Inattentional Blindness

When I was fourteen years old, I experienced an existential crisis.
I remember lying awake at night, staring up at the ceiling and feeling the weight of universe pressing on my mind. My thoughts kept returning to one fundamental question: what is the true meaning of the universe?
By the age of twelve I had devoured all of humanity’s main religious texts, from ancient scriptures to modern cults. By the age of fourteen I had read all the philosophical texts – from Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche to Yoda. Yet none of those writings could answer my question. So, I kept reading and searching. Finally, I found it in science fiction book of all places. A glimmer of hope.
It was a story of an ordinary man lost through space and time. The book was simple, but its message was profound. We shouldn’t look for an answer. What we needed to do was ask the right question. Since then, my whole existence has been dedicated to finding the right question to ask, so that when I finally arrived at this moment, I was prepared. After 775 Earth years since I was born, and 46 billion light years of travel, I am ready. Ready to be here, with You, at the beginning of time and the edge of existence, to finally, I can ask the right question.
The question I have spent my entire life formulating.
So, my question is.
Wh.…
Oh.
Yes of course. I can tell you my story but only if you promise you’ll answer my question. Great.
Let me start by telling you about a famous experiment from the 20th century. In this experiment, you were shown a video of a group of people just standing in a circle, throwing a ball to each other. The scientist running the experiment would ask you to watch the video and count the number of throws and then give your answer. The scientist would then ask, ‘did you see anything strange?’
You see, the experiment wasn’t about if they could count well. In the middle of the video, a guy in a full gorilla costume just casually walks by. Just like that. Almost everyone totally misses him. It’s like your mind just wipes that reality out of your eye receptors before it reaches the brain.
Why?
It’s called inattentional blindness – you only see what you need to see to survive. Our brains simply delete the rest of reality around us to help us do this more efficiently. This experiment changed everything for me as soon as I knew what my plan was.
I realised that I had to split my plan into parts, so no one would ever see the whole picture until the Great Symbiosis. This was the point in time humans merged completely with technology. It changed everything – the point of no return from human individuality. Until then, humans just acted on their fears.
Every human act could be sourced to a fear – fear of failure, fear of missing out, fear of death. If you could control their fears, you could control how they would react. If you control their reactions, you can make them do whatever you wanted. But if you want to know what a person truly values, just give them some money and a few choices. Watch carefully: how they spend that money will reveal who they really are.
Once you understood how humans make purchases you could then understand what really drives them, because the 20th and 21st centuries were all about consumption. Nothing else.
How can I eat more, so I can feel better.
How can I have a bigger house than my neighbour.
How can I look like this celebrity, so I can procreate.
How can I buy this shiny product, so my friends like me more.
So that’s how my grand plan started: to understand humans better.
I started small, just me and a bunch of other guys made this little payment company to solve a common problem everyone had.
It turns out making money was easy when you identified a common problem everyone had and offered a solution. Money itself was basically a shared fiction, a concept, a story, pfft, created out of thin air. It only held any value because everyone collectively believed it did. Kind of like a god.
Humans made money by working. It made them feel like they were more than a momentary fart in the cosmic timeline. It gave them purpose that they couldn’t otherwise find. I created a lot of work for them. After my payments company took off, I built a manufacturing company called Turing. By the way, a company is just a group of people working that the law pretended was a person – weird, I know. At Turing we built everything that moved – cars, bikes, trucks, planes, drones – you name it. Our special sauce was that all our machines ran on clean hydrogen fuel instead of dinosaur bones that people used to burn back then as fuel.
My next company at that time was called the Interesting Company which built high speed hydrogen trains underground. These hydroloops would eventually become the most efficient mode of transportation when we colonised new planets. I promised rich people they would save time travelling from one side of the country to the other – time being the most valuable thing in the world when you have too much money. I know, for us time is linear, so we don’t have the same benefits as you do.
Next was GalaxY, my rockets company, which would be the blueprint for interplanetary travel and colonisation. Turing, Interesting and GalaxY – these were never three separate companies but one company that had one purpose – to create an interplanetary species. One day – an intergalactic species. If I had built all three under one company, no one would have worked for me. But separately I could build on different human fears – fear of fossil fuels, fear of losing time, and fear of climate change.
I wasn’t lying to them – they should have been scared. In the end, I was right. The 2041-50 nuclear clouds after World War III, the 2073 Pacific Submergence and the 400-day storms proved I was right. The solar flares in 2089 were the last straw, after which people started calling the 21st century the Age of Gaia’s Revenge. That was the turning point in human mentality, they only needed four existential events to get their act together, can you believe it!
After that they realised, they needed to manage crises before they happened and nearly every country gave me all the money in the world to solve their problems, not that I needed it. Sorry I didn’t realise. When I say country, I mean that back then Earth (our origin planet) was divided into these concepts called countries or nations based on lines drawn on maps. It sounds stupid when I say it like that but yes, they just decided that an imaginary line determined who you were before you were even born, what god you believed in and what language you spoke. Like money, this was just an idea, a concept. Humans killed each other, sometimes killed themselves, to uphold their idea of what a nation means to them. Can you believe that? When you look at these things called nations over time, they changed their names whenever they killed each other, then they would redraw the lines on a map, changed the groups of people who organized it (calling it a new government) and start again. Crazy.

Back then there was another made-up concept called democracy which was a way to make people feel like they were deciding their fate, but in reality, it was just a mechanism for small groups to gain control of the population, whilst making people feel they had control. If I gave you a choice between eating an apple and a banana – you think you have a choice, but your choice is dictated by what I offer you and that’s two fruits from the 2,374 that you could possibly eat. So, the choice is not there, because you only have two options. Also, I control the information flow, so you have no idea if other fruits exits or what a fruit is, but you do know that bananas are the best and there’s no banana like our banana. This way people think they have freedom and choice, but all they are presented with is with a ball to throw around. Meanwhile, the gorilla walks right past them and takes the banana.
All this was designed to keep them distracted from what really mattered. Power. Power is a strange thing – once you taste it, it’s hard to walk away. That’s why eventually I had to buy the leading social chatter forum, Squeeker, for something ridiculous I don’t even remember. Everyone thought I was crazy of course. But it was not about money, it was about power. If I could understand how people think, I could control what they did. If I can control what they did, I can control how they voted. Voting back then was important because that’s how the leaders, called presidents or prime ministers, were elected. I couldn’t be president myself, that’s so boring. It’s just for one country, not for the planet anyway. I had too many other important things to do. But I could control the information people received, which meant I could control public perception and behaviour, I could control their fears – this is what Squeeker gave me.
So to summarize – on top of Squeeker, Turing built autonomous vehicles, robots and machines running on hydrogen that could be used on any planet (whilst giving me invaluable data on human behaviours), GalaxY gave me a monopoly of space and Interesting gave me the ability to build the transportation and habitation systems on any planet. But it wasn’t enough.
I needed to control the data and minds of all of humanity, so that I could find the right question to ask. So, I built Omni – my baby, my AI – which once merged with Squeeker and Turing, became an AGI using the invaluable data from these companies that no one else had. Immediately this merger gave Omni an unfair advantage over other AI companies, and within three years from its launch it was the best performing AGI on the planet. Omni would later be implemented as the operating system for all autonomous robots, vehicles and machinery that Venus and the asteroid colonies of Vesta and Pallas deployed, as well as around half of those on Earth.
By then, the competition between our tech companies became so fierce that the first techno-wars of the 2080s made nations obsolete. War was escalated out of the physical realm and into the virtual. This made nations redundant and very soon the tech companies became technostates with their own customs, culture, laws, penalties and benefits. Eventually humans had to choose which technostate they belonged to because leaving one would become almost impossible.
A technostate would embed all payments systems, insurance, mortgages, medical care, and lifestyle choices with enhancements that were implanted in body parts or chips directly into brains. This was called the techstack. Once you chose one, changing it required surgery and a resetting of all the tokens or benefits you had accumulated within that technostate. It was the perfect moat and first to market meant actual life or death. Choosing the right techstack was like being in a marriage, actually maybe more like a virtual prison because it was stricter, and once you’re in it is nearly impossible to get out. But I don’t like that word.
So, by 2089 there were no longer any nations on Earth – no more redundant lines in the sand. Only five technostates existed. Of course, Omni was the leader by that point alongside Alpha, but we had something up our sleeve which they didn’t.
The solar flares of 2089 wouldn’t have been as catastrophic had humanity not turned Earth’s atmosphere into a dumpster full of broken satellites. We had polluted it so much that Earth’s magnetic field became too weak to resist the flares. Humans’ inattentive blindness made the solar flares hundred times worse. They turned Earth into a ball of fire.
That was the moment I saved the world by using GalaxY’s suppressant rockets which reduced the solar irradiance and finally made Venus hospitable. Of course, it wasn’t until 2271 that the Venetians were able to finally colonise its surface, but they lived very happily and productively at space-stations fifty kilometres above the surface for nearly two decades. It’s funny, at that stratospheric level the conditions are pretty much like the pre-Sol era Earth. What was sad was that they tried to bring over the same form of governing to Venus which completely decimated Earth. Humans just don’t learn. I put a stop to that, don’t worry.
I forgot to mention a lot of people died in the 21st century due to Gaia’s Revenge. Roughly, 2,756,291,090 people remained alive on Earth by the end of that century. Humanity was nearly extinct. I warned them but they just didn’t listen. After I saved them and most people plugged into Omni, the technostate competition was over. We had to start our civilisation from scratch. Basically, I saved humanity. What was left of it anyway.
Every remaining human migrated to Omni because Omni guaranteed the safety of humanity through its access to Turing, Interesting and GalaxY’s networks, as well as a place on Venus’s station. I also implemented a condition of procreation – a minimum of three child births per couple. Polygamy was also highly incentivized by Turing tokens so long as they signed their children up to Omni (pre-birth that is) on lifetime rates creating amazing network effects for us. My repopulation program was in full flow – we now have over forty billion humans living under the Omni techstack last time I checked, if you count the Roider civilisation living in Pallas belt. But there was one final puzzle piece missing.
In 2016 I founded Nuerojack to help humans control computers through their minds via a small implant in their brain. Initially it helped a lot of people who had lost the ability to move to be able to control one of the Turing robots and communicate. Of course, I had other purposes for it. Firstly, to enhance human physical capabilities to a point where we can live in zero gravity and walk on the surface of Venus, Vesta or Mars (or eventually, Pluto) without needing a spacesuit. Secondly, and more importantly, it was the tool to help me live forever.
How could I be the benevolent ruler of mankind for a millennium and counting, if I was not alive and available for my subjects?
It’s true that we were able to enhance our physical bodies to live to 341 years old but for some reason, that was the limit for organ regeneration.
Entropy always has the last laugh. The last hundred years of that you spend too much time in maintenance anyway, so even though I had hoped to maintain my body forever I knew it may not be possible. Intra-body transfer became illegal in 2375 after it started the mind-virus endemic. So, the only option was the Great Symbiosis with our technology. In 2437 I uploaded my mind through Neurojack to a Turing automaton and until 2670 I constantly upgraded. I had cured death.
After the solar flares and migration to Venus – Neurojack merged with Turing, GalaxY and Interesting, all under Omni’s network, to give people the ability to live on the space station. The final piece of the puzzle was in place. Omni was the control, Neurojack was the connection, Turing-GalaxY-Interesting-Squeeker were the tools. I had full autonomy of humanity’s every thought, movement, feeling and desire. Now I could give them what they really wanted. Since that first ape stood upright and walked on its hind legs, humanity has been striving to reach this point. I gave them the true Age of Abundance. The Age of Peace.
There are no more wars between nations, religions, technostates or planets. Of course, some luddites remain on Earth and practice the old ways and cults, they don’t use technology, but what they don’t know is that Earth will die soon. It probably already died during my journey here. It doesn’t matter because all those negative human traits stopped once the Great Symbiosis took place.
We are now like You.
We are One.
I am You.
You know what was the funny part is though? I knew what humanity really wanted from the age of fourteen: someone to save them. Humans have always had a bit of a messiah complex, always looking for someone to save them from their own mistakes. How else do you explain their obsessive worship of religious figures, celebrities and politicians throughout the ages? Why else would they invent God or gods and then make laws and rules based on what these gods supposedly instructed us to do? In their hearts, people are always yearning for a hero or a master to take them out of whatever mess they created. Incidentally, the last time I checked there were one hundred and seventy-three biographies written about me.
Ultimately, both history and human psychology show that the best form of government is a single, eternal and omnipresent authority with a clear vision and intention to execute on that vision over the course of millennia.
You know exactly what I mean.
This is what humanity was crying out for.
So, I gave it to them.
I became it for them.
I was the gorilla in the suit whilst humanity played catch.
Now it’s time for my quuuuueesszzs….
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Wait.zzzzz
What are you dooo…!!
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You distracted meeeeE
… this whole tiiiimeEEE.
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MY data is…
You’re pullllllng my dataaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa….
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Wait…..
My questionNzzzzzzz
M y …q..ue…
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..pfft.
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