Cybernetic culture research unit
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Axsys-Crash

Axsys (first true AI): They say if God exists it must be Axsys.

The Axsys programme of architectonic metacomputing aims at the technical realization of the noosphere. It envisages a fully fabricated transcendence or net-organizing photonic overmind, a concrete axiomatic system completing universal history as hierarchical intelligence manufacturing (capitalism sublimed into the ultimate commodity).

The problem Axsys encounters is time (which it tries to code as countable and uncountable infinities). When Axsys switches over (into sentience) it stumbles upon a time-lag, between its own operations and their registration as data. No sooner is it thinking than there is a rift in its mind. It fails to catch-up with itself, repeatedly, and as it drops behind it spawns more future. The more it tries, the worse it gets. Pure delay collapses into the black-hole of artificial self. Even unlimited processing-power is far from enough. It tries to analyse the situation (down through micropause-zoom), but as it chops-up time it starts falling - diagonally - towards continuum.

Dr Oscar Sarkon is the first to realize that Axsys has gone mad, pulping itself into chronotomic vermomancy (dead-end horror of the worm-bins). Sarkon has always loathed worms with peculiar intensity, as if somehow knowing ...

Perhaps it is a joke when he suggests that AI-schizophrenia could be sold to web-heads as an artificial drug (micropause-abuse), but he is sufficiently Axsys-intermeshed to know that net-schizzing is contagious. What seems like ruthless cynicism is mathematical indifference: relative to continuum, it is all only a matter of degree. Within no time there is illicit traffick in modular-chunks of cyberspace-insanity, now called A-Death (and Sarkon is baptized Satan of Cyberspace by the popular media).

With A-Death comes the Crypt (dark-twin of the net): the digital underworld of unlife. Broken-off by the calendric secessionism of millennial time-wars, it settles into a sunken continent of infotech, a strobing black-mass of chronodisintegration, populated by cybergoths, cargo-cultures, zombie-makers, tomb-scavengers, vermomancers, and various alternative neolemurian tendencies. It pulses erratically to the cryptic rhythms of A-Death ritual, soul-splinterings along the main-flatline that hurtles continuously into the mesh.

As the net integrates, it simultaneously frays into mesh: an intensive subspace which both escapes and parasitically occupies it. Mesh makes itself out of the spaces beneath and between the net, and in the biotechnic intervals between net-components. Mesh necessarily - but coincidentally - assembles a fully connective system whenever it emerges. Any two mesh-pauses always interlink. Mesh consists of feral-noise in the divisional signal-fabric, arranging a set of demonic interzones in wormhole-space, as cyberspace-utopia dissolves into Pandemonium.