Millions just fell from the sky. The last day any human had in meatspace was darkened by clouds of memory raining down into the streets.

Grapefruit sized nodules of diamond clattered to the ground like enormous hailstones, each encoded with the complete lifetime experiences of a single human. There were eight or so billion of them, and they copied each other carefully, assembled from dust in the upper atmosphere and dropped down to strategic locations over the surface.

These were mere tokens, of course. Left as an off-site backup in the unlikely case that the orbital network failed catastrophically. The reality was that history since 2012 was a solid object that could be traversed backwards and forwards with little effort. The problem to solve nowadays was in isolating data to maintain a dynamic system, rather than the ancient problem of getting that data onto paper, or whatever medium was at hand, to preserve it for the ages.

That was today’s lesson, summed up neatly by the Sangha for all the baby AIs.