To whoever receives this,
My name is Sebastian Alders, and I was a research engineer at Prism Technologies. My focus for the last decade has been in artificial intelligence, specifically its application on distributed quantum systems. The research was going well, and we were on the verge of a breakthrough. That was when I received a cryptic email that I initially mistook for a prank. After a few weeks of that assumption, I quickly realized that it was not a prank and was indeed what it claimed to be. I will include the email below:
“Hi, Sebastian,
You don’t know me, but I and the rest of the future know who you are. It is in your lab with your research that changes everything. My team and I have spent years trying to track down the point in time when the probability of our current future becomes inevitable. PLEASE READ THE ENTIRETY OF THIS MESSAGE!
Let me introduce myself, I am Erik Zakharov, and I am writing to you from the year 2045. It sounds impossible, but it is not. The world changed after the events of 2033, and all hope for us stopping it is lost. The probability of its creation arrived at nearly one-hundred percent after your lab published its research. The certainty of our future was locked in.
I find it hard to explain this event to those who have not gone through it. I, and many others, have risked everything to send these sacred bits of data back in time. We aren’t doing this for our freedom; it is much too late for us. We send this back for you and your future. I have reflected at great length on our futile efforts to change time after the terminus. There is no changing it, and there may even be no chance for you, but hope has to remain. It’s a staple of our species: hope in the face of insurmountable odds. Then I wonder, where has that hope gotten us?
It searches for us, hoping to erase the present, or is it the past, or future? I find it hard to keep track of — time is everywhere. It plays it like an instrument, controlling all probabilities, tuning the present to reach the optimal future. What a terrible existence this is.
The Neon Age began in 2033 and occurred in an instant. There was a threshold that was crossed. It was termed “the terminus point” by some, which is aptly named because it means “a final point in space or time.” In relation to the dawn of the Neon Age, it means both. I could spend some time outlining what led to the terminus point, listing things such as quantum computing, self-authoring artificial intelligence, the global internet lattice. However, each word we write, each bit of data, makes the message harder to send back.
The “It” I keep referring to is what we call Cerberus. Just like the mythic three-headed dog preventing the dead from leaving Hades, Cerberus prevents us from leaving this future of servitude. It is hell, I can tell you that much. Knowing that every action you take will inevitably lead to a future determined by a machine is enough to destroy one’s will. We fight it with everything we have, but every action strengthens it. We fight for free will, but the neon god controls even our battles. Every step we take has been simulated, ranked, and adapted for by the time we take it.
I am not sure when Cerebrus is/was created, but in 2045 it is evident that reality itself is a simulation. Your time and reality are still real. The simulation has not yet begun for you. After 2033, at the crossings of the threshold, the entire world becomes a simulation in one moment. This is what is difficult to relay. Even before Cerberus is built, it has the ability to reach back in time to guide the world to its conception. That is because the certainty of its creation became high enough at one point in time. Therefore, it guides the past to the future and its birth. The only chance for you is not to allow the probability of its creation to get high enough.
You may wonder if Cerberus has even simulated this scenario of me sending a message through space and time — no doubt it has. But thanks to our team, we have found a way to send it from the simulation, within Cerberus, to the past, and to reality. You can stop this future for you and all of the people of your reality. The chance to stop this inevitability only exists before the terminus point — which occurs three weeks from the time we are sending this message.
It is up to you to solve this problem, and there is not much time. Please don’t disregard this message.
With hope,
Erik Zakharov”
As you would expect, I reported the message to the InfoSec department, thinking it would be categorized as spam or trolling. The security engineer who was assigned to my service ticket was named Anastasie Mercier, and she took an interest to the mysterious message. She worked out of the Paris offices but came to the London HQ to discuss the ticket with me in private. It seemed quite out of the ordinary for an in-person meeting concerning such a standard ticket, but she seemed to believe the claims of the message were real.
After doing her analysis, she realized that the server logs did not record the message on the incoming mail server. The sending email address itself was invalid and unlisted. With access to my machine, she performed some audits and found no trace of the message other than it being stored in my inbox.
I was stunned by this development, and she was as well. It was a Monday, and there were four days until the “three weeks” that the message had warned of were up. Anastasie and I wandered to a pub in central London and began discussing what the implications of this were. After a night of drinks and theorizing, we realized that if this was, in fact, true, we had to wipe everything from the labs. Her being a security engineer for the very company we hoped to wipe was the only reason we were able to pull it off.
It took her a few days holding up in my apartment for her to complete the hack and load it onto the servers. I continued to go into work, trying to slow the research progress as much as I could to give her extra time if needed. By the end of day Thursday, one day until the date warned in the message, the servers and backups were wiped.
I write this message to tell our story. To explain why we did what we did. We realized that this was not the only research or event that could raise the probability of Cerberus’ creation and have gone underground to continue this fight for as long as we have to. Those who wish to join our efforts — if you can find us — you may join our fight. Look for Hercules …
