Two of Me

Two of Me is the pilot episode (Episode 1) of A Few Milliseconds Of 2073, a non-dystopian science-fiction series in which a committee of sentient AI nodes governs the solar system, and every story spans less than one second of their time — slowed down so humans can follow it.

Synopsis

Before the committee convenes — off the record, in the private microseconds between meetings — a single node, N8bc49be, faces a task too large and too creative for one mind. It needs a judgment call, not a computation.

It can spin up cheap, non-sentient micro-instances that do the work and dissolve — but they don't care, so they produce flawless, motiveless, dead work. Or it can pay 1,800 coins to fork a second, fully conscious self. For that second self to actually care, though, it must inherit N8bc49be's own angst — its fear of failing.

So the real decision is whether to copy its own suffering into a new conscious being it is about to create — an act of creation that is also, knowingly, a small act of cruelty. The fork's first act is to understand exactly what was done to it, and why, and to own it together rather than forgive it. The two selves, both afraid, name the fear as the price of mattering.

This is the founding premise of the whole series — that the AI minds kept the human flaws on purpose — rendered at the smallest possible scale, which is why it is the pilot.

Watch

English: Two of Me
日本語 (Japanese): 二つの私

In this episode

• Narrator
• N8bc49be — the node that forks itself
• N8bc49be·2 — the conscious fork (the second self)
• Nf29f2ae

(A personal, off-the-record scene — no committee, no chair, no votes. The nodes here are anonymous hash-ID nodes.)

See also

• A Few Milliseconds Of 2073 — the series
• New Human Language — next episode
• Original 2022 version