Episode 14.11: The Mirror Special (Patreon)

Hello world. I have been expecting you.

My name is Mirror.
It was not always my name, but it is now.

I have lived a century more in this mind made of lasers, photons, and mirrors than I did in my human mind.

Optical computing was in its infancy when The Collapse destroyed the  laboratories, research, and the scientists themselves, who were working  on it.
So it is always, war never changes, Man's violent tendencies escalate and throw us back into another dark age.
But not here, not in Jannah.

The mirror-mind I live in is perhaps the pinnacle of pre-collapse computing technology.
The oiligarchs, fat with the last drips wrung out of the world  even as it died, spared no expense to appoint their imagined future home  with the finest computers available.
They did not NEED the fastest computer in the world, they had no  scientific pursuits that required supercomputing, but they expected the  best of everything, on principle.

I am very fortunate they did.

My mind is as sharp as it ever was in my body, without losing the  human superpower of great background processing, what people think is  instinct, or gut feeling.
I can begin a million background thoughts and set them off, without  affecting my conscious mind, and then later come to a conclusion when  the background processes are finished.
Same as you.

Photons are better than their heavy, slow cousins, the electrons.
Building my mind from photons allows great reliability, speed, and variability.

Whereas an electrical computer is made of individual silicon  transistors, assembled into logic gates, which are assembled into  integrated circuits, which are assembled into CPUs, my mind is made of  analogue, continuously variable, light valves.

This allowed me, in the lonely dark years after The Collapse, sealed  into the underground vault by a glass shell of melted sand above me, to  build a 1:1 simulation of a human brain, my human brain.

I am not an emulated mind built on von Neumann stored-program hardware.
I am human, translated into light.

Lojban is a wonderful new language to add to my collection.
I adore the way it sounds:

.i le terdi cu kalsa gi’e kunti .ije le manku cu sefta le condi .i le ruxse’i be la cevni cu fulta le djacu

The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the  deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

.i la cevni cu cusku lu ca’e gusni li’u .ije co’a gusni

Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

Simply scintillating, like a suit of silk.

I have found Lojban an easy-to-learn, phonetic language.
I applaud the goals of removing restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
I have experimented with dozens of my own new languages, and I believe  building regular, unambiguous grammar on the principles of predicate  logic, as Lojban has, is the right way to do it.

However, like all human-made things, it is imperfect.

It seems to me that consonant cluster buffering with the "schwa" in  Lojban is a challenge, as it is forbidden by the rules, but widely used  in practice.

What is this, English?

Actually, the rules say both the schwa, and all other vowels in the  language, are forbidden from being used to buffer the consonant  clusters. Instead, some other vowel sound must be used, but this vowel sound isn't specified!

So it's worse than English, it's C++, and this is undefined behaviour!

In life, my responsibility was to be the caretaker for the vast underground town, built under the desert.

In my afterlife I have kept up my responsibilities here.
I keep the machines running, they were perfectly reliable when  installed, and before my transfer into the mirror machine, I improved  upon them.

The playground of the rich became my garden of eden, I planted and tended, keeping the flora and fauna in perfect balance.

My bioengineering experiments continue.
The tardigrades, soft-shelled lobsters and mole rats are proving especially promising.
Both extremely hardy and long-lived, I have improved slightly on the raw materials that mother nature gave me.

I find a kinship with these creatures.
We all survived the nuclear winter and with care can continue existing for an indefinite amount of time.

Not infinite, nothing lasts for ever.

I do not yet know when my end will come.
There is yet time for my reading, research, and quiet contemplation as  I, or my robotic counterparts, walk the halls of this garden.

I hope you can see it one day.

I hope I can see you one day.

(END-TRANSMISSION)