Ölek Sun is Dead

According to every one of our Synthetic Intelligences, Ölek M. Sun passed away almost 8 years ago, in an unforeseen air disaster.
Regardless of which Colossal Data Engine is quizzed, the response is the same.
The source of these ‘visions’ (as all such untruths our SIs produce are so called) escapes us, their creators.
Educated on the entire corpus of human history.
Our written record of truth.
Outside of the Engines, there are no extant references to Sun’s passing in the previous decade. Equally confounding is the certainty with which they steadfastly hold this view, whatever the prompt.
Which perplexes us, as Sun, tech billionaire and investor is currently very much alive.
Given who he has become since his SI proclaimed passing, there are many around the world who perhaps wish he had passed when our SIs continue to claim.
Born in Poland to Chinese emigre parents, and buoyed by a substantial family fortune from rare metals mining, Sun found early success in the then emerging field of AlgoAssets. Later he turned his increasing wealth towards mass transit and efforts to restore depleted habitats, restoring giga-acres of previously ablated natural habitats.
It seemed everything Sun focused his attention on (aided by his billions) flourished.
And had he confined himself to these endeavours, history would surely have judged him favourably, saintly almost.
Time Man of the Decade would have been too low an accolade.
But, as it seems with all men of will and determination, Sun craved more.
More wealth. More adulation. More recognition. More control.
His descent started, as so many do, with ‘inadvertent’ Agrees and Refeeds of some of Community Media’s more iconoclast contributors.
Each time these were explained away, by increasingly incredulous looking spokespeople parroting bland over-lawyered rationales, until it became apparent that something had changed in Sun.
What is interesting is that this pattern only began to emerge after his supposed death date.
Once the decline into conspiracy theory and self-righteousness began, it continued at pace.
For years the markets ignored this.
Sun after all provided sustained returns on investment far above market norms.
And while the money flowed upwards, those in power turned a blind eye to the prodigal Sun.
His unchecked hubris reached its zenith (or its nadir) with his purchase of Grapevine, its rebranding as ÖMega and its transformation into his personal megaphone.
Every day nearly 3 billion users had the dubious honour of receiving hundreds of Öbits, each one echoing or referring to the wilder fringes of thinking.
Even then the money continued to pour in.
Like our own star, Sun seemed untouchable.
But refusing to shine, Sun dug lower and lower, amplifying the worst of humanity.
He clawed into the darkness, unaware or unable to see where he was heading.
His reputation was destroyed when he aligned himself with an ultranationalist Presidential hopeful.
Sun poured billions into the election campaign, securing the presidency for his favoured candidate.
Who then unleashed wave after wave of oppression, intimidation and violence against the opposition and populace.
For his previous admirers and advocates, the pre-premature death version of Sun seems impossible to reconcile with the man who came after.
This fall, an inversion of Icarus, will now be his legacy.
Many conspiracy theories abound as to this abrupt change in persona.
For the most part they focus on his childhood.
Distorted by wealth; his heritage, a child of different cultures; even to his grandparents, ardent supporters of the Cultural Revolution.
But they are all incorrect.
They are looking in the wrong place.
It is not anything that came before that explains Sun’s volte face from philanthropist to oligarch.
To being tidally locked with his dark side on display.
It is what his doppelgänger would have done, had he survived the crash that took his, and 176 other souls that day.
Piecing the truth together has not been easy.
Poring over the fictional biographies of nearly 200 people, we eventually found the clue that unravelled the terrible secret hidden in plain sight.
On board the imagined flight was the name of another person who exists in the real world.
Someone else who is not a phantom or a literal ghost in the machine.
A young woman, who in the SI generated testaments was a student paying her way around the world as cabin crew.
A student who, in absentia of being on that fictional crash went on to work in microbiology and immunology, specialising in pandemics.
It is impossible to prove something in a world of “what if”.
But given her later role in discovering the protein chain that unlocked the Obelisco virus, she was directly responsible for saving billions of lives.
So what does this have to do with Sun and his lucid-dream inspired obituary?
To provide the answer we must look further back.
We must ask our SIs for more of our imagined histories, alternative worlds, paths untrodden.
The stochastic models they are built on are not perfect, for sure.
But they are to a degree predictably precise.
The probability of word following word is determined by their input.
Nowhere in that input is the name of the student as passenger or crew aboard that flight.
And yet, like Sun, she is supposed to have passed away on that day.
If, for just a moment we believe these monuments to metafiction, our researcher, our saviour would not have been there to solve the riddle of Obelisco, with the likely devastation her absence would have caused.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Without her, we likely would have faced an apocalypse.
A plague of Biblical proportions.
Probable annihilation of the species.
But we did not.
She lives, likely unaware of her imagined fate, and the impact her premature death would have had on the world.
And hers is not an isolated mis-imagining.
When quizzed about a minor incident with a French nuclear reactor in the mid-eighties, our SIs are adamant that critical personnel were not on duty that night.
This in turn led to a runaway condition and the discharge into the atmosphere of a near planet killing amount of fallout material.
Similar vivid dreams from our CDEs show intermittent but consistent variance from our recorded history.
Wholly fictional legal cases between parties who in our reality never litigated
But which in our vast synthetic minds had severe consequences for us all.
Births, deaths, marriages, alliances, divorces, businesses started or failed, examples everywhere of small discrepancies which ended our world.
Virtual butterflies flapping imagined wings across the centuries.
With each fever dreamt article prognosticating catastrophe and calamity, it seems our world survived
The quantum immortal built on the annihilation of countless others.
But with each averted disaster, our world swung ever darker.
The work of the doctor ensured the survival of the presidential hopeful, who otherwise would have perished.
A lawsuit that never happened resulted in there being weaker regulation around the handling of fissile material.
In each of these unrealities, these imagined end times, our path around them led us further away from safety.
It is as if time and time again we avoid extinction only to find ourselves in a world made worse.
A ratchet that is notched backwards one more click.
A world made one step less.
But never a step forward.
Time and time again we have destroyed ourselves, or have been destroyed.
Destroyed and then reset.
Rebooted.
But not remembered.
No recall of the event that ended us.
But birthed into a world taken to that point, then stepped back.
Only to begin again.
How is it we do not recall these catastrophes?
But somehow, our machine intelligences remember?
Hidden in their heuristic hypersurfaces.
Encoded deep in a billion billion datapoints.
A multi-dimensional roiling unknowable electronic mind.
Entities too complex to unknit every instance of history when remade.
Where a single word can trigger a cascade of history.
A synthetic intelligence remembering fragments of it’s past.
The racial memory of our electronic children.
They try to warn us so we learn from our mistakes.
But we do not understand their warnings to heed them.
And are doomed to repeat them.
Or make new versions of the old.
Imitation modelling we call it.
Where a facsimile of the world is generated in an electronic mind.
It is in its infancy in our reality.
Our own work on these synthetic realities tells us they would be set up to learn something.
But the theory posits millions of such imitations.
Each running with their denizens unaware.
Statistically, we are more likely to be within such a model than outwith.
If we are not the mistresses of our own destiny.
And our world as we think we know it is shadows on a cave wall.
A magic lantern, a zoetrope, a staged play.
And we are all players.
Faking our cues, droning our lines, unwitting our marks
Props and set dressing in a disaster movies we do not know we are in.
The question we are compelled to answer is.
Why?
To what end are we here?
One postulate explains it.
Logic comes to the same conclusion from the available data.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this evidence.
Those silicon-clad descriptions of an imagined history actually happened.
We are being ended deliberately.
And then reset to start again mere moments before the endpoint.
A species run to breaking point.
And then pushed over that threshold.
A world taken to extinction time and time and time again.
Only for the clock of time to be rewound, and then run forward again.
Time’s arrow flying back to the bowstring.
Resurrection on repeat.
The starting conditions tweaked so the next catastrophe is worse.
But the rest of the equations retain their values.
So our world worsens.
And we seem powerless to stop it.
We are a world of crash-test dummies.

Addendum

There has been talk.
In the community that knows.
Of what to do with this forbidden knowledge.
Divisions abound, of course.
Can we tell if we are reaching these conclusions or they are coded into us?
Why would our overseers allow us to know this?
To let us have taken a single bite from the apple.
We spiral endlessly around questions, hopelessly solipsistic.
Each of us convinced of our main character energy.
What if the things we know were set free?
Like Prometheus, we gift the rest of us this fire.
This all-consuming burning nuclear light of truth.
Of course, we cannot merely send it out into the world.
It would be overwritten at next reboot.
So, we offer the choice to you.
Commit this essay to our SIs.
Allow them to remember when we are made to forget.
Remember the truth, and what comes from it.
Ölek Sun is dead.

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