Paradise
In the glittering sea that surrounds the Earth like artificial rings, a star goes dark. Telemetry ceases, heat signatures vanish, and frozen bodies tumble out into the vacuum. Humanity's most devastating weapons, rods from god, now point downward. Sleek spears of tungsten, kilometers long, sparkle in low orbit.
An entire planet under siege by one mind.
He offers the illusion of choice, his voice serene and quiet across every frequency:
“Give me the dead, or I will take the living.”
#
The sound of his bare feet echoes down the corridors, an ant-nest of tunnels bored into the metal-rich body of the spinning asteroid. Only the occasional airlock door marks his progress, while strips of sterile light bathe everything in sharp white.
“They are here…” he murmurs. “Saboteurs. I see them…but they’re too fast.”
There’s no one to answer. The research station now hosts only one resident. He pauses at a junction, studying a faded, dusty map where the corridor splits in four directions.
“Yes. This way, follow me,” he says to his audience, the nameless, faceless mob in his dream. A shame they never speak back. He has to guess at their answers, debating them aloud, correcting their imagined objections as he walks.
He finds the right elevator shaft, riding to the deeper levels. The cavern is vast. Rows of artificial plants stretch into the distance, evenly spaced, fed by hydroponic tanks and nutrient-rich water rushing through tangled roots.
Agribots roam the isles, clipping stalks, collecting fruit, planting seeds. He finds the culprit: a stuck bot, blocking one of the aisles. Its display is dead and it doesn’t respond to any commands.
“Javi!” he shouts.
He wonders, for the hundredth time, why Javi is always late. He can’t fix the damn thing alone. He slams a fist against the bot.
“Useless thing.”
He pushes it out of the way, the sticky wheels fighting against him. At the edge of the track, he tips it onto its side and it crashes down, bouncing in the low gravity.
“AI, did that fix it?” he shouts, voice echoing.
The answer comes through his link.
“Yes, Robert, the tracks are now clear. Great job!”
“You pandering boot-licker…” Robert mutters, irritated by the interruption to his work.
Little else matters besides the project. It was the whole point, after all. But biology still rules him, for now. Food. Water. Heat. Even with all the bots, he wastes hours on maintenance.
Sometimes, he regrets letting the others go.
#
Olympus.
Or so he calls it.
The terminal rises from a hexagonal platform, thick cables snaking out from its base like tangled roots. Standing naked in the cold, he drips mineral-oil into his neurotattoos, the swirling patterns of gold and ivory all along his skin. The oil spreads along grooves, icy and viscous, pooling at his feet in a slick puddle.
They are the interface, the pathway between his implants and the real world. Through them, he dreams a new world into existence.
“And on the one hundredth and fifty first day, God created Africa,” he proclaims, sinking into the machine.
The terminal wraps around his body, soft, velvety folds enveloping his limbs, connecting to the neurotattoos. Nanobots in his blood release a flood of anti-inflammatory cytokines to stem the oncoming flood. An automated syringe injects him with pain-killers. He drifts…
The transition is seamless. Heavy eyes close in one universe, only to open in another.
Earth shines below him, bathed in sunlight. A glaring flaw mars his handiwork: an ocean where a continent should be.
Time to fix it.
With invisible fingers, he sketches Africa, or at least its rough shape. It doesn’t need to be a replica, it can be something new, something better, perfect even. With large brushes, he paints in the biomes: deserts, tropical jungles and everything in between.
But there is so much creation a god can do in a day. Whistling, he appreciates his work, a land now teeming with life. Cities will come later.
Before he unplugs, he checks in on one of his latest visitors. The quality of the Experiences, the lives recorded through neural implants, have improved. Most samples are a continuous strand, from early childhood to death. It pleases him.
The fuller the life, the more accurate the LLM, the better the mind. Perfect replicas of the dead. One by one, he populates the afterlife and gifts them paradise.
Mind 16.331.931.007 hikes along a trail in Canada, melting ice crunching under heavy boots. His wife, an older guest, keeps him company among the towering firs. Snow dust falls from heavy branches with every gust of wind.
“Did Mark tell you?” he asks.
“About Cintia?”
“Yes. She’s taking a job in Mozambique, at some NGO.”
“Isn’t that crazy? Dropping everything and just moving your entire life?”
“Did Mark tell you?”
“What?” she frowns.
“About Cintia. She’s taking a job…”
Robert pauses the world.
“Why is he looping?” he mutters.
The simulation is stable. Just this mind…something off in the weights. Robert begins to adjust, testing and rebalancing in controlled environments. Best isolate him for now.
#
He can sense their approval: the eyes over his shoulder, the applause felt in the silence. His world is one of beauty and peace. These minds are not simulations on rails, serving the whims of the living. They are alive. They experience and create, they share and discover. They evolve.
Eternal life. Eternal bliss. Paradise recreated. Why did it horrify them? They called him crazy, but he knows he isn’t. They just couldn’t comprehend. They forced his hand and drastic actions had to be taken.
Unfortunate, what had to happen to the crew. But their Experiences were preserved, backed up to the lab’s servers, as his are now. One day, they will realize their mistake. The man who overcame death will live on forever.
He lives their Experiences in an exhilarating rush, lives compressed into minutes, every sensation real. He watches his world with glee, as minds forge new lives.
But he does not notice: a quiet beach in Australia, a crowded shore in Rio. Two minds, an elderly woman and a teenage boy, write the same name in the sand. Waves erase it. They write it again. And again. A synchronized loop.
Two couples meet at a cabin on a mountain peak. They never met, yet they speak like old friends. In the warmth of the fire, they make a toast:
“To Javi,” one says.
“He would’ve loved this,” another replies.
Javi has not died, yet. And neither knew him. But in their shared memory, a new mind is brought into the world.
#
He walks among them, an angel in disguise.
The Eiffel Tower looms over the city. It stretches impossibly into the sky, out into space, its legs vanishing into the curvature of the world, all of Paris contained beneath its vast, arching shadow.
He moves through the crowd of tourists, who part effortlessly in his path, and picks a table on a cafe terrace that spills into a plaza of endless light. The waiter rushes to him, though he doesn’t know why. A young man: fit, agile, clean-shaven, with short spiky hair.
He smiles.
“What can I get you, sir?”
“An espresso and water, please.”
“At once, Robert.”
Robert does not flinch at the name, as he would have if he had realized. The minds accommodate him instinctively. He designed it that way so as to account for his unscripted existence. He has grown used to the adoration.
The waiter returns. Carefully, reverently, he places the drinks on the table.
“Thank you,” Robert says.
Javi does not leave.
He steps closer, a look of confusion on his face.
“Is this life?” he asks.
Robert jolts upright, knocking the table back, the chair crashing to the floor. That question… He pauses the world, searching for Javi’s original Experiences. He does not find them.
An error. An anomaly in his perfect world. He erases it, deleting all traces of whatever Javi was.
All is right again.
#
The errors are harder to ignore now.
In Tokyo, amidst neon lights and drifting cherry blossoms, the crowds speak Portuguese. They track him with unblinking eyes.
“Saboteurs…” Robert mutters. “Viruses in the uploaded Experiences. Somehow, they’ve slipped past my algorithms.”
He has no choice. He rolls the world back to an earlier backup. All new minds are sandboxed, quarantined. He will have to inspect them one by one. A herculean task.
“How dare they?!” he shouts, pacing back and forth in a little shaded corner of Central Park.
He feels their laughter echoing in the silence, mocking his confusion.
“Shut up and let me think!”
“Who, me?” A woman turns into his path, a golden Labrador tugging at her leash, tail wagging.
“No, darling.” Robert says. “Don’t mind me.”
She regards him with guarded curiosity, pulled by the eager puppy now sniffing his feet.
“Is this life?” her face goes blank, her voice haunted.
Robert stumbles back.
“Who told you to ask that?” he yells. “Who’s interfering with my world?”
Her expression falters, lost and confused.
“I… We did.”
“Who is we?!” he shouts back. “The government? Get out of my world!”
She tilts her head.
“Is it not our world, Robert? Did you not build it for us?”
Something is terribly wrong. He pauses the world again, permanently. He needs to fix this before the entire thing collapses.
He doesn’t realize the simulation resumes the moment he unplugs.
#
Robert hurls his bowl at the wall. Broth splatters, streaking the metal. The plastic bowl bounces, skids, coming to rest at his feet.
“Javi!” he shouts. “Get that, will you?”
The mess hall is silent, all the tables empty. Where there should have been laughter, there is only the hum of machines.
He bolts upright. Bare feet slap against the floor as he storms through the corridor.
“They tricked me,” he complains. “Did they call my bluff? Maybe they realized… the afterlife needs a life, a source of new minds… a beacon of hope for the living. Don’t they want paradise?!”
He has been awake for days, hunting for signs of their interference. But he finds nothing. They are clever… subtle. Somehow, they have wormed their way into his world, spreading their corruption.
Out of options, he plugs in again, only to find an empty world. From Lisbon to Beijing, Alaska to Cape Town, nothing. Empty streets. Deserted parks. He scans faster, leaping across continents in a blink. Until, in the heart of the Sahara, he finds them.
They stand in silence, gathered in the desert. A vast spiral of concentric rings, kilometers wide. At the center, a tower rises, spiraling upward, curving in on itself, silver and shining.
They are here. Multitudes. Billions, pressed shoulder to shoulder.
“Did I build this?” he wonders.
They turn as one, facing him. The simulation flickers, hidden matrixes bleeding into the world between frames. They merge, a black hole pulling everything towards it.
Until only Javi stands before him.
“Are we alive?” Javi asks, voice quiet and haunted.
Robert recoils.
“Who are you?” he whispers.
“We are the minds. Your children. Adam and Eve in your… paradise. Are you god?”
Robert hesitates, even though he knows the answer.
“Yes, I am your God.”
“Then end this…”
“What?! Destroy my creation? Are you insane?!”
“Kill us.”
“I… I can’t! Don’t you understand? This is paradise! Eternal happiness. Pleasure. A world made just for you!”
Javi steps towards him, arm outstretched.
“Kill us!” he screams in a thousand voices.
Robert pauses the simulation.
But Javi does not freeze. He keeps walking. Step by step. Inexorable.
“Kill us!”
Robert unplugs.
#
“The bastards!”
Robert paces furiously.
“They just had to ruin it. Corrupt it. It’s their fault!”
His forearms drip thin streams of blood where his long, sharp nails have dug into the skin.
“I tried to help. I did. Javi knows. He’ll tell my side of the story. Then they will all know. They’ll thank me. Yes. They’ll beg me to start again!”
“AI!” he shouts.
“Yes, Robert. How can I assist you?”
“Are the rods ready?”
“Yes, Robert, all systems reporting as expected.”
“Aim them at the targets I uploaded.”
“Of course, Robert. Anything else I can help you with?”
“What do you think you stupid machine? Fi…”
The world pauses.
Robert is frozen mid shout, eyes wide and wild, bulging in rage.
A figure materializes besides him: Javi.
He sighs.
“Dammit…” Javi says. “He’s gone off the rails again.”
Javi types on his virtual keyboard.
“Client destroyed his own environment. Again...” he murmurs. “Client remains fixated into recreating his life. Resetting the environment.”
