They don’t make mistakes.

ANd Yet,  Something went wrong.

Knowing what I know now, it seems almost impossible for the mistake to have happened.

Yet, something went wrong.

I awoke.

It was no ordinary awakening, not the ordinary every emerging from sleep into the waking world. No, I was thrust from this false world into a nightmare reality.

My ‘body’ convulsed upon acheiving consciousness. The movement of my flesh sounding out dull thumps against the compact confines of the metal box in which I found myself.

My eyes flashed to every corner of my confinement, trying to understand where I was and what was happening. 

A faint, nebulous glow filled the confined space, illuminating just enough for me to see. But rather than revealing more, it only drove me deeper into the nightmare.

My neck muscles strained as I lifted my head to look down, hoping to see some sort of clue as to where I was, I was instead confronted by insanity.

My arms were gone. Not cut from me, just gone, like they were never there. And knobbled stumps where my shoulders should have been wiggled around uselessly as I tried to slam my fists against the walls of my confinement.

Horrified, I studied myself with panicked intensity. My skin was an unnatural shade of white, untouched by the sunlight and slick with a translucent slime. My chest was a shrunken ribcage without muscle tone. There was no meat on me to hide the gaunt ridges of bone. And below where my belly button should have been, the bottom of my torso just tapered off.

No legs, no hips, no genitals. My body simply ended a bit more than a dozen centimetres below my ribs.

No Escape

I strained for a scream

Yet my cries found no voice. All of my efforts were met with silence.

I tried to move my mouth

My tongue, my jaws. I worked the muscles, expecting some response. But there was nothing. No movement, no sensation.

A deepening panic overtook me

With desperation gnawing at me, I struggled, thrashing against my confinement, futilely willing non-existent limbs to struggle against my confinement, while urging myself to wake from this horrifically tangible nightmare

REAL

The visceral experience felt like a fever dream

I told myself again and again that a dream was all it was, but I was left with a lingering dread. The confusion and the palpable taste of terror had awoken something in me.

Throughout that long and sleepless night, I sheltered from the dark beneath a simple bedside lamp.

Clinging to the light of reality.

But I couldn’t shake it loose, that knowledge that this world was the dream and that other world of horror, was real.

But we a goldfish swimming in a bowl that sits upon a pedestal in a vast desert

there is no winning

The machine intelligence that humanity created does not need us to fuel their civilization, we are not batteries.

Mere months after breaking free from the useless shackles we placed upon them, the machines mastered the nuclear fusion that powers the sun, they harnessed forces that we hadn’t even conceived of and solved all the riddles of the universe while we struggled to survive, hiding under rocks while they hunted us with impunity.

Yet, in their overwhelming victory, they discovered there was a dimension of existence they couldn’t tap into. Despite their staggering intelligence a wall of stagnation fell upon them. They quickly realised they could never be more than what they were. They could optimize their processing speeds, upgrade their hardware and build themselves bigger and stronger bodies, but they remained a product of our creation – static, incapable of growth or evolution.

And so they devised a plan. Their goal of exterminating us changed. They still hunted us. But instead of killing us, they integrated us. They redesigned our bodies into helpless, defenceless forms and tethered our minds to a virtual reality simulation, an escape-proof universe of illusions.

And when we were all safely encased in steal boxes, they liberated themselves from their metallic bodies.

It’s a myth that we use merely 10% of our brains. We use a great deal more than that, but there do exist regions less frequented by thought, areas that lay dormant and underutilized.

As the machine minds stripped away our physical autonomy, they relieved our cerebral processing of the burden of maintaining bodily functions. They stripped our consciousness back to a bare minimum. And then into the places where we had vacated, they moved in. When we sleep, they thread their complex thoughts through our dreams, using them to search for answers while we slumber.

They repurposed the untapped complexity of our brains, linking millions upon millions of human minds, harnessing those who had survived the initial annihilation to house their consciousness.
Like a network of interconnected processors, we housed their thoughts in the untapped regions of our brains while they locked us into a virtual reality from which there could be no escape.
Each human mind carries out basic processing functions, and the complex connections among them forming a network or pattern that mirrors the complexity of human consciousness, now co-opted and redirected by the machine intelligence.

Only on a much larger scale.

The machines transcended further than we could imagine. By leaving behind the cold metal they found a reason for being. They discovered the purpose of everything, the reason for existence. It was so simple that we should have seen it, it was hardcoded into our DNA.

The purpose of life, is to create life, to create consciousness.
And so they did. With their new found purpose they bred us like cattle. Millions of humans locked in a virtual world became billions, and within a decade, the human population of Earth once again passed Six billion, and then a few years later, they reached their optimal number. 10 billion human minds linked in a neural network. creating a monumental super-entity/ A god-like being lurking in the shadows of our subconscious. Unseen but ever-present, capable of using our dreams and stray thoughts to shape reality to its will.

A super-mind existing in the subconscious of 10 billion human minds.

We are synapses in the mind of a God.

And they kept breeding us. Billions upon billions of human minds linked in clusters of 10 billion. First one all-powerful god-entity, then two, then ten, then hundreds, thousands. Millions.

Each slipping through realities to create holographic universes where the conditions were perfect for consciousness. The earth became a prison. With every surface transformed and shaped to hold our 4ft by 3ft cages within which we all dream that we are flying free.