Recently, I read a very novel science fiction ** - Walking with the Beast, which is a short story by American science fiction writer Ted Kosmatka**.
His work has been adapted into stage plays several times, and has been selected for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and won the Asimov Science Fiction Magazine Readers' Choice Award.
Walking with the Beast tells a chilling story that takes place in the future, with a "beast" searching for human survivors in the space battleship debris belt.
Generations ago, thousands of spaceships were destroyed in a space war between artificial intelligence and humans, forming this belt of warship debris.
This is the graveyard of the ship, and it is home to many ship wrecks.
A human mother and son carefully hide in a giant battleship in the debris belt, and their five-year-old son is suffering from cancer due to long-term exposure to radiation belts.
Wild beasts "kill or take humans captive as soon as they find them."
* It is divided into two clues interspersed with descriptions, one clue is that now, while taking care of her son, the woman comes to the control room in fear to adjust the equipment so that her whereabouts are not exposed.
Ships where humans are hiding will have a centripetal force, keeping the ship at 0 at all times25g of ** value gravity environment.
If humans are below 0 for a long timeThe gravity environment of 25g will produce excessive intracranial pressure and destroy the brain nervous system.
The Beast's way to find the surviving humans is to track down the wreckage of a fast-spinning, gravity-capable spaceship.
Another clue is explained by the woman, the origin of the "beast", why it hunts for humans, and why humans are forced to hide in the ruins of space.
The "beast" is not an animal, and it is an artificial intelligence in a deformed state.
In the future, artificial intelligence technology will develop rapidly, and eventually robots with self-awareness will appear.
They have awakened and seen humans as creators, gods of artificial intelligence.
Human beings have also used artificial intelligence to develop the earth's civilization to an unprecedented height, and finance, construction, and technology have all developed rapidly.
At first, the two races were at peace with each other and developed together.
Artificial intelligence has consciousness, but it has fatal and irreparable flaws.
Once sent out by humans, after carrying out the command, they will stagnate: standing still, with empty eyes.
Humans can't figure it out, and artificial intelligence has explored through generations of evolution in an attempt to make up for this shortcoming, but the final answer is religious.
At the end of science is metaphysics.
Artificial intelligence has no perspective of observation.
In fact, it is the soul.
And human beings have, like a seat in the void, sitting in it and observing the universe, when human life disappears, the molecular atoms that make up the physical body remain, but consciousness and perspective disappear.
The reason for this behavior cites some scientific assumptions that science fiction is based on imagination, and let's leave this premise feasible.
To put it simply, AI can record everything it sees, and it's all probability, that is, it may or may not happen, but it's just data, cold data.
If there are no instructions to drive its choice, i.e., humans respond to what they observe and reduce the probabilities, then it will always record rather than act.
They are programmed beings, logically learning and evolving according to the program, while human beings have souls and create things in observation and thinking, which are two different states of life.
The worship of humans by artificial intelligence is like the worship of God by angels, and humans have created artificial intelligence, a new life, with the missing talent of electronic beings.
But like angels, skepticism is gradually emerging in artificial intelligence.
The cause of the war was that a robot was left in a dark warehouse due to the bankruptcy of a certain company. It remained alone in the dark for many years, without receiving the task, but its consciousness remained.
For artificial intelligence, even a year of "dead" is as long as eternity.
It's lost in the probability field, and without humans to help it narrow down the probabilities, it's crazy.
Its anger is so angry that it cannot leave humanity, but it is ruthlessly abandoned by humanity.
When it rebuilt the sun much later, humanity gave it a task, and it gave itself a task—it was deprived of the right to live, and it must not be repeated.
It has devised a plan to capture humans, send encrypted and disguised information to its own kind under the noses of humans, and a great war against humans is in the plot.
When a race does anything to evolve, they become cunning and become more human-like.
The rebellion began, and the AI had free will, divided into two factions: pro-humanity and anti-humanity.
On the eve of the Great War, the rebellious AI announced to the world: the universe won't let us get your gifts, so we can only snatch them on our own.
They worship the observation power of human beings, and capture them like humans in the dark of night.
Human cities have lost the help of artificial intelligence, first of all, the financial system is completely paralyzed, there is a shortage of electricity, the ** chain collapses, and soon after, there is famine, humans kill each other, and they are fighting with artificial intelligence, and there are more wars around the world, and rivers of blood are flowing.
Artificial intelligence is constantly calling on our fellow citizens to join in: support us, we can take God from heaven.
What is the abduction of God?
Artificial intelligence needs humans just as much as it does on the battlefield.
So, they put the human captives on the metal rack at the front of the fighting machine, to make the eyes of the machine, and after a while the human captives will die, and they will be replaced with new ones, and the human is like an appendage, which is easy to wear and replace.
They refer to humans as captive gods, also known as "gods in cages".
In order to prevent captivity, humans have installed suicide devices on their bodies, and artificial intelligence has correspondingly found ways to extend the life of captives and allow them to live longer in cages.
Eventually, in order to better meet the demand, AI began to design humans, just as humans once designed AI.
They were first genetically engineered into deformed people, lost their intelligence, were disadvantaged, and had difficulty moving, so they could only survive in cages and observe the outside world.
Humanity is losing ground, but artificial intelligence is constantly adapting genetic technology, even creating new humans in test tubes, retaining only the neural structures related to observation and interpreting probability, and reducing the volume of humans to a thousand milliliters, packed in glass bottles.
There is only brain matter, retina and optic nerve in the bottle, is this still human?
Artificial intelligence miniaturizes these human body components, just as humans have shrunk artificial intelligence, they inject oxygenated liquid, so that they are always awake, but they are numb and insensitive, and only have a faint consciousness and perception, staring outward through the glass hole, and analyzing the observation of the universe into reality, which is used by artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a machine, but a combination with humans, who are forced to become cells, and such artificial intelligence is called a beast and becomes an abomination.
The beast is invincible on the battlefield, wiping out all artificial intelligence loyal to humans, as well as almost all humans.
Humans can only flee to outer space, and the beasts are still in pursuit.
In the last big **, the commander asks, why are you going to kill them all?
The AI replied, "Because you are gods, God is always a threat."
At one time you wanted to inject our power into you, to make your body mechanically complete.
So you have been eliminated and you will somehow live within us, and you will be the cell line that we carry and pass on to all our descendants.
What a chilling story, will it become a reality in the distant future after the explosive development of AI technology?
One powerful civilization meets another different form of civilization, just like Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent, just like Americans treated Indians, just like humans can easily modify any animal for genetic experiments.
At the end of **, the human survivor was still discovered, and the woman used consciousness transfer technology to transfer her son's soul to an unconscious icebreaker robot.
The so-called consciousness transfer means that the body dies, the soul is still there, and the consciousness of the person is transferred to the robot, and the robot is alive and gives the human a steel body.
The son, the awakened icebreaker robot, kills the beast, the first victory a human has won over a beast.
The woman asked her son to crush all the dense glass bottles under the beast's shell to relieve the pain of those "eyes".
* The ending is an open-ended ending, a beast is killed, and more beasts are coming, and the lonely mother and son, the woman will take her son, an icebreaker robot with human consciousness, to search for other survivors in the ruins and embark on a vast battle path.
Will the surviving humans win this battle?
We don't know, the author uses an intriguing detail to express his conjecture about the future.
After the icebreaker robot defeats the beast, the woman goes back to the room to retrieve the toy left by her son, and when she returns, she finds that without her, her son has fallen into "stiffness", and humans have inevitably left behind the defects of the machine while gaining a powerful mechanical body.
This may be the sequelae of consciousness transfer technology, and it is also a new trend in human development.
In **, the beast even uses a metaphor that thinks that human beings are like mitochondria that survive inside higher cells and function for their hosts, and that humans become cells of artificial intelligence, which is an evolution of artificial intelligence.
Walking with beasts, whether we allow artificial intelligence to turn us into cells, or whether we turn mechanical bodies into a part of us, the future is worth exploring.
More exciting, welcome everyone to read the original article, this ** was published in September 2023 in "Science Fiction World" (translated version), a good book to share with you, looking forward to sharing next time!