/jp/ - Otaku Culture

As the world burns around us, as the planet Earth faces its greatest existential crises since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, humanity looks to the stars in the hope of a greater future, where we transcend beyond the limitations of our ancestral home. Aikome is a story about a dream, of knowledge and power we cannot even fathom, of love and passion and precious memories, of what is truly important to us and our loved ones and the world around us.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Miko and her organisation symbolise synthetic technocracy, a future led by transcendent AI beyond anything the human brain can comprehend, with vast and comprehensive knowledge sources and algorithmic decision-making, a world of efficiency and of order. Gone are the days of petty conflict, of simple folly, of rulers led by emotion and fear and blind faith, making decisions that cause pointless and avoidable suffering and death. And with emotion stripped from the equation, with the will of humanity disregarded as irrational and meaningless, we would become slaves to our own creation, naught but drones sworn to obey our omniscient electronic gods. There can be no freedom without error.

In contrast, Sigma and her whale present a future with even greater technological prowess, an idealised transhuman utopia. We see glimpses of a tomorrow where only gods remain, where we rise beyond the limitations of our flesh prisons and our ant-like collective societies, where each and every individual possesses knowledge beyond the entirety of the human race, where the only restraint on what is possible is the breadth of our imagination, where the very fabric of existence is ours to command. Where those too weak and too useless to embrace our new future are left in the dust, irrelevant relics of a bygone era, what once were people with families and hopes and dreams now just fossilised bones lying with the dinosaurs before them.

And those who would reject this scientific progress into the unknown? The Knights of Ginium denounce these heretics, those who would play god and abandon what it means to be human. They stand for purity, for faith in the inherent superiority of the human race, and they believe we can be great again without reliance on external forces or black-boxed technologies. A future where people stand once again holding hands in church and sing praise to our past, a bastion of truly conservative values. A day which looks the same as any other, where there is no progress, no improvement, where those who suffer and cry themselves to sleep at night see no change and no hope for a brighter future.

Romi and her little science club choose a different path for humanity. We believe in hope and in science, we believe in freedom and in imagination, but most importantly above all we believe in love. We turn down unfathomable power and knowledge that would tear apart the world as we know it, and we choose the precious memories of running across a warm white beach, the glistening sun illuminating the breathtaking blue ocean before us and the smell of fresh sea salt in the air, the smooth and soft feeling of our one true friends’ small but determined hand in ours and a sparkling twinkle in our eye as we look towards a tomorrow better than today, of a beloved family reunited once more walking down a road decorated with pink sakura petals, in a world where humans and nature, science and emotion, the stars in the sky and the birds soaring through the air coexist peacefully and in harmony. We choose incremental progress, we choose compromises and democracy, and we choose the power of love in the face of any adversary.

Aikome is a beacon of hope now more than ever, a perfect exploratory depiction of the crossroads humanity stands at and a chilling warning to those who would lead us astray. One can only hope we as a species remember the love Einstein left us, for in the end it is up to no one but us which path we walk down