Fear and Paranoia

Posted by: Michael Moraine, Firewall Sentinel

Catching Up

You've been doing a great job in re-acclimating yourself to the state of things. I know it’s hard, a lot of time has passed since the backup you are re-instantiated from was made.

Here’s the next series of updates.

The most defining aspect of transhumanity is how much it has changed in the past few years. From the trauma of near extinction to the future shock of rapid technological change, the speed of upheaval is making a strong impact on our culture and society.

Life After the Fall

Our entire species suffers PTSD. The Fall killed 95 percent of transhumanity and cast the remainder into the void of space. We say “lost” or “went missing” or even “forcibly uploaded,” but “killed” is the word. Just killed. You look around at Mars and Luna, and you check your buzzing social feeds on the mesh, and it seems like we’re okay again, but we’re not. We’re hanging on by a thread. There are so few of us left, and of those who survived, so few of us even have bodies, or bodies worth a damn. We don’t even really know what happened. Sure, the TITANs killed billions, but why? We don’t really know. We don’t even know why they stopped on the brink of our total annihilation. Was our extinction their goal at all? What if we were just collateral damage? The exsurgent virus appeared almost simultaneously with the Fall, and there is every indication that TITAN machines were infected in strange and unpredictable ways.

Can We Trust Our Tech?

What if the TITANs were merely trying to eradicate the virus and killing us was the primary vector? But if that’s true, why did they forcibly upload so many of us? What if they were trying to preserve our species before fleeing what amounts to a quarantine zone? What if they were trying to kick-start a phase of our evolution that might make us less vulnerable to this greater threat? What do they know that we don’t? All we can do now is speculate and hope they aren’t coming back, but none of us really believe that.

We go to extreme lengths to avoid setting the stage for a second TITAN event. Computational clusters above a certain power and storage are discouraged, if not forbidden, for fear of creating a fertile bed for a seed AI to run rampant. But, of course, with all those hypercorp research facilities and other secret installations, do you really believe these prohibitions aren’t broken on a daily basis? The Jovians go so far as to rely on analog tech as a safeguard against a rogue ASI and then you’ve got some crazy brinkers out there doing their best to cut themselves off entirely from the mesh out of fear of being contaminated. Some people don’t even trust their muses anymore. Who’s the voice in your head, really?

Where’s The Humanity?

If the bioconservatives are to be believed, our society is corrupt because it is no longer solely human. We may all be hopping merrily from body to body, but at least we had a body to start with, unlike infolife. This lack of a biological origin makes it easy for some to consider AGIs unnatural things or to fear that they may ultimately be more sympathetic to the TITANs or other non-human interests. Such thinking can be infectious, perhaps even driving prejudice and institutionalized bigotry that may eventually make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Infugees and deliberate infomorphs aren’t much better from this perspective. When you lack a body, do your loyalties still lie with your embodied species? Keep this in mind next time someone gives attitude to one of your digital forks.

Then you’ve got the poor uplifts. The same fearmongers claim that we cannot truly understand their motivations or perspectives. The idea of an octopus walking around in a human body makes them distinctly uncomfortable. These are the same people who treat uplifts like clever pets, and I know I’d resent that if I was one of them. I might start thinking about other societal options, myself.

Identity Crises

The fear doesn’t stop with others; our own minds are suspect. So many of us lost years of consciousness in the Fall only to awaken into a present that grows more alien by the day. What’s the starting point for the continuity of your life? Is it when you were born? Is it when you woke up today? Is it the first time you sleeved? The first time you forked? The Jovians and other bioconservatives believe that the mere act of sleeving or egocasting is suicide and that there’s no continuity of consciousness even from a recovered cortical stack, just the propagation of data. Almost all of transhumanity thinks this is nonsense, that of course we are who we think we are. But of course we’d think that, wouldn’t we? What if the entire Fall was really just the TITANs forcing us to adopt these methods, to normalize them? If we’re not really alive anymore, what are we even fighting to protect? The aggregate of transhuman consciousness is the only thing that’s important if you arrive at that conclusion, and if you keep following that train of thought, the things that might become necessary in its defense are as frightening as the threats themselves. And there are so many threats.

An Uncertain Future

We don’t have a new home, yet. Not truly. Mars won’t be fully terraformed for centuries and every other habitat we’ve carved out in the Solar System is separated from the void or a toxic atmosphere by centimeters of steel and a lot of hope that nothing goes wrong. Sure, we’re getting better and better at engineering, but everyone knows we are just one engineering failure away from immediate and possibly irretrievable death.

Scientific progress is improving our engineering every day, but that brings its own risks. True x-risks, at that. The Large Collider is impressive but we all know it’s going to be a child’s toy compared to where things are in another ten years, and there are already people talking about experiments that might literally collapse the warp of space-time with “only” a .000001 percent chance. Back on Earth in the twentieth century, scientists lit off the first atomic bomb while wondering if it might set the planet’s atmosphere on fire. And that’s just talking about accidents.

The technologies we take for granted like ubiquitious nanofabrication, forking, and precision bio-engineering all have the potential to be weaponized on a terrifying scale by a single malicious person. Never before have such wide swathes of transhumanity had the capacity to initiate their own self-destruction. Self-replicating devourer nanobot swarms, biologically engineered plagues that happily infect organic matter or plastics with ease, and the ability to remotely produce antimatter weapons and detonate them at leisure are all within the theoretical grasp of countless individuals. They’ve been stopped so far, mostly, but when is our luck going to run out?

Dead Planets

We won’t be the first to run out of luck. Since we first started exploring the pandora gates, we’ve found the detritus of one dead alien civilization after another. Their ruins are scattered across the galaxy. Something stops them from surviving, or at least surviving in any way that we can observe. Why should transhumanity expect a different fate? We were already almost exterminated once and not ten years later we’re jaunting through these alien gates just to traipse through the wreckage of a whole lot of aliens who also messed with the gates.

I think about the Iktomi a lot. We find more remnants of this vanished space-faring, sapient species than any other. They may have been big arthropods with a technology and culture we can barely comprehend, but they were a lot like us, I think. Their ruins litter so many of the exoplanets we find. Their cultural detritus tells us they were smart and maybe scared of something. Maybe the gates. Just ten thousand years ago, the Iktomi were a flourishing civilization and then — nothing. What happened to those weird space-spiders? Did they see the end coming, or did it surprise them? Did it come through the gates? We know next to nothing about these things or who built them and yet we’re happily dialing our way across the galaxy. Isn’t it only a matter of time before something notices us? What if something already has?

The Factors

The only beings who might have answers to these questions aren’t people, and they aren’t telling if they do. I’m talking about the Factors, of course. They’re the only evidence we have of any other civilizations surviving long enough to make contact with another alien species. If you ask me, they only raise more questions than they answer. They say they’re emissaries for a group of civilizations and that they only recently became convinced we were worthy of contact. Why now? Are they here to help us out of sympathy from having survived their own singularity? They’ve sure dropped some ominous hints about the gates and AIs, but are they really here to help or are we being monitored because they’re afraid we’re going to mess with something that might endanger their own civilization(s). For that matter, what is their civilization? What if they’re not even aliens but a stalking horse of the TITANs in some subtle strategy we can’t even imagine. First contact was made in the immediate aftermath of the Fall, which means they must have been monitoring us for some time if they’re on the level. Did the exsurgent virus scare them enough to take a closer look? What if they are the exsurgent virus? I’m getting really out there now, I know, but seriously, what do we actually know about the Factors?

Firewall

Nothing here is new to Firewall, of course. We have brilliant, dedicated, and genuinely good people thinking hard about this stuff all day. But what does it amount to? You take orders from your proxy, but do you know who your proxy is talking to? Have you met your proxy in person? What does “in person” even mean anymore? When you get called up to investigate some remote mining facility on Triton, how confident are you that you’re really going on Firewall business and not because a rival mining corp spoofed their handshake protocols and duped you into wiping out a competitor? What if Firewall has been compromised at its highest levels? What if it’s always been serving another end? What would you do about it? What could you do about it?

Paranoid yet? Good. Keep that close. Use it. You’ll need it.