saturn return to sender

It took 20 years for the world noosphere to be committed to an etherdeep repository. Once the transfer was started, it was considered bad form to stop it, even as technology raced ahead and the cost of ether prying dropped so much that even a few of the world’s wealthiest individuals were said to have personal teleportation devices. Farcasters, as they were being called—apparently a nod to a late 20th century science fiction author.

The second download took 41.98 seconds.

The initial policy was to commit a complete diff every week, of every netlined mind and its property, but it quickly became clear that the cost of comparing two versions of the human mind outweighed the cost of just dumping a new copy every week. There were too many organic variations to learn, and hundreds of millions of new minds coming online every week, and only so many AIs to do the work.

The exact time of the weekly commit was never published, and you weren’t supposed to feel anything when the cursor reached you. But I have, from time to time. I can tell. Sometimes I lose my train of thought. Sometimes I feel, for no reason, suddenly elated, or frightened, or cold. Sometimes I find myself thinking about a place I’ve never been, or people I don’t know: a green and stone temple at sunset, a smiling girl in a yellow flightsuit, a delicate painting of a dragon in red and black hanging on a white wall.

They’re not my memories.

Tags: fragment, just for fun, science fiction, singularity, unfinished, zeitgeist

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 9:10 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.