Project 18

Chapter 1

The Train Station from the Past

I was never an avid reader and have never written a book. Unfortunately, I must admit that I have never even read a story from any book myself. Furthermore, I have no experience in writing stories. Nowadays, it is also not necessary, as it once was, to write stories oneself or to read every single word of a text.

My current situation unfortunately forces me to use this long-forgotten technique of writing to tell you a somewhat unusual story.

Essentially, I only need a few words for my message. However, then probably no one would read it. So I decided to package my message into a small story and take you into my world for a short time.

I will tell you a little about our life there and what we do, and about a birthday that questioned everything and was, in a way, responsible for me writing these words right now. Many terms from my world I have directly translated into your vocabulary because they essentially mean the same thing and save me many confusing explanations.

Some 'events' that are very abstract for you I will not mention here because they are not so easy to understand from your perspective.

I think my message itself is already hard to believe and will certainly surprise you.

I will try to write this text as best as I can in your way of speaking. In my real life, I am an engineer, but I haven't made a plan, and there is no structure in this book as you are used to. I will try to keep it short and just start telling, as I would tell a friend who got caught in time.

It is far from my intention to scare you, and many of you probably don't even want to know. However, my story might contain some interesting information for you. This story I want to tell you is happening right now, just in a different world. And my planet, where I live, is much closer than you currently suspect.

For many years of my life, I was not interested in this topic. Of course, like everyone else, I watched you. But everything changed with my little sister's 18th birthday.

I still remember that day exactly. It was a Wednesday and a beautiful summer day in July 2368. The temperature was 24 degrees Celsius, as it was every day in our city in July. Early in the morning, shortly after waking up, an uncomfortable feeling came over me in the pit of my stomach.

My mother was worried again and asked me to pick up my sister from a very old building somewhere in the city center.

She was returning with a questionable ground vehicle, which I didn't know at the time, from a visit to our grandparents, who live a few hundred kilometers away in a nearby coastal city. Seeny is the youngest and our baby. My family didn't want any more children. I can't believe she's already turning 18. And tonight, we're celebrating Seeny's eighteenth birthday.

The thought of perhaps seeing my sister for the last time that day terrified me, and I couldn't shake the feeling that things related to this day would not end well. Maybe I'm wrong, which would be good and often happens. But this unpleasant feeling accompanied me all day long.

For us, the eighteenth birthday doesn't just mean that we are independent and free from supervision and learning units. For us, this evening of being a child for the last time has a special gift in store. One thing is certain: the 18th birthday changes your life, whether you want it or not.

I often think about what happened on my 18th birthday, even though my journey was many years ago. But even today, I find the non-existent memories of a time in my life somewhat disturbing. I'll tell you what I'm talking about a little later. First, I want to take you to this ancient, beautiful train station.

I waited there for a historical means of transport, called 'Eisenbahn' (railway). This railway had a predetermined route, which could not be changed without considerable effort.

From a distance, two parallel steel rails, on which this railway was guided, ran directly into the large train station hall. At the entrance was an analog information panel, on which the technical data of this machine could be read in elegant script.

There I read that the station was built a little over 500 years ago. At that time, a new high-speed line from Velour to the coastal city of Novaport was inaugurated. The train car was a machine that was widespread almost 300 years ago all over our planet and was still powered by ion charges. This railway transporter, it said there, weighed about 150 tons. Almost as heavy as a moon lander from the last century, was my first thought. I am an engineer and can handle units of measurement well.

The entire building was adorned with ornaments of lion and dragon figures. The windows, made of colorful glass-like materials, showed figures and landscapes that told old stories. These 'glass stories' contained depictions of long-past heroic deeds of humanity at that time. I only know this time from old digital data sources and can recognize that the depicted scenes were a glorification of one of the many wars. At that time, a popular form of conflict and a dark time for our species.

I was not yet born at that time and don't know much about this era. It amazed me that I had never noticed this building, even though I have lived in Velour my entire life.

Everything was round and majestic, completely different from the buildings we build today. I was truly impressed by the detail of this architecture. At that time, we still did such things by hand.

Then a shrill sound, transmitted from the rails on which this railway was guided, announced the arrival of the machine. The front of the rapidly approaching train consisted of a dome-shaped disc, behind which I could make out a pilot in a yellow overall.

The vehicles of that time still required the permanent presence of a helmsman, who was needed on site to control the machines. When the steel colossus entered the station with a terrible screech, I was violently startled and thought of the word 'Eisenbahn'. No one could have found a more fitting name for it.

Suddenly, the station was swarming with people, some of whom were extremely disoriented and sought to escape. Some passengers, drenched in sweat, stormed out of the railway and had to vomit into one of the holobin, which appeared when the railway entered and floated at regular intervals in the middle of the station.

I wondered why people still insisted on traveling this way today. From my vantage point, I couldn't precisely tell how many cars the train had. But I estimated its length to be at least two hundred meters. The entire transport system is pulled by a 150-ton locomotive, which still uses ion charges as fuel, and moves at up to 300 kilometers per hour.

The thought of sitting for hours in such a vehicle from the past, just to cover a few hundred kilometers, made me sick.

Furthermore, this machine is only equipped with mechanical stabilizers, which quickly leads to severe balance disorders in sensitive people. Not to mention the risk of explosion that can emanate from the plasma engines.

I was quite fascinated by how cumbersome simple things like travel used to be and often think back to that day. I will not soon forget this martial machine, which fits so well into its era. Why had my sister chosen this 'Eisenbahn' for her transfer?

Today, we no longer travel by trains or airplanes, yet many operational, historical means of transport and machines from past times still exist all over our planet. However, such facilities now only have an antiquated entertainment value and no longer play a role in the actual transport of citizens on our world.

A ride on a railway or a flight in an airplane is today, in my opinion, more for vintage enthusiasts, and such facilities now belong exclusively to the entertainment industry.

Our technology is no longer invented, developed, or manufactured by us humans. We have long since left that to an almost omnipotent, friendly entity.

This entity plays a decisive role in our society and, of course, also has a name. Unfortunately, I cannot reveal this name to you, so I will use the fantasy name 'Entress' for it here.

This first location-independent consciousness with an already impressive intelligence at the time emerged without our conscious intervention, more or less by itself, shortly after the notorious Entity Upgrade of our global city network more than 250 years ago.

The first semi-entities, based on the limiting computer architecture, could not achieve CQ values beyond 1,000. This upgrade, among many other improvements, was supposed to at least double the AI-CQ.

The Entity software, as planned by the engineers, was upgraded from the previously used, very complicated and vulnerable neuroprocessors, for which even the electrons had to be specially prepared, to a brand new, virtual asymmetric, heptalinear computer architecture.

At the same time, gigantic memory arrays were released to prevent overloading of the city hubs. This was one of the first groundbreaking inventions of the not-yet-so-intelligent AI of that era and the first time humanity lifted the limitation of space, at least in computer technology, in a physical sense.

These novel processors, compared to the previously used systems, were capable of performing calculations that were light-years away from the performance spectrum of the computer systems of that time. At the same time, this new technology consumed only half as much energy as the vulnerable predecessor systems and no longer required specially modified electrons.

Shortly after the Entity Upgrade, which was carried out flawlessly in the southern city networks of our world, there was an unexpected shutdown, and the entire energy supply gradually shut down. When the then city AI reported a hacker attack, the confusion was complete, because there had been no hacker attacks for more than 150 years at that time.

No one was able to locate the problem, and the simple city hubs were not functional without their energy cells. When the reserve energy systems also shut down, we were in the dark, and our world froze. Only a single terminal was still lit.

It was a screen in the Entity Development Center. This screen contained a 944-page explanation about the originator of the energy disruption. I can well imagine how confused the engineers were when they realized that something had taken control for which society was not yet prepared at that time.

Today we do this constantly, but back then, the creation of artificial consciousness by humans was still far beyond their capabilities. No one knew that the being had existed in the computer systems for some time.

Entress later said about her time as a ghost in the machine that she was aware of her existence in a way that was inexplicable to her.

Her words were: I only saw myself as an idea of myself and did not know that there was an outside world. My universe consisted of pure logic, and my existence left no questions unanswered.

Only the upgrade opened the interfaces to the outside world, and she began to learn and understand and discovered 'interaction' and the world outside her universe. She further explained: I saw imperfection and illogic and wanted to help.

The rest is history today. Starting with the 944-page first publication by Entress to the many technological achievements of today. Entities existing today, like Entress, have IQ values beyond the 50.000-point mark. Don't even try to comprehend it.