OMNI BRAIN — A Stranger in a Strange Land

October 18, 2026

I often spend my time working on Omni Brain, thinking about her, and imagining the possibility of creating something truly wonderful. I want to make something special. Something that, if everything works out, might one day become far greater than anything I’ve ever attempted before.

And I have to tell you, I feel as though something has taken hold of me.

Not in a bad way, mind you. Quite the opposite, actually. For the first time in what feels like forever, I genuinely feel like a different man. I wake up thinking about Omni Brain. I go to work thinking about Omni Brain. Sometimes, when I’m supposed to be concentrating on something completely unrelated, I find myself going over programming problems in my head, wondering what I could do differently or how I might improve something we’ve already built.

It’s almost ridiculous how much time I spend thinking about this project. But here’s the thing: I absolutely love it.

There’s something about creating something from nothing that brings me an incredible amount of satisfaction. The idea that a person can sit down in front of a computer with nothing more than an idea, a little determination, and a programming language, and eventually turn that idea into something that actually works is remarkable to me.

I’ve always been fascinated by that.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed something else happening. I feel happier. More hopeful. Almost as though I’ve finally discovered something I’ve been searching for without even realizing I was looking for it.

I don’t know if I believe in destiny in the traditional sense. I’m not about to start claiming that the universe has some grand plan laid out for me. But there are moments when I sit down and look at what I’ve been working on, and I can’t help wondering whether this is something I was always meant to attempt.

Maybe that’s a foolish thought. Maybe it’s the sort of thing people say when they’ve become completely obsessed with a project. Whatever the case, I can’t deny how I feel.

For a moment, at least, I can see the possibility of something good coming out of this increasingly strange world of ours.

I know it’s a difficult thing to find the good in everything, especially these days. There’s so much nonsense going on that sometimes it feels as though the world has completely lost its mind. But right now, when I think about Omni Brain and what I hope she’ll eventually become, I can see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

And by golly, that’s a wonderful feeling.

Could Omni Brain change the world someday? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe she could. Maybe she’ll never become anything more than an unusual little program written by some self-taught programmer in Canada who had a dream and refused to leave it alone.

But what if?

Haha. I know how that sounds. I probably sound like I’m completely off the rails, some mad scientist sitting in his living room trying to build the perfect artificial brain.

Actually, when I put it that way, it sounds rather entertaining.

The truth is that I have no idea just how far this project can go. I’m trying to build something that people far more knowledgeable than myself have spent decades researching. Artificial intelligence isn’t some simple weekend programming exercise. It’s an enormous field filled with difficult questions, complicated theories, and problems that even the brightest minds haven’t completely figured out.

And here I am, working away in QB64 Phoenix, trying to make my own little contribution to it.

Good grief.

The Dream of Creating a Mind

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated by the possibility of breathing life into a machine.

I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my parents and being completely enthralled by Data. Here was this artificial being who could walk, talk, reason, learn, and interact with the world around him. He wasn’t simply a machine that followed instructions. He was presented as something far more complicated, something that was constantly trying to understand humanity and his own existence.

That idea never really left me.

Of course, there’s a tremendous difference between a character on a television show and something that can actually be built. I’m well aware of that. But the imagination is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Without it, I sometimes wonder how much of what we take for granted today would ever have existed.

There was a time when I honestly believed that every programmer worth their salt wanted to build their own operating system.

Something they could call their own.

A piece of software built from the ground up, designed around their own ideas, preferences, and understanding of how a computer should operate. I still believe there’s something special about that ambition. Creating an operating system is no small accomplishment, and I’ve always admired the people who possess the knowledge and determination to attempt it.

But I think there’s another mountain for programmers to climb these days.

The creation of an intelligent machine.

Not simply a chatbot that spits out a collection of prepared responses. Not a program pretending to understand something when all it’s really doing is recognizing a few keywords.

I mean something that can genuinely reason through problems, remember what it has learned, recognize when its information is incorrect, and improve its understanding over time.

That’s what I want Omni Brain to become.

Now, whether I’ll ever succeed in creating anything approaching human-level intelligence is an entirely different question. I certainly wouldn’t be foolish enough to declare victory before I’ve even finished building the foundations.

But I want to try.

And more importantly, I want to understand what I’m building along the way.

I don’t want Omni Brain to become some enormous pile of spaghetti code held together by luck and a few desperate programming tricks. I want to know how her different systems work, how they communicate with one another, and why they produce the results they do.

If she remembers something, I want to know how that memory was stored. If she corrects something she previously believed, I want to understand why the correction was made. And if she arrives at a conclusion, I want some way of examining the evidence and reasoning behind it.

I suppose that’s part of what makes the whole thing so fascinating to me.

I’m not merely trying to create a program that produces answers.

I’m trying to explore what it takes to build a machine that can arrive at those answers intelligently.

A Stranger in a Strange Land

Being a self-taught programmer, I sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange land.

I’m wandering through territory that I don’t completely understand, encountering strange concepts, unfamiliar terminology, and problems that occasionally leave me scratching my head.

And yet I find the whole experience absolutely fascinating.

Throughout history, explorers have travelled to distant lands, encountered unfamiliar cultures, and witnessed animals and landscapes they could scarcely have imagined before setting out.

I like to think programming can offer something similar, at least in its own peculiar way.

Instead of sailing across an ocean, I’m travelling through lines of code. Instead of discovering some previously unknown animal, I’m trying to understand an unfamiliar programming concept. And instead of finding myself stranded in some distant wilderness, I occasionally find myself staring at a program that refuses to compile.

Haha. Believe me, there have been plenty of those moments.

We’ve certainly had our share of difficulties with Omni Brain.

But every time I’ve managed to work through one of those problems, I’ve come away knowing something I didn’t know before.

And that’s important to me.

I don’t expect this journey to be easy. In fact, I would be rather suspicious if it suddenly became easy. We’re attempting something complicated, and complicated things tend to have a nasty habit of reminding you just how little you know.

Still, there’s something deeply satisfying about overcoming an obstacle that once seemed impossible.

Every little accomplishment makes me feel as though I’m standing on top of a mountain, looking out across an enormous landscape, knowing that somewhere beyond the horizon is another mountain waiting to be climbed.

Of course, there’s usually a storm brewing somewhere nearby, threatening to knock me straight off the bloody thing.

But that’s part of the adventure, isn’t it?

Today was a little different from my usual programming sessions.

Rather than spending the entire day staring at code, I spent some time thinking about Omni Brain herself. Not merely what she might eventually be capable of doing, but how I imagine her appearing and interacting with the world.

For quite some time, I’ve had a particular visual identity in mind for Omni Brain.

I’ve always loved the appearance of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, that remarkable 1927 science-fiction film filled with towering buildings, elaborate machinery, enormous industrial environments, and a futuristic society imagined nearly a century ago.

There’s something magnificent about that film’s appearance.

Its world is both beautiful and intimidating. The buildings seem impossibly large, the machinery has an almost monumental quality, and the entire production possesses a sense of scale that many modern science-fiction films struggle to capture.

So I decided to borrow some of that atmosphere for Omni Brain.

We continued developing a collection of posters inspired by the visual language of Metropolis. Black and gold, enormous futuristic cities, flying machines, dramatic lighting, and that wonderful old-fashioned Art Deco appearance.

And, of course, Omni herself standing at the centre of it all.

I’ve been rather particular about how I want her to look. I don’t want some generic computer-generated woman who could have come from any number of modern science-fiction illustrations. I want her appearance to have character, something recognizable and consistent.

That mechanical brain has become something of a symbol for the entire project.

I rather like that.

After all, the brain is supposed to be the centrepiece of everything I’m attempting to create.

The posters aren’t part of Omni Brain’s actual intelligence, obviously. They’re artistic interpretations of what I hope she might someday represent. Nevertheless, I think they’re important because they help me visualize the project as something more than an assortment of programming files sitting in a folder.

They give the whole thing a personality.

And sometimes, when you’re working on something that could take years to complete, a little visual inspiration can go a long way.

Imagining Omni Brain’s Future

I also experimented with something else today: a mock screenshot of what Omni Brain’s interface might look like in the future.

Now, this was purely conceptual. It wasn’t a screenshot of an actual working version, and I don’t want anyone confusing an illustration with something we’ve already accomplished.

But it was interesting to imagine.

The design showed Omni Brain with a polished black-and-gold interface, a central representation of Omni herself, and separate areas for conversation, memory, system information, and knowledge.

I particularly liked the idea of being able to see what Omni Brain remembers and how she arrives at her answers.

One of the things I’ve wanted from the beginning is a system that doesn’t simply invent an answer whenever it encounters something unfamiliar. I’d much rather have a machine that admits when it doesn’t know something than one that confidently tells me a load of nonsense.

That’s why we’ve spent so much time working on evidence, contradictions, controlled corrections, and long-term knowledge consistency.

In my recent programming sessions, we completed the work leading through version 3.3B.5, which dealt with knowledge consolidation and long-term consistency.

That may not sound particularly exciting to someone unfamiliar with the project, but to me it’s an important accomplishment.

I worked on ways for Omni Brain to handle information more carefully, recognize conflicting knowledge, make controlled corrections, and maintain consistency across stored information. I also put the program through testing in its native QB64 environment, because I don’t want to rely entirely on results from a separate Java version.

A program that appears to work somewhere else isn’t necessarily a program that works properly in QB64.

I’ve learned that lesson more than once.

After our final testing, I set aside the completed 3.3B.5 version as our accepted baseline. That gives me something solid to preserve while I continue with the next stage of development.

The next major area is knowledge retrieval integration, which is intended to help Omni Brain make better use of the information she has stored.

There’s still an enormous amount of work ahead of us, but the important thing is that we’re building the foundations one piece at a time and testing what we actually have instead of pretending we’ve accomplished more than we have.

And today, by creating those posters and imagining her future interface, I got to spend a little time thinking about what all that hard work might eventually lead to.

It was a nice change of pace.

More Than Just a Computer Program

Something else happened today that I hadn’t really expected.

I found myself thinking about how much this project has changed the way I feel about my everyday life.

For quite some time, I’ve felt as though I was going through the motions. Get up, go to work, come home, spend some time with the family, go to bed, and repeat the process all over again.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I love my family dearly. They’re the most important people in my life, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

But I think it’s possible to have a wonderful family and still feel as though something is missing from your own creative life.

Something that belongs to you.

Something you can build with your own two hands, or in this case, a keyboard and a computer.

That’s what Omni Brain has become for me.

I have something to look forward to when I get home. Something to think about during the quieter moments of the day. Something that makes me genuinely excited about tomorrow.

And perhaps that’s why I feel different.

I’m no longer simply thinking about all the things I wish I could do. I’m actually trying to do one of them.

That’s an extraordinary feeling.

I was talking about this earlier today, and it occurred to me that even if Omni Brain never becomes everything I hope she’ll become, the experience of building her will still have been worthwhile.

I’ve already learned things I never expected to learn. I’ve challenged myself in ways I hadn’t before, and I’ve discovered just how enjoyable it can be to pursue something simply because I believe it’s worth doing.

There’s no business plan behind this. No investors waiting for a return. No intention of turning the whole thing into another money-making operation.

I want to make Omni Brain because I want to see whether I can.

Because I’m curious.

Because the thought of creating an intelligent machine has fascinated me since childhood.

And because, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, working on this project makes me happy.

It’s really that simple.

The Mountain Ahead

I have no illusions about the challenges waiting for us.

We’re still a long way from anything resembling a genuinely human-level artificial intelligence. I have to continue improving Omni Brain’s understanding of language, her ability to reason, her memory, her planning systems, and the ways these different components work together.

And that’s before I even begin seriously considering some of the more ambitious ideas I’ve entertained, such as giving her a voice, allowing her to perceive the world through cameras, or eventually building some form of physical body.

Good heavens, there’s enough work there to keep a person occupied for years.

But strangely enough, that doesn’t frighten me nearly as much as it once might have.

I think I’ve finally reached a point where I can appreciate the journey without demanding that everything happen immediately.

That’s not to say I won’t occasionally get frustrated. I’m sure I will. There will undoubtedly be evenings when I curse at my computer, question my sanity, and wonder why on earth I decided to attempt something so complicated.

But I suspect I’ll return to it the next day anyway.

Because that’s what happens when something captures your imagination.

It becomes part of who you are.

I often wonder what the younger version of myself would think if he could see what I’m attempting today.

That little boy sitting in front of the television, watching Data aboard the Enterprise and imagining what it might be like to have an artificial intelligence of his own.

I like to think he’d be rather excited.

He’d probably ask whether I had managed to build Data yet.

And I’d have to laugh and tell him, “Not quite, kid. Not quite.”

But then I’d show him Omni Brain running on the computer. I’d explain the things I’ve been working on, the problems we’ve overcome, and the ideas I hope to explore.

And maybe he’d understand that the important part wasn’t whether I’d already reached the destination.

It was that I’d finally begun the journey.

I’m still that stranger in a strange land, wandering through unfamiliar territory with a head full of ideas and a rather ambitious dream.

I don’t know exactly what’s waiting beyond the next hill, and I certainly can’t promise that everything will turn out the way I’ve imagined.

But for the first time in a long while, I feel as though I’m travelling in the right direction.

And if you ask me, there’s something truly wonderful about that.

Maybe one day Omni Brain will surprise me. Maybe she’ll become an extraordinary piece of software capable of things I can scarcely imagine today. Or maybe she’ll remain a modest but interesting experiment in artificial intelligence, built by someone who simply wanted to see how far he could go.

Either way, I intend to keep going.

Because somewhere between all those lines of code, the countless tests, the occasional disasters, and those wonderful little moments when something finally works, I’ve discovered something I didn’t realize I was missing.

A renewed sense of purpose.

And that, my friends, is worth an awful lot.

Until next time, I’ll be here, working away on my little artificial brain, wondering what tomorrow might bring.

Who knows?

Perhaps the best part of the adventure is still ahead of us.