Eden 2.0

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.