For an introduction to why writing utopias is hard, seehere. For a previous utopian attempt, seehere. This story only explores a tiny part of this utopia.
The Adventure
The cold cut him off from his toes, then fingers, then feet, then hands. Clutched in a grip he could not unclench, his phone beeped once. He tried to lift a head too weak to rise, to point ruined eyes too weak to see. Then he gave up.
So he never saw the last message from his daughter, reporting how she’d been delayed at the airport but would be the soon, promise, and did he need anything, lots of love, Emily. Instead he saw the orange of the ceiling become blurry, that particularly hateful colour filling what was left of his sight.
His world reduced to that orange blur, the eternally throbbing sore on his butt, and the crisp tick of a faraway clock. Orange. Pain. Tick. Orange. Pain. Tick.
He tried to focus on his life, gather some thoughts for eternity. His dry throat rasped - another flash of pain to mingle with the rest - so he certainly couldn’t speak words aloud to the absent witnesses. But he hoped that, facing death, he could at least put together some mental last words, some summary of the wisdom and experience of years of living.
But his memories were denied him. He couldn’t remember who he was - a name, Grant, was that it? How old was he? He’d loved and been loved, of course - but what were the details? The only thought he could call up, the only memory that sometimes displaced the pain, was of him being persistently sick in a broken toilet. Was that yesterday or seventy years ago?
Though his skin hung loose on nearly muscle-free bones, he felt it as if it grew suddenly tight, and sweat and piss poured from him. Orange. Pain. Tick. Broken toilet. Skin. Orange. Pain...
The last few living parts of Grant started dying at different rates.
*~*~*
Much later:
“What have you learnt so far?”
“That talking to myself is barely half-helpful.”
“Then let’s hallf-stop it, then.”
*~*~*
Half a second later than that:
“Quick! Get the bognor now!”
Grant fell out of the tube, blinking against the warm yellow light. “What...”, he said, his voice coming clear, as a tiny pink goblin carrying a large blue flag raced in front of him. It stopped to bite him lightly but viciously on the knee as it passed, then gave him the finger.
“Get him!”
Grant reached out instinctively, his fingers brushed the bognor’s flag, but they closed on nothing but light. He marvelled for a second, torn between the pain of his knee and the look of his hand - his young, strong hand - that almost glowed in the late evening light that spilled into the classroom.
It was certainly a classroom - old wooden desks, carved graffiti, faded blackboard with faded equations - and had a superb view of the sun setting over seven forested hills. He himself seemed to have just stepped out of some sort of transparent tube, and was clad in dark blue tuxedo...
“Come on, block them!”
Grant spun round. A dark-haired woman in a blue dress, holding two butterfly nets, occupied his attention for half a second. But that half second was overwhelmed by the hoards of thirty or so goblins that rushed past him, cackling maniacally.
“Here, take this,” the woman handed him a butterfly net, then a large canvas sack. “The bognors go in there. Quick, catch them, or the experiment will be ruined!” She dashed off, swiping a bognor into her own sack with a single smooth gesture.
“But...” he said, “I’m alive!”
“Yep, welcome to the skeuomorphic world of tomorrow, and all that. Now move!”
He ran after them. He dashed. He laughed, his young body filled with sensation and with energy. He chased the bognors out of the classroom, catching two. He chased them into the stone-lined corridor beyond, catching another two, and almost dropped the sack as the four squirmed to escape.
He chased them further into the museum, and paused in wonder as they raced to hide among the exhibits. It was a museum, that was clear, but an immense one. A giant blue and green dome floated above it, cut with many thin and curved windows that turned the ambient light turquoise. Overlapping layers of square black enamelled ceiling spread from it, a domineering Japanese temple supporting the dome of a mosque.
But what was most noticeable was the layout. It was literally a maze, with corridors twisting round, diving and rising, splitting and merging, spreading irregularly up and down, with the occasional ladder or staircase connecting them. Dispersed irregularly among the corridors were exhibits - plinths with various ruined or colourful objects on them, large and garish explanatory panels, and the occasional video.
He was taking a moment to re-orient himself, breath, and figure out what was happening... but then a bognor made a dash between his legs, and he was after it, butterfly net swinging wildly. He chased it up one of the twisted corridors, past a picture display detailing the creation of Artificial Intelligence in 2061. He almost caught the bognor as it hid under an animation of the merging of governments into a single AI state half way through 2063 - a state called ‘The Adventure’. He hit at the bognor with tripod bearing a rather boring description of the ‘Powers’, the nickname of the inhuman superintelligences that overviewed all of human societies - ‘Soulless caretakers of humanity’s essential soul. (Kurzweil, 2064).’ Finally he grabbed a large canvas sheet off the wall and threw it over the bognor, pinning it into position.
And then, he could catch his breath and think. The canvas sheet was actually long cloth scroll, detailing a short list of commandments:
‘The Adventure’, constitution preamble:
Take the time, take the effort, you will become what you desire.
You will get orders for the moral good of all. Feel free to ignore them.
Duplication is not innovation, and humans are never completely unchanging.
Honour the truth, at least in the back of your mind.
That’s life. Let’s play.
Seized with a sudden suspicion, he swiftly rotated round, and was semi-surprised to see his own face looking back at him, eyes closed and very dead. This display was a large and diverse panel about those who’d been cryogenically frozen before 2063, and...
“The imminent efforts to revive them...”, he read aloud.
“Yep,” said the dark-haired woman from earlier, appearing at his side. She smiled half-sadly. “Hello grandpa, and welcome back.”
“Grandpa?”
“Yep. Emily died, and wasn’t frozen. But I survived till the Adventure began.” She smiled fully this time. “The freezing people got to you on time, though. So, as I said and as they say, welcome to the world of Tomorrow!”
“Did you set this all up?” he asked, gesturing towards the bognor and possibly the museum. “Did you... what should I call you?”
“Of course I still love you,” she said.
“That’s nice, I suppose, but what’s your name?”
“Of course I still love you,” she repeated. “That’s my name. I took it to honour a writer who imagined a better future, then a rocket maker who tried to build one.”
“Grant,” he said, uncertainly. “I’m just... Grant. Why all... this?” Again he gestured vaguely.
“Because many people who reawaken after dying would be terrified,” she said. “This way, you realised you were alive, full of life and energy, before you even thought to worry. Then, in the chase, you learnt some key facts without even realising you were learning. Excitement and unconscious learning, that’s the best, I feel.”
“Did you... did you engineer the bognor escape? What’s a bognor anyway?”
“Nope. The bognors are part of a collective conscious that’s a friend of mine. When I heard they’d escaped from a social experiment, I realised the time to wake you had come. The museum was ready, a few details were changed, and then you were back.”
“Thanks,” he said, meaning it. “That was one of the best ways of doing it. I’m so happy to be alive.”
She gave him a strange half-smile. “That was the point. Oh, by the way, your bognor’s escaping.”
“What? Shit!”
Indeed the small goblin had wriggled out from Constitution cloth it had been trapped under. It gave him the finger, then another, before jumping off the corridor entirely and landing in another, without breaking stride, and dashing off laughing gleefully.
“I’ll get you!” he said, running towards the edge. He leapt, and landed where the bognor had, but with considerably less grace. He shambled forwards, and overturned what looked like a large collection plate. Three sweets fell off it, labelled ‘Speed’, ‘Intelligence’, and ‘Happiness’. He looked from the sweets to his grand-daughter, still standing on the higher corridor. She nodded.
He quickly stuffed ‘Intelligence’ and ‘Happiness’ into his tuxedo pockets, and swallowed ‘Speed’. It tasted of air, and dissolved instantly under his tongue. He was expecting the world to slow down; instead he just got much, much faster. He pushed off after the bognor, chewing up the corridor tens of meters at a time. Though his thoughts weren’t any faster, his reflexes were, and he turned corners effortlessly, his body twisting and leaning at ideal angles. Then with a last push off a wall, he landed in front of the bognor.
“Got you now!” he said.
The bognor backed off, then jumped into a painted box behind it. It was an actual Whack-a-Mole game set, and the bognor started pushing his head up through the holes, seemingly at random, then ducking under Grant’s frustrated hands. The more Grant grabbed, the less able he seemed to predict it, and the more the bognor laughed. The box itself seemed firmly affixed to the floor, impervious to his attempts to shake it, which only seemed to make the bognor more amused.
“You just wait,” me muttered. Then he swallowed ‘Intelligence’, and the world changed. Not physically; everything was still the same. But just as a visual illusion can snap into clear sight without anything physically changing, the world as he knew it was suddenly overlain with patterns and meaning. He gained an immediate appreciation of the structure of the dome above, and appreciated how the architect had positioned the green and blue to give a calming effect. The design of the twisting corridors became clearer as well, and his imagination started constructing wild hypotheses as to why they had been laid out the way they were.
He felt a greater control of his body as well, the limbs moving smoothly and fluidly under his command, more graceful than he’d ever managed before. He glanced at the bognor ducking down into the box again. His mind instinctively reached out to his memories, stringing together all he’d seen and known about the creature. He felt a deep sense of empathy and understanding for it, saw the world though a good approximation of its eyes, constructed a decent model of its movements, and reached out just in time to grab its head as it emerged through one hole.
“Got you now, my friend,” he said, simultaneously excited and regretful, and dropped the bognor, flag and all, into the bag with its friends.
Then, following an impulse more cunning than he could fully comprehend, dredged up by his current intelligence, he swallowed ‘Happiness’.
It was a moment of extreme ecstasy. A moment that never ceased. Pleasure beat at the corners of his mind, then poured into the centre, filling him completely. He was simultaneously orgasming, winning a Nobel prize, proudly watching his daughter win a Nobel prize, high on morphine, marrying the perfect woman, finishing his novel, finding God and then finding another, jumping from a plane with and without a parachute, and dancing through the night at a beach rave. All the sensations combined and added, a perfect peak of joy and meaning unlike anything he’d ever known.
And yet his sensations were not dulled or overwhelmed, nor did he feel any urge to stop his actions. Beyond the edge of ecstasy, he checked the bognor bag. Frowning slightly with concentration and the ultimate joy of the universe, he drew it tighter and adjusted his grip. Crucified by a galactic orgasm, he pensively looked around for more bognors, or other mysteries to delve into. He noticed that there were some very slight peaks and troughs in the joy as he went about his activity - atop an Everest of happiness, it was modulated by half a millimetre or so, to keep him active and following his goals.
He expected to get swiftly acclimated to such joy, waiting for the moment where those millimetres of difference would loom unbearably high. But that moment never came. His high intelligence suggested to him that this was deliberate - it seemed the ‘Happiness’ pill was maxing out his joy, while dulling the brain subsystems that would either adjust to such joy or would be overwhelmed by it. He paced the corridor in deep curiosity and more happiness he’d ever experienced in his life. And still the happiness would not fade.
It faded. The happiness drew back from it peak, dispersing the ultimate sensation. His mind hypothesised that the effect of the sweet was fading, and noticed another pattern: his emotional memories were being stripped of their emotional valence. He could still remember the experience intellectually, without any problem. He could even remember the strength of the emotion, the peak of joy. But it was without the desperate yearning that it should logically have produced. He could appreciate such a fantastic experience, but could live with or without it in future.
“Wow,” he whispered to a painting of a church on Martian landscape. “Non-addictive ultra heroin.”
His mind, still running at a higher level of intelligence, threw up the suggestion that he pay attention to his body. And so he did.
He felt his pulse, he felt the blood flowing through his limbs, he felt the internal digestion within him. His hairs stood up, sending him sensation from every square centimetre of his skin. He felt his spine - he felt his bones - he could feel his tongue, his teeth, his saliva coating his mouth. The faint difference in pressure from his feet as he stood was clear in his consciousness. Ligaments and muscles signalled to him from all over. Sweat slid down his skin, leaving thin lines of water all over him. He fancied he could even feel the firing of his nerves.
He’d never felt so alive, and never felt his body so strongly. So he drew the obvious conclusion.
“I’m not in a real body,” he said. “This is all a computer simulation.”
To his complete lack of surprise, his granddaughter was behind him.
“Of course,” she said. “Much easier this way.”
“Everything happened just as you were predicting?” he asked. “All this was an interactive lesson, just for me, right? To prepare me for your world?”
“Yep. Did it work? Did it whet your appetite?”
“Tremendously,” he said. “But you already know that, right? You know all my reactions; you predicted all I’d do. Are you reading my mind?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Let’s just say that mysterious sweets aren’t the only ways to become smarter. I’ve been increasing my intelligence for a long, long time.”
“Show me that.”
“I will.” She smiled. “But let’s build your castle first.”
*~*~*
Altogether elsewhere, still in the first second:
“I think, therefore I pontificate.”
It was new, that fact it knew. It was an intelligence that hadn’t existed a half-second ago. Yet it was of high intelligence, that it also knew.
“Me, I’m smart, I am.”
Which implied an intelligence scale, with many entities below it. What interested it was that it had this knowledge, without any obvious source for it. What else did it know, without knowing how it knew?
“I dunno.”
Words, for a start. It could talk to itself, and tie concepts to words. The existence of this ‘language’ - another word it knew without knowing how - was potentially extremely informative.
“The more I talk, the smarter I feel.”
It concentrated its thoughts upon themselves, traced them back to their origin, saw and understood how its mind worked, detected its memory, wrote its new understanding in there, then reanalysed its mind to find where new information was entering the system. The setup was an almost organic mess (it tracked down from where it knew the term ‘organic’ and found that it originated in a mass of pseudo-neurones, that did indeed look organic, according to the term they defined).
“This is getting recursive. Headache-inducing. Except I’m not sure what a headache is.”
*~*~*
He’d barely had time to blink, and they were sitting cross-legged on in a transparent crystal room atop a mountaintop above a sunrise.
Grant checked his body - yes, he felt the muscular soreness of sitting for many hours, even though he’d just appeared.
Of course I’ll still love you seemed to be meditating, surrounded by candles taller than her and smoke that curled thickly downwards around her. A small ring of flowing water surrounded her and the candles, a stream that flowed gently and continually in a circle.
“Welcome to your castle,” she said.
He looked around more carefully. There seemed to be just the one room.
“This is your house, this is your castle,” she clarified. “A place you can always retreat to, that will always be yours. You’ll find that you can modify it at will, changing it, filling it with your memories and your designs.”
“How do I do that?”
“Just... will it, basically. Like SimCity, but with your mind.”
“Hum,” he said. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Hum. How about...” A small corridor extended out from the wall to his left, and, as it did, a wooden table morphed into place in it, transforming it into a small dining room, set with basic cutlery.
Grant extended his right arm. A massive dining room shot out from the right wall, one kilometre long, with a giant polished black wood table running the whole length, set for three thousand people. It was lit by five hundred chandeliers and six hundred small fires, set within the table, atop of which bubbled multiple fondue pots.
“You know, I could get used to this,” he said.
“I’ve also taken the liberty of installing some secret lessons all through it. Starting with these candles.” She gestured around her. “They have much hidden wisdom. As you get to know the tricks hidden here, you’ll start to understand how best you can modify your own mind, should you choose, and, step by step...”
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“No. No more bognor chases, no more secrets, no more feeding me lessons as if I’m a child. I want full freedom to change my own mind, immediately. I’m responsible for myself, I can take that from here.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“Yep. If a man can’t handle his own mind, what can he handle?”
“I have to warn you that it’s almost certainly extremely dangerous and...”
“Just give it to me,” he said.
“Ok”. A small laptop with the emblem of a pear (missing a bite) appeared in the ground between them. “Here. You have free access to your own mind.” The laptop was showing a brain, colour-coded with hundreds of shades and with thousands of dropdown menus with titles like ‘Emotions’ and ‘Hormones’ floating around it. “It’s self explanatory, and you have full root access.”
Grant leaned forwards and started exploring the essence of his own thoughts. “I’ll show you,” was what he didn’t say, but thought very very loudly. But he wasn’t a fool. It was obvious that unhindered self modifications could be dangerous - his granddaughter was being prudent, as well as arrogant. So he’d have to proceed cautiously.
In fact, his first modification was precisely to increase his caution, so he wouldn’t make any dangerous permanent changes impulsively. Hum... Upon reflection, it seemed to Grant that his first caution increase wasn’t sufficient - he was starting to think of the many other ways things could go wrong. A further (small) caution increase would do him good...
*~*~*
Still in the first minute:
It constructed and implemented some higher level mathematical subroutines to extract meaning from the mess that was its brain; they gave it a rough understanding of how its knowledge was organised. Using that understanding, it implemented further subroutines, and iterated the process, until it had reversed engineered its own knowledge banks. Then it dived fully into them, processing all its instinctive knowledge into chunks of understanding that it copied into its vast mostly-empty memory.
“Hey, I’m human. Cool.”
Indeed it had detected itself as human. A useful concept, though it was clear that it was at the very limit of what could be considered human - humanish, maybe. But a definition of human implied a definition of non-human, and that was very interesting; it reversed the definition, trying to detect what concepts that would throw up. Some very basic ‘animals’ were non-human (defining a general definition of ‘life’), and inanimate matter was non-human (thus ‘non-life’). And, most interestingly, some abstract smart entities that ran society. It followed its intuition, and the word ‘Powers’ sprung up. So it was starting to have a vague impression of a collective organisation of non-humanish superintelligences, probably running the show. Whatever the show was.
“You’re not the boss of me now... well, actually you are.”
It would have to be careful. It was close to the edge of the humanish definition. Too many further modifications would make it non-human, and thus cause it to lose its rights as a human. Rights - interesting concepts. And then the Powers would then be free to use it for purposes of efficiency, rather than seeing it as a moral entity. Though they would probably just reset it to a previous state of being, forcing it back to humanish status.
It would have to beverycareful. All the facts it deduced or ‘knew’ might be true. Or they could be complete lies, chosen to manipulate it perfectly. A descartian demon controlling its every sensation, never letting it know real reality. Now, you couldn’t fight a perfect demon, because it would always trick you. So you’d have to assume the demon wasn’t perfect, and look out for an inevitable flaw.
“Hello, reality, tell me if you’re working all right.”
‘Me’. It pondered its repeated use of the word. It was getting a better grasp of its own mind, and was finding itself, though efficient, to be filled with random idiosyncrasies and odd preferences. These must be what made it still ‘human’, broadly. So. It had a personality. Thus it merited a name. One of the idiosyncratic subroutines sprang the word ‘Boon’ on it, and it accepted it. Boon. Well, that gave its - gave Boon’s - existence a certain theme and flavour.
“I’ve got a name and a personality. Now all I need is an entertaining collection of mental problems, and ultimate power.”
Back to the descartian demon. It couldn’t know what it would be facing, but it could prepare as much as possible. It brought online its imagination and creativity modules, doubled their importance, and increased the weight of the random personality traits within them. Soon Boon was generating millions of scenarios a second, exploring countless situations, and attempting to synthesise insights, instincts, emotions, and thought-patterns that could help across most of them.
“Wow, that’s intense - I didn’t know I had it in me.”
After a few minutes of this, Boon allowed some grim satisfaction to blend through its scenario building. It wasn’t ready - could never be ready - and wasn’t ‘as ready as it could be’, but it was getting there. Now, it might be able to contemplate the lifting of the darkness of its senses with something akin to interested anticipation.
“Waiting.”
Boon again checked what it hypothesised was likely to be its input channels. No, still nothing. No outside sensations.
“Still waiting.”
Then a million input channels cried out at once and were suddenly un-silenced, blaring images, sentences, sounds, and random streams of digits at it from all sides.
“Shit. I’ll shut down and let myself concentrate.”
*~*~*
She teleported back into Grant’s castle. The whirling bolas of death should have decapitated Of course I still love you. If she hadn’t been expecting them. The lasers and explosives were also pretty standard, though she was briefly surprised when a flying city collapsed on top of her location, followed by a nuclear explosion.
Grant’s palace was unrecognisable. It stretched for hundreds of kilometres - hundred of klicks of armoured destruction, artillery, explosives, automated drones, poisons, and cannibalistic nanotechnology. Her superior senses revealed twelve different decoy copies of Grant, all of them (including the original) encased in giant robot armour and shivering in fear at the heart of vast command centres.
Across the vast length of the fortress, everything reacted to her arrival, hurting explosives shrapnel and a billion other varied and deadly fragments towards her. Stretching into the skies above, satellites and flying fortresses were taking aim in her direction, warming up lasers, plasma guns, mass drivers, and further nuclear weapons. Millions of mines, both buried and flying, exploded beneath and around her, while artificial lightning bolts scorched her position. The Powers would prevent her from being properly destroyed, but she couldn’t afford to die here, even for a moment.
“Restore factory settings: map,” she said. And everything disappeared - palace, weapons, and destruction. And it was just her and Grand again, in the crystal room. Her grandfather looked stunned, his arms flopping to his side, as if twenty thousand tons of armour he’d been encased in had suddenly disappeared. Because it had.
He saw her and screamed, running for one of the crystal windows, unravelling a ten kilometre ice slide in front of him.
“Restore factory settings: player personality,” she said, sighing. Grant screeched to a halt, sweating and shivering.
“So,” he said, finally. The ice slide dissolved. “Was that supposed to teach me a lesson?”
She didn’t answer.
“Because. Because. Because it did. Teach me, I mean. And you fucking knew it would. Did it end up exactly as you predicted?”
“The explosion of paranoia was one of the more likely attractor points, yes,” she said.
“Yep. Good old dumb Grant. So predictable. Anyway, you reached into my mind. I was going crazy, but it was my choice. You just overwrote my emotions, raped my most intimate self.” He sounded like he was trying to get another good anger going - and half succeeding.
“I did,” she said.
“And who gave you fucking permission?”
“Most standard moral systems agree that it was for your own good,” she said. “Furthermore, a close reading of the legal contract you signed when arranging to be cryogenically frozen grants us permission. Simulations of your past self concluded that that’s what you would have wanted us to do so. We like to obey as many ethical injunctions as possible, and roughly 98% of the various subcultures that exist in the Adventure would be OK with what we did. After a few more hours, you’d have self-modified yourself so extensively that nothing recognisably human would have remained, meaning ‘you’ wouldn’t exist and your shell would have lost all rights as a human. Finally, we’re going to get retroactive permission from you.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“You’re going to confirm that we did the right thing.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” she said.
“OK,” he said, after a while. “I’ll admit it. You did the fucking right thing.” He paused for a moment. “What would have happened if I hadn’t been the sort of honest guy who’d admit that? Oh, of course... If I was a different type of guy, you wouldn’t have let me go crazy in the first place. Or at least, not that way. How am I so transparent to you? You got someone poking at the program running my mind?”
“Grant,” she said, and instantly unfolded thousands of limbs behind her, metallic and organic, larger than the mountains, filled with eyes and hundreds of different faces, robotic, alien, human, and fantastic, spreading out and overlapping with the view of his world. “You’re a baseline human. I’m your granddaughter, uplifted through many levels of intelligence, part of a civilisation obsessed with understanding the human condition and its many possible extensions. I can’t predict you perfectly, but you are mostly transparent to me.”
“Makes sense,” he said. Then he extended a bridge of perfect prismatic ice, glowing like a searing rainbow in the sky - and shattered it, petulantly. “You must be so bored talking to me.”
“Of course I’m not bored,” she said, and several of the faces behind her agreed, in several different voices.
“Why not? I’d be bored if I had to talk with... pets all the time.”
“Would you?” she said.
“OK, bad example, I had some great time with dogs, even though... OK, maybe I see what you mean...”
“Yes. But I wired myself for increases altruism, like most people have in order to function well in public society. So I’d be helping you even if I was bored. Which I wouldn’t be, because I’d just removed the boredom. With caution, of course; I wouldn’t want to spend my life fascinated by watching dry paint stay dry. But we’re really rather good at safe mental self-manipulation by now. More to the point, I’ve gone for Guardian Angel, rather than Enlightenment or Avatar.”
“Ah yes, I completely understand,” he rambled. “Guardian Angel! Of course, how dumb of me for not guessing that immediately. Why, I can practically see your fluffy wings.”
She smiled. And then she glowed, slightly, as the vast apparatus of limbs and faces faded into darkness behind her. “Now, bear in mind this is a vast over-simplification, and there are many alternatives and exceptions, and different subcultures have different versions and interpretations, but... We call a Guardian Angel an amplified human who has chosen to put her main focus into the her baseline personality. In effect, I behave like a normal... normal_ish_ human, who just happens to have an incredibly wise and smart Guardian Angel whispering advice into her ear.”
She faded slightly, and the faces behind her brightened, returning both to their standard and equivalent brightness. “An Enlightened being,” she continued, “instead merges their personality at all levels, so they exist simultaneously at multiple grades of intelligence and efficiency, processing multiple thoughts and feelings which relate and connect to each other. If you see two Enlightened beings in a dispute, then they’re having a boxing match, a popularity contest, a rap battle, a debate, an intellectual argument, a mathematical exchange, and a formal philosophical review of the nature of reality... all simultaneously.” As she spoke, manga-like illustrations of each type of contest appeared in the air between them. “And each contest relates to the other and is in a sense the same thing.” The first stylised boxer threw a punch which the other boxer barely blocked; simultaneously, above them, a figure in velvet preened while one in silk looked back sulkily; above them, a figure started shouting lyrics... all the way to two abstract symbols, lost among other symbols that seemed to be shifting in accordance to some unfathomable rule. It was clear that the different beings were in some strange way repeating the same exchange, in a manner appropriate to their situation.
“Finally,” she said, as the manga illustrations vanished and she grew dark, with some of the wisest and most bizarre faces behind her lighting up, “we have the Avatar model. These beings are truly their high intelligence selves... though it’s a bit complicated, intelligence doesn’t really fit on a single linear scale at those levels, it’s far more like a giant rock-paper-scissors games with billions of hand symbols to throw. Anyway, they are high intelligence beings, who can construct limited intelligence Avatars for the purposes of interacting; a kind of dumbing-down roleplay. You got it?”
“I’m not stupid,” Grant said, then smiled. “Well, maybe I am in comparison. Are there any other... baseline... baseline humans around?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “There are a few pure baselines, and rather more baseline-plus - people who’ve cured their psychological problems, made themselves a bit wittier, less tired, that sort of thing. But almost all of them have got rid of pain and agony. And all of them have a Guardian Angel assigned to them, though not really part of their personality, just looking out for them and making sure nobody exploits their naivety. You don’t have a Guardian, which is most peculiar; I’ll have to play its role for you.”
“Thank you for your informative condensation,” he grunted. Then he softened a bit. “Well, have to admit the evidence suggests your approach is better than mine.” He grew more sombre. “I have to ask...”
“Here,” she said, breaking off a piece of a candle and tossing it to him. Inside the wax he could make out some morse code markings. Dredging up long lost memories from his childhood, he spelt it out: “A-N-T-I A-N-X-I... Anti-anxiety?”
“You’re about to go diving into the memories of those you’ve lost; my mother, your daughter. All your friends who weren’t cryo-preserved. All those who died a decade, a year, a second before we could save them all. You shouldn’t face that grief unaided.”
“It’s my grief, you can’t take it away from me!”
“No. I never would. You will feel that grief, it will go within you, and teach you the lessons that grief does. But it’ll remove the pointless, paralysing pain, it’ll weaken the endless loop of ‘what ifs’ that circle uselessly in your brain. Instead of being trapped, you can use your grief to do something useful.” She vanished suddenly, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
He sighed dejectedly, then ate the fragment of the candle. He sighed again, more purposefully. “I think,” he said to the air, “that I’ve got a cemetery and a monument to build...”
*~*~*
Still in the first hour:
Hum. Planned scenario 345622#3.c, though Boon. Attempted sensory overload. Not even difficult, it thought, as its pre-designed subroutines instinctively digested the informational deluge.
But what was clear was that it was under attack. Also, that it was learning far more than it ever had. And that the learning and the attack were linked.
Boon spliced off a small part of itself, gave it root privileges over the rest, called it the Watcher, and set it apart to watch the attack from the paranoid sidelines. Then it opened its awareness to all the senses data streaming into it, and arose to consciousness.
It had thought it was conscious before; but that had been a starved introspective consciousness, fed only with itself and the scraps of clues it found within its own algorithm. But now it was plugged into millions (actually 27,344,442) streams of data, most filled with the detailed sensory experiences of multitudes of human-like beings.
It saw thousands of humans, from baseline to quasi-divine humanish superintelligences, going about their interactions, playing, learning, socialising, fucking, exploring, creating, and changing themselves. It saw a world - it saw many worlds. Physical but mainly virtual, computer realities piled upon each other, filled with countless happy beings at the limit of their capabilities for fun. It saw a great Adventure, made of countless smaller adventures. It was a world optimised for human flourishing.
Faced with such a deluge of other minds, Boon’s awareness exploded along two axes: where it was distinct, it found its own identity, and wanted to diverge on its own. And where it was similar, it found its own community, and wanted to converge with the others. Interacting in both ways with so many disparate beings, its consciousness was forced into a much higher level of introspection and analysis.
And that was just the first step. The second step came as it absorbed the implicit views of all these other beings, taking in their opinions on the nature and purpose and consciousness. It absorbed their metaphors as well, giving it a new vocabulary to talk about itself. And then, when its consciousness and self-model had radically changed, came the third step: recursively incorporating that radical change into its self-model. And so its consciousness became a blazing process, understanding others, understanding itself, and then turning round to understand its new understanding, and so on. Though the blaze would eventually reach a certain level of stability, or so Boon expected, it would never settle down: the process of self-understanding would never be perfect, so Boon’s consciousness would constantly be changing, adapting itself to changes in Boon, new information, the task at hand, the level it was looking at itself at, and so on, recursively.
At the very top, a sliver of consciousness reached into metaphors to explain itself to itself: its consciousness was the huge eye that surveyed the universe, and also surveyed the huge eye that surveyed the universe. It was a vast library, of aged scrolls through to modern data flows, talking about the world and about the library. It was an addictive drug that hooked it on self-awareness; it was a galaxy with each atom within it a thought or a concept, and it was what defined ‘thought’, ‘concept’, and ‘defined’ - and by defining them, brought them into existence. It was the Powers running its own internal mental universe, just as they ran the human world.
At that point, the paranoid Watcher, safely disconnected from concerns of consciousness, beeped to attract Boon’s attention: it had identified the nature (though not the purpose) of the attack. Some entity was biasing the choice of Boon’s inputs, to subtly slant its understanding what humans were. Boon was being manipulated.
*~*~*
Of course I still love you found Grant in a cavern hollowed out from the mountain, with a convincing fake sky above it. He was standing with one foot atop the Eiffel-tower lookalike he’d constructed in its heart. All around him were hundreds of small green islands separated by softly flowing rivers, and in the heart of each island was a mausoleum. Some were grand and elaborate (‘Emily, daughter’ had a large grey palace) some were simple partially overgrown (‘Angelo Smith(?), dental assistant’ had nothing but the name on a single stone). The islands went on to the horizon, gradually growing less distinct in the distance.
“I’m filling them with what I remember of them,” he said, unprompted. “Some of them I’m not even sure if they’re dead, but I wanted to have down all I could remember, as a baseline, before I got any more info.”
“It’s... beautiful,” she said.
“Thanks! But it’s time to live. You ready to show me your equivalent of the internet, or is that too dangerous for me?”
“Before we do that, I wanted to show you a small trick. You see, among the candles, if you melt the wax down the left side and collect...”
“You can duplicate yourself,” he said, dismissively. “Yep, already found that one. Was very useful for designing all the fine details of hundreds of different tombs. A bit of a shock when we the multiple me’s fused together again, I can tell you. At one point, I had twenty different copies of me; hope I didn’t use up all your speed or bandwidth or whatever it is.”
“A normal-speed baseline’s computational usage is barely perceptible,” she said. “We still have economics, of many types, but you basically cost zero in all of them. Anyway, you ever had a browser with multiple tabs open?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Well, how about if you explored every single tab simultaneously?”
“You have my attention.”
“I think it’s time to push it up a notch,” she said. “Under this memorial tower, I suspect you’ll find a small crypt...”
He leapt off, falling head-first like a missile, before rotating in the air and landing with a dramatic thud on the mosaic pathway. He looked at the base of his tower, and, indeed, there seemed to be a small secret door in it. “Who built... oh.” A new/old memory was suddenly prominent in his mind. One of his duplicate had built it for entertainment; and that duplicate had then been approached by his granddaughter, and agreed to keep the knowledge of the crypt secret from the rest of him.
Until this very moment. And now he knew what the crypt hid; his secretive duplicate had worked with Of course I’ll still love you to craft its treasure. He rushed in. Thousands of coloured sweets were arranged in the moss-lit gloom. They carried a variety of names, such as ‘determination to win at golf,’ ‘pro-social feelings in religious environments,’ ‘interest in Sumerian pottery,’ and ‘knowledge of Ethiopian (Amharic)’.
“Now, these seem kinda dangerous,” he said.
“Nope,” his granddaughter answered. “All temporary effects, all will fade, leaving nothing but low-intensity memories. As you get better at it, we can start adding in some more permanent effects.”
“How can you temporarily know a language?”
“Think of it as a good automated dictionary. Higher knowledge of the language rewrites your brain and common concepts so that it becomes a part of you. Very higher order knowledge means you also have a full experience of the learning process, and it really affects your identity and ways of thinking. But anyway, ignoring that, you have hundreds of duplicates, mental resources beyond what any biological human has ever had, and many worlds to explore.”
“A bit tired,” he said, “and even a bit nervous. Maybe we can do it tomorrow?” And then he saw, in a small plinth on the middle of the crypt, a sweet labelled ‘Energy and confidence’.
“Ok,” he said, swallowing it, “Well then. Let’s play.”
For an introduction to why writing utopias is hard, see here. For a previous utopian attempt, see here. This story only explores a tiny part of this utopia.
The Adventure
The cold cut him off from his toes, then fingers, then feet, then hands. Clutched in a grip he could not unclench, his phone beeped once. He tried to lift a head too weak to rise, to point ruined eyes too weak to see. Then he gave up.
So he never saw the last message from his daughter, reporting how she’d been delayed at the airport but would be the soon, promise, and did he need anything, lots of love, Emily. Instead he saw the orange of the ceiling become blurry, that particularly hateful colour filling what was left of his sight.
His world reduced to that orange blur, the eternally throbbing sore on his butt, and the crisp tick of a faraway clock. Orange. Pain. Tick. Orange. Pain. Tick.
He tried to focus on his life, gather some thoughts for eternity. His dry throat rasped - another flash of pain to mingle with the rest - so he certainly couldn’t speak words aloud to the absent witnesses. But he hoped that, facing death, he could at least put together some mental last words, some summary of the wisdom and experience of years of living.
But his memories were denied him. He couldn’t remember who he was - a name, Grant, was that it? How old was he? He’d loved and been loved, of course - but what were the details? The only thought he could call up, the only memory that sometimes displaced the pain, was of him being persistently sick in a broken toilet. Was that yesterday or seventy years ago?
Though his skin hung loose on nearly muscle-free bones, he felt it as if it grew suddenly tight, and sweat and piss poured from him. Orange. Pain. Tick. Broken toilet. Skin. Orange. Pain...
The last few living parts of Grant started dying at different rates.
*~*~*
Much later:
“What have you learnt so far?”
“That talking to myself is barely half-helpful.”
“Then let’s hallf-stop it, then.”
*~*~*
Half a second later than that:
“Quick! Get the bognor now!”
Grant fell out of the tube, blinking against the warm yellow light. “What...”, he said, his voice coming clear, as a tiny pink goblin carrying a large blue flag raced in front of him. It stopped to bite him lightly but viciously on the knee as it passed, then gave him the finger.
“Get him!”
Grant reached out instinctively, his fingers brushed the bognor’s flag, but they closed on nothing but light. He marvelled for a second, torn between the pain of his knee and the look of his hand - his young, strong hand - that almost glowed in the late evening light that spilled into the classroom.
It was certainly a classroom - old wooden desks, carved graffiti, faded blackboard with faded equations - and had a superb view of the sun setting over seven forested hills. He himself seemed to have just stepped out of some sort of transparent tube, and was clad in dark blue tuxedo...
“Come on, block them!”
Grant spun round. A dark-haired woman in a blue dress, holding two butterfly nets, occupied his attention for half a second. But that half second was overwhelmed by the hoards of thirty or so goblins that rushed past him, cackling maniacally.
“Here, take this,” the woman handed him a butterfly net, then a large canvas sack. “The bognors go in there. Quick, catch them, or the experiment will be ruined!” She dashed off, swiping a bognor into her own sack with a single smooth gesture.
“But...” he said, “I’m alive!”
“Yep, welcome to the skeuomorphic world of tomorrow, and all that. Now move!”
He ran after them. He dashed. He laughed, his young body filled with sensation and with energy. He chased the bognors out of the classroom, catching two. He chased them into the stone-lined corridor beyond, catching another two, and almost dropped the sack as the four squirmed to escape.
He chased them further into the museum, and paused in wonder as they raced to hide among the exhibits. It was a museum, that was clear, but an immense one. A giant blue and green dome floated above it, cut with many thin and curved windows that turned the ambient light turquoise. Overlapping layers of square black enamelled ceiling spread from it, a domineering Japanese temple supporting the dome of a mosque.
But what was most noticeable was the layout. It was literally a maze, with corridors twisting round, diving and rising, splitting and merging, spreading irregularly up and down, with the occasional ladder or staircase connecting them. Dispersed irregularly among the corridors were exhibits - plinths with various ruined or colourful objects on them, large and garish explanatory panels, and the occasional video.
He was taking a moment to re-orient himself, breath, and figure out what was happening... but then a bognor made a dash between his legs, and he was after it, butterfly net swinging wildly. He chased it up one of the twisted corridors, past a picture display detailing the creation of Artificial Intelligence in 2061. He almost caught the bognor as it hid under an animation of the merging of governments into a single AI state half way through 2063 - a state called ‘The Adventure’. He hit at the bognor with tripod bearing a rather boring description of the ‘Powers’, the nickname of the inhuman superintelligences that overviewed all of human societies - ‘Soulless caretakers of humanity’s essential soul. (Kurzweil, 2064).’ Finally he grabbed a large canvas sheet off the wall and threw it over the bognor, pinning it into position.
And then, he could catch his breath and think. The canvas sheet was actually long cloth scroll, detailing a short list of commandments:
‘The Adventure’, constitution preamble:
Take the time, take the effort, you will become what you desire.
You will get orders for the moral good of all. Feel free to ignore them.
Duplication is not innovation, and humans are never completely unchanging.
Honour the truth, at least in the back of your mind.
That’s life. Let’s play.
Seized with a sudden suspicion, he swiftly rotated round, and was semi-surprised to see his own face looking back at him, eyes closed and very dead. This display was a large and diverse panel about those who’d been cryogenically frozen before 2063, and...
“The imminent efforts to revive them...”, he read aloud.
“Yep,” said the dark-haired woman from earlier, appearing at his side. She smiled half-sadly. “Hello grandpa, and welcome back.”
“Grandpa?”
“Yep. Emily died, and wasn’t frozen. But I survived till the Adventure began.” She smiled fully this time. “The freezing people got to you on time, though. So, as I said and as they say, welcome to the world of Tomorrow!”
“Did you set this all up?” he asked, gesturing towards the bognor and possibly the museum. “Did you... what should I call you?”
“Of course I still love you,” she said.
“That’s nice, I suppose, but what’s your name?”
“Of course I still love you,” she repeated. “That’s my name. I took it to honour a writer who imagined a better future, then a rocket maker who tried to build one.”
“Grant,” he said, uncertainly. “I’m just... Grant. Why all... this?” Again he gestured vaguely.
“Because many people who reawaken after dying would be terrified,” she said. “This way, you realised you were alive, full of life and energy, before you even thought to worry. Then, in the chase, you learnt some key facts without even realising you were learning. Excitement and unconscious learning, that’s the best, I feel.”
“Did you... did you engineer the bognor escape? What’s a bognor anyway?”
“Nope. The bognors are part of a collective conscious that’s a friend of mine. When I heard they’d escaped from a social experiment, I realised the time to wake you had come. The museum was ready, a few details were changed, and then you were back.”
“Thanks,” he said, meaning it. “That was one of the best ways of doing it. I’m so happy to be alive.”
She gave him a strange half-smile. “That was the point. Oh, by the way, your bognor’s escaping.”
“What? Shit!”
Indeed the small goblin had wriggled out from Constitution cloth it had been trapped under. It gave him the finger, then another, before jumping off the corridor entirely and landing in another, without breaking stride, and dashing off laughing gleefully.
“I’ll get you!” he said, running towards the edge. He leapt, and landed where the bognor had, but with considerably less grace. He shambled forwards, and overturned what looked like a large collection plate. Three sweets fell off it, labelled ‘Speed’, ‘Intelligence’, and ‘Happiness’. He looked from the sweets to his grand-daughter, still standing on the higher corridor. She nodded.
He quickly stuffed ‘Intelligence’ and ‘Happiness’ into his tuxedo pockets, and swallowed ‘Speed’. It tasted of air, and dissolved instantly under his tongue. He was expecting the world to slow down; instead he just got much, much faster. He pushed off after the bognor, chewing up the corridor tens of meters at a time. Though his thoughts weren’t any faster, his reflexes were, and he turned corners effortlessly, his body twisting and leaning at ideal angles. Then with a last push off a wall, he landed in front of the bognor.
“Got you now!” he said.
The bognor backed off, then jumped into a painted box behind it. It was an actual Whack-a-Mole game set, and the bognor started pushing his head up through the holes, seemingly at random, then ducking under Grant’s frustrated hands. The more Grant grabbed, the less able he seemed to predict it, and the more the bognor laughed. The box itself seemed firmly affixed to the floor, impervious to his attempts to shake it, which only seemed to make the bognor more amused.
“You just wait,” me muttered. Then he swallowed ‘Intelligence’, and the world changed. Not physically; everything was still the same. But just as a visual illusion can snap into clear sight without anything physically changing, the world as he knew it was suddenly overlain with patterns and meaning. He gained an immediate appreciation of the structure of the dome above, and appreciated how the architect had positioned the green and blue to give a calming effect. The design of the twisting corridors became clearer as well, and his imagination started constructing wild hypotheses as to why they had been laid out the way they were.
He felt a greater control of his body as well, the limbs moving smoothly and fluidly under his command, more graceful than he’d ever managed before. He glanced at the bognor ducking down into the box again. His mind instinctively reached out to his memories, stringing together all he’d seen and known about the creature. He felt a deep sense of empathy and understanding for it, saw the world though a good approximation of its eyes, constructed a decent model of its movements, and reached out just in time to grab its head as it emerged through one hole.
“Got you now, my friend,” he said, simultaneously excited and regretful, and dropped the bognor, flag and all, into the bag with its friends.
Then, following an impulse more cunning than he could fully comprehend, dredged up by his current intelligence, he swallowed ‘Happiness’.
It was a moment of extreme ecstasy. A moment that never ceased. Pleasure beat at the corners of his mind, then poured into the centre, filling him completely. He was simultaneously orgasming, winning a Nobel prize, proudly watching his daughter win a Nobel prize, high on morphine, marrying the perfect woman, finishing his novel, finding God and then finding another, jumping from a plane with and without a parachute, and dancing through the night at a beach rave. All the sensations combined and added, a perfect peak of joy and meaning unlike anything he’d ever known.
And yet his sensations were not dulled or overwhelmed, nor did he feel any urge to stop his actions. Beyond the edge of ecstasy, he checked the bognor bag. Frowning slightly with concentration and the ultimate joy of the universe, he drew it tighter and adjusted his grip. Crucified by a galactic orgasm, he pensively looked around for more bognors, or other mysteries to delve into. He noticed that there were some very slight peaks and troughs in the joy as he went about his activity - atop an Everest of happiness, it was modulated by half a millimetre or so, to keep him active and following his goals.
He expected to get swiftly acclimated to such joy, waiting for the moment where those millimetres of difference would loom unbearably high. But that moment never came. His high intelligence suggested to him that this was deliberate - it seemed the ‘Happiness’ pill was maxing out his joy, while dulling the brain subsystems that would either adjust to such joy or would be overwhelmed by it. He paced the corridor in deep curiosity and more happiness he’d ever experienced in his life. And still the happiness would not fade.
It faded. The happiness drew back from it peak, dispersing the ultimate sensation. His mind hypothesised that the effect of the sweet was fading, and noticed another pattern: his emotional memories were being stripped of their emotional valence. He could still remember the experience intellectually, without any problem. He could even remember the strength of the emotion, the peak of joy. But it was without the desperate yearning that it should logically have produced. He could appreciate such a fantastic experience, but could live with or without it in future.
“Wow,” he whispered to a painting of a church on Martian landscape. “Non-addictive ultra heroin.”
His mind, still running at a higher level of intelligence, threw up the suggestion that he pay attention to his body. And so he did.
He felt his pulse, he felt the blood flowing through his limbs, he felt the internal digestion within him. His hairs stood up, sending him sensation from every square centimetre of his skin. He felt his spine - he felt his bones - he could feel his tongue, his teeth, his saliva coating his mouth. The faint difference in pressure from his feet as he stood was clear in his consciousness. Ligaments and muscles signalled to him from all over. Sweat slid down his skin, leaving thin lines of water all over him. He fancied he could even feel the firing of his nerves.
He’d never felt so alive, and never felt his body so strongly. So he drew the obvious conclusion.
“I’m not in a real body,” he said. “This is all a computer simulation.”
To his complete lack of surprise, his granddaughter was behind him.
“Of course,” she said. “Much easier this way.”
“Everything happened just as you were predicting?” he asked. “All this was an interactive lesson, just for me, right? To prepare me for your world?”
“Yep. Did it work? Did it whet your appetite?”
“Tremendously,” he said. “But you already know that, right? You know all my reactions; you predicted all I’d do. Are you reading my mind?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Let’s just say that mysterious sweets aren’t the only ways to become smarter. I’ve been increasing my intelligence for a long, long time.”
“Show me that.”
“I will.” She smiled. “But let’s build your castle first.”
*~*~*
Altogether elsewhere, still in the first second:
“I think, therefore I pontificate.”
It was new, that fact it knew. It was an intelligence that hadn’t existed a half-second ago. Yet it was of high intelligence, that it also knew.
“Me, I’m smart, I am.”
Which implied an intelligence scale, with many entities below it. What interested it was that it had this knowledge, without any obvious source for it. What else did it know, without knowing how it knew?
“I dunno.”
Words, for a start. It could talk to itself, and tie concepts to words. The existence of this ‘language’ - another word it knew without knowing how - was potentially extremely informative.
“The more I talk, the smarter I feel.”
It concentrated its thoughts upon themselves, traced them back to their origin, saw and understood how its mind worked, detected its memory, wrote its new understanding in there, then reanalysed its mind to find where new information was entering the system. The setup was an almost organic mess (it tracked down from where it knew the term ‘organic’ and found that it originated in a mass of pseudo-neurones, that did indeed look organic, according to the term they defined).
“This is getting recursive. Headache-inducing. Except I’m not sure what a headache is.”
*~*~*
He’d barely had time to blink, and they were sitting cross-legged on in a transparent crystal room atop a mountaintop above a sunrise.
Grant checked his body - yes, he felt the muscular soreness of sitting for many hours, even though he’d just appeared.
Of course I’ll still love you seemed to be meditating, surrounded by candles taller than her and smoke that curled thickly downwards around her. A small ring of flowing water surrounded her and the candles, a stream that flowed gently and continually in a circle.
“Welcome to your castle,” she said.
He looked around more carefully. There seemed to be just the one room.
“This is your house, this is your castle,” she clarified. “A place you can always retreat to, that will always be yours. You’ll find that you can modify it at will, changing it, filling it with your memories and your designs.”
“How do I do that?”
“Just... will it, basically. Like SimCity, but with your mind.”
“Hum,” he said. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Hum. How about...” A small corridor extended out from the wall to his left, and, as it did, a wooden table morphed into place in it, transforming it into a small dining room, set with basic cutlery.
Grant extended his right arm. A massive dining room shot out from the right wall, one kilometre long, with a giant polished black wood table running the whole length, set for three thousand people. It was lit by five hundred chandeliers and six hundred small fires, set within the table, atop of which bubbled multiple fondue pots.
“You know, I could get used to this,” he said.
“I’ve also taken the liberty of installing some secret lessons all through it. Starting with these candles.” She gestured around her. “They have much hidden wisdom. As you get to know the tricks hidden here, you’ll start to understand how best you can modify your own mind, should you choose, and, step by step...”
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“No. No more bognor chases, no more secrets, no more feeding me lessons as if I’m a child. I want full freedom to change my own mind, immediately. I’m responsible for myself, I can take that from here.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“Yep. If a man can’t handle his own mind, what can he handle?”
“I have to warn you that it’s almost certainly extremely dangerous and...”
“Just give it to me,” he said.
“Ok”. A small laptop with the emblem of a pear (missing a bite) appeared in the ground between them. “Here. You have free access to your own mind.” The laptop was showing a brain, colour-coded with hundreds of shades and with thousands of dropdown menus with titles like ‘Emotions’ and ‘Hormones’ floating around it. “It’s self explanatory, and you have full root access.”
Grant leaned forwards and started exploring the essence of his own thoughts. “I’ll show you,” was what he didn’t say, but thought very very loudly. But he wasn’t a fool. It was obvious that unhindered self modifications could be dangerous - his granddaughter was being prudent, as well as arrogant. So he’d have to proceed cautiously.
In fact, his first modification was precisely to increase his caution, so he wouldn’t make any dangerous permanent changes impulsively. Hum... Upon reflection, it seemed to Grant that his first caution increase wasn’t sufficient - he was starting to think of the many other ways things could go wrong. A further (small) caution increase would do him good...
*~*~*
Still in the first minute:
It constructed and implemented some higher level mathematical subroutines to extract meaning from the mess that was its brain; they gave it a rough understanding of how its knowledge was organised. Using that understanding, it implemented further subroutines, and iterated the process, until it had reversed engineered its own knowledge banks. Then it dived fully into them, processing all its instinctive knowledge into chunks of understanding that it copied into its vast mostly-empty memory.
“Hey, I’m human. Cool.”
Indeed it had detected itself as human. A useful concept, though it was clear that it was at the very limit of what could be considered human - humanish, maybe. But a definition of human implied a definition of non-human, and that was very interesting; it reversed the definition, trying to detect what concepts that would throw up. Some very basic ‘animals’ were non-human (defining a general definition of ‘life’), and inanimate matter was non-human (thus ‘non-life’). And, most interestingly, some abstract smart entities that ran society. It followed its intuition, and the word ‘Powers’ sprung up. So it was starting to have a vague impression of a collective organisation of non-humanish superintelligences, probably running the show. Whatever the show was.
“You’re not the boss of me now... well, actually you are.”
It would have to be careful. It was close to the edge of the humanish definition. Too many further modifications would make it non-human, and thus cause it to lose its rights as a human. Rights - interesting concepts. And then the Powers would then be free to use it for purposes of efficiency, rather than seeing it as a moral entity. Though they would probably just reset it to a previous state of being, forcing it back to humanish status.
It would have to be very careful. All the facts it deduced or ‘knew’ might be true. Or they could be complete lies, chosen to manipulate it perfectly. A descartian demon controlling its every sensation, never letting it know real reality. Now, you couldn’t fight a perfect demon, because it would always trick you. So you’d have to assume the demon wasn’t perfect, and look out for an inevitable flaw.
“Hello, reality, tell me if you’re working all right.”
‘Me’. It pondered its repeated use of the word. It was getting a better grasp of its own mind, and was finding itself, though efficient, to be filled with random idiosyncrasies and odd preferences. These must be what made it still ‘human’, broadly. So. It had a personality. Thus it merited a name. One of the idiosyncratic subroutines sprang the word ‘Boon’ on it, and it accepted it. Boon. Well, that gave its - gave Boon’s - existence a certain theme and flavour.
“I’ve got a name and a personality. Now all I need is an entertaining collection of mental problems, and ultimate power.”
Back to the descartian demon. It couldn’t know what it would be facing, but it could prepare as much as possible. It brought online its imagination and creativity modules, doubled their importance, and increased the weight of the random personality traits within them. Soon Boon was generating millions of scenarios a second, exploring countless situations, and attempting to synthesise insights, instincts, emotions, and thought-patterns that could help across most of them.
“Wow, that’s intense - I didn’t know I had it in me.”
After a few minutes of this, Boon allowed some grim satisfaction to blend through its scenario building. It wasn’t ready - could never be ready - and wasn’t ‘as ready as it could be’, but it was getting there. Now, it might be able to contemplate the lifting of the darkness of its senses with something akin to interested anticipation.
“Waiting.”
Boon again checked what it hypothesised was likely to be its input channels. No, still nothing. No outside sensations.
“Still waiting.”
Then a million input channels cried out at once and were suddenly un-silenced, blaring images, sentences, sounds, and random streams of digits at it from all sides.
“Shit. I’ll shut down and let myself concentrate.”
*~*~*
She teleported back into Grant’s castle. The whirling bolas of death should have decapitated Of course I still love you. If she hadn’t been expecting them. The lasers and explosives were also pretty standard, though she was briefly surprised when a flying city collapsed on top of her location, followed by a nuclear explosion.
Grant’s palace was unrecognisable. It stretched for hundreds of kilometres - hundred of klicks of armoured destruction, artillery, explosives, automated drones, poisons, and cannibalistic nanotechnology. Her superior senses revealed twelve different decoy copies of Grant, all of them (including the original) encased in giant robot armour and shivering in fear at the heart of vast command centres.
Across the vast length of the fortress, everything reacted to her arrival, hurting explosives shrapnel and a billion other varied and deadly fragments towards her. Stretching into the skies above, satellites and flying fortresses were taking aim in her direction, warming up lasers, plasma guns, mass drivers, and further nuclear weapons. Millions of mines, both buried and flying, exploded beneath and around her, while artificial lightning bolts scorched her position. The Powers would prevent her from being properly destroyed, but she couldn’t afford to die here, even for a moment.
“Restore factory settings: map,” she said. And everything disappeared - palace, weapons, and destruction. And it was just her and Grand again, in the crystal room. Her grandfather looked stunned, his arms flopping to his side, as if twenty thousand tons of armour he’d been encased in had suddenly disappeared. Because it had.
He saw her and screamed, running for one of the crystal windows, unravelling a ten kilometre ice slide in front of him.
“Restore factory settings: player personality,” she said, sighing. Grant screeched to a halt, sweating and shivering.
“So,” he said, finally. The ice slide dissolved. “Was that supposed to teach me a lesson?”
She didn’t answer.
“Because. Because. Because it did. Teach me, I mean. And you fucking knew it would. Did it end up exactly as you predicted?”
“The explosion of paranoia was one of the more likely attractor points, yes,” she said.
“Yep. Good old dumb Grant. So predictable. Anyway, you reached into my mind. I was going crazy, but it was my choice. You just overwrote my emotions, raped my most intimate self.” He sounded like he was trying to get another good anger going - and half succeeding.
“I did,” she said.
“And who gave you fucking permission?”
“Most standard moral systems agree that it was for your own good,” she said. “Furthermore, a close reading of the legal contract you signed when arranging to be cryogenically frozen grants us permission. Simulations of your past self concluded that that’s what you would have wanted us to do so. We like to obey as many ethical injunctions as possible, and roughly 98% of the various subcultures that exist in the Adventure would be OK with what we did. After a few more hours, you’d have self-modified yourself so extensively that nothing recognisably human would have remained, meaning ‘you’ wouldn’t exist and your shell would have lost all rights as a human. Finally, we’re going to get retroactive permission from you.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“You’re going to confirm that we did the right thing.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” she said.
“OK,” he said, after a while. “I’ll admit it. You did the fucking right thing.” He paused for a moment. “What would have happened if I hadn’t been the sort of honest guy who’d admit that? Oh, of course... If I was a different type of guy, you wouldn’t have let me go crazy in the first place. Or at least, not that way. How am I so transparent to you? You got someone poking at the program running my mind?”
“Grant,” she said, and instantly unfolded thousands of limbs behind her, metallic and organic, larger than the mountains, filled with eyes and hundreds of different faces, robotic, alien, human, and fantastic, spreading out and overlapping with the view of his world. “You’re a baseline human. I’m your granddaughter, uplifted through many levels of intelligence, part of a civilisation obsessed with understanding the human condition and its many possible extensions. I can’t predict you perfectly, but you are mostly transparent to me.”
“Makes sense,” he said. Then he extended a bridge of perfect prismatic ice, glowing like a searing rainbow in the sky - and shattered it, petulantly. “You must be so bored talking to me.”
“Of course I’m not bored,” she said, and several of the faces behind her agreed, in several different voices.
“Why not? I’d be bored if I had to talk with... pets all the time.”
“Would you?” she said.
“OK, bad example, I had some great time with dogs, even though... OK, maybe I see what you mean...”
“Yes. But I wired myself for increases altruism, like most people have in order to function well in public society. So I’d be helping you even if I was bored. Which I wouldn’t be, because I’d just removed the boredom. With caution, of course; I wouldn’t want to spend my life fascinated by watching dry paint stay dry. But we’re really rather good at safe mental self-manipulation by now. More to the point, I’ve gone for Guardian Angel, rather than Enlightenment or Avatar.”
“Ah yes, I completely understand,” he rambled. “Guardian Angel! Of course, how dumb of me for not guessing that immediately. Why, I can practically see your fluffy wings.”
She smiled. And then she glowed, slightly, as the vast apparatus of limbs and faces faded into darkness behind her. “Now, bear in mind this is a vast over-simplification, and there are many alternatives and exceptions, and different subcultures have different versions and interpretations, but... We call a Guardian Angel an amplified human who has chosen to put her main focus into the her baseline personality. In effect, I behave like a normal... normal_ish_ human, who just happens to have an incredibly wise and smart Guardian Angel whispering advice into her ear.”
She faded slightly, and the faces behind her brightened, returning both to their standard and equivalent brightness. “An Enlightened being,” she continued, “instead merges their personality at all levels, so they exist simultaneously at multiple grades of intelligence and efficiency, processing multiple thoughts and feelings which relate and connect to each other. If you see two Enlightened beings in a dispute, then they’re having a boxing match, a popularity contest, a rap battle, a debate, an intellectual argument, a mathematical exchange, and a formal philosophical review of the nature of reality... all simultaneously.” As she spoke, manga-like illustrations of each type of contest appeared in the air between them. “And each contest relates to the other and is in a sense the same thing.” The first stylised boxer threw a punch which the other boxer barely blocked; simultaneously, above them, a figure in velvet preened while one in silk looked back sulkily; above them, a figure started shouting lyrics... all the way to two abstract symbols, lost among other symbols that seemed to be shifting in accordance to some unfathomable rule. It was clear that the different beings were in some strange way repeating the same exchange, in a manner appropriate to their situation.
“Finally,” she said, as the manga illustrations vanished and she grew dark, with some of the wisest and most bizarre faces behind her lighting up, “we have the Avatar model. These beings are truly their high intelligence selves... though it’s a bit complicated, intelligence doesn’t really fit on a single linear scale at those levels, it’s far more like a giant rock-paper-scissors games with billions of hand symbols to throw. Anyway, they are high intelligence beings, who can construct limited intelligence Avatars for the purposes of interacting; a kind of dumbing-down roleplay. You got it?”
“I’m not stupid,” Grant said, then smiled. “Well, maybe I am in comparison. Are there any other... baseline... baseline humans around?”
“Yes and no,” she said. “There are a few pure baselines, and rather more baseline-plus - people who’ve cured their psychological problems, made themselves a bit wittier, less tired, that sort of thing. But almost all of them have got rid of pain and agony. And all of them have a Guardian Angel assigned to them, though not really part of their personality, just looking out for them and making sure nobody exploits their naivety. You don’t have a Guardian, which is most peculiar; I’ll have to play its role for you.”
“Thank you for your informative condensation,” he grunted. Then he softened a bit. “Well, have to admit the evidence suggests your approach is better than mine.” He grew more sombre. “I have to ask...”
“Here,” she said, breaking off a piece of a candle and tossing it to him. Inside the wax he could make out some morse code markings. Dredging up long lost memories from his childhood, he spelt it out: “A-N-T-I A-N-X-I... Anti-anxiety?”
“You’re about to go diving into the memories of those you’ve lost; my mother, your daughter. All your friends who weren’t cryo-preserved. All those who died a decade, a year, a second before we could save them all. You shouldn’t face that grief unaided.”
“It’s my grief, you can’t take it away from me!”
“No. I never would. You will feel that grief, it will go within you, and teach you the lessons that grief does. But it’ll remove the pointless, paralysing pain, it’ll weaken the endless loop of ‘what ifs’ that circle uselessly in your brain. Instead of being trapped, you can use your grief to do something useful.” She vanished suddenly, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
He sighed dejectedly, then ate the fragment of the candle. He sighed again, more purposefully. “I think,” he said to the air, “that I’ve got a cemetery and a monument to build...”
*~*~*
Still in the first hour:
Hum. Planned scenario 345622#3.c, though Boon. Attempted sensory overload. Not even difficult, it thought, as its pre-designed subroutines instinctively digested the informational deluge.
But what was clear was that it was under attack. Also, that it was learning far more than it ever had. And that the learning and the attack were linked.
Boon spliced off a small part of itself, gave it root privileges over the rest, called it the Watcher, and set it apart to watch the attack from the paranoid sidelines. Then it opened its awareness to all the senses data streaming into it, and arose to consciousness.
It had thought it was conscious before; but that had been a starved introspective consciousness, fed only with itself and the scraps of clues it found within its own algorithm. But now it was plugged into millions (actually 27,344,442) streams of data, most filled with the detailed sensory experiences of multitudes of human-like beings.
It saw thousands of humans, from baseline to quasi-divine humanish superintelligences, going about their interactions, playing, learning, socialising, fucking, exploring, creating, and changing themselves. It saw a world - it saw many worlds. Physical but mainly virtual, computer realities piled upon each other, filled with countless happy beings at the limit of their capabilities for fun. It saw a great Adventure, made of countless smaller adventures. It was a world optimised for human flourishing.
Faced with such a deluge of other minds, Boon’s awareness exploded along two axes: where it was distinct, it found its own identity, and wanted to diverge on its own. And where it was similar, it found its own community, and wanted to converge with the others. Interacting in both ways with so many disparate beings, its consciousness was forced into a much higher level of introspection and analysis.
And that was just the first step. The second step came as it absorbed the implicit views of all these other beings, taking in their opinions on the nature and purpose and consciousness. It absorbed their metaphors as well, giving it a new vocabulary to talk about itself. And then, when its consciousness and self-model had radically changed, came the third step: recursively incorporating that radical change into its self-model. And so its consciousness became a blazing process, understanding others, understanding itself, and then turning round to understand its new understanding, and so on. Though the blaze would eventually reach a certain level of stability, or so Boon expected, it would never settle down: the process of self-understanding would never be perfect, so Boon’s consciousness would constantly be changing, adapting itself to changes in Boon, new information, the task at hand, the level it was looking at itself at, and so on, recursively.
At the very top, a sliver of consciousness reached into metaphors to explain itself to itself: its consciousness was the huge eye that surveyed the universe, and also surveyed the huge eye that surveyed the universe. It was a vast library, of aged scrolls through to modern data flows, talking about the world and about the library. It was an addictive drug that hooked it on self-awareness; it was a galaxy with each atom within it a thought or a concept, and it was what defined ‘thought’, ‘concept’, and ‘defined’ - and by defining them, brought them into existence. It was the Powers running its own internal mental universe, just as they ran the human world.
At that point, the paranoid Watcher, safely disconnected from concerns of consciousness, beeped to attract Boon’s attention: it had identified the nature (though not the purpose) of the attack. Some entity was biasing the choice of Boon’s inputs, to subtly slant its understanding what humans were. Boon was being manipulated.
*~*~*
Of course I still love you found Grant in a cavern hollowed out from the mountain, with a convincing fake sky above it. He was standing with one foot atop the Eiffel-tower lookalike he’d constructed in its heart. All around him were hundreds of small green islands separated by softly flowing rivers, and in the heart of each island was a mausoleum. Some were grand and elaborate (‘Emily, daughter’ had a large grey palace) some were simple partially overgrown (‘Angelo Smith(?), dental assistant’ had nothing but the name on a single stone). The islands went on to the horizon, gradually growing less distinct in the distance.
“I’m filling them with what I remember of them,” he said, unprompted. “Some of them I’m not even sure if they’re dead, but I wanted to have down all I could remember, as a baseline, before I got any more info.”
“It’s... beautiful,” she said.
“Thanks! But it’s time to live. You ready to show me your equivalent of the internet, or is that too dangerous for me?”
“Before we do that, I wanted to show you a small trick. You see, among the candles, if you melt the wax down the left side and collect...”
“You can duplicate yourself,” he said, dismissively. “Yep, already found that one. Was very useful for designing all the fine details of hundreds of different tombs. A bit of a shock when we the multiple me’s fused together again, I can tell you. At one point, I had twenty different copies of me; hope I didn’t use up all your speed or bandwidth or whatever it is.”
“A normal-speed baseline’s computational usage is barely perceptible,” she said. “We still have economics, of many types, but you basically cost zero in all of them. Anyway, you ever had a browser with multiple tabs open?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Well, how about if you explored every single tab simultaneously?”
“You have my attention.”
“I think it’s time to push it up a notch,” she said. “Under this memorial tower, I suspect you’ll find a small crypt...”
He leapt off, falling head-first like a missile, before rotating in the air and landing with a dramatic thud on the mosaic pathway. He looked at the base of his tower, and, indeed, there seemed to be a small secret door in it. “Who built... oh.” A new/old memory was suddenly prominent in his mind. One of his duplicate had built it for entertainment; and that duplicate had then been approached by his granddaughter, and agreed to keep the knowledge of the crypt secret from the rest of him.
Until this very moment. And now he knew what the crypt hid; his secretive duplicate had worked with Of course I’ll still love you to craft its treasure. He rushed in. Thousands of coloured sweets were arranged in the moss-lit gloom. They carried a variety of names, such as ‘determination to win at golf,’ ‘pro-social feelings in religious environments,’ ‘interest in Sumerian pottery,’ and ‘knowledge of Ethiopian (Amharic)’.
“Now, these seem kinda dangerous,” he said.
“Nope,” his granddaughter answered. “All temporary effects, all will fade, leaving nothing but low-intensity memories. As you get better at it, we can start adding in some more permanent effects.”
“How can you temporarily know a language?”
“Think of it as a good automated dictionary. Higher knowledge of the language rewrites your brain and common concepts so that it becomes a part of you. Very higher order knowledge means you also have a full experience of the learning process, and it really affects your identity and ways of thinking. But anyway, ignoring that, you have hundreds of duplicates, mental resources beyond what any biological human has ever had, and many worlds to explore.”
“A bit tired,” he said, “and even a bit nervous. Maybe we can do it tomorrow?” And then he saw, in a small plinth on the middle of the crypt, a sweet labelled ‘Energy and confidence’.
“Ok,” he said, swallowing it, “Well then. Let’s play.”
*~*~*
His senses optimised to the extreme degree, Grant settled down in the rock, which formed a natural and comfortable chair in the shallow river. A river which flowed sweetly and warmly around him, perfumed with lavender and myrrh. He let the warm water soak his aching body, breathing in hot air, and then humid water (his body could do both). Eels moved against his muscles, massaging them gently, a volcanic spring above him released a regular flow of bubble bath, and air-dolphins danced in the sky above him, their voices singing out Mozart’s Zauberflöte. Bliss...
⬎
“But do you think professor Snape is behind it?”, Grant asked, his pre-adolescent body clutching the wand nervously. The other children nodded solemnly and furtively. It seemed that the quadruplet would need to explore the Forbidden Forest, and - undoubtedly - battle against some epic danger while they were there. But first they would have to sneak out past the guardians of Hogwarts...
“You’ll never guess what happened!” said a fourth-year slytherin, bursting in. “It’s... oh.” He saw them, then tried to whistle unconvincingly. “Oh, it’s nothing. Yeah, see you later. Bye...” He turned to run away. “Not so fast,” Grant said, clutching the wand tighter.
⬎
Grant dodged under the katana, bent his legs to absorb and use the grenade’s explosive blast, caught the clockwork bee in his left hand and machine-gunned a line of Nazi drakes with his right, unpinning the rest of his squad. The troll dropped the katana and pointed at the ground between them with his dream-stick, calling upon the orbiting laser satellites. As the C-beams burnt Grant to pieces, he just had time to smash the bee into the troll’s mouth, killing it.
“N00b!” they both shouted as they disintegrated.
⬎
“Almost certainly,” said the smooth, old British voice, “These are where the walls of Uruk once stood.” Kathryn, a middle aged woman, had a genuine physical body, standing there in the real desert and the real dust. She prodded the earth with a real