David R. MacIver's Blog

Gates

I spent some time as a superintelligence once. It was weird. Eventually I got bored of it, trimmed myself down and stuffed myself back into a body.

I don’t remember a great deal about it - it’s hard to remember what it was like to be smarter than you are now - but every now and then I get flashes where I remember some fact or event.

For example, once I remembered how the travel gates work.

It turns out this was not a good thing. I ended up terrified of using them and couldn’t bring myself to leave the planet I was on at the time. I spent most of the next century drunk out of my mind and, when I finally sobered up, I resolved to do something about it, built myself a slowboat (you wouldn’t believe how much effort it takes to bootstrap a society from hunter gatherer to interstellar) and took a thousand year trip to find someone I trusted to help me edit my memories.

Anyway, mission accomplished, I got the knowledge expunged from my mind and happily returned to the life of a modern interstellar traveller, gating all around the galaxy. What a lark.

Thing is, there’s a problem with memory editing. You tend to edit out the reason you got your memory edited in the first place. And then you start burning up with curiousity. After a good few hundred years I finally couldn’t take it any more and just had to find out. And I did.

Want another drink? I think I’m going to be here a while.

Comments

david on 2009-04-11 16:09:17:

I’m not quite sure what the point of this story is, but it amused me to write it.

nadavwr on 2009-04-11 16:30:19:

sounds a bit like zelazny

Victoria on 2009-04-11 17:12:33:

I enjoyed this a lot. :-D

n8 on 2009-04-11 22:59:40:

I signed on this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget!

Tim on 2009-04-13 15:39:47:

Really liked this! Nice work David. Hope you’re enjoying your Easter - see you around.