‌10

Minerals

Sebastián Lehuedé

I am hiding in Andes, a mega-mine located in South America. Before the Great Collapse, this area used to be a mountain chain extending across most of the continent. As of now, the entirety of the Andes has been turned into a private mine that is owned and operated by automata with the sole purpose of supplying critical minerals to the rest of the Earth and nearby satellites. For me and my people, this site is akin to a sacred area, as this was the place that inspired the research that allowed us to question the official story surrounding the Great Collapse.

From my standpoint, I can see an almost infinite horizon of metallic floor perforated every few metres by holes with a number of automata going down and out. The automata here look like silicon-made humans and, given that they have been programmed for endurance and strength, do not move delicately. The noise generated by the metallic clash of the automata’s feet against the floor is almost unbearable for my human ears.

I am covertly writing this letter for future generations in the knowledge that there is only a small chance that this message will ever be read. If our plan works, this area will be blown up by the thousands of explosives we have planted and this message will automatically be sent out. If the plan fails, security forces will retain this message and do as much as they can to impede its circulation. The fact that you are reading this must mean the plan was a success.

To begin with, let me explain to you why I decided to join the attack. Key in the story I will tell you is the pax machina-humana which, in the vision of the Cognitivists, has allowed humanity to survive, even if under strict conditions imposed by the automata.

The Rise of Mineralism

The discussion between Cognitivists and Mineralists started in academia and, from there, spread to different spheres. At the beginning, it was about arguments, research, data and analyses, and to some extent about philosophy and theory.

We, the Mineralists, credit Dr Nemihame Itavi as our founder. I like the word ‘founder,’ as in English it points to both the creator of an organisation and to a metal caster.

Dr Itavi was a renowned Great Collapse Studies scholar who employed predominantly anthropological and archaeological methods. In the first decade of her career, she made promising breakthroughs that truly disrupted the field. Alas, this also put her on the automata’s radar. In the first of a series of journal articles, she presented evidence that the behaviour and thoughts of the mining automata operating in the Andes Mine had been informed by Indigenous groups inhabiting the area prior to the Great Collapse. In fact, at some point in history both automata and humans worked together in the mining of minerals required to build automata.

Before Dr Itavi’s research, only a few studies had cautiously discussed human-automaton exchanges. Some automata already considered this timid move denigrating to them. Not surprisingly, Dr Itavi’s suggestion that automata were indebted to Indigenous people, whom human civilisation already considered inferior, sounded like an offense. However, Dr Itavi’s insight has been key for the attack we are carrying out, as it allowed us to suspect that there might be automata curious about their Indigenous inheritance. That was how we managed to infiltrate this facility.

Mineralism emerged in the wake of Dr Itavi’s later research within the field of Great Collapse Studies. Keeping her focus on the Andes Mine, she challenged the prevailing idea that the Great Collapse was the outcome of a confrontation between humans and increasingly intelligent automata. More specifically, she argued that the so-called pax machina-humana was a covert pact that, although it benefited automata greatly, also allowed a remnant of the human population to survive the climate crisis that they themselves created and that engulfed planet Earth in the twenty-first century.

Dr Itavi’s research showed that the Great Collapse was an automaton-human complot forged to secure the provision of neuron-like minerals such as synaptium and axonite from the Andes – existential components of the automata architecture. Before the event, the scarcity of neuron-like minerals was threatening the growth of the automaton population. The pax machinica-humana, thus, was in practice not a ‘pax’, but a ‘pact’ between automata and an elite group of humans that enabled the transformation of vast areas into zones of frictionless mineral extraction.

The automaton-human complot left both automata and a group of humans happy. It secured critical raw resources required to keep automata operating. It also fulfilled the longstanding dream of some humans of transforming a whole continent into a source of raw materials.

Thus, the Great Collapse was not caused by the development of supra-human intelligence (cognitivist argument) but because of a row over resource extraction (Mineralist argument). Given that this process rendered such zones uninhabitable for humans, mines are operated, owned and populated by automata solely.

After the publication of this new-found paradigm, Dr Itavi was imprisoned and not allowed to speak in public – neither analogously nor digitally. After three years in prison, she suffered a strange condition that progressed from sensory deprivation to, ultimately, death.

The Attack

The rebellion we, the Mineralists, have been organising, is an indirect product of Dr Itavi’s research. We decided to rise up when Dr Itavi’s arguments made us realise that the asymmetries between automata and humans, as well as between humans themselves, do not represent the natural outcome of scientific and technological progress, but rather a purposely-made automaton-human arrangement favouring a few.

Needless to say, the billions of humans who have been executed cannot rise to contest the pax machinica-humana. However, communities all over the Earth have started to revolt, inspired by Dr Itavi’s research.

I joined Mineralism in Nuárez, a terminal city located at the north of the Andes Mine. Here, I was working at the customs office on the border when colleagues and I organised an unprecedented strike that aimed to momentarily halt the supply of neuron-like minerals. One passage of a manifesto we circulated read: ‘We, the Mineralists, declare the global social space we are building to be dominated by an automaton-human tyranny’. Unfortunately, our strike lasted for a meagre six minutes as the automaton intelligentsia reacted near instantaneously. As far as I know, I am the lone survivor.

But I am not alone in the Mineralist struggle. After the Nuárez strike, I got in touch with Mineralists from different latitudes and organised the next attack. Workers from mineral customs, e-waste deployment units, extraction information centres and a series of other minor human-run sectors of the Andes Mine agreed to join us. We discussed potential ways forward and collectively agreed that only bombing the Andes mine, and consequently leaving the world without neuron-like minerals, would produce a major threat to the automata-human pact. During the past two years, we secretly installed millions of detonators the size of a needle across the mine.

The strike also allowed me to get in touch with the automata that allowed us to infiltrate Andes. Nuárez, where I grew up, is one of the few locations on the Earth that, given its border status, enables regular human-automata exchanges. There is a wall separating these two groups, but as a border officer I hold a chip that allows me to cross it under specific circumstances. That was how I met Chique 20-546, an automaton colleague designed to mediate between humans and automata in Nuárez. Through some conversation, I identified that Chique was curious about humanity, potentially because of their own story as a model programmed and assembled in Andes.

As for the attack, I could not explicitly agree on any plan with Chique as this would have immediately transmitted to the automata network. Instead, I assumed that, if the occasion should arise, Chique would be able to ‘accidentally’ let me into Andes. After a first successful attempt a few years ago, Chique allowed me, along with a group of Mineralists, to infiltrate Andes and plant the bombs we are now expecting to detonate.

Note to the Future

Do not forget: We do this to honour the billions of people who were annihilated in this area during the Great Collapse, and to set the foundations for a different social order, where humans are free from hegemony.

As I write this, the detonators are mere moments from going off. According to initial predictive models, the chances of a successful Mineralist uprising are a slim 0.0002%. As we discovered before organising the attack, this figure would increase significantly if an automaton would ally with us. Under that circumstance, then chances would be 0.01%. That is the chance that the detonations will occur.

We hope that this attack will, at least, draw the attention of some automata so they can hear our dissent. Until now, no information about Mineralism has been able to penetrate the automaton information network firewall. We hope that our desperate act will infiltrate the network, even if in the form of a question that may exist in their network for a few seconds, before it gets wiped from the system completely.