Inside the Matrix by Pamela L Gay

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We are pleased Dr. Gay consented to speculate in this article about the science behind creating a permanent singularity like the possible future presented in “For the Children” by Jamie Wahls. Well, science and space pirates.

 

Inside the Matrix

by Dr. Pamela L. Gay

 

Since the beginning of the computer era, people have been speculating that our reality might exist within a computer simulation. This idea was first popularized in 1956, by Isaac Asimov in The Last Question, and famously re-articulated in 1999’s Oscar-winning The Matrix.  Today, prominent thinkers, ranging from Neil Tyson to Elon Musk, are publicly stating that there are good odds that what we call reality is just a simulation. If you are like me, the idea that we are simulated souls living our lives according to complex software is not entirely comforting. Making things even more confusing is the idea that we have the potential to someday download ourselves into future computers. This seems to imply that we could become simulated people simulated in a simulated universe, which I think makes it simulations all the way down. Continue reading…

For the Children by Jamie Wahls

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What will the human race be like hundreds, even thousands of years in the future? What does identity mean if your consciousness is digital? Exactly how snarky can an artificial intelligence be? Jamie Wahls explores these questions and more in a story about one big diamond and the fate of a species.

For the Children

by Jamie Wahls

The explosion rocked the ship. Air gushed from the hole, salting the cold vacuum with fire and oxygen and fish. Riva was squeezed out the hole, her body pulped and frozen and in a hundred other ways destroyed in ways evolution hadn’t planned for.

She died.

She woke up.

“Dammit,” she said.

Memory loss 0.003%, apologized the ship. New body ready in four minutes.

“Ugh,” groaned Riva, exasperated. One thing after another.

With her mental hands she seized the viewing eyes of the ship and dragged them into her head. The pleasantly ambiguous background of the space between flesh cut away, and her camera eyes fixed on the hole in her ship’s side.

A jagged diamond the size of mankind’s first space shuttle had opened her ship like a tin can. It was punctured through a hydrogen tank, through a cargo bay, through the cockpit, and into the aquarium.

#momo: nice one

#reaver: Shut up

#momo: no I mean that’s a real nice diamond

#momo: shame we found it so…ballistically

#reaver: Shut up

#momo: sorry about your fish though

#reaver: Yeah

#momo: hey, you okay?

#reaver: Yeah. Died, lost 3 delta.

#momo: oof, steep

#reaver: Catch me up. Was I doing anything important before I died?

#momo: eh, not really. Basically Humanity chewed us out because they want to get going already. You told them to hold their collective horse-analogues. “If you think you can do it better, come out here and do it, ya crotchety beam-of-light people.”

#reaver: Ok

#momo: “Now get off my lawn, ya damn kids. Granny Riva is working.”

#reaver: Ok

#momo: And I think you said something about how much you loved those fish

#reaver: UGH

#momo: Lol

Continue reading…