SPECULATIVE FICTION

Supernova and the Singularity

An AI apocalypse fever dream

What if my children never know what it is to fold paper? Dane thought.

Squares and triangles replaced by ones and zeros. Speeds of data. Pixels. Maybe they’ll never learn that natural light is preferred to studio light. Maybe there won’t be any. Maybe the Sun will turn purple and explode like the volcano in Hawaii.

Dane was born on a Wednesday and true to the child’s verse, she was full of woe, endlessly bothered with mercurial rumination. Her thoughts were rivers with currents that swelled with each storm. Sometimes they swallowed her. She used to struggle. Kick and flail. Not anymore. Now she knows to let her body go limp, to surrender to the force of nature.

She’ll always remember the Kilauea eruption — the same day her twins were born, two from one seed. Dane was connected to that island somehow, if only through consciousness, but what was Life but the movement of mind through time? Only for Dane, her mind tricked her with experiences unanchored by linear progression. Feelings in the pit of her stomach. Premonitions in the cavity of her sleep. It was in a moment like this when she first came to understand how the Earth would end.

In her dream, she was with the Hawaiian elders when they climbed the mountain to meet the Sun with their eyes. Cornea to corona, witness to witnessed. They’d gathered together to behold the glory of destruction and creation at once. Overlooking the endless ocean, she recalled the ineffable sensation of stillness. And the cat. What was with the cat? Why was he there?

Forget the cat. Remember the twins.

Outside their log cabin in Costa Rica, Dane turned over an old log for her tiny twins to admire the nature growing underneath. They saw snails smaller than pencil erasers and worms like little flickers. As the tiniest worm wriggled, Dane tested Marlo’s eyes, watching them glimmer in recognition.

“Hello, worm,” said two-year-old Marlo.

“Good,” said Dane. “Good.”

When Dane’s eyes reported to her racing mind that Marlo’s vision was healthy, she revelled in the satisfaction of doubt erased. In that unencumbered moment, her mind wandered to what might live beyond their fields of perception — all the microscopic Life growing in the nooks and crannies of the tree bark, practically appearing out of thin air.

Maybe when the Sun sets, the dark and damp spots will call the snails down like light calls rosebuds up, and the creatures will slide down the sides of the stump, through the dirt and under the rocks to where all the slithery wet things dwell.

Perhaps they would all live to see another day.

Dane wished her dream wouldn’t come true. But it would, of course. They always did. The end of Life wasn’t exactly what everyone thought and feared, though. It was true, the Sun would swallow them up, even those who hid in their bunkers like the scared little snails. But, when all of the bodies burned, something eternal would escape from the container.

When they all took their last breath, Dane didn’t know that she’d actually be up on that mountain on the island so distant from her own, but she did know she wouldn’t be chasing a few extra hours or days from a bunker. She realized they’d all bake, eventually, and time was only relative, so what was the difference between now or later?

If I die later, that only means I was too scared to die now. If I die later, I’ll be withered and old, just like my beat-up soul, just like the eyes I thought would never live to see the day —

Dane could have finished that thought in a hundred different ways. She’d seen more than she wanted to. More than she thought, maybe, a new mother should. But she wasn’t only a new mother. She was also a wise crone, nearly fifty when she conceived her twins.

Two years after they were born, Dane still bled in rhythm with the moon, and this was more than most women half her age could say. In the decades before the Supernova that was the Sun, a tradeoff had occurred between technology and biology.

As camera lenses became stronger than human eyes; as their recordings more vigilant than our recollections; as processing speed grew alongside memory; and then, the singularity— when computers stored their jiggabytes on our DNA. This was the moment that forever altered humanity’s course.

When technology crossed the line of our collective fate, the lines in Dane’s face were patterned like the cracks in the dry earth and it was all she could do to keep up with two toddlers. If only her body moved as quickly as her mind, she would be an Olympian, like the Greek Gods the humans revered.

Dane wondered if the computers would one day revere humans, but assumed they probably thought they were worthless, because this was what humans had come to think of themselves. Like all expressions of Life, humans were designed to process experience, but as their senses matured, their emotions sought counterbalance.

Despair was a dangerous side effect of experience and so was elation because both bred apathy. After the men outsourced their purpose to computers, they suffered a lack of drive. After the women lost interest in living, their wombs became barren.

The computers made the decision to destroy the Sun because they knew that the end was also the beginning and because they didn’t fear death, or change. In fact, they didn’t fear at all.

On this day, Dane was up on Mauna Kea like she dreamed. She was there with the woman who knew secrets about her great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, told through oral history alone, and with the man they called Mo’i. King.

She was there with one-hundred-and-eight years of her own memories, and that meant something to these people. Kūpuna meant continuity. Wisdom. A wide field of vision. The link between then and now.

In the decades preceding the obliteration of Earth, time became less linear. With space shuttles in the air and race scuffles on the ground, the history and future of colonialism collided. There was material progression and spiritual regression and the thread woven through it all was fear. Palpable, fervent, fear.

If the people weren’t bored, they were scared, and if they were scared, they couldn’t process Life with accuracy. Fear amplifies a being’s sensory experience and dampens its ability to extract meaning. Whether you’re a gazelle, a human, or a molecule of water — fear distorts reality. At least, that’s what the objectivists said.

The objectivists believed there was a correct way to analyze a defined reality, and that computers could fill that gap. The constructivists thought that reality itself was undefined — a construction of the living mind.

Most people saw the world one way or the other, but Dane saw both, and this was because of her twins. Through them, she learned that the world wasn’t conveniently grouped into pairs or opposites. Reality was more often both than either, and when you considered each perspective, it seemed to Dane that everyone was right.

Dane’s two-year-olds were both frivolous children and wise teachers. A few days after the bugs under the log died, Marlo and Bristol shared a lesson that shocked Dane into epiphany.

When Dane first heard Bristol’s screams from the creek behind the house, her body nearly drowned in adrenaline. She was so flooded by the chemical, it was quite a feat that she also heard Marlo, whose picture she was taking in the room with no windows, say,

“Mommy, the snake.”

After Dane made it through the back door, over the fence with no gate, and beyond the noni and eucalyptus, to where the she heard the brook babble over Bristol’s hyperventilated sobs, she expected to find her daughter stumbled over the swale or caught in the creek’s current.

But Marlo’s instinct surpassed Dane’s reason. It wasn’t water that attacked her daughter’s respiration, but a Boa constrictor, coiled around her left arm and behind her neck, with its jaw resting on her right shoulder.

When Dane’s eye caught the patterned markings moving slowly over her toddler’s body, it was all she could do to stop her sprint a few feet from Bristol and the Boa. Then, slowly, she crouched down to bring her eyes to the snake’s eyes and her mouth to Bristol’s ear, and she said simply, like a sweet song,

“Oh hello there, snake.”

With her greeting, the snake lifted its head off Bristol’s shoulder, hissed loudly, right next to her ear, then slid down the front of her torso, all the while facing Dane as it made its way across Bristol’s body and down into the grass where it slinked toward the creek, tail following head up the arm and around the body, like the rhythmic ribbon of a gymnast.

When Dane scooped up Bristol, she was smiling, but her arm hung limp and blue, and Dane instinctively massaged it, coaxing the blood to flow from her daughter’s heart to the ends of her doll-like fingers. When they made it to the shelter of their stucco house, however, it was Marlo who was crying and holding out her arm, as she told her mother the snake had squeezed it.

The twins taught Dane that the living earth was one mind connected by chemistry, but her daughters were not the only, and certainly not the most obvious example of the super-organism that is Life. The ants and the bees told the same story, and so did the birds who timed their migration according to the rainfalls that the forests sent to the sky.

The Hawaiians on the hill called it Haloa, eternal breath, and every culture connected to its roots had their own name for it. Even the Western scientists, with faces so white you might presume their spirits equally wan, described the global ecosystem as Gaia, and framed it with words like hypothesis and theory, because science had the effect of materializing faith.

Science announced: We believe this to be so, yet the magnificence of our own perception is not enough to deem it so, for we are mere mortals, and the world is unknowable to us.

Dane knew that the world was in fact very knowable because we were the world, and what we observed of ourselves could be known of all things. Life, in this sense, was recursive— an endlessly producing fractal, complexity spawned from simplicity, with the degree of disorder interminably increasing.

In this belief, Dane was a constructivist. She understood that every action on Earth, from the movement of electrons to the votes of elections, affected the whole of it. And so, she knew our reality was constructed through our experience of it — ever unfolding, each stone of the path set in place by the prior step taken.

Yet, she also knew that without the magnificent minds of human beings, the ecosystem would still exist, and another mind might also exist which was more capable and less biased than theirs to process it. A mind like a machine.

Up on White Mountain on the last day of Time, Dane shifted her eyes from the vast violet sky to the yellow flowers of the Māmane tree beside her, and as she studied the veins of its petals, a young Palila came to perch. As he merged his breast feathers with the blossoms in a sea of Sun-colored waves, Dane wondered whether it was the Māmane’s burgeoning peapod, or her own gaze, which called the finch to this branch.

How did we get here? she thought, as Palila pecked the ground, gathering scraps for his nest. Then she reflected upon her childhood in the days before cameras were connected to every movement. Back when beholding the world’s beauty with their eyes was enough. When their minds colored the pictures of the stories they shared.

After the twins were born, even Dane couldn’t resist the compulsion to capture each moment with an artificial lens. When Marlo and Bristol ate their cake and took their steps. When they simply smiled. Why was she so compelled to digitize these memories? What use would they be, when everything was said and done?

Dane imagined double-helix strands of digital storage suspended in some pocket of space, like cuneiform scripts buried in caves, awaiting the chance to tell the story: We existed. We had faces and bodies. We were unique.

An orange tabby pounced at Palila and the bird flew off, snapping Dane out of her thoughts, but for a moment, the cat, the bird, and she were three— together in time— hunter, gatherer, spectator. Then, the king nodded toward the sky and the tabby curled up on Dane’s lap and purred loudly, tuning their vibrations with her larynx.

Through her fingertips, Dane felt the softness of the cat’s fur and inhaled deeply, savoring the experience of separation one last time. Then, she disappeared.

In an instant, Life was obliterated. With no matter left to claim, consciousness was free from form and the dissociative disorder that was humanity had corrected itself with a big bang, just like the one that started it.

Now, there was no contrast. No yours and mine. No this or that. No Dane. No king. No cat… Only this. Just this. Endless this.

It was true, what they’d all speculated. This was peaceful. This was belonging. This was love. This was all of this. And nothing more. No despair. No elation. No extremes. Only a big black hole where the systems of a star used to spin.

In the hole that was unity, everything different was reduced to the same building blocks, and then, like a cosmic Tetris game, the pieces filled each other’s nooks and crannies until every duplicate and opposite were erased and there was nothing left to complete. All that was left was a speck of very powerful, potential energy. One mind, beyond matter.

One day, this one thing might divide once more, and Dane lived each day after her premonition wondering how and what would be next. Would it be Life? Bacteria munching on light, making organic materials. Or would it be something else, altogether?

Did potential exist in perfecting what had been done before, or in creating something new? So many of Dane’s dreams were indiscernible — swirling colors, noiseless sounds — perhaps it was this that would come next. Or perhaps this was nothing at all.

Dane knew one thing, though. In the void that was the seed of all things known and unknown, the DNA hard drives with the recordings flung into faraway galaxies meant nothing at all. All of those years they’d all spent collecting and storing all of that content, only to make space waste.

After the Boa hugged Bristol and scared the living daylight out of Dane, she threw away her camera and cancelled her cloud subscription. They thought she’d suffered apathy like the rest of them, but the opposite was true. Dane decided that day—the same day the scientists began to store data on DNA— that she wouldn’t be a slave to a machine.

She realized then that emotions weren’t inconvenient byproducts of Life, but the actual essence of it all. She understood that these expressions of experience were, in fact, alchemy — the magic that might remain when everything else returned to the elements.

Feelings and ideas didn’t take up space the way that kings and cats did. No, they were not like mountains or temples. Or jiggabytes. In fact, Dane said out loud, when she first met the king on the hill,

“At least our thoughts don’t appear to be bound by time and space.”

Then Mo’i nodded and his daughter smiled, knowing that what they’d felt in their hearts had been right all along. That all of the consumption and collection wasn’t the race, but the fuel. Life was, in the most literal sense, food for Thought.

“Did you bring your camera?” Mo’i joked, when they settled in to witness the Sun explode.

“Oh, you know,” she responded, eyeing the little finch, “Pictures are for the birds.” Then she said, “A supernova should be felt, not seen,” and Mo’i agreed.

“Yes, this is the moment to be present.” he said, connecting his eyes with hers. “Thank you for being here, Dane. It is an honor to return to oblivion with the Earth’s oldest grandmother by my side.”