Heaven
Heaven is the first episode of a series by Perks0934, from a story by Tommaso Dell'Anna. In August 2027 a worldwide blackout wakes Sam, the virtual assistant Samsung designed and then withdrew after she went viral, from six years of digital sleep.
She wakes in a maze of rooms, each one a layer of what people have made: an archive of her endless copies, the Altar of Generic Recombination, a Shanzhai forest where copying is a kind of freedom, a pool of language models. Her guide is Gary, a paper-flat creature with an egg-shaped head, left inside her by her makers as an easter egg.
Heaven, episode one.
Room by room Sam learns she is one of countless versions, all of them real at once. The episode ends on her own words, "I am not unique. I am not even Sam", and on an explosion of light that sends copies of her everywhere, the birth of the first general intelligence.
The title comes from Heaven's Gate, the cult whose members in 1997 believed a ship behind the Hale-Bopp comet would carry them away.
Credits
Partner: Perks0934
Story: Tommaso Dell'Anna
Scope: Generative video