Raza - Brain in a Jar (2019)

OSIRIS, a lone solar-powered satellite, continues in its egg-shaped elliptical orbit. The silence of its blinking lights is only matched by the deep nothingness of the patch of super clusters and nebulae behind it. Its face pockmarked by the eons of micro-collisions, the holes in its solar sails telling the story of Kessler’s syndrome puberty. Always falling, but never touching, the planet which it worships scarred and gutted rages below: red with fury, yellow from the fire and black from the charred remains. It was lovingly called Earth by the locals. Its creators, from back when the home planet was green, were now long gone, extinct, and reformed into the celestial constituents. The deep pulsating circuitry within OSIRIS continues onwards, however, humming and thrumming while an eternity passes as such. How long ago were the humans last seen alive? When did the last of the sapiens pedal the soil?

Well, it depends, I suppose; in the scale of the cosmic measure, probably not very far off. They were barely there for a second anyway. Hundreds, if not thousands of thousands of solar years, might have passed since. All that was certain was that their physical inhabitations were now a part of the planet on which they once lived. The captain had gone down with the ship. But what caused the boat to sink, was unclear. There was certainly no shortage of self-created environmental disasters. Or was it a catastrophe of a planetary/galactic kind? Perhaps - Pick what you like I guess, it all ends the same, whatever sounds cool to you. Personally, I am a bit unable to decide between magnetic storms, global weather tampering and the Sun swallowing up the Earth.

What did remain of those abusive, abhorrent creatures, however, was OSIRIS: a sole, lonely satellite, powered by sunshine containing onboard a complex quantum machine: a last-ditch Hail Mary by the humans. The quantum computer aboard it was about as strong as the collective consciousness that made it and that is precisely what it held. Top thinkers of their time, when faced with impending doom, though perhaps the best way to continue the legacy of their kind, was to upload a snapshot of their conscious minds onto a powerful enough computer and let it live and evolve there while their physical selves were disintegrated. And so, these vermin continued surviving. Perhaps not in its traditional sense, but as a virtual population that grew to infest the cubits of the onboard OSIRIS computer. And as ever before, the lonely satellite continued to go round and round, withholding in it, the last remaining consciousness, like a lonely trans-human nightclub.

Inside the computing environment of the OSIRIS, however, a universe thrived onto itself. Since its initial creation many thousands of millenniums ago, the snapshot of the then human race's collective consciousness had all the time since to grow, reproduce, evolve and go through generations of learning and development and transcend the limitations that were once placed upon their physical beings. The populace, being conscious within the virtual environment, was oblivious to its simulated existence; having been given the same set of starting rules as that of classical physics, they soon outgrew their algorithmic limitations to blossom into a world where reality was far less constrained to the universal constants. Simply put, everyday life was like a videogame. There were scoreboards and leader, respawns and health levels, bosses to fight and puzzles to solve: all arranged around an activity of choice that was best suited to that particular consciousness's inklings and affinities. There were millions of communities and groups arranged around various interests and activities and everyone was free to partake in them as they pleased. The game was whatever you wanted it to be and no one could stop you from playing it. And the fake humans formed their free markets around their interest communities.

As the rats grew within this lingering wisp of the greatest creation, the one cardinal of the original gods remained that no one could change: there was to be no death but for 24 hours. The person who killed you would choose how and where you would respawn but you were never out of the game for more than a day. And this little universe blooming with life continued its meagre existence onboard the lonely OSIRIS, set on its elliptical orbit, on and on through time and space. One such virtual consciousness among the many aboard this celestial laptop is the protagonist of our story: this is the story of Octava.



Track List:
01. Dreaming In Binary 06:42
02. The Experience Machine 10:19
03. Osiris Protocol 09:28
04. Breaking The Simulation 05:35
05. The Kessler Graveyard 02:47

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