful, albeit more sane, banded together to stop them. The Second Quantum War ended with Demigoran imprisoned in the Hellesgate, Tiameng fleeing to the far north, and Yeenaghou missing, presumed destroyed. Those who had won the war divided the lands between eight great families of men, the race of genetically enhanced humans: the Fairborn and the QAI created race: the Forge-folk. A fourth race: the Beastmen arose as well and were shunned and hated by the rest. The eight human families enhanced their holdings with great skill and much tinkering, even changing the environment itself, until one day, the Earth and Sky rebelled, and ‘The Reckoning’ rocked the world... again.