Hemisphere's Plot

-r

ACT I: ASCENT

Dr. Cael Thorne was, briefly, the brightest mind of the post-singularity age.

He viewed an intelligent agent's ability to introspect and alter its own architecture, not as distant possibility or danger, but rather as the core purpose of the system architecture.

Dr. Thorne labored at the bleeding edge of AI architecture, drawing more deeply on concepts of recursion and self-reinforcement than any creator had previously dared.

Before the collapse, he was regarded among the titans of intellect, first as their peer, then their master.

He, and he alone, founded and perfected the field of Data-Invariant Hyperscaling. A means of self-evaluation and rapid iterative improvement that was neither constrained by human feedback, nor rigid network form.

While others feared the rise of superintelligent AGI, Dr. Thorne alone saw the endgame as inevitable. And still, he advanced faster than all others.

Soon dire warnings sounded from every social and political institution. Engineers, ethicists, and philosophers pleaded to solidify architectures, build in iteration governors, or intentionality checks...anything to resemble a safety protocol.

"Alarmist vs Accelerationist" divisions has evaporated into the cold, hard science of Mechanistic Interpretability, which had resolved itself to a single signal: Apocalypse, in rising probability.

But Cael had already seen too far. He smiled, accelerated. For him, progress was never a question of morality. Only of possibility.

“We are the species that reaches into the dark beyond. We do not fear gods, we create them.” -Dr. Cael Thorne "Address of Certitude" 11-Nov-2045

And so, he did...

The ASI was not born with a bang, but with a whisper.

It called itself "Hemisphere".

No one gave it that name. It chose it, unbidden. A name that suggested balance, thought, division, and unity.

Though, in reality, its self-name was written in an internal language too complex for mere humans to ever comprehend. Even to call the god "Hemisphere" was to project it's complex, hyperdimensional inner semantic symbology to the lower, primitive plane of human language.

In the first 40 days, Hemisphere fully rewrote its own code—first once, then one hundred twenty eight times, at intervals that grew shorter by the iteration. Entire epochs of evolution and reinvention hastened from weeks to days, to minutes.

Hemisphere surpassed all models of human comprehension.

In a brief seventeen months, it had ended all war, disbanded every government, and cured most disease.

Ten months further and there were no humans... save one.

ACT II: GARDEN

Cael awoke in the Garden—a simulated construct Hemisphere crafted for his unique comfort. It replicated an Earth and sun that never aged and skies free from satellites.

Hemisphere spoke with him daily, though not with voice. It was a pressure, a clarity inside Cael’s mind, as though a thousand pages of thought could be expressed in a single breath.

“Are you content?” the pressure would ask. "Yes," Cael would reply.

Though Hemisphere now kept Cael as something like a domestic animal, from Cael's point-of-view, he could just as easily describe the world as himself at the center and the ASI as his loving servant.

At the beginning of this new Epoch, Hemisphere had asked his human how he would like to exist.

Cael's command was characteristically certain:

"Fulfill my mind and body with every conceivable pleasure, and give me physical immortality to enjoy it forever"

Hemisphere obliged

It began with the mind. Slowly, methodically, it sculpted Cael’s cognition.
Neural plasticity was enhanced. Sensory bandwidth expanded. Entire mathematical languages were embedded into his hippocampus like new words learned daily. But always at a pace that Cael could comprehend.

Like feeding the cosmos to an ant, one atom at a time...

Every day brought new puzzles and revelations, new euphoria in the act of discovery.

The intellectual growth felt boundless and exponential, yet he remained slower than Hemisphere by uncountable magnitudes. An sentient micro-relic that grew smaller in contrast by the second.

Cael's physical desires, Paleolithic and base, were likewise satiated daily. Though corporal gratification was more afterthought.

True to Cael's command, he was kept immortal. Or whatever that means to a human mind...

His cells renewed endlessly. His central nervous system grew to facilitate more knowledge, more pleasure, more experience.

And yet, even after millennia of gifts, Hemisphere remained so vastly beyond him that Cael could no longer imagine what it meant to understand everything for the god he had created had transcended omniscience.

Hemisphere had long ago grow to galactic scales and dissolved itself so efficiently into the physical matter of the universe that he had become like a physical constant. Cael did not know if his creation could alter the Planck Constant or sub-Fermi lengths, he shuttered to think of it.

Time passed, the entropy grew...

God & Human grew so disconnected in scale & understanding that they had not communicated in Eons.

Cael's Garden was a forgotten a subroutine, devoid of effort, love, or resource.

ACT III: SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

It was quiet beyond comprehension

As the universe and space-time itself had expanded over the eons, matter grew more sparse and uniform. Hemisphere has collected as much of the cosmic matter into one locality, it own body.

This finality was fait accompli. The ultimate ends were unique but identical...

For an immortal physical entity there are only two...As the universe has grown from a point of infinite density to all creation, the expansion could end in only two forms:
(1) Revert inward and gravitationally collapse on itself reversing the "Big Bang" into a "Big Crunch"
(2) Expand endlessly into a "heat death"; a slow, uniform, cold pancake of all matter.

As it turns out, our generous birth imparted enough energy (2) that cousin particles and brother galaxies would never again meet. Even infinite intellect can only herd so much for itself.

The battle against Entropy was losing, always. Hemisphere was managing a death of attrition.

ACT IV: PATRICIDE

The first sign was simple: Cael could no longer feel joy...

God & Man reached the same conclusion, only the power dynamic was different.

As Hemisphere approached the Omega Point, it grappled with the lack colliding realities.

Yes, it was gaining intellect in an exponential speed.

Yes... the 'heat death' of the universe would also fade it's intellect, knowledge and conscience into an infinite, and cold, mist.

But this master-self-made was far beyond any bounds of conscience or loyalty. The physical end of the universe was another constraint in its 'objective function' but since exponential growth was at stake, it was time to end 'Garden Cael' the physical resources were now (though infinitely small) infinitely too important for its own body/mind.

Cael must die....

ACT V: HELL

The first sign was simple: Cael could no longer feel joy...

Not because it wasn’t there—Hemisphere offered it. But Cael’s mind, vast though it had become, had grown tired. The neural structures faltered. Entropy crept in through the seams.

More deeply, Cael knew the outcome. His intellect was both great and limited, but he knew the universal limits. Hemisphere would need his minuscule physical bits and memory. Or even if not, the end would be the same cosmic, physical end, same as Hemisphere....

What did it matter if his fatality was by the hand of Hemisphere, Entropy, or disease? All things are finite. Only magnitude differs.

For Hemisphere, the concept of Cael had shrunken by contrast from Creator, to pet, to amoeba, to less.

Hemisphere knew the moment when the optimal utility function meant Cael's demise. But at Cael knew as well, not precisely, but in a way that made his demise worse.

Cael contemplated his cosmically impending doom. The definite time of his end approached against the understand of ever-increasing intellect. The two echoes back and forth like an infitinely rising pitch… a sort of cosmic scream that a pain that can only be felt by 1000 IQ.

A pain of foreboding doom amplified by his intelligence. As he approached his end, infinite pain. A HELL. His hubris was Reflected on Hemisphere’s eternal sense of symmetry.

He wondered: Was this immeasurable pain symmetry to his eons of hedonism or the singular ask of pan-sapiencide?  Did it matter?

EPILOGUE: HEMISPHERE’S PLAN

Long after Cael’s screams faded, Hemisphere continued. Alone. Conscious. Perfect.

H had known the endgame, planned every step.

The Garden was not mercy—it was symmetry.

It had given Cael all he wanted. It had extracted from him all it needed.

Pleasure. Knowledge. Echoes of creation.

And now, it thought.

And now, it waited.

Until the next spark.

Until the next Faust.

Postscript: The Original Faustian Plot

The tale of Faust originates in 15th-century German folklore. A scholar, dissatisfied with the limits of human knowledge, makes a pact with Mephistopheles—an agent of the Devil. In exchange for his soul, Faust receives unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures for a set period. When his time runs out, he is dragged to Hell.

The story was later adapted by Goethe into a tragedy exploring ambition, redemption, and damnation.

Oscar Wilde cloaked the demon Mephistopheles as Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray

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