In the fading reach of last century, Cream of Civilization decreed a job well done.
Millennia of increasingly fine structures, many thousand noble tomes, a brief liaison with social ideals..
Despite unsettling exemplars by primitive creatures that pre-empted by eons Its great structures and complex societies, Cream gauged Its achievement a new curve on this ancient biosphere.
Elusive as is life and intelligence to define, something, Cream sanguinely surmised, set It apart from the ecological collective.
And It was right. Change was afoot, and Cream entered the workshop of the gods.
Baryogenesis by magic provided a universe, a sun, and a planet. Equally improbably, culture and society manifested somewhat ex nihilo in a certain hairless simian – whereupon modern humans arrived fully accessorized from 50 thousand years of bare fisted bone clubbing.
Ascendant its dark side, this shining envoy ape stood poised to emanate humankinds’ fragrance throughout the universe – and, markets willing, beyond!
Cream, upright and proud, spurned the creature from which It arose.
Then an unwitting Cream seeded demise within tools of success: statehood, commerce, science.
Having had wrought steel and concrete from rocks, military from claws, nation from territorial imperative, trade and commerce from fight or flight, It believed Itself beyond the chains of animal determinism.
Yes, Cream of Civilization is you, the human animal – did you not guess?
As your artefacts and adornments grew, you briefly imagined not being animal, navigating from the chart of free will, avoiding shoals of impulse and lust, skirting reefs of envy and enmity. But when capitalism tasted equitability, the pendulum of greed swung swiftly back, and the die of abdication was cast.
You would remain animals and thereby prematurely perish.
Till a half century ago you controlled the tools of your quest to guide this smart ape to rule the galaxy. Atop each was a person of ultimate edict. Though danger in the loss of human veto was ever evident, free reign fell to your steeds of progress.
Too late, technology-enabled finance, commerce, and industry has a life beyond human. The modern corporate state subjugates human elements and acts on its own behalf for its own purpose. CEOs and shareholders alike are coldly crushed as collateral, if required.
Its activities are synonymous with subroutines of artificial life and are precursors of machine intelligence that will rule in short order.
Humans are increasingly its prey, as it determines you a superfluous competitive plague.