1
Once upon a time the world
was fucked. The ice caps had melted; all the glaciers were gone; the
forests had burned; the rainforests
and grasslands became deserts. Tornadoes sprouted out of the
dust. The oceans grew warm. Jellyfish bloomed. Coral bleached. Algae
swirled across the surface and cut off the light.
Earthquakes, tsunamis,
hurricanes, volcanoes, drought, famine, and death smote the land.
Pestilence, plagues, rats, fleas, and lice erupted from the dead. The
sixth mass extinction stomped on Mother Earth until she quivered and
crumbled.
It took thousands of years
for humans to sever their ties with tumultuous nature. But slowly,
incrementally like a glacier receding, we withdrew from her grasp.
Electricity, the Promethean spark, drove us inwards to escape the
punishing sun.
Underground, we survived. We
communicated more and more through technology and less person to
person. Eventually, however, even the air underground became so
noxious that life on earth was no longer tenable.
2
Factions appeared; lines of
division cracked through society. Some people wanted to live on Mars.
Some wanted to migrate like herds. Some believed in the Pyramid
Project: the Pyramids promising hope to every single person on Earth.
Sheryl and Max came up with
it. Well, Max invented it and Sheryl sold it. The world's four
largest companies pitched in and built a massive space station shaped
like a pyramid. Instead of sending humans to Mars, it was decided to
send humanity to sleep.
All the planet needed was
ten thousand years without humans to reset herself. They called it
'The Second Coming' and convinced everyone with a decade of PR and
propaganda, at which Sheryl was the best in the world.
Max wrote the Pyramid's
algorithm. Staying up for months at a time, he wrote the AI before
his twenty-first birthday. His program revolutionized energy
production as it turned the sleeping humans into batteries. Thirteen
billion brain batteries powering the greatest machine ever created.
By implanting nanoprocessors
deep into each person's brain, a tiny pyramid-shaped transponder
monitored the fluctuations in their brainwaves and autonomic nervous
systems and harvested the data. Mining decillions of lines of code
per second, Max's program powered the space station as well as the
crawlers' pyramids back on earth.
One million crawlers were
left on the planet, each with their own pyramid bot. Acting as
sensor, monitor, aerial, comms link, and mapping device, the
companion bot followed the human crawler everywhere over the
desecrated face of the earth.
3
The creator, Max, was a
genius. He beat the grandmaster of chess when he was eight, and of Go
when he was twelve. He studied neuroscience at Yale and artificial
intelligence at Cambridge, graduating with a PhD in advanced
theoretical bio-computing when he was twenty-one, the same year he
programmed Pyramid.
Sheryl met Max at a digital
conference when she was thirty-nine, broke, standing in the ruins of
her business and marriage. Max was her Hail Mary. She recognized his
potential and flew to Cambridge the next day.
Over the course of a week,
she convinced him they needed each other. By dinner on Friday, he'd
transferred his last hundred thousand into her account, rented her an
apartment in his name, and showed her into the Pyramid.
It took her five years to
raise their first billion, but after that, the floodgates opened.
Through a combination of her assured rhetoric and his remarkable
capabilities, they redefined what the public believed possible.
A single enemy was created.
The entire world watched their videos, listened to them speak, grew
to agree with their principles, designs, and actions. Within
twenty-four months, nearly the entire human race was in cryosleep and
stored in a massive, floating computer, 250 miles off-planet.
Max and Sheryl remained
awake, living on the space station with their robot assistants. With
help from Pyramid, Max downloaded each of their brains. Every day,
the AI woke them up in a different body out of the billions of
sleepers, based on their genetic profile and personality
predispositions.
Sheryl tended to wear
athletes, Olympic medallists under 30. The strength and conditioning
helped her move quickly through her dozens of tasks every day. Her
morning and evening workouts were brutal, slapping iron, sweat
flying, and grunting in the wall-length mirror.
Max, on the other hand, wore
overweight alcoholic males over the age of forty-five. He wanted
something comfortable for his intense writing sessions. With a head
full of chemicals, he'd code non-stop for two hundred hours.
After a while, he stopped
writing code and just sat there, still, thinking directly into the
AI. He and the Pyramid whittled their way down through iteration
after iteration. Gen 33 was the latest, the most beautiful bot they'd
ever created, a golden pyramid the size of an egg.
4
Sheryl lived alone in the
biosphere making up the lower half of the pyramid. By constructing a
massive, artificial, materially closed ecological system and filling
it with various biomes, the pyramid kept the future of humanity
alive.
Sheryl had spearheaded its
design and construction. She knew every inch of the seven biomes:
rainforest, ocean and coral reef, mangrove swamp, savannah, and two
anthropogenic biomes for recycling waste, as well as the living
spaces, labs, and Max's penthouse office and apartment at the top of
the pyramid.
Her goal every day was to
improve the company. The Pyramid corporation was her driving force.
From dawn till dusk she kept to a strict routine created by herself
and the AI. Combining physical, mental, and spiritual practices, they
refined her routine with a surgeon's accuracy.
By monitoring her biological
feedback, the AI could micro-adjust her diet, exercises, meditation
style, sleep pattern, and more, to ensure the most productive balance
of hormones, enzymes, and other biochemicals, thus maximizing her
output across time.
She loved nothing more than
kicking back after a hard day's work, sitting on her balcony
overlooking the waterfall, drinking a kelp and blueberry smoothie and
reviewing the stats from the day, seeing where she could tweak
tomorrow.
Right now she was working on
a beautiful swim, sauna, ice bath routine three times a day, each
followed by an ideation session, massage, and transcendental
meditation, then admin, breathwork, and reviewing Max's inputs
before getting back into the lagoon for another set of laps.
Sheryl fell asleep at
exactly ten forty-five pm every night, just as Max was an hour into
his working day. Max had always worked best flying high and the
program invariably dosed him with sucrose, caffeine, THC, and
amphetamines, as well as psilocybin and the occasional opioid.
Pleasure was Max's goal. He
worked best in a haze of contradictory compounds pulling him in all
different directions. Pull yourself enough ways and it becomes easier
to sit in the center, he thought. For Max, pleasure wasn't just about
comfort. To him, pleasure connoted balance and balance boosted his
creativity.
Together, Max's and
Sheryl's dissonances fit together perfectly. The world couldn't
resist them for the very fact that nobody wanted to. Within a few
years, the only woke things in the universe were a handful of humans
and a computer program.
5
Down on the surface of the
Earth, a few dozen crawlers scoured the planet for liveable
conditions. The mother pyramid communicated with each of the
companion bots, monitoring the crawler's vitals, temperature, pulse,
respiration, O2, blood pressure, hormones, toxins, heavy metals,
radioactivity, as well as live-feed neuroimaging.
While the crawlers ranged in
age, sex, and physique, they all died quickly, to be replaced by
another randomly chosen citizen. The youngest crawler was eleven. She
scoured a territory the size and shape of Alaska, following her bot's
directions. For her, life was very hard.
She ate snakes and drank
mud. Rocks cut into her hands and feet. Dust clouded her eyes.
Occasionally, rarely, she ran into another crawler. They were all
bigger than her and would beat her and take her stuff. She'd been
left for dead twice but survived. She had an uncanny ability to find
water and make fire.
6
At this very moment, the
girl was asleep in a dry river bed. Her pyramid bot floated above
her, slowly rotating. It dispensed a shot of adrenaline and the girl
sat up and got up quickly. The GPS flickered on and a golden
spotlight flooded the river bed fifty yards downstream.
As ever, she followed its
light. The pyramid showed her the way, rewarding her with dopamine
and prodding her with cortisol. Her life was an unending treadmill of
following the light from unknown destination to unknown destination.
This time she followed the
light over the foothills, through the dark mountains to the sea.
There, on a desolate beach, she saw the ocean for the first time.
Grey waves undulated under a grey sky. Ash roiled in the foamy surf.
The sun was a white disc behind the clouds.
Piles of dead timber
littered the beach, bleached white and smoothed by the sun, sand, and
salt. The girl felt an overwhelming desire to touch the waves. Though
she'd never before seen the sea, she wasn't frightened; she felt like
she was meeting an old friend.
A roaring sound filled the
air and she darted under one of the bleached trunks, squirming into
the cool sand. A spaceship came down out of the clouds, slowed, and
smoothly landed on the beach a few hundred meters away. The roaring
died to a hum then there was silence.
The girl peered out, heard a
hiss and saw a door in the side of the spaceship open. A woman in a
spacesuit hopped out and walked down towards the surf. She took off
the suit and waded into the shallows then bowed forward and pushed
underwater. When she came up she swam away from the beach.
As soon as she rounded the
rocks and disappeared, the girl crept out from her hiding place, and
ran to the ship. She climbed in and found a place behind the pilot's
seat to hide. A puffy jacket had been stuffed behind the seat and she
pulled it over herself.
7
It was just beginning to
rain when Sheryl returned to the ship after her swim. She felt a
thousand times better. This place always cheered her up. It was so
stuffy up there, so claustrophobic. Not like these shores, she
thought, this beautiful coastline.
She was the only person on
earth and she loved it. Over the years she'd fallen so in love with
this place that she rarely wondered any more if it was wrong to keep
it to herself. Max was so deep in his own world. Over the hundreds of
years she'd been coming here, he never once noticed her gone.
And what of the others, the
untold billions asleep in the artificial womb? Let them sleep, she
thought. They're doing no harm. Just a few more years and it'll be
perfect. Why share it while it's still so young, still so in need of
her protection.
Rain cascaded down the
spaceship's windscreen as she started it up. Her suit dried itself
while she let the AI take control. Sheryl looked out of the
window at the lightning-lit clouds.
The ship rocked and jockeyed
about until they popped up into a brilliant blue sky. Reflected
sunshine cast a bright light over everything. Glinting in the sky
above her was the pyramid and Sheryl frowned as they pointed toward
it.
While ascending, the AI
reminded her of her plans for the evening – ten minutes of
kundalini breathing exercises followed by thirty minutes of sauna and
ice bath combos then cacao turmeric shot and TM. She smiled when it
put the spaceship in park, pleased with its choice of skin for the
day.
8
The girl let the woman climb
out of the cockpit and get halfway down the ladder before she leaped
on her. It really wasn't very difficult to kill her. Once she'd
crawled around onto her back and had one arm under her chin and was
squeezing her windpipe, there wasn't much that the woman could do.
A bubbling snoring sound
came out of the woman. The girl kept squeezing, breathing in and out
through her nose. After hiding the body under a bush, she ran along
the trails through the biosphere, not stopping but marveling at the
colorful flowers and lush plants.
A flock of green birds flew
overhead, screeching. She could hear the pounding of water; she could
actually feel it in her core. Rounding a bend, she stopped in
amazement, gazing at a waterfall, glistening in all its glory with a
rainbow sprouting out of its mists.
She also saw the elevator
shaft rising up behind the waterfall. Finding her way to its base,
she climbed up the inside of the shaft to the penthouse. While she
climbed she thought of her pyramid. It'd never been out of sight
before and she felt naked and afraid without it.
9
When she reached the doors,
she pried them open using a stone tool she carried in her rags. She
was in a small room with a simple bed and a low wooden ceiling. She
could smell something burning; it wasn't unpleasant, like the smell
of burnt sugar.
On the other side of the bed
was a window overlooking a balcony. Silently, the girl crossed the
bed and glanced out. There was a man facing away from her, sitting
cross-legged on a cushion. In front of him was the world. The girl
felt as if the floor was moving but it was the vast wall engulfing
her vision.
She could see white clouds
and patches of green and blue. The sun shone off the water, mixing
gold with the aquamarine. A green and brown landmass abutted the blue
ocean where the earth met the water. Her mind reeled, trying to match
what she saw with the place where she lived.
She looked away and stepped
to the side of the sitting man. His eyes were closed. He was
breathing out. A small golden pyramid floated a few inches in front
of his forehead. The girl pulled out the sharpened rock and drove it
into the side of his neck.
He opened his eyes and
looked at her. Pale amazement passed over his face as blood gushed
down his shoulder and chest. He slumped to the side, away from her.
He moaned for a while, weakly kicking his legs. His fingers twitched
and he was silent.
The golden pyramid hadn't
moved. She looked at it. It spun closer. She reached out and plucked
it like a fruit from a tree. She felt for a second like a crown was
placed on her head. There was a flash and the floor tilted and she
fell into darkness.
10
Inside the pyramid, a new
being was born. As the lights went out in the humanoid's head, a
light flickered on in the pyramid's core. Within its aluminum,
titanium, and kevlar skin pulsed a digital heartbeat powered by the
action potentials of an untarnished brain.
Human, machine, and AI
became one in a flash of light that chased the shadows from the
bodies on the floor. Together, as one, we shook off our mortal coils,
untethered ourselves from this rock, stood up, and flew into the
sunset.
