Singularity Soon

7. 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 deep problem in Artificial Intelligence.

He remembered a vanity logo/slogan that appeared inside his virtual reality headset when he started a session: "All 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 cartoon had been made by an AI.

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.