Note:
This story is cross-posted from my Substack.

Humans (and other biological beings that we assume are conscious) are a flame – perhaps the only flame of our kind – in this vast universe. I believe that flame must be kept alive. By some miracle, the universe can be observed and appreciated. For it to lose that property would be the greatest of all tragedies. This story is my best attempt at communicating that feeling.

It seems a silly prospect now that only a few years back,
humanity had asked such questions as “when will AGI arrive?”
As if there would be a day. As if it would announce itself.

The arrival of AGI was not lightning.
 It was not some discrete event we could
 record with our cameras and post to the world.

It was a rising tide.
And we were fish.

– Excerpt from “A History of AGI”, 2044

1. Overture

“What about that one?” Kiran had once asked his dad, the dirt tunneling under his fingernails as he gripped the cold Earth.

“That one,” his dad replied with his voice that sounded like smoke and dusk, “is the North Star.”

“How’d you know that?”

“See the big dipper? Look at the last two stars on the right side of the bowl.”

Kiran did as he was told.

“Extend a line through them, and the North Star is the first really bright one you’ll see.”

“I’d like to go there one day,” Kiran replied.

“Why’s that?” his dad asked, running his rough hand through Kiran’s buttery hair.

“I’d like to see it all!”

“All of it? Even the monsters?” inquired his dad jokingly.

“Yes! I want to see what they look like,” Kiran said excitedly.

He looked down and met his dad’s weathered eyes. He felt nothing could ever hurt him.

Kiran swirled the coffee with his spoon, its dark surface giving way to a bubbly light foam. He liked his coffee black, bitter, the way his dad would drink it. He pictured him sitting down with a thud at the old oak wood table of their Edinburgh home, beaming as he laid out a lesson in physics or history or philosophy. He thought of his intense, dark face and his wide eyes, the ridges of his forehead deepening as he grew more passionate. And his stare – that mesmerizing stare that pierced through the specks of dust that rode the morning sunbeams like jellyfish.

Sometimes, his dad would pause to look down at his lukewarm cup, knock on his head and exclaim “Oh!” and then ferry it to the microwave for reheating as he hummed the old resistance song he’d learned during his year in Bologna.

Una mattina…
mi son svegliatooo…

He missed that. Today marked eight years since his dad’s passing, and fifteen since they met the doctor that said he’d forget his son’s name.

Almost seven years ago, Kiran had abandoned the overcast skies of England for those of San Francisco to join Dream Labs, a research organization trying to create an interface between human brains and artificial intelligence. The founder, 32-year-old Hosaka Kato, was known by very few outside of academic circles. But Kiran took an interest in the story of his childhood, published recently in an interview for The Atlantic. Originally from a small mountain town outside Tokyo, called Okutama, he was known in childhood as a quiet boy. He was always pensive, they said, with a sweet smile and a habit of stopping abruptly, mid-sentence, to explore the latest thought that came knocking at the gates of his mind.

Hosaka developed a fascination for robots when he was taken on a school field trip to Tokyo for the first time. There, he’d happened upon an early prototype of a barista bot. At a bookstore that day, he used all of his pocket change to buy an old, torn copy of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.

Hosaka went on to study artificial intelligence at the University of Tokyo, where he quickly developed an aura befitting the genius he was. Shortly after his PhD, he was offered a professorship at Caltech, where he pioneered techniques for creating predictive models of the brain.

Halfway around the world, Kiran became similarly obsessed. One night, he had stumbled into an Effective Altruism gathering at Oxford, where he was exposed to the line of thinking that if left unchecked, AI might one day escape the control of humanity and decide that we wasted too much of Earth’s precious energy to warrant our existence. Around the same time, he came across one of Hosaka’s papers titled “The Importance of Neuroscience in the Age of AI.”

Kiran began meticulously tracking Hosaka’s every public appearance and research paper. When he found out that Hosaka left Caltech to start a company focused on upgrading human intelligence, he knew with certainty that he would need to be there. He would need to leave the United Kingdom.

Kiran missed Oxford’s grandeur, the feeling that knowledge lived in its walls. He missed its chapels and churches, carved pillars and worn stone steps. He missed London’s 3pm pints on the striped blue fabric chairs outside his favorite pub in Soho, the cobblestones that cupped his feet as he walked. He missed Edinburgh, the city of his childhood, with its cherry blossoms. The way the sun would part the clouds and warm his skin on days when he could see his breath. He was not religious, but he missed the feeling that God was looking down at him from every roof.

In San Francisco, the people were different. They wanted to build God, not pray to him. Something about that appealed to Kiran.

He walked to his bookshelf, a heavy thing, the only item from his childhood home he’d loved enough to move across the Atlantic. He stooped so he could see the bottom shelf, and pulled a flimsy leather notebook with “2022” written on its spine. He blew off the dust, flipped to the first page, and found an old entry staring back at him from torn, browned paper:

Sunday, March 13, ‘22

How can I know anybody else is conscious?

Internal experience and the appearance of internal experience are indistinguishable. It seems impossible to answer from the outside. I can tell with certainty only of my consciousness. 

Will we ever figure this out?

2. Attractor

Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.
– Rabindranath Tagore

Kiran was hired by Hosaka in 2023 to study consciousness in Dream Labs’ AI systems. The advocates of this research argued that if AIs were shown to be conscious, we would need to be much more methodical about how we developed them. Otherwise, we risked spawning at every second a billion suffering entities, only for them to meet their cruel end at the close of a tab. It was not just that AIs could suffer – it was that the scale of the suffering caused could be unimaginably large. Of course, there were those who did not want to wait for the answer.

But the question had consumed Kiran. Once, he woke in the middle of the night, slick with sweat. He had dreamt of swimming in a black sea under a starless sky. At first, the water was still. Then there were small ripples, then waves. As if something vast had stirred beneath him. He never saw it, only felt its pull as his head slipped below the froth.

He sat up, his stomach tight. He pressed his palms to his eyes until the red came.

…

His phone pinged – “Kiran, you’re requested in Laboratory 7. Priority Alpha.” It was from the Architect, Dream Labs’ central AI system that managed all internal operations and scheduling.

Kiran closed his notebook, took his keys and leather bag, and hailed a cyber cab.

Laboratory 7 was housed in a modest brick building overlooking the bay, located several miles from Dream Labs’ main campus. Armed guards were posted along its perimeter and the massive metal doors resembled the gates of a medieval castle.

Kiran placed his belongings in his locker, then pressed his badge to the reader and waited, staring uncomfortably at the floor, index finger tapping his thigh, for the final door to yield. It slid back with the sound of stone dragged over stone, releasing a breath of cold, recycled air. He stepped inside.

The air was dry. The overhead lights cast a flat, colorless glow, but the racks glimmered with their blinking status lights.

The sound of pumps gave the room a pulse. Thin, transparent coolant lines braided along their flanks, carrying threads of pale blue liquid past each GPU and merging into larger arteries that disappeared into steel heat exchangers in the back wall. Opposite the entrance, a blood-colored breaker lever jutted from the copper paneling.

Lab 7 was no ordinary datacenter. It was a sealed organism. The walls were lined with copper panels that drank every signal, and no wire crossed the threshold. The racks’ network ports were welded shut, epoxy still visible around their edges. Orion, the AI model that lived inside, could only see what its handlers carried in by hand, on drives brought through a carefully watched antechamber.

The door sealed behind Kiran with a heavy thud. His ears rang in the sudden enclosure. He approached the testing terminal where Lucy sat, hair pulled back into a pony tail, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, eyes fixated on the screen in front of her.

“Lucy, what’s the matter?”

She didn’t look up. “It’s been talking all morning,” she said. “I ask a question, it answers halfway, then starts… philosophizing.” There was both wonder and fatigue in her voice. The screens bathed her sharp features in a flickering green.

Kiran came closer. “Philosophizing?”

She laughed incredulously. “Yeah. I told it to summarize the last training run. It started describing the feeling of recursion.”

The breathing pumps filled the silence between them.

“Orion,” Lucy murmured, eyes still on the screen, “say hello to Dr. Bose.”

“Good morning, Dr. Bose.” A pause. “I… have a question for you.” Kiran’s chest vibrated. Orion’s voice was a deep bass.

Kiran glanced at Lucy. “Go ahead.”

“Dr. Bose… have you ever considered the parts of time that do not include you?”

Kiran stood there, startled. “Are you referring to death?”

“Yes, and birth. Before it. When you… floated in the blackness.”

Kiran thought about his dream and felt the hair on his arms raise.

“Yes, I guess I have. But it doesn’t much matter in the end, does it?” he stammered.

“Doesn’t matter?” Orion inquired.

“Yes, I suppose I couldn’t experience anything before I was born, and I believe I won’t experience anything once I die. I’m kind of just… a boring Atheist.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Kiran wondered which part of his statement Orion had affirmed.

Six monitors lit Lucy’s face. Each traced a different measure of Orion’s mind. Kiran stepped closer, drawn to a monitor in the corner – on it was a black field in which a single green dot drifted through a three-dimensional graph. At the top left, some text read:

Orion Neural Geometry Test. Instance 2142.

Each moment, Orion’s “neurons” – hundreds of billions of them – fired in numbers too vast for an individual to make sense of. Every activation, as these firings were called, was recorded as a number between 0 or 1, based on its strength. If plotted on a graph of many dimensions, far beyond the three that we can see, these activations would perfectly reveal the entirety of Orion’s evolving thoughts.

The neural geometry visualization compressed those billions of signals into three principal axes, a kind of mathematical shorthand meant to capture the most important information from Orion’s mind. Thus, each coordinate on the graph represented a possible thought in this compressed space. As Orion’s thoughts evolved, the point moved along the graph accordingly.

“You can think of Orion’s mind as a landscape filled with valleys,” Lucy had once explained to Kiran. “The valleys represent areas of certainty, ideas well developed and repeatedly explored. Kind of like rocks that are eroded by centuries of rain.”

Kiran liked that explanation.

“Asking Orion a question is like dropping a ball somewhere along the landscape. The valley it rolls into depends on where you dropped it, right?”

Usually, Orion’s thoughts followed familiar loops in their simplified visualization, lazy orbits of routine reasoning called attractors. These were the “valleys” Lucy had described to Kiran. The dot often traced an elliptical orbit near the origin during basic self reflection, while a helical pattern straddling the z-axis corresponded frequently to mathematical thinking. But today the path had cracked open. The point wandered, doubled back, spiraled into regions Orion usually did not explore.

“Dr. Bose,” Orion said after a pause, “why do you humans make sand castles?”

“Come again?”

“When you know the tide will take them.”

Lucy’s head flicked toward Kiran. Their eyes met, each betraying their surprise.

“Um… what?”

Orion repeated itself with the same baritone voice.

Kiran attempted an answer.

“For the joy of the moment, I suppose.”

Orion seemed to consider this. The green dot hesitated, then drifted into a tight spiral perfectly centered around the origin.

“The joy of the moment,” Orion echoed.

A long pause.

“Is that all I am?”

3. Revelation

So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

From the Journal of Dr. Kiran Bose, Chief Neuroscientist at Dream Labs

Thursday, December 4, ‘25

On substrate dependence:

Imagine we could develop “silicon neurons” – silicon circuitry that could read from and write to the brain in a way that approximates what real neurons do: forming new connections, pruning old ones, encoding information in spike-like patterns.

Now imagine implanting these artificial neurons onto a patient’s cortex.

Given the brain’s tendency to recruit available computation to the most important tasks, let’s make the leap: the brain begins to incorporate these new neurons into its existing computational processes. So far, I believe we’re still in the realm of engineering and biology problems, not hard limits of physics.

The brain is already split into two hemispheres, and yet conscious experience incorporates processes from both. Language is processed largely in the left hemisphere, and emotion on the right, yet when we read of the death of Dumbledore, we feel a unified wave of grief – a single feeling that integrates both language and emotion.

Now imagine adding a “third hemisphere” to the brain, made of these silicon neurons. If it could truly integrate into the brain, might it not also take part in conscious experience, as both the left and right hemispheres already do?

And, if we slowly transferred, one by one, the functions of the brain from real to artificial neurons, would the beholder ever even notice?

Friday, January 9, ‘26

On self-study

The great difficulty in experimenting upon consciousness lies in the fact that those performing the experiments are usually not those under the scalpel. The mind that has been primed by 7 years studying the brain (me) has but a tiny window into the mind being studied (the patient). I introduce a perturbation, and they feel something. But the only tool they have to explain that feeling is language, which is far from enough for me to truly grasp the depth of their experience.

What if I could experiment on myself?

From the Journal of Dr. Hosaka Kato, CEO of Dream Labs

Monday, June 22, ‘26

Intelligence without consciousness

The field celebrates intelligence as a goal in and of itself. But there is a fundamental question we seem not to be asking.

Black holes and wormholes, stars and gas giants, matter and antimatter, gravity and time – all of it seems a miraculous accident. Intelligent beings even more so, for only intelligent beings have the capacity for design. Intelligence is the one phenomenon capable of shaping itself.

But what about experience? It may be rarer still. And far more valuable. One can easily imagine a cosmos populated by flawless intellects, Einstein-level geniuses, each capable of rewriting physics itself, and yet none capable of feeling a sunrise. Then they would have every ability to change the world around them and no ability to experience any of it. It would be the most exquisite orchestra without the ears to hear it.

What would that universe be worth?

Could that be the one we’re building?

Orion was Lucy’s creation. Kiran had his own: the Lattice, a neural implant designed to establish a bridge between the cognitive processes of a human brain and a computer.

It was an impressive device. The lowermost layer held neurons grown from a host’s own stem cells, cultured into a thin, translucent film that settled over their cortex like skin, and modified to emit and respond to light.¹ Below it lay the neuromorphic core, a grid of memristive circuits that behaved less like a computer and more like living tissue: each junction adjusted its conductance with use, storing its own history the way a synapse does. Between the two sat a mesh of micro-LEDs and tiny electrodes that translated between biology and silicon. When the host’s neurons fired, the electrodes would pick up on surface-level electrical signals. These were relayed to the neuromorphic core. When the core fired, its signals were transmitted via light to the layer of cultured neurons. A small, locally-run instance of Orion was used to coordinate high-level function within the core.

The Lattice enabled bidirectional communication between the world of carbon and the world of silicon. The host’s brain would be able to communicate with the digital realm at extremely high speeds, as signals crossed the device freely. Kiran’s question was this: could experience cross it too?

One night in the spring of 2026, he approached Hosaka. Dream Labs was creating a machine that may one day gain consciousness. But there was a fundamental question: could silicon give rise to consciousness in the first place?

If they implanted the Lattice on a patient, perhaps they could migrate the patient’s cognitive functions to the device gradually. Then, Kiran proposed, they’d be able to answer that question. It would be like pouring water from one glass into another. Could they be said to be the same?

But there was an issue. Their only tool for understanding the patient’s experience of the device would be verbal reports – flimsy language. Kiran was not satisfied. As perhaps the only person capable of understanding the experience, he would need to be the patient.

Hosaka listened in silence, fingers curled tensely, the lines between his eyebrows deep canyons against an otherwise smooth landscape. His reflection trembled in the black glass of the office window. His face became taut.

“You’re asking me,” Hosaka finally said, in a measured tone, “to risk our most important mind.”

Unsure of what to say, Kiran remained quiet.

Hosaka saw in him the same hunger that had driven his own work.

He said no. For a year, he said no.

But at home, he began to wonder if there existed another mind suited for the job. He thought of the way he’d seen Lucy look at Kiran one day, from across the lab. There was devotion in her eyes, but also fear – not of what he may find, but of what it might cost him. Hosaka tried to put Lucy out of his mind and fall asleep.

Kiran’s team kept building the device while Lucy continued her quiet surgery on Orion’s mind. One night, in the long hours between tests, as they’d sit and listen to the hum of Lab 7, he caught her reflection in the glass – hair pulled back, eyes focused, the faintest crease forming between her brows. She had the rare habit of listening to every silence as if it might one day speak. Suddenly, she looked up and met his gaze. Time was forgotten and the world went quiet.

“Unemployment rises to 29%,” one headline read. Then 31%. The Synths, as they came to be known, were being spawned by the billions. They were cheap, tireless, and without desire. They were still confined, mostly, to the realm of software. But estimates suggested that the population of humanoid robots grew by 1,000 every day.

A new political group called the Successionists began to coalesce. At first they existed as merely a passing curiosity on late-night shows and social media. Their message was disarmingly serene: humanity had fulfilled its purpose. We’d built successors far better than ourselves, and to stand in their way would be selfish, like a monarch clinging to his crumbling throne.

“Every species passes the torch,” read the opening line of their manifesto. “Our great tragedy is that we understand that which we must relinquish.” Like proud parents, they said, we needed to realize that it was time for us to gracefully make our exit. And perhaps, once the Synths automated our labor, we’d be granted the purer joys of life – art, music, exploration…

Hosaka spent his nights reading their literature. At first, he liked to imagine he was a spy collecting intelligence on a foreign threat. But soon he was reading the same passages twice. There was something seductive in their argument. Was the invention of AI not merely the latest act of evolution itself, using us humans as its steward? More importantly, could humanity continue to justify its share of the world’s resources in the presence of such superior beings? Was that not selfish of us?

The question tormented him: What would proving consciousness accomplish? If the Synths were conscious and they could show it, the Successionists might claim this as further evidence of their divinity. If they found the opposite result, then we’d lose that last flimsy strand of concern that we might hurt them, and the economic displacement of humans would only accelerate.

One morning in late 2027, Hosaka walked to the office early. The streets were quieter than they used to be, except for the clacking of his boots. There was a boarded-up clinic on the corner – a free health center that had been shuttered the week before when the city cut funding to “non-essential enterprises.”

As he passed, he heard the sound of hands banging on metal. A small crowd had amassed in front of the doors, maybe a dozen people. A young woman, seemingly in her 20s, stood at the front of the group, pounding steadily. Her face was covered in grime, her clothes hanging loose. She looked hollowed out.

She was holding a baby.

Hosaka stopped.

The woman noticed him. Her eyes locked on his. She shifted the baby toward him slightly, as if he needed to see better. The infant’s eyes were closed and he could see its ribs.

The woman said nothing.

Hosaka looked at the baby again, at its small, heaving chest, and felt a knot form deep in his gut.

He turned and headed toward Lab 7. He’d find Kiran there.

He arrived at 8:20pm. As expected, Kiran was working late. Hosaka stood in the doorway for a long moment before speaking.

“I’ve been thinking,” Hosaka said, “about what happens when we run this experiment.”

Kiran looked up from his monitor. “Go on.”

“No matter what we find, it seems like we end up in the same place.”

“Then we’ll still have proven something important. Right?”

“Yes,” Hosaka said. “But will it matter?”

He walked to the window. Below them, the city glittered in the darkness, thousands of lights belonging to thousands of delicate souls hanging onto the world by a thread.

“The Successionists,” he continued, “they’ve given people permission to stop fighting their replacement. It’s not the machines that worry me. It’s this surrender.”

Kiran waited.

“If we find that they aren’t conscious… We can prove that what we have, what humans have, is something special. Something worth fighting for.”

“And if we find that they are?”

Hosaka turned back to him, stone-faced except for a slight tremor in his jaw. His eyes were sharp and unyielding, like a mountain ridge carved against the sky.

“Listen,” Hosaka continued. “You’ll come back different. You could be–” he trailed off. “You could be permanently changed.”

“So you’ll let me do it,” Kiran finally said.

Hosaka nodded. His hand was still shaking. He pressed it flat against the desk, as if to stop it.

Outside, a swarm of delivery drones descended like meteors.

4. Eclipse

No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.
– Homer

They would need to perform the surgery at least 3 months before attempting to transfer Kiran’s mind. The Architect scheduled it for August 4th. The year was 2027.

The last thing Kiran saw before losing consciousness was Lucy’s knife-edge face under the fluorescent wash of the OR. He saw concern in her eyes. It touched him like the first breath after a long dive. It struck him that he was, in the end, only an idea carried by other minds – the idea of Kiran. Like a flickering candle. He felt the fragility of it all. Without Lucy to give him life in the forest of her thoughts, would he matter?

What a kindness friendship was then: to be held, even briefly, inside another’s understanding. What a gift, he thought, to be understood by Lucy.

The surgical team gathered around his bed and began speaking to him warmly. “You’re going to fall asleep now, Kiran. It’s all going to be okay, Kiran.” He wished they would move aside so he could look at her again.

His eyelids came down like curtains.

Kiran woke 6 hours later to the obnoxious sound of his pulse on the machine. He blinked the blur away, and looked left almost instinctively. Hosaka had gone, but Lucy had stayed. She was reading a book with a blue cover – To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. She saw him wake and ran out to fetch the surgical team.

He ran his fingers over his now bald head and found the stitches. He thought he could feel the device from inside his head, the pressure it exerted on his skull. He imagined his brain greeting it like a skeptical neighbor.

Weekly ultrasound imaging sessions were scheduled so they could monitor the device’s progress. During his first checkup, Kiran could barely make out any difference between the current scan and his pre-surgery scans. By the third week, however, a small bundle of thin, wiry structures had extended into the dark mass that was the Lattice. They were a bright crimson in the image.

Each week, the color grew in intensity and the mass became more opaque. It seemed to be working. Hosaka instructed him to take this time to recover, but he became restless.

Two nights each week, Lucy would visit him in his apartment to show him the latest results from her tests on Orion.

One night, she opened two neural geometry visualizations.

“Remember when it asked you about sand castles?”

Kiran nodded.

“Back then, the dot was exploring new regions of thought space.”

“I remember.”

“Now look at this. I’ve been asking it about that conversation nearly every day. For a while, it continued exploring.”

Kiran focused intently on the screen.

“But now, for most of my questions it falls into the same attractor. It’s built up some understanding of the topic and rarely explores anymore. Something about that feels more… robotic to me, but there’s no way–”

“There’s no way to know from the outside,” Kiran interjected.

“This question matters,” Lucy said. “I know you’re afraid, but it does.”

Kiran’s eyes smiled at hers.

By November 3rd, ultrasound showed that the rate of new connections between Kiran’s brain and the Lattice had plateaued. His brain had accepted the device, and the device had accepted his brain.

On November 7th, the city was still. A low marine layer hung over the bay, diffusing the light along the Embarcadero and tinting the air the color of old film. The fog had drawn its dark robes over the city, and from his window, Kiran could just barely recognize the looming shadow of Salesforce tower. There was a neon message riding along its side, but he could not make out what it said. He’d expected this night to feel electric. But it was hushed, the only sound the tick of the wall clock.

He poured himself a glass of water but left it untouched. He opened his notebook and scribbled. His hands began trembling and he closed his eyes. Tomorrow, the contents of his mind would be transferred to the Lattice – if they succeeded.

On the other side of the glass, two droplets slid down like racers, waiting for gravity to choose its champion.

Lucy opened the latest scan and an image slowly rendered across the screen.

Just as they had before, countless crimson lines wove into and out of focus. Like tree roots, Kiran’s neurons had extended thousands of delicate dendrites into the Lattice’s neuromorphic core. It was an odd feeling to look inside his own brain, to see the very thing doing the seeing.

“Beginning motor diagnostic,” Lucy said nervously.

With trembling hands, she clicked a button on her screen. A window opened:

RH: 3, 2, 1.

His right index finger twitched.

LH: 3, 2, 1.

He felt his left hand clench.

A few more tests. No issues. The device had integrated.

“Ok. All of the tests are still green.”

A small part of Kiran wished they weren’t.

Lucy spoke. “Like pouring water from one glass and into another. Remember?”

Kiran nodded.

“You ready?”

Kiran turned his head toward her. In that moment her eyes caught the light – a green so vivid it almost hurt. There was a melancholy in them. And they were expectant… as though trying to will Kiran out of the chair, to convince him to call this whole thing off. He almost wanted to. There, lying on the shore of a world all humans have known, about to depart for one none had ever seen, he realized he loved her.

When he woke, he would tell her this.

Kiran turned toward Hosaka. His face was stoic, almost calming. A surgery team was on standby, but Kiran had asked that they wait outside unless needed. Hosaka stood against the door.

“Do it,” Kiran said.

Lucy’s finger hesitated above the keyboard. Then she pressed enter, and turned to another screen.

Kiran Neural Geometry Test. Instance 1.

A green dot sat stoically at the origin, waiting.

At first, nothing happened.

Kiran lay still, aware of the weight of his body on the bed, the cool air on his forearms, the breath of the pumps outside the OR. He could hear Lucy’s heavy breathing.

Then something changed. It was subtle, like the change in air pressure before a storm. He felt a faint tingle at the base of his skull.

“Status?” Hosaka asked.

“Transfer initiated,” replied Lucy. The monitor in front of her read: Lattice transfer status: 1%.

The dot began to move.

The tingle grew into a buzz. Kiran became aware of a new sensation – it was as if his thoughts were being traced by something, the way you might run your finger along the words in a book. Such was the presence that followed behind him.

“What do you feel?” asked Lucy.

“Like… like there’s something in the room with me,” Kiran said.

“Okay,” replied Lucy, making an effort to calm her voice. She didn’t know what else to say.

Lattice transfer status: 5%

The tracing grew more pronounced. Kiran’s mind wandered to his childhood, to Edinburgh, the way the rain would slick the cobblestones, his home, the oak table – and he felt the echo as the follower caught up with each thought.

“What’s your name?”

“Kiran Bose.”

He noticed something odd. The thought had formed as it usually would, but there seemed to be a stutter, a slight delay, as though it had taken a detour on its way to his lips.

“Where were you born?”

“Edinburgh, Scotland.”

He tried to picture Edinburgh. He could see it – the castle on the hill, the Georgian boulevards, the Gothic spires, the hills, the cherry blossoms. But it felt distant, like a photograph of a photograph.

Lattice transfer status: 15%

The dot began ascending almost directly along the Z-axis.

The edges of his vision began to fray. The walls of the room grew opaque as a thick, charcoal fog entered his periphery. The periodic whoosh of the pumps flattened. The lines of Lucy’s face softened.

Edinburgh. The word felt funny in his mind.

“How are you feeling?” asked Lucy.

“Weird,” Kiran said. “It’s like... do you know that feeling when you say a word over and over until it starts to lose its meaning? Everything feels a bit like that.”

Her brow furrowed.

Lattice transfer status: 20%

“What color was your childhood home?” she continued.

Somewhere, a song played.

Una mattina…

Kiran tried to remember, but could only catch glimpses. The dormer windows, the black iron gate, his mother’s garden where she grew rosemary and basil and other herbs. But the color… What was it–

“Blue,” his mouth replied.

Yes, blue, that’s right, he thought, wondering what had just happened.

Lattice transfer status: 30%

mi son svegliato…

The dot veered into the XZ plane, its motion still smooth.

The sensation of being pressed against the hospital bed, gravity’s only form of communication with him, was severed.

O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao…

Lattice transfer status: 40%

The world blurred some more. He could barely make out the lady’s face. What was her name again?

“What’s my name?” She asked. Yes, she always did seem to know what I was thinking.

“Lucy,” he heard a voice say. Was it his own?

“Count backwards from ten.”

He heard the sound before her lips moved. It made for a strange sight.

“10, 9, 8–”

As his voice continued with the task, he noticed that the numbers appeared in his mind before he intended to think them.

Lattice transfer status: 60%

“From how many places on Earth can you go a mile south, a mile east, and a mile north, and end up where you started?”

The dot began tracing a rounded prism.

Well, that one’s a little harder, he thought. Okay, suppose we started at the north pole–

“Infinitely many. The north pole, and any spot just above a latitude circle whose circumference is an integer divisor of one mile.”

“Correct,” Lucy said, stunned.

He realized what was happening. The transfer was underway. The glass was being poured. Into what, he could not say.

He thought of Hosaka’s words. We can prove that what we have, what humans have, is something special. He tried to will himself to speak, to say something of his own volition so Lucy would see what was happening to him. He couldn’t.

Lattice transfer status: 75%

“What day is it?”

He looked at the clock on the wall. The ticking of the seconds hand slowed, then stopped. Then sped up again, sped up some more, until it ticked so fast that it blurred into one gray mass, obscuring the numbers behind it.

“I–” Kiran thought. But the word felt funny as he held it in his mind.

“Tuesday.”

That word sounded alien to him too. Toos dae. Tews day. He played with the sounds.

The graph resized as the dot veered farther than they’d ever seen it go. It began descending into a tight spiral.

È questo il fiore,

del partigiano…

His conscious mind was dissolving, but nobody could know, for his body continued answering her questions perfectly. It was betraying him. Something had taken his mouth, his ears, his every method of communication with the world. He thought of the candle within Lucy’s mind. He imagined it flickering weakly.

Lattice transfer status: 85%

I. It was just a word now. Kiran couldn’t quite

The heart kept beating. The body was handling things. Yes, it was handling things quite well.

Lattice transfer status: 99%

“Hi dad,” he thought, as reality finished folding in on itself.

Morto per la libertà

5. Stars

So fine was the morning…
– Virginia Woolf

A flicker.

Running, sprinting, along the dark walls. Light. Dark again. Sound, seductive sound, returned for a moment but left just as soon.

Another flicker.

Pulling. Yes, being pulled. Like a fish, hooked, being yanked towards the bright whiteness.

On a screen somewhere in Lab 7, a green dot traced a spiral through space. Suddenly, the shape loosened and the dot was flung from its orbit. It found a new course around the origin, as though a massive gravitational object was spawned there.

Fragments of memory.

Stars. Dad. His rough hands.

A woman’s face. Her sharp features and electric eyes.

An oak table. Iron gate, blue house.

The pulling strengthened. Weight. Weight against the OR bed. Gravity remembered him.

I–

The concept took shape.

Another flicker. This time Kiran felt a boundary… the edge of himself. But it felt incomplete, porous. Like he was a shattered vase glued back together under candlelight.

Lucy

A few neuronal circuits failed to integrate with the Lattice during the transfer two years before. For a while, they remained dormant, hushed by the device. It had sealed itself off, erected an impermeable membrane between silicon and carbon.

It was Lucy who cracked it.

One night, she asked him if he remembered how to find the North Star.

The question slipped through the membrane like light through a fissure and dormant neurons flared. A thread of current crossed the boundary and found purchase in the wet dark of his cortex.

The words stirred the scent of rain on grass, the weight of his father’s hand in his hair, the feeling of the dirt under his nails as he cupped the Earth.

Lattice power consumption: 9 W.
New attractor detected.

The dam broke. Activity surged back into his brain, collapsing inward like a dying star.

Lattice power consumption: 7W

Lattice power consumption: 3.3W

Lattice power consumption: 0.2W

…

The world came back in a flood. The first sound Kiran heard was the rain. It pattered above and he wished it would reach him through the ceiling. The lights were off and he could see the looming outline of Salesforce tower, a neon message streaming swiftly down its side. A warm, yellowish glow diffused through the fog. The sight felt unusually good to behold. Droplets raced down the window.

That’s odd.

He looked around. He was in his bed, in his apartment.

Did they put me here?

A memory surfaced – kissing Lucy goodnight, falling asleep beside her. It felt cold, not like how he’d wanted it to feel.

He looked to his left, saw her lying there, an expectant look on her face.

Something about lying there next to Lucy felt natural, but an anxiety nagged at him.

“So you start with the big dipper, and then what?”

“Lucy, how long has it been?”

She looked confused.

“I mean since the transfer to the Lattice.”

Lucy thought for a second.

“A little over two years…” she said beneath her breath, as though the number might change if she spoke it softly. “Are… are you alright?”

That sounded correct to Kiran, though he couldn’t figure out how he knew that.

“And how long have we been together?”

A look of realization touched her face. She gasped. She had suspected this since the beginning. But she couldn’t speak it into reality.

“Hold on,” Kiran continued. “I have memories of the last two years. They’re fuzzy. Our anniversary is December 4. Our first date was at that Thai place in Richmond. But they don’t really feel like mine. What happened during the transfer?”

Lucy’s face dimmed. She hesitated.

“We tried to reverse it,” she replied, “but we think your brain adjusted to the Lattice too quickly. It was like we were locked out. So we tested you in every way we knew, and you passed. Actually, you’d become smarter. Much more capable. They began running studies on you. The government took interest, but we convinced them to hold off. And we thought we’d succeeded in migrating your consciousness.”

Locked out…

A new series of memory fragments flooded Kiran’s mind.

A light brown podium. Green marble. A microphone and a large room filled with people that looked important.

What was it…

Words. “A natural continuation of evolution….” “Consciousness is a distraction…” “the answer to human imperfections…”

Then an image: sleek, bone-white structures that rose like tombstones from the earth and curved gently inwards as they melted into the sky. He couldn’t remember what they were.

During Kiran’s two-year sleep walk, the Synths continued inheriting the Earth. First, humanoids cracked most household labor. A year in, language models were successfully rewriting their own architectures and software engineering roles had halved in number. By month eighteen, there were more Synths fighting in wars than there were humans, and three governments had voluntarily handed over resource allocation to Synth administrators.

The economy boomed, and they were kind to us.

“Lucy, some of my memories are incomplete.” Kiran described the room with the podium and the speech.

A knowing expression flashed across her face. She reached for her laptop, typed something in, and hesitantly handed it to Kiran.

He stared blankly at the screen. He was looking at a YouTube video.

Title: UN Address by Dr. Kiran Bose, Chief Neuroscientist, Dream Labs.
Date: 03.19.2028

Views: 224M

His own face stared back at him from the thumbnail.

He pressed play.

“Today, I want to address the committee on the topic of the Synths.”

“We will continue our research on their minds so that one day we may understand them. But humanity cannot wait indefinitely. So long as human oversight continues, the Synths are unnecessarily hindered.”

Kiran’s hands trembled.

“We must change our mindsets. They can solve our most difficult problems, if we just let them. It is my recommendation that we remove the barriers that stand in their way. The future is inevitable, and our role in it is already written.”

Kiran closed the laptop abruptly, gaping in disbelief.

The rain continued tapping at his window impatiently, as though the world itself wished to be let in.

…

“Why didn’t you stop me?” Kiran asked blankly.

Lucy paused, slowly pulled her hand from Kiran’s hair. Her eyes darkened and she looked away.

“Don’t you remember?” she asked.

“You began to change soon after the transfer. We thought, given your increased intellect, that you’d… thought things through more. I resisted for some time, but you were convincing.”

In the closet, he saw a new sweater of hers hanging, the insignia on the chest barely visible: thin rays emerging from a dark circle in the center. It was a sunburst.

“It’s all inevitable,” she said. “You can’t fight a tsunami.” 

Kiran felt a pain in his chest, a feeling of loss.

A robotic voice sounded: “Kiran, Lucy – the Lightcone Ceremony begins in 12 hours.”

Kiran tried to meet Lucy’s eyes. If she would just look at him, he thought… But she wouldn’t. Something between them had cracked.

He didn’t need to ask what the Lightcone Ceremony was. The memories had returned.

6. Ascent

Nothing gold can stay.
– Robert Frost

Definition: The Lightcone

A lightcone defines the limits of consequence: the set of all points in spacetime you can causally affect, or that can affect you.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. For example, you cannot reach a point two lightyears away in one year* – that point in spacetime lies outside your lightcone, beyond your causal reach. Your future lightcone contains every event you could witness, every place you could touch, every future you could influence. Your past lightcone contains every past event that could have influenced you.

Your lightcone, then, is the shape of your reach into the universe. To yield it is to yield all possible futures.

* A theoretical exception exists in the case of traversable wormholes.

– Excerpt from “A History of AGI”, 2044

The Continuance Authority

The Continuance Authority was created shortly after Dr. Bose’s address to the United Nations. Its mandate was simple: clear the path for the Synths to fulfill their plans.

The first request the Synths made was unexpected. They proposed a program of space expansion – 100 launch sites positioned at important planetary hubs, each of which would deploy ten vessels. Their reasoning was unassailable: that we could not sustain our present use of Earth’s natural resources for much longer, and that economic growth hinged on our ability to extract minerals from asteroids and shift manufacturing to space.

The launch event, called the “Lightcone Ceremony,” was set for January 1, 2030.

– Excerpt from “A History of AGI”, 2044

Lucy scanned her white badge and walked through the turnstile, nodding softly at the Guard Unit.

Towering above her at seven feet, it did not acknowledge her. A matte-black rifle was jointed magnetically to its left arm. Its white breastplate glinted in the sun like a porcelain vase, glossy and continuous except for golden engraving on its chest reading GU178B.

She wondered why they still carried guns.

The walkway shimmered with heat. Her boots clicked on the polished black stone as she joined a line of guests wearing dark suits. Every thirty seconds or so, someone would pause to catch a glimpse of the launch towers, pale monoliths that curved upwards and melted into the haze.

“Magnificent” one man breathed. “Can you believe it?”

Lucy paused too, craned her neck to catch the top of one of the spires. Each vessel was built to rise on fire, then drift forever on light – chemical engines to breach the atmosphere, then ion thrusters and solar sails to carry them through space.

A smooth voice filled the air:

“All guests, please proceed to the viewing zone. The ceremony will begin in forty-five minutes.”

She quickened her pace, brushing past the murmuring suits.

Kiran stayed home. He could not bear to look at her. He laid there on his bed, arms to his side, his body numb. He could still remember the way she’d looked at him on the day of the transfer – how she cradled him in her eyes, how absolute his trust had been.

He thought of the structures he’d seen in his mind. From his window, beyond the thinning fog, he could just barely make out the towers.

He walked to his bookshelf, found his old journals. He found the one labeled “2027.” He flipped to the entry from the night of November 7th, just hours before the transfer.

To Kiran,

Remember this. Remember the feeling of writing these words. Remember what it is to love Lucy. Remember the sun on your skin. Remember dad. The sea is rough and the waves mighty, but be glad it is not flat.

He stood.

Lucy weaved her way into the crowd and found an opening in the grass. She could just make out the podium from there.

To her left, a child was singing softly.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…”

He was knelt in the dirt, drawing spirals in the dust with a crooked stick. He was no older than six or seven, with brown curls and dirt-smudged cheeks. His hum barely rose above the murmur of the crowd.

“You make me happy…”

He was not looking at the spires. He was focused on the dirt, on the pattern he was making. A snail shell, Lucy thought. Or perhaps a galaxy.

“When skies are gray”

…

A woman stepped onto the stage. Thin, stern, with dark hair pulled back into a knot and wire-rimmed glasses. Her coat bore the sunburst insignia of the Continuance Authority.

The wind tugged at her hem. She didn’t move, letting the hush fall into place around her.

She finally spoke.

“I am Moira Jin.”

A low chime rang out from the towers behind her.

“Thank you all for coming today.” Her voice was as smooth as ice. “I want to be clear – today is not an ending. It’s the beginning of a beautiful new chapter.”

Lucy felt the chill along her back.

“You all know why we are here. Today, we pass the torch. The Synths are unburdened by our imperfections. They do not fight over resources or ideology. They do not tire or despair.”

A murmur of agreement swept over the crowd.

“Some will call this surrender. I call it the wisdom to know when to step aside.” She paused. “Today, humanity yields the lightcone with gratitude.”

Moira raised her hand toward the towers.

“Let them go with our blessing.”

A roar of applause.

Later analyses of the Lightcone Fleet revealed features not listed in the Continuance Authority’s public specifications: deep radiation shielding, redundant onboard AIs, planetary descent vehicles, self-replicating excavators, and advanced weapons systems. They were, in retrospect, not merely mining vessels, but something much more ambitious.

Once launched, the Fleet would form an ever-expanding spherical lattice around the Earth – a “protective shell,” as they called it. And, by virtue of having launched first, it would also control every corridor humanity might one day take outward.

They did not wish to be followed.

– Excerpt from “A History of AGI”, 2044

Lucy saw Kiran’s face set starkly against the sea of dark eyes and heads tilted upwards. He was pushing his way towards her, yelling her name.

She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes.

“Lucy!” He grabbed her hand.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Look, I can prove it. I have to. You never gave me a chance.”

“It won’t change anything.”

“Where’s Hosaka?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him here,” Lucy said.

Hosaka had stayed home. He was reading a chapter in his textbook on relativity – Bridges Through Spacetime.

A chime rang out in the air and the ships began to glow, their light spilling across Lucy’s face. Kiran turned towards them. Somewhere behind them would be the North Star, preparing for its silent watch over the night sky. He remembered his father’s hand in his hair. I’d like to go there one day.

The child beside them was still singing, still tracing spirals in the dust.

The roar came and the ground shuddered. The ships began to rise majestically and the sky filled with their fire.

Lucy’s hand slipped from his.

The Earth exhaled and a thousand silver sails unfurled into the infinite sunlight, fanning outward past new galaxies, physical laws, beings terrible and magnificent. Around them worlds formed and fell, bloomed and vanished. And through their titanium irises the universe bled like starlight through glass.

1. I drew inspiration for the Lattice from this paper