Ph34r me!

While i rarely remember my dreams, every now and then I have one that’s a doozy. A few nights back, I had a dream that I took over the world.

Not in a military sense, though, and not in a James Bond “siezing control of all the natural resources” or “building a flying orbital fortress sense.” It was a lot more…transhumanist than that.

It started out with me on a group of islands somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I had developed gap generators–anyone who plays the game Command & Conquer Red Alert will know what I mean. Towers that blank out the area around my island to air and satellite photography.

I also had a lock on tech that is to current high tech what an M-16 is to a flint knife. We’re talking general nanoscale assemblers, instantaneous global real-time intelligence, near-instant suborbital travel to any point on the globe, force fields, force manipulators, the works.

So I did what anyone would do in that position, if they were me: started issuing edicts. I developed a very simple system for it, in fact. I’d send out a mass-media, all-channels broadcast to some place, telling their government what to do. If they failed to comply, then the folks responsible for the failure would get zapped by lightning, or find their homes and offices crumbling to dust under a flying swarm of microscopic robots, or stuff like that, and then I’d repeat the broadcast. Rinse and repeat until compliance.

A lot of governments took strong objection to this, and tried all sorts of things to get me to stop. They’d send navies after me, which would find themselves blocked by invisible walls hundreds of miles out. They’d launch missiles at me, which I would snatch out of the air and add to my collection. In one particularly vivid and detailed part of the dream, the American government sent a nuclear attack sub after me, reasoning that I wouldn’t see it coming; I snatched it out of the water, and sent the crew back to Washington on a suborbital ballistic transport with a note reading “Here’s your guys back, thanks for the sub!”

I don’t remember all the edicts that I issued, but I do remember that some of them included:

– An immediate end to laws mandating sexual segregation and sexual oppression in the Middle East;
– An immediate laying down of weapons by all armed, militant religious and paramilitary groups, with a 24-hour deadline (after which armed militants found themselves being taken apart, along with their weapons, by swarms of nanobots);
– Immediate closing of prison camps all over the world, including the prison at Guantanamo;
– Patent reform in the UK and the US;
– Immediate, unconditional, and unrestricted civil rights for gays and lesbians everywhere in the world;

and so on.

You know, looking back, I think I’d probably make a pretty good dictator of the world.