The Quantum API

This is an idea for a story I thought of when I first began programming. Minor edits were made to enhance legibility of the core idea.

The Quantum API is a story that takes place in a world where the fundamental source of consciousness was discovered. As a result, people begin interfacing with devices not as extensions of their brain (as a neural-device would), but as extensions of their consciousness. The very act of using any quantum-powered device means extending your very essence to the device itself.

The means by which people connected to such devices was a decentralized protocol known as the Quantum API, or Q-API. Since the protocol is decentralized and open, developers from all around the world began collaborating with spiritual masters to develop interfaces that extend human consciousness into realms never before possible. The decentralized quantum protocol, running on terraqubits, hosts the collective consciousness of the world.

The story follows a hacker who begins meditating and discovers the true source of consciousness on his own. Compelled by the Quantum API, he digs into the protocol and the people behind it, and discovers a oversight in the system that threatens to split the collective consciousness of the world in two.

Consciousness in the Quantum API

Consciousness was derived from developments in the understanding of quantum physics, and its inherent properties pertaining to super positioning and probability. With qubits operating as single units of information in quantum computers, scientists discovered that intricate quantum entanglement networks could be orchestrated to create basic-forms of consciousness. In the scientists conclusion, consciousness was essentially probability itself.

As technology progressed and scientists understanding deepened, full-consciousness replication was made possible on local devices running on the Q-API. The fundamental unity of consciousness was now accessible to anyone in the world.

Social Impacts

Themes of divine inspiration can be explored, and how the collective “high” of the public consciousness existed for people to exist together in fundamental unity. Despite the spiritual breakthrough of the population, the ever longing search for the highs of spiritual enlightenment has people sucked away from the realities of life, yearning to be everything but themselves. With the collective loss of self (as the decentralists are searching for), the value system of the world is flipped upside down. Although an infinitely better world in principle, spiritual transcendence threatens to take humans away from their true selves. Will collective consciousness, or the rise of the individual win?