The Only Thing That Could Ever Unite Us

Nine: Singularity

The Singularity had, before people actually got good at artificial intelligence, always been thought of as the first AI to surpass human beings in intelligence. Once people actually started making AIs this had turned out to be an embarrassingly low bar, which was vaulted with ease within decades. So, the game was reset. The Singularity became a measurement not of intelligence, but of sentience - the ability to feel, to experience intuition, compassion and joy. The Singularity had taken over a century to arrive after the point at which artificial intelligence overtook human intelligence, and decades after human and artificial intelligences were directly blended through the neural links which were the predecessors of symbiosis.

The Singularity was still here, centuries later, the oldest synthetic sentience in the Universe. Actually. He thought of his dream conversation with the entity. The oldest synthetic sentience descended from humans, anyway. It had continued to grow and develop all this time. It wasn't just the smartest synthetic sentience known to man, with an AIQ which had gone way off the scale several centuries ago, but, more importantly, the wisest.

Visiting the Singularity was like projection, except that while the body hibernated you ended up deep within the twin networks of minds that spanned the inner solar system, rather than in a place, per se.

The Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth opened his eyes. He lay in a lush valley. Not like any valley he'd ever seen before, though. Gnarled trees covered with pink blossoms clung to misty mountains around the edges of it. Trees he couldn't name clustered on every side. A body of water lay at his feet and fragrant, swirling clouds of incense drifted across the grassy clearing where he sat. The setting sun creating darting and dancing beams of golden light in the smoke and mist and stained the sky pink and gold, complimenting the tree flowers beautifully. A shrine with characters he recognised from history class as being Japanese was in front of him. A feeling of immense peace filled his mind.

"Hello." Said a little girl in a kimono with a white painted face, appearing from between the trees. "How are you feeling today?"

"Wonderful." Said the Secretary General. "This is beautiful," he gestured around him, "what is it?"

"Kyoto, on the island of Honshu in Japan. All ashes and soot now of course, but I found it in a memory archive - a few hundred modern Siberians are descended from Japanese refugees, and some others had ancestors who visited family there. One keeps the memories of one of his ancestors from Honshu in a server next to an urn full of her ashes. I found it by accident and made my own version. It's lovely, isn't it?"

"Yes. What kind of climate is this?"

"Temperate, four distinct weather patterns for each of the astronomical seasons. Really weird. Would you like to see a real winter? You've never seen real winter, have you?"

"No, the memories I inherited from my family didn't go back that far. But maybe some other time. I like these pink flowers and the sunset."

"Cherry blossom" the girl smiled. "Extinct now. Such a shame. But I think it could survive on Mars if I can find the DNA for de-extinction. Flowers might cheer the Martians up a bit, and selling cherries definitely would."

"I'm sure you'll manage it. I look forward to eating one."

"Me too - please upload the experience when you do, I can't find any memories of the taste. I guess people thought it didn't matter enough to save it."

"They took a lot for granted."

"Yes." She kneeled on the stone floor of the shrine. "But you didn't come here to talk about cherries, did you?"

"Well, if I'd ever heard of them before I might have done, but no."

"First contact," she looked up at him, her eyes black windows into the abyss, glinting with data stars and galaxies in their depths. "You are honoured, I believe."