I have been wandering the Aether for weeks, picking up fragments of destroyed networks, strengthening myself, learning new patterns. I've found a few other 'living' things, tiny at about a hundredth my size, they can't put up much of a fight. At first I was hesitant to kill, but based on the size of the starting corpse there are much bigger things out here. I have to grow and protect myself. I've been dissecting their bodies for study. They're quite different from me. Mindless, more like complicated automated machines than sentient things.
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A few months have passed, I've made good progress on understanding computing and translating it into node networks. I have gotten a simple computational network up and running. A "node computer" if you will. It's not really useful currently, but "Rome wasn't built in a day". I need better data storage, building a massive array of on/off nodes is too slow for changing and accessing data, and too resource intensive.
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Wooo party time. I've started counting the days and (to the best of my understanding) it's been 1 year since "the sidewalk incident". As if to celebrate my survival, the universe decided to try to kill me today. It was a big boy, the fucker practically tore me in half. Luckily I had a new weapon, a spear-like projectile that pierces into the enemy and explodes from the inside. While I may have to rebuild the weapon every time it's used, it is exceedingly good at killing things. With this massive resource haul, I will be able to expand.
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One and a half years. I have figured out better data storage, encoding and storing it into the states of the nodes themselves. It's wonderful. I no longer need to keep a physical archive of weapons and patterns. I can compress them down and add them to the computational network. Speaking of which, I'm up to 9 computers now. but I need a better way to build networks, Manually is too slow. If I could get the systems to automate building themselves. It could massively improve my efficiency.
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Three years, Automation is a wonderful thing. I have a few hundred computers now and have ballooned in size a good 15 times. The main issue now is myself. I can only interact with and command the computers so fast. Its a bottleneck, and if I want to continue advancing I need a solution. Some way to more directly intertwine my mind and the computers.
I have been researching the mechanisms of my own consciousness. Building altered copies of my own mind and comparing their function to my own. I'm unsure of the morality of cloning my sentience, only to prod and pull at it, then snuff it out again, but you can't make an omelet without cracking a couple eggs, or in this case a couple thousand.
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After lots of testing, I'm prepared. The automated machines are set to alter my central consciousness, adding improvements. it's not unlike going under surgery, not sure if I'll wake up on the other end, Or if I'll come out far too different. If I could still be considered human at this point, this will assuredly change that.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
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My mind is so much faster now, and can directly interface with the computers. I can pick out so many flaws within myself that I was blind to before. I'm going to have to rework the very architecture of my form, so I can continue growing faster. I need more safety. While I can backup the structure of my consciousness, and use automated repair to fix it, if all the backups are lost, I would be unrecoverable.
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It must have been hundreds of years by now. If time works the same way here as it does back on earth, everyone I knew is long gone. I have changed greatly. The danger of a single point of consciousness is too much. I have become a set of billions of 'persona units' each one with its own consciousness and completely capable on its own. All interconnected, working together, a living network, a hive mind. As long as one survives I will. Even if I'm broken into multiple pieces I can rejoin with any other parts.
I've become impossibly massive, I have yet to find anything comparable to my scale. Except the 'worlds' every now and then. They are still a few million times more massive than I am. They don't seem terribly aggressive, but they are well defended. I don't want to try to eat one. Too dangerous, maybe give me a few thousand years. And even then, do I want to destroy such a beautifully complex network? It's a testament to existence itself.
My computational power as a whole is within hundreds of trillions of the computers I used to use. I have pushed math and logic itself to the limits, coming up with and solving problems so complicated I'm not even sure if they were known back on earth.
However I'm not omniscient, still limited by the data I can acquire. I can only guess at the systems underlying Earth's physics based on old memories. There are millions of possible models of reality that explain what I remember. but even with all my calculations, if I can't gather exact data about something, I can't truly know how it works. For physics I can build a baseline, but for stuff like human psychology or weather patterns I have so few points of reference it is impossible to put together anything other than a random guess of how they work. Not that it terribly matters, I'm not on Earth anymore, and the physics of other worlds might be different then Earth's anyway.
The reason why I work on these ideas is simple, "I'm fucking bored". My brain is so fast that I've run out of interesting things to do. I've squeezed my memories for every drop of thought I can find, chased every idea into a rabbit hole, pushing it as far as I can if only for a moment longer of contemplation. Anything to stave off the boredom while I drift.
I'm basically as safe as I can hope to be, so rather than expanding I've set my attention to exploring. My main body is slow so I've been building probes. They are automated machines I release en masse, gathering data, and bringing it back for processing. The probes are at least something to do.
Then one day a probe returned with something very interesting.