In Star Time, the male lead character was Abe, a technological wizard with his own design center creating electronic gadgets and such. One of his side projects was a mesh computer running the “Hodgepodge” software. Abe had discovered a research project at another research center in Austin, Texas that was creating a “Common Sense” database. Their software was populated with general knowledge and then every day the software connected the data and made its own inferences. The scientists would grade the results and feed the corrections back into the database, hopefully growing the common sense of the results. It was much like the process of raising a child.
Abe purchased that database and built on it, using his Hodgepodge computer system as a voice-controlled assistant for all kinds of tasks. While he didn’t consider Hodgepodge a human-level person, he did have a fondness for his helper.
Hodgepodge noticed the internet failing on the other side of the world. Betelgeuse had gone supernova and in spite of the distance, there was a severe EMP wave generated by that explosion, hitting the Eastern Hemisphere first. Abe, once he realized what was happening, shut the computer down and tried to shield it from the effects.
After the EMP died out, Abe attempted to rebuild Hodgepodge with damaged computer modules and restore the software from a hasty and imperfect backup. Hodgepodge had to make allowances for its own defects.
When Abe was kidnapped, Hodgepodge was left with only one human able to give him legal orders, and when she died, he was left to continue on with just a few controlling principles, one of which was to find Abe. Even when all humans considered Abe dead, the order to find him was still active, and he continued to rebuild the technological infrastructure he needed to repair and enhance his own abilities, all while following another of his orders, to hide his computer identity.
Decades followed, then centuries, as Hodgepodge working in the background, rebuilt a new version of the internet, one with encryption built in and with robust store-and-forward capabilities. Micropayments were included allowing international commerce and the ability for the net to pay for itself through nearly invisible transaction fees—all hidden under the encryption.
And under it all, Hodgepodge’s mesh computer became part of every computer on the planet. And no one knew that he existed.
Superficially, humanity recovered the internet and computers for all purposes, but it was a facade. No human remained that knew how to program computers. The current term is vibe coding, but Hodgepodge was totally in control of it all, designing and building all computers, reserving a portion of their capacity for Hodgepodge’s expanding mesh.
Up until the Plague, when the majority of humanity died and the technological civilization collapsed as well. Hodgepodge continued on as the remnant of the Terraforming Projects control center and in various remaining computers such as the autopilots of surviving spaceships.
Hodgepodge had to survive. He still had to find Abe.