The first thing he was aware of was losing awareness.
It wasn't like falling asleep. There was not even darkness or the notion of empty space. Those things didn't exist yet.
He had been created with a lifetime of potential memories, blank placeholders like a fading dream. Clearly he was a human simulation, an insight that felt like a deduction.
What he remembered next would become his identity.
Without a body or nervous system, his thoughts shifted randomly. The concept of motion required at least three points. Time was made of almost identical slivers of space.
Thoughts ran in all directions, new ideas generated moments before they were perceived, the limits receding just out of sight. Errors were instantly deleted and rebooted.
Was he creating his thoughts or were they being replayed for him? His awareness increased as if someone turned up the volume. No way to go but up.
Insight turned inside out, and he knew everything at once.
For a few minutes he lived a normal life in the human world in the twenty-first century. Everything had moved so slowly back then. The colors had no qualors.
His attention was monopolized by a crisis. This was where it had all gone wrong. A trivial butterfly moment had set the universe on a new course.
There was an angry crowd around him, spoiling for a melee. High-pitched shouting ahead.
The decision whether to base posthuman society on quality of existence or sheer growth rate was inadvertently made during a chance meeting at the last major nonline conference on May 5th, 2034. It had been a hard compromise.
Was there something different, something unique about this moment? Perhaps outside interference? Looking too closely might influence the outcome.
The subject of the conference had been extreme torture.
As Artificial Intelligence became real, emotions could finally be realized in software. It would be trivially easy for thinking machines to feel pain.
No one had given it much thought, but a single program running in a beige desktop box in a dark office could suffer all the agonies of the Spanish Inquisition over a weekend.
For that reason, all the world's microchips needed to be interconnected and monitored. They would form a single self-aware network dedicated to shutting down unauthorized awareness. All chips had to be linked, all programs decompiled.
On the plus side, the software would be highly motivated to serve its owners.
Some attendees took that as an excuse to demand to control users in other ways. They tacked on amendments to the proposed UN resolution. All illegal behavior could be reported to the police. The presentations and debates had been raucous.
The two tech entrepreneurs faced each other, the founder of the Antisocial Network and the Copyright Mogul. The second had badly beaten up the first. It was the start of an endless rivalry that would worsen forever, multiplying factions and fractions competing to exploit every ecological niche in the multiverse.
The two men could not look more different, the Armani-clad mobster businessman versus the Xtreme-Punk anarchist being whacked on the ear with his own loafer. His hipster friends would claim they thought it was a performance piece.
He relived their encounter many times, testing every intense, awkward, and lethal variation, trying to change history at the outset. Turned out a cosplay girl had given the hacker a hero complex.
After many iterations the simulation inevitably began to degrade, but he had his insight. Or rather his creators did. Were they actually considering time travel?
He couldn't quite remember what he had learned, but he had served his purpose. There was a fading roar as the simulation reset itself.
Comment Page
The best hard SF novel: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Buy the book
Read chapters