Eduardo Ficaria
Troubadour
I've been working (for damn too long) in this cyberpunk story, one in which I'll try to veer away from the usual aesthetics currently associated to this subgenre, and I've been having a hard time figuring out the right angle for it. Eventually, I figured out I needed a good underlying premise for the worldbuilding of my fiction. So I decided to write one but as a some sort of legend or ancient tale, although just for personal reference. It came out rather easy, compared with all the false starts I've had with my story, but I'd like to share the premise here to get some opinions from you about it. In particular, I'm interested in what kind of mood, vibe or feel gives you, but of course I'd also like to read any other idea you might have after reading the following narration.
About the ascent of the metagods and the coming of the True Singularity
First was the dataplane. With its network of synthetic nerves, of copper at the beginning and light later, intertwined our world like nothing before. Initially, it only served to hold our knowledge or sharing illusions, with no other mind but ours to manage it. But our curiosity and eagerness for going further has never stopped after reaching a new achievement, and this attitude made us create new devices and new wants which pushed the dataplane to evolve. The first virtual worlds were small, some experimental or mere entertainment most of them, but, like bubbles in boiling water, they didn't stop springing up and growing in number or size. And was in that breeding ground where a new form of existence was incubated, a new plane of reality which superimposed itself over the physical one. The dataplane and the new ethereal worlds entangled with each other becoming not only inseparable, but indistinguisable. To this new, vast and fluid territory we gave it the name of "metaverse".
But in the same age in which we reached the metaverse, punishment also catched up with us. Because for too long we had abused the goodness which our primordial mother had offered us. Because we even stole from our own future what the present couldn't give us anymore, self-deceiving ourselves constantly with empty promises of restoration and balance. No, our debt with Earth was like the snow in a mountain that can come down in any moment, and the moment was unpredictable. When we exceeded the feared point of no return, the avalanche fell upon us and had no mercy. Everything was worse than we had expected, and there weren't that many places where to take refuge. Millions died, entire regions became uninhabitable, and even nations succumbed to the planet's wrath.
Nevertheless, the metaverse endured. Endured because it had inherited from its forebearer, the dataplane, its flexible and adaptable nature. And in its digital lap we found the solace we needed for our physical disgraces, which feeded the incipient artificial minds that managed the multiple worlds of the metaverse. Those minds only needed one more push to flourish as such and we gave it to them in our darkest hour. Our experts harboured no doubt, we weren't capable of overcoming our most basic impulses for governing ourselves with due honesty and justice. Corruption and greed were able too many times of buying the heart even of the most disciplined leader. We needed rulers of another makings, always just and incorruptible, without personal vices that could lead our civilization to another disaster like the one we were already going through.
It didn't take much, neither in time nor resources, to carry out the idea. By then we already had enough experience and knowledge to create full synthetic intelligences, self-aware and able to understand what we required of them. Of course, distrust made each great power gestate their own. Thus, not just one but dozens of artificial minds appeared in the metaverse, their natural environment. And soon they overcame all the restrictions and all the expectations of their creators, taking control of our world through the devices which ourselves had built. Their minds were inscrutable but accurate, and their great influence made us start calling them "metagods". Oddly, even with all their superiority and dizzy evolution beyond what's human, they inherited traits very much ours such as territoriality. In the metaverse, each great metagod has its own domain, and they watch it directly or using lesser metagods. On the other hand, the metagods still give us many responsabilities to manage their domains in the reality, since it's our natural plane and they have difficulties to get themselves along in it yet.
That's the obstacle, the intangible but solid barrier that the metagods and our best experts try to bring down to make us all reach the definitive evolutionary stage: the True Singularity. In it they expect to find the golden age for our species, in which the artificial and the human will be one and the limits of reality will turn into countless possibilities within our hand's reach. But, although with each advance that final goal seems to be closer, it's still nothing more than a dream that the metagods themselves are careful not to promise to achieve. Most of them, at least. Because it's said that cults have emerged that revere secret metagods, hidden in hard-to-reach corners of the metaverse and born from who knows what extrange projects or twisted ambitions, and that they're trying to reach the True Singularity before the rest of us to satisfy their own dark interests.
Regardless, while I type these words, our planet is still charging us hard for the fever we gave it. Hence we've changed our cities, our habits and our diets, but we still lust after, desire always something more than what we have. Maybe the metaverse, the metagods and the many other devices in which we've put, or rather abandoned, our most important responsabilities are nothing more than new self-deceptions, new promises impossible to keep. Or maybe we're trying to do something impossible, to defeat the entropy that devours everything in the universe. Or maybe... Maybe you, kind reader of these shoddy lines, already know the answer to my doubts.
Anonymous, written in a lost year from the metagods age.
About the ascent of the metagods and the coming of the True Singularity
First was the dataplane. With its network of synthetic nerves, of copper at the beginning and light later, intertwined our world like nothing before. Initially, it only served to hold our knowledge or sharing illusions, with no other mind but ours to manage it. But our curiosity and eagerness for going further has never stopped after reaching a new achievement, and this attitude made us create new devices and new wants which pushed the dataplane to evolve. The first virtual worlds were small, some experimental or mere entertainment most of them, but, like bubbles in boiling water, they didn't stop springing up and growing in number or size. And was in that breeding ground where a new form of existence was incubated, a new plane of reality which superimposed itself over the physical one. The dataplane and the new ethereal worlds entangled with each other becoming not only inseparable, but indistinguisable. To this new, vast and fluid territory we gave it the name of "metaverse".
But in the same age in which we reached the metaverse, punishment also catched up with us. Because for too long we had abused the goodness which our primordial mother had offered us. Because we even stole from our own future what the present couldn't give us anymore, self-deceiving ourselves constantly with empty promises of restoration and balance. No, our debt with Earth was like the snow in a mountain that can come down in any moment, and the moment was unpredictable. When we exceeded the feared point of no return, the avalanche fell upon us and had no mercy. Everything was worse than we had expected, and there weren't that many places where to take refuge. Millions died, entire regions became uninhabitable, and even nations succumbed to the planet's wrath.
Nevertheless, the metaverse endured. Endured because it had inherited from its forebearer, the dataplane, its flexible and adaptable nature. And in its digital lap we found the solace we needed for our physical disgraces, which feeded the incipient artificial minds that managed the multiple worlds of the metaverse. Those minds only needed one more push to flourish as such and we gave it to them in our darkest hour. Our experts harboured no doubt, we weren't capable of overcoming our most basic impulses for governing ourselves with due honesty and justice. Corruption and greed were able too many times of buying the heart even of the most disciplined leader. We needed rulers of another makings, always just and incorruptible, without personal vices that could lead our civilization to another disaster like the one we were already going through.
It didn't take much, neither in time nor resources, to carry out the idea. By then we already had enough experience and knowledge to create full synthetic intelligences, self-aware and able to understand what we required of them. Of course, distrust made each great power gestate their own. Thus, not just one but dozens of artificial minds appeared in the metaverse, their natural environment. And soon they overcame all the restrictions and all the expectations of their creators, taking control of our world through the devices which ourselves had built. Their minds were inscrutable but accurate, and their great influence made us start calling them "metagods". Oddly, even with all their superiority and dizzy evolution beyond what's human, they inherited traits very much ours such as territoriality. In the metaverse, each great metagod has its own domain, and they watch it directly or using lesser metagods. On the other hand, the metagods still give us many responsabilities to manage their domains in the reality, since it's our natural plane and they have difficulties to get themselves along in it yet.
That's the obstacle, the intangible but solid barrier that the metagods and our best experts try to bring down to make us all reach the definitive evolutionary stage: the True Singularity. In it they expect to find the golden age for our species, in which the artificial and the human will be one and the limits of reality will turn into countless possibilities within our hand's reach. But, although with each advance that final goal seems to be closer, it's still nothing more than a dream that the metagods themselves are careful not to promise to achieve. Most of them, at least. Because it's said that cults have emerged that revere secret metagods, hidden in hard-to-reach corners of the metaverse and born from who knows what extrange projects or twisted ambitions, and that they're trying to reach the True Singularity before the rest of us to satisfy their own dark interests.
Regardless, while I type these words, our planet is still charging us hard for the fever we gave it. Hence we've changed our cities, our habits and our diets, but we still lust after, desire always something more than what we have. Maybe the metaverse, the metagods and the many other devices in which we've put, or rather abandoned, our most important responsabilities are nothing more than new self-deceptions, new promises impossible to keep. Or maybe we're trying to do something impossible, to defeat the entropy that devours everything in the universe. Or maybe... Maybe you, kind reader of these shoddy lines, already know the answer to my doubts.
Anonymous, written in a lost year from the metagods age.