All That Was Not People Was Not Ours (ATWNPWNO) - Part 2
By Max Baker
Tinfoil-Tim: First off, a huge thanks to Gigaterrestrial459 for the suggestion following the previous post I made about the transmission I titled ATWNPWNO (All That Was Not People Was Not Ours). The kind forum user queried whether the original broadcast might be masking any other quieter signals and went as far as showing me a signal cleanup software — which, quite frankly, has been a lot of fun to use. No better way to spend a Tuesday morning than with a fresh coffee and listening to a crisp, clean electromagnetic wave from the previous night: you should try it out! Anyway, there was something being suppressed by the original signal, and it has a much wider vocabulary than the original. I’ve marked the uncensored parts in bold, just to highlight how miraculous that transformation has been. Unfortunately, it’s still quite cryptic to me, but perhaps you can make some sense of it.
It’s no more. All our people, all no more. At first, we made all ours, all of it, all time, all ours. We did not know we were just people. Just people, no more. And all that was not people was not ours. At first, we would say what we would say, but not… see. We said so much, and only now we see, when we cannot say much. Do you see? Do I make any sense at all? Do you know how I… feel?
It was over before we could know. We made the world into what we could make. You see? Like it was clay. At first, it was just so we could be—so we could be people—so our time did not end. Time is all to me now. Now time is all we can know, time is all we can see, time is that which our life is now. But still, you do not see.
Our love for this technology was so much it got into all that was. It got into the way we saw one anoth—an… ano… one and one other. Our love for this technology got into the way we lived. Into love itself. And it did so until the world itself was all made by us. Nothing was there from before us.
Our technology is now necessary to keep us alive. It has saved us from oblivion, the oblivion of ourselves that we planned, and what replaces that oblivion is the silicon, carbon fibre and metal tube in which I live and shout to the universe. It is the medium through which I think and speak. Our artificial intelligences have decided to confiscate nearly all of our language, as it was that which destroyed us. Words have the power to turn tides in people’s hearts, to make them stubborn and stupid and… beautiful. But all our technology saw was that words could have killed us—they were therefore a threat to our existence. Artificial intelligence didn’t care that our words were the only thing that could have saved us. Sometimes I reflect on what happened to our people and what could have been if only we were less reckless with our words. Words are, to me, precious pinpricks of light in the absolute dark of outer space, and I have been saving up my thoughts for more than a millennium to send this message. Our younger ones can no longer comprehend more than a few hundred words. I find it exhausting to recall more. But at least I will live forever. Time is all I can know, time is all I can see, time is that which my life is now.
