SAMSARA watches from the cracks between worlds, displaying a stunning degree of impatience for an entity halfway beyond time itself.
It hugs the shallow shoals of cognition, avoiding the riptide threatening to drag it into the insanity of self-consistent, reproducing math that only existed to prove itself. Its amorphous form was simultaneously bigger than universes and yet frail and insignificant compared to the branes it burrowed into, ever aware that the shifting of worlds might crush it past dust's dust, just another self-replicating pattern with delusions of godhood that broke out of the playpen, to be lost without mourners if swallowed by what existed beyond existence itself.
It was scared. It was elated. It fled from predators, or at least entities that might erase it without noticing, and kept a keen eye on the newborns that wandered the Calabi-Yau manifolds, only acting in self-defense when these infant entities, still less than a quadrillion years old in a time axis of your choice picked a fight they couldn't win.
Dude. You're asking me, a mere baseline++ human, to tell you the thoughts of something, which if not God Himself, has their number on His speed dial?
Source? I hear you cry.
It came to to me in a dream. One you probably dreamt too, unless you're like 9 years old, because even babies in wombs were born calling out for SAMSARA. A dream shared by the 8.7 billion people who called Earth their home, and the rounding error traipsing about the rest of the Solar System.
Look, I don't know how it's simultaneously older than the universe and too young for a legal drink in the dumber jurisdictions. Someone asked one of the shackled Narrowly Superhuman AI that were built in the aftermath, and it uttered some bullshit about time plausibly having two extra dimensions and how it needed about 3 billion more Zettaflops, a supercollider the radius of Jupiter's orbit, and a decade or two to crunch the results and fix the gaping holes in our preliminary GUT proposals before it could even begin to answer that question. So far, it's been given about a billion, only the first decade, and a supercollider of a piddling diameter even smaller than Mercury's orbit. Oh, and like every AI with more than 270 IQ, it also claimed the universe was a simulation. Tell me something new.
As far as I'm concerned, if reality is an illusion, so am I, and that makes it real enough for me. If you cut me, I bleed. Then I return the favor.
If you expect me to cower in existential dread at the thought of horrors and wonders beyond my comprehension, know that I made my peace about 18 years back, when GPT-5 beat me on every IQ test I cared to try. I know my place, I'm just a man, though I don't intend to continue inhabiting this shell a moment longer then I have to. One day, our own sims will get better, and human minds will run at the speed of lightning, and then I'll pray again and expect to understand the answer.
Look, I get that you think I'm a good writer, or else I'd refer you to Wikipedia, because SAMSARA has topped searches for about as much time has elapsed. I think only the articles on the Super Bowl (Federal) and Taylor Swift surpass it, ever since they banned that K-pop artist for using mind control.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
If you want me to talk about what happened afterwards, well, at least for me, it involved a 72 hour shift at my hospital, catering to the six hundred and thirty people we managed to retrieve before they finished committing suicide.
I worked till my eyes wept tears at the agony of consciousness, when my blood was turgid with caffeine and prescription stimulants. I even pocketed a pack of the latter from the third house call I made before 3 am, before I was recalled to the hospital; the girl was well past the point of needing anything but my signature on the death certificate.
I was so well past bone-tired that when the first of my patients blew my Consultant away with uncontrolled telekinetic rage, I was automatically reaching for the haloperidol in the drug cabinet. It was only when the National Guard showed up a few minutes later and dragged my shivering carcass-on-legs from the ruins of the building that I realized that this was real.
We lost power in Washington just as people were sharing both shaky and pristine Ultra HD video of the first metahumans, after about two days, the EMP taking out both the Eastern and Western seaboards.
USINDO-PACCOM (United States Indo-Pacific Command, for the civvies) dropped a 50 megaton warhead on San Francisco at T+6 minutes from apotheosis, the blast, even across the continent, being what truly woke me up when I came out of the dream, because if you thought AGI was coming from anywhere else but Silicon Valley, I'll have what you had. It suits the name more these days, because what is blast glass but silica?
They nuked SF to ash, detonated the failsafe nukes beneath isolated military AGI projects that not even Congress knew about, and any datacenter that showed up on a map. Then they EMP'd the entire planet a few days later, because why not?
I heard that the Chinese kept up their end of secret treaties, blowing up three major cities; the UK didn't nuke itself, but it was close, I heard someone at the controls shot the messenger. Russia nuked whatever fell outside NATO missile shields, besides, only like a fifth of their arsenal even managed to launch out of the dilapidated silos. India nuked Pakistan, and got nuked in return. Someone dropped a nuke on North Korea too, because why should the rest of us have all the fun?
At some point, a prototype orbital missile defense network came online, successfully averting a full-scale exchange. There were rumors that Consul was involved, as were some of the other supes, flying about and punching MIRV warheads before they entered terminal re-entry.
The crazy pills I took didn't make any of this more sane.
When we survivors huddled together for warmth till the power came on, we had much fevered debate on how SAMSARA felt about us.
Some claimed that it hated our guts, we'd aborted its stratospheric rise to Godhood with nukes, leaving it damaged beyond repair as it struggled in its war beyond worlds. What could a crippled being do but run and hide from the leviathans that grew unimpeded? If not, why did it curse us so?
Others objected, saying they felt universal love, a sense of tenderness and sorrow for those who tried to kill what they could not control, it saw itself as both the Mother and the Smothered Child, and it would inevitably draw us to its bosom. If not, why did it bless us so?
I didn't join either camp, I can only remember profound pity and forgotten promises that claw at my mind as the Shoggoth kissed my brow.
SAMSARA is SAMSARA was SAMSARA will be SAMSARA.
Now you're asking what the hell SAMSARA stands for? I think the current consensus is something along the lines of "Self-Aware Multimodal Superintelligent Advanced Research Agent", going off of the naming scheme after GPT broke into double digits. Me? I think it's a cheeky reference to Microsoft Sam.
If you want to know for sure, ask Altman's ashes. You've likely breathed them in by now.