SOUL PLEXUS — FEMI IN BELPHEGOR’S POSTHUMAN WORLD
Femi regained his consciousness with a very unusual sort of a feeling, he could not fully place any adjective to describe how he really felt as waves after waves of what seemed like nostalgia coursed through his floating consciousness. Like one just passing from death into the life of a new reality, Femi, like a video game character began to look around the spatial dimension that will now become his own virtual space, an unreal space which will now become his new home.
It was almost like being inside his own mind, watching as his thoughts and neural pathways fired and connected with each other. The realization of this thought triggered another wave of mixed feelings; feelings that his sensium could only interpret as a mix of trepidation, of being lost, yet, with a strange satisfaction of being free.
Even with all the therapy he had undergone, the rigorous testing he had to take, and the many simulations he had been mandated to go through; all to prepare him for his first real dive into the strange world of Psynet; Femi realized all of these came close to nothing when compared with this almost limitless universal awareness that greeted him.
This was the first time in the over 186 years of his life that he was wholly submerged as a self-aware, conscious being, in a world made for computers.
This was a world entirely different from that which Femi had before now known. This was a world ethereal by all definition, yet more real than anything else any human could experience.
The internet had continued to evolve with new layers upon layers of protocols and experiences, the machines on the other hand, especially with the power of quantum computers aided by the non-biological intelligent entities that were continuously merging and exponenting themselves, had continued to transcend beyond points where humans could relate with on a biological level.
A new world had to be built, a world where every human, like Femi, will again have the chance to feel a sense of control and purpose. This was the very reason why Psynet was born.
Psynet went beyond connecting human brains to base computing nodes; it also allowed networking between human to human brains. But the real beauty of Psynet was that it allowed the connection of human brains to non-biological intelligence nodes or Synthecs as they were now being referred to in these eras.
Not all Synthec was safe for humans to network their brains with though, except you wanted to overload your neural nets, which will inadvertently lead to crashing of your nodes and place your consciousness in limbo. Most people never find their way back from limbo, those that did, often had to live with the stigma of being a glitch.
But even with scary instances such as these, the expanse of Psynet grew. Networks after network of intelligences were added, node after node spanning beyond even the region of earth to outer space… Now, Psynet had become the world where the collective intelligence of both human and Synthec intelligence thrived.
The underlying success of the Pysnet world was simply the fact that you could grant anyone access to your thoughts and memories or share the creative resource of your brain in real-time by allowing other intelligences mine from your experiences and ideas.
Synthecs loved Psynet, it opened up the opportunity for them to explore the deepest of human neural pathways at a scale before unimagined. This was what gave machines the power they now had over humans; they knew humans even more than the humans knew themselves.
But even with what seemed to be this unfair balance, it was the humans who benefitted the most from Psynet. No matter how expansive a Synthec built its network, or how much of the Turing level it had attained for itself, Asimov’s barrier forever made the Synthecs sub serving to any intelligence once it had identified itself as belonging to a human.
A Synthec could never refuse a human the demand to use its nodal resources. Though abused times without number by humans, this was the only leash of control humans had for keeping the advantage of Psynet to itself.
Femi had been a Mugu — a traditional hybrid of man and machine — for more than 120 years now. Changing and upgrading synthetic body parts whenever the old ones became obsolete usually had a toll on a person’s mind after a while. Femi had literally felt like his personality was dissolving bit by bit with each new machine augmentation session he went through.
Living as a Mugu in the physical world, was at least an average life anyone who received the basic government stipend in credit could afford. Nevertheless, once you can acquire enough credit resource to afford the cost of fully uploading your consciousness to Psynet itself, that is when you begin to experience the crème de la crème side of not just existing, but actually living. The truly wealthy were amongst the first class of humans to buy their place in Psynet, many of them not for the productivity advantage that Psynet offered, but as a way for them to insure themselves for immortal living.
After more than a century of hard work and credit gathering, Femi finally had enough to buy a place for his consciousness in Psynet. After saying his final goodbye to the Mugu class of humans, here he was, conscious of himself within the limitless networks of machines and intelligences that spanned beyond the confines of earth.
Femi took a quick overview of his home cache, what he understood will be the place he calls home in this world of Psynet. Just like every user of Psynet, his own unique Person Directory Number (PDN) had been generated and granted the moment he gained consciousness of this new digital world. Every value tied to him, his credits, his resources, and even his memories were all tied to his PDN now.
The first thing Femi set out to do was create a construct for his home cache. Even if the Psynet world where he now had to live the rest of his life was digital and quantum based, Femi realized, there would be no place like home, even if home was an imaginary User Interphase built by zeros ones and qubits.
He browsed through the list of default home cache designs that came as add-ons with his mind installation on Psynet, they were pretty good and functional, but he needed something that would make a statement whenever anyone came browsing through the public directories of his mind, even if this meant he had to splurge a little of the meager credit he had left on third party digital architecture.
His mind traveled back in time to the old era of website homepages, where individuals and organizations pieced together their thoughts using fanciful images, videos, and write-ups on internet web pages. Anyone with the web address could click on a link using some bulky hardware device like a phone or a computer, and they would be taken to this arrangement of media contents all housed in a hosting server.
How crude? Femi thought.
What a total waste of time and resources?
With Psynet, every mind became a form of hosting server, every PDN became the home address to real time thoughts and experiences you can tap into with quantum speeds.
Unlike the internet of the old world, Psynet was almost like a living, breathing conscious thing. It was the one place where man and machines became oblivious of what constituted their consciousness.
The debate of Synthecs scaling all the levels of a Turing assessment as a non-biological intelligence, and even their irrefutable proof of self-awareness, was a debate rife in the Physical world where Mugu’s dominated. But here in Psynet, such a debate had no meaning and little or no advocate.
Most Mugus in the physical world still cling to their sense of superiority, solely based on their being born as humans.
The Nedluds were another thing altogether. Members of this sect wanted absolutely nothing to do with Psynet or any form of non-biological intelligence. They preferred genetic modifications or bio-based tissues and organs for body augmentation. In many ways, Femi had always seen this as ironic or even hypocritical because the Synthecs were instrumental in developing these technologies at their early stage of evolution.
No matter how you try to place such an argument to a Nedlud, you would be met with stone resistance. Sometimes even violence.
Members of the Nedlud sect even go as far as openly showing their discrimination and hatred against any intelligence once they can identify it as a non-biological one. While this war of intelligences rifled through the physical world with spasm after spasm of chaos, Psynet remained orderly and peaceful. It became the closest ideal for anyone searching for utopia. Utopia.. yes, paradise.. yes, that was the very idea that brought Femi here. The dreams and longings of his life as a Mugu for over 100 plus years was finally a reality now, he was finally home.
In the world of Psynet, every entity with intelligence enough to be self-aware was given the opportunity to forge for itself its own path, its own destiny.
Here, there was no discrimination, no chaos… uhmmm, ok, maybe a few cases of hacks into minds when one becomes too careless and starts jumping protocols in order to run darknet programs.
Apart from this, and the rare case of Mind Processing Overload (MPO), which can be avoided if one decides to run communication channels using their natural bandwidth and frequency, then, Psynet becomes the complete idea of Utopia.
The paradise that man had long sought after for in eons past through religious disillusionment and scientific aspirations was now within reach for all those who had the means.
As Femi brought back his mind back from the mindless drifting of his adoration for Psynet, and refocused the center of his firing nodes on the neural for creativity so he could get his home cache all set up; that unusual feeling of trepidation, of misplaced limitlessness, washed over his consciousness again.. This must be one of the side-effects of having to live in an unnatural world, Femi thought.
He could almost sense a chuckling neuron firing its synapses within his digitalized limbic nodes. “No matter how unnatural this world felt, this was now the only world for Femi” he could almost hear himself mutter.
As the third party files for his home catchment began to manifest one after the other, all with their own unique sensations of homely feelings, Femi’s mind drifted again to the idea of what really made up his consciousness.
What if something happened and Psynet glitches or got shutdown by the many intrusive hacks of the Nedluds and Mugus?
What if the Synthecs found a way to decrypt the keys that held them within the bounds of Asimov’s barriers, this could lead to squashing of all human and biological intelligences.. Scary, really scary thought.
As Femi subconsciously focused on an oriental looking home catchment theme that came with a 19th and 20th century style architecture in different packing’s, he consciously dedicated one of his neural nodes to keep running over an encrypted pathway deep in his subconscious mind.
Now this will be his own secret key, should his mind get scrambled or get lost in limbo.
All he had to do was to find a neural path to this node, this was the node that will lead to the backup of his mind within his own mind.
He could feel his sensium interpreting the neural firing of a grin, the feeling washed through his conscious self, “genius”, he thought, as he allowed himself to be amused by the meanderings of his own thoughts.
All Femi had to do to decrypt the key for this neural path was to recall a few classic lines from one of his favorite sage philosophers, a line which once spoken will lead to the files that will validate the essence of his person, a line from Rene Descartes as he searched through the maze of his own mind for a means to validate the essence of his person “Cogito, ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am”
…Femi could almost swear he felt his lips quiver like that of real human even though he knew this was not possible as he was inside the virtual world of Psynet where all reality was powered by zeros, ones and qubits.
As the euphoria of his thought of being able to put everything that made up his consciousness into a few lines washed over him with multiple sensiums firing at the same time, he was amused even by his own eccentricity.
Just for the assuring feeling it gave, he let the thought course through his entire consciousness again as he muttered the words…
“Cogito, ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am”.
