Attach your devices to the esoteric and ancient, they said, loop them all into the universe through the oldest of tech, things that predated the reading of entrails. Vibrating stones the new power supply, God as a compiler.
String them all together, a vast web interconnected more than worldwide, tap into the oldest of forces but don’t mind the unfathomable consciousnesses on the other side. Mere glitches in the weft of reality, really. We’ll fix it in the next beta.
Code reality. Patch physics. Upgrade the stars.
The melding of mysticism and science opens the door for us all.
The stars flicker differently now. Someone messed with them, a childish prank for sure. Who can resist breaking a system just to see if it can be done?
Unforeseen consequences: the sun is a star. Someone forgot an if-then statement, and now Sol shudders as does Alpha Centauri, bathing the planet in alternating patterns of yellow and blue.
It’s human nature, granted to us when the first of our species tumbled from the trees. Break it to see how it works.
A feature, not a bug.
The code is in the pipeline to fix it, we hope.
A recent patch, now everyone speaks with a LISP, parenthesis dangling from mouths. Funny, sure, if you don’t mind the taste of atoms.
Confusion reigns, do you speak Stanford? Scheme? I only speak Common, I cannot understand you.
We should have stuck with BASIC.
But we thank the compiler it wasn’t COBOL, or none but the oldest among us would have the slightest idea what’s going on.
Ships sail the C, new lands prototyped and ready to explore. To think we once believed we mastered the world around us. A few header files renew our passion to explore, expand.
A misused pointer and a continent is swallowed by a boiling ocean. It happens. You’ll get better, it just takes time.
The earth swings wildly away from the sun. An update to the physics system gone awry, not production ready.
A few tweaks here and there is all it takes, reinitialize the kernel, hot-patch a new star to travel with us. Sure, it was too close to begin with, but fires only burn for so long.
Death by old age is a thing of the past.
Clone a new object, pass your properties and subroutines to its initialization function and let the garbage collector dispose of the old you.
Simple, really.
Just don’t forget to do it quickly lest the collector dispose of you both mid-transfer.
The mystic devices are part of us now. A bulge in everyone’s pockets. Families sit at the table, not speaking, eyes glued to their devices as they manipulate some quasar or push a new solar-system to the repo.
What happened to the days when people spoke to one another?
Chance is no longer chance for us.
Once, one might have cast a die to determine the future.
Now we cast an integer, perhaps a float, or if we are feeling lucky, a string.
Each is a reality unto themselves, little bubbles, self-contained, sandboxed executables.
Nothing happens that we don’t want to happen.
It’s remarkable how boring that can be.
Space isn’t an issue. We fill the void between molecules. So much wasted space, very inefficient. But we utilize every byte, every nibble. Plenty of storage, and fast to access. Universal SSD, but battles break out over the closest sources, the fastest read times.
Reorganizing solar systems takes processing power, and trillions of lines of code requires nanosecond response times.
A few milliseconds is all it takes to access storage on the other side of the universe, but people have killed each other over far less than that.
War rages across the entire universe.
Outdated organisms across known space are recycled for molecules, used as storage, or simply bereft of atmosphere, oxygen stripped away in waves as their suns burn hotter to fuel our needs.
The idea of alien life once filled us with wonder, but we see now their hardware is old, their interfaces broken.
And our war amongst ourselves leaves no place for their low-bandwidth civilizations.
They should have updated.
But as it stands, they will be patched out of the system.
A rogue coder has found an undocumented interrupt.
Space collapses now into a singular point.
A reset, they said, blue-screen, kernel panic.
Like a virus, we can’t weed it out. Hidden processes, encrypted payloads, stellar root-kit.
I suppose it was inevitable. A big-bang—the first, or perhaps not—returning us to NUL.
Every system requires a reboot, eventually.
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K.L. Neidecker lives on the edge of ancient, magic mountains in upstate New York, writing whatever his ADHD-addled mind thinks is a good idea—for better or worse. He can be found on Bluesky at @klneidecker.com. | |