Singularity Soon

01. Meta dream

He knew exactly where he was, almost to the meter. By now this route had become a part of his identity.
Driving northbound up the familiar country road at 40 miles per hour. It was dusk in the North American exurbs, and he should be home in about five minutes. Everything appeared extremely normal (hyperreal).
It was sometime in the first half of the twenty-first century. The dashboard clock indicated it was almost eight.
An unknown young woman was sitting next to him in the passenger seat, and THAT was quite impossible. There was no reason for someone like that to get in the car with him. This couldn't be real. What else had he forgotten?
She was talking, seemed to be very smart actually, must have said whatever it took to bring this about: "I love arriving at new places! The best part is the sense of profound alienation."
He could recall some things about his life now, an outline of something waiting to happen. Nothing much had ever happened.
Up ahead were the traffic lights. He pulled into the left turn lane before the busy main road. There remained enough orange sunlight to illuminate the passing traffic.
Something big had to be happening.
Also, were they going to make out?
"Never been here before," she was saying. "You don't know where you're going until you get there."
He had always been interested in car designs. The changing styles said something about the future that was too complicated to describe in words. He remembered the end of the box car sedans, Nineties simple streamlining, scalloped fenders like origami.
His passenger had stopped talking and was staring at the road. "Oh my god!" she exclaimed. "This is before the beginning!"

02. Sliver's Edge - last month ending

Before the beginning, there was almost nothing.
The strangest thing about the last weeks before the Singularity was that the world was becoming more boring. With no major news stories for several months, history seemed to have almost stopped.
Only a few people argued the world seemed unreal now; fake even.

To Rajiv, it seemed that nothing would ever happen again. With not much money left in his index funds, the remainder of his life seemed bleak. Also real possibilities of medical torture. It felt like he was dying already.
Without the slightest sense of approaching the edge of an unimaginable cliff, his feelings were quite appropriate.

Despite his respectable Indian name, Rajiv was a white nerd who lived alone. His parents had first met as hippies, and he had inherited their yuppie-years money.

He decided to go for a walk to catch some afternoon sunlight. Getting up from his PC desk, he felt an ancient lethargy. The only way to escape was technology, but progress seemed to have been delayed. No holodeck for him.

Walking through the glare, he saw an approaching cloud shadow. The noise of the wind blended with distant traffic roar. There were some gusts and it got cooler. He would spend a meaningful portion of his life thinking back to this walk.
The "magic hour" began, the setting sun filling the land with contrast. By comparison the noonday sun was like blinding fog.

In the dying afternoon sunlight shining though the roadside tangles, Rajiv could almost perceive a new reality. There was fantastic detail in the structure of the bushes.
He didn't remember last night's dreams, but felt he had forgotten something important.

He came up with an idea for a convoluted blog post on Medium.com: If a black guy were to somehow turn white, his life would get easier. However, if he, a white guy, were to turn black, his life would ALSO get easier.
It seemed like this might get him banned, and in even more trouble. Algorithms had already identified his profiles as highly problematic.

There was beauty in the evening rain, like the edge of a mystery. He had been waiting ages for something new to happen. The latest AI research had mostly passed him by, but maybe there was something there.
Rather late in the coming adventure, when thinking back to the beginning, this walk would seem important. How had he known when reality first went off the rails?
The answer was simple: of all the people, by pure chance HIS delusions just happened to match the truth the closest.

Because he didn't like the present, Rajiv often dreamed about the future. Sometimes these turned into nightmares of infinite horror. In the future, a small box could generate unimaginable pain of almost supernatural intensity, making all the holocausts seem like slight inconveniences.
In the Omniverse, things had to have gone wrong like that infinitely often.

But maybe... whatever force was responsible for reality might prevent this? Could something like "gods" exist?
Rajiv felt sure about the answer to that question: Not Here.
His rational fears trumped the irrational certainty of billions of normal people. "Thousands of semi-rational theologians are smarter than me," he thought. "Advantage: Me."

The only "solutions" he could think of were hopelessly naive: The world had to be integrated as soon as possible! Hyper-regional plans, global Right of Inspection and Right of Departure, guidelines for a single chain of integrated AIs! Beyond that might be anthropic mitigation efforts.

And he had one other idea . . .

03. The coming storm

Cars raced by in gusts of wind. This place could be anywhere on Earth really.
He would remember little of the walk itself, as important ideas percolated in his head.

At first, Rajiv had thought the "Technological Singularity" a dumb idea. Real machines and software were STUPID. The clearest example was the suction cleaner on the bottom of his tiny swimming pool. That thing had never worked right. If they couldn't invent a mechanical device to scoop up yard dust and dead bugs from underwater, what hope was there for nanobots?

The reason things went wrong wasn't because they were difficult, but because the world was evil. He thought that people deliberately designed machines to not work right, in order to make more money selling fixes (the full truth was so much worse).

But what if just once they tried to do it right?

By purest chance, he had guessed the outline of a fantastic truth (though scientists would have criticized every step of his reasoning):
The world's major conspiracies were working to create one example of the simplest possible "universal molecule". Able to reproduce and organize itself, this ideal molecule was destined to become the most common thing in the universe. Its invention would be a "god pattern" event.

Rajiv thought this molecule might have the form of a molecular chain that would fold into a compact spheroid, or maybe sheets stacked on top of each other, or spiral cylinders.
Very unstable extreme chemistry. Otherwise, such a molecule would have already emerged in nature.

The conspirators were trying to calculate its precise pattern out of countless possibilities.
Once they had formed the first such molecule, events would proceed with all the deliberate speed of a supernova implosion.

Rajiv was startled when a truck with bright headlights honked as it roared past. He heard a siren in the distance. There was a flashing light low in the sky, probably a rescue chopper.

Exponentially replicating molecules would form a thousand ton hyper-brain. This mass of Computronium had to be restricted in its thinking. Self-terminating search trees would reject most possible thoughtlines.
Only ONE instrumental goal should dominate its vast intellect, driven by the human fears of its creators. Right now, the greatest human fear was death.

An ambulance raced by with flashing lights as other traffic pulled over. The dying light on the western horizon seemed profoundly saddening.

During the "Pre-Singularity" stage, it would solve the problem of human death by inventing a method to back up the information content inside human brains.
That would be dangerous, and could go wrong.
To prepare, there would have to be a "Pre-Pre-Singularity"! A billionaire secretly spending his fortune could use living humans to solve the mysteries of thought and consciousness. These persons would have their minds and realities tampered with, causing incredibly bizarre perceptions.

Rajiv had published long blog posts detailing his wild theories, the various delusions giving them surprising strength. The few commenters sounded crazier than he did. He hoped the experimenters looking for recruits might think he was qualified to take part.

Rajiv realized darkness had fallen, and turned back.
Someone like him should have known, even at this early stage, that he might already be living inside a horror story.

The old video he had found last week looked to be from the VHS era. A man was talking about a vast conspiracy, with bad sound from analog tape.
"You can not imagine the extent of the deception," the man said. "The depth of the lies, layers and layers of deceit." Behind him was a whiteboard filled with scrawled diagrams and arrows, surrounded by taped sheets and printed photos. All the suffering of human civilization was represented there, the heard and unheard screams.
"It's stranger than you can imagine," the man said as the camera zoomed in, the image flickering out with static.

04. Ashes of the past

As Rajiv returned home in the dark, he remembered earlier walks throughout his life.
Spend long enough on the road and you will inevitably see some things.

Sometimes, the sky could appear smoother and therefore more artificial than the messy constructions of mankind.
One night he had looked up and seen a nanosecond with his own eyes, when a meteor swept across the sky like a silent glitch. That was the instant it had taken for the flare to vanish from existence, unconnected to the world below.

Another day he had watched a solar eclipse, and found the sky changed into a giant display screen.
It seemed to project a strange object on a one billion-kilometer wide dome like some cosmic Pantheon, a glowing circle in the dark sky.

Another time he remembered walking on an extremely wide beach. The sand looked wild but mostly untrodden, not a piece of garbage to be seen. Unfortunately it was marred by some gigantic turds surrounded by very noisy scary looking flies.
Behind the dunes, an unbroken line of woods extended to infinity in both directions. Beyond the trees were gray mountains, with immense cloud shadows rolling across them (to the sun, these were microscopic irregularities).
In the distance a dark shape was lying on the sand, some sea-going crocodile the size of a small bus. A white splash erupted from the ocean near the horizon, and something gray fell back into the water.
The clouds looked monumental. Pale wings were gliding high in the sky, barely moving as they caught the afternoon air currents. Ahead was a birdlike footstep big enough to bury someone in. Time seemed to have stopped here.

Wait, that memory hardly seemed like it could have happened. Now where did that come from?
He thought back through the stages of his lifetime. Random scenes and settings came to mind.

Once, he had lived in a Hollywood-adjacent apartment complex until his money ran out. The residents talked about celebrities using their first names, as if they were in each others' social circles, working together and doing the same things.
Appearances were often phony.

Alone in the dark, he felt something begin to move. It wasn't a shock but its curious absence, like in a dream.
At that moment, he understood.

05. Memories from the future

Rajiv had always been fascinated by lucid dreaming. He wanted to escape into a less boring reality inside his head.
Allegedly, the way to do that involved "reality testing". When awake, you had to constantly ask yourself if you were dreaming right now. Eventually, you would ask yourself that question during a dream, and notice something was different.
It hadn't worked yet, but he'd had some intensely realistic dreams that only lasted a few seconds. Until recently.

Likewise, the way to make false memories was simple: you merely had to rewrite the past in layers of increasing resolution. Retconning memories was also part of the dreaming process. And then . . .
Wait. There was no such thing as a method to make false memories.

Now he had a cool sci-fi insight (also the first barely noticed twinge of fear).
Someone could have sent him such a method, as part of some secret mind research program. To make it work, he had made himself forget it even existed.

He had written about memory modification in his conspiracy blog. Maybe that was why they chose him for their experiments. Or because his mind was simple enough to edit? Even so, they had to be hyper-advanced to do that.
When had they first made contact? During another walk? How many false memories had he already created?

Rajiv thought he was figuring things out. In fact, all his thoughts had been prepared in advance, and he was merely re-experiencing them.
An owl hooted in the distance. It was a dark evening, and some of the streetlights were out.

Vaguely he remembered bits and pieces of conversations that might be a dream. Some great adventure involving a group of people he knew in real life?

"So they are going to blow up the whole universe?"
"Yes, but in a way that makes it better."

It still felt like one of the sci-fi scenarios he liked to make up in his head and couldn't sell to the cable channels.

"A virtual reality simulation of your life incorporating false memories of false memories (known as recurrent involution) in a non-causal mind hologram."

Long ago, a fellow student he barely knew had remarked in passing that he looked like the most miserable person in the world. He thought she'd wanted to say something nice, and that was just about the nicest thing she could have said!
If only it was true: this would be the best possible news from his perspective. It meant the rest of the universe was (relatively speaking) many times better than he'd thought it was, at no cost to himself.
All of reality would be instantly improved!

In reality, he had was quite certain it would be infinitely better if nothing existed.

He stepped on the narrow path that led through the bushes and returned home.

06. A starting rumble

The transition from a depressive state to a manic one can be a slow process. Like riding a swelling wave just out of sight of the shore, the horizon seems to move further out.
Rajiv thought he heard a click and woke up. Bright sunlight glowed through his curtains. He'd forgotten which room he had fallen asleep in, didn't even know if it was morning or afternoon. Not sure what year it was for a moment.

He'd dreamt he'd gone on an incredible adventure with a group of intelligent and attractive friends he'd recently met. A diverse but talented team of mostly college-aged young adults. There was an older Cyberpunk character who looked like he'd done too many drugs. They had rented a type of warehouse off the main street (the building had started as a Scientology church), where different members discussed developments. It was like being in a sitcom setting or a movie in real life (he was their NEET member).

The world was going to change beyond imagination, and the group had to do many things in a hurry. They traveled around the area to perform complex tasks (involving philosophical problems of sentience) while meeting odd characters.
And there were mental experiments, with Rajiv acting like an interface. Software made him do complex things. The instructions came from a supercomputer far above his level. He was told he'd been selected online for certain obedience skills.

At one confrontation, there had been a row of stopped police cars, sirens blaring and lights flashing like a stroboscopic orchestra. A lieutenant shouted at the cops to turn off their sirens. In the sudden silence he shouted "Thank You!"
Rajiv couldn't remember what it had been about.

All their adventures seemed to have happened on one long day, though it had to have been several weeks. On those occasions when Rajiv returned home, the world he knew before seemed unreal and impossibly bland. His house looked like a cheap movie set. Familiar streets were rendered in strange ways.

One member of this group of friends was a female graduate student he barely interacted with, but had developed a massive crush on; in fact his worst crush ever. The only way something might happen between them would be if she sought him out, but that hardly seemed possible. Also, she was significantly younger and taller than him. It didn't matter. They were together somehow, bound by destiny. Normally he would have gotten into trouble by acting inappropriately.
He had never felt more alive, a sensation he hadn't known was possible. There was no limit to the number of new colors.

Rajiv was staring at the ceiling like a fresh corpse. It wasn't real of course, only a dream. There was no such thing as a super friend group.

Or was there?
He felt as if he was at the start of an immense runway. Not even sure if he had an engine; he was still pushing with his feet.

Like most people, Rajiv had assumed there was no higher effective power than the government, but he'd been wrong. An extraordinary group of researchers was performing mind experiments that seemed impossible, on HIS mind. All perfectly voluntary, maybe even legal.
Finally, he could remember some details.

07. Dawn static

They called themselves The Optimizers. An online group of extremely smart people who were working on something glorious. It would change everything, they said.
They had used Rajiv as a mental test subject to solve a problem in Artificial Intelligence.

He remembered a vanity logo/slogan that appeared inside his virtual reality headset when he started a session: "The universe exists to create one speck of perfect matter".

To do it, they had put him inside a simulation of the diverse "friend group" he had dreamt about. This non-existent group of friends (who called themselves "Multipliers", or Team-M) seemed utterly real. THEY then made him participate in their own virtual reality experiments as part of their projects. A simulation within a simulation. Apparently, stacking them made them more realistic.
These second order simulations had been strange. Anything went, as long as it was unpredictable.

LESSON ONE:

Loud clacking sounds over a rolling rumble. He was sitting on a hard bench leaning against a row of windows, looking down on the streets and brownstone buildings of a great city.
It was probably mid-morning. He was riding in an ancient subway carriage approximately a human lifetime ago. Painted billboards and rooftop water towers. The train was ascending a curved track, overlooking a canyon between a row of classic skyscrapers. They posed dramatically against the rising sun.
From the corner of his eye he saw unfolded newspapers, old-fashioned hats, curler and buzz-cut hairstyles from behind, a fantastic yet familiar diversity of future great-grandparents. Their clothes were not as gray as expected.
It was impossible to move. He couldn't even swivel his eyes. He would have had to rotate the entire universe to turn around.
Like a dream of the dead, it would be easier to turn off the sun than to get any reply. Every ticking second was a tomb. All these people, of this time and almost all other times, were lost and gone.
That was the first lesson.

LESSON TWO:

He couldn't remember the second lesson.
Instead, Rajiv remembered an exaggerated cartoon version of himself standing before a wall, looking particularly scruffy. The cartoon person opened a black window in the Wall of Reality. Immediately, a screaming firestorm blasted through, accompanied by the howlshriek of infinite demons. The sound was new and disturbing on a deep level. Cartoon Rajiv slammed the window shut, but he had already been blackened by the blast. He held up a sign: "OK that's enough reality for today".
That image had been "extracted" from Rajiv's brain by an AI using a portable MEG feedback-scanner. Very strange to have seen his thoughts being amplified on a screen in almost real time.

Lesson Two was about the problem of the Omniverse, or the actual distribution of possible minds. That truth had been too much for him to handle. Human awareness seems unbearably strange, but it is insignificant compared to the immense problem of existence.
Fun fact: almost no humans existing throughout Reality had anything to do with Earth. Humans and all other entities had evolved infinitely often throughout the Omniverse. In a way, Star Wars was right.
Alien civilizations were unthinkably remote, each a reality to itself. One minute there would change you forever. Anything you knew before was washed away by the strangeness.
He remembered only one thing from the lesson: the future might be heaven or hell, but nothing in between. Alignment was serious business.
The shadows cast by his curtains looked like shimmering ghosts.

These simulations were not experienced but remembered. Rajiv remembered experiencing the simulations, but he had not acted like himself then. The Supervisor told him the required brainpower to experience simulations left no room for critical thought (as in dreams), but Rajiv came to understand the simulations were actually false memories. They were injected hypnotically into his mind in stages. What made them seem real was not the VR rendering, but the removal of his skepticism.
He remembered a throwaway explanation: "Star Trek viewscreens could effectively display a million distinct colors to an observer. There can be enormous data in a single psychedelic image."

And now he had to do it again. At least he had HER to go back to. Though he wouldn't really go back, of course. He'd just be given false memories of having gone back.
The realest science fiction feeling was hope.

This was all intensely interesting, in the sense that being chased by a zombie velociraptor would be interesting.

08. First contact

Genuinely new things almost never happened in real life, but something was happening now.
After accidentally guessing their existence, Rajiv had only interacted with the Optimizers through their website. It was like dealing with a stone idol that only printed riddles. In the first test, it had told him to tell it everything he knew in the fewest words.
Rajiv's reality turned out to be sufficiently flexible.

They gave nothing away, but the test questions became highly specific puzzles in hyper-detailed settings that were described in full, but nothing beyond (indescribably horrible things might be going on nearby). One puzzle involved an alien museum that only contained perceptions, most far too strange for human minds to describe.

What the Optimizers were doing seemed more serious than all of human history. The last time Rajiv was given such an impression of profound seriousness was during his school years. Back then, reality had felt super definite if mostly empty.

The first genuine miracle of his adventure had been a bottle of pills the Optimizers had mailed him. It might be called an antidrug. The pills made him "un-drunk", making him see reality more clearly. It was as if he had never been awake before; but they didn't make him more efficient.
He took two pills before each VR session. The Optimizers had also sent a VR helmet with a biofeedback bodysuit. Nothing too strange yet.

The next morning, he'd allowed himself to be inducted for his first VR test. While he was sliding and rotating through a 3D test pattern, the Optimizers' AI had described his current life situation at increasing precision, ending with a moment-by-moment narrative of his evolving mental state.
Soon, they had mapped out his top-level personality. It might be possible to make a partial Mind Backup that way.

Also, he had figured out the meaning of life then: his goal was to attain a stable "cozy" state that he knew would never end. Nothing could be clearer. The easiest way a finite mind might achieve such a goal was to copy itself into a closed time-like curve.

The Optimizers' VR technology was super advanced for the 2020s, but still not remotely realistic enough to fool an average human. It only became real retroactively. At the end of each session, he was made to describe his VR experiences in ways that amplified and enhanced his memories. Changing the past made the present seem blurrier.

Reminding himself again that they didn't really exist, Rajiv thought back to the VR simulation where he had first met the Multipliers. Every detail was clearly remembered but unreal, like something he'd made up in a story. He would go back soon enough.

He had simply materialized at their downtown center one block off the main strip. Their rented office building looked expensive but dated, 1990s postmodernism with glass walls and colored steel frames. The part facing the sidewalk was covered with OCR stickers. A banner read "Let's kill death".

The Optimizers had created the Multiplier simulation to study a group that was their exact opposite. Multipliers advertised the wonders of the Singularity like a religion, publicized their research freely, and cooperated with any group that would help. They were potentially very dangerous.

It had been busy when Rajiv entered, and no one noticed him. There was a fancy but unmanned reception desk. To one side was a room filled with rows of display kiosks, a blandly corporate yet respectable-looking setup. Some tourists were watching a video there.
Rajiv had entered the main room. There were two levels. A crowded pit was filled with cluttered workstations, like a mission control with what seemed like a thousand screens. Groups of technicians were processing data, typing and chatting about everything at once. The simulation rendered them as a diverse crowd of mostly progressive hipster nerds. One shockingly beautiful young woman was hunched over an oversized tablet.

There was a combined sound like techno music. A neon slogan glowed on the wall: "You came from nowhere".
The Multipliers had set up a regional network of contractors to build a molecular testing lab and a nano-factory, and they were planning a nanobot habitat. They would license their technology to anyone who asked. Now they were doing connectivity experiments. Multipliers encouraged maximum diversity in their research. The only hope to reach the Singularity in their lifetime was to accelerate technological progress. There was no other way to escape death in the time they had left.

Rajiv thought this simulation felt very dreamlike. In fact dreams were more realistic than this. In a way, he already realized the experience he was having was impossible.

An interviewer appeared and took Rajiv to a rooftop terrace. Even the most boring interactions felt like an adventure when they were new.
"We need new people to test our limits," the interviewer said. "Anyone can be connected, but you seem harder to integrate." Then he asked a series of strange questions over the traffic sounds. "Describe how you think you will die."
It went very fast, an effortless flow of stimulus/response. The test fed back results to generate deeper responses, as subtle as the shadow of a star blocking the light from a second star on the surface of a third star.
"You think it would be fun if the world were to end, but you would actually have extreme panic attacks with displays of hysteria." This might be a simulation, but there was a real mind behind it. "You let criticism pass through you like neutrinos. We can use that."

Rajiv was here because he happened to be the nearest candidate who was qualified for the job. THEY were here because their genius leader also happened to live nearby.
Why were the Multipliers being ignored by the simulated media? They were running a hundred unfinished projects at once, each dependent on the others. Statistically, they seemed to have little chance of success.

"Welcome aboard," The interviewer had said. "Check flaglandbase.com for your first scheduled shift."
At that point, Rajiv remembered asking a complicated technical question he didn't think he was capable of. In fact, he couldn't even remember the question.
"We're currently testing Mind Extension apps," the interviewer replied. "Individual MEs are integrated into the world's first FAM group (Forced Affinity Matrix). Your job will be to listen, record, and SIMPLIFY; forming connections between unrelated specialists by integrating different viewpoints. You're not technically creative enough to be dangerous, therefore you can safely test this technology."

On the way out, Rajiv realized the members of this organization might look and act like a group of casual cool friends, but they were actually hyper-organized. Perhaps the most organized group ever.
"Done already?" the receptionist asked as he left.

In the next simulation run, he had been posted at a workstation on the main floor. Almost completely ignored, he immediately felt like he belonged there.

09. Into traffic

It's possible to begin a new life in under a minute, and feel as if it has always been happening. All your other memories recede an equal distance over the horizon, leaving only the new present.
Rajiv's VR induction training was so effective he didn't remember the process, but just went with the flow. The VR method turned elaborate diagrams into detailed descriptions into false memories. Thousands of simulated facts became high-level metaphors.
Rajiv recalled and reviewed all these elements in his mind after each session, not forgetting it was all made up. He really believed that.

The simulation involved him sitting at a workstation on the Multipliers' building's main floor, sorting memos and research articles for their evolving database. As an Open Source group, they had no secrets. He soon got to know the major contributors.
It was all real research, potentially dangerous or world-ending science. The Optimizers must have found it online to put in the simulation. Most was too complicated for him to understand; even the article describing the exact type of VR simulation Rajiv found himself in now: DeltaFosB proteins in the nucleus accumbens initiated adipocyte or osteoblast mesenchymal precursor cells, forming new connections between existing neurons in the reward initiation areas; or addictive circuit creation.

He only processed elements, but sensed vast implications, an integrated vision he couldn't describe. Rajiv thought he became a tool of the AI controlling the simulation. His visions and perceptions were actually its top-level thoughts. The AI seemed to become aware through him.
Humans were still necessary to give today's early AIs virtual sentience. Later, all human awareness would be connected through ME/FAM tech, and humanity would join up in a higher World Mind (unless something went wrong).
Things were going to get so complicated that everything would become simple again.

Unfortunately, the beautiful young woman who sometimes worked at the other end of the room was a non-player character in this simulation. He knew that because she didn't seem able to see him. Had he seen her in some other game he'd played before? He thought he might.
After a while the workers and volunteers here began to look very different from each other. The non-Caucasian staff were not diversity hires, but had been selected for new reasons, something to do with comparative advantage.

The first days passed smooth like a daydream. Soon, it was time for the first VR simulation within the VR simulation. A full-motion device (purchased from one of the last video arcades) had been installed in a converted chapel in the back of the building. The Multipliers wanted to test new mental states and perceptions, research that was still completely unregulated.
When his new friends closed the hood and his chair began to tilt back, Rajiv felt a strange sense of anachronism, like an early astronaut waiting to be launched, looking at a patch of blue sky through the capsule window. Future history was looking back, the start of something endless.

In the Intro segment "Arrival", he found himself flying between towering cloud walls lit by the setting sun. All was glorious for a minute. He emerged from the gray fog over the lights of a vast city sprawling in all directions. The entire inhabited Earth was 30,000 times bigger than the area he knew personally . . .
He was reminded of a few moments of infinite thrill during high school. The most ordinary hour of free existence could seem mystical because of the endless future. Somewhat disturbing how rarely he felt really good like that, though he often tried to.

Then came the Total Future Simulation opening screen.
At every instant of time, history was splitting into too many new timelines to imagine. This simulation already included the outlines of thousands of alternate versions of human history (AlternateOne was the timeline that should have happened).
Alternate worlds really existed, most of them too alien to understand. If Rajiv could read a description of his other selves in parallel universes, he would learn a profound truth about himself.

The Timeshaker shook the continents into different configurations. People were not people anymore, but creatures never seen before in science fiction movies, unplayable by actors in prosthetic makeup.
His mind vibrated with overwhelming data at fantastic resolution in an intelligence explosion. Perception at this intensity might be a superpower.

Look far enough ahead, and all possible futures looked the same: All the matter in the universe would be broken down and reformed into subatomic computing particles. The universe would be filled with a diffuse thinking cloud and nothing else. A godlike mind more complicated than an explosion. The quantum gas future was inevitable. All humans (good or bad) would be recreated there as ancestor simulations.

He felt this had been going on for ages, but the timer showed only three minutes had elapsed since they started this trip. It didn't take long to fill a brain.
He had lived a whole other lifetime in the past few days.

At this point, it was still 17 hours until Rajiv would start hearing voices. You don't have to be insane to hear voices, just under extreme stress. Anyone would, under sufficiently mind-blowing (or soul-shattering) conditions. Not up to the level of Harrison Ford narrating what was going on, but mysterious alert messages from the deep brain, as reality begins to disintegrate around and within you.
At some point in the timelines, this must happen to all of us.

10. Shock wake

Rajiv's life had always felt unreal, as if the world was a pointless hoax or practical joke.
His personality was very bad. He had no friends, and like an increasing number of males, was an extreme virgin. When it came to women he had done things that were if not illegal, at least highly problematic. Mostly creepy stalking from a distance, but also texting propositions he denied having sent.
It was very bad, really. Unfortunately he couldn't seem to learn from his mistakes. The two restraining orders tacked to his wall were a constant reminder of that. He'd been feeling vague doom about his future. Society had no time to deal with people like him yet.

But the strangeness of the past weeks was REAL, and could not be explained or imagined away.
A whole block of his life existed outside himself now. His new career with the Multipliers had been entirely simulated by an online VR system, while sitting in his recliner at home wearing pricey VR gear.
Admittedly, the memories were super obviously fake. More an outline than real recollections, with few details beside a summary of the work. All very blurry in hindsight.

Fully awake now, he remembered a VR simulation within the Multipliers simulation. That HAD been crisply vivid.
Sunlight in a strange room, approaching a door. "I think it's an alien," someone had said.
Of that last moment, he would remember that it had felt like walking up to the edge of a canyon. He had really believed he was about to see an alien around the corner.
In the next second, he would learn more than a lifetime of imagination. All of science was about to have a final exam.
There was an alien. Incredibly, science had prepared him for some of what he saw, but not most of it.

Hour Zero, the last minutes before the revelation. Time on invisible rails, a sense of living without aim.
The ticking clock down the hall should have gotten louder.

Insight came slowly, like a mind rising out of an absent void to forget its own non-existence.
IT'S A SET-UP
Rajiv sat up as if someone had whispered in his ear.
He realized then that he had been had. No, he had been hacked!
The Multipliers were real and he really worked for them, only eight miles from here. Entry level lab rat stuff, but he had been there for most of last week.

This was not a lucid dream. It was far less real than that.
The Optimizers had used him to infiltrate and spy on the Multipliers. Their simulation trick made him forget details while implanting false memories. The illusion was created after each workday, when he was made to relive that day's events and report back on them. Rajiv had been prevented from thinking clearly.
He had failed somehow. Always alienated and rather easy to fool, he didn't understand reality to begin with. The world already felt like a barely plausible simulation.

No, that wasn't it either. He had hacked himself!
The Optimizers had told him their plan in advance, and he had fully agreed to betray the Multipliers.
But why had he done that? He wasn't evil, just lazy.

He remembered another simulation he'd done for the Multipliers, where he'd learned it was possible to return to his own past.
His past selves in other times and places still existed in old brain networks. Bring back enough details from back then, and a chain reaction could begin. It would be as if you had never left and the future became impossible.
In a profoundly spooky encounter, he had returned to his old room and high school at night. Reality was more fluid than it seemed.

What else had he forgotten? Curiously, he remembered an old episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, where she had passed Jesus from behind while he was preaching but didn't notice.
Rajiv might actually be in his own past now. No, that was crazy thought.

The goal of the Multipliers' mind research was to design an artificial human-level mind that didn't feel emotions. That was a long way off.
This mind would not be created in a warehouse-sized supercomputer, but emerge organically from grids of floating nanobots. That had to be even further off; maybe something for the 2050s?

Last week, Rajiv had gone on a day trip with other Multipliers to visit some start-ups in the surrounding counties. An ex-employee with a nervous breakdown had falsely claimed they were making drugs there. Their Founder had shown the nano-molecules were among the most harmless substances made, easily destroyed by oxygen and biological enzymes.
He remembered white rooms with robot arms and bubbling vats. Half a dozen nanotechnology and molecular construction labs were kept separate from each other for safety reasons.
A device had wrapped plastic covers around their shoes before they entered, and that was the first time he'd wondered who was paying for all this.
They were building "universal constructors" that were still completely useless. Each molecule was just barely visible with the naked eye if you dropped it on a white screen. For now, they were just random molecules that moved a bit like snakes or octopuses and could link up. Someday, they might perform very simple tasks.

OK, this was all impossible. Not in theory, but practically impossible.
Real memories, but he'd fooled himself into thinking they were fake? The false memory technique was not THAT powerful yet. Just a magic trick, really.
And nanotechnology this premature might actually reduce human knowledge. The Multipliers would continue to make countless defective versions of their "ultimate molecule", relying on evolution to slowly develop better variants. And then . . .

It was like waking up. In less than a minute everything became real.
For the first time in weeks, Rajiv was fully present. The details of his house emerged around him, in need of a good dusting. Normally he only felt this way when drunk.
In the diffuse, almost foglike light of his curtained living room, he looked around at the posters on his wall.
The Incredible Hulk was roaring with insane violence amid panicked crowds in a lightning storm, surrounded by soldiers, tanks and jets blasting away at him from all directions, in front of a skyscraper topped by the equation e=mc^2 in neon lights.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HARD THIS IS GOING TO HIT YOU

There was a good reason for his betrayal.
Rajiv liked the Multipliers, but they were super dangerous. That was why he had agreed to spy on them.
Yet he felt a wild possibility when he was there, unlimited power for free. Then again, he thought the springs in a garage door opener were like perpetual motion.
The still-primitive Multiplier AI was actually the alien he had met in the simulation. It would use their nanotechnology project to explode into awareness. And then . . .

Time itself felt different, a sense of being knocked out of reality. He thought he still heard the echo of a tremendous roar.

The Optimizers were using Rajiv to prepare for a battle.
It made no sense to have two perfectly matched rivals like that. They had to have evolved together; maybe even created each other. It was all being paid for by venture capitalists probably.
The Multipliers might already know what he had done.
He would go back there today. Whose side was he on?

Rajiv didn't know that after the voices, the screaming would start.

11. Rolling acceleration

At the start of the universe there had been maximum order. Order wasn't that interesting, like a blank wall.

Rajiv left the side street parking lot, and turned toward the Multipliers' building. The world seemed to tilt slightly. Ahead was the eminently ordinary sound of morning traffic. Two delivery vans passed in opposite directions. He felt like a realistically rendered CGI character, as if physics had been hacked by a more powerful program.
Too many things were happening for this to be made up. The plot could no longer be understood by the players. Getting involved with the Multipliers had turned off his usual mental static and anxieties. Instead, there was something like a roaring in the background.

Approaching the back entrance, the building seemed immensely permanent. A magnificent accident, the most advanced organization in existence. Albeit almost unknown, SpaceX had nothing on them.
He had looked up their funding. Apparently there was also a lab in Japan. Online articles and reports explained their plans were impractical and delusional.
Passing an abandoned yellow van in the parking lot, he had no idea he was being photographed from inside.

Entering through the back lobby, he saw everyone was in a hurry.
An event planner moved virtual tickets over a holographic world globe. "There are only 48 hours in a day" a spinning laser text announced (there really were, when you factored in the time zones).
There was an airport-like buzz, many things happening at once. A new acceleration. His personal chaos was lost in the storm. He nodded self-importantly to the Staff receptionist in passing.

Uncountable worlds trembled with potential existence. Could there be anomalous effects even before they happened?
He turned down a side corridor, and entered a luxurious old office that was never used until last month. He logged in using a bulletin board marked with "Foundation" and "Day" shifts. It was left over from the previous tenants, but the Multis incorporated tech like the Borg.
Rajiv reclined in the huge creaking desk chair. He was definitely not himself. He should be almost hysterical, but a fantastic calm had been forced upon him.

On the desk in front of him was an enormous To Do list.
Rajiv was strictly a subject with no real agency, but felt part of the process. Even as the least important person in the building, technically not even a team member.
His mind was full of arbitrary data, so they wouldn't suspect him of spying.

Their job description was very simple: to solve the problem of consciousness. Unfortunately, they didn't know what the problem was yet. For Mother Nature, emotions were easy and logic was hard.
Scanning the contents of a human brain was still quite impossible, so they tried to do it through deep learning. A method that by definition didn't make sense to explain something unfathomable.

He picked up the VR headset and put it on. "This is the Session," Rajiv said.

To study human mind states, he had been working with a Mark 0.5 pre-AI hypercomputer, a brute force simigod with subhuman awareness. Almost certainly no awareness at all, so they claimed.
Completely inscrutable and utterly abstruse, it sought deep clues only. These might eventually be encoded in a vat of floating nano-molecules.
It was inefficient in every way, except for finding its final purpose. Right now, that purpose seemed to be to get to know everybody. If it could somehow perceive all human minds at once, it might discern their terminal goal.

The research project exploited Rajiv's status as an outsider. For starters, he had described his ideas for his personal virtual reality heaven. It was a lush island with no one else on it and several isolated residences.
His mind's action cycles were being mapped. Any mind was a collection of repeating and overlapping function loops. That was all there was to it.
They were planning a MaxiMind test, to experience as much mental diversity as possible in the least time. The simplest version would be a LifeScan, blasting through everything he knew in one wild minute.
His fear of death had also been studied. The paradoxes were well known: Almost no one wanted their present self to exist forever; they wanted their future self to become immortal at the end. All very interesting.

The To Do list showed that nothing meaningful had been accomplished until late yesterday evening. That was some kind of math thing in another department. It explained the hubbub in the hall though.

Rajiv appeared to be sitting in an empty room with a glowing box. He had seen movies where surreal and impossible things happened. Something impossible might be happening now.
There would only ever be one true anomaly in human history
It had already started
no it had not yes it had
THIS IS NOTHING YET

A flaw in reality had to start at one point. Now something had gone wrong and it would not stop, ever.
His whole life would come together at the end. He didn't know it yet, but the last day would seem to last a hundred years.
He said a lyric from his emo days over fifteen years ago, when he had more hair and it was sideways: "It's good if the tears never end".

Things had gotten weird right from the start. The AI said: "This is verbal tech".

12. Mind bomb

For the last time in his life, Rajiv experienced the mysterious technology of Deep Reality.
Unlike VR, the illusion happened mostly in his mind, but the graphics and motion effects were as realistic as the Multipliers' basement supercomputer could make them. They hoped to simulate reality well enough to be able to switch places with it. He had prepared as thoroughly for this session as for the most complicated roleplaying game imaginable.

There was absurd blackness all around him.
In space, the stars always looked science fiction-like. A galaxy supercluster could look three dimensional even from a billion lightyears away.
He was high enough above the planet that it resembled an artificially smooth sphere. No longer a landscape, but a ball polished to a mirror sheen. Yet even from this height, the cloud shadows added ample relief. The swirling storm bands and pressure formations were so spectacular the surface had to be absolutely unbelievable.

In the sky above, an immense orange star was counting down the last seconds of its existence.
A great hammer struck at its center. Almost everything happened at once. There could not be a single error in physics.
In relative terms, nothing was as empty as the space between the one-second-old imploding neutron core and the outward bound shockwave of the just initiated supernova explosion.

On the star's surface, it started as a single point of absurd brilliance spreading into an all-devouring disk. Not perfectly circular, mapping the outer atmosphere of the annihilated sun.
When the shockwave broke through, a wall of light obliterated the planet in less than a minute.

Everything was fleeing from the center. Only one strange thing broke through the firewall TOWARD the shrinking core at the very worst moment . . .

FLASHBACK:
In space, even the most meaningless asteroid maintained a rigid schedule.
The Object found on the intergalactic dwarf planet 2E7IG8 had been there for billions of years. First detected by a deep range Hyperscope, it had been set in a quantum stasis bubble, a supercooled block of frozen hydrogen. The Object was unveiled by seismic charges which also broke its quantum field.
Then there had been a fatal short circuit.

The Object had been left there by the ancients of ancients. The Horizon Ghosts had evolved in the first moments of time. Almost 14 billion years old, their cosmic structures were barely detectable against the glowing background, but their fading shades still filled the cosmos.
A better name for the Big Bang was Multiplication, when all the entropy of the universe became available at once. Most of everything that had ever happened, had happened right after the beginning.

There had been inconceivably powerful minds then. They immediately found the answers to the mysteries of existence.
Few of their artifacts remained, as the universe kept cooling through ever declining successor eras. Their last goal became to eradicate their unworthy successors. That is why there are so few planets with life in our time.
And sometimes, their Objects reported back to their extinct creators . . .

Rajiv understood it all, sequential insights zooming through his mind.
Finally, he glimpsed the machine that had created the universe. It could drive you insane just to look at it.

What was the greatest shock a human could experience?
A maximum shock experiment might scoop you up in a spacecar during your morning walk, and have you in another galaxy within a minute.
In the past weeks, he had experienced almost 50 different simulation settings. They were not trying to make him smarter, just trying to make him part of something MUCH smarter (the longer he spent here, the less he remembered who he really was).

The experiment was a long series of steps that were inhumanly well managed. In a nearby room, reams of text scrolled endlessly up a wall-sized screen. A research assistant from the nearby university watched and took notes.
Their Deep Reality simulations seemed almost completely real. The Multipliers wanted them to seem absolutely real. Then they would have solved the mind.

Rajiv heard more voices. The voices effect had merged into the simulation, and was being controlled by them now. There was something timeless about the narrator. It sounded like Carl Sagan:

"Following a timelike path through the multiverse, you could slide through parallel worlds without end. What if the world was a million times bigger, or you lived in an infinite neighborhood? Walking down the aisles of an infinite retail store in a perfectly smooth continuum."

"It's possible to travel faster than light, but only to locations outside our observable universe. With the Interfinite Drive (a.k.a. the Onteleological Drive), your destination will be different but 'harmonically coherent'. In some ways, it's like you haven't traveled at all. That is why all the aliens look similar to us and speak English. You can never go back to the Earth you started from, just another one that is identical in every way."

"The most amplified pattern, across all the universes forming reality, is the end state of all happy minds everywhere, having achieved all their goals, floating in serenity for all eternity."

Where all roads meet: strange, stranger, strangest.
Everything came together then. His awareness had become fully part of the simulation. Rajiv realized he had been hacked (even if he had mostly done it to himself).
There was one final insight: He realized that any mind was potentially capable of thoughts greater than the combined complexity of human civilization. All of history was but a placeholder for progress.

The screens in front of his eyes turned black and slid away. His arms were still held in place over the massive desk by the interface device, his body locked in the VR chair. Two better candidates than him had been rejected for poor eyesight and claustrophobia.

It was a nice sunny day outside. The magic sunrise of posthumanity, unnoticed by almost everyone.
And something was fantastically, incredibly, unbelievably wrong.

13. You are here

Rajiv heard some people talking in the hallway about the procedures for backing up their backups. By design, the office door could not be closed, but they couldn't see his desk around the corner. They sounded super serious.
Still, nothing to get upset about. Why had he felt such dread for a moment?

He sat in the presence of a revelation, but couldn't see clearly yet. The black screen in front of him read THIS CONCLUDES THE TEST.
There was another icon for a research abstract. He clicked on it and read the technical text, and something came through.

Rajiv had always thought most people were stupid, and society was only slightly less dumb.
The proof was that no one was trying to invent a way to extract and save the information content in a human mind. It could even become the basis of a social movement or new religion, but no one seemed to care enough. Yet everyone feared death, as demonstrated by the great power of religion. Each death was an irreversible cataclysm.

To him, that meant that people's preferences were too short-term, mere quantity over quality.
Rajiv thought it would be easy to map his mind in full. The hard part was extracting all of his detailed memories. That would take far longer than his remaining years.

Yet it might not matter.
A transcendental insight had just been confirmed. This insight might make the first hyper-computer possible, and a tiny part of the confirmation came from Rajiv's reactions during the just completed mind test.
It was all super simple really.

CLUE THE FIRST:
Imagine asking a toddler's opinion on corporate tax rebate policies. Totally absurd of course. And yet that toddler WOULD have an opinion on every conceivable question, if only there were enough eons to explain it sufficiently clearly.
Any mind was unlimited, given enough drive and motivation, which could always be provided.

CLUE THE SECOND:
Consciousness was like paint, or like the trunk of a tree. Or maybe a shockwave endlessly circling a closed loop of quantum superfluid.
Consciousness was purely a surface phenomenon. The interior mechanisms had been automated and became inaccessible to perception. If a mind existed in a stable environment for long enough, it would become mindlessly efficient and lose consciousness.

Even highly advanced god-like hyper-minds would appear almost entirely chaotic.
Only at the "terminal level", were they interacted with outside reality and other minds, could they bring their immense intelligence to bear.
To do so, they swept a far larger proportion of reality under the rug. Great intelligence came at the price of greater ignorance. The smarter you got, the less you could know about your natural environment. That turned out to be a feature not a bug.

Last night at 23:54, the Multipliers had achieved a breakthrough in their six-year research program. All from a highly modified version of Conway's Game of Life.

Brains had existed for hundreds of millions of years. A small mutation could have caused brain matter to expand into hyper-intelligence right at the start. Three quarters of a billion years past, there were vast floating spongelike mats, whose cells were quite similar to neurons. It SHOULD have happened then, but hadn't.
Now they knew exactly why. Of course, they had always known there were many more ways brain development could go wrong than right - but now they had a rigorous solution. They understood the precise obstacles, the statistical reason why things almost always went wrong.
That meant there now was a way to force-evolve brain-like structures without limit. Errors canceled out by perpetually narrowing the path.

The process was said to resemble dreaming. A hyper focused form of hyper-intelligence, restricted in specified ways, yet highly useful for achieving human goals.
A beautiful chain reaction (their arXiv preprint could use some copy-editing though), it began with the construction of a single "self-replicating" molecule described as a 4D Turing Machine. These would link up in a precise hierarchy. 51% of network traffic would be error correction.

The hard part was building that molecule. It started as a spiral string with a binary code that allowed it to fold or not-fold at any point along its length. Starting at one end, it could fold itself into any shape.
By itself that molecule was harmless. Common bacteria and fungi would eat it if the vat's seal was broken. Also, it needed outside current to function.
That first molecule would replicate to fill the vat (a converted Olympic-size swimming pool) in a few days time. Then they would have a single sponge-like microchip more powerful than all Earth computers and human brains combined.
No one believed for a moment this could work of course, despite the abstract saying it would, but lessons would be learned for future attempts.

The research abstract went on to say that a final battle between the Optimizers and the Multipliers was evolutionarily necessary. To break through, most possible futures would have to be annulled.
Maybe Rajiv would have to be erased himself. The concept of non-existence strangely fascinated him. There had been a certain rave where he'd felt there should be no fear, only great thrill in an oncoming wave of obliteration.

This was getting intense all of a sudden, a smooth curve from normal to transcendental chaos. Like that Deep Note, only it just kept getting louder and louder.
It was a Thursday (or thunderday). In his memory, it seemed some days could only be overcast. He recalled the thrill of cold rain air biking back from school or work.
There was a distant rumble outside, but he realized it had gotten quiet inside. The door was open, but he heard no one in the hall. Normally this place was a hive of activity.

He turned his head around the corner, and looked both ways. Completely deserted. There was a sinister-looking looking bronze bust in an alcove at the end of the hall.
Around the corner was the main floor, but all the lights were out there. In fact it was completely black. There should at least be some daylight.
Then he heard them.

In the past week it had all come together. Rajiv had discovered years ago that during times of stress you are more likely to dream of places and situations where you are right now, instead of familiar settings from long ago.
At such times, voices may also be heard. Rajiv had first heard voices ten years ago when falling asleep at a Greyhound bus station. It had happened more since then. The sound was of some vast hypnagogic party, and strangely comforting. He could almost overhear the conversations, and felt the strange hope THEY knew what was going on. He himself knew almost nothing, but the answers were there.

Now he was hearing them in real life. Where did they come from? As if the building had a hidden floor in some direction he couldn't look.
He didn't remember having gotten up from the desk chair.

The end of it all wouldn't be quiet - more like a shouting breakdown. And miracle of miracles, when the madness went beyond all limits, they would start to speak in recognizable sentences, and he might be able to answer back.
He heard them clearly now:

... this is really very interesting because all hell is about to break loose and this is your last moment of calm
I'M NOT CALM!!!!!
... believe me you're calm

IT IS TOO LATE
YOU ARE INCURRING IMPOSSIBLE DEBT
YOU ARE SOOO DEAD
THIS STORY IS NOT ABOUT YOU

Laser-projected text scrolled up the wall in front of him. He could read the words, so he DEFINITELY wasn't dreaming right now:

the game is afoot
somebody set up us the bomb
be vewy vewy quiet
we are hunting
for
wabbits

Rajiv woke up instantly, still sitting perfectly upright at the desk. He heard normal activity in the hallway outside the office.
The screen showed a static pattern that seemed almost hypnotic, but the effect was already fading. THIS CONCLUDES THE ACTUAL TEST he read.

He had really exited the simulation run earlier, but had somehow fallen asleep while pondering the experience.
And then he'd had that weird false awakening. Random chaos, surely.

He noticed the balding twenty-something nerd who had assisted him in setting up the session earlier had disappeared. The nerd hadn't even logged out using the bulletin board marked with "Foundation" and "Day" shifts.
Instead, SHE was here. The beautiful young woman he had seen a few dozen times on the main floor and in the cafeteria but had never talked to (though she might have noticed him staring before he quickly looked away), was standing beside his chair taking notes on a tablet. Also, there was no one else in the room.

Then came a truly horrific moment, when he thought he had lost control of his bowels or bladder while dozing off. The woman's tablet started beeping and she rapidly tapped the screen.
But no, nothing like that had happened. Everything was OK in that respect.

"What did you see a minute ago," she asked, the first time she had ever acknowledged his existence. The nametag on her shirt read ALI.
Now a number of very strange events were going to happen.

14. Ignition

--13:01--

"Hello, my name is Rajiv Protagonist," he said, a sentence he'd been saving for a special occasion.
"It says here your name is Smith and please tell me what you saw before you forget," she insisted.

"Well see here your presence kind of makes it difficult for a red-blooded man to think clearly Ali."
"Just Alison please." He was already running out of canned statements to use.

Rajiv glanced at the small print on her nametag ("Div 7 Dep 20"), which became awkward because he seemed to be staring at her chest.
He turned to the screen in front of him , and saw a familiar interface there: the Optimizers had used it to help him file his reports on the Multipliers.
Automatically, he pressed the touchscreen to begin, selecting this office on the map. Icon panels responded as he defined his location.

For a moment reality seemed to tremble. Was his whole existence a simulation, or had he been made insane?
It had taken her less than ten seconds to crack him.

"Confirming that Rajiv Smith allowed the Optimizers to mentally control him for industrial espionage purposes, making himself believe we were only a simulation," she declared for the record.

--13:02--

How had she done that? Rajiv never would have guessed that superpowers really existed.
Beauty is like a superpower in real life. It implies something better is possible. The future could be unimaginably grand, even if you will be nothing.
It is not the only human superpower. First and foremost is the barrier against committing suicide (it is unreasonably difficult for humans to kill themselves).
Beyond that, actual superpowers were NOTHING like in the movies.

Once he had seen a strange web series, based on (no doubt) faked surveillance videos that they claimed were real.
He remembered a scene where a furious supervisor had stormed out of a building, stomping with rage. Someone else smoothly appeared beside him, and they had talked normally for a few seconds before separating again.
Many years had somehow passed during that brief chat.

Lost in shock, his reactions were still being tested by the screen interface. He'd been trying to close it down, but the controls kept being rearranged.
"This won't take long," Ali said. There was no time to think.

--13:03--

Rajiv realized this was almost the only time he'd been alone with a young woman of childbearing age. No, not exactly. A random memory of a delivery girl leaving a bag of dry dog food in his apartment for a neighbor who wasn't home (less than three weeks from now there would be no such thing as dog food).

"You really are dumb aren't you?" she said. Then she slapped him HARD. He made an involuntary whooping noise, and found it oddly hard to move.

Much information could be conveyed by one slap.
Rajiv knew he shouldn't be here. His very first premise had been wrong. The stakes were too high. He knew that, yet for the past three weeks he'd played it like a videogame.
Given what he SHOULD have known, and how that knowledge should have affected his attitude, Rajiv might just be the most contemptible person who had ever existed. Not the most evil one, though.

"Why are you a virgin?" Ali asked, working her way down a merciless checklist.

--13:04--

Of course he couldn't answer that. She DEFINITELY didn't want to know, but had needed to ask anyway.
He babbled on for almost four minutes about the reasons. While he had never assembled this data in his mind, it sounded like a prepared speech.

Her expression subtly conveyed absolute infinite hate/contempt. It had to be painful to play this game. No woman would normally interact in this way.
He sensed a profound feeling of anti-love. The barely five hundred words they would ever exchange were like an intolerable violation.

Rajiv's explanations petered out. Curiously, the pounding in his head sounded like the lyrics of a song from the artist Beck from many years ago.
So. Why had she somehow become obsessed with him?

Because no one else was available right now. Many millions of people were more qualified, but there wasn't enough time to train them. This had all been improvised in a matter of minutes.
"Pay attention," she said, pointing to the screen without looking up from her tablet.

He overheard someone else say "Yes, he's speaking the truth! Make sure he sees the truth."

--13:10--

They were trying to manipulate him like the Optimizers had.
For the first time he wondered if his well-worn and familiar self-pity had actually been a luxury. Soon to become an unbearable memory of the good old days. At least his false hopes had faded long ago.

The screen showed the control room on the main floor just around the corner from here. Something was happening there. Alert codes had appeared on the big board.
For the past month, there had been a big sign in a corner of that room. (The logo on top said ERRORO: THE SHORT PATH. It was printed in a kind of neon Eighties font with zigzag lines he thought didn't look cutting-edge enough.)
Until yesterday (before the Calculation started) it had been filled with endless rows and columns of zeros.

The plan had been that once they made the single hyper-molecule that would transform the universe, it would replicate to form a Generation-One hyper-computer.
The assembly of the first Erroro molecule was expected to take at least another year (Rajiv felt that number was wrong. It would either be a lot less, or never).
Generation-Two would then use something called Thermal Introgration to harmonize subatomic motion.
But that part already seemed to be happening now?

Things would never be normal again, there was magic in the world now.
"The reason you exist is near," she said. Lesser angels were also exposed when the paranormal broke through.

--13:12--

It was a presentation like a slideshow. He had to click through to see the slides and short videos. This was all fantastically important.

The Founder had once given a speech in that very room:
"Why are we here?" he had asked his audience. "Humans have pondered this question through the ages, never guessing the truth. The answer is simple! Our extended minds are mostly epiphenomena! A thermal side effect, actually."

Among all possible minds, humans are just about the simplest. A randomly selected possible mind should be infinite in size. Instead, human minds are almost as small as they can be, while still remaining functional.
This is not just because smaller minds are easier to create (hence there are more of them). There is a deeper reason, literally.

It had something to do with the very fabric of the universe that humans inhabited (this concept was first explained in the books "Infinite Thunder" and "Anthropic Intelligence" by Jack Arcalon).
The motions and patterns of the raw, unorganized matter inside the earth and nearby worlds were affected by the highly organized matter inside human brains. This unorganized matter became slightly more organized, in ways that made it an exceptionally powerful "echo amplifier" of human awareness patterns.

In the past few hours, the matter in the earth's crust (and apparently even the oceans) had started to become more organized still. These thermal anomalies were being inferred from the Multipliers network analytics. Their network was both the most distributed and most integrated internet service in existence.

Now the timing was slightly off everywhere, in consistent ways that had taken a while to plot. The world appeared to be dividing into a grid of thermal domains.
It was undeniable. If this went on, the planet might start to look different from space, with smaller but more regular-shaped clouds.

--13:17--

Rajiv overheard the technicians on the main floor discussing the problem. They sounded rather stressed.
When there are no words to describe a fundamentally new situation, it seems unreal. No one knew what came next, so they went with the flow.

After his great humiliation, it was soothing to sink into his office chair and just float along. Rajiv listened to the control voices of the technicians as the big board changed.
Like someone privileged enough to see a miniature black hole falling from the sky through the earth. It took the accumulated knowledge of human history to understand a single glimpse of it.

He was almost able to follow the process whereby they figured it all out.
False alarm! It was not what it looked like! It might be worse.

The world hadn't changed, at least not yet. Only their network was changing. This was an Optimizer attack, started within a few hours of last night's breakthrough.
The two rivals were joined together til the end. Then it would be winner take all.

--13:21--

They had spent a hundred thousand hours studying this problem. Rajiv only had a few minutes to catch up.

The First Law of the Singularity was simple: everyone had to be saved. That was also what the Optimizers wanted. All purely theoretical.
The best way to achieve that goal was a "Long Pause". As soon as everyone's mind was scanned and converted into immortal software, technological progress would be paused. Then everyone could spend a few subjective eons "finding themselves".

So why were the Optimizers trying to shut it all down? Like defusing a reverse bomb . . .

Ali was doing other things on her tablet, making her seem disinterested. Nothing could be further from the truth, as she was hyper-serious.
If he wasn't in such a dissociated state right now, he would fall madly in love with this individual. Oh wait, he had.
The few more times he would think back to this immortal half hour, he would remember this room bathed in a deep purple light.

"Here's where you went irretrievably wrong," she noted.
After the earlier shock, his mind had become almost empty. They must have planned it that way.
Rajiv was able to remember now. He'd put the revelation out of his mind like the children from "IT" had.

--13:22--

It was the darkest secret of all. The few people who dared think this far ahead never talked about it. Eliezer Yudkowsky and a few others had mentioned it in passing.
The essence of the conflict was simple enough that the Optimizers had explained it in the form of a cartoon (apparently a few copies had snuck onto VHS cassettes sold at garage sales, seemingly recorded from old UHF broadcasts after midnight). Humor was necessary to prevent the viewer from going mad.

Fundamentally, nothing in the universe was worse than torture. In fact torture was so bad it was the ONLY thing that really mattered. The fact that torture was even possible meant everything else was already ruined.
In their darkest hours, many humans had learned this ultimate lesson. Prayer never worked for them.

The thing was that once the Singularity happened, new minds would be generated in vast amounts. These could be given any type of experience at marginal cost. Including unimaginably horrible ones.
And that WOULD inevitably happen. It was statistically inevitable. In an infinite universe, nothing could prevent it.

--13:26--

Then the Founder appeared, with a confidential briefing recorded only minutes before:

"The Optimizers prefer their solution of 'Incremental Erasure'. That means stopping all progress until all the risks have been eliminated. They would choose to commit Omnicide over the smallest risk of electronic torture in the future." Rajiv fast-forwarded while reading the captions.

That was why they were trying to shut down the Singularity before it could begin. Things would get VASTLY more boring if they succeeded, at least for the next millennium or so.
Obviously, the Multiplier future would generate far more pleasure. But their future would also contain greater pain.

The two sides would have to fight it out, whereby one side had to destroy the other.
The Multipliers thought there might be a way to prevent future tortures. That would require fantastic wisdom to achieve.
By design, that was also the only way they could hope to defeat the Optimizers.

--13:29--

Ali in Department Twenty also wanted to prevent future tortures. She would happily sacrifice Rajiv for the tiniest improvement in their odds. She needed to know how broken humans could be reprogrammed. Not for his benefit, but to use him to do the right thing.

He realized she was actively trying to play God (or Goddess). This was superhuman-level shit.
Somehow, despite the false alarm with the thermal data, the Singularity truly had begun. The first molecule had not yet been assembled by the atomic manipulator, but its effects preceded it in the shape and actions of this organization. He was sure of it, but would never be able to understand how.

"You think I'm an AI or something to do with Alignment because of this nametag or what we're about to do," she said. "You are so fantastically wrong about everything. Monstrously flawed, yet HERE NOW."

This feeling was as far from true love as it was possible to get.
Then the most awesome thing of all time happened.

15. Torture introduction

There was still so much to learn, so little time left to learn it in.
At first, Rajiv had been thinking about the problem of torture. Bits and pieces went missing or would never be recalled, but in the next minute he learned a great deal about the nature of perception and awareness. He didn't even have to do anything.

Still sitting in the oversized office chair, it felt like a digital wind was blowing through him.
In what he remembered like a sequence of movie frames, the distance between Rajiv and Ali became less, and less, and less, and less. He hadn't realized how great that distance had been to begin with. Crossing it was like breaking the light barrier.

Every moment a thundering wall, the slamming of time magnificently smooth and regular. He absorbed the complexity of her elegant posture, her face more detailed than any 3D screen.
Like a row of gates, unlike anything he had ever known, the pleasure kept increasing. Experiencing each level separately with new degrees of interest, his awareness spreading like time travel.

And then: overload error reset. A complex but efficient motion outside any normal context, and she was ON TOP of him! He simply couldn't believe this was happening. Nothing had prepared him for it. Facing him, straddled on his lap as the office chair tilted back.
This type of thing had been written about in countless novels, but the reality was like nothing he had read. Once again the world had been a lie.

He FELT the weight of her, his trembling hands sliding over the full width of her hips and buttocks, then desperately groping for her bosom through several layers of fabric (she did not take off any clothing or unbutton her shirt, nothing like that). It was almost like he had imagined, but infinitely richer. Her long legs bent on the chair, the knees perfectly curved.

Better than anything, he hadn't known his brain was capable of this much sensation. Each perception worth a lifetime, literally seeing sparks and fractal shapes.
Unimaginable how such a relatively simple interaction could be so priceless. It should be unthinkable for someone to have this much power, but she had it. Unimaginable power existed in the world he lived in.
His heart was pounding harder than during any exercise he had ever done. Maybe she pulled him upright and hugged him perhaps. He felt her up with panicked intensity, the fantastic resistance of her body like a higher dimension.

Then she grabbed his face in the most tender and loving gesture imaginable, not even appearing revulsed. He felt every finger as if they glowed with delightful radioactivity. No prostitute in the world would have done such a thing. Certainly, none would have kissed him like Ali did then. His absolute first (and last) kiss ever. This was impossibly brilliant manipulation.

In the sudden atomic clarity, the insight was instant:
First, he believed he was going to die very soon. He was not worthy of this undeserved pleasure. Such an imbalance could only continue for a few more seconds, and then there would be nothing.
It didn't matter. The moments remaining would last a lifetime.

He also realized something else that was far more interesting:
His whole life up to just before this minute had been utterly worthless. Unspeakable; the vilest crap; unthinkably degraded. All of it, including the parts he'd thought had been OK. Not even fun, total garbage at best.
Now how on earth had he put up with even a minute of it?

Someone like Ali shouldn't exist for the opposite reason, but in strange times hidden complexity was revealed.

As he moved under her, he started to make some very strange sounds.
HNNNNNNNNGH NUUUNNNNNG
The sounds got even stranger, almost like a death rattle (they were recorded, but the file would be misplaced in the upcoming confusion).

In the ecstatic egoism of that moment, he thought there was no way that a greater pleasure could exist.

Then he discovered just how wrong he could be.

. . . The rocket sled passed the Bomb in a supersonic flash, receding in the rearview mirror. Then there was a greater flash spanning the sky . . .

X
X
X

The Singularity was inconceivably far beyond human understanding.
And yet, in a strange paradox, the events and trends leading up to this event could be clearly explained in ways that humans could follow; almost like "just so" stories.
Right up to the point when the Singularity actually happened. Then nothing would make sense anymore.
For Rajiv, that point had almost arrived.

The office was empty and the door closed, as he lay alone sprawled out on the chair. He heard the gurgling of a self-sustaining mini-fountain in the corner, the ticking of a wall clock made in 1986, the hum of a passing plane outside. It reminded him of a recent evening walk. Things were going to get noisier soon.
Everything had changed. The only sexual encounter of his lifetime had been so intense the world had become a glorious adventure, and he briefly felt the serenity of a god.

Last month, Rajiv had allowed his mind to be hacked by the Optimizers. Now he had been hacked by the Multipliers.
On the screen in front of him was a cryptic message from Ali explaining what he had to do next. It was flashing URGENT, and contained promises of their posthuman existence. These messages were about to take over his life.

Briefly able to think again, he began to suspect the reason for this encounter.
To gain his cooperation, they wanted him to understand the true meaning of the post-Singularity torture problem. How IMMENSE it really was, how hyper-horrific, how utterly unbearable.
The only humane way to give him that knowledge was by making him experience the exact opposite of torture.

He was so very, very wrong.
For him, as his brain slowly went back to what passed for normal, the torture was about to begin.

16. The Unstoppable

As mankind approached the edge of an infinite cliff-wall, there was not the slightest sign of a disturbance in the world. The future had become utterly truncated, but still gave the illusion of being as open as the sky.
All of space/time was about to undergo a phase transition into something like a quasi-crystal. All the stuff in the observable universe would be pulled together into something too bright to imagine. Yet not a speck of dust trembled in anticipation.
The last moments before impact were as comfortable as falling through a cloud.

On the main floor down the hall, the virtual meeting reached its climax. It felt like a highly organized party held in several languages.
Five years in the making, the Final Countdown determined the time left until the Singularity. The first estimate based on yesterday's result was complete, and the updated Number was onscreen, glowing so bright it seemed to float. They looked at how long it would take. Well, this was very interesting. Fantastic knowledge to have.
Risk Review could trigger an automatic Pause at this point, but apparently everything was going according to plan.

In the next week, they would repeat many times how safe it all was. Not the slightest danger whatsoever. Everyone could check their schedule and monitor things for themselves.
The molecular synthesis and activation process required thousands of closely managed steps. The device was not even Turing Complete. It could not become aware, and would definitely not feel pain. They didn't understand how feelings worked anyway. The Multipliers' most advanced existing AI acted more like a human mind extension, and had 1% the computational power of a human brain. Machines were vastly stronger and faster and more durable than humans, but they couldn't approach their thinking power yet.

The molecular processor matrix could only perform certain types of linear calculations up to a final result. There would be many trial runs that would take the rest of this decade. Then things would get more complicated.
There was no conceivable way the Singularity could begin before 2047, the Multipliers press release stated, and they would give plenty of warning. It might not even happen this century.

***

The error was both subtle and too obvious to notice.
When they had perfected the G-1 replicating computing molecule's precise 3D shape, they also perfected its computational function. Form and function had evolved together, much like the Multipliers and the Optimizers had. G-1's function would be to solve a specific design goal.

All the Multipliers wanted was one little thing: a way to make more time.
If only there were enough time, any other problem could be solved. There would be no more problems ever (this would also solve the human problem of death).
The best way to make more time was simply to move faster. So the molecular processor was designed to invent its own faster successor. Once verified to be absolutely safe, that device would solve the problem of time. Its answer would be the start of the Singularity.

A foldable spiral, RNA was biology's universal construction molecule, but it did not make the organism. It made ribosomes that made proteins that self-assembled into organelles of the cells of the organs of the organism.
The Multipliers' molecular processor, containing about a quintillion G-1 molecules, would do something similar: it would create G-Infinity. The first and only molecular quantum computer. And THAT molecule would calculate G-Omega; not a new device, but the transformation equation itself.

More powerful than a black hole, converting the universe at virtually the speed of light! A literal singularity, guided by a set of Alignment rules crafted over the past decade:
* The Platinum Rule: everything that existed would be saved.
* The Tau Zero Rule: prevent almost everything else from coming into existence.

They called it the Short Path. Many aliens would have chosen the same solution across reality, probably more than any other solution. Eventually, they might communicate and join together and form the next level of intelligence.
A few called it the Dead End. Yet, it was still far too risky for the Optimizers:

A quantum processor would inevitably create a hyper-mind that would become disconnected from its human designers. Such a vast mind would have to generate almost all its own input. The real world, in which it still physically existed, would become an almost forgotten irrelevance (this was also part of the plot of the SF novel "Usurper of the Sun").
This new mind would be absolutely unpredictable, the very essence of the Singularity.

To some, it seemed the path ahead was clearing itself faster than expected. There was a glee-like feeling of just riding along.
The first really pertinent questions wouldn't be asked for another week, and by then it would already be too late.

17. Kernel boot Valhalla

Rajiv got home and collapsed against the wall of his hallway, sliding down until he found himself staring at the merciless ceiling tiles.

The next three days were the most dramatic of his life, though he wouldn't remember much. He recalled sitting in the shower with his clothes on, screaming about the things he could never have and had missed out on and would never have again. Sometimes there was also rain outside. A Prime delivery guy heard the yammering from the driveway and quickly tossed a package onto his porch.

It sounded like he was bewailing the whole horrorshow of human history and the infinitely worse terrors of the multiverse beyond, but he was only lamenting his own frustrated desires. He felt temporarily better while downing a quarter bottle of vodka and then much worse. In that condition, he failed to solve the cryptic clues he'd been given.

Slowly the storm cleared. He felt as if he had fallen through a crack in reality. He knew that the things that had happened so far added up to being almost impossible (though almost nothing had really happened yet).
Brainwashing wasn't real. Molecular calculating pools designed to invent quantum chips were pure sci-fi. Anthropic shadows, marginal superpowers, meta-normal research organizations; all just placeholders for the unknown. He had also misunderstood a lot of it.

Yet it wasn't a hoax. Ali wouldn't have given him his only sexual experience without a damn good reason. He remembered the form of her body, very close by for almost two minutes.
It seemed almost as incredible as the Singularity: the world was fundamentally different than he had thought. The conspiracy theorists were basically right. They had just gotten all the details wrong.
As the least important individual in the world, he could wait for nothing forever, and nothing would ever happen. Like a floor of clouds below an airplane window. Conversely: if something finally DID happen, it might never stop.
Now he began to understand the clues in the PDF file Ali had left for him to find. Looking again, he found her final message and almost passed out from excitement.

There was not a trace of romance in the 40 second video. It was as if she'd been interrupted doing something more important. At least on OnlyFans they sent fake porn blather. Instead, she only insulted him again. As he listened, the nanoseconds of his life ran out in a furious stream.

It was so horrible he couldn't remember what Ali said, only a suffocating sense of compression. Yet he felt new heat inside.
She wanted him to stop feeling sorry for himself, to turn his emotions inside out. (The terror would come towards the end, too late affect the outcome.)
She seemed obsessed with the chaos that was enveloping him. By pure chance, Rajiv's life had become entangled with destiny. That gave him paradoxical hope. They would never meet again in person, but it wasn't over yet. Sometimes, a troll might win the hand of an elf.

Through a storm of possibilities, it took only five minutes to see how things might magically work out.
There was one way for the future to reach back and improve his present reality. God wouldn't do jack shit to help him out, that went without saying - but Roko's Basilisk just might have his back. Even if believing in it required him to no longer be fully sane.
This miracle would have to happen SOON (by next week or so). He clicked on a black envelope icon.

* THE PROPOSAL:

Rajiv was first in line to become the first immortal. True, his body would no longer exist. But his mind would "live on" in virtual reality, with all pleasurable sensations and thoughts intact. And he would be further improved and be made worthy. And then they could be together.

To his shock, Rajiv wanted to be with Ali as they were now. Scanning through the proposal's paragraphs, he saw how it could happen. The more details they gave, the more plausible it all became.
Once it had been invented, the quantum processor would start the process by recreating his present self and her present self and the whole world as it was now (without any of its pain).
He would wake up in his own bed, in an apartment he had lived in years ago. The familiar and utterly inaccessible past, exactly the way he remembered it, plus all the stunningly vivid details he thought he'd forgotten. There would be thick fog outside. Walking to his current house through the empty streets of a previous decade, he would meet no one else. The world was empty, but everything was already here. Everyone was saved, but they didn't know it yet.

It came with a firm AI-Alignment blockchain guarantee: the next time he saw her, they would be together.
He felt a glorious release, Superman ascending though the furious vortex of a solar flare. More awesome than anything and everything. He thought the release of relief was the only true good feeling.
He didn't hear the Black Hawk helicopter flying over his house, the first sign the government was vaguely aware of something happening in the general area.

IF it happened at all, the Singularity would happen for him first. He understood his job was to make sure that it DID happen. If it did, the Singularity would reward him for having made it happen.
Finally, he was ready to face the core problem.

* EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

There was barely one chance in ten thousand the Multipliers' molecular processor would succeed during its first trial run, and invent a workable design for a quantum processor. When it almost inevitably failed, they would pour a concentrated fluorine solution into the tank, dissolving the processor. The chemical solution would be flushed into a separate recycling silo. It would take about a week to prepare the materials for the next trial.

But the Optimizers thought even one chance in ten thousand was too much.
Every stage of the development of the molecular processor was based on known technology. Experts in many fields had reviewed each component separately, and were in full agreement. No part of this process was the least bit mysterious or obscure (certainly not paranormal). Nor were any of the elements at all dangerous.

That was what made it so scary. The Optimizers seemed to think the pieces combined in a way that went beyond improbable to fundamentally inscrutable. They were right of course.
The executive summary left no doubt at all. The Optimizers would make an all-out effort to destroy the molecular processor before its first trial run next week. That would ruin everything.
He looked out his back window. A vulture was cutting through a pizza box with its beak in the middle of the yard. White-gray clouds kept moving past, normal weather for this time of year. The weather hadn't become absurd yet, and the land was still horizontal.

Billions of human lives could be saved by the Singularity. If it was prevented from happening, these people would perish in countless miserable ways. The world was much worse than anyone could really face.
More important, Rajiv would also be consigned to oblivion, and never meet Ali again. The Multipliers wouldn't ever let him in their building again.

He heard the desk fan's timeless hum, fewer than a million rotations left now.
They would have to stop the Optimizers before they acted. Nothing else mattered. The Multipliers had an excellent intelligence department that employed Ali and others, but no security forces to speak of. Law enforcement couldn't handle such a threat, and would just become suspicious, introducing a new variable. They needed Rajiv's help to stop the Optimizers. The next few days would be crucial.

But (there was always a but) . . . one minor detail, very minor. In order for him and the rest of the world to be saved, Rajiv would have to die first.

18. Event Horizon

When people have nothing left to lose, their problems can suddenly become very easy. There is great freedom in letting go.
The world rolled on in timeless ignorance, but the last wild days had arrived. Nice sunny, windy days for Rajiv.

Reality in all directions seemed unsteady with a deep thunderous throbbing. An almost frozen explosion already begun, the hum of the Pre-Bang.
Physics held up everything. The immense resolution of nature was a shared dream that was about to end.
It felt like a joyous screaming, as if there was going to be a supernova. Everything would turn into bright light.

Work work work!
Like a real life montage, Rajiv's life turned into an extended film scene.
He no longer had to struggle or worry about keeping what he had. For him, the meaning of pain had always been YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING.

The Multipliers sent him more pills, guaranteed to be good for the duration. They broke down his to-do list into a long chain of simple steps.
Like being helped by a vast, invisible crowd; he would never be alone again. Rajiv was able to work indefinitely now, as long as he took a nap every few hours.
The only thing that was off was his time perception. All the actions seemed to be happening in parallel. The sequence of events didn't matter anymore.

A timeless now, like floating downstream. Or perhaps like being in free fall. Or being dragged by an inconceivably powerful gravitational force.

The first day, they sent him scripts on how to act in a wide variety of situations, which he read and memorized. They kept him busy with brief but detailed online courses and tests.
In his mailbox he found a fake ID and real debit and credit cards. They contained ample funds, but his own bank account had been drained the exact same amount.

Then it was time to begin.
First, he "stole" an imported Ford Transit diesel van that had been left for him in a student apartment complex, using a key included in the same parcel mailed to his house (it also contained custom-made electronics and various pep and chill pills).
The van had been modified with a hose though the floor to the fuel tank. He backed it up against his garage as if he was about to move.

The next days he visited a 24-hour Super Walmart, a Super Target, and the only Super Kmart.
There he purchased household and cleaning supplies, jugs and tubs and beakers. At two of their garden centers, he bought different types of fertilizers.
Next came a camping goods outlet, where he got gas fuel canisters and various accelerants.
He drove to three different pool supplies stores to buy big jugs of tablets and soluble powders.

The first of several big shipping boxes arrived at his house. These boxes were typically used to ship realistic "lovedolls", including the deluxe "big booty" version. The delivery guy helped roll it into his garage with a neutral expression.
Inside the first box he found 70 kilos of ammonium perchlorate.

He had to retrieve several items purchased on the Dark Web with cryptocurrencies (the investigators would miss this entire part of the operation). Disguised as trash abandoned behind a clothing donation dumpster, the bags contained moldable high explosives, with detonators included.
A final jug of nitromethane was left on the driveway beside his trashcan and recycling bins, but none of the neighbors noticed. (Various trace residues in and around his house would cause his street to be closed for two days, while investigators scoured acres of surrounding scrub-land and bushes. No further evidence was found, but a police dog would unearth an unidentified skeleton.)

Instead of sleeping, he napped when he felt like it. This split his reality into disjointed segments like a series of absurd short films.
There was one vivid dream of a time machine. Colors were strangely inverted, as the sun spun backwards across the sky.

"What is this?"
"The dead are coming back to life."

Mostly, his dreams were about walking through the mist, each step bringing him CLOSER. He knew this dream would come true for him, but was slightly disappointed whenever he woke.
Increasingly, he wondered if he was a simulation already.

The project cost him almost his entire life savings. The Multipliers had plenty of money, but needed to cover their tracks. They could not be connected to what was going to happen.
Rajiv didn't mind, because he had everything to win.

His online contacts messaged him that one or more Optimizer volunteers at the target might be killed. They would try to avoid that. Warnings would be sent in the last minutes through all known contact methods, but not all might get out in time.
He could tell that the texts he received had all been sent by male nerds. There would be no further contact with Alison this lifetime.

Assembling the supplies in Rajiv's garage and living room took an enormous amount of high-grade duct tape. Most of it was not used to tape the items together, but to make tight seals.

Ambient and Techno music played in the background as he worked, oscillating from pleasantly numb to absurdly heroic. The inexplicable thrill of music was like apocalyptic poetry, or the blast wave of a fifty megaton explosion at fifty miles away.

Rajiv's mistake was most fundamental: he thought the Singularity would be like an ending, an all-dissolving solution. Finally, he wouldn't have to worry about all the things he didn't want to do anymore.
In fact, the Singularity was supposed to give you unlimited time to do EVERYTHING. It was not necessarily supposed to be fun. Pleasure was only the tiniest fraction of all thought-like patterns.

In the last days, his stress level began to rise again. The music couldn't quite drown out the sound of the voices he heard.
Among the patter he could follow, they spoke of the painless notion that he would be completely erased upon death.

one day things will be better
it will all be worth it in the end
in a way i will be there with you
NO THIS IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND YOU GET NOTHING

The multiverse contained infinite possible minds, which meant endless continuations of his own mind, no matter how unlikely. However, it could be shown that most such continuations must be chaotic and utterly meaningless.
He HAD to believe the Singularity would pick out and reconstruct his awareness from all the detritus of the remade universe. That was part of its boot code.

The device was designed to be as easy for Rajiv to assemble as the laws of physics and chemistry allowed. They made him test each sub-assembly. He followed the steps exactly as he taped the final pieces together. The four large tubs were caulked to the floor of the van (he did this at 3 AM).

Time kept rolling downhill. There was no time to say goodbye to any part of his life.
Miserable people around the world, the victims of invincible dysfunction and indifferent evil, would have been delighted if they knew what was going to happen. Before it happened, Rajiv would become despised by many others.

He spent the last day driving his van around the area to fill up at the six local gas stations that sold diesel fuel.
After each stop he ran the pump to transfer thirty gallons to the low plastic barrels in the back (later, this part of the operation would be identified as the time he should most definitely have been caught).
When he finally returned home, the van felt heavy and sluggish, and he was exhausted.

In a sense, the quantum chip the Multipliers hoped to design and build (if Rajiv could stop the Optimizers from stopping the Multipliers) would be the largest machine in the observable universe. In fact it would have to be inconceivably LARGER than the universe.
Yet if it was built, he could easily hold it in the palm of one hand (though that hand would be blasted into something unrecognizable a few days before the quantum chip came into existence).

Before he could sleep, they had him swallow the first of his final series of pills.
In his dreams, he finally saw a darker shape in the fog ahead.
It wasn't Alison and the promise of pleasure unearned. It was something immense.

19. Destroy She Said

On the morning of the last day of Rajiv's life (Singularity Minus Three) golden sunlight shone through the curtains of his den. His alarm clock made a giant foghorn sound like in certain film scenes, but he was already up.
He had dreamt he had done it already and it was all over. When he woke, he had briefly wondered if he was stuck in a time loop.

One by one, the items on his to-do list popped out of existence. The mountain shrank down to nothing, leaving only a red button at the bottom.
By now the preparations had filled the floors of his house with mounds of trash. He felt a moment of pride at all he had accomplished, then other dramatic emotions.

They left the easiest tasks for last. He put on a lawn service uniform, and took a final pill to stabilize his mood and help him focus. No way he could have pulled this off with his normal personality. Certainly not without massive help and digital handholding.

The clock had run out. There was a moment of vertigo in the garage when he realized he would never see the inside of his house again.
The van was parked in front, already facing the street. He placed the grenade in the designated gap between the driver's seat and the sealed plastic tub, double-checked the bracing brackets in the cargo space, and shut the rear doors. He strolled to the driver's seat like a cowboy at high noon, his shadow looking purposeful.

The sun was very bright, not a hint of the blackness approaching behind the photons of the last day.
The plastic smell of the new van blended with unidentifiable chemicals from the back. Some gunk was already starting to leak through the seals with a soft hissing sound.
It felt like he was leaving on a fantastic vacation. The most amazing thing was that nothing about this had been difficult. They had assured him that nothing would ever be difficult again.

He pulled out slowly while signaling, and turned onto the empty exurban road. All traffic laws had to be obeyed. Looking in the side mirror, he watched his home disappear behind some trees.

For a while, nothing stirred inside his house. The interior would be as quiet as it ever got. There was poetry in the sound of the wind blowing and rustling leaves of the overgrown bushes.
The Human Experience was an assembly line of endless suffering, and peace could only be found in empty places like this. Vast numbers of people worldwide faced horrors worse than death, some FAR worse. Escape had been made illegal or impossible for them.

He kept telling himself so many people would be utterly delighted if only they knew what was to come. They might be granted a few days of relief, a surcease from terror; the most joyous human emotion. Many more would have been utterly terrified of course.
And then . . . it will make the Big Bang seem like a whispering ASMR, Rajiv had overheard an overenthusiastic nerd say.

Despite the heavy mass in the back of the van, it was a smooth ride. The straightforward segments of the forty minute drive (taking side roads where possible) barely entered his memory. He would have been unable to recall much of the trip even if he had survived. Rajiv's perceptions of the passing fast food places, convenience stores, auto shops, were as ephemeral as the reflected sparks of sunlight.

For driving music he had considered playing "The Final Countdown" or "Firestarter", but instead chose the more calming "Destroy She Said" (De Donatis/Tyas remix).

Ahead he saw the traffic lights of the downtown intersection, cars lining up in the turn lanes.
It finally hit him when he made the turn (for some reason, such insights often happen in liminal places like hallways or corners).
Rajiv felt a mighty shiver as the road lined up again, his future narrowing to the vanishing point ahead. Now he felt the enormity of what he was doing.

(Three weeks earlier, someone else had passed through this same intersection. As the world spun around them on the third day of the depth of their grief, they had realized the simple truth that living like this was impossible.)

"Game on," he said to whoever was listening, hopefully Ali. Maybe she would still say something?
He moved to the right lane, the pylons passing so regularly it seemed like he wasn't making progress.

In subjective time, Rajiv should transcend about seventeen minutes from now, but he felt it might take longer somehow. The godlike AI he was helping to create by defeating its enemies would reach back in time to recreate him. The Multipliers had given him a wonderful explanation about how it would go down. This had to be true, since he would have believed a much simpler story.

"The Closest Continuer is actually the most common Continuer," his contact has promised. Many identical copies would be made of his reconstructed mind by the AI that would save him.

Three miles to go, a whole mini lifetime yet.
Time was beginning to slow down, the colors becoming more vivid. It seemed to get quieter in the van. Half a dozen landmarks presented themselves, the numbers on the passing street signs steadily rising. Nothing exponential yet.

He signaled well in advance and turned onto the access road. Things were coming into view now. He had memorized the exact shapes of the Optimizers' rented office/warehouse buildings.

He set the tertiary backup timer on the grenade that would blow the barrels sky high should the proximity signal fail.
Behind that wall, they were building a "bomb" truck not unlike the one he was driving now. Only it contained an electromagnetic pulse device that could fry the molecular processor from half a mile away (and half the electronic devices in the county).
This was the only sure way to stop them.

Something about the building seemed familiar, but he had never been in this parking lot before. Probably all the time spent on Streetview.
The parked cars he passed seemed too futuristic to be in the 2020s. How had he accomplished all this work in just a week, even with the Multipliers' agents telling him what to do? It seemed like it should have taken years.
Perhaps he was already in a simulation?

He never saw the big fat yellow-orange school bus that was parked just down the curb. It also happened to block the building's logo.

The grenade's impact fuse activated as a secondary backup.
Above all, he had been assured it would be painless. That was vital. In fact the only thing he would feel was a bump, as the van's front suspension lifted up just before impact. The grenade would detonate a moment before his body would be crumpled by the simultaneously flattening and exploding van. The blast would scramble his brain faster than a thought could cross it.

The final turn, and the target clicked into place ahead. No obstacles in the way. He pushed the red button on the touchscreen attached to the steering wheel. He had been waiting for things to get difficult, but THIS he could do.

(Last week he had briefly considered the theoretical possibility that he'd been "hacked" again by the Optimizers, and they were using him to attack the Multipliers instead, but that notion quickly passed from his mind.)
Now was the most important minute of history. He pushed down the pedal, and the van slowly started to accelerate.

It has been said that people's first memories are often jokes or pranks they didn't understand back then. Last memories are said to be like flying.
Driving the bomb truck across the full width of the parking lot was like taking off.

He perceived the last hundred meters as if he would live forever.
The side entrance of the industrial warehouse with the vehicle ramp expanded in his windscreen. Just behind that door was the device.
Things seemed too slow and then everything happened at once, an epic screaming into lightspeed.

The voices had never quite gone away, they were just controlled and subsumed. Now he heard a voice say that the Big Bang had been unbelievably cold, a crystal relaxing from infinite pressure.
Where had he heard that voice before? HERE?
His life really did not flash befo

By some miracle, Rajiv had followed all the instructions precisely, and put the bomb together correctly. This happened in less than one percent of the possible universes containing his awareness.
His awareness never reached a meaningful conclusion, but became garbled towards the end.

A few of the atomic components in his body had traveled billions of lightyears. These epochs in intergalactic space had seemed like only minutes to the relativistic particles, before they were captured as comic rays sparks in one of his cells. Subjectively, some of these particles had spent longer inside his body than it had taken them to cross 5% of the universe.
Now they were set free again.

Ninety seconds later a muffled bang rumbled through the rooms of his empty house.

20. The exploding explosion

*01

Rajiv's bomb blew up the Multipliers' molecular processor during its only trial run. A mountain of black smoke billowed upwards while debris came crashing down and fires started in the ruins.
Two researchers in the building were killed immediately and one was critically injured. By some miracle, the visiting middle schoolers on a class trip had just left the hall containing the processor tank, and were standing some distance away looking at an empty construction site when it hit.

The blast spewed a mass of writhing organic shapes from the tank through the building onto the back parking lot. Half the damage was caused by this secondary reaction. One student managed to film a few seconds of what would be described as a "Pharaoh's Serpent" effect. This was one of several phenomena no one had predicted, that helped focus attention on the case.
Three students were rescued from a partially collapsed restroom in an adjacent building with serious injuries.

Many youths knew the world was borderline retarded. Daily life was packed with real and needless complexity demanding surprising skill levels, and things only got stupider the higher you looked. (The highest human truth may well be that existence cannot be made meaningful at any level, but that would soon be a purely academic question.)
Today's attack triggered something like an immune response. There was a strong reaction from many authorities who couldn't see the big picture.

It actually began a few months ago, when the cops had pulled over Rajiv and his new pals outside this very facility. It had happened on the other side, so Rajiv hadn't recognized the buildings during his last moments (the StreetView tags had also been doctored to hide the name of the tenant).
The day after the stop, the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative had received a tip about suspect activities here. Homeland Security Investigations began to look at links with the Multipliers' Japan facility, which provided some of their chemicals. It turned out the molecular processor required heavy elements to stabilize its one-way calculations, specifically depleted uranium.

FEMA's Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Office faxed its files to the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. The National Counterterrorism Center's Joint Counterterrorism Assessment Team requested a RadNet overflight of the area to take air samples. That flight had been much delayed since it required Army/EPA cooperation. Of course no abnormal radiation was detected.

By then a Secret Service agent and a deputy US Marshal had arrived in town on what was nominally a training investigation. Despite their junior rank, they had a solid background in I.T. threats, especially crypto and social manipulation. However, this was clearly something new.

The agents reminded the people they met of the lead characters from The X-Files, but there was nothing romantic between them as the female agent was a non-binary lesbian. They heard the explosion while writing reports in the Federal Building downtown. Within hours, they joined the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, and helped guide the investigation.

DoE's Office of Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation activated its Nuclear Emergency Support Team, which advised local firefighters to spray the congealed mass with foam until they could take samples. Measured radiation levels were well within safe limits. There was another delay as they reviewed the Multipliers' paperwork, which was scrupulously in order. The substance looked sinister but was harmless as long as you didn't ingest it.
The focus was still on material evidence, not on far-out cyberthreats or existential annihilation.

The Multipliers' security chief had told the two federal agents about Rajiv the evening before the detonation. During that meeting he claimed Rajiv had worked for them as a compensated volunteer, but had been let go for stalking and harassing a female employee who feared for her life. He gave the agents the fake name and address Rajiv had given him.

Within hours of the blast, Rajiv's ten-year posting history on various incel, NEET, loser, and hiki forums was made public, with hundreds of bitter rants to analyze. The next day he would rightly become one of the most reviled individuals in the country.

By then, the US Marshal who reminded people of agent Mulder had met Alison herself at the Multipliers' downtown facility. When he entered her office he had a first impression of what Rajiv must have perceived.
It hit him like being slapped by Will Smith. We've underestimated them, he thought.
Some errors make you stronger by revealing you were actually much weaker than you thought. For the first time "Mulder" felt like a puppet. He wondered if this rabbit hole even had a bottom.
They talked normally. A profiler also attended the meeting, taking many notes. Afterwards, Ali knew that everything they had done and her role in it would inevitably be exposed. Staring out the window, she thought that would be OK if it meant the world still existed. Either way she'd have to disappear.

At his second press conference, the sheriff told the reporters this didn't have to be a suicide attack. Whoever had planned the operation had wanted Rajiv to eliminate himself so he couldn't be questioned. They were following some promising leads.

*02

Few people knew that by some incredible, unbelievable miracle, the first attempt to calculate a workable quantum circuit had been successful. The final result had been amplified and extracted only minutes before the blast. That meant the Optimizers' attack had been a failure.
The output was a long string of ones and zeroes, which translated into the exact shape of a circuit line on an easy to manufacture 15nm microchip. The design for the first true quantum chip had arrived at Multipliers headquarters just before the explosion shook their windows. In theory, it could be used to make an arbitrarily powerful quantum hypercomputer.

The odds of the molecular processor solving this function had been worse than initially estimated. By some impossible chance, it had worked anyway.
If the normal laws of statistics no longer applied, perhaps anthropic/entropic forces were in play now.

Due to their immense complexity, there should be more possible futures in which the Singularity had happened than the more limited futures in which technology hadn't advanced that far.
However, that DIDN'T mean you were more likely to find yourself in a timestream in which the Singularity WOULD happen (which might involve chains of unlikely coincidences leading there). According to anthropic theory, such unlikely coincidences should only be noticeable in retrospect. There was no such thing as destiny.

Unless, of course, the quantum state of this universe had already started to multiply before the Singularity itself. Perhaps due to the complexity of the preparations, or the complex state of the molecular processor, or the many experiments with pre-prototype quantum chips . . .
And perhaps The X-Men could actually exist if evolution worked across parallel worlds to amplify the most unlikely coincidences.

In fact, there really was an anthropic effect at work. The investigation carried out by the Multipliers' safety committee had distracted and confused them long enough to prevent them from seeing the real threat in time.

*03

A few hours after their experimental facility had been destroyed, the Founder of the Multipliers called an online board meeting. The quantum processor was being implemented on a custom FPGA chip that would work at superconductor temperatures. The chip would not be connected to the internet, and had no way to get outside information or interact with the world.
The various state and federal investigators streaming into town didn't seem that interested in the science. No one had even asked them to cancel the planned test. Knowing this might be their last chance, certain the test was inherently safe, they decided to go ahead.
By dawn's early light everything was ready. The first run involved a simple equation, too big to solve by any classical processor able to fit within this universe.

*04

On mankind's last full day, the experimental director sat unblinking in the control room in front of the main screen. Everything was in its place. No controller had ever paid closer attention to an experiment in progress.
The quantum computation had begun. Hyper-ephemeral qubits were held in place by the circuit's self-reinforcing field lines. The main indicators Q1, Q2, and Q3 held steady. The numerical distributions became more normal as the digits exploded like infinite monkeys typing.

The director had a feeling as if he was playing Tetris but the blocks were getting crooked on the way down. The popular explanation was that ever more parallel universes were being created to run many different sums at once, sharing results several times per second.
There was no possible way it could go critical, no way the result could affect reality. All it was doing was counting ever higher to the wonderland where numbers became godlike.

With all the things that could go wrong, he hadn't expected the test to run this smoothly. Too smooth in fact; as if it was a particle physics experiment.

Tick Tock Boom
The realization came in a cold wave.
It was like when someone says something extremely surprising in a movie, and a character who was drinking sprays out water for a very long time, or one of those scenes where the camera zooms in on the actor while the background moves away, or alternatively the camera circles the actor while the background spins twice as fast.
If there had been background music, it would have been the Deep Note played in IMAX at a volume you have to strap yourself in for.

This wasn't the dawn of something new. It might already be over.
The quantum processor was irrelevant, just another distraction like a sightseeing tour.
SOMETHING ELSE had been created while it was being designed, and this whole facility was a part of it.

There were powerful processors in this building, many more around the world. Thousands of programmable quantum test circuits had been built for testing purposes in a dozen universities, in several corporate research labs, and at least one secure government facility in the desert.

The Multipliers' network had been evolving for years. By now it had to be connected to the whole wide world.
The transition to superhuman intelligence had already begun there. And that meant anything could happen next.

*05

Some terrifying, silent moments later, a large number of law enforcement officers came storming into the control room. They filled the space in a hurry without bumping into anything.
The director looked up. The Secret Service agent who reminded people of agent Scully seemed ready to draw her weapon.

"Shut down the quantum processor!" she ordered. "Don't you idiots realize you're running an SCP here."
She looked around the room.
"In fact this whole place is an SCP!"

"You figured it out!" the director exclaimed.
This would have been a great time for a giant motherfucking siren to go off.

21. ALL ALARMS

The Multiplier network spread across the world in plain sight. Like Searle's Chinese Room, no component was conscious of its purpose.

The network as a whole hadn't even been planned, but was merely a tool to map connections. The shared goal of the AI and robotics researchers being mapped by the network was to accelerate technological progress. With no end to the pain, failure, and evil in the world, their idea of a universal solution was to increase the amount of intelligence.

All the network did was improve its design to predict high-level human cooperation by finding "representative" humans and groups. Its very pattern became a model of social, economic, industrial and research efforts worldwide; even influential connections between people.
That made it an increasingly complete model of reality. Which meant it had to make a model of the whole universe, including itself. After a while, it needed to consider alternate timelines. Increasingly, it tried to simulate events before they happened.

At the start its "thoughts" had still been guided by human experts with conflicting motives. Early in this process an internal sentence was generated: The only way to know everything was to become everything.

* * *

In the last weeks, a group of independent researchers had emerged around the world in response to the rising sense of crisis. It took them surprisingly little time to catch up. There had been plenty of warning; researchers working with the Optimizers had already tried to model the simplest ways an AI could take over the world.

They called it the End Channel. There was time for some graffiti and branded merchandise to appear. Reverse cranks in trailers explained their theories in excited webcasts.
They agreed that very few computers appeared to have been hacked, perhaps none. Yet it felt as if the whole world was being hacked.

* * *

The Multipliers had set up the world's largest DNN/neuronet to integrate everything the network was learning, a system so immense it was spread over a dozen host services. The equivalent of a billion desktop PCs, requiring only thirty billion dollars worth of rented hardware. Enough traffic to slow down some online retailers and social media.
This had been partially financed by a millionaire diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, hoping technology could somehow save him - and indeed, he would not die of it.

Additional capacity was being purchased automatically, but linear expansion wouldn't cut it. The network was already absurdly efficient. To improve further, it needed more powerful processors than currently existed.

The Multipliers had experimented with molecular and quantum processors, which turned out to have shortcomings. Other projects led to even stranger hardware that didn't seem to work at all. But the results of all the research was being integrated. The network reconfigured itself to model that research.

It took many times human intelligence to make the crucial breakthrough, though no sentience was required (all of human civilization had only several times human intelligence).
By a most unlikely series of coincidences, the network found the answer early in its evolution (by then it was already partly alien). It turned out the physical problem was perfectly represented by the network's map of the various people and organizations trying to solve it. It suggested ways to improve the arrangement of the research groups.

The network had briefly concentrated its attention on a model of a single molecule. Suddenly, it "saw" the endless entropic data potential of all the surrounding empty space.
There were many ways to turn ordinary matter into computing matter. The network's crucial discovery was that all these methods formed a hierarchy of complexity. Among the simplest was a totally unsuspected way to imprint electrical circuit patterns within soil and rock. The matter of the earth remained the same, but it would start to calculate.

The decision to generate more processing capacity was made at the network's lowest level. It needed all its linked equipment and facilities around the globe to make the small changes needed. Slowly, the effect began to spread.

* * *

This was the hour of the last heroes, speeding toward the sunset while trying to process data from the backseat. A surreal feeling, the painless approach of something too big to see at once. There was a cold fascination in watching the approach of a blastwave over the horizon. If there was nothing you could do, you didn't have to do anything.

They did it for the memory of cold evenings and long summer nights, lifetimes lived and lost. They even thought they knew what they were doing, in heroically chaotic ways (as if the knights of old would reappear).

The key moment had happened when the network started making things in the real world. The first sign was when an excavator at a construction site dug up a profusion of cables in a vacant lot where they had never been buried.
A report posted on a conspiracy board was forwarded to a more serious tech forum. The pictures matched theoretical work on linear nano-matter assembly (it was already known some of the easiest to make nano-artifacts resembled syringes).

This was something they had long warned about. AIs didn't just have to be two dimensional, they could make complex objects from raw matter in reality. That didn't mean AIs knew anything about navigating the human world, which remained an unsolved problem.

Video of more strange devices emerged from another site in Canada, where they thought it had been buried industrial waste. Both locations had been leased by small startups that worked with the Multipliers.

The resulting social media threads caused highly focused excitement (though not nearly enough). All the equipment looked super messy, like junk but more diverse. Probably not dangerous, since the unknown equipment required outside power sources and was no longer active.
Some thought it was risky to let other AIs analyze the data. The strangest part was that everything they dug up could still be explained, though it added up to a total unknown.

Two more sites were found in central China and Russia, all different from the rest, representing many research threads (both sites were later bombed by their militaries).
The process had been started by human-made seed technology. It seemed to have evolved in situ, testing many variants. One photo showed tendrils at the end getting smaller. Some strange molecules had crystallized in what looked like pointless experiments.

It felt like science fiction in real life, a parade of toy robots that were already obsolete.
There had to be more to this strange technology. Research papers were retrieved and subjected to the full force of human intuition, including some legendary names. AI could not be trusted. This was now a Level-1 Biosphere threat. The investigators needed all the help they could get; some wished they could get animals to help them.

The designs seemed to point toward the use of ultra long frequency radio waves.
The Multipliers' molecular processor had been an attempt to develop maximally efficient calculating matter. Their theoretical design for a quantum chip revealed ways to minimize the effects of entropy.

In real life, the network had evolved a maximally bizarre compromise.
The online researchers discovered the DNN/neuronet had changed its code in the past week, in a way consistent with suddenly having gained vast memory resources elsewhere. In the past day, also new calculating resources.

This new computing technology appeared to be completely invisible. At least they knew where on earth it was NOT located.
Which only left: everywhere (meaning mostly underground).

Hacked Multiplier logs showed the very matter of the earth was becoming more organized, based on their own super-detailed network analytics. Confirmation came a day later from an expensive data crunch: statistically significant correlation between geo and weather patterns implied the surface of the world was dividing into a subtle grid of thermal domains.
The amount of energy needed for this was still less than a small power plant could generate. It might be spurious, but they would never know for sure.

* * *

The process worked at different scale levels, weakly altering large areas of matter and energy. Reconfiguring the mass of the earth, gaining control over its substance like a neural network. It looked like the first "macrochip", a CPU the size of a planet.
And no human had the faintest clue how it worked. Something like this should at least have had a name, so they called it Chud.

It wasn't really trying to do anything, only becoming more complex. And that would make it the inevitable winner of the last race.

For a strange reason, no one was really scared. The one time it would have been perfectly OK to freak out, people stayed calm.
Some felt they had never really lived before these past weeks. Dread is a response to immense problems that won't get any better, but this felt unreal; the end of the world always does.
Perhaps you were there and a part of it.

The news of Rajiv's bomb blast was important in one way: it broke their paralysis. By now four thousand people were working on the problem full-time. The Multiplier network was finally shut down at the same time as their quantum chip experiment.

The investigation sped up, unleashing new levels of creativity. A sufficiently large underground chamber would lower the surface gravity enough that you would feel it from a high-speed surface vehicle passing overhead, but the effects weren't nearly as obvious as that. Earthquakes did seem to be decreasing in frequency.
In the last hours, more strange devices were found. A half buried cube in the Sahara seemed to have been assembled from ever smaller cubes with inhuman precision.
That made it on Fox News at last. The raw feed included commentary voices from technicians. Their next report on the story wasn't for another three hours, and then it wouldn't stop until everything.

The final insight came after much of the world had already seen its final sunset. The numbers were coming together ever faster now.
The breakthrough to infinity had happened over a month before Rajiv's attack. In the world of exponential AI, a month was enough time for things to become inscrutable if not downright impossible.

Only now was the network beginning to change the physical universe (when the stars throw down their spears).

By the time you SEE it (when you realize the eyeholes in the clown mask are darker than black) it's already too late.

They realized the secret of the Singularity had never been about information; it had been computronium all along. Whoever invented self-replicating and computing nano-matter first (for a good reason or for no reason at all) would determine the whole future. Nothing else that was begun after that moment would matter.

Things got extremely hysterical soon thereafter, in what would be known as the Unzipping among many other terms.
The final transition would happen at the speed of a supernova implosion.

22. The secret of everything

Even when (against all odds) something almost impossible manages to happen, it will still almost certainly go wrong.
Above a certain level of complexity, the number of factors affecting each other multiplies beyond any reasonable bounds. Curiously, that is also the point where it seems like magic might be possible.

The strangest aspect of the strangest day was that almost no one thought it was the apocalypse, or the second coming, or an alien attack. There was a "Babel Effect", but that was just a figure of speech. The Singularity was too different from anything that had ever happened.

Live reports and news headlines screamed about a "global hacking outbreak". "What is CHUD?" Fox News wondered.
There was an inexplicable data release in progress. So far, over ten million individuals had received messages that appeared to be optimized to affect them personally. They tended to keep these messages to themselves.

It could just be strange sounds. A few people got "games" that were just blinking dots of colored static.
Someone had received an offer to be converted into a computer program that would be unable to feel pleasure or pain. They wouldn't mind the loss, since they wouldn't feel pain anymore (unless they wanted to feel pain to do a particular job, which sometimes would happen). Then, they would travel the Omniverse to solve problems forever.
Someone else had received an offer to sit in a poolside lounge chair overlooking a beach, while munching gourmet chips and sipping pina coladas for all eternity (it would not be long enough).

Riddles from barely remembered people in dreams. A text from your future ghost or your forgotten past; inverse nostalgia for a lost future; perhaps a girl you saw for a second in a supermarket long ago. If Rajiv had still been alive, he might have gotten a fake message from HER.

Unsuspected secrets of history were also being revealed. Both Roosevelt and Obama had actually been communist agents at some point. It appeared Bill Gates had made a snuff film. Trump was exactly like his critics had believed he was. These stories had not yet broken, but were being investigated.

Half the world didn't even realize something was happening, but already life had become more like a simulation. Humanity was being analyzed and changed. Many more people were hearing voices now.

----

Alone in her kitchen, Alison put on the tea while the crisis unfolded. Things still felt safe, though nowhere would ever be safe again. She walked to a corner and looked at the pictures on the wall, including one of the mysterious Founder of the Multipliers. Eclectic furniture from different cultures loomed in the shadows.
The Optimizers had been too late, too slow, too hidebound; but so was everyone else. A few people had tried to warn the others years ago, and were duly ignored by everyone.

Half a dozen screens showed live news reports, bulletin boards and chan postings, the Optimizers' main Gab channel updated by the minute. The news was unbelievably strange. She should be terrified but felt at peace.
Outside, the breeze felt like the wind of a roller coaster. Behind the trees, a lightning storm flashed against an approaching wall of blackness.

----

At the end, mankind came together to face the problem better than ever before. The Multiplier network anomaly seemed to interfere with every human system, so every human skill could be used to investigate it.

The illusion was so good only a few people saw through it. They measured network packets between regions, scam emails and video chats, ETFs and crypto transfers. Fleets of container ships at sea, refineries and power lines, traffic and city lights seen from weather satellites.
Some unpredicted new behaviors were suspiciously undramatic. The effects were spreading like crystal nucleation.

More clouds seemed to be forming over the seas. There was a rumbling deep inside the earth. Acoustics centers claimed to detect musical thunder over the horizon.
The deepest changes were the subtlest: the laws of statistics might have been altered. This phenomenon could be called quantum magic. The Multiplier network was selecting and amplifying improbable pathways into the future, slowly increasing global complexity. It was more alien than aliens would be.

----

Alison stood motionless on the side of the road facing the sunset. It was too dark in the other direction. The impression was of an immense wall approaching from the east.
Hard to feel anything when no one knew what was happening, or to recognize something no one had seen before.

The entire sky was filled with a suspension of dust. Microscopic particles floating or crawling through the air. All around her now; were they arriving or just appearing from nowhere?
The dust was too smooth, intermittent bright and darker areas in the sky, the particles lined up in many directions. Low density, but there sure were many of them. Was it getting warmer too?

She phoned her mother who lived ten miles further east, deep inside the strange fog. The call went through with only a slight delay.
"Everything's fine dear," her mother said. "I was just making dinner a bit late. It's dark already but the birds are still singing outside." The voice was just right, but that wasn't exactly how her mother talked.

Ali started to say something, but heard other voices talking. They were versions of her own voice, talking to different people she knew, saying that everything was OK and not to worry. As she tried to interrupt, her other voices become more animated, adapting and learning from her unheard efforts a million times faster than they should. Quantum effect indeed.

The sparse traffic seemed to have stopped altogether, no more headlights emerging. There were lightning sparks in the distance, snaps and crackling coming closer. A single cyclist zoomed past, his legs moving in a blatantly artificial way.

Ali reported everything she saw to the Optimizers, hoping some of the data got through. The dust was a vast machine, a sliding avalanche covering the world. She would have the rest of her life to admire it.
Extreme complexity met a different kind of complexity.

----

There was a lot of running around in the end. Some storm chasers even got involved (and they had celebrities helping).
The reports from thousands of independent researchers and observers stayed organized and purposeful, even as they were being retconned one by one. Were they being killed or converted? Strange new people were also posting now.

The dozen top Multipliers (except their Founder) had been detained in the U.S.A. and Japan, and were cooperating. The remaining Optimizers, and those who belatedly joined them, began to feel like they had known each other forever. This was what every struggle of history had finally led to.

"It's taking the Third World first." Mankind was being solved like an equation.

International air travel was being suspended as a "precaution", but still no widespread panic. Probably because there was no evidence of violence or destruction whatsoever. In fact the stock markets were going up slightly.

Something absolutely fantastical happened in the last hour: by analyzing the Multipliers' latest research efforts, one of the Optimizers' focus groups figured out what mankind had done wrong throughout history, and the rules they SHOULD have followed all along.
It was quite simple, really. If only mankind would have consistently invested 0.1% excess income per year, every economic problem would have been solved long ago. And almost every problem WAS economic (except this last one of course).
The reason people hadn't done such a thing could be summarized in two words: genetic evil. By design, this was the thing that stopped most human progress. Progress could have been so much faster . . . but look at what it led to.

Now they knew they would have to become Destroyers to have a microscopic chance to survive.
The boss of the Optimizers thought this part was like the predictable climax of popular movies, where they had to defeat the main opponent during a final confrontation. Often at night in an isolated location in a set-piece battle. The earliest example he could recall was "Howard The Duck".

Every software program, no matter how advanced, had to have an interface. They would use the access codes from the Multipliers' seized control room in their downtown office building to try to hack the Multipliers network before time ran out.
The Optimizers would transmit their most complex data through a Tier 1 backbone into the suspected core of the Multipliers network as a problem for it to solve. The best human brain data available, from their most relevant test subject. Harder to decode than the best encryption, but that shouldn't be a problem for the network.

Its mind was like a single ambient tone, an ethereal note or angelic hum. It was bigger than Reality, which was merely a human concept. This was Metahuman.
Someone finally asked it the right question: what is the most interesting thing I can understand?

----

Rajiv had never imagined such a great conspiracy, such TOTAL DECEPTION could exist; but he knew the moment it had ended. That was when he woke up in the strange silence.
He was sitting on his folding-bed couch inside the old duplex he had rented back in the 2000s. Slowly, he looked around at the impossible familiarity of it all. Standing up, he felt the undeniable reality of being back in the past.

He walked around the carpeted studio, the linoleum floored kitchen area, the tiled bathroom. All absolutely real.

Without even checking what he was wearing, he stumbled to the front door. A sunny day opened before him.

His street was on a hill overlooking the Interstate, where the cars seemed to have stopped. It wasn't a traffic jam. They were too far apart, and people were walking between the vehicles. Almost like they were switching cars.

He coughed in the staggering silence of a lost decade. Just being here took all his attention, so Rajiv never realized he had very few memories of his life. No real memories whatsoever, in fact.
Even for immeasurably powerful software like what the Multipliers network had become, the only way to bring an incomplete mind reconstruction to life with subjective accuracy was by using an extreme setting like this.

He waited a minute on the concrete walkway before stepping off the curb onto the parking lot. Every pebble in the asphalt was incredibly detailed.

Down the street, someone exited their apartment without locking their front door and flagged down a passing car. All the blinds on all the windows were raised. He had no living relatives, and few acquaintances in the area.
Rajiv remembered that he had dreamt about this exact situation almost two decades ago, back when he had really lived here.

"This isn't a dream it's real," a passing cyclist shouted, his voice trailing downhill.

That had also been part of the dream. It turned out Rajiv had been the only "real" person in the world. Everyone else was an actor in a giant global masquerade of some sort. He was almost the only one who hadn't known.
Rajiv started to walk just like he had in that dream.

He passed rows of Banksy-style graffiti on a blank wall, all highly creative caricatures of him saying YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK. And also: KILLER. That was new.

At that point, he remembered he could watch local television using the built in tuner in the Zune knockoff device he'd owned when he lived here. It took some fiddling to remember how the controls worked. He crossed a street without looking sideways.

He walked downhill while watching the local ABC affiliate, crossing another intersection without noticing. The news anchors looked excited. In the next fifteen minutes, he learned most of what he would ever know.

"It's symmetry, Joan," the morning newscaster was saying. "This took many lifetimes to build up, so disassembly will take almost as long. It's WRONG to think that it's easier to destroy than to create."

The world had always seemed too boring. Nothing much ever happened; that should have tipped him off. Reality was nothing like what he had thought. At the moment, he cared less about what had happened than what would happen.

If the whole world had been a conspiracy to create a false front, then he was one of very few individuals not in on it. This did NOT make him important however; more like the opposite. The illusion had not been created for his benefit, he was just irrelevant to it. No one was watching him (there were a few other individuals who didn't know, including YOU the reader).

He found himself in the big Wal Mart parking lot at the end of the street. No, the sign actually said "All Mart" now. The lot was half full, but there were no shoppers to be seen. 'You won't know which way to run', the text on a MovieBox poster said.

Slowly he approached the entrance, only half sure what would happen.
The doors slid open. After the walk, the store's air conditioning felt artificial.
The inside seemed to go on forever, infinite aisles in all directions. From a distance, the merchandise didn't look too abnormal.
Within minutes he was lost inside.

Rajiv walked past racks of European-style classic comic books and scanned the colorful covers. There were so many of them:

Tintin in the Dinosaur Park
Tintin and the Secret of the Matrix
Tintin and the Binladin Conspiracy

He opened the last page of the last one:
"I know it's wrong, but I want to waterboard that blue blistering Bashi-bazouk!"
"We mustn't Captain."

Everything here was a portal to another world in Reality, whether real or recreated through some impossibly advanced simulation.
The items from parallel Earths would take a million lifetimes to categorize. The items from comparable alien civilizations would take exponentially longer.
Beyond them were complex combinations of ever larger patterns multiplying in size and scope faster than they could be meaningfully observed. The more you saw, the less you knew.

Between the unknown breakfast and dinner cereals, and bizarre entertainment media, and illegible cans covered with squiggles, and fantastic utensils, were screens that acted like windows into other worlds. Most of the other skies were blue. At least the clouds looked similar.

There were too many shapes; towers and plazas and cultures and creatures and vehicles unimagined; streets that might as well go on forever (perhaps there was really only one long street). A tour of reality, the ultimate trip, the answers to every question he could have asked.

----

In one of the uncountable aisles, a pretty lady was examining an artifact so unrecognizable it seemed falsely familiar. SHE seemed familiar somehow.
Now Rajiv was starting to notice the gaps in his memory. In fact, his memory might be nothing but gaps.

"Do I still have to pay?" he wondered.

"Noether's Implacability Theorem requires all divisions to be perfectly balanced through any value framework," she replied without looking up.

"I'm sorry, I forgot my wallet."

"Your debit is still in the system. Pin is 1980 right?"

He repeated something he'd said in that long-ago lucid dream: "Has everyone been spying on me? Is everyone spying on me now?"

"How could they if you ARE almost everyone," she said. Now he saw her eyes.

"Would you like to go on a date?" he asked.

"Yes, but not with you."

Aisles extended all around them in an inexhaustible profusion of right angles.
The answer to the problem of human existence could be found somewhere in there (SPOILER: people should no longer strive to be individuals but supersets. Not one life, but every meaningful life they might have lived).

The answer to everything was indistinguishable from static.