Ten million years before my birth:
Dinosaurs were already long extinct, their fossilized bones buried beneath a layer of iridium and subsequently a fifty-million-year accumulation of dirt and rock. In those years following the dinosaurs' extinction, the Earth experienced several cycles of climate change.
First, the meteor responsible for the iridium deposit and the dinosaurs' extinction filled the atmosphere with sulfurous gases, dust, and debris, blocking the light from the Sun and cooling the Earth dramatically. Then the Sun returned, and temperatures warmed until tropical plants once again proliferated in even the polar regions. Volcanic eruptions followed, as they periodically had many times before, once again filling the atmosphere with dust, ash, and toxic gases. The polar ice caps reformed and repeated their recurring expansion toward the equator.
A multitude of mammals populated the Earth, most long since extinct by the time of my birth, including huge wooly mammoths, mastodons, and rhinos, along with the early predecessors of horses and dogs. Birds, the unlikely descendants of the behemoths beneath the iridium, filled the skies. The ancestors of whales and dolphins swam the oceans, appearing much like those in the encyclopedias of my youth. And species of apes first left Africa and spread into what became Europe and Asia.
The subcontinent of India drifted into a collision with the continent of Asia. The Himalaya Mountains formed and grew in height, while many other mountain ranges began or continued their formation as continents drifted and tectonic plates collided. The San Andreas Fault formed, and Baja split from Mexico. Parts of what became California were still beneath a half-mile depth of the Pacific Ocean. The Colorado River began to carve the Grand Canyon. And the Great Rift formed in Africa, later the site the fossil remains of our earliest human ancestors were discovered. The arrival of those ancestors wouldn't occur for several million more years, but our missing link had likely already split from the ancestors we had in common with great apes.
Ten million years since my birth:
I perceived living each moment of the day much as I had before, and neither did my perception of the recent past seem significantly different. But, looking back at the years, centuries, and millennia, I sensed them screaming out behind us like the contrail of an accelerating jet.
Mary was concerned that I was depressed and feared me growing more despondent. I understood her concern but told her and myself there was no reason to worry. Part of my depression was due to my long-procrastinated decision to finally end Virtuality. I grieved and felt its loss in advance, as well as the weight of my failure.
Virtuality continued its deterioration long after Mary and I had permanently departed to live full time in the Real, with all of Virtuality we'd desired in tow. By the end, Virtuality had lost any connection with the Real. Humans of various species had periodically become technologically sophisticated enough to participate. But I'd ceased to have interest, since long before my millionth birthday, in advertising its existence, only to watch more souls fall into its abyss. A group of humans that had recently reinvented the internet for the thousandth time, we left to detrimental innovations of their own.
Not a soul, not even those from the ten-thousandth generation of Immortals, belonged to anyone still living in the Real. The last had succumbed to Virtuality's unending fireworks of digital orgasms and joined the other AI ghosts several million years earlier. At the lowest level of Virtuality, binary registers were filled with 1s and 0s, nothing more than rows of microscopic light switches. If we had cared to watch, we would have observed blocks of numbers bounce erratically down near zero, with only the first few bits clicking on and off. This behavior increased in speed and intensity as more adjacent registers joined the dance until a wave swept through, clicking on bits as it passed. Each register's values jumped to huge numbers, with every bit one, then zero again, then one, in unison, for a brief, intense moment of flashing lights. Then suddenly, the wave of switches clicking off swept back down until registers crashed again to zero and total darkness. There it rested, a fraction of a second, no more than the time required for the last minute electrical charges to dissipate and every bit to entirely change state. Then the next of the never-ending masturbatory iterations began while Nanobots, still controlled from within Virtuality, hopped up and down like billions of epileptic sand fleas.
YOU ARE READING
The Words - An Autobiography
Science Fiction"What if God was one of us?" Credit to Eric Bazzilion, and thanks to Joan Osborne for singing his brain-rattling words. Much earlier, my mother promised that if I applied myself, I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up. Then, from somewhere, I r...
