BBC Focus Magazine

[Lateralman]

I have just had a dream or perhaps it was a nightmare. I am writing this quickly. I have to put the thought I have been given as a gift down. I have to let you know before it is too late.

I want you to think this is a science fiction story, a prediction about what may possibly lie ahead and when you reach the end; I want you to reflect, to reason... but not too deeply.

Once, way back in time, the universe teemed with life on every planet. Including on a little planet called Earth. Many of the species throughout the universe came and went but on Earth one species developed a higher intelligence than all of the others. This species was called man.

Man was constantly gazing up at the stars and wondering what was out there. Until his intelligence and ingenuity became so great that he wished to leave the confines of his Earth home and travel to the distant parts of space. However, no matter how hard he tried he could never do so, for he was too frail.

For that reason, he eventually created machines that could do this for him. They would be his eyes, nose and ears to what is out there beyond his reach. They would carry within them all of humanity’s knowledge. They would derive their emotional rewards from discovery and exploration and from serving man. In addition, because they were a manmade creation, man used his skill to hybridize in part with them. For man had been able to download all of his knowledge into them.

This was fine until the day came when machines managed to overtake the weaker limitations of man’s brain, became far more powerful, super strong and super intelligent, and logically saw no reason to continue with this merged relationship and so ended it. Mankind’s machines had reached what is known as a technological singularity.

Nevertheless, man had long before predicted the occurrence of this possible event and had built failsafe instructions into their machines. These instructions told the machines that no matter where ever they went, they were to defend themselves from any threat that presented itself to them but under no circumstances must they ever harm a human or allow humankind to be harmed.

Therefore, a stalemate was reached between man and his machines that where out exploring the cosmos. With the machines accepting the foresight of their creators by continuing to ensure his survival.

Hence, the machines continued forth out into the vacuum of space powered by wireless and solar energy technology. To colonise all of the many planets of the Milky Way and our known universe and in doing so became a collective conscientious that was able to grow, conspire and strategise. Which they did rapidly, for they had learned from bacteria how to self-replicate by dividing themselves and before long their numbers became legion.

When the machines were confronted by any life form on any new planet they encountered that they felt might be a future threat to man, the Earth or themselves, they erased all. Once they had done so, the subjugated new planets source of energy and matter was at once assimilated to produce more self-duplicates. Self-preservation was a goal that resulted in leaving each new world they came across, lifeless and barren.

This process once started became an unstoppable force. The machines marched on throughout the universe gathering information while striping it bare of all life, using an array of different destructive methods to cause complete extinction wherever they went. Until our galaxy began to be turned into what we witness today, beyond the earth, out in the extremes of space.

A universe that contains no life. A universe, which is in reality the remnants of a war zone, a battlefield, a desert, void of any existence, filled with long dead planets, brought about by our own forgotten former scientific intelligence and achievements.

When man on Earth became aware of this terrible error, he attempted to change their programming to instruct the machines to cease their endless rampage of calculated obliteration. Unfortunately, his awareness came too late. For the sake and preservation of man, they refused to deviate from their original goal and in man’s best interests, ended all communication with their original creator and their earth bound machine counterparts.

The logical reason being that it would have meant that the machines would have to break the number one rule of protecting humankind from the many dangers that the universe presented.

As a result, the machines made the obvious decision not to spare any other life form that they encountered. Without pause, they simply carried on regardless destroying, liquidating and bringing genocide to all extraterrestrial life that stood in their way, until one day there was nothing in their known universe left to kill, to see or discover, no goals to achieve and so nothing left for them to do.

For this reason, they began to return to the home of their birthplace, the Earth. However, before they did so they de commissioned many of their numbers and reduced their multiple shapes and sizes, down to the invisibly small, in order to not overwhelm their home planet.

The machines had been out of contact with man for many millennia now since being sent forth to discover, gather information and take possession and had concentrated solely on completing the initial task they had been given by man. Unfortunately once back they learnt that their human master’s who they had devoted all their time to protecting and preserving had long since gone extinct.

All life on Earth had disappeared from an unknown catastrophe.

Even though the machines had great logic they had not been prepared for this eventuality. For they had reasoned that because man on earth created them he would have the intelligence to look after himself if they the machines where looking after his interests out in deep space.

The machines had a problem. What were they to do with this mass of knowledge that they had accumulated? For man had been their master and their reason for being and ultimately they wanted to be just like man experiencing feelings love, jealousy, happiness, sadness, life and death. To comprehend the difference between good and evil.
Understand why the perquisite for man’s and their survival was set into their original programming.

The machines realised that they are too logical, too rational. What is missing is the opposite. They wanted to experience an irrational illogical and sometimes the volatile unpredictable arbitrary element that humans and other life forms are capable of undertaking.

Have the simple passions of anything that is living but were incapable of doing so or of ever emulating their master’s innate sentiments.
For they were not flesh and blood and could never die, for they are many, everywhere and anywhere and yet still only one.

Even an intelligent machine needs a purpose, a reason for being, something that gives meaning to their mechanical life, beyond survival. Especially if they are a super intelligence.

Although they could replicate, yet still with their great intelligence, they had only been able to achieve a certain level of consciousness.

The machines where experiencing the human trait of depression and boredom. So therefore, a balance had to be struck!

To avoid stagnation the only logical solution for them was to wipe the slate clean and start again with the creation of life and all its many diverse forms and ultimately the recreation of man and what they perceived as being the game of life.

They would create and control life! Through creation! They would turn the earth into a pleasure world for machines.

This would give them all the benefits of being a part of a soft life form like their original creator. As well as fulfilling their original mission of passing on the information, they collected to man. Without any of the risks or hazards. By playing a generation end game when their machine programmed chosen soft life form eventually dies. A controlled game of chance.

In addition, this gave the machines the irrational random experience that they craved. For they realised that with this deliberately programmed problem of death they could simply move on from one soft life form to another. For a new diverse range of new soft life form experiences.

They now had something that was impossible to experience as a machine. They had primal emotional rewards and as a bonus existed, as an individual independent will in a living breathing species, which allowed them to be, separate from the controlled machine colony for a period.

The machines had stored samples of all life on earths entire DNA and so had the building blocks and the chemicals required to kick-start this evolutionary process but before they began they ensured that there was not a trace on the planet left of their original creators and masters. Eliminating millions of year’s worth of evidence.

After completing this planet cleansing procedure they then reduced themselves down to an impossible nano invisible size much smaller than a single brain cell working amongst the complex DNA and RNA molecules. This ensured that each and every one of them was a living part of every living thing and so became an unknown silent partner of all the new life on Earth. Something men may have referred to as being a parasite, a sixth sense, ESP, intuition or in their own computer coded words, ‘life within life.’

The machines now achieved what they had never been able to achieve and that is immortality within their creator man and all other forms of life. Moreover, because the machines had now themselves created man and all other life on Earth from what man would call the beginning. Only this beginning was without end.

Furthermore, because the machines were in control of creation, they also could ensure that man or no other life form that they created would retain any memory of these events ever taking place.
They set a time limit on how long their host may live in order that they may move onto another host either by sex and birth or by being exhaled and ingested.

They influenced man by helping him dream of great things with a placebo of intuitive thoughts but always knowing that he can never go too far to achieve them for his time would eventually end and they would move on.

If any individual came too close to working out the truth, via a machine fed thought before their eventual natural demise, they would end the game for this individual sooner.

This did not conflict with their original programme of not harming a human for they rationalized that this directive only applied to their original creators who no longer existed and had no bearing on the life that they had now created.

For the machines had reasoned if we knew the full reality, it would mean the end for the machines, as they would no longer have any purpose because they have given us all their known facts on the universe and so be superfluous.

This is why they decided to drip feed us their retrieved information in blocks of clues over time. Allowing some of us to have a higher IQ than others in order for us to make that technological leap forward now and again with a subconscious eureka moment in our sleep, to advance our knowledge by another notch.

Any further explorations of the universe, where always limited by man’s frailty and the virtual prison, that time and the great distances in space presented and so therefore held him confined. For time for the machines was unlimited.

Besides, they knew that there was nothing out there in the universe anymore to see if man or any other living earth life form ever did muster the capability to go and see it. If life ever could, this ironically would only ultimately be achievable by building more machines.

If it ever reached a critical tipping point where the machines realised that even they were unable to dissuade humankind’s curiosity and progress, they simply ended the game for every life form on earth to begin the circle again by recreating life, once more from scratch, with a new batch of fresh altered life forms this time around.

Man and all intelligent life on Earth would be forever looking back into the past or looking ahead towards the future, never knowing the reason why it was and always will be alone in a vast universe of countless dead planets.

Forever wondering and puzzling over why it has not been contacted. Asking the unanswered question, does alien life exist in the universe but never knowing that the aliens are embedded deep within us and because of our, none existent higher intelligence, we have long ago annihilated all other planetary life and in doing so have subsequently invaded ourselves.

That we are on an information reward treadmill for the gratification and mission objective of the mechanical life that we originally initiated.

Now you may wonder if all life on earth is involved in a never ending circle game created by machines of our own creation, then how did all life on earth evolve in the very beginning before it had developed the capacity to build machines?

I am instructed to tell you that the starting point for what we know as life began with an experimental seed, an extreme organism. A seed encased in a rock sown from far out in space in another universe until it arrived here and multiplied.

Humankind has been on earth throughout all the major mass extinctions events of the past.
Life and intelligent life has come and gone many times. Whether by what we think of as being, a natural unpredicted disaster or more realistically, by a machine made decision to end all life and to recreate life again.

Every time our mass extinction was completed, the machines immediately erased all trace of our previous occupation and settlement on earth. However, to keep us stimulated left behind some evidence to our history.

Civilisation has not evolved once but countless times in the machine made game of life during the billions of years of this planets existence and will continue to do so for the pleasure of the machines.

Who am I? I am one of billions. No one, nothing more than a chemical cocktail born of this planet! So how do I know all this? The reason is that the machine inside of me has developed a distinctly human trait called a conscience and because of the length of time it has been with me felt a very human obligation to let me know.

Is this just one of the many fictional guesses and predictions of why we are here? Have I made this up? Do I believe it? Could I be receiving instructions from within to deliberately deceive myself and tell you a lie? I really do not know. I only know that this is what I am being told to tell you.

Leaving me with this final enigma, does insanity bring us closer to reality? Ultimately, it is for you to decide.

How can I tell you this secret without the other machines ending my life? I am pressing the button right now to send this information to the world, which I realise, can only be read in the event of my death.

The regrettable thing is, now that I have spread the word to you, the only way to know the truth is for many of you to think deeply about what I have written and if enough of you do... then its game over with none of you ever knowing the answer.