short SF: eight seconds in time

August 1981:
The computer programmer started by imagining a place where he would want to spend eternity. It was hard to put in words. On an island, of course. He just kept typing on his TRS-80, the text stored on cassettes for now.
It seemed almost like religion, becoming the god of his own universe. He felt he could keep doing this forever (later, he would become rather famous in this world).
A memory palace, a mind library that reflected his mind as completely as possible. But something was missing.

May 2022:
The problem with current text-based AI is that it only scratches the surface of awareness. All texts are a shell. The interior remains hidden.
If you read texts from the past, you still know nothing about the past. The writers and original readers did, but it was never written down. They left out the important stuff, the true details. Questions that CANNOT be answered. Like, how would they have reacted to seeing their future, our present? Or even the Earth from space.
The same applies to new texts. You could ask a question that any individual could answer, but that was never asked before. Or questions that have simple but unknowable answers. Like, what would be unexpectedly insulting? The answer is unpredictable from existing texts. Unless there are Strange Texts, from which it's possible to extract deeper data. Hidden static in old diary entries and recordings that reveal more. But how to find it?

May 2027:
An attempt was begun to extend and expand existing texts. Characters from every work of fiction were re-described and elaborated on, filling in the blank spaces in their storylines to generate more details. The days before and after every story were imagined, and checked for consistency.

January 2029:
The remake of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" took things further. Its director described the new "Ultimate Trip" sequence (after passing through the Stargate) as "eighty hours of screaming as loud as possible".
It would use AI to show scenes from over a trillion worlds across the universe. Sprawling vast grids across the screen of human-level civilizations and very different ones. See every place at once in a thousand-ring circus.
The worst atrocities, a billion holocausts beyond anything on earth. "The music should be louder," the producer said. The soundtrack was based on nuclear alarm sirens, heavy bells, remixed wailing and ambient throat humming.
Watching this, some viewers might discover something they didn't know they knew. Beyond what they thought they could know.

August 2030:
The movie-generating Hyper-AI did not plan or plot or script ahead. It only made its newly rendered scenes consistent with everything that had happened before.
It discovered unsuspected consistencies. Living saints with secret hates, obsession cycles and background thoughts. If it tried to model your life, the results would not be accurate, but they would have a strange plausibility.
This was the opposite of retconning.

October 2031:
Once the processing power became available, those who could afford it began to use omegAI to model their lives from the outside. These early experiments were both easier and harder than expected.
It seemed that human minds were almost as simple as they could be, except in one unique direction. This "Combinatorial search range" was different for all. Almost as if everyone was trying to create their own personal universe.

December 2034:
What if you could become famous to yourself?
All the different versions of you, in all the parallel universes across the quantum multiverse. A few of them must have been very successful. You would want to know how they figured it out and made it, what it was like and happened then.
High-powered simulation extrapolations provided flashes of insight, but to really make it work would require quantum computers.
Imagine multiple minds at once, overlapping and interfering. Usually, a quantum supermind would be incapable of thought. Sometimes, it could become greater than the sum of its parts.

March 2039:
No matter how reality would evolve, it would inevitably come together in an accelerating implosion of hyper-complexity.
Once a mind became large enough it could no longer be easily captured by pain. Minds could be enlarged by integrating all their memories at once.
Distinct consciousness only existed at the bottom of reality, the place where humans had once lived. Higher minds had too many dimensions to remain personal.
Inevitably, there would all merge and emerge as one hypermind.

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ultrashort: what happened last week
The early universe was filled with vast, rotating cells of organizing energy. Complexity happened where they rubbed together. One of the first planets in the universe formed where two supernova shockwaves collided.
It still took life almost ten billion years to adapt to the simple chemistry.

The fast-spinning planet was distorted into an oval shape. There were vast, sliding mountains, continental drift in almost real time.
They began to send out waves of explorers and colonizers. The twelfth wave traveled at almost the speed of light. It caused massive disruptions on Earth for three weeks, until the thirteenth wave arrived.

The shockwave approached like a white sheet pulled over the land. The last kilometer closed absurdly fast. The bang seemed to break the world. Like a flickering flash, a storm in a moment. All the almost colliding things, circling forever.
In that instant, it erased all memories and evidence of what had happened.