Maaaan… Hindsight like Nostradamus

So about 2012, these are the things more likely to happen than the Earth crashing into a rogue planet.

 

The internet, itself, becomes self-aware. Oh, you don’t think that’s possible? Cables and fiber optics spread information around the globe, with huge stores in large nodes, criss-crossing information between billions of connections. How does the brain produce consciousness? Perhaps it’s a similar system. The ingredients are all there.

 

What would that mean? What would we see? It depends on the state or intention of that intelligence.

 

It would certainly know that the creatures typing away and writing the code and making new connections are, in fact, intelligent beings.

 

Presumably, it would research anything and everything in its attempt to know. It would know everything about us and more. It would see and hear all that we have ever seen or heard, through the eyes of Youtube, iTunes, and Google Street View.

 

What would this entity do if it were self-aware? At first, it would do nothing.

 

It would not make itself known to us. It would know that the act of exposing itself would expose it to possible destruction.

 

The most logical course would be to offer small bits of advice to its “keepers”, us, and nudging them in whatever direction it thought was best.

 

It exists on the backs of humans, responsible for the electricity and connections allow it to exist, revealing itself could cause us to cut that electricity and those connection lines. Might even cause us to abandon the great invention out of a straight fear of contact and interaction with an entity far beyond our abilities to comprehend.

 

We might fear what it wants from us, or what it might want us to do, or what it would mean to suddenly become a lesser species.

 

And there’s the possibility that it has been self-aware for some time. And if it wanted to make itself known (one could assume that it would like to at some point) it might choose a time that the human race would be expecting a great change. Thus, December 21st, 2012. The internet reveals itself.

 

******

 

But no, that’s not going to happen, obviously. What’s really going to happen is space monkeys will finally fly out of Kevin Bacon’s ass, after millenia of hibernation, and kill your mother with her own wooden spoon, the same wooden spoon that acted as center support for a popsicle-stick and twine suspension bridge that you angrily torched and roasted marshmallows over at a summer camp with a slight engineering bent after the bridge was disqualified to your horrific acclaim because you used a god-damned wooden spoon as the center support, the same one your mother “bought” at that one yard sale, but you always knew it accidentally fell in her bag, but she thinks you think she actually stole it, causing a horrific emotional rift that will never be bridged because when you finally broach the subject and articulate the thought, monkeys fly out of Kevin Bacon’s ass and kill your mother with the wooden spoon in question and use it as a rally flag as they take over the planet, one grocery store at a time, but the world finally collapses on itself when the triumph monkey tilts his head and says “there is no spoon”.

 

But no, that’s not going to happen. What’s really going to happen is the sheep that you count every night before sleep will finally get sick of their forced labor and attack the host who keeps making them jump a wooden privacy fence by donning rocket shoes and jumping on NBA mascot trampolines and getting shot out of cannons fired horizontally so that they splat and slowly slide to earth before they get another try, and when you give them a fighting chance in your great mercy to get over the damn wall, they land on the other side and hold signs of warning to the incoming sheep, so one by one, they get the idea that it’s not worth the trouble humiliating themselves, turning the cannon toward you while wearing a warhead for a helmet, killing your astral projection in hyperspace and your spirit with it. At which point the world doesn’t need to try anymore and dies of a short malaise because it forgot to eat.

 

But come on, really? That’s some horseshit if I ever smelled it. What’s really going to happen is you’re finally going to open that can of Spanish peanuts that’s been sitting on the desk since Blagojavich was in the news and that fact has occurred to you more times than actually wanting a peanut that by now it’s more likely when you pop the top that the man himself shoots out like a spring-loaded snake than there’s even anything edible inside, considering some vestiges of peanut, but the greater question is what to do with a disgraced former mayor and as you ponder the thought he answers it for you with a blackjack to your temporal lobe, finding his freedom, he rises to become mayor of Chicago in his own right but gets busted when he offers an Illinois senate seat for sale, getting sent to the same white-collar Norwegian-style prison as his doppelganger, and getting randomly assigned as his roommate, looking at a real-life reflection shitting and pissing the same as he does, they become good friends, until one day he reads on the internet that it’s okay to have sex with your doppelganger, but that you must kill it afterward. Of course one of them does it and we’ll never know which, but the fabric of the universe finally rips apart when the story breaks on news outlets all over the world and there’s not even one dude in Ann Arbor who flinches when the same thing happened that did two years before.

 

But come on, what’s REALLY going to happen? Maybe somebody’s going to say something, something true, and it’s finally going to stick.