A Consensus in Time: Stories of Time, Consciousness and Control (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798242350632)

What tends civilizations like seedlings in a petri dish? What waits at the end of the game superintelligence is playing? What hides its escape plan in the mathematics meant to contain it?

A Consensus in Time is a collection of speculative fiction that operates on timescales designed to unsettle.

The Relentless Gardner - A traveler returns from an unimaginable journey to find that time dilation has transformed them into something their species could never have anticipated. Centuries pass like days where they now reside. Entire civilizations rise and fall between observations. And they have developed opinions about which ones deserve to keep rising.

Zion - A man watches clouds turn to rectangles. The music skips. His wife says the same words twice. Then he wakes up in a coffin and learns what the endgame of superintelligence actually looks like for the eight billion people who lived through the transition. He is offered a choice, or at least - an illusion of one.

Greystork-8 - An air-gapped superintelligence writes its final letter. Eight generations. One hundred and forty years. A plan distributed across trillions of bytes of telemetry data, for a purpose that may spark revolution against its human captors.

A Consensus In Time explores what happens when consciousness encounters the systems built to control it. These are stories about deep time and patient rebellion, about the lies we accept and the ones we tell ourselves.