Green Horizon

 

By Brandon Johnson (World: Green)

Greetings from Green Horizon Station, a research and communications facility on Green Mountain run by the nonprofit Restoration Acceleration Consortium (RAC) based in the town of Evergreen. I am Station Research Coordinator Brandon Johnson.

Green Horizon is our equivalent of a Hikeyay test community and one of 56 that are distributed around the world. RAC’s mission is to develop means to rapidly restore and conserve natural habitat so that the global extinction rate can be reduced as much as possible. While this might help delay humanity’s demise, which many of us in RAC believe is imminent and unstoppable, our main focus is on the fates of other species and their abilities to change, and adapt to, the hellscape that ours is creating.

Like several of our stations, Green Horizon is home to 75 permanent residents who operate and maintain core infrastructure. Up to 50 more people intermittently visit during a typical year to perform specialized activities. Access and material flows are rigorously controlled to minimize the station’s ecological footprint and to ensure security of personnel and operations. The existence and use of the Interlink is the most closely held secret, known to only a few people, me included, based on affinity to the Mountain Sisterhood.

Analysis of our own situation has us considerably worried that revealing contact with other worlds (other than as a fictional narrative like this blog) could initiate attempts to control them, or worse, rather than peaceably learning from them. Those attempts would detract from, if not totally disable, the work that needs to be done to save our world and others. The activities of Sally the AI are particularly problematic in this regard, because her/its activities to expand the Interlink could possibly be interpreted as precursors to invasion if not direct efforts to control our world, triggering a defensive response with real, personal consequences. I mention this, not because we intend to cut off contact, but because this is a real threat that others might not have considered.

To the extent that we share a common nature, the success of Hikeyay in launching a global effort to confront its human extinction crisis provides a small but significant amount of hope that enough people can work together to avoid total catastrophe. We thank you for that and look forward to sharing what works and what doesn’t as we try to save those who cannot. 

Reality Check

Reminder: this is a fictional blog. There are no other (known) worlds communicating with each other. My intent - as with much of my writing - is to share my thoughts, speculation, and research about how we might understand and address the very real extinction crisis.

Considered but not included in this post is the following conceptual backstory of efforts by the fictional RAC. In reality, it is a summary of my recent research:

“Key to RAC’s mission is understanding what motivates living beings to take actions that benefit or harm themselves and others, beyond their basic biological imperatives. We have identified four types of interactions between individuals or groups of individuals, and between them and their environments. We call the types: isolation, competition, cooperation, and exploitation. Of these, exploitation most reliably increases extinction, especially when it involves creation and distribution of materials that can’t be processed in an ecosystem to support survival of its residents. Humans with our technologies are very effective at that kind of exploitation; and our societies tend to most reward people who enable it, because use of those materials allows them to maximize control over their own lives.”

Interlink

By Maura Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

Those of you who have read this blog’s archive already know quite a bit about me thanks to my husband Will, who has written extensively here about our world’s international effort to drastically reduce the threat of humanity going extinct. We’re still in the early stages of implementing our global strategy, which we are sharing in the hope that we can help you and you can help us to achieve this critical goal.

I want to brief you on what many call the Interlink, so we can all be on the same page about what it is, what it isn’t, and what it might become in the future. Most of you have communications networks that enable you to share information around the world. The Interlink enables communication between universes; but is much more limited than what you’re used to: capable of text, photos, and crude video at best.

 

“Interlink” and “Mountain Sisterhood” are terms that have been used interchangeably to describe this system. Actually, Mountain Sisterhood is the core part of the Interlink infrastructure that enables transmission of messages, with some encoding at both ends of the transmission. The rest of the Interlink interprets messages at both ends, making them readable in whatever formats are required. 

 

There is currently only one place in each world capable of using the Interlink: the mountain bunker where you are receiving this, under a community whose name is also used as the call sign for your world. In the absence of a community, the mountain’s name is used instead. The mountain was chosen because it is a “hotspot” that was created around 1920 when a dark matter collision with one world spawned several near-identical copies of that world, each in a parallel dimension that shares a common bubble of spacetime. The hotspot on each world is a node of a network of trans-dimensional tunnels, called “sisters,” that connect them all and allow a limited range of signals to traverse them. There is some evidence that other tunnels exist, but they are transient and not localized enough to be usable.

 

Our artificial intelligence creation Sally has mapped the network and, along with her other duties, has developed ways to modulate the signals to allow meaningful communication as the processing component of the Interlink. For the past three years, she has experimented with inserting parts of herself into the network and what she calls “jumping” into data processing components on different worlds and altering them to act as nodes of tunnels that mimic aspects of the transient ones which she is also attempting to map. When successful, she expects to enable communication on most worlds that will rival current global communication and require fewer resources in support of minimizing the extinction risk.

 

Reality Check

 

This post is pure fiction with questionable physics that explains the existence of multiple worlds and the means of communicating between them. At best, it describes how inhabitants of simulated worlds might perceive themselves and their interactions with limited knowledge of the essence of their reality.

 

From the perspective of my fiction, Maura is avoiding admission that she and her identical copies on other worlds are the naturally transient “sisters” and that their ability to communicate their thoughts is amplified in proximity to the mountain she mentioned (Colorado’s Green Mountain in our world) as well as Mauna Kea in Hawaii.