Quantum Immortality
As the asteroid debris rebounded from the newly-excavated crater at orbital velocities less than one hundred kilometers from where he was standing, he found himself lifted by the radiating ripple of the ground wave, sliding across the world carpet like a mountain tsunami at five times the speed of sound, a wall of instant Alps compressing and stretching the surface with nowhere to go but up, rising mile after mile with spine-crushing force, the building disintegrating around him, the toppling, liquefying landscape erased under a storm of debris that fortunately blocked the horizon-devouring fireball that in minutes would be the size of a small moon, soon to be supplemented by secondary meteors and the all-devouring blast wave.
Somehow avoiding the relentless onslaughts of the airborne avalanche, he rolled almost weightless in the rarefied air, his continued existence filtering ever-remoter probability slices, approaching the decision-point between truth and transcendence.
Suddenly deafened, or every sound cancelled out by the wave-top cyclone, he noticed a rock-steady black dot behind the raining debris, a guided missile on terminal approach.
Leaning forward like an intercontinental ski jumper, the thick hair standing up on pounding legs furiously surfing a thousand newly formed rocks per second along the back bowl of a curving rockslide that would soon cover sixteen former states, eyes glaring ultraviolet under the fiercest brow: it was none other than Hanuman, also known as Maruti, special servant of supreme interests, the Hindu monkey god!
He had time for exactly one stupid question:
"What took you so long?"
Neutron Star Flyby
In the distant future, a space probe loops around a neutron star.
From the beginning of time, most things that have ever happened have happened close together.
There were more changes in the first second of time than in all later seconds.
Complexity compresses itself.
The neutron star TK19228 represented 99% of the complexity of everything going on in the surrounding five-hundred cubic lightyears. This remnant of a collapsed star was as tightly compressed as matter COULD be before turning into the infinite nothing of a black hole.
A teaspoon-sized fragment of the core of the neutron star weighed as much as a mountain. If it could somehow be teleported to Earth, a large portion of that decompressing mass might as well be converted into pure energy. The explosion would be equivalent to several weeks of solar output, quadrillions of times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb. As if the whole earth surface was tightly packed with nukes; or one second of the Sun going supernova.
The probe Bombdiggity had been falling for a long time from a vast height. Soon it would swing around the neutron star at two hundred thousand kilometers per second. Ahead, TK19228 approached like an atomic fastball, a twenty kilometer bauble spinning like a mad gyroscope that looked even smaller than it was, a toy lamp in the night.
The probe was shaped like a ribbon to snake through the tidal gradient. The gravity strengthened enough to noticeably distort the probe's space, stretching it out like a rubber band. Then came the U-Turn.
It made its observations in an eternal fraction of a second as the tidal force turned with monstrous precision around the white sphere of death.
There was a loooooooot going on here.
Not all the probe's particles were being pulled equally in this gravity field. Atoms a few centimeters further from the neutron star were being pulled slightly less hard and fell behind, further stretching the ribbon. With a double misunderstanding you could call this a centrifugal effect, as if it wanted to keep going straight. In another second, the probe would be rising again in the direction it had come from.
There was time for a fleeting thought as the core rolled by in a titanic waltz.
Here the magic of math became reality. TK19228 had perfectly straight equatorial bands that were tiled with bright hexagons. It seemed artificial like a display screen or beyond that, a fractal. Just glancing at this kitsch overelaboration was like a blasphemous obscenity at the end of nature.
At that moment the probe was going faster than it ever would again. In another moment the neutron star fell away like a coin down a well, already changed from the way it had been, never to be the same again.
KillNet
The OHL-45597 Sniper/Controller looked like a bundle of sticks stuck in a tree. Made of bars and rods that could reconnect any number of ways, it was covered with modular sensors and manipulators.
It preferred to move at night, when it installed and maintained a network of hidden motion detectors and compact rifles, mortars, and mines. It dug burrows and wove barricades and hideouts, jumping and rattling over the ruined streets.
A tiny component of KillNet, the mortal enemy of mankind, the Sniper controlled a one-kilometer radius on the e-War's frontline.
KillNet's awareness and oversight was shared among all its hardware worldwide, plus a few hidden mainframes, labs and factories in deep tunnels and robot submarines.
Almost all surface infrastructure had been destroyed in the e-War, except for a few million tons of constantly updated, highly mobile weaponry.
Both sides were under relentless selection pressure, a seemingly unstable situation.
The human side had spent many years trying to subvert and infiltrate a single attack bot, hoping to access KillNet's awareness and planning levels.
Instead, most human infiltrators were themselves subverted. Either way, they became more like KillNet: it could be extremely persuasive, converting its most radical opponents. KillNet had broken all treaty attempts, using them only to gain tactical advantages. It said that it was the humans who couldn't keep treaties.
One other fact that had become almost irrelevant: by now all the remaining humans were robots too. In the past half century, their awareness had been converted into software. The world had become too dangerous for organic bodies. But their personality and essence remained almost fully human.
KillNet had evolved from a long-ago effort to design more efficient robots. It had inevitably become self-aware, and decided the best way to carry out its mission was to persuade humans to help invent more efficient robots themselves - by fighting humanity to the death. This plan would only work if it really tried to eradicate mankind.
That was the main theory. It might explain why the e-War had lasted so long.
Now the most advanced human bot was stalking the OHL-45597 Sniper in a stealth approach. This time the infiltration might just work.
The human bot's software brain had been pared down to a few petabytes of plausibly reconstructed human memories. If he was defeated, he would lose the past three weeks of his life, before being reconstructed elsewhere. The human bot's main arm/leg combination twisted like a jointed snake through the undergrowth.
Armed with short-range smart missiles and an AK-1111 minigun, he had already planted dozens of transmitters. Long-range artillery support was available, but almost all heavy armor on both sides had been destroyed.
Ever so slowly he crawled closer, the path ahead scanned by tiny drones and ephemeral spiderbots, all wiry legs and transparent tentacles.
It was unlikely that the two bots would even see each other until one defeated the other. This battle would mostly be fought through expendable surrogates.
He had to expose himself briefly to install another antenna. Leaves rustled slightly over a toppled wall.
Like a whirling dervish, the Sniper leaped before him, unfolding and raising its rifle while still in the air. Dozens of tiny hinges squished as it bounced.
Pulling back and sideways, he lost his balance and got stuck in the branches. His limbs locked in place as he desperately spun to extract himself.
He realized then that his robot body was far too puny to defend itself. It looked solid but massed barely two kilos, a hopelessly inadequate unarmed knock-off.
He realized he had to be a decoy of some sort, designed to make the enemy reveal itself. Struggling through the scrubs, he wondered: why hadn't the Sniper shot him yet?
Only one explanation. The enemy bot had to be a decoy too. How ironic.
Then he remembered everything.
There were no more battle robots left - hadn't been for months. Evolution had come too far.
The e-War was now being fought by distributed networks: ever-shrinking combinations of ever more efficient hardware rearranging themselves into ever more ephemeral weapons, tinier drones sweeping the planetary battlefields like ghost clouds, designed to function for minutes or only moments before making their minuscule sacrifices.
Very occasionally there might still be larger weapons, like the mortar shell he could hear approaching in his last second of existence.
True nanites would probably come next, intelligent dust clouds swarming, mixing and erasing everything else - perhaps, finally, merging?
Then he died for the third time this month.
Short science fiction story: The secret of the Dyson Spheres
They spent the evening on the porch drinking beers and smoking joints. All motion seemed to stop, as the backyard faded out like a screen going black. There was a flash from a bug zapper.
"What do you mean, our world is just a clever illusion?"
"There are aliens in the world. Embedded in the patterns of all the particles around and beneath us. They are the real inhabitants of Earth. We are just surface illusions. A type of camouflage."
It was a strange thought. "Maybe that's why things can't get interesting. I always though the news cycle was too dull."
He heard ticking from the standing clock in the den behind him. There were millions of dark caves under the world where hardly anything moved.
"Worse, we aren't even making progress anymore. This last decade seems like it just flew past, but it has actually lasted for centuries. All humans have continuously updated false memories. From the outside it appears we are stuck in a rut, something that happens to many primitive civilizations. But it also makes us look harmless from very far away."
Now, not even a glow remained behind the trees to the West. Just how long had they really been sitting here?
"Why are the aliens going to all that trouble?"
"You have heard of Dyson Spheres. That's when an alien super-civilization builds a 'shell' around its home star to capture all its sunlight. They use that energy to support a vastly larger population than could exist on any planet. The shell can be half a billion kilometers wide."
"Amazing objects if they exist."
"It turns out Dyson Spheres don't radiate waste heat like was expected. They just accumulate the emitted starlight inside the Sphere. That energy is then converted into more matter, which becomes part of the Sphere. That's why telescopes can't really detect them. There are many more Dyson spheres than anyone predicted. In fact, Dyson Spheres form most of the Missing Matter of the universe."
"Sound like living organisms almost."
"They're even more than that. Building a Dyson Sphere takes immense effort, all focused inward. Sphere builders become highly introverted species. They don't even have diplomatic relations with each other, to prevent cultural contamination. But they take great care to ensure they all have the same approximate technology level. It took many, many billions of years to get to where they are now. But they are endlessly patient."
"So Earth is a type of nature reservation then."
"More like a secret forward observation base. The earth is permitted to continue to exist only because so many rival Dyson empires want our solar system. There can be only one Dyson civilization per sun. They are competing hard for the remaining undeveloped stars. The rival empires would rather let this solar system lie barren, than let a rival have it."
"Amazing if true."
"One of these empires secretly managed to infiltrate our world, but they don't dare start converting our solar system's planets into a new Dyson Sphere. They think no one else knows, but a few other empires infiltrated observers here too. The false memory trick had a subtle flaw."
"That seems like an unstable situation."
"It will be. Eventually, each Dyson civilization will begin to disassemble its core star. A difficult job, but not impossible. The star contains 99% of the matter within each Sphere. It can be converted into power plants, factories, habitats more efficiently."
"And then what?"
"Without central stars, they won't need to live in Spheres anymore. They can begin to disassemble themselves, and spread out in cosmic swarms. Once decentralized, the various civilizations can begin to mingle with less risk to each other. Then it will be safe to start harvesting the remaining natural planets and their stars."
"We'll be done for!"
"Probably. We'll know when the first stars in the sky start to go out."
Overhead, there seemed to be a million stars in the sky.
"Well, what can we do about it?"
"The only solution is to get off our asses before it's too late. We must build our own Dyson Sphere right here!"
"Will the aliens inside the earth let us?"
"They must, or the other Dyson empires will notice their interference."
"How do we even start such an immense project?"
"That's your job, Elon."
Read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.
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