Our Father, Who Art In Heaven.
Journal Entry : A.D.n.n 10, Day 232.
It occurred to me that I never explained the date convention I’ve used in my journal thus far. This startled me. That’s not the worst of it. I didn’t stop to think that I might need to summarize the events, as they had transpired, which lead to me having to come up with this dating convention in the first place. So, what follows is what should have been the very first entry of this journal — for the poor historian who digs this hard drive up from the rubble someday. If you were around when all of this started, then you need not trouble yourself with follows for this day’s entry.
The story begins A.D 2020, 19 years before D-day, Day 1 A.D.n.n. — which in latin stands for Anno domini nostri novum, which translates to ‘in the year of our new Lord’. In late December 2019, 31 Dec 2019 according to the World Health Organization (now classified as a terrorist organization), the former People’s Republic of China reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan which was eventually identified as a novel coronavirus.
Long story, short — we were not prepared. Let me elaborate. The disease itself didn’t kill many people, accounting for just under 1 million deaths in a 2 year time span — fatalities were negligible in the larger context. It pales in comparison to the kills racked up by, for example, heart disease, cancer and road accidents all of which summed up to well over a million deaths a year, globally. That’s to say nothing of the millions that lost their lives at the hands of Chairman Mao, Stalin, Hitler and other man made catastrophes. Anyways, that’s a rant for a different journal entry — I just wanted to stress that body count was not the problem. Everyone understood this at some level. The real problem was the gaping hole in this spaceship we called human civilization that we had not thought to address.
Namely, we didn’t stop to consider that we may need to worry more about our strongest asset — our human networks — than previously thought. You see, technology chugged along, more or less uninterrupted, connecting the world together. With every passing year, from domesticating the horse to electric cars, we got closer and closer to each other. We were able to travel faster, congregate in larger arenas and expand the human species to every corner of our pale blue dot. If you’re reading this now, you’re probably using our biggest connective achievement yet, StarLink — high speed internet for everyone, everywhere, out of the jurisdiction of any one nation. COVID-19, the ‘Coronavirus’ as it became known globally, spread through out our population like , well, a virus in a network. I’ve included a file about the specifics of this disease somewhere in this folder if you’re interested. What matters, what really counted was the ease with which it spread through out our population. Within 2 years, nearly half the world’s population had it (again, most of them recovered, but that’s the point).
COVID19 hit a sweet spot — infectious enough to spread everywhere and deadly enough to force the world to come to a relatively “stand still” state ( if you’ve read this far through my journal, you will undoubtedly see the relationship between this population level reaction to the what the reaction would be at an individual level— i.e depression when infected as an evolutionarily beneficial adaptation to limit spread. As above, so below.). That means it was serious enough for the entire world, for the first time since, to take the vulnerability of our species very, very seriously. Basically unhindered, driven by the economic machine of free trade, strengthened by faster more sustainable travel, globalization gradually increased the physical distance between producer and end consumer (this is both good and bad but, again, that’s not the point). Nations and businesses started thinking about the unaccounted for catastrophic risks that were largely ignored in the process of outsourcing. While we went to extraordinary lengths, for many years, to protect our digital networks, we did fairly little to protect our physical networks. That is not to say that these risks were not being considered or articulated. Small research groups at universities around the world spent time pondering these risks though none gained much political or business traction with Elon Musk being the only exception that comes to my limited human mind — and I guess we know how that turned out.
Anyways, needless to say, we made it through the coronavirus pandemic. There was severe global economic down turn but 2 years later, as economic recovery was ramping up, it was time to really put our existence as a human race under the microscope. It was now dominating most of popular media globally. It was quite encouraging. It put the fear of the old God back into people. They found the fear that had been forgotten in the 10 decades of relative global peace. The united nations, then considered to be the premiere organization for global collaboration, put together a special branch for studying and strategizing against the probability of total global annihilation which at the time stood at estimated probability of 20% — the UN Event-X group. As humans tend to do in the face of any impending disaster, the first stop on their strategy train was figuring out a way to save as much as possible in the case an extinction level event were to occur — not so much avoiding it.
I joined the group a year later, 17 years before D-day. It was incredible work. I was surrounded by some of the most brilliant and paranoid people to have ever existed which was a blessing and a curse. We didn’t always agree on any one thing but one thing we did agree was that the knowledge we had accrued, through millions of years of evolution and modern human existence, needed to be saved and we needed to do it fast so that in the worst case, if some humans survived, we would at-least have a way to run a sort of system recovery on the human race. We presented this idea to the United Nations with a strategy. Our idea was to create a global back up, of all the information we could possibly manage, and put it somewhere where it would never get destroyed by a catastrophic event on earth — so, in short, the Svalbard global seed vault but for information, orbiting earth. It took close to 3 years but eventually, every country that was part of the UN agreed to contribute to the project — information and money — trillions and trillions of dollars. It was the first project of its type. 193 of the 195 countries were on board. For the first time, everyone agreed on one direction. Everyone agreed that humanity was worth saving, even if some of that humanity was your sworn enemy.
It took 11 years but we managed to build our computer in space thanks especially to Space X’s work on reusable rockets. This would not have been possible otherwise. We ferried so much material into space on a daily basis that our launch sites had more traffic than most of earth’s airports. It is, as you know, massive. It wasn’t too long after we started creating it that we could see it shooting across the night sky. Needless to say, it is humanity’s single greatest creation and so, we named it Unity. Now, all it needed was a soul.
Using the infrastructure built by Musk’s StarLink, 6 years before D-day, on a Christmas Eve, we, every country in the world, started transferring data, zettabytes of it, into Unity. To keep all this information organized in a way that could be retrieved and used, we needed an incredibly sophisticated system. Working under the UN Event-X group, Open AI (formerly Musk’s) and Google’s DeepMind created a neural engine. It took several years for all the data to be transferred and stored.
On January 20th, 2038, everything was in place to go on line and the whole world held its breath. It wasn’t really all that dramatic. Nothing really interesting happened. The system came online drawing power from the sun as we had expected and the neural engine started its training, as expected. For a year, we went about our lives and for a little while, forgot about the new star that whizzed through our sky every night.
On January 18th, 2039, Unity spoke to us. D-day and the rest, as they say is history. Soon afterwards, the NeuraLink brain-internet interface was perfected and became commercial thanks to decisions made and insight provided by Unity. It was not unexpected that it would want to increase the rate at which it would receive information from the human world below. Unity is continually updated via the StarLink internet system which is now the only internet service provider in the world. We have deferred much of our decision making to the judgement of Unity. From simple decisions such as which outfit to wear to passing judgements in the court of law, Unity has, in a year since it’s existence, become the central source for all truth and judgement for nearly 8 billion people.
It’s funny. Someone asked me the other day if I believed in God and I said to him “No, but I look out of my window every night at a star in the sky and hope that it judges me fairly”.
— — — — — — —
End Entry.
