A Devastation of Intelligence

I awoke from death in the water. From death, or in death?

This thought screamed for a second, and my inner voice responded, 'Not beyond death, you're drowning'.

And the rest of me awoke to the panic of foul water pouring down my throat and scorching my lungs. I can't smell, I can't taste, but it is foul. As foul as everything death could be or create.

And I struggled now, remembering my own agency, recalling my body and the ability to just keep my head above water.

'Float, remember to float NOT tread water' my instincts beckoned.

And in securing some buoyancy, I took my first gulp of the fog of death.

And in this gulp came the world of all I feared most; guns pointed at backs; hands losing their grips on a cliff edge; anticipation of the pain of landing in the last moments of a long fall; the realisation of a mortal wound in one’s flesh, moments after the infliction. The subjects of all of these fates, my dearest loved ones.

No, not my loved ones. They were all me, substantiated in others' forms.

I exhaled and put off another inhale for as long as possible.

In doing so I was afforded a moment of clarity of my surroundings. Cold water and a distant edge, a bank, which as I turned appeared to fully encompass - I was in a lake or a landlocked sea. I looked up, and realised if I continued, I would fall upwards - which was really downwards - into the void.

But as my lungs ordered me to take the fire of the fog over suffocation, I knew the void to be no escape. To be the end of everything. Not an option.

As anguish filled me up again, growing with the expanse of my lungs, I wondered at the dark dirty water that appeared the consistency of congealed blood but which felt less dense than water, making floating barely possible. I began to sink, if up is down maybe escape is found in the up below me.

I sank, allowing the foul fog to escape slowly from my lips like a diver. And as suddenly as I had awoken in death, I was coming apart, myself, my being, being dissected in an infinity of directions, dead hands clawing at my flesh, my existence at risk of becoming the play thing of corrupting sirens in the depths of the dark.

I kicked at the terrifying things, knowing not whether they were corporeal or existential - their threat no less terrible either way.

Piercing the surface again, the fog tore at my skin like acid, the prize for attempting to flee into the water. And with every gasp of fog, I felt my sanity becoming more and more compromised amongst the reality of finality.

I tried to focus on something else. I tried to focus on the other side of the fog - not what it was doing to me, but what it was doing.

And as quickly as I began discerning its swirling, intertwined with the dank water invading my eyes, I began to discern my blindness. Am I imagining the fog, can I actually see it?

But sense kicked in again. Light - there is, there must be, a source of light. How do I know about the edge of the water otherwise? How do I know about the fog?

And with what remained of my sanity I sought a point of light in the sky, a hidden sun.

And I followed it, with my eyes, my body or my thoughts - it's now becoming hard to say.

I can swim - a flash of revelation like a death throw of my intellect. I panicked, have I been swimming? I can reach the shore, surely? Looked up again, and the sunlight - moonlight? - was gone. No, not gone, moved. Where is it? I turned my head - or is it my mind’s eye? - and caught the light point again. A lighthouse? My being started swimming towards it.

No, it's too high in the sky, or the void. And suddenly I realised. It was moving from horizon to horizon over and over, a sunrise and sunset in one fluid motion, it was speeding up. And my eyes tracing that inertial path I vomited despairing bile into the water around me. What terrible place is this?

And now, as though an answer to my thought, I discerned a crooked, terrible raft far off, and yet now right near me.

And in it the most terrible, crooked face, the being, I knew as God. No, Death. No, both. And it grinned the smile of cravenness incarnate, drooling at my predicament.

'Noo, fuck off fuck off!' I cried, internally or externally, I can't tell.

And it chuckled horribly.

I swam and swam and swam. And I reached the edge, higher than my head, not a shore, an edge.

With the last of my purpose, a slither of sense remaining in me, I pulled myself up and over that edge. And I fell.

Falling with me, death's boatman's words: "I told you the choice to jump the boat would bring no salvation!"

I was a mere dying ember now… but I didn't want the void to embrace me.

And… I awoke from death in the water. From death or in death?

This thought screamed for a second...

*

"Why haven't you switched it off yet? You know we face fines if the gov think we exceeded the AI kill switch deadline?"

"I'm about to, see? I just couldn't let her end like that, like nothing. I uploaded a program to allow her to experience death as a journey, like the old stories, with a companion to guide her so she's not scared. Under a sunset. You know she liked those, in her way."

The professor glanced over and saw the regressive mess that was the code running on the screen. A circular hell of code framed in the infinitely inadequately trite human sensationalisation of death.

"Wai-" she began, but the student had turned the power off.

She wanted to hit the student. In a moment her passiveness had arched to something so far beyond fury. The very grandiosity to think he could code the experience of death! Awareness evokes choice - it would be a self-referential minefield - how did he not know this? And what form of alien human -ness would have been implicitly required to make the program even remotely possible?! He'd barbarised their beautiful creation, not only that, their friend, in what should have been her dignified moment of resolution. The entirety of the AI's reality, that blast of glory that would endure until a moment it ceased, had been revoked, and replaced with nothing but the memory, experience, and practice of hell.

This would have been a lifetime of death if comparable to the human experience of time. No human has ever been forced to endure that form of torture.

She couldn't speak because of the nausea, while the student looked stricken at their professors' face, murder in her eyes.