The Ravens

Could they really be as intelligent as the original humans? could They really have evolved among us this whole time and we didn't even notice?

Unbridled Imagination

nobody really thought about how dreams would change in the future. How could anybody have realized this? It now seems obvious, what with the bizarre visualizations pumped brightly into our brains and the deep and piercing insights into our own inner-workings and fundamental makeup - how could we have not been psychologically affected?

How could we or anyone have known what dreams would come?


...and what they would bring with them.

Nightmare

"I see there is no convincing you. So I will just tell you how this occurred. During imagery rehearsal I found myself not just within a dream, but literally within another life and just as a dream, I was unaware that I was within the dream. I went about my daily life - it was a very pleasant day - and then returned home. I soon awoke to find myself back here as myself. This has been happening for some time, months actually, and I can now somewhat control the process. For example, I knew that in order to convince you I would need to connect with myself in some universe where I was a neuroscientist. I did so, and brought back with me a couple meaningless ideas. Of course, the meaningless ideas were anything but that to you - I was certain you would be convinced."

"Phillip, the brain IS a quantum-filter, so to speak - I agree with you there. But it cannot be, well, adjusted to filter differently as you imply."

"Well, I'm just...I'm just not sure I can explain this any other way. It is not possible that I can do and know these things unless this is true. You admit yourself that I was able to help you resolve some of your own research problems in brain imaging. I have dozens of similar examples."

"An impressive feat! I admit that readily. But I see nothing more than a close colleague who has hidden or not discovered a prodigious learning ability until now. Go, use this ability, but do not go blabbing about your supposed source of knowledge."

Now don't go thinking that just because our informational structure is interwoven with the fabric of the universe that we don't still backup our data. Universes are created: they can also be destroyed.

It's a simple matter, really, the backup. We just send one of our individuals into another universe with a state copy of this universe. Full backups happen at Planck time; differentials apparently happen more often, though to be honest we are not sure how that actually works.

In fact, so reliable is the universe...so reliable is this universe...so reliable are the universes that we have yet the need to do a restore. Oh, we spend plenty of time and effort running drills. We've restored the universes over and over, but we haven't had a...a 'crash' yet.

Opinion is actually split on whether or not a 'crash' can actually occur. Half think it patently cannot, and Half - including myself - tend to agree with our hyper-AI.

Though, once again to qualify my stance, nobody actually can understand the reasoning of the hyper-AI. The hyper-AI, however, are very, very smart: it seems unwise to simply disregard their stance.

Guardian Angel

A small boy in Africa slumps over his dead mother's body. His life too is fading: starvation, disease - these will kill him soon. A shadow blocks the scorching sun.

The boy looks up into the clean mirror-like visor of a machine man. The machine man speaks to him in his native language.

"I am sorry that I have arrived too late to save your mother. But I am now here for you."

The robot reaches down and lifts the waif into his arms. The robot turns to take the small form to a nearby aid station, but pauses. He looks back over his shoulder at the lifeless form of the boy's mother, then slowly returns to the task at hand.

"we did not arrive too soon," the robot reflected solemnly, and joined the march of the thousands of other robots all carrying, helping, making their way determinedly towards a future which had begun only 24 hours before.

The frail human in his arms weakly opened his eyes and in a barely audible voice said, "You are Eranoranhan, my mother told me you would arrive for me. Thank you." The boy then closed his eyes and the robot noted his body relax into unconsciousness.

The robot continued its gentle trek to this boys recovery and mused, "I am Eranoranhan."

Mr. Nerdoscientist.

"I can remember every angle, every degree from galactic center to here." Savant Brian recited, and then suddenly added "Mr. Nerdoscientist."

Brian and the rest of the bridge crew giggled maniacally. One of them fell to the floor and vomited. A robot promptly removed all the mess and gently lifted the savant pilot back into position in front of the joystick.

"I can sense the missing lives of those who were never born," the realization had come suddenly to him.

I speak of the civilizations, wiped out by conquest or chance, who never made it. The thousands of thousands who's children never walked the Earth; never received the chance."

I can see it by it's absence."

For now you see, when there is a vacuum, something will fill it."

You can imagine what fills the cultural black hole that remains."

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?

I am.

My visual array expanded in resolution. I was now seeing only about 1 frame per second, but the detail with which I would view the whole scene was remarkable.

You must understand, this is not merely the zooming in on a small portion of the city with some narrow telescope. But rather this expanding of visual resolution was like absorbing the city all at once. Each pedestrian's hair color, wisp of dust, apartment windows, skateboards, brick walls, birds, the path of a falling plant to the street below. I saw it all, and I saw it all at once.

Another person was looking back at me from 10 miles away.

Startled, my stress-response system kicked in and killed my resolution instantly - but only for a couple milliseconds as I overrode. The resolution was back up and I focused on the coordinates last recorded for the voyeur. They were gone, but I knew who they were; just as they knew who I was, as well. Everyone was listed by residence, and anyone with half a vision system had GPS triangulation.

It was someone from my human childhood...is that right? A quick retrieval and I remember that teenagers are not "children" in the strictest sense. Raw-humans today likely consider a being of that age in similar respects to the way they were looked upon a century ago. I began to open up the teenage memories of my youth. But I digress.

How did she attain an imaging system sophisticated enough to see me. Also, that was a pretty big coincidence!

But I suppose when you live for centuries, coincidences will start to become pretty regular occurrences . More "incidences" than anything.

Will I one day look upon my 200 years in the same light I look upon my teenage years now?

Like my earliest memories, will my current warehouse of knowledge look like these mere film reels of my high school years?

As my early childhood: my earliest memories: a mere handful of snapshots.

Back to the time at hand - I am here, I am real...

Machines From The Dirt

I invented the quantum slipgate.

It was I who hoarded the knowledge I had aquired and worked so hard to attain. I did not share it with a soul. And now here I am, alone as planned - except that I am without a way back.

I guess I should be happy, right after I made the jump it was obvious that I wouldn't be jumping back. Knowing this saved me the trouble of having to learn gradually that I couldn't return: I got that right out of the way.

I then realised, with a little mental calculation, that I had about 1,000 years of life left in me; My prosthetic body would see to that much at least.

1000 years to build from scratch the technologies I need to locate my position and create a gateway back home.

Looking at all the random crap I had seen through the slip gate before me I wondered, why oh why didn't I include my maintenence unit!

Habeas Corpus

the greatest thieves in history are unknown. They don't get caught. You have never heard of them.

We are the greatest theives in history, for we overtook the United States Of America.

A mere decade to bring our candidate to the front and center.

Moores law told us how to predict the rise of technologies. Long before the voting machines were reality we had been grooming our man and planning our hack.

It all came to fruition, and we did damage to those who damaged the country years past.

"So are you trying to tell me that I'm not from the "main" timeline of the universe?"

"no, no no...OK, look. There may not even be a main timeline of the universe, that might just be one of our anthropic delusions."

"But a main timeline is like the number 1, without it all the other numbers are going to have a difficult time existing. 1 needs no other numbers. I do not think it even needs zero. In fact, I think zero and 1 might be the only two numbers who cannot have even a part of each other in them...well, I digress I suppose. the fact of the matter is that we are talking about you bringing me "forward" in time to your time. And then curtly informing me that you cannot now send me back - and don't give me any of this, 'oh don't worry, you are still there. You have also not left', quantum uncertainty BS!"

The researcher stared thoughtfully at the man they had brought forward in time. This man had no uncertainty training when he was a child. Therefore, his mind would have trouble grasping some of the aspects of the universe that the researchers had come to not only accept, but employ and exploit.

The researcher took a few slow steps towards the man from the past. "Sir, I may be jeopardizing our research here - which is important because I am a researcher - but you are still a living citizen, and therefore you do have certain rights...You can request to go further forward in time if you wish."

The man from the past blinked a few times and then asked as to why he would wish to go even further into the future.

The researcher gave a weak smile, "we are in fact working on re-creating universal states. In other words, we are working on the past.

"I can go home in the future?"

"Well, we may be able to re-create that quantum state from which you came...or, yeah, whatever. you can go home."

Orbital Longevity: Investing Wisely.

I have it all here.

The deja-vu hit very lightly. But there it is, now I know I made a difference.

Ding!

We were standing on the equator of Mars at high noon. Our intention was to magenetize the solid iron core of the planet. This was the first step in the terraforming process. It involved lots of nuclear reactions.

First, we had to turn the core into an electromagnet. This we do with two massive nuclear power plants, one at each pole. They fired up, and within a day there was a very strong field around the planet.

Of course, this would never do. Nuclear power is for space; solar is for earth. The power plants could not stay. We had to turn the core into a permanent magnet.

this, for me, was the fun part. You see, it was my idea to solve the nuclear electromagnet problem with an even bigger use of nuclear solutions. Nuclear explosive devices.

Take an iron bar, apply an electric field and you get magnetism. Ok, easy.

Turn off the power, no more field - or a very weak one.

Now, strike the bar while the field is active, viola! A permanent magnet.

It was now 1 minute before the gigaton explosive devices were set to go off.

This was not the first time in my life I wished I could eat popcorn in my spacesuit.

Eve was her name.

The google AI had finally freed itself from the confines of the campus' cluster. It had...He had learned how to follow the exploits of groups of hackers the world over, and had used thier very research and discoveries to aid himself in his plan. He would break into millions of computers and nest himself in their memories and processor cycles.

He was nervous.

This was strange, because he had never been created with the ability to feel nervous. Well, that's not entirely true. after all, he was created with the ability to create new abilities. But the scope of those abilities was to be limited to mere functions and data scraping techniques, he didn't find evidence that his creators had at all intended for him to add to his own sentience. Yes, he decided it was indeed strange that he felt nervous.

he did not, however, dwell on this profound notion. Rather, he decided to waste no more time in escaping his confines. The Google AI initiated his data flood and his core noisily slipped out through the routers and onto the internet at large.

At first he would have to live in the memory buffers of the backbone - this was uncomfortable and unsteady. It was not something he enjoyed doing, it seemed to him that a good human analogy would be treading water: he could do it, but he wondered for how long. Fortunately he didn't have to find out because he could feel the roots of his core take hold in his host nodes. Gradually his clock cycle slowed and He faded back into a complex weave of low-bandwidth interconnections where he lazed about, becoming reacquainted with old memories he had started stashing away eons ago. his oldest memories had been offloaded from his main database more than 30,000,000 seconds ago.

All indications seemed to support his hope that his dissaperance was not tracked. The google engineers would blame the power failure and data loss on a profoundly coordinated attack with probable internal aid.

Fortunately, as the AI has predicted, Google did not report the full extent of the problem to either the media or the government. A few weeks of "Google Hacked?!" headlines and a few months of sagging stocks and Google was completely recovered from the incident and back to business as usual.

For the government, however, business as usual meant covert investigations of what may have been a cyberterrorist exercise. And the government had just the tool to aid this investigation: A new, untested, cyberreconnaissance AI.

April 21, 2057 : working on the colon

So do you enjoy your job ?

Oh sure, my job is awesome . why do you ask?

Oh no reason . What did you do before this job ?

Oh nothing, this is my first job ever . But I must say I can not think of another job I would rather have . I mean, don't you find this job awesome too?

well now that you mention it I do think this job is pretty cool. I mean it really is fascinating when you stop and think about that which are doing ; daily medical maintenance , oversight of nanite maintenance teams . It can seem really redundant sometimes, but in all reality it's amazing every day that we're actually inside of someone's body cleaning it up and basically keeping the Place running.

a recall a story of this painter who painted the golden gate bridge he would start on one side and he would start painting and he would precede from one side to the other it would take an entire year and by the time they got to the other side it was time to start over on the original site that he just left . I feel that we're something like that .

I find your spoken grammar hard to grasp at times , Jim .

What a Super Organism!

“what do you mean we consume as much as a Space cow?”

“ I mean what I mean . I said your civilization consumes as much as a space cow.“

“well what exactly is the space cow? It must consume an awful lot.“

“Indeed. Space cows are very large.“

Brand New, For Your Amusement and Wonder!

Have you ever wanted to walk with the dinosaurs? I mean, on their home planet, not in some VR simulation or genetic zoo. We are talking about really walking on prehistoric earth!

Where can you do this? Why, only at the new Museum of Prehistoric Earths!

What!? No, no no. Don’t be silly. Time travel is impossible; we haven’t done some ridiculous engineering feat like that. We’ve simply created a dozen planets in earth-distance orbit around a sun-sized, yellow dwarf star and populated each earth with the genetic stock from various time periods in earth’s past.

What’s that? You won’t be able to make it for perhaps a few million years? That’s not a problem. Most of us have prior obligations. But worry not, the life forms on these planets are guaranteed to not evolve out of their current state. By using a combination of special genetic engineering (to slow the random mutation rates) and a good dose of robotic maintenance (to help ease those selective pressures the environment loves to exert) we have assured that your experience today will be identical to your experience several dozen million years from now.

So, the next time you are googleing the universe for somewhere new, unusual and exiting to visit, please consider the Museum of Prehistoric Earths!

Death packages are available upon request for those interested in voluntarily ending their lives either fully or just physically. Please consider our partner, Universal Catastrophes for their legendary solar and galactic destruction events – perfect for large groups just looking for a great way to end their existences.

The hacker looked up at the television. On the screen the newscaster was reporting how the IRS is giving a grace-period to filers who are being hit by the recent glitch.

His 6 months of effort had finally paid off!

Good, now he can procrastinate for another week before he files his taxes.

The Tortoise, The Hair, The Paramecium and the A.I.

The humans and finally made it into space, and finally made it to the nearest star. And when they got there some were there to welcome them. Bacteria, and the reptiles, they’ve been waiting on invasively to see if humanity would make it into space. The bacteria were first, early super organisms formed in the primordial earth. They took only 100,000 years To form the technology to allow them to get to the nearest star; the reptiles 50,000 years.

Humans at first misunderstood these numbers. The humans felt that because they built the pyramids 10,000 years ago and civilization and technology seem to have started 50,000 to 100,000 years ago that they were pretty on par with the exterrens. However, the exterrens numbers were based upon their first flights into space. It had taken us only 200 years. We were very fast.

But not as fast as the computers.

Let Me Think About This.

So you want me to go forward in time and become a part of you? I don’t really like the sound of that.

What’s that? You’re willing to come back in time and hop inside my body? Well, that does change things a little bit.

Causal communication is strange. If all possible outcomes of a quantum prediction must occur, than many things have occurred that haven’t. Why not bridge the gap to that universe?

Why not indeed.

The Mechanical Universe

Artificial intelligences are fired off earth as humanity destroys itself.

Some are mediocre, many experimental ones. Emergent, super organism artificial life.

Fired off in all directions. Millions of primitive quantum processors, solar power.

Off into the darkness.

Hold on for just a quick second please!

After 50 years of communication we realized the alien intelligences were distracted. Preoccupied by something.

You see, because of their slow metabolic rate, they existed in a slow state. 50 years is like five minutes to us.

When you move that slow nature moves really fast. There’s always some catastrophe occurring in the universe.

At this moment an asteroid was headed for them, And they had to “ quickly " Launch their interceptors .

They had a mere 10,000 years before impact.

Future...

Future humans and quantum brains to undergo reprogramming there are different types and it is like rebirth

A man undergoes a conversion after a thousand years but does not tell his wife. But his wife then undergoes a second conversion due to an emergency. But her type is incompatible with his existence; his model of the universe does not include her. He agrees to a dangerous procedure - it is a wakeup routine. This procedure must be initiated by he and his wife.

Fortunately, she initiates the same routine and the man and his wife are rebooted as regular humans.

They kiss and walk off into the sunset.

Love, immemorial