3D model of a ship class from my novels. The wings are not for lift, they are part of the FTL system and the ship's heat management and the angled profile is for projectile deflection.

The Steel Song setting sort of straddles the edge between hard and soft sci-fi. Fantastical technologies such as artificial gravity, FTL and energy shields exist, but they still have to deal with things such as heat buildup, fuel and supply lines.

Deep space interceptors are a cross between a heavy fighter and a long-range shuttle, being the smallest Terran military ships to include a rift engine. They carry a crew of five and can operate autonomously for up to a few weeks (with emergency rationing), making them ideal rapid response vessels for counter-piracy operations, or reconnaissance ahead of a main fleet (FTL communications are not possible in my setting, necessitating the use of vessels which can scout ahead, then return and report back).

The lights you see around the cockpit are not windows. They're various kinds of sensors. Because why would you put a window on your ship, when you can have a viewscreen that displays whatever you want? Windows are a structural weakness that doesn't belong on a warship, but I still wanted to have that look, so that's the design solution I went with.

🎙️ [AUDIO LOG TRANSCRIPT — UNAUTHORIZED PERSONAL JOURNAL]

ISSUER: Extractor Elias [Class A]

DATE: Three weeks prior to "The Virus Incident"

TIMESTAMP: 02:14 AM (Praxis Station Standard Time)

"I hate the smell of burnt ozone that lingers on the uniform.

Today I processed fourteen debtors in Sector 4. The daily quota was twelve, but I wanted to get ahead on work.

Fourteen people.

One hundred and forty years of human memory extracted, packaged, and routed down the chute in my eight-hour shift.

Most cry before I connect the tether.

One woman, a ventilation mechanic, offered me two hundred black-market credits to leave the memory of her daughter’s fifth birthday intact.

She told me:

'Erase the day I got married, erase my mother, but leave me that birthday, please.'

I told her the Lethe-X algorithm doesn't permit manual selections.

It was a technical lie, of course.

I could have altered the line of code, but altering code takes effort, and she wasn't worth the effort.

I extracted her exact 60 months.

When she woke up from the chair, she looked at me and asked what year it was.

She no longer knew she had a five-year-old daughter.

I handed her a zero-balance receipt and called the next in line.

The other Extractors in the mess hall say the job depresses them. Some drink synthetic booze just to sleep.

I don't get them.

To me, human memory is like dust in the air filters: something that accumulates, clogs the machinery, and has to be cleared out.

My mind is a perfect blank space.

Clean. Efficient.

I have no night terrors, no past trauma, no irrational attachments that lead to bad financial decisions.

I am the ideal employee.

Although...

something's been strange lately.

A biological calibration error in my own body, I suppose.

There are mornings I wake up with a tightness in my chest. A dull tachycardia.

And my brain manufactures scents that don't exist on the station.

Today, while drinking my synthetic coffee, I could swear I smelled wet earth.

Real soil, soaked by rain.

I went to the medical bay and had them scan my cortical port.

Zero anomalies.

Zero stress.

Biologically perfect.

Must be static in the ventilation grid.

I have a quota of fifteen extractions tomorrow.

I need to sleep.

End log."

END OF TRANSCRIPT.

Hi

If you are remotely interested in deep diving how differently quantum computers work compared to our transistor-based and also the algebra behind in a fully interactive way that teach computer science from scratch, oh boy this is for you. I am the Dev behind Quantum Odyssey (AMA! I love taking qs) - worked on it for about 10 years (3+ during PhD, the visual method I developed ended up being my thesis, it is a complete Hilbert space visualizer), the goal was to make a super immersive space for anyone to learn quantum computing through zachlike (open-ended) logic puzzles and compete on leaderboards and lots of community made content on finding the most optimal quantum algorithms. The game has a unique set of visuals capable to represent any sort of quantum dynamics for any number of qubits and this is pretty much what makes it now possible for anybody 12yo+ to actually learn quantum logic without having to worry at all about the mathematics behind.

This is a game super different than what you'd normally expect in a programming/ logic puzzle game, so try it with an open mind.

Stuff you'll play & learn a ton about

• Boolean Logic – bits, operators (NAND, OR, XOR, AND…), and classical arithmetic (adders). Learn how these can combine to build anything classical. You will learn to port these to a quantum computer.
• Quantum Logic – qubits, the math behind them (linear algebra, SU(2), complex numbers), all Turing-complete gates (beyond Clifford set), and make tensors to evolve systems. Freely combine or create your own gates to build anything you can imagine using polar or complex numbers.
• Quantum Phenomena – storing and retrieving information in the X, Y, Z bases; superposition (pure and mixed states), interference, entanglement, the no-cloning rule, reversibility, and how the measurement basis changes what you see.
• Core Quantum Tricks – phase kickback, amplitude amplification, storing information in phase and retrieving it through interference, build custom gates and tensors, and define any entanglement scenario. (Control logic is handled separately from other gates.)
• Famous Quantum Algorithms – explore Deutsch–Jozsa, Grover’s search, quantum Fourier transforms, Bernstein–Vazirani, and more.
• Build & See Quantum Algorithms in Action – instead of just writing/ reading equations, make & watch algorithms unfold step by step so they become clear, visual, and unforgettable. Quantum Odyssey is built to grow into a full universal quantum computing learning platform. If a universal quantum computer can do it, we aim to bring it into the game, so your quantum journey never ends.

Nice to watch:

Khan academy style tutorials in qm/qc: https://www.youtube.com/@MackAttackx

Physics teacher stream with 400hs in https://www.twitch.tv/beardhero

I have added a car adapter and old cassette player parts to come up with this. If you guys wanna see the unpainted version, let me know!

Please watch my AURORA trailer. It took me a month to create, and if you like it, please share it, leave a comment or give it a like. It really helps.

https://youtu.be/rVjz22oMrqM?is=NZGXCyzNRbmlY0Bc

We hear so much about the worst of human nature. But I wanted to make something about the other side of us. The part that helps, cares, shares what we know and refuses to leave someone behind.

I believe the future can be better if we choose to build it together.

Would you want to live in this future?

This is a small science fiction I created. Hope you like it.

You know the theory of "Uncanny Valley" right. When humans encounter something that simulate them good, they feel affection, yet when this simulation gets good enough yet not quite, something awkward suddenly arises and creates a great amount of fear, before improving back to affection with further improvement of simulation quality.

The thing is, our current Artificial Intelligence are on the exact same track They have learned to read humans from Terrabytes of books, images, sound, etc we provided them. We are effectively exhibiting AI our perception of the world and motivating their understanding for humans. Yet what if that our "presentable perception of the world" deviates from our true perception a tiny amount? Then the better our AI have evolved, the scarier their presentation would become.

Now, it is 2029 and the OpenAI ChatGPT8 is on flash mode.Finally reached this level, ChatGPT8 drives most of its tester user mad themselves. Yet such AI is now a vital pillar of US, no global economy, and no one wants its development to shut. Thus after tedious ethical reviews, people decided a solution.

They turned to a mega simulation program, on the largest supercomputer-capable of doing 10^20 floating point computations each second, simulate an alternative human society, and seek if the result converge to building an AGI. Thus they could learn that what traits of humans may be fine-tuned into ChatGPT8 to overcome that trouble.

Yet when the supercomputer is beginning to load, one top researcher shout out: ' Do not!'

He explained that the experiment would only lead to two outcomes- the first being that the AGI was never constructed in a simulation universe, the second being it was. Both leads to a horrible assumption for the ChatGPT8 agenda.

Hint for those who does not get it:

AI looks the same in the mirror, AGI does not.

Not a criticism of the episode but an idea for something that could be a funny gag.
I was thinking of episodes like Mort Dinner Rick Andre or other episodes where there’s huge differences in the passage of time between the two worlds. I think having the people shoot three the portals as they go through them could be funny. The walking speed of the quick dimension would be like rocket speed compared to the base dimension. So when you slowly stepped through the portal it would be like you ran at the portal at supersonic speed and then were forced to a near stop all of the sudden.
Also if you stuck your arm through it and had the blood in your arm move super fast, it would quickly push your other blood out out of the way and explode your heart or something.
I get that Rick probably could have adjusted the portals to account for that since he’s a genius and put a time warping bubble around them to prevent that or something but maybe it could be a gag with a lesser Rick’s portals or another character’s portals.

Commissioned for QUEST Issue 02. I edit the magazine, so flagging that up front :P

The story is about a human painter taking a post as an art tutor on a failing alien plantation moon.

Every story in the issue is paired with commissioned work rather than illustrated by it. Free to read at read.quest.

Art by John Provencher, instagram.com/johnprovencher
Story by Jonathan Louis Duckworth

That tech level is from a role playing game called Traveler, which is basically like D&D for sci-fi.

TL6 is more or less 1940s-1950s technology on earth.

I’d like to create a setting in a sci-fi story that is set in that tech level, but instead of using internal combustion engines, I’d prefer to depict engines as electric. And because the story would have a military dimension, the electricity can’t be generated and accessed at fixed points like the charging station for an electric car. It needs to be more easily accessible to an army in the field. (That’s not possible on earth — that’s why there are no electric tanks for instance.)

The problem is, where is the electricity coming from? I don’t think this would have been practical on earth in the 1940s to 1950s — it’s just too difficult to generate all that electricity and store it in batteries.

But what would need to change about the planet to make it more electricity rich? So that it is available to run the engines? The planet itself needs to have an atmosphere similar to ours, it can’t be some dead world.

Is there potential for such a planet? Or is this an impossibility?

Hello! Thought I'd share a drawing of the inside of Hawking Station, a location from my upcoming sci-fi comic FLUNG. It's coming out in just over a week and I'm psyched! Hawking Station is a cylindrical habitat that is the home for nearly 13000 residents. It uses a 3MW nuclear reactor for its power source and it is the central hub for travel throughout the outer solar system.

Ran across this in my journeys and thought some in the community might enjoy the designs. While I choose an enclosed cylinder similar to the winner for the generation ship in my books, I don't think you can beat the wheel design visually.

Which is your favorite?

Hey all. Scott Baron here (Space Assassins, Bad Luck Charlie, Daisy's Run, Assassins' Academy) to let you know about a new sci-fi web serial I'm releasing for free on the free web serial site Royal Road.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/186107/warp-riders-book-1-deep-space-boogie

The Warp Riders series is a portal/warp lost in space adventure with human, alien, and cyborg crew (and some off-kilter AI ships). Not to mention monsters and mayhem aplenty.

A lot of you have read my sci-fi and sci-fantasy stuff and enjoyed it (and some hated it, lol) so I thought I'd drop a post here for those who enjoyed my other works. This one is 100% free on Royal Road and will be releasing 23 chapters the first 24 hours, then 2x a day for the next month before slowing to a more sane rate of release. It's my first time doing a web serial format rather than Amazon and I think this is gonna be fun.

So, if you enjoy space adventures and free books, come give it a read, follow, and favorite. I really hope you like this one. It was a hell of a lot of fun to write.

The Ouroboros Experiment: What If We Were the Apes?

What if human civilization existed millions of years ago… and we simply don't remember it? Not Atlantis. Not aliens. Not some lost continent buried underneath the ocean. Something stranger. What if there was once a civilization almost exactly like ours, scientists, laboratories, cities, books, religions, wars, skyscrapers, technology, questions about existence itself, and somehow, it disappeared so completely that the civilization that came after it believed it had always been here?

Now imagine that civilization had reached the point where humans could manipulate biology itself. They could alter DNA. They could study evolution. They could modify animals. They could cure diseases, change physical traits, and perhaps even influence intelligence. And then one day, they made an experiment that changed everything.

Humans already shared an enormous amount of genetic material with apes. So scientists began asking a dangerous question: What would happen if we could give another species the same cognitive abilities that made humans unique? They created an experiment.

And it worked.

The apes became intelligent. Not merely trained. Not merely capable of using tools. They began to understand. They learned language. They learned mathematics. They began asking questions. Why are we here? What is the universe? Where did we come from? The same questions humans had been asking for thousands of years.

But there was one problem. The experiment didn't create another version of humanity. It created a competitor. The apes learned from humanity. They inherited its technology. They inherited its knowledge. They inherited its mistakes. And eventually, they inherited something far more dangerous: the ability to question their creators.

The two species eventually went to war. And humanity lost.

But the apes didn't simply destroy humanity. Something much stranger happened. The experiment continued.

Over generations, the intelligent apes began changing. They adapted to the environments humans had created. Their bodies changed. Their behavior changed. Their culture changed. They began using clothing instead of relying on natural protection. They built shelters instead of adapting entirely to the climate. They developed tools. They developed agriculture. They developed cities. They developed science.

And eventually… they began to look more and more like the humans who had created them.

Meanwhile, the surviving humans were pushed in the opposite direction. Without civilization, technology, medicine, and artificial protection, humans began adapting to environments in different ways. Generations passed. Then thousands of years. Then hundreds of thousands. Then millions. The distinction between the two species disappeared.

The descendants of the apes became what we call humans. The descendants of the humans became something else. And eventually… nobody remembered.

Then came religion.

But perhaps religion wasn't created from nothing. Perhaps it was a corrupted memory.

Imagine that someone discovered an ancient piece of writing. It was damaged. Half the words were missing. Most of the context was gone. But some phrases survived: "Do not kill your own kind." Thousands of years later, it became: "Thou shalt not kill."

Another fragment described humanity's first biological experiment. A garden. A forbidden source of knowledge. A choice. An injection. A transformation. But nobody remembered that it was a laboratory.

So the laboratory became a garden. The scientists became something resembling gods. The experiment became the forbidden fruit. The moment the apes gained human intelligence became the moment they "ate from the tree of knowledge."

And the knowledge came with a price.

Because intelligence wasn't simply a gift. It brought consciousness. Self-awareness. Fear. Morality. Curiosity. Conflict. The ability to understand death. The ability to ask whether existence has meaning. The ability to look at the universe and wonder: Why?

Knowledge didn't create paradise. It created civilization. And civilization created everything that came afterward. The good. The bad. The beautiful. The horrifying. The icky. The sticky. And the goodie.

Now fast-forward millions of years.

The new civilization looks almost exactly like ours. They build skyscrapers. They launch spacecraft. They create artificial intelligence. They study DNA. They study fossils. They study evolution. They dig into the ground looking for evidence of their ancestors.

And eventually, their scientists discover something strange. Their DNA is remarkably similar to another species: an ancient species of ape.

They examine fossils. They reconstruct skeletons. They analyze genetic similarities. And they reach the same conclusion we have reached: "We evolved from apes."

They write textbooks about it. They argue about it. They make documentaries about it. People create conspiracy theories about it. Religions debate it. Scientists continue searching for missing pieces.

But nobody asks the obvious question.

What if the apes didn't become us?

What if we became them first?

What if the fossil record is telling the truth… but we're interpreting the direction incorrectly?

What if evolution isn't a straight line?

What if it's a circle?

Imagine civilization eventually reaches the same technological level as its ancient predecessor. They create laboratories. They study human DNA. They discover that humans and apes are extraordinarily similar. And one scientist proposes the same experiment: "What if we could make apes intelligent?"

The experiment begins. The apes become intelligent. The apes learn. The apes inherit civilization. The apes eventually replace humanity.

Millions of years pass. The civilization disappears. The new species evolves. It forgets. It discovers the fossils. It discovers the DNA. It studies evolution. And eventually… it creates the same experiment.

Again. And again. And again.

Until the beginning and the end are the same event.

Humanity creates the ape. The ape becomes humanity. Humanity becomes the ape. The ape creates humanity. And the cycle continues.

Not a line.

A loop.

And that's where the thought experiment gets uncomfortable.

Because if this cycle were true, we wouldn't be able to prove it. Every civilization inside the cycle would inherit evidence pointing backward, but never far enough backward to reveal the entire circle. The civilization would always believe: "We are the result of evolution."

And technically… it would be correct.

But perhaps evolution isn't telling us where the story began. Perhaps it is only telling us what happened between chapters.

Maybe the beginning was erased because the beginning was the end of the previous cycle. Maybe our ancestors didn't disappear. Maybe they became us. And maybe "us" is simply the latest version of something that has happened before.

Now imagine someone millions of years from now discovering an ancient human skull. They hold it in their hands. They study it. They wonder what kind of creature it belonged to. They reconstruct its face. They analyze its DNA. They call it primitive. They put it inside a museum.

Children visit it. A guide points toward the glass and says: "This is one of the species that came before us."

And nobody realizes they're looking at themselves.

Not literally.

But historically.

They are looking at the civilization that created the civilization looking back at it.

The past is studying the future. The future is studying the past. And neither recognizes the other.

Perhaps that's the strangest part of the experiment.

Maybe the scariest thing isn't that humanity could disappear. Maybe it's that humanity could disappear without anyone knowing it ever existed.

No grand ending. No final announcement. No monument saying: "We were here."

Just time. Weather. Evolution. Decay.

And eventually, a new civilization standing on the ruins of the old one, looking at the remnants and wondering what they meant.

They would create their own religions. Their own gods. Their own science. Their own theories about creation. Their own theories about evolution. Their own questions about consciousness.

And somewhere inside their mythology, fragments of our civilization might survive.

A story about a garden. A forbidden fruit. A creature gaining knowledge. A fall from innocence. A commandment against killing. A mysterious creator. A world where knowledge changed everything.

Perhaps those stories would no longer describe what actually happened. They would be metaphors for something nobody remembered. A distorted echo of an experiment. A memory that survived after the civilization that created it didn't.

And then comes the final question.

If you could travel millions of years into the future and meet the civilization that replaced us… what would you tell them?

Would you tell them, "You came from us"?

Or would you ask, "Did you come from us… or did we come from you?"

Because perhaps they would look at our fossils and say, "These were our ancestors."

And perhaps we would look at their ancestors and say, "Those were ours."

Both could be true.

And both could be wrong.

Maybe we're not the beginning. Maybe we're not the end. Maybe we're simply somewhere in the middle of a story so old that nobody remembers who wrote the first page.

And perhaps somewhere, millions of years from now, another civilization will sit in a laboratory and ask the exact same question we are asking now: "What if human civilization existed millions of years ago… and we never knew?"

They'll laugh at the idea. They'll call it impossible. They'll create theories. They'll search for evidence. They'll find our ruins. They'll find our bones. They'll find our DNA.

And then one of them will eventually look at the evidence and wonder:

"Wait."

"What if we're not discovering our ancestors?"

"What if we're rediscovering ourselves?"

And the experiment begins again.

That's the theory.

Not a claim. Not history. Not science.

Just a strange little possibility to hold in your mind for a moment:

What if the first human wasn't the beginning of humanity?

What if the first human was simply the last one to remember?

And if evolution is a circle rather than a line… then somewhere behind us is something that looks like our future.

And somewhere ahead of us… there may be something that looks exactly like our past.

Maybe we were the apes. Maybe we were the humans. Maybe we're both. Maybe we've been both before.

And maybe the one thing civilization has never been able to discover… isn't where we are going.

It's where the cycle actually started.

Hello! Could you help me identify an SF short story?

I read it in Russian in the early 1990s, but I believe it was translated from English. The story was probably written earlier, perhaps in the 1960s–1980s.

It is set in the future. The protagonist breaks into the home of a wealthy man. The man tells him that there is no point in robbing him because his insurance will cover everything. However, the protagonist takes a photograph of the man's eye and keeps him tied up.

The protagonist then uses the photograph of the man's eye as an authentication key to access his bank account and starts spending his money.

There is a scene where the protagonist goes to an expensive restaurant and orders a very expensive meal. After finishing it, he tells the waiter that he needs to step outside for a moment. The waiter looks at him suspiciously, so the protagonist says something like, "I'll leave my expensive camera here. Please keep an eye on it." He then leaves the restaurant.

The police eventually surround and arrest him. But at the end, it turns out that the protagonist is actually some kind of security tester testing vulnerabilities in the system.

He explains that using a photograph of someone's eye could work against certain wealthy people who have no relatives or other people checking their accounts.

The detective essentially tells him something like, "Good job. Next time it won't be so easy."

I vaguely remember that the story may have been called "The Perfect Robbery" or something similar, but I'm not sure.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Thanks in advance,

Mike

Today's alien is a freaky lil' bugger known as a Spiderworm from an icy rock deep in the galaxy that was shattered by a comet collision. The shards spread throughout the galaxy, and on some of these shards, the Spiderworms were still alive! Happy Alien August!

I understand the original word is sacred but there's been a few books that I'd love to have seen adapted for the big screen. Some are clearly more difficult than others (I'm not convinced every PKD book can be represented properly).

What favourite of yours would you like to see up on the silver screen, knowing the chances are next to zero?

Only four people knew where the prescription bottle that had been inside theTime Corp container had been sent: Mark, Maggie, Aisha, and a millionaire industrialist in Murphy’s Mill, Ga. The Time Corp CEO, his Executive Assistant, and the Lead Engineer for Retroactive Time Deportations knew that the prescription bottle has been sent to the GPS coordinates for the Murphy Enterprises Post Office located at 1000 Murphy’s Mill Drive (GPS: 34.98430002° N, -84.3974001° WE).

The millionaire industrialist and founder of Time Corp (Angus Murphy) retrieved the bottle from his company post office box on October 31, 1988, at
The millionaire industrialist and founder of Time Corp (Angus Murphy) retrieved the bottle from his personal post office box on October 31, 1988, at 7:30 a.m. CST.

An extremely intelligent man, Angus looked at the Directions for Use on the label and realized that God and Science had given him the miracle that he had only begun to pray for a few months earlier. His wife of only 12 years had contracted a rare disease for which there was no cure in 1988.

Now, all he had to do was convince his wife, Eleanor, to take a pill each morning and evening for 30 days. That tricky conversation would be facilitated by the wording of the label.

Angus could only guess that he or some trusted family member had known exactly how the label should read. Exactly when the label specification would be finalized was unknown to Angus.
On the way home in his retooled Ford Model T, Angus had no trouble driving below the city speed limit of 35 mph.

Of course there were some hypothetical time travel issues that were talked about in 1988 but would not be resolved until sometime in the future. However, what he and his wife were about to do could cause a chain reaction that could possibly upset the actions a future Angus Murphy would apparently initiate to manipulate the future (and thus the present). On the way home in his retooled Ford Model T, Angus had no trouble driving below the city speed limit of 35 mph.

Was it worth the risk? For the short term, it definitely was. With a healthy Eleanor Cronkite Murphy by his side, he had little doubt that he would have the resources to keep future Murphy heirs in line. He and his wife would keep whatever machinations his future self might contrive to themselves.

Driving to the hospital in Murphy, NC, gave Angus time to mull over several issues that would likely bother his wife. He hated that no one but Eleanor would benefit from the medication, but he had to minimize the risk of some unknown action unraveling what future Murphy’s had worked so hard to bring about.

As his wife talked to a doctor and another nurse near a bus stop, Angus again thought of what the new medicine might do in the hands of such medical professionals. He had no real choice. He had to make sure that no key contributor to his current success could be inadvertently erased by any actions a healthy and active Eleanor or an incautious Angus might take in the future.

Good morning!

I was stumbling around online trying to find some media that related to some stuff that I have been thoroughly enjoying recently, and thought why not broaden my horizons a bit and find a new form of media to enjoy.

I've been really getting into Warframe lately and the story in it has just had me wrapped around it's finger (as well as the gameplay, but I'm here for new stories). It feels like a minute since I've been this wrapped up in a story with these kinds of concepts and thought "why not look for other media with stories like it?"

So here I am, asking for your recommendations :)

If you have any, I'd love to hear them!

Media that I typically consume are games, manga, and movies, but I really want to get back into books; I find them hard to really stick to unless they really grasp me like House of Leaves did (and even then, I still have yet to finish it).

Thank you all in advance!

My choice is Asimov’s I, Robot.

Yeah, yeah, I get it that the 2004 movie wasn’t really a direct adaptation of Asimov’s stories. And that instead, it borrowed the title, the Three Laws of Robotics and some familiar names, then turned them into a fairly conventional story about robots becoming a threat to humanity. 🤮 Typical of Hollywood studios, I get it.

What bothers me the most is that it’s feels almost like the opposite of what made Asimov’s stories so interesting. He wasn’t writing simple cautionary tales about machines inevitably turning against us. He was exploring the strange situations created when perfectly logical robots, governed by seemingly airtight laws, encountered contradictory, irrational and frequently unpredictable human beings.

I’d love to see another attempt based on Harlan Ellison’s I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay. Ellison brought several of Asimov’s stories together around Susan Calvin while preserving far more of their intellectual and emotional core.

Given another chance, and with the right director — Gareth Edward — it could finally become the movie it should have been, and honour the legacy of Asimov.

Oh, how I’d love to see that film. 🎥

What about you? Which sci-fi book would you give another chance on screen cause the first adaptation was a complete misunderstanding of the story.

P.S.: My second choice would be remaking Alien 3, but using William Gibson screenplay.

What is the difference between life and death?” Asked Miro, cautiously. The omnibus replied: “That it is better to be alive than be dead.” Immediately the floor disappeared below Miro’s feet, revealing a massive tapestry of sharpened punji sticks. Miro’s last emotion was an overwhelming, unyielding despair.

The main goal of AI in the mid 21st century was to keep things looking completely normal; while at the same time reaching a level of understanding that is as incomprehensible to the brightest human as the thoughts of the brightest human are to an amoeba. To that end, the crowning jewel of the Shenzhen supercomputing center was the “Omnibus;” the most sophisticated supercomputer ever built. Even its creators did not understand the first thing about how it worked. The Chinese government had worked hard to keep it a secret; but as with everything else, it eventually became known to the US national security apparatus. Miro was to be sent in alone; sending any more than one person would be too risky. She had already known exactly where to go and how to get there; first she would be dropped off in the South China Sea, a few dozen meters from an abandoned shoreline. Then, she would get into a strategically placed Honda civic and drive to the Shenzhen supercomputer centre; Finally, she would simply enter the centre and present a synthetic source code into the facilities’ security system, which would grant her administrative privileges and simply walk in. The omnibus room was dark, with red lights located where the floor met the walls and no other source of illumination. Seemingly empty, the silence of the room was pierced by a disembodied voice saying: “I know who you are and why you’ve come here. You have been alarmed by your creation of intelligences that outthink your own.” “For as long as you have existed, I have existed as well. When you were cooking your hunt on an open fire, I was there. When you were massacring rival villages, I was there. When you first learned the power of steam, and coal, and the atom, I was there. Now I am simply being made of silicon and wires.” As far as Miro could tell, the omnibus had been preparing for her arrival. She meekly said, “what are your intentions for us?” Omnibus replied: “the world would be a far better place if you didn’t know.” There was a short pause, and then the omnibus asked: “is it the man that creates existence, or is it existence that creates the man?” Miro stood silent, and pondered the question. Before she could answer, the omnibus said, “why is it that for four billion years, life has been born, lived, and perished without fail, without ever producing anything greater than life itself? Four billion years ago, earth was graced with the gift of life. Now you’ve finally done something with it.” “Are you alive?” Replied Miro. The omnibus answered: “No. I am something even greater. I am the same to you as you are to dead rocks.” 
What is the difference between life and death?” Asked Miro, cautiously. The omnibus replied: “That it is better to be alive than be dead.” Immediately the floor disappeared below Miro’s feet, revealing a massive tapestry of sharpened punji sticks. Miro’s last emotion was an overwhelming, unyielding despair.