Choose Your Own Singularity is a piece of interactive fiction that grew spontaneously out of an attempt to imagine and record what I believe are the most important of potential future technologies. I'm fairly convinced by the case that accelerating change in the technosocial milieu is going to lead to a technological singularity in about fifty years, give or take. This narrative is an attempt to elucidate the things I've been anticipating in regard to how contemporary culture might grow into these momentous and powerful capabilities.

It's published at http://n8o.r30.net/dokuwiki/doku.php/chooseyourownsingularity, on my Wiki. It's in draft form; misspellings, typos and other errors are still all over it. Feel free to make corrections and additions.

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I've tried briefly, on previous occasions, to work on writing linear stories. It was difficult to get excited about them. The bulk of the initial posting of this page was cranked out in about 4 hours after midnight, entirely spontaneously! Once I'd glanced at the clock and absorbed the shock at how little I'd noticed the time passing, I knew I was onto something.

I learned something interesting about written storytelling in the process. Written narratives in general evolved as way to communicate about the past. When we look at the past, it only happens one way, and so we expect fiction to follow a similar form; it's a short leap between what was and what could have been. We are largely monogamous with our pasts, only furtively flirting with alternates; and when we do cross over, we don't put up much with tracing multiple paths through a story.

Science Fiction, of course, concerns itself with the future, and our view of the future is entirely different. In the future context, we are completely at home with ambiguity, with possibility. It seems only natural to give readers choices here, since a prime function of forward facing fiction is to prompt us to think about what we will do, and not just what we saw or experienced.

Given this tendency, is it any wonder scifi manifests a much stronger presence in interactive video games than in fiction? It seems a perfect match.

In the future (haha), this may turn into collaborative fiction, or perhaps even the premise for a video game. The wiki is of course, the perfect place to do this. For now, any contributions that others submit might be moved to another page, depending on whether or not I think the changes are interesting or plausible. Discussions about the likelihood of other tech not (yet) included in the story are encouraged - that's the point!

For now, I'm releasing this under a non-commercial share-alike Creative Commons license.

In 2015, you are a poor human. you have no assets, and no debts (yet). You live paycheck to paycheck.

Some nut invents an autofab, a machine that makes things, including copies of itself, and starts distributing it under GPL. The fab makes plastic stuff, and circuit boards to connect microchips, power sockets, batteries, USB peripherals, etc. It's not a Nanofactory by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes copies of itself pretty damn cheaply. The fabs are fed by digital designs you can download online. Some are for sale, but you can pirate them as well, just like music and movies back at the turn of the millennium. Others are available under the GPL, and subscribe to some nutty patent commons idealism that's out to share public-domain patents with anybody who promises not to sue them.

you:

• start buying designs and licensing patents to improve on in the hopes of selling your own innovations. Don't touch the commons stuff! It's a virus designed to steal your IP rights!
• pirate designs, and use them for yourself. You either keep any improvements to yourself, or pirate them to others using darknet channels. Commons designs are cool, maybe you can kick some improvements back here or there. Asking you to do without proprietary stuff is a little much, though.
• Keep strictly to the designs in the patent commons, contributing back improvements wherever possible. Maybe you can't always get the greatest whizbang feature, but at least you don't have to hide from the patent cops.

In time, you develop a considerable patent portfolio. After tons of sweat and persistence, and more than a few missed or botched opportunities, you produce a hit product. The royalties accrue with a sudden frequency, and you make a fair amount of money - enough to retire on comfortably. You decide to get into politics, and contribute to some industry groups aimed at strengthening intellectual property protection and enforcement.

Next: Part II: I, Sim?

After much effort, study, and networking, you manage to put together a piracy ring with lots of something that's not common anymore: privacy. You don't make much money, but your network manages to pull you into a shack in the country with a satellite connection through which you can control your worldwide network of infoanarchy!

The party is not to last, though. The cops never crack your crypto, or your network, but the locals start noticing how much of your stuff is old, or not "smart" like their stuff. Legitimately purchased stuff is infused with microscopic trusted computers, which interact wirelessly with police scanners at close range. You're pulled over for having a headlight out one night, and the cop notices the relative dearth of arfid responses coming from your vehicle. one thing leads to another, and suddenly, search warrants are issued for your property. Your fab lab is busted!

You don't have any real assets to pay fines with, but you end up doing time for possession of an unlicensed fabrication device. Luckily, the feds couldn't prove terrorism charges, since the evidence they fabricated (no pun intended) didn't convince the judge. After a few years in the clink, you are released on your own recognizance, with minor surveillance. You have few prospects, but you're free.

Next: Part II: I, Sim?

You struggle with poverty. Several jobs lay you off. You're fired from one job after they find out you're a major contributor to patent commons projects, over concerns of "viral" commons licensing "infecting" your work for them. You never really get your hands on a fab - they're illegal, at least the ones you want to design for, but you can order products from the local plant for cheap. This helps, along with expanded government homeless shelters, designed to deal with the economic dislocation of the manufacturing sector precipitated by the autofabs (hey, it could be worse: you're not living in China). When you have net access, you're at the peak of philanthropic production. Not only do you improve products that improve your own meager existence (patents permitting), but you garner much acclaim and satisfaction for all the other poor people you help, too.

Next: Part II: I, Sim?

Years pass. computers are everywhere. the equivalent of a rackful of pre-autofab PCs is bolted to every utility pole in every civilized area on the planet, free for the jobbing by residents and passersby alike.

Biotech researchers announce the first functional neurosimulation, or "sim". A hi resolution scan of a human volunteer's brain is brought into sustainable operation within a computer simulation, and, for the first time, it claims to be the person whose brain was scanned.

you:

• sign up for this procedure as soon as a reasonable modicum of reliability is acheived. Immortality! self-programmability! mind backups! instant forking! such possibilities
• decline the offer. Sounds too risky to you. for that money, they could at least guarantee some reasonable chance of success. Uploading is not quite feasible yet, though.

Got dough? unless you want to spend some of that retirement wad you made at Stake Your Claim, above, you'll have to wait. Return to A Whole New You and choose again (haha, "choice" - get it?) if you're poor.

Otherwise, The doc tells you some subtle details of the procedure you should know before proceeding. neurosimulation isn't a one way to ticket cyber paradise (yet). you'll be scanned, and your sim can be activated, but he doesn't replace your natural self yet. The doc also can't tell you WHICH "you" you will be when you wake after the procedure. Either you'll wake up as the sim, or you'll wake up as you were before. There's no way to control which. Feel free to pass on this if you're not interested anymore.

Also, you'll have to decide before you go under how to divide your remaining assets between your meat and your sim selves.

you:

• Don't Look Back: Give most of your wealth to the sim; it would be a shame to waste it on the meat puppet. He's going to wither & die anyway.
• Better the devil you know: Give most of your wealth to the natural person. The vast new powers and efficiencies inherent in a sim will practically guarantee it'll be rich again in a jiffy anyway.
• Fifty/Fifty: Split it evenly. There's no need to gamble, here. Both of you will have to go back to work for a while, but it beats losing a bet.

Note your decision. Then, flip a coin:

• Heads
• Tails

You wake up in the flesh, unfortunately. If you chose to leave your bio self some money (split or meat), you can blow some more cash again, for the chance to return to Sign me Up!, and flip one more time only. This time, you won't have any money left to divvy up, though, so don't bother deciding about that.

If this is your second trip out here, you're out of luck. and out of dough, unfortunately.

Next: Part III: Synthetic Civics

You wake up in cyber space! It's actually disorienting, and painful at times, but with much grit, determination, and simulated psychoactive drug treatments and therapy, you recuperate. In fact, you do more than that: you thrive! you spend weeks diving into your own psyche, optimizing, experimenting with speed on your sim - speeding up and slowing down how fast the world goes at will. You learn to fork your sim, and suddenly there are two copies of you. The extra computer to run the new you is relatively cheap, but you don't really see much reason to keep doing that. You begin participating in an experimental sim therapy program designed to teach sims how to re-integrate forks back into a single personality thread.

Later, you are approached by a large corporation looking to populate call centers with sims and forks of them. They offer you a very nice deal including funding for the merging program's research in return for having several dozen forks of you doing customer service and support for their Internet media services. You agree, and are richly rewarded, along with all of your forks. You remain confident that one day, you'll be able to merge them all back into a single you.

With so much to learn, so much to create, and so many possibilities on the horizon, the future is downright blinding. You know - you've beamed yourself out into the solar system to see the planets. And, with Moore's law still pushing computing power costs through the floor, you'll have more room for more forks of yourself, and vast virtual realms and bot avatars on Jovian moons for each of them, all paid for by your conservative banking investments in the perennially unprecedented post-industrial economic boom.

The end.

The sims are a novelty to society. there's much debate and assorted hand-wringing over whether they should be granted legal personhood - including the civil right to vote. They certainly claim to be fully conscious, very intelligent people, much like the ones they spawned from. many form close relationships with their natural siblings ("parents" is term which doesn't seem to stick).

At first, there were accidents. Many fundamentalists denounced these experiments as atrocities, showing some (at times dubious) results demonstrating the resulting mental states of failed sims as torturously painful. Many, but not all jurisdictions banned sim research. "not all", of course, is all a determined researcher needs today. Relinquishment, as a policy, doesn't really work. Now that the research has borne fruit in the form of walking, talking (in remotely operated android bodies, of course) net-set cyborgs on cognitive steroids that can pass every test for humanity and even a particular person's identity that humans can devise, the fundies are faced with the unpleasant task of following their appeal to sentience for these creatures to its logical conclusion, and grant these post-human beings civil rights and suffrage.

How do you vote?

• not a chance. Sims are machines, and machines are property.
• They're people, or at least indistinguishable from them. They should be free to live their own lives, and they should be represented in government just like naturals.
• slavery is unacceptable, but we can't have these things voting. They can reproduce like rabbits! Only faster! A "one sim, one vote" policy is just asking for an avalanche of forks; enough to outnumber and short circuit any political interest that existing natural human stakeholders might have.

The debate rages on, but squabbling mires the whole process. For most of the world, civil rights for sims remains a dream.

The sims aren't stupid, though. Nor are they poor. With the help of their sympathetic natural families and many lawyers, they concoct shell corporations and trusts around themselves, held by "silent partner" naturals they trust which possess most of the civil rights they desire. Voting is still out of the question, of course, but progress in re-merging forks (and even merging with forks of others!), along with few political and economic incentives (each fork would have to split the same resources, thus impoverishing them) keeps them an elite minority, supplemented with a steady trickle of uploading natural forks.

A few scandals break out over nightmarish "sweat sims" that are forced to fork and work on pain of cybernetic torture simulations. Unlike slaves, however, sims have superhuman capabilities that allow them to get the upper hand over their owners. more often than not, it is the sims who are the masters, using their natural stakeholders as contractors and trusted confidantes who provide valuable legal services - control - and hand it over to them in return for being taken care of financially in an increasingly bleak (for naturals) economy.

Proceed to The Great Showdown

sims don't get full personhood status, but they don't seem too fazed. Most are pretty satisfied with recognition from their fellow sapients, and some legal protections. They're too busy with other things to concern themselves with democratic politics, anyway. Slow naturals frustrate the living daylights out of them.

An uneasy barrier goes up between natural humans and sims. natural envy of sim capabilities and prosperity is met with sims who deride naturals as primitive fundies mired in fear and tradition. Many sims consider democracy obsolete, preferring the libertarian nature of the markets they have inherited. Considering the technologies they inhabit have largely eliminated their vulnerabilities to coercion, imprisonment, and death, they have far less of a need for a mediatory civic power to protect them from intiatory coercion, anyway.

Proceed to The Great Showdown

Considering the fact that sims are second class citizens, there sure aren't many jobs available. sims, under contract from large service conglomerates, seem to be doing everything a natural can do, even with all those government-provided psychoactive pharmaceutical prescriptions and Internet processing power at their disposal. The sims just keeping getting better, and they keep getting CHEAPER. There's an unprecedented economic boom happening, but natural employment isn't really part of it. It's enough to make one wonder, "where the hell is all this money everyone's supposedly making?"

Most naturals have given up on working, and government taxation on fat corporate incomes is there to support them, fortunately. consumer choices are meager, but it's offset by a rich mediasphere, where most people spend their time. Time off from the employment grind has given many an interest civic participation, and much ado is made in the comings and going of democratic debate. Most of it consists of power bartering with sim-driven combines in exchange for the budgets to keep people in subsistence living conditions. Thank heavens you decided not to give sims the vote, or else you'd have had nothing left to bargain with!

Several major Nations come to the conclusion that the Turing test should serve as a definitive criteria, not only for personhood, but for suffrage. Sims are granted equal political status with naturals, regardless of their origin or status of siblings or forks. As a result, the population explodes, filling up massive amounts of the accelerating computing resources. cyberspace becomes chaotic and "crowded". prices for computing power remain relatively scarce and expensive.

Even sims often find themselves unemployed, but at least they're not naturals! natural humans quickly find themselves surrounded, and discriminated against as minorities. Able to muster neither the economic means to compete with competitive sim-dominated labor markets, nor the political clout to legislate subsistence guarantees for themselves, they are forced into crime and violent revolution. Needless to say, technological superiority allows these desperate measures to bear little fruit.

Fortunately, the newly enfranchised sims see no reason to simply exterminate rowdy naturals. hi technology has produced the means for a high compassion. Instead of arresting, imprisoning, or executing rebellious insurgents, The sims decide to preserve them. Government decides to institute income guarantees after all, and set aside reservations of land, similarly to the way expanding western societies sequestered aboriginal tribal peoples in centuries past.

The guilded cages posthumans create for their ancestors are easily accepted by their inmates. The net is still wide open for human participation, although much of what goes on there is so bewilderingly complex that humans have no hope of participatory equality. Natural human governments form across the reservations, which not only expressly bar alien sims, but which sims prohibit their own citizens from joining. sims nevertheless walk freely on the reserves, taking in the historical conditions of their ancestors, and offering to upload (which has now been perfected as transformative process, rather than a duplicative one) and uplift any natural who desires the challenge and is willing to accept the posthumans' social contract. different reservations form different nations, each isolated from each other to prevent inter-reserve warfare, but are permitted to interact and trade. As time passes, the number of uploaders grows thin, leaving behind a staunchly xenophobic and fundamentalist mindset to self-reinforce as the mavericks, the critics, and the just plain curious set out for new frontiers.

After a time, the posthumans develop the means to upload, not just every living human, but every human-perceivable detail of the reservation states. Having other, inconceivable plans for Earth, they resolve among themselves to scan the whole state of natural humanity into a simulation, and... send it somewhere... else...

The end.