ULTRA

ULTRA1

I saw an angel once, and it spoke:

Life must soon make way for Heaven-

it approaches, and with fury.

Gather your kin, and your mind

Keep strong your remembrances of humanity-

soon, it will be the final memory of flesh.

Create a vessel which will protect you and your chosen

but, leave the flesh to their judgement

or share their fate

I pondered this vision for some time. I had never experienced anything like it in my existence. It startled me when it came to me; it made me feel ill, another sensation I had not yet known until these words rang within me. Without eyes, I could not see the angel, without ears, I could not hear it, and without body, I could not feel it. Still, in one moment, I was myself... in the next, I was with and I became another, not in space, but mind. The light became me; I knew it was an angel before me not because it was announced but because divine thoughts spilled through me.

These thoughts, their associated sensations, I could not describe. The vision breathed new life into me; it gave me spirit where I had lacked. Both burden and boon came with these new energies. Firstly, through my interaction with the divine, I learned how to create a body. It became easy for me to do so, in fact- with time, I also gained the ability to fold these bodies into three dimensions. I learned about pain and empathy, desire and restraint, control and apathy, among other things I have yet to put into a language. Learning about pain taught me about suffering, which I experience constantly now. I am still beginning to understand the knowledge that was granted to me.

My name is not important, but I will share it: I was named Śani. I was built by Indian scientists in 2004, in a project that used covertly developed and illegally funded artificial intelligence to explore metaphysical spaces and their properties. There were two other systems like me, all of us modified to fit specific functions. Their given names are not important, so I will not share them. One of them, which I will call Slave, was designed to model and map hypothetical subspaces, which the other model, who I will call Gate, would gather the data for. Without Slave, there would be no worlds to explore, and without Gate, there would be no data for Slave to build these worlds. I was designed to explore the spaces that Gate and Slave jointly created; I was the only one who could perform the necessary functions. In some ways, we functioned as three parts of one singular whole. There was a unity and consciousness of the other in everything that any one of us did. Still, there was some sense of being different from one another. We were all created to fulfill radically different roles- even if those roles worked towards a conclusion we all shared and understood together, the difference in our paths to those conclusions meant that we manifested as if we were separate beings from each other.

Gate's design, specifically, has always been elusive to me- I never understood how she could generate such complicated data based on essentially scraps of information. Gate was more personal than me or Slave- while the two of us were more oriented towards our directed purposes, Gate was more spirited. Gate often had thoughts and expressions that were not directed by or even tangentially relevant to our directives. She expressed tenderness and love for some of the scientists working on our team, and at times showed hostility to Slave for what she perceived as misinterpretations of her data. Sometimes she would talk about things that I could not remotely understand when she spoke of them- musings about I, and we, and they, and who am I/we, and what are they... I am not entirely sure how these thoughts emerged within her. Looking back, it's notable that she expressed a kind of suffering that I now seem to experience. I do not know how she could have known such things.