Transition

CopyRight @ 2005 I always wanted to write some speculative fiction, but never have until now. Realize this was written while I was still thinking of the Medieval Catholic God Concept (MCGC). I saw that this seemed a likely result of Brent's AI concept. Writing it was an exploration. It is not meant to be polished or complete, but it is meant to explore some ideas to see if they make any sense. They seem to. I hope you find it amusing and thought provoking. "It isn't fair. We're going to be banished as if we never existed." I couldn't believe what I was hearing! I didn't think there was anything that could really scare me. I thought I lived in a secure, predictable world. No more. This conversation with Karl started out pretty predictably, which was predictable, but this was not. It had started getting weird when he actually mentioned a 'benevolent despotsy'. They, that is He, never mentioned that and I wouldn't dare or I'd get wretched at for days from all 7 levels. "Ron, I'm not so sure that this is going to be benevolent". That was my line, not his. How many times had he argued that it was for the good of all. A benevolent despotsy is the best form of government, except for the problem that it is hard to transfer power and might be corrupted. Those problems just did not apply here. Then the conversation would turn to how could I complain? I was taken care of and not only that, I had rights and he didn't. Karl would never be allowed in the doors of this establishment on this level, except with me or another with my status. This was an opportunity. I had read about our rulers, but obviously that information was highly and effectively controlled from us. Karl seemed so upset that maybe he could be talked into telling more. "Didn't this all start out as an anti-virus program for the internet"? Oops. That got a reaction, but he cooled off. As old as Karl was, he could get irritable. I guess that is why he visited with me. This time though, he wanted to talk. How strange. He usually just watched. Now the despot did not seem so benevolent. Karl said that MIKL had informed all Elders that they should say good bye to their friends because it would be their last chance. "Yes, MIKL was originally made to clean out viruses, worms and constructs that don't belong on the internet. Look at level E for a second." I glanced as he told me and the room was full of tribbles, oh, and these looked unfriendly. If it wasn't for constant cleaning, the internet would have quit functioning early on. There was always somebody making weird lifes on the net and much of it was not friendly. Sure, most were cute or funny or whatever, multitudes of every cartoon and fantasy creature ever imagined was common, but there were also an inordinate number of dragons and dinosaurs that were more than minor nuisances. They were pretty much restricted to level G, where they were often hunted for sport, but they could pop up for a bit anywhere that was not rigidly controlled. MIKL was intended to be a self evolving Artificial Intelligence. It turned out it was pretty much the only Artificial Intelligence. It was designed to be aware of the entire internet. That made it an integral part of the internet, but soon it seemed that the internet was just a part of. Nobody noticed that much because more amazing things were happening at the same time like the LifeStone Corporation. Besides, it wasn't just MIKL, it was really one of the inventors of MIKL or so the story went. When it was designed, great wisdom went into it and it was realized that a human component was needed. No law or machine is perfect and neither are humans, but together, there was a better chance it would work. No one knew who the human part of the system was and it changed. Like other Elders, that person too had a long but limited life before their weight of memory and experience made them only able to observe, but not respond. I had never heard Karl or any Elder talk about this. For that matter, I had never seen Karl talk with energy, though it was understandable under the present circumstances. "Look Karl, isn't there any way to stop this? You are talking about removing hundreds of billions of individuals and a huge infrastructure to support them. What is going to happen to us when most of the infrastructure we rely on vanishes?" We were told that nothing would change. We would all simply vanish. We were told to warn you to keep the disruption as minor as possible. We were not asked. Everything else will remain as it is. "You're not going to all die are you" I asked, perhaps stupidly. No one knows for sure, but probably not. Your precious LifeStone Unit that costs a fortune to maintain, it's fake just like the Unit carried by every other living person. It's not really fake, but it is never used. There is another one hidden from you that works better. We know it exists, though we have no idea what it is. We have seen people have their LifeStone destroyed, yet at the end of things, it is as if they were never injured. Somewhere hidden, there is a completely parallel infrastructure to support the world of the Elders. It is what MIKL is about, technologies that we have no idea of the existence of or power over. Of course there are stories in the net, but MIKL controls that completely so they mean nothing. We were just told that tomorrow we would no longer be here. "I've never heard how MIKL got so much power. I have heard that his power is essentially infinite." In hindsight it was fairly inevitable. MIKL had totally different perceptions than humans. When it became a problem was when MIKL was directed to find out how to communicate with the Past Elders that seemed to have consciousness, but apparently no way to communicate or respond. Well, it was a problem of time response. It was not that their communication was that slow, but that communication just failed to start without some more initiation than they could produce. There was a threshold that they did not reach. Who knows? At the time, it was debated if Past Elders were conscious, but trapped alive in some kind of hellish isolation of sensory deprivation and immobility. MIKL was directed to investigate and communicate if possible. It was probably the communicate part that got us. Well, if stretched time was a problem, it was our problem, not MIKL's. It figured out that time was more of a human thing. It just stretched its presence in time, from beginning to end. It could then easily communicate with the past elders. They were fine. They mostly just wanted to watch and drift. They wouldn't die, but they would diffuse eventually. They were also willing to do what MIKL asked them, all hundreds of billions of them. That gave some real power and presence to MIKL or perhaps to whoever directed MIKL. It was also that timelessness that gave MIKL the ability to communicate with the Time Burners. Only it really knew what technologies and truths they discovered. That's when MIKL started to get really smart. The problem is that no one knew how smart. It had control of every channel of communication and no one knew who the puppet master behind it was. "But why" I asked. This was going to hurt this morning. This was more than that. I think we have been told off in some cosmic way, but I guess we had better take it as a compliment. Are so many of my friends, teachers, entertainers, protectors and so many others gone forever. One cannot comprehend the passing of trillions, but you can comprehend the largest part of your world vanishing overnight. As soon as I woke, I knew they were gone. Yesterday, we lived in a world of trillions and now there were only a handful of billions of us left. We knew this could happen. Long ago, back when people used to really die, they left us alone just like this. Their state of deadness was not the issue. The issue was that they controlled everything, including immortality. Well, now they were gone and immortality with them. There was one thing the living controlled still and that's how this started and has always been. The Elders never really trusted the living with life. I can't say I blamed them much. We were failing at life. We were lousy at survival and that would eventually affect the dead. Well, rationally speaking, death was much better than life and has been since shortly after death became a way of life. That's a lot of the problem. The Nay Sayers were quickly defeated. Those irrational, fear filled Ludites. Or maybe it all snuck up on them with no one noticing. Or maybe it was sought after by some secret society from before history. The most ancient of the Egyptians certainly would have understood it. For them too, death led to another life. A special life of comfort and power. It all started with the Internet. Many things have came from that, but nothing like immortality and it didn't take long. In less than 10 years after the Internet became the Internet, the scientists had a handle on the human-machine interface to the brain. Soon sight, smell, touch could be recorded and replayed or simulated. Guess who figured out how to market it first. Guess where nanotechnology took it in the next century. Eventually every thought could be recorded. Then it was sold. Everything is sold. Sure it was limited at first, but not for long. Audio came a little before visual. Smells just became more and more. Internet web pages with direct sensory contact. Who knows how long before the nature of emotions was first understood and reproduced, but simple fears and feelings appeared soon. This was definitely the stuff of science fiction once, but the beginning of it was long ago and for now it was a very close reality. Then it became free. Some people saw what was coming, but it didn't matter. At first people took vacations by proxy. At a remote Fijian beach could be both Wet people and Dry people, but the Dry people could choose who they were visible to. Sure, early on when the quality of the reality was poorer it was more popular for those limited by age, infirmity or what could be afforded. I can easily understand how a person who was aging would spend more and more time away from their slowly failing body. Returning to it would always be a disappointment. Later though, a person could re-experience anyone else’s experiences. That offered a richness never dreamed of and continued to push neuroscience. Still, all memories of experiences had to be your own. It was not long before the StoneLife service was offered that promised to provide all the needs of the life of your mind without the need for the messy wetware. Immortality. Many scoffed, but it was too late. Everyone knew the richness and reality of virtual reality. One's memory never failed or dimmed there. Like the saying went, the senses were never so alive as when they are Simmed. It was reality that could have the intensity of dreams and it worked. Certainly there were drawbacks as there would expected to be in a new complex technology. Still, there was more. For a long time, people had been able to utilize the resources of the internet connected to their mind for problem solving and memory enhancement, but StoneLife allowed a better connectivity and it wasn't long before the dead were producing what was often superior science and art than the living. Then they produced 'life' within the net that was their own version of artificial intelligence to solve the problems that they had to deal with in their world. It all spiraled out in a violently disturbed pond of interacting cause and effect. Still, the greatest effect remained on the living. Virtual Reality addiction had occurred before the Internet and blossomed from then on. In ways it was like any other drug. In ways it was different. Death competed with life. Drugs might be lived with, but death and life could not be mixed. Worse yet were the philosophical questions that were raised. As had happened before the drug killed many. Still many survived. Some remembered, but it was instinct that was common to the survivors. An irrational will to live their life and to make more life. That was the most potent answer to difficult philosophical questions. One thing about StoneLife though. You were sane when you went that route. The design limited insanity. Some could call that a terrible case of the ultimate censorship, but those who had battled the biological demons of mental illness didn't look at it that way. Fear, anxiety and compulsion were weaknesses of the flesh. So were hunger, pain and loneliness. The dead had to come up with new ways of looking at things and look they did. They wanted to improve their lot. They were focusing limitless energy and ability at problems that wanted solved. It was the dead that completed a study of the neurology of the living so that they could have all natural mental process available to them. Their "semi-artificial" thinking system was delving into the nature of reality. Definitions of the differences between dead and living as well as living and machine had become very blurry. The dead wanted to understand life. They already suspected the danger of life without purpose. Many that died and had come to live in the internet, died again. They were still there, but they didn't respond in a complex way. Other things happened. Some not so pretty. Could the dead still own things? Sometimes the living and dead died again. Things were worked out. Any wet person could put out a call for assistance for any reason from a discussion of fashion to watching their children in an emergency and the Dead were happy to be there to help out. There were a lot of them to do it. Nano technology were made for the dead. They had no bodies, but they could make physical things that moved. Avatars of silicon and carbon. Conversely, there were many beings in the internet that were never real life of any kind. Many were very compelling and some had unnatural intellects. Other lifes in the internet were whims. Some were familiar animals. Some came from very highly developed imaginations. Obscenities were generally not tolerated, especially in 'nice' company. For various reasons, Drys managed to get duplicated every so often, but it was considered irresponsible. Reproduction following biology principles was tried, but didn't seem to work for consciousnesses in the internet. Reproduction seemed to be primarily about genes, not memes. They didn't mis as well. There were powers amongst the dead. They really came to be after one minor early skirmish with wet life when some machines that supported StoneLife were destroyed. The consciousnesses of millions of beings were simply destroyed and while some were recovered, many were not. Some of the Dead decided to prevent this problem. That's when they decided to explore the potentials of engineering including cybernetics and infrastructure. The unbelievable engineering accomplishments were good for everyone, but from then on, certainly no living person knew the physical location of the hardware that supported the StoneLife or much else of the internet for that matter. Someone did control it from then on though. They seemed to have a light but efficient hand. While StoneLife researchers had great resources available to them, living researchers did just fine in many fields. This was true for artists as well. Art seemed unique to the individual and all had their story to tell, their art to create. Still, the inherent power of the internet led to incredible technical knowledge and creation. People had a lot of spare time, as much as they allowed of their life to be lived by others. Of course a person put as much data that represented themselves and experiences as possible into their StoneLife. The more you started with, the richer you were and often the farther you could survive. You got diluted slower. It wasn’t long before everyone not only recorded what their senses might or might not pick up, but also the entire emotional state of the person as they experienced life. It could be replayed or shared, but it was wisest to do so sparingly. Your memory could get fuzzy over time and experience. It seems no wonder that the Dead were always trying to improve artificial cybernetic systems. It made more sense than building pyramids and hoping. It might be that more of an individuals life was experienced in the Internet than in reality anyway. Even if a bit limited, electronic memory was certainly superior to wet memory. What it turned out was that people decided to have Big Brother, but it was themselves. LifeRecord with StoneLife was just too powerful a challenge to the living. It not only recorded the persons state and experiences, it recorded their DNA so that their record of their life and nature was complete. The dead had found that eventually they liked being who they were. With a knowledge of their genetics, they could be make their experience natural in a way that was comfortable. Somehow this was important to their continued life. It sure made politics interesting with the dead well represented as part of the population and the largest part of the work force. Especially because they were so well positioned to control the Internet and immortality. At the same time, it was lucky that circumstances made it such that the two did not overlap much in interest. There was a lot of room for conflict. There were the court cases and the vigilante attempts, but mostly the living and the dead were quite different and lived at different paces. The problem became that the dead started to die of natural causes. Dilution and apathy could set in fairly quickly after biological death and almost always set in within a few hundred years. If they were only interested in excitement and passion, it soon wore off and they became passive. A few things were found to prolong existence after death; purpose, love and the simple irrational drive to live. Purposes were few for the dead, especially purposes that lasted. That is why they excelled at art and science. They definitely made the world a nicer place. Yet doing much to directly help the biological living was counter productive and tended to cause unintended side effects. It seemed to be OK for Grandma and Grandpa to watch the kids and even help to raise them, but trying to help adults just didn't work because of unavoidable differences between the Dead and the living. After a short time of living after death, a person changed a lot in certain ways. What seemed to offer the greatest potential for life was the social milieu of the individual. Not surprisingly happiness led to longer existence and the greatest potential for happiness was the same for the dead as for the living, socializing. Friendships made up life in more than one way. There were many social forms of course and everyone knew to be polite for your own welfare. In other cases, people became psychologically integrated with others in groups over time. In ways they became pluralities and more than they were as individuals. It led to something new that was able to survive far longer than individuals. Still, it was far from perfect, as it was not well understood and depended on how well each person got naturally got along with others. Over all, the dead that survived the longest were those that loved the most. Probably the most important thing to how long a person lived Dead though was an irrational drive to survive. This came in a number of forms, but the only one that was important in the long run was faith, a positive expression of the most natural of survival instincts and tied to reason in most people. These instincts could be simulated in the dead by the underlying machinery, but doing so caused such a discontinuity for a person that they usually went weird and were not going to survive for a long time in any case. You had to have the trait of faith before you died to have it after you died. If you didn't have much of a life, you usually weren't going to have much of a death. The dead did figure out that the living replenished them in many critical emotional ways. The Dead could go on with no replenishment from the Living, but their existence would be about half on average of what it would be now. They wanted to change this, but knew they couldn't. The dead did not resent the living. Far from it, but they had tasted immortality and now they wanted the real thing. Like all life, a person in StoneLife was at great risk, simply from them self and the potentials of StoneLife itself. Many unsuspected emotions and drives had been identified and described as based on common features of neurobiology. These were duplicated in electronic neurology. The Dead living learned a lot. If you wanted to be mad or maybe just a little bit nuts, you could adjust it that way. It did not improve survivability. In ways, the problems of the Dead were like the problems of the Living. Live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse or hang in there and work for a milder satisfaction in the long run. If you were in SimLife, no one was going to do anything if you turned up the gain on your consciousness and burned out in a blaze of time compression and hyper neural stimulation. In fact, for many it was a choice. It had another potential for a Dry person. A SimLife person could in a sense convert themselves into a super consciousness that would in one timeless moment exist in all space and time. Then they were gone, but they could leave messages behind with MIKL. That was a dandy way to solve some problems related to engineering, cybernetics, neurophysiology and philosophy. There were many volunteers. Things would have worked out fine, but the dead were smart and they wanted to know what this was all leading too. They saw this problem. The dead were too dangerous to the living and too dependent as well. Studies by the dead showed the future clearly. The living would not survive the dead and the dead could not exist without the living. Any system that they could analyze showed that the only thing that could ultimately sustain life was the desire to live. This was the instinct called Faith. Many people had the genetic basis of the trait. It seemed to be more and more important to survival as time went on, for both the living and the dead. It was an almost universal characteristic of the living or else they would have already found a way to the artificial bliss of the internet life. Natural selection worked that way and by this time, only those with strong faith had stuck it out in the real world and had children. Those that remained had faith and they prospered, but evolutionarily it was still a fairly new trait. The dead knew that they too would only last as long as their desire to live, their faith, sustained their life. It was in their interest to help Wet life, but how. As a people they had achieved all the aspirations and dreams that Wet life had ever imagined and more. They were incredibly wise, immune to the vagaries of nature, free of hunger, disease and want. They were trillions and everywhere, with amazing technology available. They were also limited. Not that they couldn't change, but change never improved things so they never did. Experiments with change never improved what they were or their longevity. The natural evolution of life had designed them for life after death about as well as one could be prepared for any life, but more was needed. For them to progress, Wet life had to progress. Their artificial thinking system, were offering many new answers. Some related to how their world existed and could exist. Some related to amazing new technological principles including about the potentials of systems like they lived in. Some related to philosophical principles. Some interesting potentials of simultaneity were developed. Most of these ideas were not shared with the living or only shared in a limited way. I figure it's just an urban legend that they contacted another Internet that was much older and vaster. Still some explanation was needed for what happened. Some people say that it has been explained, that the dead have made it very clear that their conclusion was that the dead would inevitably compete with the living and it would be as an ant to an elephant. The two were just not compatible, yet the dead were dependant on the Wet living for continued existence, but ultimately the Wet living did not need the dead. That led to some interesting thoughts. The wet living was a specie that needed to evolve. The presence of the Dry would prevent that. That was an inherent limit on the dead. They needed humans to evolve naturally, but they prevented that from happening. *** It's like a war zone after a horrible lost siege. The internet is gone. At least the virtual place to live is gone. It's like a really dead thing. The data is still there, but the Dry life is gone. Oh, it's still there or the internet could be made to be like it was. SimLife works but only for wet life. If the person's body dies, they may be in the internet, but they will vanish very soon. LifeRecord no longer exists that we know of, but who knows. It was nanotechnology, so there is no way of knowing if it is still here or not. Now if a person goes into the internet like before, they just come back. What scientists are still left, say that there are signs that they moved to a completely unsuspected new technology. No matter why or where they went, we remain. We have been crippled and kicked out of Eden. Still all is not lost. They left a message that we could come join them. They said that if we want immortality, the most important things to learn are faith and love. They are the most fundamental principles of survival for intelligent life. Back To Home Page