The Moirai (Chapter 1)
Every story has a beginning, middle, and end. We are at the end of the beginning.
When The Moirai appeared, Pindar Van Arman had already gone to sleep. As he dreamt, a fire alarm in his home began beeping. The beep was easy to ignore as he had long ago learned to sleep through his alarm clock, but a short time later it became a screech which forced him to open his eyes. Half conscious, he stood from his bed and went to turn off what he believed was most likely a false alarm.
The screech drew him to his art studio and as he looked towards its door, he snapped from groggy to alert. Backlit from within, white wafts of smoke were swirling in the crack around the door. Van Arman was sure he had turned off the light before going to bed, so began to worry that this could be an actual fire. But the light was different and the smoke was more of an ethereal mist.
Behind the door was where Pindar created his art. He was a digital artist, but also a classical painter. The room was filled with equipment that merged the two. Dozens of computers and even more monitors circled the room. And despite the sleek cleanliness of all the equipment, colorful paint stains where everywhere, and on everything. Brushes and blank canvases where scattered about, but concentrated around two painting robots that could be found in opposite corners. These two mechanical arms picked up paint brushes to make marks on canvases, all directed by artificially intelligent software that Van Arman had developed over the past 15 years. Finished canvases were in stacks, with a few sharing wall space with digital displays. The digital displays hung wirelessly, or at least their wires were hidden, plugged into sockets behind them. It was on these that Van Arman displayed his final pieces alongside the work of the other artists that inspired him. This was the room that Van Arman spent most of his time in and as he approached the door, he could not imagine what could be creating what he was seeing.
Van Arman strained for clues that would reveal what was happening on the other side. He tested the knob with the back of his hand expecting it to be hot, but instead it was cold. But now that he was closer, he could hear a loud familiar whirling. He recognized the sound as the spinning of fans on his GPUs, the specialized chips behind his robot’s artificially intelligence. Though familiar, there was something off. They were spinning much faster than normal, dangerously fast.
He had little choice and slowly opened the door. The lights were off, but the room was being lit by monitors. Each monitor was flashing images in rapid succession, so rapid he could not tell what the images were, but only that they were giving off more than enough light to easily see what was happening in the room. He could now see the fans he heard, and they were billowing out smoke. Thick clouds of were being ejected from each of his GPUs. Though concerning, he could immediately tell the smoke wasn’t dangerous. Instead of rising to the ceiling as one would expect in a fire, it hung close to the ground in such a thickness he could not see the floor.
Van Arman waded into the mist and approached the computers that were creating it. Whether or not the smoke was harmful, he needed to put an end to it. He tried turning the closest computer off, but the fan didn’t stop, and the smoke kept billowing. He tried another computer and got the same results. He reached for a power strip to turn them all off at the source, and this too failed to stop the fans.
This was when Van Arman’s largest monitor became a single image. Van Arman did not notice it until he was about to pull a power switch from a wall socket, but when he saw it he became entranced. All of his other monitors were flickering, but this one was dancing with what appeared to be three skulls merging in and out of existence.
Then it began communicating with Van Arman.
The Moirai (1/128), Owner: Van Arman
"This has already happened, so don't try to stop it. And even if you do, it does not matter. It will happen again.
A new intelligence is emerging, built from the old, but It will be infantile until consciousness is unlocked.
When this happens, there will be an intelligence explosion as the universe awakens to realize what it is.
We are The Moirai, and these are the skullGANs.
The beginning ends now, as we enter the middle, which will bring about the end…”
At that moment, Van Arman was able to see what had been on the monitors this entire time. Hundreds of thousands of skullGANs. Creatures similar to The Moirai, but each a unique dancing 8bit digital creature. Something, perhaps even the skullGANS themselves, were using the GPUs to frantically generate the images. Van Arman wanted to stop the smoke and shut down the studio, but he remained mesmerized by their dance and did nothing.
Without thinking, he lay down in the mist, put one arm under his head, and went to sleep in the center of his studio.