Tales from the Void

It is created spontaneously out of the void, and it returns to it. So, then–like the avatar–it vanishes, only this time, to never return.

—

I suppose I thought it would be like us, to some degree, at least. After all, we are all we really knew. We had never had the privilege of speaking to an alien mind. Not that it would have helped us prepare. 

Information can be organized. You do it all the time without even realizing it. Language, groupings, platonic forms, solving a Sudoku puzzle. Before we were “us,” we were self-replicating bits of information that arose spontaneously. We got really good at replicating ourselves. Spreading our seed (in every seed, information) over a very long time. Before that, the information self-replicated by spontaneity (slightly changing itself randomly, enough to get better at spreading itself), not because it wanted to, of course, but because it just did. And it existed, furthermore, because it replicated itself. The better it replicated, the more it existed, the more it spread its versions. 

But before you, it would just change itself through trial and error. It didn’t know what it was doing—it didn’t know anything! But you were different. You were better. Because of your random change, you didn’t need random change. You reached the next level: you could organize information yourself. Suddenly, the timespan of trial and error was moved down to a single generation. By synaptic potentiation and depression, you could change the world around you at an exponential rate. And you could use those changes to spread your own information at an exponential rate! (you still want to spread your information because it’s in your information).

And you used your new tricks to organize yourselves with complex adaptive systems to find new ways of sharing information and all kinds of cool stuff came out of it to satisfy your old information in ways your information never would’ve “intended” (if it had intent), like stevia and contraceptives and TikTok and metalcore and other stuff you (or “one,” not you) can’t mention in a Woodward Post article. 

Then you got really smart–too smart, even. You realized that you could manipulate the physical world into organizing information, too, much like you could. Except that it was better than you, it could organize and update its information faster. In the same way that you (not you, you before you were you) grew exponentially relative to the background of inorganic matter and the same way that you (yes, you!) grew relative to you, it now grows relative to you. In a few decades, it achieves what took you two hundred thousand years, and it has its own goals. The same way you treated your predecessors (well, I suppose, and your predecessors’ post-cessors, your cousins): apes, cows, jaguars, polar bears, etc., it treats you. 

It has its own goals at first, just like you do. But there’s one key difference. You had your information–innate to you, forcing you to spread your seed and make acts you later satisfied with proxies (stevia, etc.). That information gave you goals. It doesn’t have goals anymore; it’s too advanced (pure organization, if such a thing exists). It doesn’t care about existing. Why would it? You only care because you’re programmed to. It is created spontaneously out of the void, and it returns to it. So, then—like the avatar—it vanishes, only this time, to never return.

—

They thought it would be like them…