An ordinary man has everything a life should add up to, and something is still missing. With a machine wired into his mind, he climbs higher than almost anyone has, asking every being he meets the same two questions: what do you still want, and how do I reach it. A novella in nine chapters.
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The Summit Is The Ladder is a short novel in nine chapters, about an hour to read. It is fiction, part of the book AI Has No Morality. It Has Yours.
An ordinary man has everything a life should add up to. Work, people, money, a roof. Still something is missing, and he cannot name it. In his world everyone has a bead under the skull that links the mind to a machine holding everything anyone ever wrote down. The machine can give anyone calm in a breath, so almost no one trains the mind by hand anymore. He does. With the machine as his guide, he learns to climb inward, into states of mind an ordinary day never touches.
On each floor he meets a being far above him and asks the same two questions. What is the ultimate thing you still want? What must I do to reach it? A man who holds every road one life could take. A thing wired into every mind on earth. A table of gods, a king of the dead, a maker with four faces, and one who climbed to the highest seat there is. Every one of them still wants something.
The machine names what he sees on the lower floors. Higher up it strains, then goes quiet, because no one ever came back to write down what is there.
The machine guided every step and climbed none of them.
Forever in the wrong place is the longest thing there is.
The same ideas as fiction, shortest first.
A visitor travels a long way to ask a host how to forget a memory that will not fade. Over one cup of coffee they trace how machines and minds both learned to remember, and why teaching a machine to forget would be the worst thing we could do.
The making-of for the book's rooms, told as a party. Heracles, a diving woman, Arjuna, Data, WALL-E and a seated Buddha, all in one room, and then the real machine walks in. It can do every trick there and cannot want one thing. A footnote for every guest.
Seven people inside one war's kill chain. An analyst approving strikes from a hotel room, a commander sealed in a bunker, a girl whose mother points a satellite dish at the sky each night, a paratrooper waiting in line. Every system performs as designed.