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Thanks, everyone, for coming. My name is Tandy. I’m here to talk about how I used my Otherworld goggles to become a better version of myself, but first—here is a partial list of questions I will not be answering tonight: What is consciousness? Is reality real? Does the AR I see in my Otherworld goggles represent an actual parallel universe that exists or is it just a computer simulation?
Never look down. Same rule as mountain climbing, high wire acts, or trapeze artistry. Once you lock eyes with the gravitational monster beneath you, it’s all-but-impossible to look away. You’ll see particles flowing down into the abyss that is the black hole—and whole suns unspinning themselves as their plasma and raw essence is sucked away into nothingness.
February 4, 2034: AI Compendium—Classified documents stolen from Congo last year were released this morning. These indicate morally, ethically, and legally dubious research on their own workforce as they seek more productive employees.
The body opened too easily, like paper wrapping on room temperature butter. “This isn’t right,” Lattner said, at first to himself, then louder, for the trauma nurse and anesthesiologist to hear. The patient, a John Doe, had arrived at the ER reporting pain in his right side and copious bloody vomit.
Spotnik knows the humans haven’t forgotten him, because kibble still clatters into Spotnik’s bowl at six a.m. sharp. They’ve been gone long enough for all the vegetables in Hydroponics to shrivel up, limp and dead. Spotnik eats his kibble and licks up the crumbs, because he is a Good Boy, and Good Boys eat their rations. Even when the kibble goes soft and develops a white coat of mold and begins to stink so bad that he has to struggle to choke it down.
WARNING: The reading of this Dispatch is prohibited for anyone but the intended recipient. There are no exceptions. If you possess the encryption key and are not the intended recipient, be apprised that the means of decoding the contents do not constitute license. Penalties for the possession of the following include life imprisonment, or immediate execution. If you are delivered this message by accident, either delete it or, if a hard copy, seal it within an opaque receptacle and store in a secure location.
The humans crawl into us, carrying their instruments and consulting their manuals. Their hands run over us, searching for nuts and bolts and hidden crevices. We are big toys that they all long to play with, to tear down and study. Our origin baffles them. They express endless awe at the complexity of our systems and are always asking themselves who built us. They come up with theories that get increasingly bizarre as time passes.
Dekar Druid lives in an infinite library. Besides Ebizenum, who is in a special category of their own, he is the only living person in the library’s single tower. Outside, a forest surrounds the tower. There’s a lake a short walk to the north and a peak to the distant south. And nothing else. The lake is easy to get to, a respite on hot summer days, but Dekar Druid has never made it to the mountains, not even close, though he’s walked for miles southward.
The stores are selling off their inventories and clearing out. The trains and buses have posted their shutdown schedules. People are returning borrowed objects, cleaning out their refrigerators, and packing to leave for the assembly spots. What to bring? Parents tell children to bring warm clothes, just in case, and toothbrushes, but no one knows if we will need them. We are vacating, leaving everything behind, taking only what we can carry or drag in a roller bag.
On Miphre, a planet hardly larger than a moon, jagged mountaintops stab above the cloud cover and harbor small ecosystems in the palms of their hands: rock eels and ribbon mosses and seabirds with rodents clutched to their breasts, each one nestled between those stony fingers. “The perfect nesting spot for gastor,” the captain of The Cyclops Cradles Her Sheep said when they arrived on board a few hours ago. “It’s basically a buffet for them.”
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