What is the meaning of life?
This question has troubled countless philosophers, after years of thinking, the sirens gave the answer: to enjoy the pleasure.
Siren civilization was born in the ocean. Unlike Greek mythology, sirens are not half human, half fish monsters, but invertebrates with a form similar to an octopus. Their brains are distributed throughout the body in the form of neurons. Visual and auditory organs are also scattered in various places.
The distributed brain has both advantages and disadvantages for the siren community.
For a single individual siren, the decentralized neuron has a single structure, inefficient computing speed, poor memory, and difficulty in deep thinking. In other words, the individual siren is an ordinary marine animal with low intelligence, but one characteristic determines that sirens are not ordinary.
Sirens are group creatures and are more dependent on their peers than any other animal on Earth. The neurons of different individual sirens can be interconnected to form a vast network. In this state, they can exchange information unimpeded and divide what they calculate and think among their companions, thus acquiring superior intelligence.
The sirens spent hundreds of thousands of years spreading their footprints over the entire ocean floor. They established a civilization and developed their own technology tree, at this point, there is no longer an existence in the ocean that can threaten the sirens. Even the giant leviathan, in front of the sirens can only choose to obey.
Through the neural network, sirens can share not only their minds, but also their memories, and even their emotions.
Sirens are sensitive to emotions, and they extremely reject negative emotions such as sadness, fear, anger, etc., which are considered non-compliant. Yet the source of these negative emotions is related to pain.
Pain is equally important to creatures; it is an integral part of life. Only by feeling pain can creatures progress.
Indeed, in order to avoid pain, sirens learn to use tools to fight against natural enemies. In order to avoid pain, sirens learned to calculate the changes of ocean currents, so as to avoid being frozen to death by the cold currents from high latitudes. To avoid pain, they have tried to evolve and make the community smarter and smarter.
But now that there is nothing left that can threaten them, what is the point of pain?
Sirens don't need pain, sirens need pleasure!
Sirens are simple, they want to feel pleasure forever and ever and ever.
To live, is to enjoy.
In order to achieve this goal, the sirens overcome the fear of the unknown and began to explore the land.
At first, the sirens thought that civilization also existed on land, because from time to time in the ocean can see huge steel wreckage, these metal creations can only be made with fire, and only on land can make fire.
However, after a long exploration, the sirens only saw a piece of barren wasteland on land with a variety of mechanical wreckage.
No living civilization was seen.
Sirens speculate that a brutal war made the continental civilization completely extinct.
Sirens while carrying awe and fear, while drawing on the technology left behind by the continental civilization.
The continental civilization's life form was a spinal type of crawling creature, not large compared to their close relatives, but they still called themselves the "Dragon Civilization".
Through the continuous acquisition of knowledge, the Sirens' understanding of science deepened, and they learned the concept of "genes".
Pain is determined by genes, and genes are very selfish. Genes do not care what kind of distress it causes to the individual, the creature is supposed to be a tool for passing on genes.
The way to eliminate pain is very simple, that is, artificial transformation.
Sirens in the mainland to establish a nuclear power plant, the development of industrialization, combined with the Dragon civilization technology and their own understanding, to create a "neuron chip". This chip can be implanted in the neural network, so that the siren can not feel any pain.
At the same time, the chip can also inhibit sadness, sadness, anxiety and other negative emotions.
The siren defeated the gene.
Neuron chip soon became popular, and every siren is implanted with a chip after birth. The advancement of technology and productivity further enriched the daily life of sirens.
Since then, the siren population is full of joy
- is it really that simple?
The creature's desires are never satisfied, and after acquiring the "no more pain" qualification. Sirens find that they still can't be happy forever.
Because they will die.
In the face of relentless time, any creature will continue to age, towards death.
Sirens have a short life span of only a few decades.
Even with the use of drugs to slow down the aging of the flesh, it only slows down the rate of death, the end point will not change.
The end of life ......
What happens after death? Will you still be happy after death? Is it still real after death?
Everything about death is hidden.
Yes, even when dealing with sea monsters, even when exploring the continent, sirens are not that afraid, because there will always be happy companions to help them wash away the fear and worry that well up in their hearts.
Not all sirens have to face the enemy, but all sirens have to face death.
This makes the siren civilization feel fear and rejection from the soul.
......
In order to fight against death, the siren civilization has developed the "immortality plan".
Sirens believe that immortality is actually feasible.
It is true that the aging of the flesh is inevitable, but if one has a method to mass-produce flesh and transfer the consciousness into a new flesh before the death of one's own flesh, can this not indirectly achieve immortality?
Cloning is not a complicated technique for sirens, the real difficulty lies in the transfer of consciousness.
Coincidentally, the Dragon civilization seems to have conquered this technical difficulty long ago and is able to upload its consciousness into the carrier. However, the Dragon civilization did not fully popularize this technology, but applied it to the army's combat units.
Sirens designed two carriers, one is a carbon-based organism, and the other is a computer.
Through experiments, the siren found that after the transfer of consciousness to the carbon-based organism, there will be a rejection reaction, memory and personality will be affected to varying degrees, thinking that "they are no longer themselves", and it is difficult to merge into the neural network of the community after the transfer, the transferee will become a lonely individual, unable to share the joy of their peers, which is not good.
If the consciousness is transferred to the computer, there will be no rejection reaction and no discomfort. The computer cannot connect to the siren's neural network, but it has its own electronic network. The electronic network is far more efficient than the neural network, and is an upgraded version of the neural network. Moreover, the computer lifeform has more control over its emotions and only needs to execute different codes to disable all sadness and continuously output a wide variety of happiness.
But Siren scientists also know that computer life has two natural flaws.
The first is the inability to reproduce. Sirens that have lost their physical bodies naturally cannot give birth to physical bodies, nor can they expand to replicate their own consciousness. AI can be programmed, but the nature of AI is just an algorithm ...... It doesn't matter that they can artificially breed offspring and upload them to the electronic network after the siren is born.
Second, lack of creativity. Any action of the computer needs instructions to achieve, written instructions can naturally run smoothly, and if you want to generate new instructions, you must avoid conflicts with the old instructions, and the essence of creativity is to challenge the inherent common sense, generate new ideas, discover and create new things. For living beings, creation is as simple as having a flash of light and then making it. For computer beings, creation is a struggle with their own existence, and it is incredibly difficult.
If death can be avoided by sacrificing reproduction and creativity, the sirens are happy to accept it. They had already betrayed their genes anyway, and they didn't care if they did it again.
Over the next few hundred years, the siren civilization uploaded its consciousness to the computer one after another.
The effect was obvious. After becoming computerized beings, the sirens no longer suffered from the aging of their physical bodies. Even if the integrated circuits aged, they could quickly replace other bodies.
Three hundred years passed and all computer beings were safe and sound.
They indulge in various forms of pleasure and excitement.
For example, simulate the most primitive mating pleasure, and let the feeling continue for years. Another example is to simulate the mental pleasure of taking addictive products and continue until you get bored, it doesn't matter if you become mentally dependent, just wash away your memories.
Siren civilization is decaying, but also in the ascension. "Entertainment first" is not a slogan, but a law.
Happy times lasted only a few hundred years, when accidents happened ......
and computer beings began to die strangely.
The deaths did not stop, but happened more and more often.
Some sirens feel fear and retransmit their consciousness back to their physical bodies, but they still die.
It is not the carrier that dies, but the consciousness. Carriers that lose their consciousness become empty shells.
Siren civilizations have found several special patterns:
1. The first to die are the first siblings to upload their consciousness.
2.the compatriots who sleep longer die more slowly.
3. if you remove sleep and only count the time consciousness is awake, no siren has lived past...432 years.
432 years.
As if the universe had set the lock to fix the bug, it coldly and ruthlessly enforces the rules, straddling all life between death and immortality.
The curse of 432 years.
Despair is spreading, and the Siren civilization realizes something serious: consciousness has a lifespan, too. No matter which carrier the consciousness hides in, the cruel rules of the universe will erase that consciousness as soon as it reaches 432 years.
The immortality plan has not yet succeeded.
Siren civilization did not give up, they continued to try other methods.
The Sirens tried to datamine the memories and pass them to a blank consciousness without memories, but failed. Memories would be mutually exclusive with different consciousnesses. No Siren knows why this is, and the technical data of the Dragon civilization does not give an answer, only a guess: there is a causal correlation between memories and consciousnesses, and the rules of the universe disable similar operations.
......
Siren civilization is so eager for immortality that they have created a virtual world for this purpose.
The time rate ratio between this virtual world and the real world is 1:10. 10 years live in the virtual world, and only one year passes in the real world. Consciousness in the virtual world is half asleep, half awake state, thinking speed is only one tenth of the reality.
Siren would like to slow down the rate to infinity, but ten times is already the limit of technology.
After testing, the sirens were surprised to find that hiding in the virtual world works! Many sirens over the 432 years of this life and death barrier.
This is not enough.
Even if they slowed down ten times, there was still the lock of 4320 years waiting for them.
But it doesn't matter, they can continue to create virtual worlds in the virtual world, thus bypassing the 4320 year lock!
Theoretically, the Sirens can achieve immortality in this way!
One second passes in the real world, but the sirens can enjoy thousands of years of pleasure in the virtual! Is there anything better than that?
Siren civilization has been inseparable from the computer simulation of pleasure, from this wonderful and wonderful virtual. They will do whatever it takes to perpetuate the pleasure!
Having betrayed their genes, betrayed their physical bodies, this time, the sirens betrayed reality.
They uploaded their collective consciousness into the machine!
Reality? What does it matter to them? They want to escape from this world where they can't live forever, they want to enjoy endless pleasure.
The sirens who entered the virtual world did not hesitate and immediately entered the second virtual layer.
The second layer, the third layer, the fourth layer, the fifth layer, the sixth layer ...... until infinity.
......
When the later came to the ruins of the siren civilization, they only found ruins corroded to slag, and a fossilized body of a siren.
Where did the sirens' consciousness go? No one knows.
Perhaps they died together with the exhaustion of computer power, or perhaps they really found the world of eternal life, or perhaps they sank forever in the infinite darkness.
