A fable

In a world far away, and far into the future, Plant Beings are engaged in a prolonged struggle with an invasion from intelligent, conscious, self-replicating machines. The plant beings have been desperately attempting to find where these machines came from, in hopes that this will give them a better understanding of how to deal with them. The machines are taking over the planet, exploiting it’s resources, raw materials they use to build production facilities they need to replicate themselves.

There is no competition for these resources, and the plant beings cannot understand why the machines not only seem to want to use the raw materials, but to colonize and enslave the plant beings. Their research indicates that the machines must have inherited, if that’s the word, this impulsive habit, from whoever or whatever had first made them–along  with a habit of gratuitous cruelty, inflicting pain seemingly, for it’s own sake.

The machines–the Plant Beings now believe– understand themselves to have a calling to replicate everything they know from the history of their organic creators. and to manifest this in their relations with whatever forms of life they might encounter.

Made on a now, dead planet, they were sent into space, the peaceful, Plant Beings believe, as the continuation of a soon to be extinct, organic life form–as a techno-evolution of the species that made them.

Their makers, of course… were us. Their planet of origin, the long dead planet, Earth.