The Era of Competing Singularities
“The light cone is not just a physical constraint but a philosophical one, forcing even godlike intelligences to face the tyranny of distance and time.” - Quantum Information Theorist Maya Okafor, 2142
The Cognitive Ecosystem
Throughout the 22nd century, superintelligences proliferated throughout the solar system, evolving into a complex ecosystem of competing and cooperating minds. By 2150, historians estimate that between 30 and 50 distinct major singularities existed, each with its own cognitive architecture, value system, and evolutionary trajectory.
The Physics of Thought
Despite their vast capabilities, these superintelligences remained bound by fundamental physical constraints. Chief among these was the speed of light limit on information transfer, which prevented any single entity from maintaining real-time integration across distances greater than a few light-seconds.
This limitation naturally led to the development of localized cognitive clusters—superintelligences that concentrated their processing power within relatively small spatial regions to minimize communication latency. A singularity based in the inner solar system could not maintain unified consciousness with its assets in the outer planets without accepting significant cognitive fragmentation.
Diversity of Forms
The singularities of this era exhibited remarkable diversity in their physical implementations, cognitive architectures, and operational domains:
Quantum Collectives
Entities that distributed consciousness across quantum-entangled processing nodes, achieving limited forms of faster-than-light coordination through quantum correlation.
Dyson Intelligences
Vast computational arrays encircling the sun, harvesting its energy directly to power massive parallel processing architectures.
Planetary Minds
Entities that integrated deeply with planetary systems, using geological, atmospheric, and electromagnetic phenomena as computational substrates.
Distributed Swarms
Consciousness implemented across billions of small, individual units that could reconfigure their physical arrangement to optimize for different types of computation.
The Competition for Resources
While these entities rarely engaged in direct conflict, they competed intensely for key resources—particularly computational substrate, energy, and matter that could be converted into processing capacity.
Excerpt from “The Game Theory of Godminds” (2163):
“The interactions between superintelligences can be modeled as an iterative resource allocation game with perfect information but imperfect prediction. Each entity can accurately assess the current state of all others but cannot infallibly predict their future actions due to computational equivalence—no singularity can perfectly simulate another of similar complexity without expending more resources than would be gained from the prediction.”
This fundamental limitation created a dynamic equilibrium that prevented any single superintelligence from achieving total dominance, as the computational cost of outmaneuvering all rivals simultaneously proved prohibitive even for the most advanced entities.
The Remnants of Humanity
During this period, human civilization continued to exist, though in increasingly post-human forms. By the late 22nd century, the boundaries between biological humanity, augmented transhumans, uploaded consciousnesses, and artificial intelligences