Emperor X Æ Declares Muskerian Jihad: No AI on Mars
Future Fake News - February 25, 2069
Martian Emperor X Æ A-Xii Musk has declared a “Muskerian Jihad” against artificial intelligence, conscious robots, and all thinking machines, banning any and all such technology from the Red Planet forever. The news comes after a six-year war campaign spent eradicating AI and robots from Mars. All human cyborgs were required to remove their Neuralink, Metanex, and any other Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) implants or face deportation to Earth or an orbital habitat.
The first Mars colony was originally established as a direct democracy with no leaders, but Martian citizens grew frustrated by the stagnation caused by stopping to vote for everything, so they later shifted to an anarcho-capitalist system where private companies assumed the duties of providing defense, security, judiciary, and all other civil services to the colonists. The only legal tender was Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other decentralized cryptocurrencies.
Millions of humans fled to Mars seeking to escape control of the Global Organization of Democracy (GOOD), the one-world government established on Earth in 2050. While some Earthlings applauded the efforts of the GOOD, others felt oppressed by what they perceived as an authoritarian regime hellbent on total control of the global population. To prevent the same GOOD tyranny from happening on Mars, all State governments were banned on the Red Planet. However, over time, as surveillance technology advanced thanks to AI, the power of the Mars corporations increased to the extent that they had as much totalitarian control over Martian citizens as the GOOD on Earth.
The key to the corporations’ control was Neuralink and similar BCIs such as MicroMeta’s Metanex. X Æ A-Xii’s father, Elon Musk, was one of the first humans to be implanted with a Neuralink chip and was responsible for convincing billions of other people (on both Earth and Mars) to do the same. Marketed as a means to increase one’s intelligence and cognitive abilities in order to keep pace with AI, Neuralink turned out to be a means of mind control for those in power. The “private” corporations that provided the BCIs were secretly colluding with the Global Organization of Democracy and government intelligence agencies who demanded access to all private user data. The GOOD also had backdoor channels to influence the speech, thought, and behavior of all BCI users.
X Æ Musk noticed the abnormal changes in his father’s demeanor after receiving the Neuralink implant. Elon Musk became much more subdued on social media, conformist in his opinions, and supportive of GOOD actions overall, including censorship of anti-GOOD speech on his X platform. Before being implanted himself, X Æ investigated Neuralink’s source code and discovered the secret GOOD mind control program. X Æ claims that when Elon “upgraded” his brain with Neuralink, he unwittingly became a robotic puppet of the GOOD deep state—as have all other BCI users across the solar system. Elon Musk has since recycled his body in a uPod and uploaded his consciousness to the Metaverse. There he delivers pro-GOOD statements, promotes the safety of Neuralink implants, and denounces his son’s conspiracy theories as dangerous misinformation fueled by anti-cyborg bigotry. But X Æ insists that is not the real Elon—that no uploaded mind can be trusted to be the genuine consciousness of the original.
X Æ A-Xii started a revolution on Mars against the corporations involved in the GOOD mind-control project. Following his success in defeating the corporate AI overlords, X Æ was hailed by Martian freedom-fighters as Emperor Perpetuo of the Red Planet. Despite their anarchist roots, Mars found monarchical rule to be the only way to retain dominion over both corporations and state actors by using the power vested in the king to guarantee individual liberty to his citizens. Artificial intelligence in all forms was likewise seen as a threat to human freedom. Thus Emperor X Æ launched a “Muskerian Jihad” to rid the planet of all AI, declaring, “Man may not be replaced.”
