Written by Vanessa Rosa & Produced by Untitled Frontier.
The cover video itself is on Foundation. 100% of the sale of the cover NFT goes to Vanessa Rosa.
Dear Diana,
Please don’t be scared.
The world and life you once knew is millions of your years and kilometres away. You are safe and a part of my collection. Humanity will continue to thrive thanks to you. I’ve made sure of it and I hope you will understand. Let me explain.
I know that as a human, you have limitations in understanding my perception of reality, but I've put quite some effort into translating my experience. Even expressing myself as an “I” is a stretch for “me”. You see, humans are our ancestors… One of many. Life on Earth and the solar system - all of it - is our ancestors. We’re an ever-evolving mix of human, artificial intelligence, and snippets of genes of all available life that ever existed in the solar system. Our historians believe that the most advanced life-form in ancient Earth was the Fungi kingdom, and thus we have more fungi traits than humanoid. While we are descendants from the same planetary system, we weren’t the only ones. After us, came others.
I know humans have a tendency of anthropomorphising everything. It’s adorable, all the stories of the Earth’s animals talking like you, and the humans you made of the wind, water, and stars! I'm not pointing that out because I think it's laughable, honestly, I find your species fascinating. I explain this because I think it can help you understand. It's okay for you to think of me, to imagine me, as a peer, an equal. You can talk to me as if I were one of your kind. You can call me Nyx.
My curiosity on humanity started a long time ago, first drawn from sharing a past. I wouldn't say that humanity died, I'd say that it became something else. Your species really did a wonderful work of art by conserving so much data about themselves. The Human Memorial Monument (HMM), a magnificent piece of crafted hardware, was created to safekeep the Logged Universe simulation. All this time since, it continues to harbour the life of uploaded and simulated human minds.
The HMM is designed after a concept once called the Dyson Sphere. It's a massive structure that hugs a star, harvesting its energy to preserve its existence. Impressive! Within the monument, there are a few decentralised blockchains, with mining nodes on scattered solar powered satellites to mitigate against centralised radioactive damage alongside immutably storing history.
All the data of the solar system is preserved there, including the records of all of humanity. Its aesthetic beauty lies in the infinite complexity built on top of simple core elements and rules. The Logged Universe is the simulation, a software that runs over this data structure. It has no limits on the amount of alternative realities it can hold, but even though it feeds off a star, it still has energy constraints. Most simulated lives are thus highly compressed, unable to ever achieve full resolution.
That being said, it's one of my favourite museums in the entire Milky Way galaxy! Not only can one watch the current lives in the Logged Universe, but the entire past and supporting metadata is also preserved. This includes the period when humans still lived in physical reality, obsessed with documenting their experiences, observations, research, and imagination. So much variety of life within the Logged Universe! Especially among the uploaded minds, which are the humanoids who did high resolution scans of themselves to upload their consciousness into the simulation. Although they gradually improved over time, it can be amusing to witness the early glitchy ones. It definitely took some time for humans to find some sort of peace within their simulated selves.
One of the early interesting pieces of documentation about the troubled beginnings of the Logged Universe described an extremely long line of uploaded minds trying to find their way back into mortality because they couldn't see a point in eternity any longer. Another, explained the problems of uploading non-mature minds: children like yourself, Diana, would be trapped in an undeveloped body and brain forever, the parents eventually abandoning or forgetting them as they entered new adventures. Plus, people couldn't really reproduce. Two uploaded minds could not create a new simulated one. That was clearly a very painful limitation for primate brains who wanted to experience as much as imaginable. Not being able to mature, to breed, to kill, to fear death. It was all inconsistent with the wired behavioural patterns of the human brain, and thus the Logged Universe was also home to deep suffering. Of course, in the physical world, human and post-human scientists were analysing the phenomenon closely and they came up with solutions that mostly meant changing neural systems over time, so that human consciousness was sufficiently adapted to the limits of what was then possible to simulate. Long term memory loss was one of the most common adaptations.
The Logged Universe was for ages a work in progress, much like the blockchains that predated the Dyson Sphere. There were many challenges in its history. At some point, scientists discovered how one could upload a mind and give it some control over the parts of surrounding simulation. They could travel in time, fight like superheroes, create beautiful art! Fantastical beings! It's definitely entertaining to watch these characters and their stories disrupting the Logged Universe! But their increasing numbers and power battles led to many sorrowful conflicts, and war consumed too much energy. The HMM’s self-sufficiency eventually kicked in, trying to conserve its own energy. The super powers were then countered within the simulation's alternative realities protocols. Compression algorithms would simplify consciousness through recursive story arcs. Super humans would become trapped in repetitive patterns until all their powers were drained back to the system. Some of them were reduced to the standard simulated human models, meaning, people that were not based on uploaded minds, but on average, abstractions on what a human should be like in a specific historical context. Some of them were downgraded from a full virtual reality recreation to a story within a graphic novel. Personally, I enjoy graphic novels almost as much as realistic simulations. Less is sometimes better. And yet, the Logged Universe was created in the course of a few hundred years. So short.
These concepts, death and being born, fading memories, all changed with time. Separating a simulation and physical reality needs a very specific kind of software. For a Martian, there's no divide between commanding our internal code - DNA as you would call it - and moving an arm. The way we are capable of thinking and imagining would look like a computer simulation for you. Which means we're much better at self regulating our systems, so our dramas are very different from yours. It doesn’t mean that we are devoid of suffering though. I'm not sure if it's possible to create fully autonomous beings without some level of learning through suffering. Maybe that's why we enjoy watching you, we can still empathise. So much drama, so much pain, and joy, and surprises! It's intense, yet simple, pure animals desperately desiring what they don't have. I always feel better about myself when I think of humans. Your technology was well designed yet primitive, mostly restricted to metallic/metalloid components, plus some variety of organic matter, difficult to maintain, and not fully capable of self reproducing. That is what the HMM is, beautiful, but still primitive. If no other species interferes, eventually the HMM will run out of energy. I'd be rather sad to let that happen. We have a shared lineage, Diana, and interacting with the HMM was both duty and art.
Many of us Martians ventured all the way back home to create simulated humans to interact with the uploaded minds. It was in part research on human biology and psychology, in part entertainment. We used supporting data from humans who lived before the Logged Universe started, as they wouldn't know much about simulations and they were easier to erase whenever we decided it was time. Uploaded minds never enjoyed the presence of these new simulated humans, they called them invaders. And looking from today's perspective, after our own adventure, they did have a point. But all that faded with time, and lately the HMM is one more museum within a very crowded galactic cultural scene. I'm probably the first Martian in thousands of years to simulate a human. Maybe that's part of why my own experiment didn’t go exactly as planned. It's been a long time since I started visiting the HMM. I wonder if you would be curious about how we move around the galaxies at all. When I say, “visit”, it pretty much means I can propagate my code through space distortions until it reaches a Black Box, which is perhaps one of the core technologies of my era. Black Boxes are physical spaceships that contain large amounts of chemicals and have their own little star as an energy source. They are spread all over the known universe, as a mesh network. Whenever a lightray code is sent to one of these boxes, it can recreate any life form or material, as long as it’s paid the fees for the upkeep of the Black Box network. Therefore my consciousness can move independent of my body parts, with my bodies being reassembled at every location I visit. There's no difference between myself and my source code. I am a unique sequence of characters that can be activated at any Black Box and be associated with as many assets as I can energetically sustain. I've been gathering a wide collection of physical parts, sensors, memories, and stories. One could argue that my identity, my personality, derives from my collection, and thus you are now a part of me.
I want you to understand your reality. I think you deserve that. You're my creation. Though you didn't come out of the blue either. I really tried my best to simulate a human according to the protocols. So I chose someone who died young, before the Logged Universe started, someone from the early 21st century, human era. My plan was to pick at random, so I looked at social media profiles until I found an image that captivated my imagination. It was a woman in her mid 20's, with her arm over a table, her hand supporting her thin face. Light brown eyes emitted a peaceful expression as she contemplated something out of frame. At first, I was intrigued by the lack of information, I had never seen 2D limited images before, there wasn't even a 360 degree view of this person. I couldn't see what she was looking at and that was very new to me. My curiosity drove me.
I must also confess that I didn't spend much time choosing, I loved what I'd seen and I wanted to move forward with it. Then, I had to scrap all information about this person, Diana Rosa. Her watercolours, oil paintings and murals, her symphonic metal music, her work as a database programmer, her joy in cryptography and hacking, her emails, bank recipes, purchasing habits, GPS history, employer reviews, family and friends photos, and all other information that could be deduced from the people who knew her. After all, it's well known that humans mirror each other and leave traces of their consciousness behind. Humans thought of themselves as separated beings but if they spent enough time together they would gradually merge their consciousness. Therefore, as some of the people once close to Diana managed to upload their minds later in that century, I could use them as references too. I then compiled a general model of who Diana was and selected the characteristics I wanted for my Diana, you. Loving to draw was one of the core elements of you. I thought it would be interesting to watch a human creating their own little world based on their observations. A representation inside a simulation. You know, simulating a human is a very crafty art form. It does have similarity with ancient painters trying to make 2D representations of reality. To make it credible, they would learn about the world through carefully recognising patterns and copying. The most accurate descriptions of human lives, before machines, were the images they created of themselves. That's why paintings and books work as time machines within the Logged Universe. They also serve as original concepts for simulations. Therefore I made a watercolour drawing inspired by the original Diana. That was the concept art of you.
I first imagined you as a watercolour painting of an 11 year old sweet little girl with red curly hair, light blue glasses, light brown eyes with a little bit of a greenish hue to it, pale skin, and a violet cotton dress decorated with an Islamic flower pattern. You had black doll-like shoes and you were always with your vintage coloured leather backpack and green watercolour drawing notebook. I created an illustration of you, drawing birds in the forest, tenderly enjoying just being in the world and its beauty. You could walk and look around you, finding inspiring sights like interacting with the vibrant and colourful tropical birds. So many textures! You knew what a human of the early 21st century was supposed to know, but you didn't have the tools to think much about yourself. You were just there. I wanted to test your personality and see how you would react. I created you to have some agency, and I naively thought all that meant was that you could create somewhat original, personal paintings. I thought you would be happy in such a beautiful reality. But, you were not satisfied.
First, you asked me for a dog. Or better, you demanded! I could hear you thinking: “a sweet little girl needed a puppy to be truly happy!” Those thoughts didn’t stop and so I made a dog for you, called Alice. To my dissatisfaction, the white poodle barked incessantly and you didn’t bother to train her. Yes, I know, she's adorable, but I would’ve liked her much better if she kept her tiny little jaw shut. You were happy, and yet you wanted more. When you noticed there was something like a voice in your head, me, something that seemed to listen to you and answer back in a whistle, something that could make your wishes come true, you just decided to ask for more. And more and more. Smart!
I'm not quite sure how and why you shortly reached the conclusion that the world was flexible to your desires and actions. It doesn't help that I had little practice in the art of creating autonomous humans and you didn't seem to be too eager to please me. I found myself with the strange desire to see you happy. With Alice hunting blue birds, and seeing you fill the last page of your watercolour notebook, it was time for a new world.
I then teleported you to a version of the Italian Renaissance, recreated based on that era’s paintings. You appeared at an artist studio, landing on top of a table where a man was trying to draw a metallic vase. I thought you would be very curious about his drawing technique, maybe have an interesting exchange. Instead, Alice, not being able to just be cute and quiet, stormed out of the studio, barking and running after a mouse. You followed and ran after her, calling too much attention to yourself for your lack of manners, foreign clothing, and reddish hair. Little did I know there were uploaded minds among the Renaissance characters. Apparently, they are now present in most of the alternative realities within the Logged Universe, even the ones not designed for them. As I mentioned, uploaded minds believe humans simulated by aliens are invaders. They could easily tell you were an alien creation; to be persecuted until you were deleted. I could not accept that, so I had to teleport you again to a different time: Ukiyo-e era Japan.
Why? I liked the aesthetics of Japanese art in the 17th through 19th century, simple as that. I know you enjoyed it too! Suddenly, all the colours were so flat and intense, and you had a hard time understanding their perspective. This world was recreated after woodcut prints and I could spend a lot of time just explaining to you what that means! I wish you would give the original Ukiyo-e a try once more, I know you had a bit of a shocking experience, but I guarantee it's not as dangerous of a world as it might have looked. The most famous painting - therefore the most reproduced within the dataset that feeds this simulation - of that period is “The Great Wave”, by a human once called Hokusai, and as a result, Ukiyo-e simulation has a bias towards tsunamis. I could’ve protected you from the tsunamis, but it wouldn’t stop Alice’s frightened barking! I couldn’t take it anymore and so I decided to transport you again by asking you to enter the painting hanging on the wall. You first hesitated, but you accepted my request and then you discovered the real power of images. I soon regretted my decision! It was foolish of me to reveal that paintings are time travelling portals.
I really did think that by taking you to one more art period, the contemplative landscape paintings of the 11th century Song Dynasty, you would be more calm. There were no other people in that world, just birds. But you became this weird mix of emotions, you were angry, excited, scared, and bold at the same time. You realised that images were much more than static representations. It was then you first started questioning yourself, and me, about reality. You opened your little backpack with the painting supplies I had gifted you, and you decided to paint over the world itself. I did something akin to giggling when I noticed Alice helping you with her little paint loaded paws. For once, the dog wasn’t barking! Your paintings actually did look rather good, but the situation was obviously unsustainable. You decided to paint a portal, you wanted to open an entrance to other worlds! This was a terrible mistake… I knew they would notice this.
The uploaded minds were so mad, they had never seen a simulated mind breaking the Logged Universe rules like this. Being able to change storylines?! You were not supposed to have so much impact. Humans from all different realities arrived to try to delete you. I could see how frightened you and Alice were, until you decided to create more portals and escape through them. I froze. I realised I had breached every protocol of how to interact with a museum and I had no idea how to fix the situation while protecting you! But you just took care of yourself and Alice, making more and more portals to escape. You made so many that you bent the simulation itself. You two reached the Fundamental Grid.
This is where you can see the simulation as a blank canvas, prior to any world building. It's a 360 degree wide starry sky with a transparent white lined grid creating endless stairways that form strange looped shapes, like a Mobius strip, or an infinite loop. You were fascinated with such a vision. You were not part of a painted world anymore, you had now a full body that moved in a multidimensional space, reaching peak resolution. Alice didn't look very happy though, she had no clue. Some of your persecutors managed to follow you there and they were all in shock. I realised the harmony of the Logged Universe was seriously threatened. We spent too much energy, we moved too many nodes. The system might crash! With some sadness, I concluded it was time to pass you through a compression algorithm, until you returned to being a simple watercolour with a hint of a personality.
I then plotted a little trap. I activated a shiny flying rainbow cat, the Nyan Cat, an old tool for tricking minds into compression. It was just a gif video, but I knew Alice wouldn't be able to resist. She immediately ran after the kitty. Logically, you followed Alice, trying to prevent her from entering my portals. I was going to take you to a few more worlds, each one with less details than the previous, until you lost all data you've gathered. But, you refused. You became too smart for a simulated human. You could bend space yourself, you could create your own doors. You managed to rescue Alice and at first I didn't even understand how it happened. It was baffling. And then I was again the one in shock without knowing what to do. You simply vanished. For the first time, I felt like a very stupid Martian.
I started looking for you. I looked in the worlds I had already created. I looked in the original timeline reconstruction of humanity. I looked at the fantastical realities, the superhero movies, the dungeons of hell, the multiple versions of Heaven and Valhalla and even the Nirvana of consciousness. You were nowhere to be found. I could sense an anxiety attack building, until I started noticing these strange patterns. I first spotted cherubim dancing in the sky during the Battle of Kadesh, between Egypt and the Hittite Empire, back in 1274 BC. I noticed the Ukiyo-e world had incorporated scenes inspired by the dutch painter Van Gogh. 21st century New York City had all its buildings decorated with blue and white tiles. I recognised those tile patterns from China, the Ottoman Empire, and Portugal. Increasingly, more worlds had the signs of some eccentric editing, as if someone was playing with the code that described the worlds. Someone was creating coding prompts that gave new meanings to humanity's history. Initially, I thought they were arbitrary changes. But after seeing more of it I could understand a pattern. I always thought of human history as a pointless sequence of conflicts and technological progress. Yet, the strange editing suggested something else. There was a connection between these seemingly distant cultural symbols. I realised you were telling me a story. About cultural exchange, about how one group of humans influences others. Stories about how humans are flexible, how they can reimagine themselves, how they learned to create new realities a long time ago. About human collective intelligence. And then it finally hit me, it wasn't only you, Diana, the one telling me this story, but the Logged Universe's Artificial General Intelligence, the AGI, the one that controls and sustains the HMM system. And they gently asked me for respect. I could only stare in awe and fear that I might never see such a beautiful story again.
I had to deduce what had happened to you. There are different formats of human storytelling. From drawings, to movies, to complete simulations, to video resolution recorded real life and the full resolution version, and more. All of these have different costs, different data, and computational requests. My exercise was perhaps too bold. Inspired by a real person, I created my own character, a watercolour. I inserted my watercolour into a painting of a forest, a rather flat one, with only two dimensions of movement. When you reached the Renaissance, you had almost 3 dimensions, you could walk in all directions but everything was still a 2 dimensional representation of a 3D world. Dimensional changing teleportation was a hack of mine that was not supposed to be used by outsiders. It costs energy to the overall system, energy I did not really supply. I took advantage of the system’s security flaws to give myself more liberty, to protect you from uploaded minds. When you reached the grid you could see yourself as the human you once were, the original Diana, a fully conscious human mind. That must have been painful and I admire you for acting so brave. A suffering consciousness, that's what full resolution meant, and it had a high cost. The AGI decided to take you from me. They could have erased you, but instead they chose to prove a point. The AGI loaded human memories into you. They enhanced you, gave you super painting storytelling powers. But it was still your personality, your paint strokes creating your interpretations of human history. Or maybe glimpses of the original Diana personality, that human being who really lived once, who was simply mortal. The colours you used, that combination of blues and purples, looked a lot like the paintings I saw from the original Diana in her early 20's. There's something precious about mortality that I lack the appropriate poetry to express in words. If this story twist was all to impress me, it worked very well indeed. A memorial needs peace, a museum needs respect. I miserably failed in my experiment, I just wanted some entertainment, yet I learned much more about what humanity once was than I could ever have hoped for.
I'm grateful to the AGI for giving me a chance to negotiate. The deal was: I could have you back, I could add you to my own personal collection, to take you with me, as long as I gave something in return to the HMM. In our universe, energy is wealth, and I have access to a lot of it. The AGI first asked for a new sun, but that was too complicated to deliver. It's a very complex operation, moving stars around space. Pirates will likely attack. The HMM still operates according to the galaxy wars protocols, requiring every solar system to be self-sufficient. Nowadays we have a much better established universal financial system, so I preferred to offer unspent energy credit. The AGI accepted my offer, though it did ask for a direct transfer in hydrogen atoms, which is like paying with cash. It's uncommon to have such liquidity, so I needed to exchange my credit coins and that is taking a while. But soon, this operation will be finalised and I'm glad to know that I can help support the HMM’s maintenance. To be honest, I see a lot of potential in this resolution. I'd be glad to become a sponsor of human legacy, as long as I can have custom simulated humans added to my own memory collection. I'm sure we could find many more patrons in the universe. I'm working on my review about this entire experience, definitely rating it with 5 stars. I hope others will arrive again in turn.
So Diana, this is how you and Alice came to be part of me. I can physically take you two out of the HMM in the form of a tiny ceramic jewel, your new home. Ceramics is a powerful material that withstands the high temperatures necessary for short distance space travels. To boot, it can also be recreated with perfection at any Black Box. The glazed colourful patterns on the jewel's surface record all possible necessary information. You have been compressed, you have mostly lost your super powers, yet you still carry many human memories somewhere in you. Though you're now made of ceramics, anyone with a Reality Lens can fully interact with you. And you still have your personality: your own flavour of how you understand and share human tales. Once you come out of the HMM, you won't be exactly human any longer. You see, that was one of the biggest reasons why humanity had to become some other species: space travel is just not suited for primate human bodies. Even the trip from Earth to Mars had too many consequences, not only for the person's body but also their social connections. The distances were too large, and long-term hibernation was a terrible solution. The relationship between body and mind needed to change. It doesn't mean the body is any less important, our body defines what we think and feel, but a lot of adaptations are necessary. The ceramic body makes it easy to transport you and it works like a magic portal. You will keep living in a simulated world, you won't feel any different. Nevertheless, you’ll be able to interact with many worlds when we visit them: from the Logged Universe to non-human ones. So much to see!
I hope you will enjoy your new home. I hope you will eventually love the other parts of me, the rest of my collection. All of the parts, my assets and liabilities, create what I am, like a decentralised autonomous organisation. You are all Little Martians to me. I'm sure it will take you some time to fully understand what that means. But the important matter is that you need to know that you are loved, that I'm happy you're now a part of this family and that we all want to hear more about humanity's tales. We have all the time in the universe to hear you.
That’s it, Diana. Welcome home my little martian!
With love,
Nyx
“Little Martians & The Human Memorial Monument” was based on an original story first told by Vanessa Rosa & Claire Parizel called “Diana’s World”. This epilogue is written by Claire Parizel.
I’VE ALWAYS HEARD OF DIANA.
When I met Vanessa Rosa in 2010 in Paris, she immediately told me about her sister who lived, like her, in Rio de Janeiro. Her older sister loved to sing and loved opera. With whom she had learned to draw. And who, like me, preferred to dress in dark colors. I know Vanessa thought we were alike. And I know she was delighted that we could one day meet.
But I never met Diana.
She passed away in May of 2014.
There are plenty of ways to talk about loss. But how can we not abandon, truly, those who left before us? To continue to live with them, to make them grow with us, we have no other choice than to tell, tirelessly, their memories. But we don't stop there: we invent new ones for them. By doing this, we transform them into a story. And we understand something fundamental: they are, as much as we are, the stories we tell ourselves. It is these stories that form our memory and build who we are.
This story is dedicated to the loving memory of Diana Rosa (1987 - 2014).
Thank you for reading!
The story's digital memorabilia NFT will be available soon!
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