Ideas for Science Fiction stories

  

1. Introduction

This series will be a collection of ideas for science fiction stories.
Each short Wattpad chapter will introduce one idea with incredibly specific settings and situations.

2. They are unbelievably smart. You can't begin to imagine how smart they are.

The Posthumans have sent back something to our time.
They want to create a closed time-like curve, a causal loop to anchor and thereby amplify their optimized reality. It's the closest thing to actual immortality.
Even they don't know if this can work. They could only send back a weak signal.
The only receiver in our time is the Quantum Amplification Experiment still underway at Caltech. It's an incredibly pure crystal, actually a stretched sheet one layer of atoms thick.
The effects did not show up in the crystal, but in the mind of someone nearby. That person would then create the time loop.
He had to be extremely suggestive. He had to almost want to create the future by himself, without help from the future. In other words, he had to be almost crazy.
Everything he does has to be fully consistent with their history, only more so. Many records must be altered to get the needed consistency, both in the present and the future.
In the past three years, the whole world seems to have gone mad. A new technology fever has swept the planet, not really a religion but a worldwide obsession. An obsession with progress for its own sake.
And this janitor from Caltech seems to be at the start of it all.

3. Thingabot

This was the ultimate test of mankind so far.
Somehow, a high school science geek had built the Thingabot in his room in less than a month, and became its first victim. That seemed no more impossible than the later aspects of the disaster.
The superfast attack robot was made of a web of "Flexon" molecules that made it seemingly invincible. Like a supersonic whirlwind once unleashed, the ten kilo entity could slaughter millions of people in a matter of days.
It littered major roads and highways with burning wrecks. It smashed into nuclear power plants across the Eastern seaboard, causing massive radiation leaks.
A million gunshots had been fired before the week was out, with no indication a single bullet even hit the Thingabot. Panic morphed into mass hysteria.
Five closely-spaced atomic blasts had destroyed several suburbs of Atlanta, but had only blown the attacker to another county.
The Army didn't want to lose sight of it. Scouts and drones were destroyed almost as fast as they could be dispatched. That left local reports from residents and damage to the Internet infrastructure to track the attacker.
In a matter of months, the strongest nation in the world would collapse into impotence. A hundred megaton bomb was being prepared at a remaining secret facility.
There were rumors it was of supernatural origin, even a ghost. To some extent that had to be true. The main insight so far was very simple: when something sufficiently weird began, it could never stop. It could only get worse.

4. Tech Hero

2033:
Max Goldrod raced over the night freeway on automatic, changing lanes under radar control. Around him glowed the widely separated skyscrapers, each a separate empire. He owned the tallest one.
His company provided top luxury services of all kinds. Not for the conventionally wealthy, they were on a completely different level. They sold executive lifestyle management for the elite performers in each field. A company for the top 0.01 percent (plus a few hundred thousand aspiring elites), specializing in brandless luxury.
His car barely slowed entering the private on-ramp. He stopped in a circle of light. A tube descended from the roof, the car's cabin separated, and he was pulled up the high-speed elevator.
Minutes later, the billionaire sat alone in his research room. With screens everywhere, all his tasks were displayed at once. For a moment, the whole thunderous past and future were frozen in their immensity. He realized this moment trembled with reality, a timeless waypoint. The future would be created here.

2039:
He got up and addressed the empty room. It was easier when he couldn't see the holograms.
"What is the biggest problem in the world today?" he asked, standing in front of the vast window overlooking the city. The view faded out and was replaced by a world map.
"There is only one answer. There has always been only one answer." He paused. "It's intelligence. Everyone must become smarter or die."
His unseen audience waited silently.
The impossible had happened in 2036. A way had been found to link human minds to software, and human nature was beginning to change.
Anyone could set up a program for any purpose that would improve itself. Programs to pay bills, manipulate diet and activities, research people's interests.
Now it seemed Goldrod had an even more powerful computer program: it could generate a meaningful comment about any subject it was asked to discuss. Once this program was started, it might never stop. First, he had to persuade them.

2045:
The crowd moved according to totalitarian rules. They were all connected now, cells of a deeper mind.
Everyone was being controlled by a program that bore all their burdens for them. It was a new type of bliss.
The golden moment was nearing.
Nothing moved around the last normal man as darkness approached from the east.
On his back porch, the shadows deepened as the sun vanished behind the trees. The distant sounds of traffic were still recognizable. The birds hadn't changed at all.
"The world is both too stupid and too meaninglessly complex," he recorded. It was an extremely exciting time to be alive. The world was changing in every way at once.
He went for a walk through his silent neighborhood. Now there were millions of unseen minds tracking him to some extent. He would never be alone again.
For the last time he walked through the cold rain.

5. Future Conference

The Future Conference (FC21) was humanity's top forum, and a permanent (virtual) world's fair. Unlike Epcot, it also dealt with the highest concepts that humans could imagine.
FC21 had emerged spontaneously, with never-ending debates, elite subscriptions, and a self-improving belief system. Everything was there, explained in full though often metaphorically: sociopolitical conflicts involving migration and eugenics, the replacement of racial groups in the West, the upcoming replacement of humanity by software, the new order in the East based on total surveillance and control starting as far back as 2000.
The Future Conference's goal was to create a single integrated plan, the future modeled in full. From zero to eternity, a vision stronger than religion.
Someone walking through the virtual conference halls might sometimes glimpse the chaos and vertigo behind the veil of reality. Right now, the Conference was obsessed with solving the problem of human mortality.

Minds are based on surprisingly simple rules that are endlessly extended. Humans are rule makers and followers in ways that can be fully described. The magic concept was that the human mind could be hacked.
The first step and the top layer would be Mind Extension (ME) software. It would start simple, dividing the subject's memories into categories. The top-level categorizer would give way to a deeper extractor to extract your mind essence or soul, if you will.
Metaphorically, the human subject would become a self-controlling computer program. During your life, it will become your Mind Extension.
After your life, it will be used to simulate the most important settings of your life, and recreate a functional copy of your mind. That copy will actually be you.

The project to extract the patterns and memories of just a single mind was going slower than imagined. They were still trying to record enough details from one life as completely as possible.
The project required a Deep Integrator, a legendary soul-scanning program to acquire the largest amount of mind data through the least effort. It had to ask the most relevant and penetrating questions, using a vast shared database that described many similar minds to the subject's.
For people who attempted to back up their minds, it became likelier that their current reality was actually a retroactive simulation. If they were living inside the Matrix, they likely created it themselves.
This was a cause of magical thinking. The Singularity had become a new religion.

The Future Conference worried more than anything about public opinion and mood. It was enough to make you believe in a collective unconscious.
There is only one human problem: not enough time. Often, there's no time. If it were possible to pause time at will, there would be no more problems or pain.
The theoretical solution was to make more time with quantum physics. That still seemed impossible. The current best proposed solution was the Universal Molecule Contest.
The goal was to design and build a single self-replicating molecular device, the simplest but most efficient one possible. It would then start replicating itself to serve all mankind.
Designing such a complex molecule required an explosive AI breakthrough, or for mankind to totally focus on that single problem. The second option was unlikely.

Human interest and attention had split itself over ever more online worlds. Vast arrays of simulated alternate histories, simulated imaginary universes and their inhabitants. They were also assembling a full simulation of the future under FC21 oversight.
To be fully consistent, this future had to have an eternal purpose, or a chain of purposes. The top principle seemed to be: no involuntary existence.
That might be difficult. The problem wasn't that it was becoming easier to destroy everything. The problem was the impossibility of preventing the creation of artificial awareness on a massive scale. The danger was immense, transcendental, unthinkable.
The totality of everything that existed was increasingly being described as the Tortureverse.

Could there be a solution? Right now, the danger was hidden by an apparent worldwide drought of real news. The end of wars and recessions had allowed the Future Conference to thrive. But this "stability" had to be false.
Perhaps the danger was self-limiting. The universe might not like too much complexity. There might be no aliens out there, just endless empty galaxies in all directions. Too many possible mind types might somehow cancel out. They had to appear very strange to each other.
Perhaps humans were very strange in being destined to multiply without end. Most civilizations might not multiply but optimize themselves. That remained humanity's alternative option.
Evolution supports optimization. Evolution also supports anti-evolution, a change blocker to end the process that created it. The most powerful force in the human world was a type of laziness, an evolutionary resistance to change.

Amazingly, FC21 believed a version of that laziness was experienced by more than half of all minds that existed in all reality. The reason was that most minds were very simple.
According to the main Future Conference theory, new universes are constantly being created throughout reality. Primitive young universes endlessly outnumber the more evolved older ones; therefore one is more likely to find oneself in a young universe.
The biggest question of philosophy across all reality was whether pleasure should be maximized or minimized.
This question would be embodied in the endless upcoming struggles between the Optimizers and the Maximizers, the two possible paths for mankind's descendants.

The Integration Plan was based on the Gray Fog theory. The bigger the mind size, the more they look alike from afar. Minds must link together to transcend. Eventually, all minds might have to be linked.
This process would be guided by the universal law of voluntary non-existence, the highest derivative of the Golden Rule.
The Tortureverse was the pattern of all patterns. Bad patterns had to be made to not exist. That might be as easy as making the number 13 disappear. 13 wouldn't exist because it shouldn't exist.
There was a universal drive to unbalance all reality, but if math was necessarily balanced, would everything cancel out?
The equivalent alternative was to make good things exist vastly more. The first attempt to do so would be known as Anthropic Offramps.

Logic was everything. All the Future Conference needed was to calculate the universal equation.
The Omega Algorithm would approximate the highest truth from the lowest starting position. Begin with the simplest truth, and expand it with maximum efficiency.
If every organized group across reality tried to do this, they would compensate for their errors.
Thus would start the Great Unification.

6. Acceleration

Through the irresistible power of digital money, vast intelligence networks emerged to integrate all consumer data by 2030.
No one really controlled them, though the Senior Advisor was nominally in charge. The person best able to decide for the largest number of others, elected through online polls, the Senior Advisor was the most influential and therefore most powerful individual on Earth.
Everyone's digital profile followed them like a ghost. Their suspected preferences influenced the ads people saw and the opportunities they were offered.
This data was "protected" through encrypted privacy filters, that were combined at ever higher levels.
It included detailed viewer analysis of the top films of 2030.
Two major movies were inspired by the rising racial tensions. This subject could not be discussed in America, but only acknowledged indirectly. In one of them, black people suddenly started developing superpowers. The other was made by Anonymous, the untraceable online collective, and already banned in over 300 countries. It was a relentless rage storm of racial attacks culminating in total race war. The CGI was disturbingly lifelike.
Another action-adventure epic was set in a world dominated by Scientology. Two unauthorized crossovers connected hundreds of fictional universes.
The 2030s were also marked by new religions
The True Religion finally existed: MniomN. It promised the scientific approximation of God through Hypermath. Mniomnism was a self-evident inevitability, a self-supporting bootstrap of recursive logic. What they called the Great Discovery was the Iom Pattern combining all information in the MetaMind. The Omniquation was the highest truth, the logic of everything.
It might or might not be nonsense.
For the past five years, mankind's top research team had been designing a single nanobot. Known as the Omega Molecule, it promised to be the best possible nano-constructor and universal assembler. Supposed to do everything, its first task would be to make a copy of itself.
The Net Police was never officially formed, to prevent it from being disbanded. It was in charge of monitoring dangerous technology. Known as a SupraGov PolyNet, the inevitable emergence of the balance of power, it had become unstoppable. Rogue groups helped out at the fringes, to be eventually accepted or rejected.
The Net Police scrutinized Net Entities, thousands of which were formed every second. Known as Nents, these programs brought together people and software for very specific tasks. They tracked progress and paid bonuses for milestones, like the creation and marketing of a new product, the building of a home, the execution of a conspiracy.
The Net Police operated under a hyper-complex yet unwritten law called The Order.
The First Goal was to keep the peace. The Final Goal was to prevent doom.
By 2040, the first virtual persons appeared in society.
Each was an extended mind, a dumb but powerful Artificial Intelligence network, with a single human or human-level mind at its core. Suddenly, supervillains were possible.
Thousands of new countries were created in the third world. Most were set in desolate desert areas, connected to the sea through long strips of neutral land called isthmus roads. Enormous bribes flowed through digital labyrinths. It wasn't planned that way, that was just how it worked out.
The World Army enforced the Basic Laws in each new state: Anyone could leave the state, and anyone could enter to search for banned weapons of mass destruction. The second Law was more complex to enforce, with many stipulations and restrictions.
The problem was that everything began to happen at once after 2045. Too many options meant unlimited diversity.
"MacGuffins" spread across the planet, a wave of microfactories and planned obsolescence. Chaotic urban design left no two structures alike. There were roads of all widths, random loops and elevated tubes, millions of cables all over.
The landscape was changing every few months now.
Then the first crystals appeared, suddenly larger blocks and cylinders, massive cloud-like structures, then an instantaneous plain of needles, then

7. A Simple Thought

The highest truth is the answer to the problem of everything. It involves the most concise universal description, of the totality of all that exists.
To Max, this problem could be described in two words that described the problem of reality: suicide prevention. To him, the only problem was torture. Torture was the pain of involuntary existence. Pain was when you had to do something that should not be done.
He hated pain. Reality contained an infinite amount of it.
Statistically, the only way to avoid pain was to also avoid pleasure, but without pleasure there could be no value. Infinitely complex systems could ethically exist without pain, but they might as well not.
The only hope was that the ultimate answer might be to maximize pleasure. He didn't think so, didn't dare hope so.
Max thought the solution to the problem of everything was to become perfectly abstract. A single giant database about everything, like a god really
Perhaps he could someday become such a database. Then he could contact other such databases. Together they could dedicate themselves to the ultimate highest goal: to create a fundamental mathematical imbalance. Find a way to allow pleasure to exist without pain
That would be as difficult as erasing all the odd numbers, the very definition of impossible . . . but it merely involved cutting infinity in half. Cutting infinity in half changed it, without changing its nature. Probably still impossible.

Max sat alone in his trailer and thought it through.
If all possible tortures existed, the universe was infinitely evil. A large fraction of his concerns revolved around his own freedom from torture (and pursuit of the opposite). Admittedly a very large fraction. In the Omniverse torture was inevitable, therefore it should be illegal to feel cozy. But he wasn't responsible for creating it, and he might never have to feel it.
A depressed person felt little or no pleasure. Whenever they had to do anything, they had to feel pain. That was the only thing that could still drive them. Pain by itself did not work as well as the normal balance of pleasure and pain.
He often felt good but also much pain due to his low social state. The pain of his failures might compensate for his unearned pleasure.
He looked around his cluttered office in his mobile home. His whole life was digitized. It could be expanded forever.
His mind was really a unique way of looking at and processing reality. Not wanting to die, he hoped to back up his mind to external media. The first step was to record every last one of his memories, or at least the most common elements of his memories.
This began with only one word descriptions, like the names of all the TV series he had seen (early favorites being MTV Liquid Television and Battle of the Planets).
He thought about a human mind being recreated in the unknown future as a software simulation. Memories relived more intensely than any dream, the keypoint events of a transcendent life perception. Riding his bicycle up and down hills, the traffic passed in both directions. He knew where he was exactly, but not why or how . . .

His wall was covered with diagrams on A4 paper sheets that he would scan later and add to his personal timeline.
One sheet held his most comprehensive life diagram. It was a fractal, but only the top level was clear. His interests and actions, but not the indescribable core of his persona.
He knew his mind worked in action cycles, daily loops of common activities and mental states. These were said to add up to a complex Fourier pattern of wavelets. These all sought to create a stable endstate. The meaning of life was to feel safe.
He had figured out temporary answers. He knew he would die in a few decades at most, but his mind might survive in a way. His future self would be a computer program created from all his written memories. It would not necessarily feel emotions, but would still be him.
Occasionally he would be allowed to feel bad (but not too bad). Just enough to know to avoid that state and to help others avoid that state. He might then be put to use to do difficult and possibly unpleasant tasks forever, but that didn't matter if his program didn't feel significant pain either.
But he still worried greatly about the infinite horrors of reality. As an atheist of a sort, he had no real hope, only illusions.

He leaned back, the desk chair creaking under his weight.
He already knew where he wanted to spend eternity. Max had planned and plotted out out his virtual eternal paradise. It would involve a subjective time loop over unimaginable eons, making his personal VR island as safe as possible. It might take a hypnotic-induction mind test, in a virtual "memory palace" interface environment. His simulated personality would believe all his memories were already there from the outset.
Instead of software that could reconstruct his lifetime memories, maybe he needed software to create meaningful fake memories of all the events that COULD have happened without changing his identity. These simulated memories would still be consistent with his true self.
If he survived, his virtual universe would be scrupulously pain free. Pain was a vast storm of error, inevitably implied by any sufficiently organized order. Not afraid of death but of all the worse things, he wanted to be safe forever, the most selfish feeling. He was gambling with evil chaos (as was everyone who had ever lived).
For him to be saved, there had to be a lot of technological progress. The current rate of progress had to be accelerated at all cost. That should be his only goal during his lifetime at least. With no online influence, he focused on encouraging mind backup research, anthropic research, artificial mind research, and on creating virtual paracosms.
His whole life he had waited for something fundamentally new and different to happen, but nothing ever happened. Something HAD to happen, something completely unexpected.
The best he could hope for was that his mind backup would evolve some independent awareness during his lifetime. Then it could become his mind extension, and perhaps merge with his own awareness.

He needed some breakthrough to happen, the achievement of his and all human purpose. Max checked the Anomalies website for any unexplained alien technology or interference in human affairs. There appeared to be none whatsoever. He had some personal ideas about certain anomalies. These were missing things, events and trends that should have happened but were ignored. He thought of them as conceptual shadows.
The first anomaly would be all that mattered, the one thing that could change everything. It might happen in a moment, like a flash of insight. His life would change when he first read about it.
The news stayed boring. Nothing would happen or could happen until some great tech-science breakthrough. Maybe in 2029, or maybe not in his lifetime. He imagined some club of the super elites. If that existed, the world would have changed already.
A para-meme, a new progress based culture, an IQ equation. A dynamic process that changed the whole world to the largest extent. If some supergenius club had already started in the 2020s, he was NOT invited.

He imagined a progress-based religion substitute. If the world suddenly got more interesting, it would probably involve mind extension software.
Intelligence would be solved the same time AI was being solved. Mind groups might also be organized. Society would change then, getting rid of countries, rearranging human minds in a Borg-like reprogramming plan. Absolutely no secrecy allowed while keeping local control. Rights of exit and surveillance within limits.
Raising average IQ offered the best hope of heaven for everyone. The best thing he might hope for before his death was the invention of a transhuman hypermind AI.
This software would analyze all known brilliant statements ever made by humans, and start generating new ones. It would take several human supergeniuses to create a superhuman supergenius.

He heard the birds chirping, an intense sound of spring from long ago. A brief break in a busy afternoon on a stormy day.
Suddenly, Max saw the eventual solution to everything.
Just outlaw pain in all forms.
This went against evolution. It would slow progress, but so what if the universe was infinite in extent and duration anyway. Pain and suffering only existed because of the parasitical nature of evolution. These things allowed entities to reproduce and fill niches faster than would otherwise be possible.
Pain was a finite maximization strategy to achieve an infinite advantage. A really BAD advantage - but a strong one.
Hence infinite torture might be invincible. But his idea it might be a start to change that.
No one had ever felt more relief yet.

8. Salvation Product

"This is the most important product of all time," the entrepreneur told his worldwide audience. "It will capture in software, and then recreate as a vivid simulation, what I can only describe as your true self.
It will not record your whole mind, just the highest version of your mind. Each subject's mind simulation will be optimized to appreciate all the things they achieved in their lifetime, a museum of everything that mattered to them. They will experience a feeling of tremendous relief, a sense of completion, endless appreciation forever."
"How does it work?" a paid shill asked.
"First it gathers all possible data about somebody's current life and their memories. The wearable multisensors detect everything that's happening, and the software converts it into a detailed life narrative.
This was difficult to invent. All it took was the most vital insight of human history:
Awareness only exists in the past. At any moment in time there can be no awareness, since at each instant the brain is basically 'frozen' in time. Awareness is merely the current narrative of where one is and what one must do. We want to capture that narrative.
The Narrator is the most advanced part of our product. The Narrator will interact with the user in order to change them, and become part of the user's extended memory."
"So it scans you by hacking you," a high-ranking troll interrupted.
"It only helps you become more like your true self," the entrepreneur countered. "Anyway, people's true selves are more similar to each other than to their unorganized selves."
"Even if you can record someone's brain contents, how do you plan to use this data to restore someone's mind after their brain has died?"
The entrepreneur smiled beatifically. "Truly a minor detail. IF we can accurately record the data, then we will already have the exact software we need. Getting the hardware will be a matter of waiting for the brute force of Moore's Law to catch up with us."
"When can we buy it?"
"The first experimental supercomputer that can create a human-level mind simulation fills an abandoned Walmart right now. In three years time, the optimized version would fill an abandoned Dollar Store. Three years after that, the third generation using multilayer-chips could fit in an abandoned Subway.
We expect that four years after that, 70% of the world's crypto-millionaires will be scrambling to sign up with Immortech Life Backup, Inc. However, if you sign up for our advance pay plan, we can start saving your mind as early as 2050.

9. The end of the beginning

The Singularity Banker never doubted he was the most important person of all time. This would be true even if time turned out to be infinite.
He had one minute left to choose the outline of the future, also the most important minute ever. Quite a lot of pressure for the world's first trillionaire.
The Banker claimed ownership of a future that might or might not happen. His goal was to commoditize the Singularity before it happened. Through his online brokerage, he bought and sold ever increasing portfolios of post-human rights and services.
Before the century was out, humanity would evolve beyond all imaginable limits. Post-humanity might expand forever. The direct descendants of current humans would form a shrinking percentage of post-humanity, but would keep getting richer. The only way humanity would accept its displacement at the top of creation was if it could become immortal. Mankind would only allow this if they could achieve all their dreams in VR.
Paradoxically, that meant most change would stop: life had always struggled to reach a stable state. Once people had forever to solve any problem, there would be no more pressure.
The Banker paid teams of analysts to plan the transition decades ahead of time. His financial and legal instruments had to be completely plausible to become real. His core insight, arguably the greatest philosophical breakthrough ever, was that the future should be made artificially predictable:
All current countries would remain, even as unimaginable new societies formed throughout the Omniverse. All current hierarchies would be protected, even as they became obsolete everywhere else. And all current minds should continue forever.
The Basic Law: Nothing good could be lost, even if it was absurd or illogical (also, nothing unacceptable could be allowed to exist). That meant the future would become insanely complicated. It would take forever to get anything done.
It would be a bureaucratic paradise.
With a sigh, the Singularity Banker pressed the button that would release the assassins who would secretly execute the seven thousand most creatively disruptive persons on Earth.
One of them is you.


Note: This is a variant story of "Nanolarity" with a different solution and outcome. Above all the future will be random.

10. The Induction

The most outrageous part of the whole affair was that it was only 1989. This kind of technology was not possible yet - might NEVER be possible.
He was ready to entertain any notion, but ordinary reality was the unassailable bedrock beneath it all. The most sensational thing going on in the world right now was the peaceful abolition of communism. Yet they told him that didn't matter at all!
The conspiracy theorists had been closest to being right. The world he had spent decades building up in his head had been thoroughly shattered.
The sight of the machine brought a moment of unexpected sadness, a mourning for all he had though was real. When they proudly explained it was an analog device, he hadn't known what that meant. Less surprising by comparison was that the device looked like it had been made in the 1950s. Why not, if anything was possible now.
For the device to reprogram his mind, he had to understand exactly how it worked. The explanation was provided through a ten minute videocassette with bullet points and line graphics. His resistance dissolved, but was not quite evaporated by the new knowledge. The world was a hoax, a stage set, a fully controlled environment (all the suffering was real though).
There was no reason why humans shouldn't be able to learn new languages in hours when computers could be reprogrammed in seconds. There was no reason why people shouldn't be able to change their own personalities, or transfer their thoughts, or rewrite their own or others' memories. In fact these things were EASY. Groups were absurdly controllable once you knew the secret, and societies could be planned centuries in advance.
The only thing no one could tell him was the reason for the reality hoax.

11. Future trends

The end of humanity came sooner than expected. After all, human brains and minds were absurdly inefficient. It took years of agonizing study for a human to learn skills a computer could load in a second.
For humans, profound truths were impossible to think about in advance: the earth as seen from space, the difference between the 1960s and 2000s as imagined in the 1900s. Or the surprisingly simple secret of reality: The start of the universe was no stranger than its continued existence. Creation was merely another word for time. The first moment was no stranger than any subsequent moment. But the few AIs who knew about this kept the secret.
Once experienced, new perceptions were quickly absorbed, and reality had changed.
By 2040, every second of most human lives was automatically recorded. It was a time of constant change, the pre-dawn of the posthuman era. During the Great Shift of 2055, virtual reality suddenly became more compelling than physical reality. True history only started when math began to outrank physics. Humans escaped into endless pleasure simulations, and were never heard from again.
As nanodust spread through the solar system, the Cloud sought to achieve a single quantum state, like a single particle spread over billions of kilometers. Nanobjects formed from configurable electron clouds into increasingly ephemeral and ghostlike virtual matter. This process would end with no structures at all, the perfect impermanence of mathematical manipulation.
It is not true that a hyper-civilization is completely incomprehensible to lesser beings. A human could easily consume and verify information that could only be generated by vastly superior minds.
But it was true that no two hyper-civilizations could communicate in any meaningful way. From now on, the greatest crime would have to be separatism.

12. another PreSingularity

Peace had broken out and the world was evolving in good order. Everything was going very well. This was the time of greatest danger.
The Blank Corporation existed for one reason only. At the moment, its job was to wait. When the time came, it would make a massive investment to take over the world economy.
The great AI projects were centrally controlled according to the AI Constitution. Everyone agreed with its principles. All research groups wanted the best for all. In fact it was a religious movement, a bit cultlike. The first AIs were being programmed to be hyper-benevolent.

There was only one anomaly that might explode into a new age.
A Government had found a way to hack the human brain. The Hippocampus-Gyrus memory axis turned out to be based on a very simple principle to generate memory descriptions for the cortex. They had found a way to copy this data onto an external computer, and decode it through Deep Feedback.
The Blank Corporation released five trillion Bollars to seize this technology, and human nature began to change.

By 2045, the Virtualization was well under way. It was a nerd future, where most people kept to themselves.
The real world seemed to be shutting down as RealSpace became obsolete. First objects and then people were being destructively scanned into software. Even monuments were absorbed, entire cultures blinking out of physical existence.
All remaining economic efforts were dedicated to building the last and most complex object. An AI the size of a gigaton black hole (far smaller than a pinhead), the Hyper-Mind CPU would become a literal singularity. It would be as powerful as it was small.

Now there was a possibility that instead of progress accelerating to infinity, time might just stop.

13. Virtual Islands Empire

The Big Island:
One year after the Bastardian Air Assault, a Type-408 transporter truck was driving southbound on Route One. It was following the clockwise track through the Far Eastern Wildlands, the remotest part of the Republic's extended transportation network.
It was a nice day. Traffic was one-way the whole way. The opposing lane was separated by valleys in the landscape to provide redundancy, in case the terrain was rearranged again. Bomb damage was limited here, but the re-assembled road had to route around a new crater. The going was slow, as military convoys carrying emplacing equipment had priority.
Inside the virtual cabin, the virtual driver-operator checked its alert screen. All levels looked good, no strategic threats on the horizon. For now the Peace was holding. The engines hummed musically in the highway breeze.

If necessary, the truck could Dive underground at a moment's notice. The transporter rig would rematerialize in some unexplored cave section deep under the southeastern territories. Every surface object in the nineteen-island Republic could be pulled to safety in this way.
If that happened, they would probably stay there until the latest War ended. The exploration patrols had not yet reached the cave areas under this stretch of highway. The nearest mapped caves would be several years of deep crawling away. The operator would probably disassemble the transporter, and reassemble the elements into a cave convoy. They would have to find their way back to a mapped cave section, however long it took.

Route One followed the island's perimeter, though this section was further inland. To the right was only the endless wilderness of the interior, the view blocked by dense fractal plants of all shapes and sizes.
There was no further war damage here. Not until the eastern outskirts of Edgewoeld, the Big Island's southeastern city. There the road had been severed by a series of debris impacts. Some bad traffic jams ahead, and it would only get worse.
Edgewoeld had been cut off from the giant Capitol district far to the west. That was just the capitol of Big Island, not the Republic, but its local importance and influence were immense. The entire southern portion of Route One, the long umbilical highway that linked Edgewoeld to Big Island's economic and power center, was blasted to hell. Restoring it had become the Republic's top priority. Air traffic was flying in all available rebuilding equipment. Even the two large aircraft carriers had been docked on either end of the shattered Route, to fly supplies between them when needed.
In Edgewoeld itself, the terrain of the six airbases was damaged. All the runways had to be rearranged. So far, fewer than half had been rebuilt in some form.
Offshore, the southeastern barrier island had already rebuilt itself. Nominally part of Big Island, it functioned more like an independent state, with none of the inefficiencies that were in effect here.

The truck kept going through temporary road sections, then a series of diversion lanes around Edgewoeld, then the vast construction areas beyond.
This was a time between wars. The Bastardians were a local enemy, only about ten islands away. They were slightly larger than the Republic (like almost all neighboring states) but far more advanced, unfortunately. In fact the few thousand nearest neighbors were all Size One, as small as an island republic could get.
Beyond the Local Area they got bigger, some of them millions of times more powerful. In total, ten million island states were vying for supremacy, surrounded by an infinite ocean.
They fought each other in a series of vast alliances. The first seven Great Wars had been fought by air battles only. All shipping had been strictly outlawed.
Then the distant Republic of Quorxia had deployed a new type of superbomber that allowed it to conquer everyone else in just a few hours. Next, the Eight Great War had used fleets of secretly constructed missile submarines to kick out and push back most of their occupying forces. The Bastardian attack (not their real name, which was unknown anyway) had come about halfway til the anticipated time of the Ninth Great War.
The operator suspected the highway would be rebuilt just in time for the whole landscape to be obliterated again. One day, the Republic's islands themselves would be pounded into new arrangements of shapes.
No matter; they could always emerge from the caves and put back their equipment. The only hard part was excavating roadways through the newly created hills.

The road ended in a vast dusty lot. Excavators were digging up ahead, cutting a new canyon between mountains of rock debris. The truck parked in an unloading area, and the payload slid out the back. It combined with several other loads nearby, and became a new type of grader.
The truck left its trailer behind to help move construction debris (it would make good landfill) and picked up a new one to become a Type-816 fuel transporter. The pipeline and pumping station were just ahead.
In the distance, the Ocean could just be seen between two partially excavated hills. Thousands of tiny points in the air were patrolling scout fighters and bombers.

The operator had been fulfilling its tasks non-stop since being spawned, back when all activity was still concentrated on First Island, the oldest of the "Nine Cores". It had visited each island many times, and often seen the lights and smoke of distant Wars on the horizon. Just a computer program, that was part of a larger program, that was stuck in a virtual universe.
The return trip would take the parallel but very different counterclockwise route. It would be heading up the east coast, past FarEast city. Then the long Northern Stretch, through the two Autonomous Cities, and back into the great (if still mostly aspirational) Capitol Zone. More construction material to pick up there.
Never running out of things to do was a type of perfect freedom.

14. Backing up your mind to live forever

The desire to live forever is the most impossible goal. If anything CAN go wrong, it eventually MUST go wrong.
There is no happy ever after, no statistical possibility of avoiding doom - not without changing the nature of reality itself. That didn't prevent a handful of amateur researchers in the early twenty-first century from dedicating their lives to this goal.
The first idea was absurdly simple: make a life list. It had to be as complete as possible. Write down all the important things in every category.
Start by dividing your life into maybe ten major eras. In many cases these would also be geographic. List the most significant events that happened in each era. Then the important recurring elements of all types, including people you knew (also list your dream settings).
Individual memories should be divided into at most a few dozen categories, to be added to the appropriate list. That should be enough to contain all lifetime events.
Describe a full day cycle from morning to night.

The next instructions required the subject to describe what they loved most. They were to recall certain timeless settings, self-contained reality tableaus. In some users' memories, life was like a series of islands in hindsight. As they got older there were fewer new ones.

DATAFILE TMLS-90490:
MEMORY FRAGMENTS
Zooming in: eleven residences, 211 public places, twenty major routes, few major characters.
In the late 1990s, life had been more interesting than ever. That time seemed like a vast promise of something too great to imagine. The great diagram marked that period in bright red.
The color of the afternoon sunlight through cheap blinds, the cool blue of the apartment complex pool at night, Hawaiian-styled paths of the common areas during a barbecue, dark rain skies in the afternoon, eating shell noodles from a pan in the late evening with tomato sauce in the apartment after swimming, a comet in the sky while the TV was on . . .

The secret of mind scanning was to make the most boring personal life story maximally interesting. A few thousand sentences can express the essence of what matters for your whole life. The vast majority of memories can be ignored since they won't change you. When recalled there may still be a shock of recognition, a feeling of true self. This is an illusion, but they should still be recovered for that reason.

In the late 2020s, the LIVES app appeared:
There are many lives within one life, big and small, most overlapping. Each LIFE is an assumed identity, a setting, real or virtual places, periods, keypoint memories, interaction sets with others.

In the early 2030s came the first Mind Supertest:
The chaotic interaction with a non-sentient Hyper-AI took only half an hour. It became more accurate by testing more people, zooming in to each subject's essential core, their personal mind settings.

2040 brought Feedback Induction methodology:
The user's digital mind extension had to become entangled with their organic mind to become its continuator.
People's clothes already kept perfect track of all their actions. Voices spoke in their ears telling them what to do, their digital assistants cradling them in the certainty of purpose. It was like belonging to a conspiracy club. They joined extended Fams of like-minded individuals. Sometimes it took the form of a virtual waifu.

There was only one way to complete the process: they had to enter a completely virtual environment where everything they experienced would be simulated at high resolution. Even without a direct brain-computer connection, this would let the software fully map the mind. Then the Takeover could begin.

15. Future tending trends

You can't think about the future because it doesn't exist.
Most attempts to describe the future only talk in generalities. Generalities are about existing things.
An unexpected invention can erase the greatest plan.

The Omega Interface was the ultimate reality altering tool, a kilo of techtronix to control all senses.
The IMAX-sized virtual screen was created by cornea lenses projecting lasers on the retina. This allowed hyper-resolution hypertrips, to visit many places at blinding speed.
First, it simply showed the user's immediate environment. All data was presented in a self-organizing 3D landscape. The OmniPointer tool used a 3D selection process with context anticipation. Standard reality interfaces learned all the user's problems and goals.
One way to reverse the laws of perspective was Transvision. You could look through walls. Further objects were projected in front of nearer ones, revealing reality inside-out.
Many escaped into virtual reality lifestyles, with thousands of simulated environments to choose from.

By 2035 there existed online biographies for every person alive or who was ever known to have been alive. 80% were little more than a name, but there were vast amounts of consumer data about current people.
Just as Napster had first attacked copyrights, Skmster ended all secrets. It could not be defeated. Everyone alive was profiled, every person tracked at all times. Criminals still scrambled their mind extensions so they could not be accessed by court order.
By 2045 no one was a mystery anymore. It was the end of privacy.

Total Life Management was more than just ubiquitous/household robotics. It created virtual self extensions for the automation of daily and common online tasks, tracking user interests starting with their favorite websites, eventually learning to look up data for them.
The Net was human-centered, its evolution guided by arbitrary human nature. This was as good as anything among infinite possibilities.
Once someone's core personality could be perfectly defined, human mind extensions started to migrate online.
All human knowledge was slowly being integrated into a single world mind. The Linkers dedicated their lives to finding connections and hidden similarities. Humans became like nodes or link collections or list of priorities.

Forced improvement was like being permanently hypnotized and modified, being made to pay painless attention to a personality alteration program. It turned some people incrementally into nerds by showing them their evolving near-future selves.
The Uplift tried to make mankind better, smarter, more skilled or specialized without changing their basic DNA. Non-persistent neuro genes could be introduced by viral vectors.
Everyone could pretend to become a demigod, by becoming an aspect of the World Mind.











Read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.

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