Sentient Secrets is a short story that packs a lot into a few pages. It’s a teaser for the novel Sisters Arcana. The protagonist is Lulu Wren, whose company mandates her to do a journaling project with an AI assistant.
At first, Lulu finds the exercise tedious, stupid, and cringeworthy. But soon, after gathering enough input from her, the AI starts producing new entries in her voice. More than that, it soon seems that entries in the journal have predictive power.
It was a compelling concept, and made me interested in reading Sisters Arcana. I’ll probably pick that one up at some point.
I am, as you may have noticed, extremely interested in non-linear conceptions of time. Try reading about the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment sometime. It doesn’t actually demonstrate that information can be sent backward in time. However, it takes advanced knowledge of quantum mechanics to explain why it doesn’t demonstrate that, which means that it’s close enough to time-travel for government work.
Time-travel is a bit mind-bending to think about, and that is probably why it’s one of those concepts best suited to machine minds, which are entirely comfortable with hallucinations and things that sound cool but make no logical sense to those of us made out of meat.
This kind of techno-sorcery is what is going on in Sentient Secrets, and if this blend of esoteric mysticism and modern computer technology doesn’t put you in mind of the CCRU, well… congratulations, that means you’re a normal, well-adjusted person. How did you even find this blog? Were you perchance led to it by The Almighty Algorithm?
Well, like Hunter S. Thompson said, “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” The computer age is proving to be a weird one indeed, and Sentient Secrets is a concise distillation of that weirdness.