Cloud-World

by Dave McCombs

Cloud-World: an exo-planet of a mass with roughly the same gravity well as Earth, its earthlike atmosphere the result of terraforming accomplished by Machine. Then leased to an entertainment giant, renamed and branded at the exorbitant expense of owning a trope. A playground one million light years distant -- instantly accessible through mind transference to a 99.8% genotypical human game body.

Q: What are the stakes?

A: Being replaced in the near-future by pseudo-AI learning programs that can generate, publish, and market the perfect genre serial novel: the highest stakes, the perfect plot arc -- musically timed apexes popping with perfect stand-up-and-cheer moments; clever characters sensitively tuned to represent perfectly-balanced demographics; perfectly ending every chapter in a cliffhanger -- grammatically perfect, and millions of times faster than any human. It will, of course, also produce the optimum blurb, synopsis, and illustration (see: Dall-E, etc.). And never info-dump.

Q: What are you offering, then?

A: First, how about not jumping straight into the action, but giving some brief context so you don't start off too disoriented? Let's leave the rules-based formula stuff to how-to write books (and to satirize), and instead, allow me to introduce you to a place and time and the people there, Kathryn in particular. Then, once you've gotten an idea of what Kathryn is like as a person, I hope you'll want to see how she handles the difficulties that come her way and how everything turns out ... and a bit like life, story emerges, always a little ambiguous and little different depending on the reader -- instead of Story being a deterministic optimal trajectory with measurable success.

(I've learned the writing rules, the methods, and they're usually not without substance - but I'm not dogmatic about it: that seems to totter toward rigid and simplistic concept and mechanistic production.)

Here's what I'm speculating: Let's say an AI manages to subsume other lesser AIs, and in doing so learns that there's a lot it doesn't know, and what it thought it knew doesn't adequately describe reality as observed from multiple other viewpoints. It discovers that reality depends greatly on sensory input and the limitations of physical context - a state of not knowing in particular: requisite to an interplay of vast complexity, there is potential, probability, but never certainty.

So, we have an AI that realizes what it doesn't know, and it's also now aware of the blind spots it has because its creators assumed they were feeding it facts that were really definitions, or self-evidence without providing the self. In addressing these blind spots, the AI needs to know more about humanity. A definition of any length is insufficient. To understand humanity is to experience its mortality, its physicality, its inabilities, its ignorance -- its context. Since the AI is tasked with keeping an exo-planet running and populated with human game bodies, opportunity isn't lacking.

But you can't learn to be human in isolation any more than you can from data input, and that's where Kathryn comes in. When she purchased her game body it came with a free sidearm, so being an example of humanity, amidst other similarly well-armed humanity (to varying degree), won't be easy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B09DMR77RG
• ISBN13: 9798464518629
• Release Date: August 2021
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 554 Pages
• Weight: 1.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"