As Rajiv returned home in the new darkness, he remembered earlier walks throughout the years of his life. If you waited long enough, you would inevitably see things.
Sometimes, the sky appeared 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 had swept across the sky like a silent glitch. That was the instant it had taken for the flare to fade out of existence, quite unconnected to the world below.
On 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 and 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 in 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.
Wait, that memory seemed like it could hardly 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 shock but the curious absence of shock like in a dream. At that moment, he understood.
CITEȘTI
Singularity Soon
SFI did a research project to explore whether The Singularity could happen sooner than expected. Like maybe RIGHT NOW? Technically speaking that turns out to be very difficult, but not impossible, if we assume a series of precise breakthroughs. The...
