People who see me try to disguise their horror, but in their fascination they ask me how I got this way.
“What way?” I ask, unaware of anything about my appearance that would beg such a question.
Clumps of grass, the people claimed, had grown thick across parts of my neck and face. Mushrooms were rooted on the back of my head. What looked to them like fingers had emerged from my chin and my hair had turned into something resembling thick pasta.
I look at the back of my head in what I find to be a surprisingly difficult to set up arrangement of mirrors. I think, this is a part of my body I almost never look at, like the bottom of my feet or my perinium. Thickets of mushrooms could thrive on the back of my head without my immediate knowledge. Tattoos burned into me while I slept or subtle satanic birthmarks could lurk on the bottoms of my feet, which already look like they belong to another creature besides myself.
But as I look in a mirror and see none of what the others described. I see graceless swaths of age and person I do not fully recognize, but I do not see grass or extra fingers. I imagine how useful it might be to have fingers or a hand directly under or on both sides of my mouth, but no amount of imagineering makes those fingers appear.
But everyone around me insists they see these things.
What if the people were advanced enough in the Singularity that they were seeing what others could not? If not the Singularity than some other elemental curtain they can open but others such as I cannot.
Everything is everywhere. If some random sound engineer at a community college recorded a performance of an obscure piano concerto in 1985 then it should be available to all who have an interest in it. Simple, right? But that would suggest that whoever possesses this recording had to make it available to the network, had to digitize or make available for digitization the reel to reel tape or whatever physical media on which it was recorded. Why cannot materials like this pass into global availability without the tedium and potential risks of encoding. The audio, present in the memory of the sound engineer who recorded it, should be available for direct transmission from the brain of this individual and onto the network. This is a promise of the Singularity, and while we are not there yet it seems inevitable to me that it will come to pass.
It is said that as little as four or five percent of content that is reachable through the public Internet is indexed by search engines. I find that hard to believe, and estimates seem to vary considerably, but I can certainly believe that oceans and galaxies of information are out there either languishing in unlinked-to obscurity or being hidden deliberately by entities such as myself, who for now at least has made this content invisible to the vacuum cleaners of commercial search robots.
