Singularity Soon

2. Sliver's Edge: last month ending

Before the beginning, there was almost nothing.

The strangest thing about the last weeks before the Singularity was that the world was becoming ever more boring. There had been no major news stories for several years now, except for one event that only suppressed the news. The last few days had been the worst, as if time was coming to a standstill.

Probably an artifact of several news cycles ending. Though many people were bored, only a few argued that the world seemed unreal. Fake even.

To Rajiv, it seemed that nothing would ever happen again. He experienced it like a time before dying. Without the slightest sense of approaching the edge of an unimaginable cliff, he was right.

Despite his respectable Indian name, Rajiv was a white nerd who lived alone. His parents had been hippies.

He decided to go for a walk to catch some afternoon sunlight. Getting up from his PC desk, he felt an ancient lethargy. No energy for anything, but nothing important would happen anyway. Ahead, was only the remainder of a boring life at best, medical torture at worst. The only way to escape this sludge was technology, but progress was delayed. No holodeck for him.

Walking through the glare of his street, he saw a cloud shadow approaching. The noise of the wind blended with distant traffic roar. There were some gusts and it got cooler. He would spend a meaningful portion of his life thinking back to this walk.

The "magic hour" had begun, the setting sun filling the land with deep contrast. By comparison, the noonday sun almost felt like blinding fog. In the late afternoon light, shining though the tangles beside the road, Rajiv thought he could almost perceive a new reality. Nothing seemed to move. There was fantastic detail in the structure of the bushes.

If there had been any dreams last night, he didn't remember them, but he felt he had forgotten something important.

He thought about an idea for his next blog post, to be linked through social media: how strange, that if a black guy were to somehow turn white, his life would undeniably get easier. However, if he, a white guy, were to turn black, his life would ALSO get easier. He shouldn't go into too many details to avoid trouble.

There was beauty in the evening rain, the edge of mystery. He had been waiting ages for something to happen.

Rather late in the adventure, he would try to make sense of it. When thinking back to the start this walk would seem important. How had he gotten himself into the situation, how had he even known there was one?

The answer would be simple: of all the people, by pure chance HIS delusions just happened to match the truth most closely.

Because he didn't like the present, Rajiv often dreamed about the future. Sometimes these thoughts turned into nightmares of infinite horror.

In the future, it would become trivially easy to generate emotions through software. A small box could contain unimaginable pain of supernatural intensity, making all the holocausts seem like a slight annoyance. Things had to have gone wrong infinitely often in the Omniverse.

But maybe... whatever force was responsible for reality itself might limit this? Could something like "God" exist? Rajiv felt sure about the answer to that question: Not Here.

His rational fears trumped the irrational certainty of billions of normal people. "Thousands of semi-rational theologians are smarter than me," he thought. "Advantage: me."

The only "solutions" he could think of were hopelessly naive. For starters, the world had to be integrated as soon as possible! Hyper-regional plans should be announced, global rights of inspection and departure, guidelines for a single chain of artificial consciousness! Beyond that might be anthropic mitigation efforts.

And one other idea.