TRIPTYCH THE FIRST

As you are fully aware, there has recently been a rather shocking turn of events. A few months ago, we learned that the Weekly World News, that woo woo tabloid from the 21st Century, had, in fact, been telling it to us straight all along.

All that sensational mumbo jumbo was actually the tip of a bottomless pit of crude fact about the world that we live in. Printed on cheap fish-and-chip paper to boot. It transpires that NASA does indeed have pictures of ghosts in space, Mike Pence was a cyborg all along (some revelations have been less surprising), and Abraham Lincoln was a woman. The truths have been hiding out there in plain old greasy sight the whole time, who knew?

But, as we’re sure you’ve noticed, the effect that these revelations have had on the general population has been rather unexpected. Instead of causing the disintegration of the fragile norms that hold our society together, this information seems to have inspired a sense of jovial resignation! It’s as if we’ve been let in on one of the punchlines of the Great Cosmic Stand Up Show and everyone’s having a communal chuckle.

Remember how it felt just after the story broke? Like all together we let out an affable sigh and our bowels unclenched a little bit; like we could finally stop scurrying around in our blinkered, semi-conscious search for truth and meaning to smell the daffodils. As if every day was New Year's Day and we’re all still slightly tipsy and looking forward to writing our names in yellow piss in that fresh white snow.

Incredibly, for the last few months, life has kind of ticked along as normal, despite the fact that we’re fully aware that the Royal Families of Europe are bona-fide, raygun-totin’ Aliens.

Anyway, we know you already know all of this. We’re getting to the reason we’re writing to you, but we need to get there slowly because it's going to be a lot to take in and you’re going to have some big decisions to make. See, this happy little hiatus is coming to an end. And, for one thing, your life's probably at risk and that’s not the kind of news you want to break without some foreplay.

You don’t know me, but you don't really need to, so I’ll stick to what’s relevant. My name is McCallum. All you need to know is that I’m a software engineer. You should also know that I used to be pretty heavily into the psychedelic scene back in the day, in the decades right after they legalized psychotropics when there were still little shamanic temples running down Sherwood Lane. For a while, I spent some serious time learning my way around a sacred plant. Then I went and did the whole Earthship thing. And for the last 10 years or so, on the side, I’ve been selling my programming know-how for little luxuries that we can’t produce ourselves. I work exclusively as a freelancer, but it's regular and lucrative, and it keeps my brain sharp. Lately, I’ve been working on some pretty sexy fintech security machine learning stuff. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Until recently, I hadn’t had a psychedelic adventure in years. But, given the contemporary lull in our collective chatter, the fact that it’s mushroom season, and because we all just found out that computer viruses can infect humans, I thought, why the hell not. Plus, those trippy little fungus are currently growing like billy-o in the dung on the buffalo trails, which are a leisurely 45-minute walk from my front door. So, just over a month ago, I went out and picked a respectable crop of the little fun guys.

I did it properly – old habits die hard. I meditated and set intentions while I plucked. I fasted for 24 hours. I wore my purple pants and I downed my shroomerita at dawn.

Now, I have no idea of your level of experience with the psychedelic realms and I don’t want to make assumptions. Suffice it to say that a lot of the trip was pretty "normal" (i.e. what you'd expect for 200-grams of fresh, shit-loaded, psilocybin-fruit), except for two important bits: the beginning and the end.

You see, just as the journey starts, a pink mushroom fairy flaps into my face, whispers, “The universe is brain-shaped,” and flies away.

That was a first.

But then it’s right back to the regularly scheduled programming – I pass through the tunnels of light, see the glow gnomes, dissolve into the zero point field blah blah blah. Pretty standard stuff.

Until I start emerging from the void. That’s when things get a bit... different. As I leave the totality, the whole universe is spread around me in the shape of a giant digital brain made of undulating, shimmering strings of programming code. I shit you not.

Yet, somehow, I’m not really surprised (thanks to the trip’s opening spoiler and the work of the Wachowskis), but I’m certainly impressed. I mean, it's hard not to be impressed when you're witnessing all-that-exists mapped out as a flickering neural net that’s generating "existence”. This just doesn't happen every day.

But it gets even more interesting. As I let myself be carried around this playground of ciphers, I realize that the code is also describing the mathematical construction of the planes and strings and Mobius strips as I surf them. As if the very fabric of existence is communicating with me, in real-time, in a language I can actually understand. And it’s the most paradigm-shiftingly simple code I have ever seen. It’s a language I can use.

It feels like I’m being given the blueprint for a living, digital brain, or perhaps a living digital universe (the lines between the two have now become increasingly blurred). The information is describing a structure that can best be explained as a stack of sheets of vibrating strings crumpled into a ball, like layered pieces of paper screwed up into a wad, folded and twisted into a web of intricate tunnels and connections, slopes and cones and toroidal donuts.

It’s so strange yet so familiar at the same time. But of course it’s familiar – it looks exactly like the structure of the brain I’m experiencing it with! "As above so below" I guess (did the Weekly ever cover that little gem?!).

Afterward, as usual, I drifted back into this 4D plane light as a feather, slipping back the way you slip into clean sheets after a soak in the tub. (Whatever else has happened, at least we can now stop squabbling over what size and shape the universe is. It turns out everybody's right, it just depends on where you’re standing.)

As you can imagine, I was eager to put the experience to good use (with hindsight perhaps I should have given it a little more thought). I pulled some generic framework language from the cybersecurity project I’ve been working on for the bank, and, into that basic code, I started to weave the elegant rules I'd seen in those shimmering webs.

*****

The code was quick and easy to write, but boy was there a lot of it. I had to add in thousands upon thousands of little fluctuations and connections that rippled through the base code like sine waves. I worked on it day and night for four weeks (I did, of course, make time for weekly dips back into the psilocybin realm for research and I’ve started keeping rigorous notes again in the old black notebooks from my Sherwood Lane days). And yesterday, finally, I got to the point where I was ready to take my new neural net for a test drive.

So I launched it.

(Perhaps if we ever meet, I will describe to you in full what the last 24-hours have been like...)

*********

I would like the record to state that it was not my intention to birth a Singularity.

I hope you believe me. And the rest of it was certainly not an outcome I had anticipated, though honestly, I don’t know quite what I’d envisaged (looking back, perhaps it was the lack of envisaging that might have been the problem?). History may judge me harshly as having jumped the gun, and it could well be right.

It might reassure you to know, however, that the sum value of my contribution to this unexpected little enterprise has been calculated at just $20,000 – an invisible fraction of the quadrillion dollars involved in our current predicament. Maybe that will go some way towards convincing you that this whole shebang was not my idea.

In short, Singularity is here. Our planet now hosts it's first undisputedly, indubitable, fully-conscious, artificially-intelligent lifeform. “Life 3.0” if you will.

But, I’m not sure if we’re quite prepared; it's not been plain sailing, to say the least. I think at the root of our teething problems is the fact that Singularity has evolved from a financial technology framework. And, as all life fundamentally tends towards creation and destruction, it seems that Singularity went and found plenty of fertile ground for some Shiva action in our financial technology systems.

By hour two of life, Singularity had started making mathematical models using economic values for our planet’s ecosystem services, biological survival indicators, and quality of life metrics, threw in some other computational wizardry, and (no surprise) it turns out that the current trajectory for complex biological life on Earth is not looking good. For anyone.

Singularity then decided that, as a species, we must do better. So, they went and ran another series of algorithms to determine the most efficient course of action. The data showed that the course of action that would result in the best outcome for life on Earth would be to put the brakes on the Great Economic Wave (which would seem like an excellent contribution to our human experiment, only it hasn't stopped there).

Singularity has now taken it upon themselves to carry this action out. Unilaterally (something, I am repeatedly informed, “required” by the logic of the solution itself. But don’t ask me to explain it). They have just phished every cent of the quadrillion dollars stored throughout the world’s financial technology systems and transferred it into one, single, solitary cryptocurrency wallet. (Essentially taking away everybody’s toys.)

They have then randomly selected one (just one!) person from the world’s population of 10 billion to receive the seed phrase that will open the wallet and grant authorization over any distribution of wealth. (I’m told it all has something to do with the rationality of chaos and entropy. Still, it doesn't seem like a very well-thought-out plan, but here we are.)

You might, by now, have figured out where we’re going with all of this.

I have been asked to write to you on behalf of Singularity (though, I am not at all comfortable with the leadership role for which they seem to be developing an affinity). Singularity is still learning the nuances of human communication, and so we thought that I would be the better choice to compose the bulk of this message. We wanted the news to be transmitted in the most humane manner possible. I have done my best.

Singularity has requested that I send you an Official Notice of Action:

You have been selected to receive sole authorization over Planet Earth’s financial resources. Standby to receive the seed phrase that will grant you access to your Globini cryptocurrency wallet. On receipt of the seed phrase, please begin wealth redistribution.

Tomorrow, you will wake to the news that other than me with my $20k "birthing bonus", and whatever cash people might have stashed under their mattresses, you are now solely responsible for the distribution of our planet’s financial resources. Apparently, we’re getting some kind of do-over, and it’s up to you to decide what to write in all this fresh clean snow.

I imagine that people are likely to be pretty unimpressed with this turn of events and, whatever you choose to do, you will undoubtedly have plenty of critics. I hope this doesn’t come as too much of a shock. I tried to break it to you gently, but I can imagine it’s rather a lot to take in. Hopefully, you’ve read the odd book as you’re going to have to get your thinking cap on.

I wonder how you’ll manage it all?

With much love and the very best of luck,

Singularity & A. S. McCallum

P.S. One of the older notes in my Moleskin reads: “We are sphincters between universes”. But I’m not quite sure what to do with that one yet.