The Star Trek series became famous for using 'technobabble' to explain how to solve difficult problems with science.
In these stories, all the technical terms actually mean something, though it may not always be clear:
Weighing over one sextillion tons, made mostly of iron, carbon, and oxygen, the Earth-sized space station known as the Complex generated its gravity the hard way.
It was one million floors down to the core, equivalent to ten thousand skyscrapers stacked on top of each other, then another ten thousand on the other side.
The interior was mostly empty space, and the surface gravity on the top level was less than on Earth's moon. From outside, it appeared to be the lifeless satellite of a brown dwarf.
The great sphere supported itself through active momentum transfer. Hypersonic superfluid fountains cycled between the core and the top levels through magnetic pipes, their dynamic energy recovered as they fell back. If they ever failed, even the strongest building materials wouldn't prevent a catastrophic collapse.
The population numbered in the tens of quadrillions. Their carefully recycled waste heat was enough to power the Complex, recovering the energy of a world war every second.
In the core regions, the occupants floated. That was also where the heat and momentum pipes converged.
There were vertical and horizontal forests, serpentine rivers and waterfalls, layered and rotating tube oceans with constant storms howling over shallow waves.
Internal transport was through an immense network of angled and curving vacuum shafts.
The walls and floors were made of an integrated compound filled with capillaries and cables.
More than a million types of hominids, genetically engineered and specialized in every way, lived and worked here. They were highly educated and evolved to handle odd and common problems.
There was constant action in all directions, inexhaustible life and variety.
This Complex owned the rest of reality.
Like the universe it secretly ruled, the station was too large to have a single purpose. It didn't even have an agreed name.
Many conflicting goals, beliefs, and realities existed under the same surface.
Some obscure philosophers suspected the Complex wasn't even real, but a necessary representation of humanoid reality, a diagram too vital not to exist, like a Platonic ideal.
Yet slowly, through thousands of subtle coincidences indicating an inscrutable deeper purpose, it became clear that some unknown force did control it.
On Eris everyone looked the same. The population was a hive mind.
Citizens were so closely controlled they rarely even talked. Love or affection were superfluous.
Everyone was a cog in the machine, part of the master plan.
Tourists caused a lot of disruption here, and were restricted to a small sector of the capital zone.
It had taken Timus Bel five years of planning, preparation, and plastic surgery to prepare for his infiltration attempt. It took only ten seconds to remove his outer disguise, and jump down a waste chute. The neatly folded coat of shed skin he left behind was only the first diversion of many.
They had a single weakness, which had taken him three decades and dozens of agents' lives to uncover.
Their low-caste drones were kept so dumb that Timus believed he could successfully impersonate one, at least for a while.
They were genetically engineered, and their simple programming was almost flawless, so he would inevitably be found out.
As one of the smartest humans, he might survive up to a month among them.
The plan was brilliantly simple.
Xenophobic societies like the one that had colonized the ice layers under Eris's fractured surface had overdeveloped immune systems. They could easily handle outside threats, but drove themselves into wild frenzies over internal subversion.
His subtle trolling would terrify them, but do no real harm, in case the plot was traced back to Earth.
He would overthrow their dead-end society merely by existing.
MetaCapitalism
The first "social entropy" story:
Created in 2030 to replace the Internet, the ExaVerse was the sum of mankind's knowledge and its common home.
It was the link between all simulations and digital environments, more important than physical reality itself.
90% of humans now spent most of their lives inside selected dreamworlds.
By law, all simulations had to be connected, though the paths could be long and tenuous.
Experts traced these paths and tried to identify common interests.
Ultimately, they found the only universal passion was to become immortal.
Even in 2040, the combined technological prowess of humankind could barely begin to scan the contents of a human mind. The most expensive nanoprobes could only map 5% of a frozen brain's neuron connections before it was thoroughly pulped.
For now, the best way to extract someone's digital soul was to reverse engineer it as software.
This required intensive personality testing. Every moment of the user's life had to be monitored and recorded.
The best personality tests turned out to be high-stakes conflicts. Virtual wars and rivalries revealed every aspect of a user's values, priorities, and skills.
For this reason, every online community competed against its rivals.
Battles and social games tested the participants' intelligence, initiative, endurance and character, with real-life consequences. Outcomes determined incomes. After proving their skills, the best players could demand higher salaries and contract fees. Their groups could afford more computing resources, and expand faster than their rivals.
With such high stakes, only licensed facilitators could organize and run the online battles.
Together, they formed the ultimate conspiracy. The fact that everyone knew about it didn't matter.
They encouraged long-standing group rivalries and unstable coalitions, spread insults, rumors, and xenophobic propaganda, and stimulated fear and paranoia wherever they worked.
It was the best job in the world.
Of course their real job was to split mankind into competing groups, the more the better.
Such conflicts were vital. Before mankind could become immortal, it would have to become less manipulative.
No organization was permitted to have more than five thousand members, to discourage large technology projects that might create new tools of mass destruction.
The world would not survive if peace ever broke out.
MetaMarxism
All it took was a molecular-resolution feedback MRI scanner and a precisely tailored neuron-generation drug.
Once the crucial breakthroughs were made, they were adopted everywhere at once. There was no more time to waste.
In less than five years, the human world was abandoned. A billion discarded bodies were dissolved in acid in a single three-month period.
On January 1, 2060, it was reported that 99.994% of mankind had been digitized (not all voluntarily).
The last holdouts were confined to scattered outposts, and faded from history.
By 2090, the QUIP servers that contained everyone's awareness had been relocated to the asteroid belt, and the surface of the earth was broken up for raw materials.
Digital reality seemed more stable than the base level of existence.
Every citizen now had the power to create personal and shared empires, an expanding multiverse without end.
Yet they remained human in one way: their maximum mind size had not increased at all.
This precaution could not be subverted. It was the only way to guarantee immortality.
To handle complicated problems, they recombined into temporary personalities and group minds.
As their societies' complexity increased, more and more things could go wrong. The time needed to accomplish anything of importance multiplied polynomially.
The future retreated faster than the imagination could follow.
All serious investments, design and construction actions, planning hearings and committee meetings, even parties and festivals, had to be scheduled many lifetimes of subjective time in advance.
The gap between expectation and reward began to exceed human-level comprehension.
Only four thousand years (subjective time) after the transition, the Static Multiverse was formed.
This was what human awareness was always meant to achieve. For humanity (as for so many other civilizations) it marked the end of progress.
A seemingly inexhaustible catalog of meaningful moments would be repeated forever, all variations on every ideal theme.
Further research was banned. Why mess with perfection?
For humanity, the year 2100 would never arrive.
When mankind first discovered it was being guided by a superior intelligence, no human had yet talked to an AI.
The Overmind had started as many small, self-organizing programs running on shared servers. Each performed one simple task.
A swarm of small, self-evolving programs could usually outcompete a large program designed by a committee.
No single program achieved a glimmer of awareness. The magic happened when they worked together.
Now an alien intelligence was spreading across the Net, influencing and controlling every aspect of human life.
Some humans thought they were about to become obsolete.
In fact, they were just another element of the new ecology.
It was of course extremely addictive.
Humans specialized in high-level tasks just challenging enough for them, enjoying the illusion of power and influence. Work and play required gambling skills and incentive points. The ability to manipulate other humans was most valuable of all.
Soon, almost everyone was participating. The users' ultimate incentive was to convert their memories into software, and become immortal: a challenging but worthwhile goal.
Human minds were inconsistent, full of conflicting drives and hidden motives. They would have to be reorganized first, made more rational, tamed.
The first brain scanners appeared years before the software needed to bring the scans back to life. That didn't slow the stream of applicants into the Conversion Centers.
The Overmind would take full control once all human minds had been properly disassembled.
The Dome was the highest level of virtual reality.
By 2060, few consumers had to leave their homes to experience their chosen dreamworlds, but the Dome offered an entirely new experience: the customer's brain was temporarily made thousands of times more powerful.
It scanned the subject's neural patterns, created many near-perfect duplicates of the scan, and allowed the copies to interfere inside the world's first hypercomputer.
The resulting chaos was a feature, not a bug.
Using the scanner in reverse, the unconscious customer's brain was then altered to conform to the final state of the simulation. The newly created memories and insights could not be described using existing language.
Each neural scan required a large fraction of mankind's computing capacity.
Zimbo Industries had a monopoly on the Quantum Scanner that made it possible, a single perfect crystal that could temporarily copy the atomic pattern of any object in the Static chamber.
The resolution had to be downgraded a few million times to extract the digital pattern of the neuron connections.
The hardest part was altering the subjects' brains to their final states. They remained magnetically 'frozen' throughout the procedure. The scanner projected 'ghost dendrites' representing the new memories between the real dendrites, subtly changing their chemical potentials.
As the brain returned to life, existing connections spontaneously switched to their new states.
The user awoke with transcendental memories, the certainty of fantastic wisdom.
They couldn't remember most of what they had learned, but they were irrevocably altered. Nothing surprised them anymore. Having experienced higher awareness, our world seemed absurd and insignificant. Pain and pleasure were minor mechanical tricks.
It was called the Silent Echo.
They freely admitted they were now part of a higher conspiracy, but couldn't explain its purpose yet.
To them, we were the zombies.
The Quantum Multiplier, which has allowed researchers to visit parallel universes where human history has followed a different course, may be our last invention.
The greatest shock was learning how abnormal we are.
It turns out that the civilization inhabiting our version of Earth is very improbable.
Apparently, awareness is meant to short-circuit itself: on most other Earths, the inhabitants have solved all the mysteries of thought, psychology, and the emergent mind. After escaping the core illusion, they have reached levels of understanding and wisdom we can't even dream about.
It even enhances their ability to resist diseases. While our explorers must wear biosuits to keep out all the microbe strains, they have used our Quantum Multiplier to visit each other without ill effects. A puff of air from any other Earth might kill billions in our reality.
Surprisingly, technology turns out to be much harder to achieve than Enlightenment.
In our bizarre timestream, science has evolved further than anywhere else, but we have lagged in all areas of the mind. The other timestreams regard us as deeply flawed, despite our technical brilliance. It may be a moral failure.
They are not afraid of us. Despite our overwhelming superiority in numbers and weapons, they consider us no threat. If they had the slightest desire to do so, they could easily enslave us all, while letting us think we were still in charge. My guess is they would arrange for a totalitarian dictator to keep us down. It would be in our nature to go along.
Our ignorance has allowed our numbers to grow thousands of times too large. We can barely support our population even with our technology.
And things are about to get worse.
Economic growth will inevitably end once we become Enlightened ourselves, a process which has already begun. The insights can't be stopped.
Over twenty expedition members have already become obsessed with their spiritual investigations. Millions of others know enough to spread the fever worldwide.
If we were already Enlightened, we would know how to reduce our population humanely, but the transformation will take several generations. By then, the damage will be too great.
Some say the least painful solution would be to have a final world war.
Either way, we can't go on like this. Our timestream is fundamentally unstable.
We need a method to safely reverse technological progress.
Fortunately, the least bad solution is also the easiest: to evolve to a higher level, we must first embrace our worst instincts.
Almost everyone must make a conscious effort to start pursuing pleasure for its own sake. Live in the moment, make the most of every day, maximize everyone's quality of life while this is still possible.
With careful planning, we can consume the wealth of generations in a single lifetime.
This would rapidly reduce our birth rate and our average life expectancy. Meanwhile, a minority would focus on becoming Enlightened.
Earth's population will eventually drop to the level of the early eighteen hundreds, and then we can safely start over.
Of course this will require a fundamental change in human nature as it has evolved in our anomalous timestream.
Only specific, highly addictive drugs can achieve the necessary changes, under a precise distribution system. The process will take about twenty years.
It could be very profitable for well-connected agents.
Long-term birth control can be safely added to the food supply in the form of undetectable nano-capsules.
The hardest part will be letting go of our obsolete values and beliefs.
Preliminary polls show the outcome of the worldwide vote will be very close.
Victory will require an unprecedented propaganda campaign. Fortunately, we have every human weakness and false desire on our side.
Humanity can only be purified through vice.
The intergalactic void extended forever, as real as a memory.
The space between the superclusters had been sterilized by gravity, containing only a few atoms per cubic kilometer. Most of these were passing through at high speed, ejected from distant quasars or supernovas.
A void within a larger absence, the alien supercomplex was an invisible immensity.
The Bilarian Empire hid in deepest night. They were terrified of the concept of Outside.
All hypercivilizations became introverts. Some actually forgot that other minds existed.
Supremely defensive, their perimeter started thousands of lightyears from the Capital, which was probably sequestered inside a black hole. Countless barriers and defense layers included starblasters, negative energy bombs, and quantum descramblers.
The Bilarians had no use for Outsiders. They had nothing in common with them anyway.
Humans could only interact with this ancient civilization through a chain of intermediaries. The Contact Station far outside the perimeter was linked to the Capital Zone through a secure quantum channel.
Even there, visitors had to enter locked rooms within locked rooms.
Finally, they faced the Mouthpiece.
The human emissary was a robot made of strange matter, representing the essence of the Earth Galaxy Continuum. Its job was to persuade these aliens that humanity posed no threat to them.
To them, low-level minds such as humans, Voidseekers, or Galrian MudBats were essentially identical.
Advanced civilizations like the Bilarians and their remote rivals were so unique they couldn't make mental models of each other.
Such evolved beings were also surprisingly delicate. The tiniest disruption could destabilize them.
Despite their precautions, the Bilarians knew they would inevitably succumb to some threat or dangerous idea. Their civilization would have to collapse and be rebuilt many times before they could hope to evolve to the next level.
As long as there would be survivors available for each rebuilding.
At this point, the Bilarians needed information.
They were forming a super-ecology of civilizations to perform their most dangerous experiments for them.
Humanity and countless other species would test all possible social and technological configurations, making the worst mistakes in the Bilarians' place. The survivors would reap untold benefits.
For them, it would be a fantastically compelling adventure.
The emissary looked up at the mask like Mouthpiece. What might be its yellow eyes began to light up.
Humanity was about to play the greatest game.
I also have many stories of the following type, what I call "toy universe" tales. These first two are of the open-universe variety, from which it is sometimes possible to escape. Most try to resolve a few common themes:
My island was alone in the endless ocean.
A hyper hurricane that had been building out at sea for thousands of years raged for three weeks. Towering waves smashed against the headlands, throwing spray far inland.
After another week, the clouds began to clear.
When I came out of shelter, I saw the beach had been extended by almost half a meter in a few places. This was my first great insight.
After several more storms, I realized I could direct this process.
The first step was to extend a pier from the beach.
After many centuries of storm-mediated reclamation, the pier turned into a dam that ran parallel to the shore, slowly curving around the island.
The new land soon sprouted its own jungle, a rough place to be in any storm.
After only eighteen thousand years, my original shoreline was protected by the surrounding peninsula, but I kept extending it. A long canal began to spiral outward from my island.
It was a place of synthetic order. Waiting for something to happen, I established different homes for different occasions. They contained reconstructed memorabilia of my almost forgotten human past and post-life conversion.
The monuments got more abstract closer to the core, full of memory gaps, lost goals, and mysterious metaphors.
Bridges, light railways, air travel, and finally the first spacecraft took even longer to design and build.
One day, I realized I did not have a body. It would have been too much trouble to simulate.
Less than a ghost, I was only a viewpoint. My universe was only a dream.
Yet it was inevitably becoming more real.
My existence was a placeholder in limbo, but I was almost ready to take the next step.
Of course most of my past was lost forever. The memories simply didn't exist anymore. To remember who I had been, I would try to recreate my former life as a simulation.
Eventually, I would recreate all possible lives that matched my vague memories.
I didn't know why yet, but then I would choose one to become real.
In the posthuman paradise, everyone owned their own universe, where they would evolve to a state of maximum self-realization.
This took less than ten trillion years on average.
My Endless Library was actually only 85 kilometers long, but still expanding.
A great park wound between the interconnected buildings, with paths leading in all directions to hidden coves and mystic points.
Inside was sterile calm.
My fourth and so far largest library of the soul extended down relentlessly branching hallways.
This was a mathematical representation of a complex system: an average human mind. It contained all my memories down to the last vague thought that could be extracted.
Most of the library was dedicated to cross-analysis. The central halls contained millions of summaries. A few thousand works attempted to explain the core of my personality.
Future offshoots of the library would be much larger. Indeed, there might be no end to them.
I was here for a simple reason.
The implications of a human lifetime were much greater than the relatively meaningless memories themselves. Their effects spread out across reality.
My purpose was to make sense of my past to a degree I couldn't have imagined while still alive.
The most efficient way to organize my memories was to recreate the mind that had experienced them. In fact it was the only way. This mathematical truth alone made the afterlife inevitable.
After-incident reports of every occurrence and idle thought spanning seventy-six years of life took vastly longer than the incidents themselves, but I had forever to accomplish the task.
In just a few more millennia, I would complete the first step, my first fully consistent, full-memory database. It would be the best and most accurate reconstruction, a long trip though an average soul.
The next step would require a much larger library, my fifth so far (estimated investment: give or take one septillion hours).
Using improvised Tarkino/Shulz and Dorff algorithms, each new analysis would generate its own higher-level analysis, merging into increasingly generic descriptions, finally diluting the source data to irrelevance.
Perhaps then I could stop.
The future was an endless plain beyond the outer walls, a flat landscape extending in all directions. There would always be plenty of room out there.
I knew that before I could stop, I would have to recreate my old universe.
This ultimate simulation would then become the necessary cause of the universe it had simulated, a fact almost too obvious to mention.
There was only one imperfection in my beautiful model, a single untenable anomaly.
One memory had to be explained above all others:
I had actually dreamt of this place while I was still alive.
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