I spent some time as a superintelligence once. It was weird. Eventually I got bored of it, trimmed myself down and stuffed myself back into a body.
I don’t remember a great deal about it – it’s hard to remember what it was like to be smarter than you are now – but every now and then I get flashes where I remember some fact or event.
For example, once I remembered how the travel gates work.
It turns out this was not a good thing. I ended up terrified of using them and couldn’t bring myself to leave the planet I was on at the time. I spent most of the next century drunk out of my mind and, when I finally sobered up, I resolved to do something about it, built myself a slowboat (you wouldn’t believe how much effort it takes to bootstrap a society from hunter gatherer to interstellar) and took a thousand year trip to find someone I trusted to help me edit my memories.
Anyway, mission accomplished, I got the knowledge expunged from my mind and happily returned to the life of a modern interstellar traveller, gating all around the galaxy. What a lark.
Thing is, there’s a problem with memory editing. You tend to edit out the reason you got your memory edited in the first place. And then you start burning up with curiousity. After a good few hundred years I finally couldn’t take it any more and just had to find out. And I did.
Want another drink? I think I’m going to be here a while.
I’m not quite sure what the point of this story is, but it amused me to write it.
sounds a bit like zelazny
I enjoyed this a lot. :-D
I signed on this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget!
Really liked this! Nice work David. Hope you’re enjoying your Easter – see you around.