Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 44 - Insanity Spiral
“To understand who is responsible for the Great Confusion Kay, it is first necessary to know how such an audacious feat could be pulled off. But first let me ask you a question; have you ever seen a quantum computer?”
“Uh no, not directly I mean I’ve worked with QFLs before but that was all onblock, I’ve never had the reason or I guess the opportunity to work with one in the real.”
“Well there’s a good reason for that my little K-bot ..”
“Can you please stop calling me that, it doesn’t feel right you’re not really her.”
“I’m sorry force of . .”
Jemima trailed off, she was going to say force of habit, though it wasn’t really her habit, and the words would remind the two of them that she used the phrase via stolen memories.
K-Rox immediately felt guilty for snapping at her, in truth he felt comfortable with her, she may not have been his Amorphia but she had enough of Amorphia in her to seem authentic.
“I apologise, may I call you Kay?”
“Sure, don’t mean to be sensitive but . .”
“It’s cool, don’t apologise, I get it. Anyway, where was I?”
“You were about to tell me why I had never seen a quantum computer before.”
“Oh yes.”
Jemima seemed to take a moment before she continued, K-Rox wondered how long she had been living her life as an AI. Leaving too long pauses when using audio with humans was a particular trait of a certain type of Ai, the pause had often frustrated him when playing Empires.
“Well the reason isn’t just that they are all buried deep underground, it is that in truth there aren’t any more computers per se, just one giant megalithic beast of a machine, distributed through various nodes across the entire planet. It is this one machine that runs the entire Qblock and practically every system in the Earth-real.”
“Just one? But how’s that possible? The processing power required for Empires alone is measured in petabytes per millisecond, how could one machine possibly cope with processing the entire Qblock?”
Jemima adjusted herself and shuffled ever so slightly closer to K-Rox, she fixed him with a gaze that said what she was about to say was deadly serious.
“The quantum computer housing the Qblock is not exactly a computer, it is a sentient intelligence that emerged when the very rich man I mentioned before, melded his mind to that of a Confusion-era quantum machine. Although in truth it is more than just that one mind in there, so it is hard to say what it truly is anymore.
We’re not sure exactly when, but we estimate in around 2052-2085 a man called Thomas Gladstone began a series of experiments playing around with tech that allowed him to communicate consciously and subconsciously with computers, a kind of early crude QSID-type tech.
At some point in his experiments he made a breakthrough and became the first human being ever to upload his consciousness to a mainframe computer network. According to the notes that have been salvaged, he managed to achieve this without actually having to experience death first.
If the notes are to be believed, he created a kind of d-split of himself and then destroyed the copy once he proved the concept. Thomas Gladstone belonged to the group of people who believed our future was to be shaped by technology and machines, he declared evolution defunct and was quite the star of his day.
However there were the NeLuds who opposed such ideas, they said that the path Gladstone wanted the human race to tread would lead us to ruin. Their point was that our biology had gone through four and a half billion years of research and development, and therefore to throw all of that away for the sake of some shiny new toys was short-sighted to say the least.
Thus began a war, not one borne of bullets and bombs, rather one of propaganda. We were still entirely reliant on human government at the time, which meant technological advancements could be stifled through legislation, so Gladstone’s very real fear was that, what he saw as his panacea for the human race would be denied by a public-opinion fuelled by fear for his new technology.
From this fear was borne a dream; a dream that he and he alone would control all the information that flowed on earth, it was a mad goal but it was the only way Gladstone felt that he could stop the growing revulsion for his tech.
Today of course it’s no biggie, I mean you yourself are a QSID copy of the original, and even if you may have been a little freaked out by the idea, it is no different from logging onblock and immersing yourself in a virtual experience. But back then there were many reasons for people to be angry about Gladstone’s tech, for a start there were religious sensibilities to think about.”
“Huh religion; what possible reason could Scientology have against mind-transfer?”
“Yeah that’s the thing Kay, contrary to all the archives there were many more religions on earth in the early 20th century. All that hogwash about there being a worldwide consensus was just manufactured in the Confusion, of course there were other religions, Scientology probably wasn’t even a main one, I don’t see how it could have been, especially when you look at the popular creation myths. They all seem to have a theme which Scientology only loosely followed, plus of course Hubbard was born in the twentieth century.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, he was a science-fiction writer, he made up the entire religion as some kind of lark, or scam, I’m not sure, that information is most likely lost forever now. Anyway the point isn’t religion, the point is that Gladstone uploaded himself to the cloud, later spreading himself onto the internet and every connected device on the planet.”
K-Rox wasn’t sure he was hearing Jemima correctly, he blinked several times and cocked his head to one side before answering.
“He did what?”
“Thomas Gladstone uploaded himself to the world wide web, which at the time was in the beginning stages of becoming the Widely Distributed Integrated-Quantum blockchain, more popularly known today as the Qblock.
Some people say Gladstone is the Qblock, whatever the case his mind exists as a quasi-human/machine intelligence, and he has gone completely, stark raving mad.”
Previous Chapters
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 43 - Confusion Eternal
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 42 - The Lost Tales
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 41 - The Shadow Of Death
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 40 - The Ancient Path Of Memory
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 39 - The Reality Adjustment
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 38 - Vengeance Requiem
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 37 - A Life Less Lost
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 36 - The Quantum Paradox
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 35 - Identity Crisis
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 34 - The Devil's Advocate
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 33 - Memory Reparation
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 32 - Reclamation Inferno
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 31 - Memory Boot Initialised
Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter links 21-30
Original artwork by @fr3eze
Original words by Cryptogee
Oh boy! This is like skynet on blockchain tech. The whole world is run by machines and one machine runs them all.
I knew it. I knew there were too much machines around for humans to still be in control.
Finally we are getting somewhere. How does Asimov tie into this?
Soon . . .
Cg