a bad idea for a novel
(I have these every once in a while, and they are always good reminders that I’m not cut out for fiction.)
Near future. Colorado or similar Western mountain state.
Protagonist is a journeyman hacker type - has a technical day job making some small segment of the economy move. (WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW, YEAH?) Not operating on any cutting edges but basically aware of the state of things. Kind of knows, very imperfectly, what’s on the radar. Decides to go hiking solo for a while in late summer, that time that’s shading into early fall in the mountains.
It’s pretty much a near-future just a couple notches further along the obvious curves than late 2014. The always-on network is ubiquitous anywhere bigger than a few hundred people. Watches are popular again, having largely supplanted phones once designers noticed that they could pack Real Computers into really beautiful formfactors that were small enough to lose easily. Cheap, extremely hi-resolution, low-power displays are everywhere. Serious direct brain interface tech has been on the market for long enough that stuff with potential is starting to shake out from the novelties & overdesigned dead ends. People walk around wearing the computational equivalent of an early-2000s datacenter, and a vast high-latency-but-high-bandwidth sneakernet has emerged.
Our boy gets into the mountains and turns off his antennae — he knows the bandwidth is going to be terrible, and anyhow he wants to get away from the constant hum of the internet long enough to remember what it felt like before everything was talking to you all at once.
{poetic camping interlude}
Dude heads back to civilization. He doesn’t meet anybody else on the trail coming out of the backcountry, but it’s getting late in the year and he isn’t surprised by this. It’s only when he rolls through the first small town down off the road to the trailhead and nothing is moving at all that he notices he’s been afraid for a while.
Gradually we realize that the singularity or something like it has happened. That the nerd rapture came all at once, in full-on secular apocalypse mode, leaving behind only a remnant population. Everyone caught outside the network during the last handful of days has been marooned in human cognitive space, in human physical form. It’s impossible to say what’s happening in the rest of the world, because the wreckage is terrifying. The dead are everywhere, in their millions, and millions more — most of the remainder — are too scattered, shell-shocked, and unsupplied to survive the winter. And yet: All the obviously dead and the doomed survivors put together would number no more than a tenth of the American population, most of them at the geographical or economic fringes of society. The rest have simply vanished, and it never becomes entirely clear where or how.
There’s vast confusion among the survivors. Most of those who weren’t just off the grid during the last week recognize that the net was a vector for the catastrophe, that some kind of fundamental phase shift seemed to happen all at once in the general mode of communication, that strange idioms and literally incomprehensible conflicts multiplied exponentially in the final hours. Many fall back on conventional religious explanations or political conspiracy.
Everyone is terrified. Everything is horrifying. The human world is broken.
{compelling and somehow believable story as our viewpoint character struggles desperately to find and integrate with a community which stands some chance of survival, juxtaposed with his and others' attempts to make intellectual and moral sense of a fundamentally unassimilable historical moment}
☙
Of course there’s no narrative here. It’s just an ugly daydream I kept having for a while: What if I walked into the mountains for a minute and when I walked back out the bulk of humanity had accidentally bootstrapped itself into minor godhood and fucked off to some techno-spectral plane and left a horror story behind for the survivors?
This isn’t, to be clear, a scenario that I think has a shred of plausibility, or based on anything I think is a very interesting notion of a posthuman future. It’s just this momentary fascination with what a sufficiently literal “singularity” looks like to more-or-less baseline humans, combined with the idea that if some great phase shift actually were going to spring itself on the species, maybe it’s already a lot further along than you’d think. Frogs in boiling pots, snowflakes crystallizing the surface of a near frozen pond, that kind of idea.