How do I create a societal collapse with ruins, while the tech can make Ridiculously Human Military Androids?
How do I create a societal collapse with ruins, survivors, and the weaponry is back to pre-gunpowder technology (swords, shields, bows, etc.), while the Pre-Collapse tech can make Ridiculously Human Military Androids?
A few Androids survived the Collapse and can maintain buildings and stuff, but their number very small... 10 across the whole of the world?
And the Pre-Collapse civilization technology could have a 1st World Standard of Living for everyone on Earth, if their cities replaced our cities of Real World 2015.
I'm going to say that we're on Earth...
The Androids' are human-sized, with electronic brains that can do everything a human brain can do. The point of that being emotions.
They can wirelessly connect to some info-server.
They are outfitted with nanites that can transform their hands into weaponry, and also be Uterine Replicators.
Their eyes can serve as Everything Sensors, or at least for everything medical, with human biology, within... 1 minute of observation and analysis combined.
Android skin is made of ferro-ceramic plates.
Their medical technology is what is expected if they used all of their listed technology to the fullest.
There's space travel... Let's say that their space travel technology is like Earth's circa 2015.
No magic.
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Your advanced civilization stored all knowledge in electronic systems. Moreover, all work was done by robots or androids. Therefore humans didn't have much practical knowledge (it wasn't needed because the androids did everything for you). Moreover, people didn't have knowledge such as how to make gun powder (not only was there no need for it, but also there was no point in learning it because if the need should ever arise, you could simply look it up).
The civil and the military power system were separated, with the military system much more protected against attackers than a civilian power system could ever be. Also, although this was never publicly admitted, the military wanted to have the option to just temporarily switch off civilian power in case of an uprising. Over time, the military was replaced almost exclusively by androids, so the military power basically was the power network of the military androids and their server infrastructure.
Now one day the unthinkable happened: The civil power system failed hard. Nobody knows exactly why it failed. There were of course emergency plans for such a case, which included redirecting military power into the power control stations, which then could be used to operate the systems needed to find and correct the problem. However it turned out that the nature of that failure prevented redirecting military power; as soon as this was tried, the military power network failed, too, however it recovered after disconnecting it from the civil power stations.
Since the power was gone, everyday life broke down. Everyone relied on the technology that was no longer available. Humans had to re-learn even the basics, such as how to grow food or how to build houses. Since there was no access to information (the military databases of course didn't contain that type of information), people actually had to rediscover everything. Clearly the existing buildings could not be maintained any longer; people didn't even have an idea how they were built. Instead, people re-learned how to build traditional hoses from wood. Basically, humanity was thrown back into medieval times, apart from the military androids that were still working thanks to their separate power network.
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