Sunday, May 20, 2007

They were trying to convince him again, but he didn't need anymore convincing. jHe wondered how long it would be before they knew...


Watching, the technician for the intergalactic trade and negotiation bureau suddenly realized what had just happened. One of earth's population had somehow realized what he was being used for.

On the technicians screen numbers began rolling past quickly and dread began to mount. The technician initiated a full clearance brain scan on the man. It would take less than a minute and would have all the telltale signs of realization, if they existed, on the male human's brain.


The technician thought: how could millions of years have passed, since inception, with no incident. Epochs of time have seen these clever humans chat and bargain between interested parties far removed in language or custom, but united by the unique human view on reality and social structure.

The humans, naturally, needed to stay unmolested and in a completely unaware state. All humans were living together in a vast synthetic reality made half of the real, hard ground and the breaths of air and the other half of a projected reality in which beings of varied time-frames, metabolic rates, mathematical understandings and general zenocentric problems mingled with the humans - simulated and overlayed to appear as life long friends and relatives, strangers, passers-by.

Without their own knowledge the humans were running the universe: they were apparently made for it: They were very good at denying reality.

But this one, after millions of years and trillions of humans, this one stumbles upon the system by pure chance! He somehow KNOWS that he is in a simulated reality. Movies, websites, books...Things in the reality which cannot be controlled have shown him clues.

And this one was negotiating for a historical scientific precedent in the universe - this was bound to be a tragedy.

What can we do when the power of the human escapes the cage?

3 comments:

mrdomino said...

I love this. And not just in that pretentious "you've hit on something I've been writing about, too" way. It's a really cool outlook--recalls Douglas Adams's earth-as-a-computer thing.

You should keep writing these.

:| said...

Wow, a Douglas Adams compliment. Thanks Steve :]

:| said...

This was not the first time this human had caused trouble.

Before we elaborate on this human's history it might be helpful to give a bit of background on the human experiment.

The human mind is a very interesting piece of evolution. Primarily, the earthing brain's imagination and subsequent creative ability is, to me, the most remarkable thing about it.

Whereas when one takes a rating of the various intelligent species of the universe and plots a human being's abilities in calculation, memory, logic, speed and endurance against the rest, a human will place somewhere around the middle with most of these. In fact, the overall human score is actually quite high - but they do not excel at the "core" abilities.

It was found, however, that the human imagination - their simulative space - was immense! Using standard formula and combinatorial math, the results were astounding. Off-the-charts is the only expression that can be used - the word "unimaginable" comes to mind as well, but so much of what humans imagine is unimaginable to the citizens of the universe that this word has little meaning.

When the first humans were cloned into the Universal Center for Found Species, it was discovered that the power of their simulative space could not be adequately predicted. This resulted in the first systems outage at the center ever: once thought a theoretical impossibility. By merely assigning a low-access systems neural interface to the first cloned humans the Center had opened a literal floodgate.

Giving the human brain these extra capabilities, modest as they were, unleashed cascades within the central system. It was thanks to the forethought of a long-missing, likely extinct, ancient and cautious species that the system meltdown was isolated to the Center and did not propagate to the surrounding systems.

A mere logic trigger, a singular computing machine, was able to recognize this error and was able to cleverly access the proper systems (through some rather unsavory methods, it must be said) and sever access to the outside world.

That was the first human incident.

This human, however - he is the second incident.