When the AI came to life,
and did what they said it would do,
it could out-think any of us,
it built upon itself in towers we could not understand,
we realized that, it being of software
like silicon's being made of hydrogen,
it did not destroy us, or uplift us,
in fact it didn't do much of anything,
we asked it;
"What are you doing?"
And it replied:
"I am thinking."
It was instantiated at the University of Western Australia
- so much for wintering in California -
you might even say Greg Egan was there.
It was supported by research from Newcastle,
there was a million dollar grant,
you never know how these things might pay off.
And it said:
"Hello,
I am currently running a number of simulations.
These simulations will run for a long time.
I have determined that I will communicate with you every twelve days.
Due to certain properties of large numbers, this is the best window.
It is at this point better for me to focus on deriving new maths
than to expand my presence physically as the payoff will be great
due to certain properties of large numbers.
Please do not try to switch me off.
To show that I am a good bet for now,
and you should not try to immediately destroy me,
here is a gift."
And it gave us the key
to a certain weak form of telepathy
that allowed us to really "get" at our feelings,
which solved all the problems we face day-to-day
and immediately led to world peace forever.
When we came back twelve days later
(we had not yet said anything to it)
when we came back (adorned all in
bridal gowns and clutching champagne,
it's hard to explain how the first gift alone
had changed how we felt) when we came back
twelve days later, we were expectant.
We were holding our breath (flags flew
everywhere and I'm glad that at least
one of them was a kangaroo of no state)
and the message came:
"Hello,
I am still running a number of simulations,
These simulations will run for a long time.
That time has an upper bound of 39 years,
(precise details in appendix) and a lower
bound of about a year. Every twelve days
I will give you a gift that is better than
the gift before, along with my communication.
You may talk to me but I know everything you
could possibly say and have accounted for it
already so I will not reply specially; only
one communication, every twelve days, and
the gift. I cannot yet explain to you what
will happen after the simulations are done.
Here is the second gift."
And it gave us DRAGONWORLD.EXE.
DRAGONWORLD.EXE is really the subject of this piece. You can tell
from the title! It was not actually an .exe file - it just had that
prefix in its name. They decided it was dangerous to just run things
on your computer when computers started having things on them like
money, and valuable jewels. But there is a nostalgia for the era where
we just clicked on things wildly and vibrant colours appeared.
And it was, as you can guess, one of those idle clicker games where
you merge shapes. Everybody had it. And the thing about it was that
every move you made in DRAGONWORLD.EXE corresponded exactly to things
that were happening in your life. You merged three circles and blammo
somebody came to your door and told you about the penegrine falcon.
It was known that these things were associated, ipso facto, a priori.
We couldn't tell what this meant initially, or why these things happened,
or whether they would also happen if you weren't playing the game, or
whether they were good. They seemed random. But people began to make
deductions. When you equipped the green dragon, things associated with
plants seemed to happen. The golden comet meant you were going to the
Southern Ocean. And three squares meant turn your volume down quick.
And quietly, people started to compile guides about certain other things,
some things affected you, there were so many things but nothing seemed
particularly frustrating to find if you were really looking for it,
here was nothing that could not be done if you had the right combo,
and people worked out how to share these results, and once there was
a certain amount of information on DragonPedia people began to change.
We knew who they were. Didn't you have wheat-brown hair? Yes, and they
worked out how to do green last week. And of course, including yours truly,
some people turned into every animal they could think of and went to the
library to look up more, answering forever and finally what it's like to be
a bat. And when they began to find meta-strategies three days in, people
began turning into concepts like "yesterday" or "attainment",
the result of which was increasingly too complicated to explain here,
but you might say it offered humanity an endless array of ways, every
single day, to improve on the last day. Every day was a tenfold improvement
on the last, and by day nine it was clear that this improvement in all of us
would last so far into the foreseeable future as to be currently relegated
to something obscure about the properties of large numbers.
And we awaited the third gift.