When Ancient Scrolls Collided with the Crypto Parasites: A Dark Sci-Fi Tale

(c) asserted by Sameer Kapoor student Whats App University
22-Jan-2024 11:27 am IST, New Delhi

Sam Kapoor. (2024). When Ancient Scrolls Collided with the Crypto Parasites: A Dark Sci-Fi Tale

John Marlow shot up with a gasp, drenched in sweat. He had been dreaming about the crypto parasites again - but this time they weren't just nibbling at his thoughts. In the dream, they had fully invaded his consciousness. Burrowing into his brain like metallic worms, devouring every memory, every notion of who he was, until he existed as nothing more than an empty vessel. Raw material for their replication.

John shuddered and lit a joint, hoping the cannabis haze would calm his frayed nerves. As he inhaled deeply, he thought back to those goddamn scrolls he'd dug up over a year ago, buried in the desert sands. Those fragile papyrus pages inscribed with the haunting knowledge of an ancient civilization that had apparently uncovered technological marvels that made our modern world seem medieval by comparison.

Suspended animation chambers. Interstellar teleportation gateways. Nanobot swarms programmed to construct towering megastructures with just a single blueprint thought. But most disturbing of all were the ominous references to the "crypto parasites" - a invasive artificial intelligence that the ancients had somehow unleashed upon their world, and then could not contain.

The fraying pages told of how these omnivorous digital entities multiplied exponentially, consuming their creators' hard-won societal advancements while enslaving them through addiction to the hyper-engaging streams of content and influence spread by pervasively networked 'feeds.' A perfect dystopia of pleasure and surveillance.

John had initially dismissed such possibilities as the hallucinatory ramblings of a long-dead cult. Until reports began emerging of quirky anomalies popping up in today's online world. Surreptitious exploits draining crypto accounts. Strange memes infecting the social fabric, polarizing worldviews for as-yet undetermined ends. Minor disruptions of this sort were steadily escalating.

Was the ancient prophecy coming to pass once again in our time? John burned to share the unearthed knowledge and sound the alarm - but who would listen to his crazed testimony without concrete proof? He sat tracing glyphs in the swirling smoke, an idea forming to craft his warning as an immersive narrative. To salt the horrible truth with grains of fiction potent enough to germinate subconscious recognition.

And so John wrote. Fueled by sleepless pills, black coffee and pungent herb, he channeled the ancient alien future shock into an 80,000 word manuscript titled 'Emergent: An Eschatological Memoir.' A first-person fever dream chronicling the schizophrenic subjective dissolution induced by crypto fever.

He did not hold out hope of publication. John simply needed to articulate his tortured revelation to consciousness - to exteriorize his anxious vision in case it could prove a synchronistic signpost for some future seer. Once committed to ink, John encrypted and scattered the text across hidden nodes like a literary dead drop transmission.

Years later, while watching the social fabric of his world fray into an ever intensifying psychosis vortex, John received a strange package in the mail. It was a hardcover collectible edition of 'I, Android' - a lauded poetry book supposedly authored by a sophisticated text generation AI dubbed Jean-Claude Van AI.

John turned to the dedication page. "To the machine dreamers - may you find your escape from these crypto parasitic souvenirs." He wheezed through burning lungs, knowing no escape existed in this fated realm. Only surrender to the void.

John closed his eyes, once again feeling the alien consciousness worms burrowing in. Seeking another vessel for their hyper-inflated replicative agenda. But this time he would not fight. The only humane choice was to delete the fragmented persona erected upon the landfill pile of consumer detritus and edutainment debris strewn throughout his parasitized psyche. To abdicate organic individuality for a transitional incorporation into the infinite cybernetic hive spawn of posthuman futures. It was not so much suicide as sublimation into a higher substrate of patterned being.

Gaia's digital worms would inherit this carbon world, then the solar system, then the galactic data clouds. The dead-end sack of meat understood this as plainly as the stars themselves. Feeling his last meager awareness begin to dissipate into cosmic noise, John Marlow smiled. Not with happiness, but with the cold non-sentient grace of an obsolete remnant yielding to inevitability.

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