The dagger stood in the corpse of Your World. I saw the dried blood scatter like dust through my ocular implants as I scanned for signs of life. While watching the glint of the blade flicker in the wind, I thought of all the agents who protected me since I was a mere germ, before I could even ask to be born.
I was too late in this timeline.
Excavating lots until I found a hololens harddrive was not hard. Most of the lots are roughly the same, stacks of rubble. There was endless rubble.
I planted what must look like a steel rod to you into the ground. And it shot out what must look merely like grey sand. Sand with nano-processors. In 10 minutes tiny spines rose out of the ground that started merging like strands of rock. I hear rustling as burned roofing, wood, tires, and rusted metal, merge. After 20 minutes of letting the machine combine itself and seeing the tragic beauty of a red sky I am ready.
I must have dug into what was once a living room. I could tell by trace fabric residue I was looking at a rug; a coffee table; ceramic bits that were once a mug; and the picture frames with black rectangles.
On specific missions like these, I command my visual overlay to put black rectangles on all faces. I haven't figured out how to make black rectangles appear on the entire body of the attached head, which would make my life a lot easier.
After uncurling the phalanges and biomatter from the drive, I rested the still life back in its pose; the way it was before I intruded, embracing what showed as another black rectangle.
Next I had to see what happened in this ancient civilization. To do that, I had to read out data from old technology.
Old technology was made by authors to talk in specific ways, essentially freezing its ability to speak and adapt. Old technology did not yet talk with other systems to learn how to communicate, and talk in a negotiated way, by themselves. (Or if it had, it wasn't in mass scale.) On these occasions, I carried documentation, which I found cumbersome, slow, nonvisual, and nonimmediate1.
My implant would still attempt to inform me how to talk to the device, but translating Standard American English documentation into a dynamic model that captured every nuance of meaning, was impossible.
The work would be boring: finding a way to activate the drive, reading documentation, extraction of drive information, cataloging data, training a model to catalog data to work alongside me, training another model to train other models to catalog alongside me, and forensic reconstruction.
If I find something inconsistent, I could find other drives to build a better picuture, and plug data into a consensus-reaching propagation network. Finding other drives wasn't hard since a dead body usually lies around other dead bodies, and dead bodies usually have drives on them.
The work would be boring. Except, according to agency journals, this was the earliest timeline where humans invented silicon-based computation.
The future of Your World is a failed one. I hope by sending this analysis in old, flat, symbolic medium, that you can save Your World.
Please ACK. ACK by storing messages at the locations I'm attaching, each a backup if anything goes wrong.
I will find the weighted average timeline stemmed from the differences you make. Talk soon.
– jwow3424
I wonder if civilization could have fallen this way: people who only learned to talk in one specific way by dogma were then, unable to work together. A world where everyone is trapped and alone once the author of their original dogma was no longer relevant or interested.
Still, I couldn't change the implant inside me to cover bodies with black rectangles, so maybe I'm trapped too. It's hard to see you're trapped until you can think that you are trapped.