Chapter
3 – Artificial Immortality
I said that I’d finish this fight
alone, but I didn’t expect that to occur so quickly. Everyone else who crashed
on the Ascendant's mechanical planet is being quickly killed by
their so-called soul-saving green electricity. I’m trying to save them, but I
can only protect them for so long until we’re overwhelmed and they die. My
guardian angel only allows me to produce so many clones of myself and so many
fireballs for some reason. Why don’t you allow me to protect them all? I know
the potential for what I can do is nearly infinite because of the grace of God,
so why limit me like this?
Why allow everyone else to die? No,
my faith isn’t waning, God forbid if it does. Let me find a way to end this
battle more quickly so that no more people will die. Huh? The servers? Yes,
I’ve been destroying them at every opportunity. Oh, you want me to jump in
them. Won’t that be dangerous? No, I don’t think my soul will seriously be
trapped in them. Okay, I’ll do it. Ow! You didn’t say to jump in that specific
spot-whatever.
Huh. It looks a lot different from
what I imagined. Well, I imagined it to be a digitized city, a paradise, like
the voices were talking about. Everything I see here is nothing but a green and
black void with a bunch of ones and zeroes floating all over the place.
Guardian angel, I’m going to need your guidance more than ever, because I have
no clue where to go or start blowing this all up. My guardian angel pulls me
through the seemingly never-ending void of information and numbers to a place
where the ones and zeroes form a video from a camera in some sort of research
room.
“Experiments have proven to hit a
standstill. The machine can replicate a person’s thought patterns, but not
their entire personality exactly as it was. It also results in the subject’s
death, which is not exactly unplanned,” a researcher says.
Another researcher says, “We’re not
trying to replicate people. We’re trying to put their souls in our immortal
machine. Come on, we can’t give up now. We’ve drawn up plans to expand our
machine and the accompanying maintenance for it.”
“What’s the point of it all if it
doesn’t capture our souls?”
“Our so-called souls are nothing
but patterns of behavior in our being. The machine works fine. It just doesn’t
get the whole person’s personality in it. We’re on the verge of complete
success. We’ve already obtained the secret to immortality. It just needs a few
adjustments.”
The video ends, and my guardian
angel pulls me over to another. This one shows me people being strapped in,
being hit by green electricity, and a robot coming to life, pretending to be a
person. Some of the robots rip the skin off the person they’re supposed to be and
wear it.
“See? We’re getting closer to
perfection,” a researcher’s voice says off-screen.
“They’re ripping the skin of their
former selves and wearing it,” another researcher says.
“Wouldn’t you want your original
face after you died? Then again, if I were you, I wouldn’t want my old face.
I’d want another. I think it’s time we made a production of faces so the
subjects can make a face they’ll wear after they die and enter the system.”
“It seems like a vain pursuit in
comparison to what we’re trying to do.”
“It’s either that or having them
rip the skin of their old bodies to wear.”
“Okay, okay. We’ll do it, and I
have no problem with wearing my old face again.”
This video ends, and I’m brought to
yet another video that shows the two previous researchers talking in a crowded
room with two groups behind them.
“We shouldn’t force people to use
our technology to save themselves. It’s their choice to make, and not everyone
believes that they’ll live through the servers,” one researcher argues.
“What better choice do we have to
permanently end world hunger, wars, and to save ourselves from death itself?
This is our only shot at it, and to not save one person is to say that the rest
of us don’t deserve it,” the other researcher says.
“This isn’t salvation. You know
what it is. It is a flawed replication. The green electricity transfers an
approximation of a person’s personality into the system to create an AI of
them. They don’t come back to life in the servers. Their behavior is merely
mimicked in artificial life. It isn’t true immortality.”
“Believe what you want. I already have
the government, and the majority’s okay on this. Humanity will live eternally.”
The video fast forwards to a later
date where the researcher and others are banging on the doors of the facility
as green electricity lights up the sky before striking down everyone. It again
fast forwards, showing mechanical people building up the servers, and fast
forwards one last time to show them building the planet into what it is now. Okay?
What do you want me to do with this information? I figured that something had
to happen on this planet that made it so mechanical, and there’s no one that
human souls can be captured within machines. My guardian angel teleports a USB
into my hands, and the ones and zeroes around me are sucked into it. Alright, I
see now. I’ll show this to everyone on Earth so they can learn from the
mistakes made by the people on this planet.
I still need to destroy this place,
though. There’s no reason to hold back whatsoever. All that’s here are the
echoes of past sins and machines pretending to be the ghosts of men damned long
ago. Agreeing, my guardian angel lights up my body and allows me to spew fire from
my hands. I fly out of the servers and into what looks like the planet’s core
and start blasting everything in sight.
Through the speakers, I hear a
mechanical, distorted voice say, “Stop! This is humanity’s only hope for immortality!”
I don’t say anything to it. What’s
the use of talking to a machine? It can’t feel. It can’t come up with new ideas
within its established parameters. It can only do what it was programmed to do
and nothing more.
The machine continues to beg me to
stop, using its automated defense turrets and sending out its robotic
defenders against me, all of which are destroyed by my never-ending firestorm. My
guardian angel gives me the go-ahead to start leaving, so I do so, while
continuing to burn and blow up machines on my way out. Outside of the planet’s
core, I see the planet blowing up from the inside and the mechanical men
turning off. Seeing that the planet is so close to Earth, I put both my hands
out, and a large blast of fire comes out of them to push the planet into space,
so that it explodes far away from it.
Well! Job’s done. That was a fun
way to spend the day. I go back down to Earth, giving the USB to the world
leaders of the Dominion, and just as quickly leave to go to the nearest bar café
for some well-deserved beer and ice cream. Usually, there’s something to learn
from every conflict, but what was there to learn from this? Nothing, besides,
the reminder that men are more than flesh and blood, and superior to whatever
artificial intelligence that we make, like how God is superior to men. Now that
I’m looking at my meal in front of me, I realize something else. That I have to
have double the dessert for what I’ve done! I will be getting a fat paycheck
for it, so why not?
The End
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