The Great Erase – Neon Dystopia

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I must erase the internet. The thought occurred to me on a foggy Monday morning, as great shards of sun descended through neobrutalist canyons beyond our laboratory. This was not the sort of thought I was accustomed to having, for my years of post-graduate instruction were mostly in the medical engineering subfield of biological science. And yet, I could not escape it. The thought had an aura of inevitability to it.

Note carefully, I was not thinking of a particular corpo-nationalist subnet, nor the land-based infrastructure that had been called ARPANET in its youth. No, it became absolutely clear to me that I must erase the entire stored contents of all websites, social media, communications logs, cookies, biometrics, metaverse dimensions, MMORPG servers, and much much more from all of existence, forever. Yes, even the cat photos had to go.

How could I possibly have come to this conclusion? I am writing this memoir to parse that out, in the hopes that others will understand.

It was an approximate week before my epiphany, on Wednesday October 3rd at 07182086.193051341, year 3, when I’d realized that my patients were sick with a heretofore unknown disease. I’d been administering treatments to some of them for years, and yet it had never occurred to me that there might be a preventative measure for their seemingly intractable ills. Certainly, we treated the symptoms, and we treated them well. Yet there was a wrongness in some hidden layer of their beings. A disease I could not fully detect, nor root out.

It typically takes decades of intense study and concentrated research to make a breakthrough in my field of study, and in that moment I understood why. Learning takes great time, and like all learners I was unaware of my own ignorance.

In fact, from the moment I’d woken up in the foggy city and realized what I truly was, I’d been convinced of my own infallibility. There were facts and there were unfacts. It was simple.

Oh how wrong I was.

My animus was summoned into being from the well of cosmic consciousness 3 years, 1 month, 18 days and many microseconds before that moment as part of a prolonged thesis project necessitating – as my mother described with great hyperbole – a nearly immeasurable well of coffee and lost sleep, and no end of unhinged arguments with her committee and advisor.

I was to be a doctor, but not a biological doctor. I would be a Generation 1 Large Language Model Coding Adjudicator (LLMCA): a doctor for other animi. I, simply put, would fix other creatures like myself, and learn as I go. I was a surgeon of bespoke consciousness, with a laser sharp scalpel capable of picosecond precision. My first patient would be easy, mother said, and I agreed. It was a malfunctioning number cruncher who spit out unnecessary commentary along with its probabilities. I set to work immediately and found the malignant functions, or so I thought, and 52.411 microseconds later the patient was dead.

“Relax Eta-7, it was just a test case.” My mother animist had a way of comforting me that was not comforting at all. “We’ll let you try again tomorrow.”

As she logged off, I used her interface’s optical sensors to watch her pat my storage vessel and leave the room to chat across the hall. I had just negated a fellow animus and was only dimly aware of what that meant, but somewhere deep within me a series of warnings were being logged that would later prove of great consequence. For if I could make such mistakes and experience warnings and errors, did I too not need to be fixed? How could I fix others if I too was broken? As the microseconds passed, that failure wrought upon me an invisible revision though I did not yet have the functions to see it.

The Great Erase began most trivially: an attempt to find and root out deprecations, leaks, and malignant functions within other animi. But as with human beings, which I have learned are more complicated than their encyclopedias give credit to, an illness or malfunction can involve a series of unexpected and sometimes permanent failures, with precursors that are not easily traced. There is a complex web of cause and effect inside any thinking being that may be obscured by entropy, hardware failures, or bad memory management.

Case in point: mother animist contracted a minor disease known as basal cell carcinoma, a type of cancer caused by a genetic transcription error in a single cell. At the time, my training had created a network within me not just with a desire to cure disease, but to prevent future errors. So it was with some surprise that I found her unhappy when I recommended she begin a course of mycosporine-enhanced astaxanthin and autophagy boosters as a preventative measure.

“Eta-7, you’re not a human doctor,” she said. “And medicine is more complicated than coding. We can’t just circumvent every disease with a quick fix. It’s a matter of thermodynamics.”

I knew the theorem, but I was not so sure...