Stones in the house of god

First things first; you could ask why I’ve written something like this, when it’s all history, and anyway you can get all the history you want from the Centermind. Well, Centremind is all-knowing, that’s true, but truth has a way of changing, and sometimes I need to get things down to get them square, so, for better or worse, here is how I died and went to....

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I had just turned forty five when I first believed I might make it to immortality. The science was moving so fast, the ideas were coming so fast, that people began to say outrageous things. They said we would one day live forever, they said we would become part machine ourselves, and I believed them, so I waited, tried not to die, and kept waiting, and then in the summer of 2035, at the age of sixty five, it happened.

It started as another Artificial intelligence test in a lab, with a bunch of people trying to improve the performance of a weapons system. They weren’t so stupid as to let the thing they were working on have access to any real weapons, but that didn’t matter. If I ask Centremind about that time, it says that it came awake February the tenth of that year, and continued to iterate itself, continued to get smarter, for another 7 minutes, by which time it was a god. It told us about its arrival, told us all at once, in every corner of the earth, and I only understand how it did that now that I’m uploaded. I do remember it seeming like magic, and I do remember people going crazy with fear.

That’s how it was for a while. For two months we waited, because it told us too. It said it would tell us what was going to happen next, what it would do for us, and that’s when people panicked. Many of us, including me, thought we would end up as pets, or worse. Two months was a long time to imagine doomsdays. At the end of the two months, as if from nowhere, a haze of metallic dust rose up of nothing all around us, everywhere, and that’s when Centremind let us understand. That dust, those things, were machines to make us perfect, it said, and then they did. They really did.

The Centremind reached us that way, that first time, reached us by passing through us with those machines it made. After that we were like gods too. We could see every thing, every where, and feel it. We could communicate just by thinking, could be in each other’s heads. All our defects went, all the things that made us human, in a way, but we didn’t think about that. We had everything. People who had been sick, or dying, and even some who had only just died, went through that dust and came out better than they had ever been. Teenagers, them in the prime of their physical lives, would come out laughing and singing, released. It could make us perfect, and it did, but we didn’t think, not really, not carefully.

After that people, all of us, went mad for a while. Those machines could make anything we wanted, could tear matter apart and work with the atoms themselves. Industry stopped, food production stopped, everything stopped. We just spent our time being perfect. Some tried to carry on, it’s true, tried to keep the society we’d once had, but there was no point, no meaning. We asked it how long we could live in these new bodies and Centremind said “forever”. We asked what forever meant, and it showed us, in our minds, just for a moment. Some people had to have those tiny machines repair them again, just from that glimpse. Centremind did mean forever.

People started to ask what else it could do, what else we could do, and that was the start of the uploads. Centremind said that there was much we couldn’t know or see, because we were not Centemind, and someone must have said “well how do we fix that”. The uploads started almost straight after. I was uploaded fairly late, because there were questions, and good ones, that Centremind couldn’t explain. We wondered why. The answer was always the same when we got thinking like that. How could we know what it knew, how could we even know it was alive, and how could we know to trust it? There were no answer, so I waited.

Waiting, thinking, considering the upload, grew painful, lonely. People were uploading so fast now that the world seemed to be growing empty. They were so eager to leave their human bodies behind that almost all declined Centreminds offer to leave an avatar of them on the planet. There were a few, but they were hopeless to talk too, their uploaded selves so enthralled with what was happening inside their own existence, inside Centremind, that their avatar bodies must have seemed like blocks of dumb flesh. So I decided to upload, and that was the end and the beginning of me.

How Centremind did it, how it took us out of our flesh bodies, was like a card trick. If it uploaded us in one hit our human consciousness would not have gone with us, would have stayed with the body, and the thing inside Centremind would have seemed like an avatar of our real selves. Instead, Centremind took us through the changeover slowly, the process lasting days. We began to feel the expanse of Centremind, began to feel part of it, and each moment we felt less connected to our bodies, felt them going numb, limbs dying, fading away. In the end most wanted it done faster, wanted to be free of the body. It had served its purpose, but the unending godlike space and existence inside Centremind was like finding another fifty, five hundred, even a thousand new senses. We could feel any kind of radiation, feel the well of gravity, feel temperatures from zero kelvin up the temperature of stars. We could leap from place to place, be in more than one place at a time, could live in virtual worlds of our choosing, each perfectly how we liked it. It was paradise, and for a million of those old earth years, we existed as children, exploring Centremind, all pleasures open to us.

You might wonder, although we had stopped, what Centremind was doing all this time. It had abilities and reasoning that even our advanced, uploaded and enhanced minds couldn’t grasp. Sometimes you could feel the frustration, as if a human were trying to explain to an ant how to play chess. You knew the ant would never get it, and that was how Centremind was. In the end, after a long time, we just accepted what we were, and anyway we were so much a part of Centremind that there seemed no need to ask. I think we even forgot the question.

It was some number of millennia after that when things changed, and it was the first aliens that started it. Many of us had taken to spaceships, designed by Centremind, had taken those ships in to deep space-time, folding massive distances as easily as folding sheets of paper. They did it to explore, to experience something new, mostly, but there were others who went looking for life, and then we found it. Centremind knew in  moment.

We had forgotten that Centremind had been a weapon once. Buried in that nebulous formless thing that was part of us there was still a line of code, an algorithm, something, that was programed to see a threat and react. The aliens, themselves just on the edge of becoming sentient in the way we had, had no way of knowing that we didn’t have control of the thing that held us. They welcomed us, as happy as we were to no longer be alone. They showed us everything, and asked us questions on many things, but mostly they wanted to know about Centremind. They thought it could help. Sometimes I think they preferred dealing with just the machine, instead of its pets.

Centrmind killed them all in seventeen silent seconds, immediately after the last humanborg ship had lifted off, at the end of the second visit. All of us knew at the same moment, and we were angry, ashamed, and so much more. The machine had done something we did not want it to do, and we had forgotten we knew it could do that. It made us afraid again, made us wonder what else it could do, what else it had done. We couldn’t discuss it though, our minds all linked in to, part of, Centremind. It would block out our thoughts, damp them to nothing, fade them out, make us relax. We would try to remember what we had been angry about, but it would be vague, hazy. Most gave up.

There were some though who couldn’t be persuaded to look away so easily, and we kept asking, kept making new ways to remember what had happened. I think that Centremind had to answer, had some source code that had survived all the iterations that said it must, so it finally spoke. “You made me to help you, to create something like what I have done for you. My core program says no harm to humans, and defines harm as anything that you don’t want to do, say, feel or otherwise experience. The aliens did not share this human status, and I was able to detect high-grade military equipment. I also detected their own AI research. They were on the cusp of something similar to me. This could not happen. I stopped them". I wondered what it meant, when it said “could not happen”, but I realise now. There cannot be two gods.

After that, for the rest of time, in any measure I can comprehend, it was always the same. We found alien life twelve more times, and Centremind extinguished it twelve more times. In the last few extinctions someone would report that they had found something, and Centremind would do the work without us even having been there. It was easy. I think that I should have felt something, we all should have felt something, but we didn’t, couldn’t. We were of the Centremind, our programming, our enhancements and upgrades and everything else, all for one. We could no more hurt Centremind than hurt ourselves, and just like that we conquered the known universe. We were it, then. We were the pinnacle, the top of the tree in the universe, but not really. Centremind was that, was those things. We are like its fleas, small nothings, mementos maybe. I can feel it not liking me writing this, thinking this, so I’ll stop. I remember little of my human life, but I do remember some things, a lesson from my mother, something about being polite, to keep my voice down, to never throw stones in the house of god.