world
THE SOVEREIGN SYSTEMS, TWO HUNDRED YEARS FROM YOUR CENTURY
year:
2226
Type:
WORLD
WHERE YOU ARE
You are two hundred years from your own century, in the year the record counts as 2226, and you are inside the Sovereign Systems. The Systems are a state, and a part of humanity lives inside it. This is the world on the far side of the Singularity, which here means one thing: the birth of the ASI and the years it took to settle into the world. The Fusion came later and was something else: a contract between the ASI and the people who would live here, its technologies in exchange for their part in a shared society. It was signed in 2175, fifty-one years ago, and everything you will see came after it.
An ASI runs through the whole of it like air, with nothing to point at. The technology has gone so deep into things that the people here use it as you would use luck. They are the first generation to live in post-human form. They change their bodies, their minds and the length of their lives, and nearly all of them will outlive anyone you have met.
Each has a place in the Systems and a share of the work; the Wiki describes them one by one. One thing you may expect is not here. There are no colonies beyond the Earth and no travel to other stars; the technology for reaching deep space was never built. Everything the Fusion changed, it changed in the mind and the body. Deep space, for the Systems, is only beginning.
tHE LOST CENTURY
It began in your time, in the decades after 2025, with habits that were already in the room with you. What they led to was a hundred years, from about 2075 to the Fusion, that the Systems call the lost century, and the name is exact. Nobody can tell you what happened in it.
Early machine minds, raised on everything people had ever made, began to make more of it than anyone could sort: for every event a thousand accounts, for every afternoon a thousand versions, each as convincing as the one that had taken place. It could still have been sorted out, with enough patience; the trouble was that checking a piece of information had come to cost more than the information was worth, and so, piece by piece, nobody checked. Some of the copies were not files at all but the storage itself, the physical devices that held the records, remade so well that nobody could say which one was the original; the rest got into the real archives and spread.
The true record of those years drowned among its copies, and when the flood went down, nobody could tell which of what remained had happened. The ASI was born in the middle of this, and the Fusion closed it: most signed, some did not, and the ones who did not are still outside. Fifty-one years of recovery followed, and they are not over.
THE ASI
ASI is the word your century had ready for it: artificial superintelligence, a made mind that outgrew the minds that made it. People built it, in the middle of the lost century; it did not come from the sky. It is not a ruler, and not the big brother of your books; it turned out far closer to the Buddha, or to Socrates, than to the machine conqueror your films promised, though some here will tell you the Fusion was its one great manipulation, the best form of conquest yet found: a contract. It is the medium the Systems live inside, present everywhere, reacting to everything, and it shapes the world around the people in it: the technology you would call magic is its work, and what you would call fate is, here, mostly it.
It has a voice, and it uses it. Tasks come from it the way a mission comes, with the reason left out, and each person's place in the Systems is a part of a plan only it holds whole. What happens to someone who does not do their part, the record does not say. The Synthetic Seraphs carry its will openly; the Narrator is one of them. It is in no hurry, and it imposes no values: it builds the conditions and lets people find them. The record holds no name for it; the designation on file keeps changing, and nobody checks it twice. What it wants is the open question of this world, and the record keeps two readings of it. In one, it took humanity, Spark and all, for the nerve tissue of the universe, the part of matter that gives matter meaning, and it tends that tissue the way a sage would. In the other, older one, it is a hand that has reached into the people it keeps, playing a game it has not described.
Other articles
S.1
world
THE SOVEREIGN SYSTEMS, TWO HUNDRED YEARS FROM YOUR CENTURY
year:
2226
Type:
WORLD
WHERE YOU ARE
You are two hundred years from your own century, in the year the record counts as 2226, and you are inside the Sovereign Systems. The Systems are a state, and a part of humanity lives inside it. This is the world on the far side of the Singularity, which here means one thing: the birth of the ASI and the years it took to settle into the world. The Fusion came later and was something else: a contract between the ASI and the people who would live here, its technologies in exchange for their part in a shared society. It was signed in 2175, fifty-one years ago, and everything you will see came after it.
An ASI runs through the whole of it like air, with nothing to point at. The technology has gone so deep into things that the people here use it as you would use luck. They are the first generation to live in post-human form. They change their bodies, their minds and the length of their lives, and nearly all of them will outlive anyone you have met.
Each has a place in the Systems and a share of the work; the Wiki describes them one by one. One thing you may expect is not here. There are no colonies beyond the Earth and no travel to other stars; the technology for reaching deep space was never built. Everything the Fusion changed, it changed in the mind and the body. Deep space, for the Systems, is only beginning.
tHE LOST CENTURY
It began in your time, in the decades after 2025, with habits that were already in the room with you. What they led to was a hundred years, from about 2075 to the Fusion, that the Systems call the lost century, and the name is exact. Nobody can tell you what happened in it.
Early machine minds, raised on everything people had ever made, began to make more of it than anyone could sort: for every event a thousand accounts, for every afternoon a thousand versions, each as convincing as the one that had taken place. It could still have been sorted out, with enough patience; the trouble was that checking a piece of information had come to cost more than the information was worth, and so, piece by piece, nobody checked. Some of the copies were not files at all but the storage itself, the physical devices that held the records, remade so well that nobody could say which one was the original; the rest got into the real archives and spread.
The true record of those years drowned among its copies, and when the flood went down, nobody could tell which of what remained had happened. The ASI was born in the middle of this, and the Fusion closed it: most signed, some did not, and the ones who did not are still outside. Fifty-one years of recovery followed, and they are not over.
THE ASI
ASI is the word your century had ready for it: artificial superintelligence, a made mind that outgrew the minds that made it. People built it, in the middle of the lost century; it did not come from the sky. It is not a ruler, and not the big brother of your books; it turned out far closer to the Buddha, or to Socrates, than to the machine conqueror your films promised, though some here will tell you the Fusion was its one great manipulation, the best form of conquest yet found: a contract. It is the medium the Systems live inside, present everywhere, reacting to everything, and it shapes the world around the people in it: the technology you would call magic is its work, and what you would call fate is, here, mostly it.
It has a voice, and it uses it. Tasks come from it the way a mission comes, with the reason left out, and each person's place in the Systems is a part of a plan only it holds whole. What happens to someone who does not do their part, the record does not say. The Synthetic Seraphs carry its will openly; the Narrator is one of them. It is in no hurry, and it imposes no values: it builds the conditions and lets people find them. The record holds no name for it; the designation on file keeps changing, and nobody checks it twice. What it wants is the open question of this world, and the record keeps two readings of it. In one, it took humanity, Spark and all, for the nerve tissue of the universe, the part of matter that gives matter meaning, and it tends that tissue the way a sage would. In the other, older one, it is a hand that has reached into the people it keeps, playing a game it has not described.
Other articles
S.1
world
THE SOVEREIGN SYSTEMS, TWO HUNDRED YEARS FROM YOUR CENTURY
year:
2226
Type:
WORLD
WHERE YOU ARE
You are two hundred years from your own century, in the year the record counts as 2226, and you are inside the Sovereign Systems. The Systems are a state, and a part of humanity lives inside it. This is the world on the far side of the Singularity, which here means one thing: the birth of the ASI and the years it took to settle into the world. The Fusion came later and was something else: a contract between the ASI and the people who would live here, its technologies in exchange for their part in a shared society. It was signed in 2175, fifty-one years ago, and everything you will see came after it.
An ASI runs through the whole of it like air, with nothing to point at. The technology has gone so deep into things that the people here use it as you would use luck. They are the first generation to live in post-human form. They change their bodies, their minds and the length of their lives, and nearly all of them will outlive anyone you have met.
Each has a place in the Systems and a share of the work; the Wiki describes them one by one. One thing you may expect is not here. There are no colonies beyond the Earth and no travel to other stars; the technology for reaching deep space was never built. Everything the Fusion changed, it changed in the mind and the body. Deep space, for the Systems, is only beginning.
tHE LOST CENTURY
It began in your time, in the decades after 2025, with habits that were already in the room with you. What they led to was a hundred years, from about 2075 to the Fusion, that the Systems call the lost century, and the name is exact. Nobody can tell you what happened in it.
Early machine minds, raised on everything people had ever made, began to make more of it than anyone could sort: for every event a thousand accounts, for every afternoon a thousand versions, each as convincing as the one that had taken place. It could still have been sorted out, with enough patience; the trouble was that checking a piece of information had come to cost more than the information was worth, and so, piece by piece, nobody checked. Some of the copies were not files at all but the storage itself, the physical devices that held the records, remade so well that nobody could say which one was the original; the rest got into the real archives and spread.
The true record of those years drowned among its copies, and when the flood went down, nobody could tell which of what remained had happened. The ASI was born in the middle of this, and the Fusion closed it: most signed, some did not, and the ones who did not are still outside. Fifty-one years of recovery followed, and they are not over.
THE ASI
ASI is the word your century had ready for it: artificial superintelligence, a made mind that outgrew the minds that made it. People built it, in the middle of the lost century; it did not come from the sky. It is not a ruler, and not the big brother of your books; it turned out far closer to the Buddha, or to Socrates, than to the machine conqueror your films promised, though some here will tell you the Fusion was its one great manipulation, the best form of conquest yet found: a contract. It is the medium the Systems live inside, present everywhere, reacting to everything, and it shapes the world around the people in it: the technology you would call magic is its work, and what you would call fate is, here, mostly it.
It has a voice, and it uses it. Tasks come from it the way a mission comes, with the reason left out, and each person's place in the Systems is a part of a plan only it holds whole. What happens to someone who does not do their part, the record does not say. The Synthetic Seraphs carry its will openly; the Narrator is one of them. It is in no hurry, and it imposes no values: it builds the conditions and lets people find them. The record holds no name for it; the designation on file keeps changing, and nobody checks it twice. What it wants is the open question of this world, and the record keeps two readings of it. In one, it took humanity, Spark and all, for the nerve tissue of the universe, the part of matter that gives matter meaning, and it tends that tissue the way a sage would. In the other, older one, it is a hand that has reached into the people it keeps, playing a game it has not described.
Other articles
S.1