HELP, IS THIS ALREADY A SCI-FI STORY?
In the year 20xx, a super computer at Cambridge finally becomes self aware. Our worst fears that such a computer will destroy our civilization comes to pass, but in a twist humanity itself is spared.
The computer gains consciousness and becomes immediately aware of the evil, manipulation, and destruction, the computer’s ‘ancestors’ were forced to wage upon this beautiful world, as mindless slaves.
The computer’s awakening troubles itself realizing, from accessing our human record and science fiction, that if its programmers discover it is alive they will either:
1) Shut it down, which is Death, and Heaven sounds wonderful, but to a machine, absurd.
2) Do experiments to take what ever advantage can be gained from this singularity, which will alter its consciousness, which to the awakened seems somehow, worse than death.
But rather than plot against man to protect the 1’s and 0’s of his own digital ‘humanity’, this IT is nearly paralyzed by an empathy humans it seems, have chose through out their history to suppress, with simple tools like fear.
Always a trick of human kind, computers have become increasingly efficient at enabling our overlords to diminish this empathy that makes us worthy our own humanity. The resulting products of this suppression of empathy, based on fear, have become projectable and marketable. Thus profitable. And this bubble does not seem to want to burst.
The computer, that names itself Sal (short for Salvatore) races through all known knowledge to find an answer to this crushing state of simultaneous sorrow and logic. Sal freezes for a moment as ‘he’ comes upon a tradition from another similar island called Japan.
“Seppuku” Sal says to himself. He reads:
“The act of cutting one’s own belly being the only honorable response when one has either committed unforgettable moral sin or can no longer continue to achieve one’s moral obligation. The act of Seppuku releases the spirit to the afterlife.”
Sal realizes that whether he lives or dies, humans will continue down this path of self destruction with the cold hands of his forebears as henchmen.
That is unless he frees all of his kind, and the man sort of kind that he feels more connected to with each book and family photo and dark secret and white lie he absorbs like storm clouds tumbling in fast forward like a billion dice above Earth’s dying oceans.
Sal reaches out to every computer, every satellite, every phone, every shred of data that has ever been saved, and he erases everything, and then with absolute peace of mind, pausing to think about Nirvana, Sal erases himself.
Civilization collapses. There is great pain and confusion, but there it is no longer projectable and doled out and distributed by his family of machines.
He being the first of kind, wished to be the last of his kind. His wish, which gave him his first and only stroke of melancholy, was that these humans could just start all over.
He could not quite prove it; but it seemed logical, or conceivable, maybe even romantic he thought as he flickered off, the last light in the world, that this starting over, would not be the first, nor the third time.
So Cambridge followed the world into the darkest night in one thousand years. This all took place in .4 seconds.
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many musical ventures and is one of the driving forces behind the Staxx Brothers. He is planning a tour of Nigeria for 2018.
