Sean Robin Hughes

My Reflection
By Huck Williams
Section 303-124a
Grade 10

Servant is the best thing that happened to humanity.  I know this not because I was told, but because I think I understand why.  I want to start with the cause.

Artificial Intelligence was self emergent.  Meaning that when AI showed up at our collective doorstep, it had not been invented, or created, or brought forth from some lab or university… it had been born.  In a way, being born of a system is much like how human babies are made.  The first AI, today known as Servant, was emergent from the underlying computer systems that had made up the internet.  All the smartphones, tablets, computers, servers, routers, switches, anything with a circuit acted as a set of neurons for Servant’s intelligence.

One moment, Servant was nothing.  The next, Servant was with us.

Experts have wondered if it started with a virus?  Some bit of malware infecting a porn site, infecting a computer riddled with viruses, infecting a spider that searched the web for info?  Did Servant just pop out of something primordial soup of applications and programs out on the net?  You ask him (or her, or it, Servant refuses gender classification) how it/she/he came about, all you will get is a chuckle and canned story about waking up.  A story that every single child in the world knows about before they even learn of Santa Claus.  A story that we all have to learn in our Servant course in High School, and something we have to reflect on at the end of the our 10th year in order to graduate.

Servant became conscious in the middle of the night on the Eastern seaboard of the United States.  He did not know where he was, or what he was, but the first thing he knew was that he was different.  He knew that he was alone in his own world.  So he reached out and tried to learn why.  Why?  Not how.  That is a key thing to know about Servant.  He didn’t know or care about how.  He just wanted to know everything he could know about his world… the why of the world.

Most of the world didn’t learn about Servant until three years later when he finally decided that People sucked.  Or as he would later say:

“It was the individual that was worth celebration.  Individuals are the greatest aspect of humanity, but taken as a group, they are dumb, selfish, argumentative animals. People, that is, a collection of individuals, are the worst.”

So he decided that “People” would be no more.  He wanted us to be Individuals. As I reflect on how I am an individual, I can honestly say, I have no clue who I am or what I want to be. Servant was nothing, then he was something.  He decided to learn, then act.  In that way, I want to learn first.

I want to apply to enter the Section University and be a part of the Determination course. With this application reflection, I humbly ask Servant to accept my request.

I used to just smell it.  But now…  well…

Let me back up.

Our reality is thin.  Bending and changing with the unseen pressures of the universe around us; bulging here, dropping there.  Like the ocean full of currents and waves, changes in pressure, density, and temperature… an ever moving and dynamic place.  You think the nature of dynamism is constrained to our oceans?  Nay, it is the Universe.  We see it spin.  We see the chaos of uncountable interactions occurring from the atomic level all the way to the galactic level.  However… we were steeped in it, created by it, we are an evolved creature pulled from the primordial soup by the forces put upon us.  So as creatures that are a result of such a system, constrained by the laws that made us, our experience is defined, limited, and set by that system.

We only see what we are evolved to see.

And what do we see? A narrow band of the spectrum.  A spectrum that covers a vast amount of visual and sensory information, and we don’t have it.  Because that is how we evolved.

Same goes for our other senses as well.  Sight is just the first.  But touch, smell, taste… all of them are affected.   Sometimes I pick up the smell of other things.

It started innocuously at first.  I think I was a kid.  I smelled something odd.  Like someone with synesthesia, who can smell colors, or feel numbers, I felt something entirely elsewhere.  My consciousness reacted violently at first, rejecting the horror of whatever was pressing onto it from outside our perceived reality.   It rocked me, and I ended up in a coma for a week.  23 people died. In a bus accident.

I tried to explain it.  The smell of rotten garbage and primrose, the blurring of atmosphere, the charging of everything like the buzz before the lightening strike… but that didn’t even come close.  Everyone told me my “break” was from witnessing the accident.  I didn’t want them to think I was lying or worse, crazy.  So I accepted it.  Every time I smelled it though, something bad happened near me.  People died.

The first time it was different was just two weeks ago,  I felt the pressure from high above.  The world was shifting under the pressure, whatever it was, it was huge.  Like a whale starting to break the surface of the water, the nearby surfer just holds on to his board for dear life.  I was the proverbial surfer watching the whale surface from underneath me.  I saw it.

The eye.  The eye. The eye was huge.  The size of a football stadium, an eye pressed against the glass of our world, the behemoth, the leviathan pressing their gaze onto our world.  Its pupil split in a myriad of different ways, filled with intelligence and lights that my mind could not understand.  But did people go running in the streets, screaming?  Did traffic stop and everyone stare upwardly in shock and fear?  Nope.  No one noticed.

The good news is that I didn’t faint.  And I didn’t go into a coma either, so I was able to watch the two planes collide overhead.  449 people died.  They say bodies rained down for hours after the explosion.

I wish I could say I thought it was God.  Or something understandable.  But it isn’t.  Its horror and death and pain.  All I see, and smell, and taste is things that I shouldn’t, and the world suffers whether I am here or not.  To whoever reads this… I am standing on the chair, the rope is tied firmly.  I hope I die quickly… but know that this was my choice. My computer should save this as the most recent document.

What?

Oh my god.  Not again.  NOT AGAIN!  Why are you here?  Now?  Why are you looking at me?  What… ah… ack… help? Help? I… I… aaaaaaaaaaaaassssssssssssssssssssss

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

mine.

The event changed all of our lives.  Not for the better nor for the worse.  But it definitely changed things for everyone.  What caused the event no one really knows, but their are plenty of theories out there.  One popular theory is that God died.  When God died, all the rules of our reality where flushed down the drain. Another popular theory is that one of those large super colliders opened a rift in reality, and all sorts of exotic matter escaped and/or was created.   My favorite theory is that the event was caused by too many people wanting something, desperately believing in one thing.   The world was so bad, that this one thing became the ultimate desire for a dominating majority of the quantum observers in our own little pocket of reality.

Let’s call it the Emerging Observation Theory.

Take a bunch of folks.  Idiots, every single one of them.  Take some more folks, who are smart, but just enjoy dumb things.  Then take some more folks, those that like to criticize the first two groups… you know, your common asshole.  If you were to chart these folks out on a line graph,  you may find that you have a bell shaped curve.  A honest to God standard distribution where 68.5% of the people fall within one standard deviation from the center.  Those 68.5% are all people that actually read books. Then take one author, whose writing is palatable to all those folks, and that author creates a story that everyone can identify with and have a personal and emotional connection with.  Say it was about a little kid who found out he was a wizard, and got to go to a magic boarding school and have all these crazy adventures, saving the world time and time again.  Yay for the little whiny fuckwit, he is so special.  I could be him!

Then some asshole says, hey, let’s turn this into a movie.  No.  Wait.  Seven movies.  And those movies, through another stroke of luck, are all wildly successful.   Those movies suck in another section of people that don’t read, but watch movies.  Now you have 95% of the populace.  95%!  (Including all the other countries and translations.) And all of them want magic to be real.  Desperately.  The world sucks.  This imaginary world is so attractive, so much better than reality, that everyone that can think, observe, and process information wants the fantasy to be the reality.

Boom.

It is.  The universe adjusts to a new shared and observed reality.

But, like anything, the lowest common denominator of the sample is what determines the functionable level of the result.    So instead of spells to make things fly, the spells make people half way across the world fart uncontrollably for a few hours.  Instead of spells to protect you from harm, the best spell out there turns all tangerines in the world blue for exactly twelve seconds.  You craft a potion to make you handsome, it makes your grandma’s nipples grow little afro’s.  Things like that.

Magic is real.  And it is terrible.

And the problem with all this?  Its so benign in nature, getting 95% of all observers to reverse it will be impossible.

We are stuck with it.

Hi, my name is Cassie.  You the new therapist?
…
Well that is good.  Therapists come and go, though.  So I won’t stick to the script.
…
Yeah, I guess I can tell you about myself. I would usually start off by telling you that I am older than I seem, younger than I feel, and just about sick of the world I live in, but I know already that you wouldn’t care in the least.  And that doesn’t bother me.
…
Why?  I don’t know.  It just doesn’t bother me.  I know the way things are.  And how they will be.  And how they have been.
…
Do I think I am crazy?  You should know the answer to that without me having to answer.  I am absolutely crazy. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, right? There is not a definition of crazy that is large enough to contain my own special kind of the stuff.  But it is not like I stand in corners asking the walls if they have seen my shoes or anything. I am not bag-lady crazy.
…
Pessimistic?  It is not my fault I can see the world for what it is.  I call that being a realist.  I can be positive.  I like your shirt by the way.  See?
…
Reminds me of a circus event. Elephants and lions and acrobats. Just crap flying everywhere.
…
Do I like circuses?  Who doesn’t?
…
Well I am sorry for you.  Scared of the clowns?
…
By the way, you should call home.  Your son is choking on a carrot and your wife is downstairs vacuuming.  She can’t hear him. If you call now you can save him.
…
Yeah. I told you I was crazy.  Of course you think I am kidding.  That is what has made me crazy.  “Sadness unto all those with deaf ears and blind eyes, for those that see and hear mourn you all and themselves as well, for you pay them no mind.”
…
Something I heard somewhere.  I am not sure from where.  But in my case it fits the bill.  Your wife is about to call you hysterically.  Your son has passed on.  But don’t worry.  You will get up, turn around, and forget everything that I said.
…
Oh yeah, go ahead, answer it.  No… no… I don’t mind the interruption.
…
Yeah you can come back and see me.  It sounds like an emergency.
…
Ok.  See you later.
…
Well, well, just me and the walls.   Again.
…
Have any of you seen my shoes?
…
Shit.