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TO CONCENTRATE ON HEAVEN IS TO CREATE HELL. —TOM ROBBINS
The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power
ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.
Brüks had never considered himself a great believer in the nobility of the Human spirit but even he had been surprised at how little time it took for the sky to start looking the same as it always had, at the speed with which the world’s petty differences returned to the front page.
For his part, he was sick of waiting. He was sick of life on hold, waiting for monsters or saviors to make an appearance. He was sick of killing things, sick of dying inside.
In all the billions of years that life had been iterating on this planet, had any predator ever tried to comfort its prey?
Life was a struggle to exist at the expense of other life.
Except this was no fucking war: this was a massacre, this was one tribe of giants slaughtering another, and any baseline fossil stupid enough to get caught underfoot didn’t even rate the brutal mercy of a slashed throat on the battlefield.
“Even God can’t plan for everything. Too many variables.”
Brüks wasn’t sure what he really saw in the flash-blinded split second that followed. A great flickering hole opening in the morning sky, a massive piece of that dome peeled back as though God Itself had popped the lid off Its terrarium. The sky crinkled: wisps of high-flying cirrus cracking into myriad shards; expanses of deep and endless blue collapsing into sharp-edged facets; half of heaven folded into lunatic origami. The sky imploded and left another sky behind, serene and unscarred.
“If it makes you feel any better,” she said after a while, “I kinda know what you mean.” “About?” “About things not seeming real. I actually feel that way all the time. Gaming’s the only time I don’t feel that way.” “Huh,” Brüks grunted, a little surprised. “I wonder why.” And after a moment’s thought: “Probably the company you keep.”
Reality was finally cutting through the drinks and the drugs and the sheer idiotic bravado of spoiled children raised on promises of immortality.
Three trillion nodes and a ten-thousand-link search radius was a pretty impoverished echo of the actual Quinternet, but you could still dig for a thousand lifetimes and never reach its edge. Instant expertise in a million disciplines. Interactive novels you didn’t even have to play, first-person eidetic memories that planted themselves directly into your head if you had the interface (Brüks didn’t, but this came close), served up all the thrills and wonder and experience of just having played without even needing to set aside the time to inhabit the story in real time. Indelible footprints of
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Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.
Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.
Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.”
And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.
The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. At least that explained why reality had a resolution limit; Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort.
“These days, half the time we don’t even know who the real enemy is
Soul mates could be made to order now: monogamous, devoted, fiercely passionate. The kind of love that prior generations had barely tasted before their hollow sacraments withered into miserable life sentences, or shattered outright as the bloom faded, the eye wandered, the genes reasserted themselves.
The company of a friend, the warmth of a pet, it was all the same; all that mattered was the simple brain-stem comfort of a body next to yours, huddled against the night.
He still wasn’t sure where this newfound facility was coming from. His subconscious simply served up the right responses without bothering to show its work. It frightened him, at first—the way new thoughts spilled from his mouth before he could check them for veracity, before he could even parse their meaning. He bit down, to no avail, grew queasy—almost terrified—by his own insights,
Valerie didn’t avoid the seizures at all; she—encysted them, and carried on.
I am a colony of microbes talking to itself,
Maybe the Singularity already happened and its components just don’t know it yet
He was still Daniel Brüks, the human coelacanth: lurking at the outskirts of evolution, unchanged and unchangeable while the world moved on. Enlightenment was enough for him. He wanted no part of transfiguration.
It was such an uphill struggle. Consciousness had never had the upper hand; I had never been more than the scratchpad, a momentary snapshot of a remembered present. Maybe Brüks hadn’t heard those voices before but they’d always been there, hidden away, doing the heavy lifting and sending status reports upstairs to a silly little man who took all the credit. A deluded homunculus, trying to make sense of minions so much smarter than it was. It had only ever been a matter of time before they decided they didn’t need him.
