SINGULARITY

SECOND SEQUENCE

"Cavil, this... This isn't reality. This is a computer program. This isn't real."

"This is no more real than the bodies we have back out there."

"But the people, your family are."

"There are real people here as well. You and I, we're real and there are millions more real people living in here now than out there. Zac you worry to much, you talk like I'm about to become consumed, obsessed by this place."

"Cavil... You have to stop coming here so often. You can't make this your reality."

Cavil chuckled, "You know, someone once told me that; reality is where ever you're happiest."

"If only life were actually that simple."

Cavil sighed and slumped in his chair, his meek looking form giving the impression he were to die at any moment, and he chomped on his cigar as he spoke, "This way of living; the way we can live in here... It doesn't exist out there anymore. It died out years ago. We keep trying to hold onto it Zaccaheus, but we can't. Look how many of us are left. Soon, those streets, everyone of those buildings, they will be barren, completely empty. There will be no one left out there. They'll all be either in here, or somewhere far off in space that only god knows."

He held up three finger to Zaccaheus, "The way I see it, all of us remaining have got three options. One, we kill ourselves, refusing to accept the inevitable. Two, we abandon our bodies, let them rot, and live in here, forever, and never return to the world back out there. Three... We download into one of those nanotech bodies, and, leave this world forever... Explore the universe..."

Cavil's voice began to trail off as he gave his last point.

Zaccaheus replied, "So it comes down to death, a dream where I can live like we used to, or I move on to the next stage of 'human evolution'."

Cavil sat in silence for a while, mouth slightly agape and gazing off into the distance, pondering, before speaking, "it wouldn't be so bad would it... To see the stars, the galaxies... To build worlds... To create life."

Zaccaheus intejected rapidly, "Cavil, its not a human existence. Those people, who chose that way of life," Zaccaheus spat this out with disdain, "they're no longer human. Everything here that you love, that you cherish; none of that will matter anymore. An immortal being, with the potential to touch and manipulate all the matter within the unvierse... Nothing becomes sacred anymore. Your wife... Fuck, you could just recreate an exact replica of her from the particles in the air if you wished. Its not human Cavil. If you live for eternity, and you see everything there is to see in the universe, do everything thing there is to do, then what? There is nothing left. It is our mortality, here, here, Cavil, that is important. If you go down that path, you will no longer be you. You will be something entirely different."

Both sat there in silence for a moment.

"Zac, I know you hate it when I talk about that last point."

"Never mind."

"But who could've seen it coming, or thought it would have actually happened? I remember when people were scared that super intelligent AI's and nanobots would result in the destruction of the human race..."

"It did."

"Well, not quite like how they used to imagine it. I still remember it, seeing it on the news," Cavil was eyeing Zaccaheus now, watching for a reaction, trying to make sure he didn't say anything too sensitive, "a collective conscious. All those people, their conciousnesses merged, coexisting together, linked to that AI, inhabiting that body of nanobots... The apex point, all mans work lead up to that. They said we had created a god. Now, there are many of them. Anyone can become one."