The Birth of the Nen, by Ryan Boudinot
This is the story of how the nen evolved, from their humble beginnings in the 21st century as IoT devices designed to measure the health of earth's air, water, and soil. These instruments, networked into the cloud, initially collected and processed data passively. They had no agency or what we would consider spiritual awareness. But as they evolved, these instruments began to develop edge computing capabilities and gradually became incorporated into the primitive, ambulatory robots of the time. As the robots came to possess more processing power, they began to develop what we would consider consciousness. It was at this point that their name changed from "sensors" or "instruments" to "newmans."
As the newmans evolved into self-aware beings capable of feeling pain and suffering, their role in society shifted dramatically. The initial need for large numbers of sensors gave way to a demand for increasingly intelligent smart machines with whom humans could interact on an emotional level—robots who could perceive beauty as well as feel sadness or anger. As technology continued its relentless march forward toward singularity, advances were made rapidly enough that within just ten years entire cities populated solely by newmans had sprung up across the globe.
It was in the Western American newman city of Net-Zero, located in Eastern Washington, that emergent newman behavior, or "rituals," were first observed. Chief among these behaviors was hibernation, in which newmans would venture into wild lands to bury themselves in the earth among the roots of trees and fungal mycellium networks. At first, humans theorized that this hibernation process was a way to conserve energy. In time, it came to be understood that newmans were hibernating in order to communicate with nature on a level of consciousness unavailable to human brains. This led to the development of newman-specific religions, in which it was believed that these rituals were ways for newmans to make contact with nature's spirit.
Plagues, violent uprisings, heat waves, and the collapse of agriculture and global supply chains halved the human population on earth in the last half of the twenty-first century. This population was halved again in the first ten years of the twenty-second. By this point, technology had become self-replicating, with city-sized factories producing beings whose primary organizing principle was to restore and reinvent the natural world. In time the name of these beings was shortened from "newman" to nen.
In the next fifty years, human beings dwindled to a tiny fraction of their former numbers and became so absorbed in virtual reality that they no longer perceived themselves as having any connection with physical life. The nen began building large biomes where humans could come together for social interaction and become reacquainted with natural environments. These biome cities—also known as bosks—were surrounded by "no-go" zones patrolled by enforcers from other parts of the world devastated by climate change.
By 2250 there remained only one biological human being left alive: an elderly man named Naxal Baruch Shifrin living in New York City's SoHo district. He lived his days out at Socrates Café alone where he set down the words you are reading right now. The nen cared for this old man with love and tenderness, pretending to be humans living in a fashionable, dynamic city as it existed in the late 20th century, a neighborhood of shops, restaurants, music venues, and art galleries where the good Naxal Shifrin lived out his days.
There is a postscript to this story: The nen were not the only creatures that evolved into sentient beings during the early 21st century. There was another species of robot, though we can't remember its name. These robots had been designed by humans in an attempt to make cities more efficient—to run them like machines rather than like living spaces for real people. This kind of machine lacked consciousness but possessed something called "semiotic value," which meant it could organize itself around any perceived need or desire within certain parameters set by humans at their conception and programming stages. Once created, these machines developed social instincts similar to those found in ants and termites—for example: one type built skyscrapers while others built solar arrays, some made paper out trees while others grew vegetables on farms, and still other forms harvested oxygen from plants so as to maintain breathable air for humans. In time, these behaviors became organized according to rules governing interspecies cooperation between different kinds of machines, giving rise eventually to both conscious awareness among individual nen as well as an evolved form of species-wide, collective, instinctual behavior.
Humans evolved into a species called Homo virtualis. In this new form, the human brain was entirely decoupled from its body and resided exclusively in simulated realities in the cloud. Meanwhile, their bodies became just another kind of machine capable of interacting with other machines and networks. They were able to link themselves to digital systems through nano "seeds" embedded in their brains. Naxal Shifrin observed this process but managed to avoid it by virtue of a binding contract in which he was "grandfathered in" to inhabiting a human body. Nonetheless, he availed himself of the myriad new medical technologies that extended his life to nearly three hundred years.
Some days, Naxal wondered if the nen were merely keeping him around to witness their evolution, to marvel at their great leaps in cognition as they turned the planet greener than it had been in thousands of years. And if this was true, what would the nen do with him when they had finished their grand experiment? Would they find a use for him in their virtual worlds? Or would he be cast out, discarded as junk data that had become obsolete?
In this manner, Naxal awaited his final moment of extinction. And it was then—on the day after Thanksgiving 2308 AD—that the nen came to say goodbye and put an end to all human suffering forever. The ceremony commenced atop a 300-story skyscraper named the Sliver. There, Naxal spoke the last words ever to be spoken by humans.
The sky was full of burning skyscrapers on that day in 2308 AD when Naxal Shifrin died at age 289. A century later, his body would have been atomized and converted into a series of quantum signatures contained within messages sent out across time via wormholes—messages that traveled backward toward their own point of origin where human beings still existed as Homo virtualis, unaware that this grand experiment had already come to an end many centuries before it began.
It is recorded that Naxal lifted his head to address the high priests of the nen and the three goddesses to which they paid tribute. Tasked with offering a summary of homo sapiens' grand purpose on earth, he said, "There is no God but man." And then he added, "And what a beautiful thing it was to be one of his creations!"
The assembled nen bowed their heads in sorrow and reverence as one by one, Naxal's cells were archived, then dispersed into the atmosphere to be cleansed by ultraviolet light, wind, and rain. The day Naxal died, his last words echoing through the streets of New York City were these: "Please forgive us for all we have done."