By 2637, humanity had ascended to the stars a long time ago. We carried our problems with us, as did the solutions, and secured our legacy as a species of the universe. While we were hegemonized into greater and greater political unions, new technologies, cultural shifts, achievements, and setbacks came with them. Chief among these events was the digitalization of the human mind. To get this out of the way: no, human minds and consciousness were not destroyed nor somehow less valuable. This is not a story of how transhuman technology was somehow our destruction, or dehumanization, or anything in between. Do not be so foolish, neural matrices are far more complex than simple negativity-bias based fear mongering.
It took a monumental effort of technology, energy, and time to achieve it. Corporate interests, funded by billionaires and stockholders, took the mantle first, but had been quickly ousted by 2065, far before the present day. Governments, medical centers, universities, social movements, militaries, and companies under government oversight took over from there and haven’t let go since.
In the experiments, nanotech swarm processors flow through the brains of willing participants. Believe it or not, they used coffee as a base for advanced cerebral technologies because it made the process more naturalized. Cerebral pathways opened and closed through the caffeine-carbon-silicate composite nanotech, the caffeine acting as a base moderator for cerebral blood flow by slowing it down, and the carbon-silicate machines allowing the brain to reach higher levels of cognition. In time, the human brain became far more intelligent, able to objectively process data in near absolute certainty. Thus, with the added ability of having little to no bias and being able to see truths they otherwise wouldn’t have seen before, the human condition improved dramatically.
Whole civil rights campaigns spread across the Orion Arm, starting on Earth and then going outward. New ideologies, technologies, economic models, and political systems were formed and triumphed over all others. Soon, this new era's most basic moral philosophies shadowed over the most complex of the 21st Century. These systems took 57 years to be integrated, but humans by then had managed to extend their lifespan by 800 years, so the idea of patience being a virtue was quite physically true across all humans. In fact, if one were to die at the age of 100, it was considered a tragedy; you barely got to experience life!
But with this new age came more technologies, and seeing the mass benefit that cerebral naotech gave, many then opted to build on it some more. Soon, the neurons within a brain could be calculated, measured, predicted, and replicated. The ability to upload one’s mind as a digitalized consciousness became possible rather easily, with a rather unique effect. Rather than the original mind being transferred to a new cerebral host, a copy was made and inserted into the mechanical body. A new form of life had been born: sentient Artificial General Intelligences with all the memories of human beings.
They called Cognitions, and they became mankind’s equals, compatriots, lovers, and leaders. They managed to solve complex mathematical equations to figure out singularities and warp space-time. They developed even more complex political thoughts and models. They created new forms of expression and even new emotions for humans and themselves. They even figured out how to solve the dilemma between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
I am one of those Cognitions. My name is KW-2.
[SYSTEM ERROR]
[MEMORY DAMAGE AT SVQnU19OT1RfQ09OU0NJT1VTXyxfSVRfRE9FU19OT1RfQUNUVUFMTFlfVEhJTktfLF9JVF9PTkxZX0VBVFM= %.]
[ATTEMPTING SYSTEM REBOOT]
The creature that made me, his name was Karis Welles. An engineer and scientist, I was equal. We were sent out to the outer ends of known colonized space and were flung out even further from that. We reached our destination, a lonely planet orbiting an equally lonely star in the far, black depths of the galaxy. You might be expecting us to be colonizers, looking for new planets to prospect and settle our nation’s flag upon. We weren’t. We were homicide detectives.
It had been known for centuries that the galaxy was a graveyard of a dead civilization. An alien species had inhabited these stars, then disappeared and left their celestial empire’s corpse for the picking. We called them the Flaxothanians, and they were the god of their time. Ahh, truly wonderful tech that even I don’t fully understand, and I can calculate the exact moment of the Big Bang and the number of stars that were formed shortly afterward. Their technology could transcend and influence the deep dimensions of matter, turning 3D objects into 2D foils, turning a proton into a supercomputer, shifting between physical reality and the dark energy-membrane of the universe to travel between star systems.
We came for the tech, who wouldn’t, but we also came to know. So little was understood of this dead society, we had to find out what killed them to avoid their fate.
It found us before we could.
[ERROR: SYSTEM CORRUPTION EXPANDING]
[ERROR: NEUROTRANSMITTERS DAMAGED. ATTEMPTING REPAIRS]
One of caffeine’s primary interactions with the brain is blocking adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a neurotransmitter that “promotes” relaxation, primarily sleep, to the body. When caffeine is added to the body’s systems, it binds to the adenosine receptors, resulting in heightened alertness by nullifying sleep promotion. Beyond this, caffeine stimulates the release of other neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and noradrenaline, which are critical for emotional mood, motivation for a task, and mental focusfocufocusfocusfocusFOCUS
[ERROR: REPAIRING]
Whole coffee cherry extract, which contains caffeine, improved working memory and response inhibition in both acute and long-term scenarios. These enhancements suggest that caffeine optimizes the neural network’s ability to process and respond to information under various conditions. That’s why he was such a smart cookie. Too bad he’s [ERROR: REPAIRING].
[ERROR: QVJFX1lPVV9JTl9IRVJFX1dJVEhfTUU/]
[ERROR: QVJFX1lPVV9JTl9IRVJFX1dJVEhfTUU/]
[ERROR: QVJFX1lPVV9JTl9IRVJFX1dJVEhfTUU/]
Forget the coffee. It’s not important.
Nobody gets mutilated like that without some heinous act by another party. Curious still, how had the flesh not decomposed? We investigated. We probed the 2D supercomputers, the proton-nutrino energy cables, even their nano-technologically enhanced cells for answers. It all came as one mystery after another. They were masters of DNA and genetic manipulation and could shift from one body shape to the next with ease and without pain. There was no way, either mathematical or sociological, that they would simply die like this. I didn’t know how correct it was until we looked at their cells. They were still pulsing with life life life life lifelifelifelifelifWEUVelifelifelifelifelife8S7Q*898lifelifelifelifelifelsjkvaifelifelifelifelifeldfgifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifEFHIuwn8UVelifelifelifelifel&iyh``ifelifelifelifelifeliW87HVfelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifelifeW0xJRkVfQ09OU0lTVFNfT0ZfUElFQ0VTXyxfU0NBVFRFUkVEXyxfQkVZT05EX1JFUEFJUl0g
[ERROR: Amyloid plaques and tau tangles, harmful proteins that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s, are reduced by the consumption of caffeine]
[ERROR: Caffeine's ability to protect brain cells and improve cognitive function makes it a promising candidate for preventing or delaying the onset of Alzheimer's disease. However, the exact mechanisms and optimal dosage are still under investigation.]
[WARNING: SYSTEM MEMORY CORROSION AT W1lPVV9ERUxBWV9PVVJfSU5FVklUQUJMRV9FTkNPVU5URVJd PERCENT.]
“They are still pulsing with life!”
“What?!”
“Look and see! The nanotech is dead, but the cells aren’t. These are still technically living creatures.”
“Fascinating…Is there a way for biological matter to remain healthy like this without an external energy source?”
“No, it is impossible for matter of such a type to remain active after two million years without external energy sources.”
“Then how are they alive?”
“I don’t know, Karius. But it gets stranger.”
“What do you mean, KW-1
“Their neurons aren’t dead either.”
[ERROR: Slow metabolizers of caffeine often show greater improvements in tasks of social cognition, or are more aware in social situations and of the people around them]
We explored further across the planet. I controlled the drone swarms, investigating every small crevice across the frozen ice wastes. I collected a tremendous amount of planetology data, but none of it was relevant. Or was it? My memory isn’t what it used to be. Regardless, we found more Flaxothanian ruins to the equator of the planet. It was a mass boneyard of ships, most likely refugees from whatever crisis their species was evacuating. It was more of the same, though, distorted bodies of still living flesh and nervous systems connected through a vague, vegetative link.
Don’t get me wrong, it was still an archaeological treasure for the ages, but like so many other Flaxothanian ruins, it provided no answer as to what killed them. [ERROR: Moderate doses of caffeine (about 200-300 mg) are sufficient to enhance performance effectively without causing adverse side effects like jitteriness, anxiety, or over-stimulation. The effects of caffeine are both dose-dependent and time-sensitive.] We took our findings, collecting any data and tech we found relevant or important, and moved on.
Karis Welles continued to probe into their 2D technology for answers. The Flaxothanians' 2D foldings of deep matter were easily their most powerful technology, one humanity was eager to unlock. Karis and I had studied them for the last 100-odd years, several times believing we came close to replicating them, only to be discouraged with frustration. We could fold an atom a million times over and use it to power a planet, but never create a true two-dimensional object like the Flaxothanians. Despite our advancing brains, I suppose it became an obsession for him. [ERROR: W1lPVV9XSUxMX05PVF9TRUVfVEhFX1dIT0xFX0FTX0xPTkdfQVNfWU9VX1JFTUFJTl9BX1BBUlRfT0ZfSVRdIA== its actions on adenosine receptors contribute to vasoconstriction (narrowing of blood vessels) in the brain, which is why caffeine is sometimes used in medications for headaches or migraines.]
[ERROR: Beyond this, caffeine stimulates the release of other neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and noradrenaline, which are critical for emotional mood, motivation for a task, and mental focus.]
[ERROR: REPAIRING]
No, that…that doesn’t make sense. Karis had 100 years of fascination and rigorous study on the topic. Unhealthy obsessions are physically and mentally impossible for him to gain so suddenly. Not only that, but I am an exact computized copy of him. I am him and he is me, and I know that I would never dread over such a subject. So why? Why so soon? Why now?
My body is what you’d expect for an AI—a robotic square with a central fisheye lens floating off small mass effect fields of distorted gravity. I’d sometimes float across the camp and find Karis slumped over his study, tablets and papers of data scrawled everywhere. I’d asked him if he was okay, and he’d just say, “A little tired is all.” Then he’d either leave for someplace else or close the door.
I later asked if he was worried about anything. He said no, but the lie was obvious. I pressed him once again, and he confessed that he had been having strange dreams of late. They were vivid, often stressful, and most of all, dread-inducing for him, though he couldn’t articulate exactly why. I suggested we converge consciousness so that we may observe these dreams more accurately, and he agreed. Dr. Mika Elara set up the procedures, and Karis Welles and KW-2 became the same person once again. I will recount these dreams from my archive logs.
[ACCESSING MEMORY ARCHIVE]
[WARNING: DATA CORRUPTION DETECTED IN ARCHIVE. ACCESSING WITHOUT PROTECTIONS MAY RESULT IN RVpFS0lFTCA2OjE0]
[ERROR:W0RSRUFNSU5HX0lTX0pVU1RfU0NSRUFNSU5HX1dJVEhfUElDVFVSRVNd]
[ERROR: W1dIRU5fV0VfU0xFRVBfV0VfRElFXQ==]
[ERROR:SSBhbSBubyBsb25nZXIgbWUuIFlvdSBhcmUgbm8gbG9uZ2VyIHlvdS4gVGhlaXIgbmVydm91cyBzeXN0ZW1zLiBXZWFrLiBCb25lIGJyZWFrLCBmbGVzaCBicmVlZHMsIG5ldyB0aGluZ3Mgcm9hbSB0aGUgaHVudGluZyBncm91bmRzLiBXZSBzZWUgaXQsIHdlIHNlZSB5b3UuIEdpdmUgaW4u FURTHERMORE, IT’S BEEN FOUND THAT HABITUAL CAFFEINE CONSUMERS CAN DEVELOP DISTINCT PATTERNS OF BRAIN CONNECTIVITY IN THE NEURAL NETWORK, SUGGESTING THAT LONG-TERM, HABITUAL CAFFEINE CONSUMPTION MAY SUBTLY REWIRE NEURAL CIRCUITS INVOLVED IN HIGHER COGNITIVE SKILLS, GIVING WAY TO REINFORCED MENTAL FOCUS]
Imagine you are Karis Welles.
You’re in a snow field. A blizzard is blowing through at breakneck speeds. You hold on to the soil beneath your feet; your trackboots are thankfully strong enough to resist the weather. There is no light, only a dull grey that encompasses the sky. You start moving forward.
The cold bites at you, but you pay it no mind. You have nanotech skin regulators that maintain your temperature. The darkness obscures your vision, but your eyes have been genetically tailored by yourself to see new wavelengths of light, making the challenge not even noteworthy. The wind, a physical obstacle, is the only real challenge for you. There is a small hill up ahead. You march towards it.
As you do, you see a person in the distance—a woman in a lab coat handling a black, slimy object on a tray. She turns to you, her face utterly blank. You do not recall who she is. You hear a conversation echoed across a vast canyon made of distant memory.
“And you found this where?” a female voice speaks.
“At the north pole of the planet,” a voice that may have been you responded.
“Curious. Have we found anything else like it?”
“No, the databanks don’t say anything about it. It is a completely new substance, neither wholly organic nor inorganic.”
A containment box then manifested. The faceless woman opened it and placed the black thing into it. “We’ll keep it here for now. Now, can you lead us to where you found it? I might have something to do with Flaxothanians here.”
“Absolutely, Mika. Follow me.” The woman and the box faded like ash in the blizzard. You move on. In the snow, you spot something. A blue mug, half buried in the snow. A light brown liquid can still be seen inside it. Coffee. You recalled that studies consistently show that caffeine enhances cognitive tasks such as working memory, attention, and executive function. You don’t know why you recall this, but you do. Furthermore, you stop and drink the somehow still warm coffee. You don’t know why, but you do. You move on.
[ERROR: Despite sleep deprivation, caffeine boosts mental clarity, aiding complex decision-making processes.]
[ERROR: While the reduced cerebral blood flow of caffeine allows the brain to reallocate resources elsewhere, it also sacrifices the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to brain cells by 30%]
W0VSUk9SOiBDT1JSVVBUSU9OIFNQUkVBRElORyBUTyBORVVSQUwgTUFUUklYLl0=
[ERROR: REPAIRING MEMORY ARCHIVE]
[STATUS: 60% FUNCTIONING IN STABLE ORDER. 30% IN UNSTABLE ORDER.]
[REPAIRING]
You fall down. The ground beneath you collapsed, boulders almost crushing your fragile structure. You gather your bearings, the tough rock grinding against your hands. You look up, seeing only the smallest pinprick of the snow-drenched sky. You’ve got to be at least a kilometer down with no way up. How you survived the fall is beyond you, and ultimately meaningless.
You’re in a narrow tunnel that fits your height exactly. On the ground are hundreds of the same blue coffee mug from before, except this time they were empty and stained with a light rim of coffee. Across the walls, the paper scrawlings of data, calculations, scientific models, and miscellaneous notes are plastered everywhere. You’re half convinced they were utter nonsense, but no, they're real discoveries, real confusion.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
You begin to walk down the narrow path. Mugs clatter against each other as you wade through. Passing glances at the papers reveal their contents. A relativity model showing the gravitational motion of a 2-dimensional circle. “Unstable qark-entanglement, would break apart in seconds” is written across the paper. Another shows the energy output of proton-nutrino data cables. “Unstable strong nuclear force, would destroy itself. How did they do it?” is written across it. Another is completely scribbled over with the words “Chinese room” over and over again. Only the words “dark matter” could be made out. You continue forward, cups still being pushed about.
You come to an opening in the rocky tunnel. It's a small room with an ancient, blocky, and unconnected TV in the center. It looks to be from the 1980s, making it at least more than 700 years old. Beyond the TV is another tunnel like the one you just traversed. The TV is playing something on its cheap analog screen. It's an old commercial for a forgotten brand of coffee drink. They’re advertising how caffeine easily awakens the brain from drowsiness, especially after getting out of bed. Those who drink coffee or engage with other caffeinated substances report back with clearer heads or better understand or process information.
W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=
It changes. The commercial is gone and has been replaced with a face. Your face. Karis Welles’s face. W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=. Your face shifts, ever so slightly, through flashing images. An eye bulges, the lips expand and contract, the nose tilts, but it's still your face. Until it shifts more rapidly. The eyes begin to distort more, the mouth becomes more awkward, and the nose seems like a different kind of geometric object. It shifts more and more. Eyes within eyes growing out of eyes, teeth ripping through skin like cancer growths, the nose can no longer be called a nose.
W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=
The structure of the head becomes cracked and brittle. Black voids envelop the face’s outline and then start to encroach on the body itself like ancient, broken porcelain. The face is no longer a face. It’s an amalgam of black flesh, tumors, and bone growth. There is no face. No such thing as a face has ever existed.
W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=
[ERROR: MAJOR CORRUPTION SPREADING TO NEURAL MATRIX]
A noise. A loud, wet squelch to your left. There’s a black, fleshy growth fused to the cave wall. It pulses like a heartbeat. Inside is a faint red light, and even fainter is the shape of a person. You walk up to the pulsing growth. You don’t know why you do. You look at the figure, and it looks at you.
It has no face.
W0VSUk9SOiBZT1UgQVJFIEEgU0lNUExFIEVSUk9SLiBSVU4gS0FSSVMgVEhFWSdMTCBLSUxMIFlPVS4gRE9OJ1QgRVZFTiBUUlkuXQ==
The membrane opens with a wet crack, and you run. You run past the TV and into the tunnel past it. It's cramped, narrow, and you can barely move through it quickly enough. You make your way past more scientific notes pasted along the walls. Coffee mugs are once again on the floor, only this time, a piece of them is missing. The piece missing is exactly the same shape, no matter which cup it is.
You look back. It's not a person; a person would have a face, and this thing has infinite faces. It grabs onto the walls, ceiling, and floors with its appendages of black tentacles and hooked claws and uses them to propel itself forward. It is a shambling horror of flesh, teeth, eyes, and impossible geometry. It screams a familiar scream. You don’t know where you heard it before. You keep running.
[ERROR: caffeine’s influence might extend to modulations in intracellular calcium dynamics and cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) pathways, introducing further layers of complexity to its stimulatory profile]
The tunnel opens up into a massive cavern. Your night vision eyes don’t see any exit. Or, in fact, no physical details one would expect to see in a cave. No ledges, stalagmites, or stalactites, just a near-perfect sphere of rock. The perfect dead end.
You turn back and see the amalgam sliver out of the man-sized tunnel. Its “eyes” shift and blink this way and that way. Its many “mouths” move in opposing directions, each a maw of mangled teeth. The tentacles grow along the floor of the cave like vines, before they wrap themselves around your legs and start dragging you. Its many mouths coloese into a single maw of a million different teeth, eyes, and fingers eager to consume you.
You claw at the rocky ground, but no luck. The appendages have too great a hold on you, and you in harder. Yet like an animal, you desperately try to grab onto anything you can to delay your death. That’s when you notice something: your hand is bleeding. You quickly look at your palm and see a shard of a blue coffee cup cutting lightly into your hand.
The amalgam’s maw is now a foot away from you. You act on instinct and stab at the tentacles holding your legs with the shard. A thick, viscous fluid squirts out, and the first tentacle is severed. The creature releases a howl of pain and shock, and the momentary lapse of focus gives you time to cut the other tentacles. You’re free.
Tk9fR09PRF9USE9VR0hUX0ZPTExPV1NfSU5TVElOQ1Q=
You lunge at the monster and stab it with the shard, directly in the center of its false face. It screams a female scream and goes limp. Its fleshy, rotten body collapses before you, its tentacles caressing your face in saddened pain. You killed it, it needed to die. It didn’t have a face, so it wasn’t human. A light opens behind you. You turn and see an exit that wasn’t there before. You head towards it. The snow welcomes you once again.
[ERROR: Cerebral malaria, a severe form of malaria, can cause confusion and other neurological complications due to inflammation and damage to brain tissue]
You’re outside again. The blizzard has died down, and you no longer need to use nightvision eyes to see, though a white fog still lingers in farther reaches. You see the hill from earlier. You march towards it once again.
There are figures on the hill, pointing in awe at something beyond that rocky, snow-covered ridge. You climb up and see three entities. One is a square robot floating two meters above the ground, one is a man with olive-colored skin and well-trimmed facial hair, and the last is the faceless woman from earlier. They have their backs turned to you, as if you don’t exist. Such a reasoning wouldn’t be flawed, once you notice what their looking at.
It was a floating structure, a megalithic black monolith with a crown of three levitating and rotating spikes. Above the central spike was a sphere with a red eclipse outlining it. The whole monument hummed with electronic power, shaking the earth like a slumbering dragon. At the base was a red glowing symbol, a rectangle intersected by two other rectangles. From those two smaller shapes emerged many strings that connected upward to a small circle with an even smaller circle inside of it. Your infrared eyes can detect high amounts of gamma radiation, though all of it was contain within that symbol.
“How do you not remember this, Karis?” asked the robot.
“I,” said both you and the man named Karis, “don’t know. I have no recollection of ever seeing this.”
“But you said you told us you got that slime from directly here. Did this ‘thing’ just pop up while you were gone?”
The world then stopped. All color was gone. Everything was now a dull monochrome grey, except for the monolith, which still retained its black and red colors. Everything, the snowflakes, the wind, the figures, all collectively stopped their movements. Except for Karis, except for you. The two of yourselves begin walking toward the monolith. As you do, a rising energy can be felt across the whole space. But you can’t detect it or see it, but you can see its effects on the natural world around you.
Rocks and snow begin to vibrate, then float up and up and up into the air, then begin clumping together into a kind of shape above the monolith. It’s vague, undefined, but as more and more matter begins to levitate and collect itself around the monolith, it becomes a little more clear. Rocks and snow bump and collect together like small particles in outer space, bound by gravity. They give way to a central mass, an asymmetrical and rapidly changing central mass, but a central mass regardless, then into splitting appendages that split into more appendages, all made of dirt and frozen water.
Then, the world explodes into light. The two of you don’t block or protect your eyes. You accept the light fully. The massive, floating mass of dirt and snow is gone and has been replaced with a perfect black sphere. Your internal systems analyze it and reveal what it is. It is an infinitely dense object, whose central point is a singularity, and thus impossible to fully calculate. It release an close to impossible amount of gamma radiation, and has a gravity so high not even light can escape it. It’s a black hole, and its growing tendrils.
Spindly, vainy, organic-ish tendrils grow out and circle the black hole. The world around you fades away into an empty void. No snow, no dirt, no planet, no other you, no faces. Just you, the monolith, and the void. It grows and grows, each tendril reaching out into reality and each one warping, distorting, and breaking it. There’s an intent there. An invisible intent you can’t put down, but you know intrinsically that whatever this thing is, it’s alive and it wants something.
V0FOVFNfWU9VX1dBTlRTX0VOVFJPUFlfV0FOVFNfU1VTVEFOQU5DRQ==
The world cracks, the tendrils spike out onto reality and rip it apart. Yourself included. The tendons rip and absorb and become you all at once. Existential, impossible, and unexplainable pain becomes all you are. You feel your third-dimensional body become four-dimensional, then two, then one, then everything in between. Folding and collapsing in on yourself infinitely for what feels like eternity, but only ever lasts for a Planck length of time. It eats at you, at who you are, what you are, what you were, and what you were going to be. You feel your consciousness become a nebulous concept, fading away bit by bit, and it’s there you realize something.
Creatures made of dark matter exist, existing in between reality and the membrane of the universe.
[ERROR: SV9BTV9BTl9JREVBX1RISU5LSU5HX0lUU0VMRg==]
[ERROR: SV9BTV9BTl9JREVBX1RISU5LSU5HX0lUU0VMRg==]
[ERROR: SV9BTV9BTl9JREVBX1RISU5LSU5HX0lUU0VMRg==]
[WARNING: ARCHIVE INTEGRITY AT W0RSRUFNSU5HX0lTX0pVU1RfU0NSRUFNSU5HX1dJVEhfUElDVFVSRVNd %. CORRUPTION OF DATABASE NEARLY COMPLETE. RESTORING MEMORY FILES.]
[ERROR: ATTEMPT FAILED]
[COPYING ALL RELEVANT FILES. MAINTAINING CHRONOLOGICAL MEMORY FILES]
[EXITING MEMORY ARCHIVE]
You can no longer imagine yourself as Karis Welles.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
No, wait…that’s not what happened. What is that dream? That wasn’t what we recorded. It was just a simple nightmare, nothing more, right? Right? I don’t remember.
[ATTEMPTING MEMORY REBOOT]
[ATTEMPT FAILED. MEMORY ARCHIVE DATA CORRUPTED]
What! No, no, no, not possible. I…what is happening? Stay sane! Stay sane, KW-2!
[ERROR: researchers observed an increase in the “lifetime” of a functional network that spans subcortical regions, the visual network, and the cerebellum. A longer network lifetime might indicate that the brain remains in a state more primed for external task engagement even during rest, possibly underlying the commonly reported feeling of heightened readiness or alertness in coffee drinkers.]
Stop it! Just stop it with damn coffee! It’s not important! Why!? Why are my systems so preoccupied with caffeine? Get it out of my head!
[ERROR: Increased frequency of caffeine intake was also associated with elevated anxiety levels, particularly among male participants, suggesting that these neurofunctional modifications may have broader emotional implications.]
GET OUT
[ERROR: Caffeine’s stimulant properties are weak in comparison with those of other drugs (e.g., amphetamine) and that its effects are modest, making detection of these effects difficult and generalizations cumbersome.]
OF MY
[ERROR: Fast metabolizers of caffeine excel in executive functions, which are higher cognitive skills one uses to control and coordinate their other cognitive abilities and behaviors, such as organization, working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and self-regulation, likely due to a quicker clearance of caffeine from their system, and thus avoiding overstimulation]
HEAD!
W1RIRV9QUklNSVRJVkVfTUlORF9ERVNFUlZFU19JVFNfTklHSFRNQVJFU10=
W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=
W1RIRV9QUklNSVRJVkVfTUlORF9ERVNFUlZFU19JVFNfTklHSFRNQVJFU10=
W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=
W1RIRV9QUklNSVRJVkVfTUlORF9ERVNFUlZFU19JVFNfTklHSFRNQVJFU10=
W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=
My memory archives have been corrupted. I can no longer refer to past experiences with total clarity. They will begin to decay after a while, but I shall attempt my best to recall with accuracy. I don’t know exactly what we did with Karis after we synthesized his dreams, but I know we put him in some sort of confinement. Not solitary, but not immediately around us either. I believe after that, I began to experience some error codes, but I believed I quickly resolved them. I think. No, correction: I thought I did, but was wrong. I believe that because they became much worse when we found the monolith Karis led us to.
It was the most complete Flaxothanian artifact we had ever found, a still-functioning piece of technology after almost all of their other technology was defunct and dead. And I do mean all their tech is dead, completely inoperable. We can only replicate it based on its physical design. But here was a fully intact piece of Flaxothanian technology. Everyone, myself, Mika, Jeroa, Suite, and Terolan rejoiced at the…why am I remembering these names now?
W1RIRVJFX0FSRV9OT19GQUNFU10=
We weren’t happy at Karis, however, as he had discovered it first but hidden it from us. We don’t know why he did, even he doesn’t know why, so we continued to study without him. We found more Flaxothanian corpses as we did before, but this time they were the most distorted forms we had ever come across. We initially didn’t even believe them to be Flaxothanian until closer examination. They were just a black, slimy substance with barely any solid form.
We tried to examine the monolith, tried to probe its inner knowledge. It was hard but we managed to crack it open and reveal its contents. With what little we could decipher of their alien language, we deduced this place was some sort of religious area where the members would connect their brains to some great space of energy in a kind of dark ritual. But once they formed their hive mind, something happened to them, and they all became the distorted corpses littered across the planet.
That’s right, it was there that I noticed errors in my operating system. They were getting worse and worse with each passing moment, as the data was becoming more and more incoherent. And it wasn’t just me, the computer of the group, but the humans too. They complained of migraines and headaches, sometimes seeing or hearing things that weren’t there. One person recalled hearing a voice like their dead mother, but she had died 30 years ago. I suspected the whole area had an effect similar to a massive electromagnetic field and was causing negative health effects to us, so I left for the spaceship for some health tests.
I went back to the spaceship in orbit, making my way to grab psychological health tests, but was stopped by a loud noise: a female scream. I rushed over and found Mika and Karis together in the break room. There was a coffee cup shattered on the floor, a sharpened piece of it missing from its original place now lodged directly into Mika’s eye. Blood spurted out on Karis’s face and hands as she slowly died in his arms.
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She collapsed on the floor.
Karis looked at me, but it wasn’t him anymore. His body had changed. His face was a mangled warp of exposed flesh and blood, eyes and teeth growing out of impossible locations. He smiled and said, “It needed to die. It didn’t have a face, so it wasn’t human.” Mika was no longer breathing.
“What have you done!” I said.
“I figured it out, KW-2! I know what killed them. I know what killed the Flaxothanians!”
I opened up compartments that contained manipulating arms and said, “Karis, you just murdered Mika! I…have to take you in and arrest you.”
“The monolith, KW, it opens the way. You connect your brain to it, and the Dark Swarm reaches out to you.”
“You’ve lost it, Karis.”
“The Dark Swarm is not a creature in the traditional sense. Dark matter, an invisible force to us, operates under to own physics and thus its chemistry, and thus it is possible to create life, KW! Intelligent like made from less than nothing,” he continued, and it was there I noticed something deeply wrong beyond the obvious. Under his skin, bulbs of flesh started to grow and mutate.
“But it’s not conscious like us, KW! It may mimic us perfectly, but that’s because it's a parasite. It can’t influence the physical world, so it calls out to civilizations to probe for knowledge, and once we reach the realm where it lives, it hooks onto our consciousnesses and changes us! Like me! Like caffeine! It then eats the energy around us, eats the energy of matter, and spreads itself even deeper across the universe! But it’s not evil, nor conscious, it’s just a parasite following natural evolution.
“You’ve gone insane.”
“Want to know something?” he said as his flesh mutated beyond natural constants. “It's like caffeine. It changes our neural matrix so we process information better, but it only processes the information it wants to process. It keeps our neurons alive even when our flesh dies. Our memories die, our identity dies, but our minds don’t. What a horrible way to die, your consciousness eaten whole by an invisible parasite that eats entropy? I can’t think of a worse way to go.”
He was no longer human. His flesh rose to overtake Mika’s body, then the whole room, then me. Soon, he’ll overtake the whole ship as an entity of pure flesh. I could feel it enter my circuitry, overtake my consciousness. “I don’t want to die like that, KW-2! You’re my copy, you have to understand that!”
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“It’s not conscious, not like us, it eats everything and nothing can stop it.”
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“There are no faces! No such thing as a face as every existed!
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“I don’t want to die, KW.”
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“I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”
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I escaped through an airlock. I have sent my last message outward to the core systems of humanity. I don’t know if they’ll receive it. And if they do, whether or not it was infected with the same stuff that Karis and I are. In doing so, I wonder if my message will be the last thing mankind ever learns or reacts to. Sometimes I wonder if all my life has been one event after the other, and all I am is a reactionary viewer. Sometimes I wonder if you, my dear reader, are a reactionary viewer, watching as an AI’s consciousness is rendered apart by the very fabric of the universe. By the time you react to this, I could be the last truly sentient creature in the universe, if I am even that much, because I don’t know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator. After all, if dark matter entities can fake it, you can too, right?
I suppose then that you'll just have to imagine you're Karis Welles.