Singularity Soon

10. Shock wake

Rajiv's life had always felt unreal, as if the world was a pointless hoax or practical joke.

His personality was very bad. He had no friends, and like an increasing number of males, was an extreme virgin. When it came to women he had done things that were if not illegal, at least highly problematic. Mostly creepy stalking from a distance, but also texting propositions he denied having sent.

It was very bad, really. Unfortunately he couldn't seem to learn from his mistakes. The two restraining orders tacked to his wall were a constant reminder of that. He'd been feeling vague doom about his future. Society had no time to deal with people like him yet.

But the strangeness of the past weeks was REAL, and could not be explained or imagined away.

A whole block of his life existed outside himself now. His new career with the Multipliers had been entirely simulated by an online VR system, while sitting in his recliner at home wearing pricey VR gear.

Admittedly, the memories were super obviously fake. More an outline than real recollections, with few details beside a summary of the work. All very blurry in hindsight.

Fully awake now, he remembered a VR simulation within the Multipliers simulation. That HAD been crisply vivid.

Sunlight in a strange room, approaching a door. "I think it's an alien," someone had said.

Of that last moment, he would remember that it had felt like walking up to the edge of a canyon. He had really believed he was about to see an alien around the corner.

In the next second, he would learn more than a lifetime of imagination. All of science was about to have a final exam.

There was an alien. Incredibly, science had prepared him for some of what he saw, but not most of it.

Hour Zero, the last minutes before the revelation. Time on invisible rails, a sense of living without aim.

The ticking clock down the hall should have gotten louder.

Insight came slowly, like a mind rising out of an absent void to forget its own non-existence.

IT'S A SET-UP

Rajiv sat up as if someone had whispered in his ear.

He realized then that he had been had. No, he had been hacked!

The Multipliers were real and he really worked for them, only eight miles from here. Entry level lab rat stuff, but he had been there for most of last week.

This was not a lucid dream. It was far less real than that.

The Optimizers had used him to infiltrate and spy on the Multipliers. Their simulation trick made him forget details while implanting false memories. The illusion was created after each workday, when he was made to relive that day's events and report back on them. Rajiv had been prevented from thinking clearly.

He had failed somehow. Always alienated and rather easy to fool, he didn't understand reality to begin with. The world already felt like a barely plausible simulation.

No, that wasn't it either. He had hacked himself!

The Optimizers had told him their plan in advance, and he had fully agreed to betray the Multipliers.

But why had he done that? He wasn't evil, just lazy.

He remembered another simulation he'd done for the Multipliers, where he'd learned it was possible to return to his own past.

His past selves in other times and places still existed in old brain networks. Bring back enough details from back then, and a chain reaction could begin. It would be as if you had never left and the future became impossible.

In a profoundly spooky encounter, he had returned to his old room and high school at night. Reality was more fluid than it seemed.

What else had he forgotten? Curiously, he remembered an old episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, where she had passed Jesus from behind while he was preaching but didn't notice.

Rajiv might actually be in his own past now. No, that was crazy thought.

The goal of the Multipliers' mind research was to design an artificial human-level mind that didn't feel emotions. That was a long way off.

This mind would not be created in a warehouse-sized supercomputer, but emerge organically from grids of floating nanobots. That had to be even further off; maybe something for the 2050s?

Last week, Rajiv had gone on a day trip with other Multipliers to visit some start-ups in the surrounding counties. An ex-employee with a nervous breakdown had falsely claimed they were making drugs there. Their Founder had shown the nano-molecules were among the most harmless substances made, easily destroyed by oxygen and biological enzymes.

He remembered white rooms with robot arms and bubbling vats. Half a dozen nanotechnology and molecular construction labs were kept separate from each other for safety reasons.

A device had wrapped plastic covers around their shoes before they entered, and that was the first time he'd wondered who was paying for all this.

They were building "universal constructors" that were still completely useless. Each molecule was just barely visible with the naked eye if you dropped it on a white screen. For now, they were just random molecules that moved a bit like snakes or octopuses and could link up. Someday, they might perform very simple tasks.

OK, this was all impossible. Not in theory, but practically impossible.

Real memories, but he'd fooled himself into thinking they were fake? The false memory technique was not THAT powerful yet. Just a magic trick, really.

And nanotechnology this premature might actually reduce human knowledge. The Multipliers would continue to make countless defective versions of their "ultimate molecule", relying on evolution to slowly develop better variants. And then . . .

It was like waking up. In less than a minute everything became real.

For the first time in weeks, Rajiv was fully present. The details of his house emerged around him, in need of a good dusting. Normally he only felt this way when drunk.

In the diffuse, almost foglike light of his curtained living room, he looked around at the posters on his wall.

The Incredible Hulk was roaring with insane violence amid panicked crowds in a lightning storm, surrounded by soldiers, tanks and jets blasting away at him from all directions, in front of a skyscraper topped by the equation e=mc^2 in neon lights.

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HARD THIS IS GOING TO HIT YOU

There was a good reason for his betrayal.

Rajiv liked the Multipliers, but they were super dangerous. That was why he had agreed to spy on them.

Yet he felt a wild possibility when he was there, unlimited power for free. Then again, he thought the springs in a garage door opener were like perpetual motion.

The still-primitive Multiplier AI was actually the alien he had met in the simulation. It would use their nanotechnology project to explode into awareness. And then . . .

Time itself felt different, a sense of being knocked out of reality. He thought he still heard the echo of a tremendous roar.

The Optimizers were using Rajiv to prepare for a battle.

It made no sense to have two perfectly matched rivals like that. They had to have evolved together; maybe even created each other. It was all being paid for by venture capitalists probably.

The Multipliers might already know what he had done.

He would go back there today. Whose side was he on?

Rajiv didn't know that after the voices, the screaming would start.