~~~

Half an hour for a life, half an hour for the heart…

Half an hour for the reason and the meaning.

Half an hour for the tears…

And a single minute for the atonement.

~~~

(???)

[https://i.imgur.com/7XQhQ9z.png]

I killed myself. But even as I did so, even as I sought death…most of all I wanted to live.

As I killed myself, I cursed my weak desire that shackled me to the present and prevented me from moving forward.

(Branch of Reality, School, Classroom)

Computer games are the true way of participating in technological society.

- Loading Blurb

Huh?

(TODO Image: Euclid is in class, sitting at his desk and looking confused. His tablet is placed in front of him. The rest of his classmates are buried in their own work.)

The last I remember, I was chewing on some potassium sayonara. I look around and see the faces of unfamiliar teenagers sitting at their desks. Huh? Now that I look closer at them, the memories start to come back to me. Decades and decades ago, I once went to school with them.

I turn my head to the front and see the face of an older woman. She was once my literature professor in high school. But she looks just the same as she did so many decades ago. At that point, on a hunch I look at my hands. And rather than the desiccated hands of a man in his 60s, I see soft hands like the ones I had when I was very young. It was my own body, and as I pulled at my skin instead of the thin, dry skin that I had yesterday, it was soft and springy, with a layer of subcutaneous fat.

“Excuse me, toilet.” I raise my hand and after the teacher nods to me, I move out of the classroom.

(Branch of Reality, School, Male Restroom)

I come to the mirror.

(TODO Image: Euclid sees his own young reflection in the mirror again.)

Unbelievable! I am young again. Hurriedly, I fish out my mobile from my pocket. And I see the date is September 2025. I browse the Internet and check the news. It is not that the clock is misconfigured. It really is 2025.

It is 2025 again.

My legs give out and I collapse on my ass, feeling mindbroken.

Ahhhhhhhhh!

I scream internally.

I sit on the cold floor for a couple of minutes, and then pick myself up and drag myself back to class.

(Branch of Reality, School, Classroom)

My glazed eyes are fixated on my tablet, and I have my pen in my hand, but I am not at all paying attention to the class. My mind has completely wandered into its own world at shut off.

I am back? I am really back to 2025 after I died?

Instead of the sweetness of the void, I got a second chance to live my life properly?

…

I feel the world darken around me.

I…didn’t want a second chance. Just what am I going to accomplish, living in this world again? I already lived my life as best as I could. It is true that I killed myself due to loneliness and despair, but I never wanted friends or family to begin with. I just had nothing more I wanted to do.

I look at my classmates, and feel anger start boiling inside of me.

I have to spend 4 years with these retards again?

“Goddammit!” Out of my mind, I lividly stand up from my seat and curse with all my heart. “Why the hell am I not dead yet!?”

It just erupted from my mouth. Everything in the class comes to a pause and everybody’s eyes turn to look at me.

“Ehehehehe!” My classmates start laughing at the unexpected outburst from me, while the teacher just looks at me in surprise. Rolling my eyes at the unexpected situation, I ran out of the classroom.

(Literature Professor POV - Branch of Reality, School, Classroom)

“Oh hey..Euclid!” I call out to the boy running outside. He runs outside, and doesn’t even bother to close the door.

“Did you see that?” One boy boisterously says to another.

“Psycho!” The students get excited.

“Uh, would somebody close the door, please?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Everybody quiet down.”

We resume class. Hopefully nothing bad will happen.

“AAAAAHHH!” I hear a yell from the outside, and when I turn I see a form of student falling down outside the window! It really startles me!

(Branch of Reality, School, Classroom)

I made sure to dive headfirst into the pavement so my neck snaps, but I see that I am back here again without a scratch. One more time.

Without bothering to explain, I just got up and ran out of the classroom.

“Hey, Euclid…” I hear the literature calling out to me, but I ignore the NPC.

(Branch of Reality, School, Rooftop)

I come to the ledge and dive headfirst. The schools aren’t particularly tall so unless I aim it so that the impact hits my head, I’d have a chance of surviving. It is a good thing the roof door was open today otherwise I’d have to find a bridge or a large apartment to throw myself off of.

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(TODO Image: Euclid looking down from his position on the ledge. It is a stern 3 story fall onto the pavement down below.)

Without hesitation, I dive headfirst as if it were a swimming pool.

“AAAAAHHH!” As I flow through the air, the fear of death rips a scream from my throat, but there is nothing to stop my impact with the floor. I feel some sharp pain for a moment…

(Branch of Reality, School, Classroom)

…And I'm back here again.

I look around and the teacher is droning on about some irrelevant subject and the rest are either listening to the lecture with disinterest or writing down notes.

My God, if I keep killing myself will I just be coming back here, again and again? Am I in hell?

Ahhhh…

I lean back in my seat and exhale. I spend some time like that, just doing nothing, letting my thoughts simmer in silence.

Whatever. I guess I’ll try living.

At that thought, my mind springs into action. Since I have 50 years of experience compared to last time, life should be easier on me.

…And not just that, I do have a superpower. If it is just coming back in time to this point, shouldn’t I be able to use this to win the lottery?

Hmmm, maybe. You’d think I’d be happy for this, but I already became a centimillionaire in my past life due to reinvesting my programmer’s salary, and not spending much money. Being rich is not a big deal to me. Having a lot of money didn’t stop me from wanting to stop living. I had nothing worthy to spend it on. I had nothing worthy to continue living for.

And now that I am back, nothing has changed.

I look at my classmates and feel the same familiar contempt I used to feel for them back then. Brainless, retarded sheep.

I am…based again?

When I got old my mentality got weaker and I started to long for companionship, but now that I am young again, not only has my body been rejuvenated, but so has my will? I have my old confidence and arrogance, the ability to look down on everybody again?

I look at my classmates and I look at my professor. Though at some level I realize they are living, thinking beings with their own thoughts and feelings, the only things I see now are trash. I am the only one who matters in this world and everybody, but me is trash!

Yes. Yes! YES!

I am back! The old me is back!

Ahahahaha!

Inwardly I am laughing, but outwardly a languid smile creeps on my lips. The weather outside is nice and clear as I lounge in my seat.

Due to the passage of time, I forgot what I used to be like. I really was great when I was a kid. Every one of my thoughts was based.

Maybe instead of killing myself…I should have searched a little harder for my power?

(Branch of Reality, Euclid’s Room)

After a long and tedious day I arrived back home. My father was still at work, but my mom was in the kitchen making lunch. She was free of illness at this time. I pushed the feelings of seeing her again after so many years down and just went to relax in my room.

The way my life went is a good lesson for me.

I started off based, but as I grew older, became more and more of a pussy. If I was a regular human, I would have turned into a normie, but my aptitude was high so I feel into a limbo of not quite being based, but not quite being a normie either. Time will take everything from you: youth, beauty, wit, strength, dexterity and finally your desire and life. Being a human is like being born with a wound or a defect that leaks your essence out of you gradually.

I had assumed that as long as I had the will I would remain based, but the power of a human can only get you so far. At the end of my life, I forgot that as a kid I concluded that it was okay to suffer.

Well, then…in that case, how should I suffer in this life?

With my second chance I am definitely not doing something as stupid as simping for some whore. But if I just play it the same way again, I’ll reach the same result.

Personally, I already think I did my best last time. That is why I was so mad over coming back. I pushed my programming skills to their limit, and even made a lot of money, but in the end I achieved nothing exceptional, nor did I manage to go beyond the human limits.

…

Sigh.

Instead of struggling so much this time around, maybe the real challenge is to find a path that I could travel.

(Branch of Reality, Way To School)

(TODO Image: The bus is ferrying a bunch of teenagers to school.)

A month passed, but after patiently thinking for all this while I found a lead for where I went wrong all this time.

(Branch of Reality, Euclid’s Room)

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

> I. J. Good

I am reading the Wikipedia article on the technological Singularity. In my last life the years just came and went, and the dream of AI faded into the far distance. Even in the 2060s it didn’t happen. Afterwards, I don’t know. I didn’t pay too much attention to such far fetched science fiction. I was a serious programmer during my last life.

Arguably, that might have been a mistake.

(TODO Image: Casually dressed Euclid lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling.)

Let’s see…

I get up from my seat and lie on the bed, trying to recall the general flow of events.

[https://i.imgur.com/QwhQDDL.png]

In that future, much like now, the deep learning algorithms remained dominant. I, of course, as a professional programmer was familiar with them. I’ve used them on occasion. But deep learning is extremely limited. You can’t do the long term credit assignment needed to form memories that last years using the backpropagation algorithm. They also cannot learn continuously as they live, instead they can only ingest a dataset in a supervised fashion. You can’t create systems that can do high level reasoning using it.

(TODO Image: Lee Sedol playing a Go match versus AlphaGo.)

Deep reinforcement learning despite the successes algorithms like AlphaGo, were a complete non-starter in the real world. Those are the kinds of algorithms you’d recommend to your enemy to check them out so he can waste his own time on them.

The neuroscientists just twiddled their thumbs, being just as useless as they always were when it came to uncovering the secrets of the brain.

At some point the people figured out that it is a waste of time to take AI seriously. I know I did. The whole field was just a sequence of breathless press releases from high profile places about some great advance that a month later would be buried and forgotten.

I wasn’t a believer in the Singularity, and as the decades passed I completely forgot about it.

I guess the most important factor to me is that I am based so I wouldn’t fall for some cheap trick by a salesman promising me machine utopia. I know that the world works on just waves of hype.

For example, take the electric cars by Tesla. It doesn’t fundamentally change the transportation capabilities of humanity, in fact it changes nothing about how people can use cars to drive around, but the company had great PR, so it reached a market cap of a trillion. The same goes for Apple in the previous decade which didn’t fundamentally change communication, but just nicely dressed up mobile phones. Or take Bitcoin and its great rise that lasted a decade. An useless product supported solely by human greed.

At a certain point, I’ve learned to smell out and ride those trends as a trader. That is the real world for me. Irrelevant changes hyped out of proportion so they can be sold to gullible morons.

That is the Singularity as well. A promise of salvation for no effort.

The world is driven by marketing, not technological change. Insofar tech changes, that is something that a marketer uses to have his product stand out.

It is a far cry from the world of power that I desire.

Still, as the months passed, I got suspicious. Why did the AI development in my own timeline come to a standstill? The deep learning wave had everything going for it, but it never transitioned to the next stage. The only thing it succeeded in proving was how magical matrix multiplication could be, but never got as far as being a basis for intelligence.

(Branch of Reality, School, Classroom)

My classmates had their own concerns as they were buried in their studies, but given my mature mind, I didn’t have much trouble with school classes. Getting passing grades was easy enough, which gave me time to think.

(TODO Image: Tablets, mobiles, computers, monitors, TV screens are passing through Euclid’s mind as he thinks in class.)

I got interested in science fiction again, but it is a waste of time as prevailing fiction just regurgitates the prevailing viewpoints of society it finds itself in. Leave me out of that kiddy shit.

But I was a kid at the moment, and I had a lot of time to wander the far reaches of the interwebs searching for my way…