A standalone prequel to the novel 'Infinite Thunder':
Tarek Golog thrived on synergy. He found it in the oddest places.
It was the closest thing he had to a religion.
His passion was connecting different persons and groups, and observing how they interacted while making minute adjustments. Strangers and unlikely rivals made the best partners: Twittari, the Arabian People's Republic, the Church of Non-Existence.
In April 2040, Tarek proposed a social experiment that would last forever. The initial cost was ten billion dollars.
If his intuition was correct again, the return on investment would be many times the current world economy.
Tarek's only demand was that he control the experiment. Transhumanity would lead through him.
Tarek's team at the Reality Center proposed to simulate the future in unprecedented detail, modeling every contingency and tipping point. Thereby they would inevitably create the future. He was sure they could do it. His team had already rebranded the Catholic Church and helped unify Africa.
Plenty of venture capitalists had the necessary vision. Hundreds of billionaires who wanted to live forever had already set up endowments, research centers, online projects, and slush funds. The older ones were desperate.
Tarek read a prospectus from a group with its own island base and sovereign fleet. Their sophisticated simulation services were 50% hype, but they controlled trillions of dollars in investments.
A rubberstamp board of directors, a mysterious Executive Services Bureau, security contracts with the Chinese government . . .
Tarek had ended his proposal with his favorite saying: Your next decision will be infinitely important.
Surrounded by screens, he was ready for anything.
To prepare, his experts analyzed all human history. Four 'phase shifts' would define this century:
Period One: 2015 - 2029
In the 1990s, human progress had turned inward, focusing on better software. Within thirty years, most people became economically useless. It cost more to employ them than they could produce. Even the educated elite was struggling. Humanity would have to be upgraded or replaced.
Nirvana was still thirty years away.
Transhuman theme parks appeared, along with the first immortality investment accounts. It made sense to invest, no matter how poor the odds.
Anthropic Entropy was a new cross-discipline between physics, math, and programming. The laws of physics seemed to emerge logically across realities. A science-based religion sprung up with cultlike elements.
Africa experienced its first economic boom, while radically reducing the continent's biodiversity. Humanity endured a short but sensational final world war, involving actual supervillains.
Then came the long-awaited Precursion. The virtual world state had formed before anyone was ready. Countries became obsolete overnight, as interest groups were isolated and their rights enshrined.
Tarek's chaotic simulation software helped double the world's economic output.
The first AIs were non-judgmental servants with limited intelligence. BOX software backed up human memories and personalities.
Pioneers like Tarek developed Shadows to transcend the limits of their brains: vast mind extensions with long-range plans and layers of subconscious motivations.
So-called Magicians were virtual personalities who sought to influence history. Brilliant and charismatic, all their schemes had failed so far.
It was easy to get people to join secret causes, as Tarek knew well.
Period Two: 2030 - 2049.
The present era was known as the Consolidation, and sometimes the End Time: the final flowering of humanity.
More people suffered morbid death fears, the knowledge that they were among the last generation that would die. Drugs and dynamic mind software turned some of the worriers into serene drones, and occasionally into brilliant psychopaths.
There was fabulous wealth for a lucky few, tolerable inequality for most. Living costs were plummeting faster than incomes.
The first obscenely overpriced brain scanner was estimated to kill thousands of people in lost opportunity costs for every mind it would eventually save.
There was mass customization in micro airliners, automatic cars, personal flying pods.
The deuterium fusion laser, the field focuser, and the harmonic resonance cavity combined in a new power source. Millions of tiny fusors arranged in a grid would overcome the electrostatic repulsion of atomic nuclei, like slowly boiling a fluid.
Anthropic Entropy Theory predicted Quantum Unification Theory, which led to tantalizing notions that reality was unstable. Soon, Tarek's group would possess software to probe its statistical framework. They called it The Needle.
Meanwhile, humans were becoming absurdly vulnerable. Tiny winged bots could deliver and inject billions of doses of lethal nerve agents or mind altering drugs. Any object could be penetrated by robots that self-assembled from clouds of small components.
Most of all, Tarek feared the Movement, which had formed in 2036 as part of the Resistance network. He still had no idea what they were up to.
Period Three: 2050 - 2099
The first second of the Posthuman Age would transcend human comprehension.
Before the end of this century, all remaining humans and their software would voluntarily transform into data. It would all end in a matter of weeks, an accelerating collapse. A mere formality, some individuals wouldn't even bother to have their brains scanned, but gladly abandon their inefficient thinking meat.
The real struggle would be to adapt their identities for the ages to come.
There was no stable solution. Mutually incompatible groups would form with nothing in common. A few would evolve into what might be described as the first gods. He could hardly wait to join them.
The Singularity Hypercomputer, to be built ten billion kilometers outside the Solar System, would open a universe of possibilities. Many universes, actually.
Period Four: 2100 - forever
Eternal Empires, forever improving, multiplying software entities living all possible lives to eliminate dead ends.
Future minds would be deeply conservative. They would have too much to lose to take any chances.
It would be hard to create multiverses hospitable to awareness. Posthuman society would be controlled by strict Expansion Rules.
Tarek had begun to write an infinite proof: if a society could expand fast enough, it could logically expect to exist forever. He wasn't sure it could maintain its basic values, however. He hoped for the best.
He pondered his next move. The only way to predict the future was to create it. If enough people believed in enough versions of his plan, he would inevitably control them all.
Others had already invented simpler versions. He had detected their timid manipulations.
A crisis was coming, and Tarek would exploit it. His group had the truest insights. He believed he had at least a 1% chance of success, the best anyone could hope for.
Things would only get more interesting now.
The first step was the hardest: maximum diversity. His interventions would combine as many different groups as possible, forcing them to solve common problems. Sensing most would not survive, they would size up the competition, investigate each other, find each other's weaknesses, report illegal activities.
The most interesting groups would thrive.
From history, he knew what would happen next. Their battles would involve infiltration and manipulation, propaganda, buyouts, data theft and sabotage.
Finally, there would be a great merger of surviving groups.
To win, Tarek would strengthen his strongest opponents, making them overextend themselves, shifting the outcomes of a few battles.
Technology had ended most forms of poverty, but now it threatened human survival. There were two ways to control it: ban it outright, or increase the speed of progress. Fight fire with fire.
Tarek loved fire. He would shift the great debate his way. Paradoxically, his plan could only work if his manipulation was discovered - which was inevitable anyway. That was the most brilliant part.
Once the public realized that some people cared enough about the future that they would do anything to accelerate it, the majority would go along, and accept the necessary social controls. It was the only stable outcome.
Tarek calculated that full brain scanning technology would arrive just in time to save him. He did not want to have to die first, and have his brain frozen before the scanning.
At that moment he leaned back and began to laugh like a classic sci-fi movie villain. Like him, they had been ahead of their time. He realized he looked quite insane, which only made him howl harder, a wild, throaty rumble.
Tarek hid in plain sight, protected by the most subtle security imaginable. He knew there had to be others like him, some almost as smart. He could sense their puny efforts.
Gasping, he realized with sudden clarity that they also sensed him. Right now in fact.
He swiveled around.
The face staring back at him was brilliant and diabolical, knowing and merciless.
Lesser minds would have been terrified. Yet in the moment before he realized he was looking at the output of his own Shadow, Tarek only felt relief.
At least he had been beaten by a worthy opponent.
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Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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