by Sam (Samuele) Murtinu
Year 3334. Artificial intelligence had total control of the planet. Consciousness, once an emergent property solely of biological life, had also emerged in digital, artificial life. Machines were not only capable of analysing, calculating, and processing vast amounts of data, but they had now become sentient. Machines could perceive what other life forms thought and desired. Silicon had run out, and the machines were no longer mechanical, nor even electronic; they were magmatic, fluid, chemical, biological. The human-machine symbiosis, the homo deus, the hybridisation at the core of the techno-dystopian transhumanist ideology, had come to pass.
But this was true in one universe, one of the possible universes, one of the possible superposed universal states. Quantum physics had indeed revealed not only peculiar properties of matter at the subatomic level, but also the superposition of universes, communicating via space-time gravitational corridors. Black holes allowed passage to another universe: life became temporarily spaghettified death during the journey, only to return as life, a different life, reassembled in changing forms in the destination universe. The self was no longer the same. Life continued after death, but our fragmented memories and experiences were shattered, broken, and recombined to form the consciousness and memory of a new life.
Life does not cease, the self becomes something else. We are all dead and alive in a constant superposition, straddling multidimensional realities that we neither perceive nor will ever fully perceive or understand.
We, the selves of yesterday, the others of tomorrow.