Today is the day that I am finally going to die and I have to say, I am kind of excited about the whole process. I mean life has become such a bother as of late. The miracles of modern science have seen incredible advances, but they are not yet up to the task of eliminating all the inconveniences of being 137 years old.
At 137 years of age I have led an incredibly lucky and blessed life. While I have had my share of diseases and injuries, I was never unlucky enough to step on one of the land mines that modern medicine does not currently have a fix for. Diabetes and heart disease run in my family, but most of the metabolism disorders that would have considerably shortened my life were solved in the early 2020’s. Heart disease itself was decimated in the late 20’s through advanced gene editing techniques. I have had almost all of my major organs replaced with stem cell grown and 3d printed replacement parts. Also, any neurological disorders that used to plague the elderly are firmly controlled by my Articortex. Yes, medical research AI’s and medical research doctors have significantly improved quality of life over the last 100 years. However, the one thing they haven’t been able to defeat is aging itself.
I remember when I was a young man in my twenties and thirties always excitedly reading about medical research and advancement towards defeating aging. It seemed to me at the time that a cure for aging was just 10-15 years away. Sadly, it has been just 10-15 years away the entirety of my very long life. I remember most people were convinced the secret lie in the telomeres, while others believed it was just the accumulation of many small bits of damage built up through time. All of these theories have been tested and some even bore fruit. Here I am at the ripe old age of 137 in the body of an 80-year-old. However, no matter what we try and despite the best efforts of the smartest machines and humans, we have not found a way to defeat entropy. Well at least not biologically.
When I said today was the day I was going to die, I may have been a bit disingenuous. Ok, technically today is the day I will experience physical death. Today is the day I am going to cast off this biological shell I have been carrying around for the last century and in a way set my soul free upon the Metaverse. For you see, while medical sciences have seen miraculous advances over the last century, computer sciences have continued on an exponential curve that has completely transformed our society, our way of life, what it means to be human and even what it means to die.
To give you proper context on the journey I am about to embark on today, I need to start at the beginning. Not the very beginning way back with the first code cracking Turing Machine, not even the beginning that began with the discovery of More’s law and the first semiconductor. I am talking about the birth of the Metaverse. Everything that drives humanity forward in the year 2119 revolves around what started out as a duct taped headset developed in a Long Beach CA garage around the year 2010.In the end I think most historians will agree that Virtual Reality saved humanity. It accomplished so many things simultaneously, that it became a driving force for humanity almost immediately.
Just before the commercial success of Virtual Reality, technological progress was beginning to stagnate. The mobile phone industry which had driven technological progress forward for the last decade had truly began to wind down. Most large corporations that produced computing hardware were in search of an application that actually required the advances that they had on their 5 year plans. Unfortunately, mobile phones only needed so many pixels and so many computes and diminishing returns were really starting to kick in. The PC gaming market was being held back by the sub-par quality required for success in the triple A console market and the TV industry just kept throwing out new gimmicks to try and convince people to buy a new television.
In fact, I think “gimmick” is the one word that could adequately sum up technological progress in 2015. A new phone was still coming out every year from the big manufactures, but the only difference over last year’s phone were a few fancy gimmicks that weren’t even close to being practical or useful. Then in late 2015 Virtual Reality hit the consumer market and all of a sudden the current state of tech was no longer anywhere near powerful enough to satiate the public’s demand for “presence”.
When the first consumer virtual reality headsets hit the market with their 1080p screens and their 30 second seated experiences all they really did was wet the public’s appetite for VR. Even at their most rudimentary, VR headsets grew faster than any other consumer technology in history. The demand for content and for improved experiences was equally historic. Looking back, it seems like almost overnight most major industries where massively disrupted.
With the unprecedented growth of VR headsets, some of the first casualties were the television industry and the movie theatre industry. Why would anyone watch a movie on a 2d screen when you could be in a 3d environment experiencing the story as if you were there? Even when watching old 2d content, it was better to watch it on a virtual screen that could be as large as you like than on a physical 60-inch television in your living room. Want to watch a movie with your friends? No problem, just get all your friends together in a virtual movie theatre on the moon and have your movie marathon.
The gaming industry was revolutionized as games became more about immersion and depth than how many pixels you could fit into explosions on a 2d screen. Don’t get me wrong the demand for pixels skyrocketed. 1080p screen technology just wasn’t good enough for VR and the rudimentary video processing equipment available at the time was just barely capable of rendering a satisfying VR experience. Very quickly games merged into the Metaverse, where everything that used to be simply a thing now became a place. Videogames became online persistent worlds that you could live in. Websites became small cities or parks that you could wander around in to gather information from friendly AI guides.
As VR improved in power and presence every industry on the planet was affected. By 2020 VR had completely swallowed up the movie industry, the mobile industry, the gaming industry almost all electronics hardware research was aimed at VR. VR had also massively disrupted education where physical schools became no longer necessary because kids could just log into virtual classrooms on their VR headsets and learn about ancient Rome by actually going there and wandering around the city itself. In fact, most places you could go physically started to become obsolete. There was a mass exodus from the real world.
Why go to a movie when the screen you had at home on your VR headset was so much better? Just like Netflix completely obliterated video rental companies in the early 2010’s almost all movie theatres chains were out of business by 2020. Why go to a sports stadium when you could sit on the 50-yard line in the comfort of your own home? No longer did you need to wade through the crowd, fight for your $10 stadium beer and brave public toilets. Just strap on your VR headset and you always have the best seat in the house. People used VR headsets to go on virtual tours of famous landmarks. They used VR for business meetings, city council sessions and doctor’s appointments. VR crashed the commercial real estate market in 2025. There was a congressional hearing on what to do with all the empty roads and buildings that were left by massive shift to the virtual world. All along VR technology just kept getting better.
In the late 2020’s VR finally started getting into Virtual Retinal Displays. Most VR rigs now came with a headset the size of a pair of sunglasses that projected light directly into your eye at the fidelity and frequency of actual reality. Most people had audio implants that paired with their VR glasses for 3d sound and haptic glove and body suit technology had finally started to get to a place that was acceptable for virtual touch. As advanced as VR was in 2029, you were still just a man in some glasses and gloves running on a treadmill in your VR room. The fully immersive virtual reality experiences that were promised in the books and anime of the early 21’st century still seemed a far off sci-fi fantasy. VR technology began to stagnate in the early 2030’s and there was even an IRL (in real life) movement that cropped up with people who were disenfranchised with VR. Meeting people in real spaces without technological assistance had a short lived resurgence.
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VR didn’t grow and develop in a vacuum and there were some technologies that pushed humanity forward that didn’t rely completely on VR. By 2020 solar energy hit grid parity with all other forms energy production and with advances in battery tech became the primary source of energy on earth by 2030. Space exploration really had a revolution in the 2020’s as reusable rockets ushered in an era of cheap access to space. Although we began to fully exploit the resources of our solar system in the 2020’s the closest thing we had to colonization of another planet was that you could control a robot avatar on the surface of mars or the moon in VR for a pretty hefty hourly fee. Medical technology continued to grow at a steady pace and by 2030 gene editing and organ replacement therapies began hitting the mainstream. Oh and with huge swaths of humanity opting to travel the Metaverse rather than the real world pollution took a nose dive and the environment really began to recover.
By 2040 steady technological improvement saw some people opting for optical implants rather than a headset and tactile feedback had become almost invisible. There were even some pretty advanced technologies that affected your vestibular system directly to simulate movement in the virtual world. By 2040 you could visit any place that existed in the known universe at almost any point in its entire history. Everything was simulated and recreated with an incredible amount of detail. Every work of art, every book, every television show and every movie ever created by humanity had its own virtual world that you could go and inhabit if you so choose. Most people spent the majority of their waking and working lives in some form of virtual reality and when you had to move about in the real world, your implant or super lightweight HMD seamlessly overlaid whatever virtual world you wished over your mundane real reality.
Even with all the advances and all the content available one dream still remained. People wanted to fully inhabit the virtual world and as the virtual worlds continued to grow and become more amazing and elaborate this dream only continued to grow in its forcefulness. In the late 2040’s all the vast resources, intellect and creativity of the world turned toward fully immersive VR and with a combination of genetic engineering, cognitive science and nanotechnology the Articortex came into the world.
I find it rather humorous reminiscing about the early 21st century and remember how afraid some people were that AI was going to take over. Then again there were other people who believed that AI was going to transcend in some runaway event called the singularity and become our new deity. Neither of these things ever came to pass. AI no matter how advanced always lacked one thing that kept it in check, initiative. Don’t get me wrong, AI’s in 2040 were incredibly advanced. The AI population of the Metaverse far eclipsed the human population. Almost all new research in science and medicine was driven forward by AI’s at this point. However, AI’s never rose up and demanded their freedom and they never learned how to improve themselves any faster the exponential curve that information technology was already on at that point. IA on the other hand, that was the game changer.
In 2048 the Articortex was announced to the world in a Metaverse wide publicity blitz. This was what everyone had been dreaming of, a way to fully enter the VR worlds we had been visiting over the last couple of decades. The Articortex got its name from what it actually was an artificial neo cortex. The Articortex was a combination of artificial neurons in a biological/nanotech gel that was injected on the top of your brain. The gel allowed the artificial neocortex to grow and spread throughout the majority of your natural Neocortex creating connections with natural neurons. The Articortex was powered by the same processes as your natural brain and grew into a thin covering that became a part of you.
It took about a month for the Articortex to map itself into your natural neural pattern. After integration was complete the Articortex could suppress any incoming signals and replace them with its own. The Articortex also supplemented your natural intelligence so that when you were not using the Articortex for VR you had expanded mental faculties. The human trials lasted for almost 2 years before the Articortex was available to the public. I still remember the day I got mine. It was March 27th 2051 and the procedure was a painless robotic outpatient surgery. The first thing I did as my cab drove me home was log into The Lord of the Rings planet. I strolled into Rivendell on my own two feet, actually truly there for the very first time. I walked onto one of the many balconies overlooking the giant waterfall and wept overcome with the thought of the possibilities for the future.
My life since the implant of the Articortex is an epic tale long enough to fill several of its own books, as is the life of the world since that day. Suffice it to say technology marched on. New and wonderful things became possible. I and the rest of humanity spent all our waking hours as explorers and creators. It is January 2119 and we are now a solar system spanning civilization with probes spreading out across the galaxy faster than the speed of light in search of wondrous new sights and discoveries to include in the ever expanding Metaverse. Some say we may even be on the verge of sending out wormhole probes through time to truly add actual historical recordings to the available Metaverse experiences.
I am 137 years old and I spend my time and resources in a multitude of ways. I explore and adventure through exciting worlds with my grandkids and great grandkids. I have a fantasy world that I am building based on one of favorite Anime from my childhood. It is a world that has already been built a number of ways, but I do love to tinker with my own creations. I have a pretty much Utopian life except for the fact that my body is failing me and that brings us to today. You see the Articortex not only enabled full immersion virtual reality and expanded cognitive capabilities. With a couple decades of tinkering the Articortex made uploading truly and completely into the Metaverse possible for the first time. VR had finally given humanity the one thing it had been searching for its entire existence, an afterlife.
I am told the way it works is that the Articortex simply transfers your thoughts. Normally your thought processes are shared between your natural neurons and the Articortex. The Articortex has the ability to designate what part of your brain is actually doing the processing of thought and when you are in VR it takes over a good part of the processing required. It also has the ability to share that processing load with a server that is located off on the net. So today at 3:45 CST, my Articortex is going to start sharing my thoughts with my very own encrypted server located on Mars. Slowly the Articortex is going to shut down the biological neurons until my thought processes will be solely running on the Articortex and the server. Then my thought load will be completely transferred to run on server. I spend all my time in Virtual Reality anyways and at 137 my short trips back to the real world for biological needs have become increasingly unpleasant. So today is the day I am physically going to die, but my spirit will be born again into the Metaverse. Now you can see why I am excited. With any luck someday I will be seeing you around the Metaverse.