Orion's Arm Universe Project
A Self-Destructive Sabbatical
 Image from John B |
by Ryan B (Rynn) (2021)
He first realised that he was returning to sobriety when the wall became an infinite plane.
For some time he simply stared, his mind refusing to see the wall as anything but boundless. To be sure, he'd perceived a lot of strange stuff recently. Most of it was so far removed from his default mode of thinking that the memories were incompatible junk. This plane though, this was something solid. Something real.
He didn't see much of it for a while, slipping as he frequently did into psychedelic and euphoric experiences so intense he forgot all sense of self. But the infinite wall kept pulling him back, piece by piece. Over time the periods where it was just him and the wall grew longer, allowing him to notice more detail about the situation. For a start, the wall wasn't the only part of the environment, eternal though it was. Its edges met several more surfaces that curved around and over him. In trying to follow them he realised that he had a neck. A few more gaps of lucidity later and that realisation grew to the acknowledgement that he was lucky enough to possess a whole body, one that appeared to be sprawled on the floor of a small room. Most of the surfaces were bathed in soft light that shifted hue slowly. The floor was one large sponge that supported his huge frame; four arms connecting to one long serpentine body that meandered over several meters. Spider-like bots crawled everywhere. He watched as a fist-sized spider climbed up one of his arms and inserted a fang into a vein. For a while the sight absorbed his attention as the arachnid's body slowly shrank, pulsating softly.
During these growing times of consciousness nothing could hold his attention for long. In time it would always return to the infinite wall. As the spider quietly pumped his body with who-knows-what, he began to make out features on the plane. But they were ephemeral, like floaters in the eye. Every time he thought he saw a pattern it disappeared under scrutiny. Eventually this period of lucidity began to fade. He felt a wave of euphoria that threatened to obliterate all thought. The last thing he remembered before giving into the ecstasy was his body shuddering as it voided itself onto the absorbent floor. For the first time in what felt like a long time there was a small stab of revulsion.
*
Time passed, bringing lucity again. This time felt different. He was still in the room, spiders and infinite wall still present. But now he had a sense of coalescence. It was as though there were lost parts of his mind that were nearly in place, like spacecraft docking in the void. Looking down at his body he remembered now that the larger spiders were feeders. The contents of their abdomens, delivered into his bloodstream via fang, was a nutrient solution. Why this was happening he wasn't sure, wasn't really that capable of forming the question yet. The wall beckoned. No longer was it so stubbornly immaterial, a topography was revealing itself. Much of it remained in fog but in some areas it thinned to nothing. In these visible regions the surface undulated across its length; thousands of hills, most of them connected by a complex web of ridges. Many high points merged into wide plateaus with spurs of cliffs. Deep valleys separated hills from directly connecting, except through the maze-like arrangement of ridges and smaller hills. Liberally the landscape was punctured by gaping holes that seemed to stretch down to another infinity. In some places the vodis formed impassable ravines (in one case a circular gulf completely cut off a plateau from the rest of the plane).
After letting his eyes wander a while he began to feel a rising sense of confusion. It was overwhelming! He began to panic and spiral in his thoughts. At the edge of his mind was the promise of sweet release. A return to blissful obliteration in a haze of alien experience. Rather than grasp at it this time he fought through the pain. Distantly he was aware that his body convulsed, most of it numb for some reason that felt worrying. There was something he needed to see on the wall first, he had to find it. Hearts thudding and bile rising he craned his neck for a better view. The promise of blissful release seemed to hang back like a cautious pet. Frantically he scanned the wall as a sense of impending doom began to suffocate him. There! Down on that hill next to a bottomless maw! A tiny pinprick of light was drunkenly ascending, as though it was trying to climb while the hole dragged it back. Moaning from terror as much as pain he gave into release. As waves of calm, love and happiness crashed over him he realised what that climbing spark was. It was him. And his name was Caville.
*
The next time he came to, Caville felt more awake than he had ever been, though this wasn't saying much given that his memory still felt incomplete. Over the course of several minutes he summoned the strength to sit himself up. His arms were weak but seemed up to the task. Looking down at his long tail of a body he concentrated on coiling into a comfortable sitting position. It took a while to remember how to work the Nagaform and even longer to remember that this body was just his latest chosen phenotype. The spiders waited a respectful distance as he got settled. Once he was they scuttled forward and onto his body. The smaller swarms marched across him in regimented lines. He watched them scrub and clean his skin with the damp fibres of their legs. As a larger feeder-type worked its way towards a vein Caville reached out and picked it up. Large and green it hung limply in his hands. Acting on instinct he bit down into the abdomen. Still the spider didn't wriggle but seemed quite content to be eaten. Gingerly chewing and swallowing for the first time in recent memory Caville examined his surroundings more closely.
The room was a simple cube, four meters on its side with curved edges where each wall met. Avoiding the wall that appeared infinite he checked out the others. Aside from some holes near the floor where spiders entered and left they were decorated in soft patterns of light. As he watched they gently rippled, calming him. Biofeedback mesmerisation, Caville thought, though exactly why he thought that and what it meant remained a mystery. The wall opposite the infinite plane had a raised pattern of an archway. A door maybe?
His body quivered slightly and a ghostly feeling of needing to flee this confusing place passed over him. Munching on a spider Caville shrugged and did the only thing that seemed appropriate; looking back at the infinite wall. This time the level of detail was even higher. Most of it was still obscured by fog but the hills and valleys had gained features. Colour splashed across the land, lower areas tended towards dark reds and purples with the hills beaming in greens, yellows and blues. Some areas appeared slippery, others prickly. In the very centre of the plane was a vast continent of plateaus. It was studded with valleys and maws but compared to other areas of the map was mostly healthy colours and high elevation. A little off from the centre was one of the maws, a sinkhole halfway up the curving side of a plateau. Between the maw and the centre of the map the tiny spark could be seen again. Its journey upward seemed more confident now, skating the edges of ditches and pits that would impede its progress.
Watching the journey Caville felt a strange sensation. It began with the sense of something hovering just below his consciousness. Like an insistent memory that refused to be fully recalled. With this sensation came the gradual satisfying feeling of pieces fitting together. Bit-by-bit clarity returned. This infinite plane wasn't a landscape or a random hallucination, it was a toposophic map. A representation of the phase-space of intelligent systems. Such a map could only truly be viewed in dozens of dimensions, some bounded and some not, but Caville's small modosophont mind couldn't be expected to comprehend that type of detail. This is a simplified model produced by my…exoself. The further the spark climbed the more he remembered and the more together he felt. His mind wasn't just randomly editing itself across the map, his exoself had calculated an intervention was in order. It had judged his previous position in the maw to be undesirable and was dragging him back to a healthy state, one tweak at a time.
Wavering across a ridge Caville again felt a faint shudder and confusion. At the edge of his mental perception he realised the glow of sweet release was still waiting. Instinctively he reached for it and the spark slipped off of the ridge. He was startled, his mind going blank with rising terror but his exoself wasn't going to allow any backsliding now. An epiphany struck, he didn't need to be afraid, he was going to be a balanced individual again, more capable and happy than he was now. The spark shot back up to the top of the ridge and ascended safely up the next hill. Ah, the "release" is a narcotics program, one designed to induce exotic yet pleasurable states of consciousness. Holy Binah, how long have I been stoned out of my mind in this room? *
Hours later the spark was nearing the centre point. Modifications to his neural architecture allowed for old memories to be reintegrated. His thought processes became neater and smarter. Caville remembered now what was going on. Gazing over the map he recognised for the first time the central plateau was capped by a large magnet icon; an attractor that was acting as a guide to his exoself to bring him back to a healthy state. Around many of the valleys and maws (and some of the ridges) were hard fences. Set by local law (Forafaust arcology, that's where I live) these were illegal mental spaces. Those known to give rise to blights, the criminally deranged and dangerous ideologies (one such set of valleys was sealed off for giving a psychological propensity for exponential population growth).
Finally the spark arrived at the centre. Caville felt calm, whole and happy. His mind settled as the last of the edits were completed. He remembered everything now; at 600 years old Caville had developed a few quirky habits. Like most sophonts his psychoware placed artificial attractors around desirable mental states, the plateaus of the map. Through life experience and artificial editing he could deviate of course, head towards unhealthy or undesirable states. But the attractors meant that he would always circle back. It should be impossible for Caville to suffer from depressive disorders or accidentally modify himself into undesirable toposophies. Really it was difficult to not be a fully actualised individual most of the time. But a few centuries ago he'd tweaked his settings. He'd turned off the attractor, allowing himself to naturally fall into any number of legal but unhealthy states. Unfortunately his neural edits had gone further than intended. His implant logs revealed that eight years ago an innocuous combination of mental modifications induced a self-reinforcing pleasurable sensation. One capable of outcompeting all other desired behaviours. In simpler terms: drug addiction. From their his unhinged mind had wandered, requesting and accepting all manner of modifications that allowed for forms of pleasure he was no longer capable of remembering.
By law his psychoware had kicked in the moment he crossed a threshold of probable return (in wall terms, once he'd fallen too far down the slope of a maw). But by choice he'd weakened the recovery; rather than pulling him out quickly the attractor was programmed to strengthen semi-randomly but very slowly over time. This setting was a holdover from a previous time he'd spent a few years in a self-destructive state, before being fished out by his exoself. During this period he waived some rights, a condition that wouldn't be the case if he didn't handicap his psychoware, but it wasn't like he'd be tasked with social responsibilities while catatonic on the floor. Contentedly he reviewed the experience, acknowledging feelings of sadness that it lasted so long this time but taking solace in the wonder of the diversity of experience in his life.
Rising he discarded the half-eaten spider to be recycled by its fellows. The door opened at his presence revealing the messy interior of the Spicy Splice; his favourite mod club. A group of sophonts clustered around the nearest autodoc yelled in surprise and happiness. Gingerly Caville waved, amused and embarrassed at taking up a private booth for several years. He looked back into the room one last time, already it was reformatting itself as a public space. The illusionary infinite wall persisted though, with his spark right at the centre. It's strange; what the map looks like, where there are valleys or hills, depends entirely on where one is standing. Within the maw I would have considered myself at the peak of a perfect mountain, nowhere to go to improve. Do I have any right to be certain now my values have been edited to something else? He paused, regarding at the transapient designed fences on the map.
Probably for the best.
By Ryan B (Rynn) (written 2021, added 2026).