Singularity Soon

5. Memories from the future

Rajiv had always been fascinated by lucid dreaming. He wanted to dream 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 simulate the past in layers of increasing resolution. Constant rewriting of the past was also involved in dreaming. And then you . . .

Wait, there was no such thing as a method to make false memories.

He had a final insight then. Also the first (barely noticed) twinges of fear.

It was a cool scifi story idea: Someone could have sent him such a method, perhaps 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 control and modification in his VR blog. Maybe that was why they had chosen him for these experiments. Or they chose him because he was simple enough to edit his mind. Minimal life hacking for maximal results. Even so, they needed 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 something 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 many of the streetlights were out.

He would have fully joined their program already. Vaguely, he remembered pieces of a conversation 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 scifi 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), creating a non-causal mind hologram.

More things were going to happen that he would soon forget. He was not free.

A fellow student he barely knew had once told him something strange: that he looked like the most miserable person in the world.

But that wasn't an insult at all. He thought she'd wanted to say something nice, and that was just about the nicest thing she could have said!

Imagine if 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, at no cost to himself. All of reality was instantly improved. Impossible, of course.

In reality, he had not the slightest doubt it would be infinitely better if nothing existed.

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