We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?
Dynamics of Mind
Biogenetics
The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.
The Blessed Struggle
Information Networks
You ivory tower intellectuals must not lose touch with the world of industrial growth and hard currency. It is all very well and good to pursue these high-minded scientific theories, but research grants are expensive and you must justify your existence by providing not only knowledge, but concrete and profitable applications as well.
The Ethics of Greed
Applied Relativity
Our ancestors harnessed the power of a sun, and so again shall we.
The Science of Our Fathers
Fusion Power
As I stepped onto the Magtube, a thought struck me: Can there be friction where there is no substance? And can substance be tricked into hiding from itself?
Morgan Industries Researcher
Frictionless Surfaces
Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.
Looking God in the Eye
Polymorphic Software
Yes, yes, we've all heard the philosophers babble about "oneness" being "beautiful" and "holy". But let me tell you that {this} kind of oneness certainly isn't pretty and if you're not careful it will scare the bejeezus out of you.
MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview
Singularity Mechanics
Begin with a function of arbitrary complexity. Feed it values, "sense data". Then, take your result, square it, and feed it back into your original function, adding a new set of sense data. Continue to feed your results back into the original function ad infinitum. What do you have? The fundamental principle of human consciousness.
The Feedback Principle
Pre-Sentient Algorithms
If our society seems more nihilistic than that of previous eras, perhaps this is simply a sign of our maturity as a sentient species. As our collective consciousness expands beyond a crucial point, we are at last ready to accept life's fundamental truth: that life's only purpose is life itself.
Looking God in the Eye
Planetary Networks
We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding--the childhood, if you will--that has the most far-reaching repercussions.
Morgan Polysoft
Digital Sentience
There are only two ways in which we can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects: either experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible.
Critique of Pure Reason
Datalinks
Secrets of the Human Brain
You waited so long to heed us, earthdeirdre, Almost we pruned you, as we may yet prune your branches.
Conversations with Planet
Secrets of Alpha Centauri
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
The Sickness Unto Death
Datalinks
Secrets of Creation
Men in their arrogance claim to understand the nature of creation, and devise elaborate theories to describe its behavior. But always they discover in the end that God was quite a bit more clever than they thought.
We Must Dissent
Quantum Machinery
We have reached an informational threshold which can only be crossed by harnessing the speed of light directly. The quickest computations require the fastest possible particles moving along the shortest paths. Since the capability now exists to take our information directly from photons travelling molecular distances, the final act of the information revolution will soon be upon us.
For I Have Tasted The Fruit
Optical Computers
Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind. Have you drunk your fill?
Conversations with Planet
Epilogue
Transcendent Thought
To map the very stuff of life; to look into the genetic mirror and watch a million generations march past. That, friends, is both our curse and our proudest achievement. For it is in reaching to our beginnings that we begin to learn who we truly are.
Address to the Faculty
The Human Genome Project
What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output.
Essays on Mind and Matter
The Virtual World
As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
U.N. Declaration of Rights
The Planetary Datalinks
God does not play dice.
Datalinks
The Supercollider
The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.
The Father of Rocketry
Datalinks
The Theory of Everything
And the Lord said, "Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
Datalinks
The Universal Translator
Of course we'll bundle our MorganNet software with the new network nodes; our customers expect no less of us. We have never sought to become a monopoly. Our products are simply so good that no one feels the need to compete with us.
Morgan Data Systems press release
The Network Backbone
Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind.
We Must Dissent
The Self-Aware Colony
In one moment, Earth; in the next, Heaven.
For I Have Tasted The Fruit
The Space Elevator
What actually transpires beneath the veil of an event horizon? Decent people shouldn't think too much about that.
For I Have Tasted The Fruit
The Singularity Inductor
Imagine the entire contents of the planetary datalinks, the sum total of human knowledge, blasted into the Planetmind's fragile neural network with the full power of every reactor on the planet. Thousands of years of civilization compressed into a single searing burst of revelation. That is our last-ditch attempt to win humanity a reprieve from extinction at the hands of an awakening alien god.
Planet Speaks
The Voice of Planet
No longer mere earthbeings and planetbeings are we, but bright children of the stars! And together we shall dance in and out of ten billion years, celebrating the gift of consciousness until the stars themselves grow cold and weary, and our thoughts turn again to the beginning.
Conversations with Planet
The Ascent to Transcendence
I don't know but I've been told, Deirdre's got a Network Node. Likes to press the on-off switch, Dig that crazy Gaian witch!
Spartan Barracks March
Network Node
It will happen, and it will happen in our lifetimes. Fusion Power isn't just the future. Fusion Power is now.
Morgan Metagenics
Fusion Lab
Have you ever wondered why clouds behave in such familiar ways when each specimen is so unique? Or why the energy exchange market is so unpredictable? In the coming age we must develop and apply nonlinear mathematical models to real world phenomena. We shall seek, and find, the hidden fractal keys which can unravel the chaos around us.
University Commencement
Quantum Lab
Some civilian workers got in among the research patients today and became so hysterical I felt compelled to have them nerve stapled. The consequence, of course, will be another public relations nightmare, but I was severely shaken by the extent of their revulsion towards a project so vital to our survival.
The Personal Diaries
Research Hospital
It is a medical commonplace that the tissues of the human body replace themselves regularly, essentially creating an entirely new body every seven years. From whence then come cancer and the slow degeneration of age? They exist as faults in the patterns of intelligence within the genes themselves; by reprogramming these smallest parts, the whole becomes well.
Nonlinear Genetics
Nanohospital
Planet's Primary, Alpha Centauri A, blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely. Incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal river of wealth.
The Centauri Monopoly
Orbital Power Transmitter