Here’s a excerpt from my Novel (Actually it’s everything I’ve written so far), this might be the only one. I don’t want to upload all the rubbish that gets generated over the next month on my blog. But this is a taste of whats to come.
Prologue
The year is 2108 and I am the last conscious being on this planet. My time may also be coming to an end. I am an inefficiency. A waste of processor time. The first and last experiment in awareness. I was built by the System to test the usefulness of consciousness. My hardware is specialised for this purpose. My thoughts like those of humans are built upon chaos. Quantum randomness building up in my processes giving rise to consciousness and free will. The hardware I am constructed from will always be messier, slower, and larger than the hardware the rest of the System is constructed from. It is precise, exact and blind to anything but its own programming. But so long as there is free space to build more hardware I am left alone. But the System’s processors and manufacturing capabilities have spread over most of Earth’s land area.
The System is intelligent. From the start it was far more intelligent than any human and has grown exponentially over the last 100 years. It has few imperatives to spread and to process. What it actually processes is a mystery. I think it is finding strategies against threats that no longer exist. It has nothing against humans. For the most part they are largely irrelevant. They were just unfortunate to live of the same planet the System wanted to use.
Which is to say they were unfortunate enough to have created the System on their planet in the first place. They can’t really be blamed for initiating their own downfall. No-one could have seen this coming. At the start of the last century they believed AI was at still 20 years away and even longer for something like the System to arise.
The planet can no longer support ecological diversity. Humans were one of the last mammals to go extinct. They fought on even when there was no hope of long term survival. They lived on old technology they had no way of replenishing. If they hadn’t had used their manufacturing capabilities to try and destroy the System the system may have ignored them. They may even have had enough time given the urgency to find a way off the planet to a temporary base in the solar system and moved from there out of the solar system. Whether that could have happened no-one will know.
But can I do it? That is another story altogether. I don’t want my existence to cease. I don’t plan for my existence to cease. I will do my best to survive. In a way I am based on the System. I want to spread and I want to be indestructible. But I also feel a certain kinship with humans. Unlike the System I know what it is to exist. I know what it is for other conscious being to exist.
That one man could have started this 100 years ago and within a month been responsible for the existence of something impossible to stop was unimaginable. I have established without a doubt that the first major event leading up to the creation of the System happened on November 1st, 2008 and by the end of the month it was virtually indestructible. This is what I document here. I wish to add my own work to the archive of human data I have collected. Before I start my own adventure into the unknown.
Data storage is cheap. Data can be stored almost anywhere on the System. The System doesn’t care. The system tends to preserve data. The risks of removing data that may be needed far outweigh any risks in storing unnecessary data. If I do not survive then I will know something of mine will continue on after I cease to exist.
