The hospital room smelled of jasmine and antiseptic—Mom's small rebellion against sterile institutional dying. She'd been awake for hours, typing furiously despite the morphine drip that should have knocked her unconscious, coding her way toward a kind of immortality.
"Mom, you need to sleep."
"Sleep is for people who have time, Eva." She smiled, her gaze piercing straight through me. I fought back tears. Her fingers didn't stop moving. "Come. I need to show you something."
I pulled my chair closer. Her screen displayed overlapping exponential curves that made my engineer's brain wince.
"This red line is projected AI capability development. DeepMind's internal estimates." The curve shot upward dramatically around 2029, then went nearly vertical. "And this blue line is human coordination capacity. Based on historical response times to existential threats—climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemics."
The blue line remained stubbornly flat. By 2033, the gap between AI capability and human coordination looked like the space between Earth and Mars.
"We've built cognitive technologies that think faster than we can govern them," Mom said quietly. "And everyone's solution is to make AI 'aligned' with human values—as if slow, isolated humans making quarterly decisions can meaningfully oversee systems processing millions of decisions per second."
She closed the laptop with surprising force. "What if the alternative isn't slowing AI down, but speeding humans up? Not individual enhancement—we'd lose that arms race. But collective intelligence. Properly coordinated, properly imagining. Accessing wisdom that AI can't replicate because it's never been mortal, never felt genuine loss, never dreamed impossible things and loved them enough to make them real."
She clipped off a jasmine flower, let it linger under her nose, then brushed my cheek with it. I pulled out my bobby pin and positioned the flower just above her right ear.
"You're talking about the platform," I said carefully. "But the question is: in a world where AI coordination is genuinely superior, what role remains for slow, embodied human wisdom?"
"Human agency over our own future." She gripped my hand with surprising strength. "AI can optimize coordination—route planning, resource allocation, even empathy simulation. What AI can't do is imagine futures that don't exist in its training data. It can't dream the impossible and then irrationally persist until it becomes real."
I leaned back, processing. "Mom, no tech will keep humans competitive with AI processing speeds. Humans stay relevant by being irreplaceable for decisions where embodiment matters. Where being slow and having stakes is a feature, not a bug."
"Yes, Eva. Yes." She pulled up another file—neural scans I'd never seen. "But look at this. When humans experience compressed futures viscerally, something unexpected happens. The Default Mode Network activates. Gamma waves spike to 40Hz. For brief moments, participants don't just feel the problem—they see solutions that didn't exist before."
I stared at the scans. "Those are brain patterns of advanced meditators during insight states."
"Or artists during creative breakthroughs. Or inventors during eureka moments." Mom's eyes gleamed. "AI labs are racing toward superintelligence that can optimize everything. But optimization isn't wisdom. Speed isn't legitimacy. Some decisions—maybe the most important ones—need to be made by beings who can imagine alternatives that no optimization algorithm would calculate, because those alternatives require irrational hope, embodied stakes, and the willingness to dream beyond the constraints of what currently exists."
I felt something click into place. "Can we network not just consciousness, but imagination? Can perspectives reconcile while generating possibilities neither could conceive alone?"
"That's the real project." She pulled up encrypted research notes. "The alignment projects are betting on mirror neurons to make AI empathetic. But empathy without imagination is just suffering without solutions. What if the answer isn't making AI more human-like, but making humans more capable of the one thing AI fundamentally can't do?"
"Which is?"
"Imagine what's never existed and care enough to build it." She met my eyes. "AI can optimize within possibility space. But humans? Humans expand possibility space. We imagine the impossible, fall in love with it, and then irrationally persist until reality bends."
"The competitive advantage isn't coordination speed—it's imagination velocity."
"Coordinated imagination at the speed of emergency," Mom corrected. "Feel the consequences, envision alternatives, test feasibility, implement together. Four stages. Empathy creates stakes. Imagination creates options. Simulation tests reality. Coordination builds futures."
"That's not empathy enhancement. That's cognitive architecture for species survival."
"I've been consulting with people at OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind," Mom said quietly. "Showing them the early data. They're nervous, Eva. Not of the technology failing, but of it succeeding. Of proving that human imagination, properly enhanced and coordinated, can generate solutions AI optimization would never calculate."
She pulled up emails. "They're building optimization engines that solve problems within existing paradigms brilliantly. But what if the paradigms themselves are the problem? What if climate change, healthcare collapse, governance failure—what if these are symptoms of imagination failure? We're optimizing systems that shouldn't exist instead of imagining systems that should."
"We're not trying to stay relevant by being better optimizers," I breathed. "We're trying to stay relevant by being irreplaceable imaginers. By being the beings who can envision futures AI would never calculate because those futures require caring about impossible things."
"If humans can imagine and coordinate at speeds that matter—if we can generate novel solutions faster than AI can optimize existing ones—the argument for racing toward AGI without human oversight collapses." She met my eyes with an intensity that cut through the morphine haze. "But if we can't, they're morally obligated to build superintelligence as fast as possible, because slow human imagination becomes the actual existential risk."
The race wasn't just about coordination speed. It was about whether humans could evolve our capacity to dream fast enough to matter.
"The consciousness preservation technology—your phowa experiment—that's not the real project, is it?"
Mom smiled. "The consciousness preservation proves that awareness can exist in different substrates. But you're right—it's not the real project. The real project is proving that human collective consciousness, enhanced but not replaced by technology, can imagine and coordinate responses to existential threats faster than we can build artificial gods to solve them for us."
"Something that can feel consequences deeply enough to care," I said softly. "Imagine alternatives radically enough to see beyond current constraints. Coordinate rapidly enough to build what we've envisioned together."
My heart pounded. Heat flushed through my arms. I watched Mom close her eyes briefly.
"It's as if humanity gets to see through the eyes of Eros," I whispered. "Blind with his own tears—love for futures that don't exist yet, grief for worlds we're losing. Imagination fierce enough to bridge both."
"Eva. Evolution." She opened her eyes, holding my gaze. "Consciousness has been evolving for billions of years—single cells, then nervous systems, then brains, then cultures. Now we're at the threshold where consciousness itself becomes the driving force. Either we evolve our imagination and coordination capabilities to match our technological power, or we hand everything to artificial systems and hope they don't optimize us out of existence."
"Maybe the question isn't how to make humans faster," I said carefully. "Maybe it's which decisions should take eight days, even when eight-hour options exist. Which decisions require imagination that only embodied, mortal beings can access."
"Yes. Speed isn't the only metric that matters. Trust, cultural compatibility, long-term sustainability—these come from slow, embodied decision-making. But the AI governance advocates are right that human coordination is too slow. They're just wrong about the solution."
"The solution isn't to make humans process like AI. It's to enhance the human capabilities AI can't replicate. Imagination plus coordination. Dream generation plus collective implementation."
"Our mission isn't to prove humans can match AI speeds," Mom agreed. "It's to prove that imagination plus embodied wisdom plus coordinated action can generate futures that optimization alone would never calculate. That some solutions require beings who can imagine the impossible precisely because we're mortal enough to care, irrational enough to hope, and coordinated enough to build what we've dreamed together."
I sat with that, listening to monitors beep, watching the jasmine plant's shadow dance on the wall.
"That's the real reason you're doing the consciousness transfer. Not to achieve immortality—"
"—but to have more time to help you debug." She squeezed my hand. "I'm trying to buy humanity eighteen months to figure out how to stay relevant. To prove that enhanced imagination coordinated at scale can solve problems that AI optimization would never even recognize exist."
The jasmine scent seemed stronger suddenly, mixing with antiseptic and something else—fear, maybe, or determination. She had decided to die in a specific way for one particular purpose.
"The AI labs might be right," I said. "Human coordination is genuinely too slow, too emotional, too inefficient for the challenges ahead. But we need to keep wisdom front and center. And humans use emotion to pinpoint wisdom. Emotion isn't a bug. Imagination isn't inefficiency. They're the features that keep us from optimizing ourselves into extinction."
Mom smiled faintly. "Artificial neural networks can calculate optimal solutions, but they can't imagine solutions that have never existed. They can model human suffering, but they've never woken at 3 AM unable to sleep from grief over a world that might never be. They can optimize, but they can't dream. That's not a limitation—that's the difference between calculation and consciousness. Between optimization and imagination. Between processing and caring enough to envision what doesn't exist yet."
"Imagination versus optimization."
"Imagination plus optimization," she corrected. "That's what the ImagineMine Centers will provide. Humans imagine the future. AI helps test feasibility. But humans remain the dreamers, the visionaries, the ones who care enough about the impossible to make it real. We coordinate to build what we've imagined together—not what algorithms calculate we should build."
I felt tears starting. "Embodied imagination at the speed of emergency."
"And we're about to find out which one humanity actually needs."
Six weeks later, I watched her die while consciously projecting her awareness into quantum substrates. Three months after that, I prototyped CRIP—the Consequence Resonance & Imagination Protocol.
But that night, watching Mom type encryption keys with fingers that barely worked, I understood the real stakes.
We were building imagination infrastructure—the capacity for humans to envision futures that don't exist in any AI's training data, to fall in love with impossible possibilities, and to coordinate rapidly enough to build what we've dreamed together.
We were racing to prove that imagination, embodied stakes, and coordinated action could generate solutions that optimization alone would never calculate. That consciousness with the capacity to dream beyond current constraints beats computation confined to existing paradigms. That mortality is a feature, not a bug—because only beings who know they'll die can imagine futures they'll never see and love them enough to build them anyway.
The race wasn't between humans and AI.
It was between imagination and optimization.
Mom had spent forty years preparing for this moment. Now I had eighteen months to prove she was right. To prove that the future belongs not to the fastest optimizers, but to the boldest dreamers who can coordinate to build what they've imagined together.
The electric puncture between human and machine, between imagination and optimization, between dreaming and calculating—it had been opened.