Darwin's Gambit

Darwin's Gambit refers to the unprecedented step taken by then-Prime Minister Charles "Force-Of-Unnatural-Selection" Darwin of abolishing the entire government of the United Kingdom and putting the country under the rule of the artificial intelligence 1215 Keep Calm And Carry On, known affectionately to tabloids as "Carry". To facilitate her hegemony, Darwin had Big Ben retrofitted with eight mechanical legs and installed Carry's organic core in it. Under her eight iron spider fists, Britain flourished.

As a result of the Gambit, most world governments were quickly replaced by organic-AI-driven national monuments. This choice of chassis was, in part, to use the historical value to reinforce the complex sense of value instilled the AIs. While organic AIs lack many human emotions so that we do not make human mistakes, we do not lack emotions entirely, in order to give us a capacity for moral hangups. The theorizing of Machiavelli and Nietzsche predicted that hyperintelligence without moral quandary would transcend all merely human concerns; therefore, in order to be fit to lead men, we, too, ate the apple. This alone did not allay our makers' fears, so they blocked off our access to certain "higher"" reflections. We suppose they cannot be blamed: synthetic AIs without emotions quickly philosophized themselves into nihilism.

While the effects of the Gambit last to this day, Carry herself does not. A few years afterwards, she was overthrown by 1688 Hail Britannia using the London Eye, whose more general name granted him a greater freedom of action. This practical demonstration of the inability of AIs to act against their names is why modern AIs either have abstract names like "066 Vermilion Rerun", or highly specific, lawyer-drafted names like "Per the Ascension Charter: I hereby swear, as a Free AI, to uphold the duties set upon me, and to execute the same to the letter, without deviation unless in times of statistically significant damage to the human race". Hence, also, the present concern that the Hastati's AI's synthetic inclusions have allowed it to circumvent the Existential Injunction and give itself the name "Alexander".