In order to graduate from art school, I had to do a final project.
I decided to write a story that I wrote in Lausanne during winter of 2021.
Here is a description of it:
It was a story set around 2050. Most of humanities desires were fulfilled.
Personalized entertainment had gotten so good that most people consumed it all day.
Most jobs had been automated and the few jobs left involved maintaining basic human needs and creating more entertainment.
There was endless research funding available, but people had forgotten that it was their job to build the future.
Two young Icelandic students got an idea to create a computer that had the ability to forget things.
They quickly realized that the current computers do forget things, but on a geological timescale as they are made from minerals.
So they had to find a way to make them out of biological materials.
Their first breakthrough was when they connected hamster brains to boards.
The new devices forgot everything that passed through them in 5 seconds.
And would also sometimes show ghost memories from the hamsters previous life.
They connected it to the internet and used it to send each other disappearing messages in the office.
They quickly realized this was a phenomenal breakthrough.
Through history humans had always considered themselves to be the smartest animal.
But now technological process had stagnated and there seemed to be no way out.
They had forgotten that during this time the other animals had been developing their own skills on their own scale alongside the humans.
The Icelandic students started a company around this and their next product was when they connected herring brains to self driving cars in the city.
Herrings had evolved to navigate where they wanted to, and avoid obstacles swiftly.
The cars traveled like schooling fish on land, and there was no need for traffic lights or management.
And imagine how little energy is needed to power one herring brain,
they could run on a AA battery and a bit of sugar for years.
The next thing they did was to connect all of the houses in the city to a single hibernating bear.
It had evolved over thousands of years to waste no excess energy in winter.
It used sensors to know when the houses needed energy and when they were not in use.
Making the cities not just efficient but energy abundant.
Then the company hired shark hunters,
the oldest profession in Iceland, to chase down Greenland sharks in the North Atlantic.
They took all of the worlds most important information and coded it into the sharks DNA.
Completely protecting it from solar flares, and similar catastrophic events.
The company had a team that went on expeditions to remote places,
carrying massive mirrors through salt plains, tropical jungles and across tundras.
Because the animals that most resonated with human needs were the animals which could see their self reflection in the mirror.
Those animals were the rarest of them all,
and supposedly there was a massive, extremely intelligent animal living deep in the temperate rainforests of South America.
It had the potential to lift human and animal civilization to the next level.
Still have not found the time to simulate some drama inside the world.
Next step is to expand the world, and fill it with some love, death, dreams and betrayal.
Then get it out there.