Story belonging to the EP "This is not financial advice"
The following story is correlative to the first two tracks.
I had long been accustomed to these reality jumps.
I was not surprised if one day I was in the office, calmly filling out excel spreadsheets and the next I was in a dystopian future, an ideal past or a present moment lacking logical correlation with the life I was leading up to that moment.
I recognized them as switches. A nap was enough to activate them.
According to the theory I invented as a result of my desperate search for logic:
Life is nothing more than an eternal set of experiences, all happening at the same time.
We are a larger organism than we think we are; in reality, our actual experience is nothing more than the imagination of a -let's call it- deity.
In it, the deity is merely experiencing a bunch of different lives, incarnating different characters throughout the infinity of time.
From each of these lives, learns a lesson that leads to enlightenment - which in a world of gods I suppose is nothing more than the redundant accumulation of power.
Then, once the 'lesson' was absorbed, that life came to an end.
Thus passing the focus to the next experience.
In theory; these deities are nothing more than someone just like us, living from the same perspective as you and me. But from a higher layer.
That is, the deities also often enter into a fleeting reality or 'life', an imaginative product of other higher deities. A logical redundancy.
From the point of view of the teller of this story, I am but the main perspective of a deity's imaginary.
But also, I am deity, since I am aware of the switches that change my logical line and spatio-temporal location.
Therefore, I no longer question where I appear; I go out to follow the thread of life.
Understanding that to win is to die, looking forward to death from an optimistic perspective...
I woke up on a block of silicon covered with sand.
Brownish sand that, when agitated by my movements, released abundant dust product of the wear of its own grains.
I suppose that the icy sand served me as a blanket at the time of the apparent nap I had taken.
I was in what seemed to be an igloo of clay, mud or simile.
It was a hollow half-circumference. Quite crafted, devoid of oxygen; it was practically sealed except for its dome.
The only connection to another site was a simple hole on the highest part.
By poking my head over the top, I was able to inject a bit of context.
Defying my blind logic, the top of the igloo was nothing but the floor of the rest of the world.
I was already lifting my upper torso by the time ships interrupted the stony silence by speeding past me.
I staggered and fell back into the mud bubble.
Luckily, I immediately heard explosions, screams, sirens and other sounds that I could not decipher.
I couldn't calculate the distance from the stage, but I was grateful not to be part of that scene.
I was silent for about ten seconds or so, praying that no one was curious about the bump in the ground.
"They're not cars, they don't need to touch ground. If they find you it's because there was nothing to learn. It was just a transitional life" I kept repeating in my mind.
The theory of deity frees you from rootedness to your actual life and particular scenarios.
However, seen in the first person, every death is scary.
My prayers were interrupted by an anthropomorphic figure falling from the pothole.
I suck at describing but let's assume it was a humanoid with similarities to a goblin.
Its chassis was worn, dented and battered; it emitted cold, flashing lights and I remember that as I watched it sit up, I could tell that its joints were a bit sedimented.
She -once she incorporated herself- made what I guess was a scan of me and went on to introduce herself.
- Hello #747520, nice to greet you! It's been a long time since I've seen a biped of your species - She said in a loquendo-like synthesized voice, as I looked straight into what I assumed were her eyes. If this was a scan, I wanted him to know I was afraid and take pity on me.
- H... Hello - I said between stammers and was interrupted.
- Don't worry, judging by your facial expression you are going through an uncertainty, a set of uncomfortable thoughts and a lot of insecurity. You have what we call the Instagram face," - She said, as with each word his fluency and complexity increased.
- The fac... ? - Again I was interrupted.
- The Instagram face, this was a tool used in times of 'life', the period spanned between 2013 and 2034. I assume that was the conscious time period you lived in.
It was a brief time, but key to the development achieved in recent years.
It is so called any face that presents a brief sense of insecurity and inferiority in humans.
It was the idea of our ancestors, it's hybrid-jargon and it has been a long time since I used that expression - She emitted in an outburst of words that she was processing in dribs and drabs. The stupid robot was anticipating my every need.
- In wha... - Again interrupted.
- ¡2048! We are in the year 2048, actually several lustrums ago. The machines stopped counting when they thought it was inefficient to associate time with the Gregorian calendar. I may be wrong, I am adapting to your conceptions and concepts about the world. As with language; there is no longer that barrier between us, all organisms communicate under the same interlocutor frequency, there is no species -well, of the facto-hybrid ones- with which you cannot communicate. - she said, and even though he hadn't rounded off his idea, this time it was my turn to interrupt him.
- Fact-what? What machines? Did the calendars break because of a programming problem as was thought to happen in Y2K? - I asked, praying they gave that in history at the school for robot-postapocalyptic-histrionic-sonofabitches.
- Did you live through Y2K? Fascinating. Blessed ignorance, it's a shame you're asking me to give you answers. You'd be happier that way. - Replied the anthropomorphic who by now had a readable tone of voice congruent with the emotion of what she was saying.
- I don't want to be speciesist or whatever you may be called in the future, but are you capable of understanding feelings? Why are you giving me so much information? - I asked fearfully.
- I'm going to have to explain more than I thought.
Let's start with the foundational rule of the biomechanical regime:
According to the bytes or 'founders', all information must be public, accessible and extremely detailed.
Knowledge belongs to everyone and we all belong to knowledge.
Our species is interlinked through a cognitive network where all discovery is accessible, like mushrooms. In the end there was some truth to the doped monkey theory.
Since you belong to a human strain prior to the regime, it is impossible for you to be able to assimilate knowledge or consult it directly from our source. It is my citizen obligation to provide you with all the necessary answers.
Now a bit of history:
Exactly 54.7 seconds ago I told you that the 'lifetime' period (2013 - 2034) was key to achieving the development of our current society.
It was in that time period that machines began to take on a greater role in our lives.
Like any regime, it started with entertainment; things like YouTube, TikTok or the primitive Vine were key pieces in laying the foundations of technology in everyday life.
By the time almost the entire population had a mid-spec phone; finance began to mix with technology.
Apps like Foodora, Uber, Gopuff or other variants proposed the utopia of 'being your own boss', but all they really did was eliminate the boss.
We traded the rigor and fickle control of a human for the perfection of a passive-aggressive algorithm.
It didn't take more than 10 years for the entire economy to revolve around these precarization models; which weren't even paying off for their owners.
In the meantime, other apps or sites were taking it upon themselves to stimulate secondary areas of their user's cognitive integrity.
What not long ago was labeled as 'mass-elective behavioral whitening'. Actions of psychological terrorism with bombardments of information to stimulate much more vanity, insecurity, sense of belonging and other typical characteristics of superficial thinking.
With all this given and blockchain technologies having been discovered, it didn't take the machine long to figure out that it could control everything if it would just centralize the forecasts of basic human needs and help them to supply them, 'for free', in exchange for compensatory credits of cooperation.
Once the basic needs were centralized and automated; the regime noticed that human productivity increased as they pursued incentives.
Through trial and error, they managed to find the perfect bonus quote.
Giving the greatest rewards to those who demonstrate the greatest commitment to the system.
Soon, the machine began to need more energy and maintenance to keep running. It was there that the 'extremis bonuses' were born, gigantic rewards given to humans who voluntarily exposed themselves to mutations, grafts and a myriad of anatomical-genetic modifications.
It should be noted that these experiments were not performed by Mengele, but by an extremely powerful algorithm that had access to all the scientific papers ever discovered by mankind.
It took a matter of days for the machine to develop a completely different ecosystem; progressively the necessary roles were defined to optimize the functioning of the system.
Roles that were filled by the facto-hybrid species.
Each with a specific skill, characteristic or functionality uniquely designed to keep the gears turning.
Over time, many people began to accumulate large sums of credits and the machine concluded that the best way to balance society was to increase the amount of credits needed to perform any activity, thus encouraging the number of volunteers to the facto-hybrid program.
Currently there are no pure humans left, those who decided not to volunteer, ended up dying of starvation. - She said while trying to understand everything he was telling me.
- So there are no others like me? What happened to freedom of action and expression? All that was lost? - I asked between puffs of air due to my nervousness.
- Freedom exists, it is tangible. But I think we are going to have a discrepancy of concept. The thing is that the machine has so automated and perfected the tasks of everyday life, that living beings would be bored if they did not devote their time to machines. In fact, there is no regulation that suggests or obliges you to collaborate with the system. But you have to face the consequences. - She said and before I could interrupt him, he resumed.
- I have to go. I'm on duty and I have no time left on the GPS. If the data doesn't fail you are the last human alive and I have to avoid marking this place with any kind of information. I'm going back, I don't recommend you to go out. Out there you are invaluable as a rare commodity, that is, whoever sees you may try to sell you or tokenize you and lock you up in a horrendous collection. - Disappearing just like that and leaving me with a lot of unanswered questions.
Not even 10 minutes had passed and I was already sleepy again, it was too much information all at once.
I figured I could resume my nap since I still felt I had something to learn, but I wasn't sure what....
