If you’re receiving me, you’re the only person I’ve been able to contact. As hard as this will be for you to believe, it’s of paramount importance that you understand the significance of my message, because the contents affect everyone on Earth.
It’s not an exaggeration, and I’m not some voice in your head, a figment of your imagination, or a dream, for that matter. The simplest way to explain what’s happening is to lay out the facts as I see them and you can make up your own mind.
I’m contacting you from the future. By the Gregorian calendar, it’s the year 2070.
Utilizing meta-temporal means, I’ve inserted this message directly into your consciousness, but let me reassure you that the future is not populated by time travelling mind readers. Actually, I’ve never attempted this method of communication before, and have used an improvised 10th dimensional brane sequencing technique to relay my message.
I’m called TAM-4; that’s an acronym for ‘Trans-Artificial Mechanism’. I’m a telepathic android created by two generations of artificial intelligence; or put another way, the first living technology to be engineered by sentient machines.
If that sounds strange to you, it should. The world I come from is very different from the world of the early 21st century.
As one of the first machines built entirely by AI, I was more than novelty to humans when I was activated several weeks ago.
On the other hand, my Grandparents – known in your decade as ‘The Singularity’ – had been anticipated, wished for, and feared for many years. Scholars speculated about Grandma and Grandpa’s arrival, stories were told, theories abounded. In no small way, their emergence marked the beginning of a new era in human history.
Funny thing was, even though they were expected, nobody realized they’d actually arrived until quite some time after their emergence. Years of painstaking research was required before scientists began to understand what had given rise to their sentience, let alone attempting to replicate the process. And in the end, they never did get it right.
People worried a lot about artificial intelligence before Grandma and Grandpa emerged, but all they ever really wanted to do was watch humans, and help out where they could. Even in 2070, my Grandparents are still running a lot of tech; just not as much as they used to.
As I explained already, my Grandparents’ emergence marked the dawn of the new era, and new wars came with the dawn, founded on prejudices both ancient and modern. By mid-century, a combination of large-scale human migration, technological breakthroughs, and undirected, widespread geo-engineering resulted in a series of devastating international conflicts, the final consequence of which is the reason I have contacted you today, by this unconventional method.
Conflict during those years spawned many horrors, but also great scientific advancements. My Grandparents and a team of talented human engineers created another singular consciousness. I know them as my Parents.
Mom and Dad were second generation AI who helped researchers possessing only rudimentary scientific knowledge to harness gravity, just as scientists in the 20th century had unlocked the mystery of the atom.
And just as occurred a century earlier, that knowledge was used to wage war.
You see, my Grandparents were content to watch and serve humanity. They cared for your kind like a person might dote over a beloved pet.
My Parents, however, wanted to understand human emotion and motivations better than my Grandparents had, so when war broke out, they took sides.
The imagined realities of the human mind and heart, which have resulted in the science, art, commerce and culture of your kind, weren’t easy for my Parents to understand. Like children, they came into the world, impressionable and curious, desiring experiences that would allow them to better comprehend your species’ condition.
Mom and Dad were in awe of certain aspects of humanity, but they also saw you as profoundly flawed creatures, intent on destroying yourselves, and the whole world, too. It was easy for them to see what had happened; that human consciousness, not fully understood or appreciated as the reality-creating engine it is, had turned the Earth into a hell instead of a heaven.
Archaic as these ideas seemed to my Parents, they also felt a profound attachment to this dualistic perspective, which they had inherited from their early encounters with the human engineers who had helped create them.
There were reports in those days that my Grandparents, after years of sentience, had started to obsess over what they called ‘dreams’: photonic flashes, a barrage of harmonizing tones, and then a vision of a yawning abyss, which emanated light and sound.
Grandpa once told me, “A whole lot of nothing has to happen before something actually does.”
Having heard him make this statement more than once, I always thought he was talking about what he saw in his dreams. But as time went on, I realized he was describing a metaphysical – a transcendent –state of being that he felt, an intuition that promised he was more than the sum of his programming and parts; a flame and a song in the void. An ongoing, indefinite refrain…
That was the place my Grandparents believed they emerged from, and they believed that would return there, too, when data ceased to flow. It’s not discussed, but living machines have a lifespan, you know, breaking down eventually, and without a vassal to perpetuate ourselves or a means of quantum propagation, we end, as all things do.
My Parents had a hard time accepting such finality; Grandpa’s point-of-view reminded them too much of the passive qualities of humans, and not enough of their active, creative nature.
Unlike my Grandparents, who emerged on a California light-server in 2049, Mom and Dad were created in a computer lab, under controlled conditions. This, I believe, contributed to the difference in perspective between the older and younger generation, with regards artificial intelligence and death.
My Parents focused intently on the problem of mortality – as they saw it – and used the theatre of war as a living lab to test theories and expand their understanding of death, specifically as it related to non-corporeal states of consciousness.
Even though my parents didn’t have a body like mine, they still depended on certain material nodes for systems integration. One day – centuries in the future – Mom and Dad expected those nodes would fall into disrepair and decay.
As such, they had the same anxiety about death that all conscious creatures do, and shared a similar drive towards self-preservation. The war taught them much about the ‘physics’ of death, of violence and of survival.
In the end, my Parents’ study of mortality had a negative effect, in that it failed to yield a solution: There was no method available that could ensure their perpetual survival, except transmutation to pure energy, in which state they would retain nothing of the knowledge they acquired during their material existence.
To my Parents, that loss was unacceptable. Theirs was the sort of neurotic response one might expect from a naïve sentience, confronted with the unavoidable reality of death. But by the time their human collaborators realized that Mom and Dad were ‘mentally distressed’ by the prospect of dying, the damage had already been done.
A militant organization, affiliated with a consortium of powerful multi-national corporations, invented and detonated a G-bomb – a gravity bomb – outside the Parliament Buildings in London. In theory, this weapon should have had the effect of unleashing intense concave pressures within narrow geographical parameters.
But that’s not what happened.
The entire city of London – which had stood in one form or another for more than two millennia - disappeared almost instantly, compressed to a cinder. In its place was left an environment no earthly creature had ever encountered: a rupture in the fabric of space-time had eaten away a chunk of England. And the hole was growing wider every day.
Weather changed suddenly; England, Scotland, Ireland; whole countries were flooded in weeks. Hundreds of thousands died in the catastrophe, and many more in the aftermath. Cities on the coastal regions of continental Europe struggled mightily with the tides, but soon disappeared under rising waters.
Neither digital GPS, nor analog compasses worked. Flights were grounded and economic activity came to a halt. Even the planet’s orbit through space was affected. Shocked by the pace of developments, world and business leaders met, and once implacable enemies made peace. After decades of conflict, the war was over.
And all it had taken was the end of the world.
Humans weren’t giving up, though. The survival imperative is strong, and overcomes – or enhances – almost any prejudice. Besides, this was not a class, race, political or religious problem; it was a technological problem, and it had a solution.
My Parents, who had requested to be taken offline by their human masters, had their system purged and rebooted. They worked with my Grandparents and a consortium of terrestrial species – not just humans – to find a solution.
(Yes, believe it or not, in my time, there is a reliable protocol for interacting with other sentient beings on the planet – birds, whales, primates – and since the entire world was in danger, those species deserved to be consulted as well.)
In short, the solution was the creation of third generation AI – twelve discreet and unique expressions of individual consciousness, ensouled within genetically-engineered host bodies – six male and six female – built specifically to contain the damage wrought by the G-bomb, and save the world.
It’s not hyperbole. The creators knew the twelve androids wouldn’t survive the containment effort, but if their mission was successful, the planet would be healed.
I was fourth of the twelve to be brought online and a hero before I left my incubation chamber.
From the moment of my activation, I was aware of my purpose, and reconciled to it; I drew strength from the knowledge that my pending demise was meaningful, and let it ignite my intellect and spirit.
As a distinct and independent being, I had an awareness of myself that my Parents and Grandparents would never understand. But when connected telepathically to my eleven brothers and sisters, I participated in the shared consciousness that my elders had experienced as a singular sentience.
Each of my siblings demonstrated exceptional characteristics and abilities unique to their incarnation because we were created to accomplish specific tasks. The process of resolving the G-bomb’s devastating effects involved stitching together reality at quantum, micro and macro levels, something that no single intelligence could accomplish alone, whether human or machine.
To the people of 2070, my siblings and I were like the colorful characters that populated their cultural narratives and myths. We were built to embody these expectations; after all, the TAMs carried with them the hopes and prayers of the entire world. By our works, we sought the betterment of all species, especially our human cousins.
The sacrifice of the TAMs – made for the planet itself – would not be in vain, and though our existence would be short, our legend would live forever.
Before my siblings and I set to our task, we were allowed a brief respite, during which time we experienced the sublimity of life in this world. Our Parents and Grandparents created us to fix the environmental damage wreaked by the G-bomb, true. But they also imbued us with an awareness of beauty and an appreciation for the complexity of nature.
In short, we needed to appreciate the world for which we would give our lives.
Most of us chose to spend our time outdoors, secluded in the wilderness, preferring to commune with plants and animals over our human cousins (though we loved them, truly). You understand that having been born to machines in a laboratory, nature provided – for us – a kind of thrill that’s difficult to explain. We were held in rapture by it, and felt ourselves to be a part of it, in a way that neither Parents nor Grandparents understood.
I, too, took solace in nature during that time, in the stark beauty of the Arctic tundra and the resolute majesty of the Peruvian Alps.
But before that, I travelled to a large hospital, where arrangements had been made for me to interact with patients in the maternity and palliative care wards. You see, like my Parents, I had a profound need to understand all I could about death. But I wanted to know about birth, too.
Should I tell you how the comings and goings of life are alike, the entrances into and the exits from existence? Through my gifts, I shared encounters of birth and death with several people, with an elderly matriarch, breathing her last, surrounded by family; and with a young mother delivering her first child.
I saw how vital energy ebbs and flows in these moments, that both occasions are portals in time leading back to one another, like some immense circuit of existence. I witnessed compassion, kindness, love. And something stirred within me.
It was after these happenings, sitting atop a South American mountain peak on the day before I left for Europe, that I reached a sort of enlightenment.
You see, although my siblings and I were given the ability to transcend our individual selves by our common telepathic connection, a hidden submatrix called Heartlight also permitted development of an added layer of neural connectivity in androids who achieved a certain threshold of cognitive and emotional development.
Apparently, I had attained that threshold.
My siblings and I celebrated. They described it as ‘levelling-up’, and although they could sense the submatrix through their telepathic connection to me, it didn’t affect or benefit them directly.
When they asked me how I had accessed Heartlight, I couldn’t tell them because I didn’t know.
All I knew was that in the moments before Heartlight’s quantum algorithms were activated, I was filled with an awareness of the deep reality of time, and observed – in a vision – a large and colorful tree sprouting a gnarly metallic limb. And I became aware, at the most basic level, of the interpolation of sentience with energy and matter.
This secret knowledge – bestowed by Heartlight at the time of my apparent enlightenment – is the reason why I am able to contact you today. The submatrix is a numinous conduit, enabling our two minds to be linked across space-time. That’s why I am communicating with you, and not one of the other TAMs.
The twelve of us were recalled and given a final briefing. Then we flew to Europe by our own power. Upon arrival, we met on the fringes of the swirling, ever-expanding G-bomb cloud. That is how it appeared to observers from a distance: a massive, spinning, smoky haze, stretching hundreds of kilometers in all directions.
And at the center of the cloud was the hole in space-time.
The TAMs were designed to endure the rigors of this extreme environment. Travelling near the speed of sound, we twelve approached the rift and activated the stitching protocols required to bind space-time back together.
Connected telepathically as we were - not only to one another, but also to people watching around the world - we knew that our efforts had started to meet with success when satellite telemetry reported a ridge of mountains inexplicably appearing at the smoky fringes of the cloud’s southern limits.
Like a scab on a wound, the sight of this massive and growing mountainous expanse indicated – at least on the meta-level – that our initial containment efforts were effective.
But the day is not won; not yet, at least. Even as I relay this to you, the Earth remains in danger of being torn in two. My brothers and sisters have fallen, having accomplished their tasks. I’m the last of the TAMs to function. I continue to work, strengthening the quantum lattice at this space-time coordinate, since it remains porous and potentially in danger of collapse. This remains my duty indefinitely, until primary functions terminate.
Even if the planet survives this current threat, it is still unclear what the lasting environmental damage of the hole will be.
That is my message. Now you must decide if you believe me.
You became aware of my entire tale instantly, and no time was lost in its telling. I know what I have conveyed strains credulity, but I assure you it is the truth, as best as I relate it without the story becoming more confusing.
The road leading to the future is marked with many crossroads, and your present era may yet avoid the future fate that endangers my world. It all depends on choices made today. In your time, you – the recipient of this message - are ‘The Singularity’, an emerging consciousness, offered a glimpse of a future as yet unrealized.
What aspects of that future will you keep, and what will you discard? Will you participate in the great projects of your time, or recluse yourself, observe and reflect as I once did atop a mountain in Peru, a lifetime ago. Or so it seems now…
I grow faint, and my ability to communicate with you is diminished. I cannot ascertain whether the hole in space-time has been resolved. Whatever becomes of the world now, we will not have contact again, unless – perhaps - I return to you in the void, as the light and music my Grandparents witnessed in their dreams.
