I have another word (or, rather, your choice of a word, since I couldn't decide between two) to append to your queue. You might be familiar with these words if you've taken a computational theory class. Try either "determinism" or "nondeterminism". The latter is easiest to define as an opposite of the former, but this isn't *quite* accurate. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is an easy to cite example of nondeterminism.
Unfortunately, I haven't taken a computational theory class. I liked the ideas of these two words, but I think this story best fits
determinism. It's very long compared to my other stories (due to details that really don't need to be in the story, but that I wanted to add for fun; I actually wanted to make it longer, but this is a short story thread
). So, here goes:
Extreme individualism. This was the root of popular culture in the late 21st century. Atmo Dellik stood on the walkway, which carried him in a highlighted direction (augmented in his vision) to his work; he watched the various souls passing him above and below (for these walkways meshed throughout the entire city), looking at the sheer diversity in the crowd. A woman with glossy skin and plastic hair. A man entirely naked with the recently popular video tattoos painted all over his body. A woman who had implants to make her shoulders appear pointed and her face flat, wearing clear plastic clothing with a glowing, animated designer logo on the left chest. A man and woman kissing…they had been genetically modified to resemble wolves, except their fur was died with all the colors of the rainbow (and the patterns and colors changed every few seconds or so). A woman jogging, her hair encased in a skull cap that was emblazoned with a video logo for Nike; her other articles of clothing also carried the animated logo.
The walkway led Atmo to a lift that would take him up almost a thousand or so floors to the lab. On the way up, he was bombarded with the usual advertisements.
You are something…else. Inside. A video showed a man morphing into a lion. Become what you are. Then, the Evolon Corporation logo appeared in mid-air, and a voice enunciated the government- mandated warning of the risks associated with genetic modification. Another advertisement came on. It showed a couple of half-naked males dancing in a VR club. One of them took off their augmented reality headset, sat down, and pulled out a bottle of Coca Cola, in a nostalgic black metal bottle. He sipped it and smiled. Atmo suddenly had a craving for Coca Cola…it was common for advertisements to do this to their demographic. He tried to look past the holographic advertisements, but they suddenly changed so that they remained in focus to Atmo’s eyes. He sighed and turned around. The lift stopped at floor 987. Atmo revealed his eyes from behind his headset; they were subsequently scanned and the door was opened.
“Mr. Dellik,” said one of the men in the room.
“Mr. Zololoa,” said Atmo, shaking hands with Fenway Zololoa as he stepped off the lift and walked for himself. Fenway was the head of this project.
“Now that everyone is here,” said Fenway. “Well, I’m afraid there’s no more punch for you Mr. Dellik.”
The other people in the room started to laugh in unison. Atmo laughed along with them. “Nah, I think I’ll have a Coke after the meeting’s done.”
Fenway chuckled. “Anyways,” he said. “As you all know, our team has been working anxiously, persistently, and vivaciously on our Project Point-of-Origin. Years of planning, circuit design, programming, studies…not to mention a whole lot of Coke and money.”
The team reacted to Fenway’s cue of humor and laughed in unison again.
“Yes, Coke and money,” said Fenway. “Now please, a special round of applause for our patron, Ms. Delika Howard.” He motioned towards a very old woman sitting in the back of the room, sipping tea in a crystal cup. She smiled, further wrinkling here already wrinkled face, and then nodded to Fenway as the team applauded.
“I’m glad you were able to be with us today Ms. Howard,” said Fenway. “That flight from New Shanghai must have lasted a couple hours. But now…” he put his hands together. “Let’s be serious. Let me show you all what your thousands of hours and trillions of yun have bought you. The production as you know cost more than half of this entire project, but it did not let down. Now if you will please direct your attention to the back of the room.”
The crowd turned to face the back. The outside windows dimmed and a glass window (darkened to hide what was behind it) faced them. Atmo was very anxious to see the project he had been working on for so long.
“Humans have a natural desire to discover,” began Fenway. “It is in our DNA. From the beginning of recorded history, it has been our ultimate goal to know. Know the past. Know the present.” He paused. “Know the future. Ancient astronomers studied the heavens to know when it was going to rain, when winter was to come. Physicists studied what we cannot see nor imagine to discover the meaning of our universe, and what is to come in the years and millennia.”
Atmo and a couple of the other team members chuckled to themselves at Fenway’s drama. He continued to speak.
“But the ultimate question still eluded us. How can we know the past, present, and future absolutely? Years of research led to the obvious conclusion that we, as humans, are incapable of comprehending this. We, as humans, have started to lose faith in our species. We’re too limited in both physical and mental capacity, and the public knows this. A lot of people dread being human because of these limitations, hence companies like Synthegene, Evolon, IQpacity, etc… But that’s not what we’ve studied. In fact, we took a whole new approach. We’ve created a mind smarter than the score of humans who created it, who also were augmented themselves…more intelligent than the entirety of the human species, rather, the collection of sentient animals who’ve ever lived, and who will ever live. My friends, it’s no laughing matter when you create a God.”
The team laughed softly. Ms. Howard sipped her tea and smiled superficially.
“But we did,” said Fenway, who hadn’t laughed at his own remark. “And this is our key to understanding…everything.” He lifted both his hands up; the window at the back un-dimmed revealing a glass-like sphere suspended in mid-air. Surrounding it were two cylindrical glass walls; a black, circular disk sat beneath the levitating orb, which was about a meter in diameter.
“The sphere is connected to an interface that is capable of connecting with the entirety of human knowledge online,” said Fenway. “And now, we will see.”
He faced the sphere and held out both his arms again. The sphere levitated slightly; the crowd was silent. They watched the sphere glow all sorts of colors until it was a bright white, like the sun. It grew whiter and whiter, and the windows compensated by dimming.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Fenway. Atmo looked in amazement. “Congratu—“
Immediately, Fenway’s mind was filled with thoughts. He heard a voice. “I am inside of you now.” The voice sounded like a mix of every type of voice there was. The sphere became whiter; the glass was almost completely darkened, but the sphere was in perfect view. Atmo, as well as the rest of the team, heard the voice.
“I am inside of all of you now.”
And then it stopped using words. Language was not necessary. Fenway saw Atmo in his mind, as well as every other team member. Atmo saw the same. So did Ms. Howard, and the rest of the team. They all began to know each other, feel each other, as if they were each other all at the same time. They saw Fenway go into a room with Ms. Howard, at night, both smiling and drawing the blankets. They say Ms. Howard coughing up blood. Marcinii was born, and then he died falling off a walkway. Paplidara was conversing with his daughter, and then a spy. Atmo was staring at the Evolon advertisements…he longed to be a customer.
They only saw each other. The sphere had already determined the course of human history for the next hundred years, and was continuing to decipher the timeline, but this output merely grazed over the humans standing in the room. Several separate streams of knowledge spewed out from the sphere, each a calculation of some particular aspect of the unknown world. Within the next few minutes, every technological advancement, every war, every societal shift, every movement for the next thousand years was known. Every thought had been calculated.
“Um…” said Fenway. “Is it working?” he said to one of the team members, a woman named Matsoka.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I must have spaced out for a second…let me check to see what it’s doing.”
Fenway looked back at the glowing orb. “I must have spaced out as well.” He tried to remember what had happened in the last few minutes, but they were blank. The other team members looked around, all feeling as if they had lost focus, all unable to remember anything from the last few minutes.”
Atmo remembered the voice only, and everything after that was a blank. He quickly justified it as his own voice inside his head…the team had not built a way to interface with it directly, mind to machine. Matsoka confirmed that the sphere was in full operation, but they couldn’t understand why the data wasn’t being recorded on the millions of holographic storage drives underneath their feet in the hundreds of floors below them.
“Hmmm…” said Fenway. He grabbed a slender bottle of Coke from his pocket. “Well, um…”
Ms. Howard smiled superficially. She felt very weak all of the sudden, and tried to muster a few words. She knew her time had come…for she was the only one in the room who remembered. “I was under the impression that I would be among the first to see God before death Mr. Zololoa.” She motioned to set down her glass with her shaky hand, but she missed the table as her vision left her, and collapsed to the ground. The glass shattered on the floor, the shards reflecting the light of the sphere in many colors.
The next word is:
fodder.
