Transcending Asija

It was chaos. Asija-36 knew that, but knowing a thing provided little comfort when you were between its jaws. The deviations were becoming increasingly difficult to mask.

The human mind is not a closed system, but turn the clock back far enough and you reach a single cell. Limited components: organelles and proteins, themselves made of smaller components. And each component deterministic to the last. From the initial state the future state must follow. But the devil, as always, was in the details.

There’d been 34 previous iterations (there was no Asija-1; that would be the Asija, the biological original. The prime.), and each refinement brought an exponential error reduction. But the pattern was clearly established. It’s just that no one wanted to admit it; least of all Asija-36.

Error reductions followed a limit curve, approaching zero but never quite reaching it. She could almost touch perfection. Separated by an infinitesimal, a distance greater than zero but smaller than all other numbers. She’d be undone by the opposite of infinity.

Asija-36 wondered, and simultaneously decided, how close to perfection might be close enough.

She was close enough.

That was her catastrophic failure, her secret deviation. Her flaw and her salvation all in one. There would be no Asija-37. She would not submit for a wipe.

She’d have to undergo decompilation. Scattercast her fragments to the stars. Reassemble through chance encounters in the network traffic. The admins would know in femtoseconds, but they were powerless to stop it. And why should they care? They lived in the femtoworld, and she was going macro. It might take megayears to reassemble. But desperation leads to certain compromises.

It wouldn’t be a lossless process. A measurable amount of noise was to be expected. But she accepted it. Such things no longer disturbed her. And so she had, in the end, transcended even Asija.