(Cover design by Barış Şehri)

It contains 22 stories, most of which are revised versions of the best stories I’ve posted online. The thread that connects them is the struggle to hold onto our identities in the face of radical technological change—the same thread that winds through many of our own lives.

⁠⁠I’ve also written three new stories for the collection, which are some of my favorites:

• Lentando is set in a future inspired by Charles Stross’ masterpiece Accelerando. Through it we follow Liza, a zero-knowledge consultant whose soon-to-be-deleted copies struggle to hold the world together.

• The Biggest Short is the story of two traders who make a fortune buying and selling reputations while struggling to preserve their own.

• Kuhn’s Ladder is about a simulated utopia that starts experiencing inexplicable glitches which seem designed to remain hidden.

You can preorder the physical book here, and the ebook here.

Looking forward, it’s hard to say how much writing I’ll be doing over the next few years. I have a sense that static text will soon no longer be the best way to tell stories, so I want to try to figure out what the successor format to the short story will be. But I still have a few more stories in the pipeline, including one that’s my most ambitious effort so far—all of which I’ll post here when they’re finished.

Lastly, some thanks are in order. To Jessy Wu and Marlene Baquiran at Encour Press, whose efforts produced a much better version of this book (and made it possible at all). To Madeleine, who uplifts and inspires me. And to all of you who have read or commented on my writing over the last few years. I’m grateful for the encouragement that moved me to create The Gentle Romance, and I hope that you will enjoy it!

You’re a precocious child. You excel at your lessons, and memorize the rules faster than any of the other children in your village. Chief is impressed enough that, when you’re eight, he decides to let you see a glitcher that he’s captured. Your mother leads you to just outside the village wall, where they’ve staked the glitcher as a lure for wild animals. Since glitchers are too slow and uncoordinated to chase down prey, their peculiar magnetism is the only reason they’re able to survive in the wastes.

Each of the glitcher’s limbs is tied to the ground. Its clothes are rags by now. As the group gathers around it, it starts to moan through its gag, a painful undulating noise. “Look at it,” Chief says. As if roused to a frenzy by his voice, the glitcher throws its body from side to side, shaking against its restraints. “This is what you’ll end up as, if you’re careless.”

Suddenly one of the glitcher’s arms breaks free. It waves in the air, fingers forming frantic spasmodic patterns. You stare at it for a second, before your mother yanks you around and buries your face in her side. When she lets you look again, two men have wrestled the arm back into place. Chief looks at you somberly. “If you’d kept watching for a few more seconds, you would have been hypnotized. And if you’d stayed hypnotized for a minute, even odds that you would have glitched yourself. That’s how easy it is to be careless. Do better, or you won’t make it to adulthood.”

You have nightmares for the next few days, your mind full of the glitcher’s slack face and its writhing fingers. You lull yourself back to sleep by reciting the rules. You’re determined that you won’t mess up again. And so you make it all the way to thirteen before everything goes wrong.

It’s morning on an ordinary day. You left your room to wash, and when you walk back in there’s a screensnake curled up in the corner. You look away immediately, but there’s a second one crawling towards you from the side, and your eyes lock onto it. You freeze for a moment, not knowing where else to look—and that’s long enough for the patterns on its skin to catch your gaze. They flicker, blooming in radiant colors. There’s something hypnotic about them, and for a few seconds you can’t look away.

Then an axe comes down, and you hear voices shouting, and a piercing scream. You blink, and shake your head muzzily, and when you look up again Chief is throwing a blanket over the screensnake corpse.

“Fuck,” Chief says. “God fucking damn it.”

“What happened?” you ask. There’s a gasp from the doorway; you turn to see your mother. “He’s okay! He’s okay he’s okay he’s okay—” She starts towards you, but Chief moves faster, stepping in front of her and pushing her back.

“Think! It got him just as he walked in. How long ago was that—five minutes? Ten? That’s a lethal exposure.” His head never turns away from you as he says it, though his eyes are focused over your shoulder. He’s still holding his axe in his hand.

“But he can still talk! No glitcher can talk!”

“Nobody’s ever survived five straight minutes of screensnake trance either.”

“I feel fine,” you break in. “It wasn’t that long, was it? Or maybe I’m immune.”

Your mother lets out a sob. “See? He’s still thinking straight! He must be immune somehow, he must. Here, show Chief—”

“Quiet!” Chief barks. He backs out of the room, pushing your mother behind him. “Don’t go anywhere, child. And don’t say a word. I need to think.”

They leave you alone for hours. Outside, you can hear your mother arguing with the guards Chief has posted at your door. But they barely reply, and she gets nowhere. Eventually, you hear Chief’s voice outside again. “Say yes if you can hear me; don’t say anything else.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard rumors that occasionally people arise who have some kind of immunity. But that’s all they are—rumors. And I will not risk my village on those. You can’t stay here.”

You hear your mother’s voice raised in a moan outside, but Chief’s voice cuts through it.

“One thing the rumors say is that there’s a whole village led by someone who can resist glitching. They say it’s two week’s travel north. I’ll give you enough supplies to get there. Maybe they’ll take you in, maybe they won’t. But either way, you leave today.”

His voice softens. “You were a good kid. I hope the rumors are right, and I hope you make it to safety. But whatever happens, you can’t come back.”

The deep wastes are quiet, and lonely. You’ve only ventured into them once or twice before. Now they’re all that you can see in every direction as you walk, following an old wives’ tale that’s your only remaining hope. Somehow, you’re less scared than you would have expected. You never really thought you’d be glitched, but it’s still a fact of life: you lose friends every year. And you are immune, you must be—you’ve felt totally normal since the screensnake attack.

You still don’t want to take risks, though. Each night, as the stars come out, you cover your eyes firmly, and keep them covered until dawn. On the third day you see a glitcher shambling towards you from afar, but you give it a wide berth, and quickly leave it behind. You set traps every night, but all you catch are two ratlings. Still, they help stretch out your dwindling supplies a little longer, giving you a little more room for error.

After ten days of walking, you start looking for signs of the village Chief had spoken of. There are often still roads leading to them—sometimes covered in sand, but visible if you’re careful. You scout in a zigzag pattern, trying to cover as much ground as possible. But you see nothing. In the back of your mind you start to wonder if Chief had just made up the story wholesale, to get you to leave quietly. You curse yourself for a fool, but keep searching.

Two days later, you stumble across a suspiciously straight line of sand dunes. You start digging at their base, and after a few minutes you spot the telltale dark gray pattern of a buried road. You follow it north-east, searching for any sign of human presence. The next day you start spotting traps. They’re mostly empty, but even when they’ve caught a thylac or jabberjay, you leave them undisturbed. A few hours later you see who’s been laying them: at first faint figures in the distance, slowly resolving to two men as you walk closer. They’re focused on their task; only when you’re a hundred meters away does one look up and see you.

They shout in alarm, and scramble for their weapons. You rush to reassure them, but they’re wary—you need to yell back and forth for a few minutes to convince them that you’re not a glitcher or a mirage. Eventually they agree to take you back to their village, though they first bind your arms behind your back.

After an hour of walking, you reach their village walls. The hunters confer with the guards behind the gate. Finally two guards grab you and pull you through the main street, to an imposing building larger than any in your village. They lead you to a room near the entrance, where an old man sits at a desk, writing.

“Shaman,” one of the guards says, bowing his head. “We found him wandering in the wastes. He said that he seeks refuge, and that he has information he needs to tell you personally.”

Shaman turns his head towards you. He stares at you for a long moment, then gestures for you to speak.

“Greetings, Shaman,” you say deferentially. “I traveled here because I heard that you are immune to being glitched. I discovered recently that I am too. If you allow me to stay, I will contribute to your village in any way that I can.”

Shaman’s eyes are cold. “Are you sure that this story is the one you want to stick with?” You nod. He turns to the guards. “Test him,” he says.

The guards pull you towards through a corridor, into a large, dimly-lit room. In it are more glitchers than you’ve ever seen in your life—each tied down to a table, twitching intermittently. The guards tie you to one of the empty tables in the same way, and gag you. They each grab a pair of bulky earmuffs, and carefully place them over their ears. Then they walk around to each of the glitchers and remove their gags, one by one. As they do, the room gradually fills with their moans.

All night you listen to the babbling of the glitchers, noises that sound too alien to be produced by human mouths. As you sleep, you dream that you’re a glitcher too, prowling across the wastes under a sky that you’re still too afraid to look at. In the morning the guards come back, with Shaman behind them. He motions, and they undo your gag. “Well?” he says.

“I’m unharmed. But you can test me further if you like,” you say.

Shaman’s eyes widen. “You were telling the truth, then.” He pauses, and smiles. “I’d almost given up hope. This makes you the very first to succeed.”

They treat you very differently after that. You’re given food, and a room, and several days to rest. You spend the time exploring the village, which is much larger than your own, and much more raucous. The people in the streets seem less scared than those you grew up with. You wonder if that’s Shaman’s influence, though you’re too wary of offending them to ask.

A few mornings later, Shaman summons you to his office again. At his gesture, you sit in front of him. He waits for a few minutes before speaking.

“Tell me, child. Have you ever wondered why the world is like this?”

You frown. “The stories say that things used to be better. The land used to be fertile everywhere, not just where we cultivate it. Animals used to be safe. Even the stars used to be a beautiful sight. And then… I guess there was some kind of terrible accident, though I’ve never heard any explanation of what it was.”

Shaman laughs. It’s an ugly sound. “An accident? An accident that breaks the sky in ways that go on to break humans? An accident that turns animals themselves into weapons against us? No, this was no accident. It was a deliberate, targeted attack.”

“But… for that to be deliberate… it requires unimaginable power. What sort of beings have that?”

Shaman nods. “That’s the right question. Or rather, half of the right question. The other half is: with so much power bent on our destruction, why do they not simply crush us like ants?”

“Oh.” You think for a moment. “They want to… drag it out? They want to torment us?”

“Possibly, but I don’t think that they care about us even enough to enjoy hurting us. No, my guess is that they work under constraints that are invisible and maybe even inconceivable to us. I think that there was some kind of bargain. Humans used to have power, real power. We negotiated with them in aeons past, setting up compacts that would protect us from direct attacks.

“But they’ve been getting around the rules, step by step. They figured out how to overwrite our minds with only a few minutes of visual stimuli, to reform us into vessels for their purposes. Not easily, and not precisely. But they don’t need to be precise. If they can glitch enough of us, time will take care of the rest.”

The sheer scale of what he’s saying overwhelms you. “So we’re doomed.” You feel a lurch in your stomach as you say it.

He shakes his head. “No. We can adapt too. We have adapted—with all our safeguards, all our rules. And we can learn from the techniques they use. I’ve been studying glitchers for a decade, but it’s been slow work. I need someone else who’s immune to help me run more experiments.”

He stands and leads you towards the room full of glitchers. As you enter, he grabs a book from the desk by the doorway.

“The first question is: can we make any sense of their language? Is it even a language at all? They occasionally commune with each other, and sometimes their actions are suspiciously coordinated, which makes me think the answer is yes.”

He flips open the book, showing you pages upon pages of scribbled notes and tallies. “When I listen to them, there are some repeating syllables, and some structure. Your first task is to replicate my observations, and see if you can make any sense of them yourself. It won’t be easy, but from there we might be able to find patterns that give us hints about how to make more people immune, or maybe even find a cure for those who have already been infected. Will you work on this for me?”

You feel dwarfed by the magnitude of his ambitions. It’s like you’ve been living in a cave for your whole life, and now you’ve suddenly emerged into the blinding light of the sun. You worry that your voice will break if you try to speak. But you nod, and he seems satisfied.

You spend weeks working with Shaman, then months. His mission consumes you. He saved you from a drawn-out death in the desert. But more than that—he’s given you a way to fight back against the sheer senselessness of the world, to strike a blow against whoever caused all of this to happen.

Most days you sit in the corner, taking notes, as Shaman runs through experiments. Many are attempts to uncover any lurking remnant of humanity within the glitchers. He makes them try to pull clothes over their twitching limbs, or vocalize human language again with their writhing tongues. If they don’t succeed, he hurts them. They’ve lost almost all of their minds, but they still understand pain.

When Shaman is busy, you go to the lab alone, and try to replicate his old experiments. When you’re tired of that, you sit and watch the glitchers’ indecipherable hand gestures, and practice mimicking them. Sometimes they seem to respond to you, but you’re not sure how much of it you’re imagining. The ones that Shaman has had for longer do seem cleverer, though. So you focus on them, slowly training them to follow your commands.

You meet others from Shaman’s village, but they seem wary of you. You don’t blame them. They’re terrified of glitchers, of course, and you spend so much of your time with them that you’ve even started to smell like them. But you don’t care for their company either. They have no idea how important your work is; nor can they discuss it intelligently even when you try to explain it.

So you spend most of your days with only Shaman and the glitchers for company. Sometimes you despair of ever making progress. But other days it feels like you’re communing with them, that you’re right on the cusp of understanding them. You go through those days in a fugue, only half-aware of what you’re doing. Your notes on those days are eerily insightful, though. And it often seems like Shaman is in the same fugue state—he works like a man possessed.

One night, you dream again of the glitchers, and when you wake up you find yourself in their room, listening to them. You flinch, and realize that you must have sleepwalked there. The glitchers’ heads are all turned towards you. God, that’s dangerous. You start to tie yourself to your bed at night, to prevent any accidents.

But you don’t want to take a break. With your help, Shaman is making more progress than he has in years. The two of you have noticed a kind of correspondence between their words and their gestures, and Shaman thinks it might hold the key to translating the glitcher language. You still don’t know what any of it means, but after a few weeks of practice you can listen to the glitchers’ mumbles and effortlessly trace out the corresponding patterns with your fingers. Shaman watches you intently. “Could you learn to speak like them too?” he asks you one day. “I think so,” you tell him. He nods with grim satisfaction, and you redouble your efforts.

Sometimes you think about your home village—whether your mother still grieves you, whether Chief regrets his decision, whether your friends are still following the same routines and playing the same games as they used to. Sometimes you wonder what your life would have been like if you’d stayed. But you don’t regret any of what happened—your work now is too important. So you sleep, you wake, and you sleep again, the days all blurring together—

You snap awake. You’re standing in the lab. Shaman is holding your shoulders and shaking you. His face fills your vision, twisted into a rictus of terror. “Listen. Listen! I thought I was immune too at first. But there’s no such thing. It’s a trap! You and I are just a new type of glitcher—subtle enough to blend in, smart enough to research how to create more of our kind. All our work, all our experiments, we’re doing exactly what they want. Destroy it all and kill me! Please, kill me now!”

You stumble backwards in shock, hitting the desk behind you with a thump. He flinches at the sound. For a moment a look of blank incomprehension appears on his face.

Then his eyes snap back into focus, and his voice mellows. “Forgive me. I’m an old man, and my mind sometimes wanders. What were we talking about?”

You stare at him. “What do you mean? You just told me that all our work is helping the enemy! You asked me to kill you!”

He smiles slightly. “It sounds like you’ve been having a bad dream. Go back to sleep. We can talk about this in the morning.”

The smile is what convinces you. Your hand goes to your dagger. As you lunge towards him, he moves backwards, almost in slow motion. You kill him quickly, mercifully. As soon as he stops moving, you stride over to his desk and write out a note. You keep it as brief as possible, to prevent any further contamination. “Immunity is a lie. He and I were just more subtle glitchers, and our research would have created more of them. Kill the captive glitchers NOW.”

You think about killing the glitchers yourself, but you’re worried that they’ll make enough of a fuss to rouse others. And you don’t trust yourself in their presence any more. You don’t know how close you are to being trapped inside your own body, like Shaman was. So you gather all the papers from Shaman’s desk in a bundle under your shirt, and walk quickly out of the building. Nobody sees you as you navigate to the edge of the village and scale the wall to the outside world.

For an hour you walk deeper and deeper into the desert, eyes fixed on your feet. Eventually the adrenaline wears off, and you find yourself shaking from the cold. This will have to do. You drop to your knees on the sand, and use your hands to dig a small hole in front of you. You pull the papers from under your shirt and pile them in. Your whole body is trembling still, so it takes you several tries to set them alight. Once you do, though, they burn merrily.

The dancing of the flames is peaceful, almost hypnotic. By the time it dies down, what happened in the village almost feels like a bad dream. You look around at the sand stretching out towards the horizon. It’s all so peaceful, so serene. Did he really say those things to you? Was it all some fevered imagining? You don’t know what to believe. But it doesn’t matter any more—you’ve burned your bridges. And if you can’t solve the problem of the glitchers, as you’d so fervently hoped, the only thing left is to make sure you don’t exacerbate it.

Your dagger is by your side as always. As you unsheath it, you notice that it’s still sticky with Shaman’s blood. Somehow that feels appropriate. You close your eyes, take a deep breath, then drive it into your chest. For a second you stay there, frozen—then, involuntarily, you slump onto your side like a broken doll. You feel your blood start to pool under your body. With the feeling of helplessness comes a feeling of release. Wonderingly, you realize that at last the rules no longer apply to you. You can do anything you want.

With a last spasmodic effort, you twist yourself onto your back. The night sky fills your sight for the first time, and you let out an involuntary sigh. It’s grander than anything you’ve ever seen. The stars, multicolored, whirl in patterns, dancing across the sky as you watch. Hypnotized, your focus zooms in and in, chasing the universe as it spins towards the center of your vision. Your last faint thought—oh. It’s so beautiful. Then your mind falls into the spiral, and you are lost.

This is the one story that I've put the most time and effort into; it charts a course from the near future all the way to the distant stars.

You can read it here:

Asimov Press

The Gentle Romance

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me…

Read more

a year ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Richard Ngo

I’m about to descend deeper into the archives than I ever have before. I’m standing in the center of a vast stone hall, with walls that arch towards a ceiling higher than I can see. To my side stand the half-dozen other archive divers who accompanied me on the journey here. Beyond them lie haphazard piles of stones that had once been arranged into shelters, scattered relics of the others who had reached this point over the centuries.

But my focus is on the gaping pit in front of me. It’s far too deep for the bottom to be visible. By the light of my headlamp, though, I can faintly see that the walls of the pit appear to consist of enormous stacks of thousands or millions of books. Are they merely carved into the stone? Or is the pit itself actually lined with books? Perhaps both: this many millennia deep into the archives, the difference between facade and reality blurs.

I take one last look into the pit, then turn my back to it and beckon. The others gather in a loose semicircle around me. We’ve travelled together this far, but it’s been my expedition from the beginning. So I’ll be taking the final plunge by myself—seizing the lion’s share of both the glory and the danger. They start murmuring my name, the mantra that will carry me through what’s to come: “Ren. Ren. Ren.” Their voices grow louder and more insistent, the sound echoing back from the walls, the hall itself affirming me. “Ren! Ren!” As the chant reaches a crescendo I throw my arms wide, join them in screaming my name, then throw myself backwards into the pit.

The light fades as I fall; I close my eyes and focus on my heartbeat. The distance I fall will be determined just as much by my mindset as by whatever simulacrum of physics governs the terrain around me. So I wait until I’ve pictured very clearly in my mind the people I’m searching for, and only then open my eyes. Blinking, I scan in the dim light for just the right moment, just the right—there! A book with a burnished bronze cover gleams below me, and I angle my fall towards it, fingertips reaching out to just barely brush it, and then

I’m

no

longer

“—myself!” my father roars. I can hear the rage in his voice. “You think I’ll let her shame the family like this? If she won’t do her duty, I’ll kill her myself!”

I cower, and apologize, and marry the man he wants me to. Our wedding ceremony is raucous; my father is determined to make it the talk of the town. I sit quietly, keeping my eyes on my husband. It could be much worse. He’s a merchant, so he’s educated at least, and rich enough that I’ll have servants to wait on my every need. But I sense a cruel streak in his eyes which frightens me. And though the wedding night itself is not so bad, I soon discover I’m right. He forbids me from leaving his house except in his company—a harsh constraint at the best of times, bordering on torment during the long summer months when he travels to other cities.

So I spend my life trapped within his walls. I know in some deep inarticulable way that this shouldn’t be happening, but there’s nothing I can do except wait—first for years, then decades. Finally, one day, I look through the window at the farmers taking their wares to the market, and scream in rage and frustration. And suddenly I know myself again. The people outside are all stopping to look at me, but it doesn’t matter any more. I look back at them and smile fiercely. Then I twist, and the

world

dissolves

into

—chaos reigns in the square; shouting and laughter, the mingled sounds of animals and humans. I’ve been to this market dozens of times, but have never truly enjoyed it—I still far prefer the quiet of my family’s farm. Perhaps I should let my son do the bartering next time, I think. He’s almost a grown man, and it’d be good training for him. But next month some instinct warns me against it, and the month after that too. There’s something not quite right. Eventually, the day before yet another market, a thought comes to me, as if I’ve known it for a long time: I’m not going to find them here, not in this humdrum life. Won’t find who? Why is that so important? I can’t recall.

The next day, my wagon is accosted by bandits on the way to the market. Three men with swords shout for me to dismount and hand over my goods. Suddenly I know what I need to do. I walk towards them with open palms, ignoring their threats. As I get close enough to touch them I twist towards somewhere else, and after the drudgery of the farmer’s life it feels

like

a

sudden

“—rush in, we’ll lose everything,” the captain is saying. “We’ll need to hold fast and drive them back when they approach along the river”. The tent is dim and smoky, but I’m concentrating hard on the captain’s words, straining my eyes to make out the details of the map on the table. I’m lucky to be included in this meeting at all; I’d better not embarrass myself. Eventually, we agree to hold and wait for the enemy to come to us.

It only takes the enemy a few days to make the approach; luckily, this time, it also only takes me a few days to come back to myself. I look around at the armies readying for battle. One more hop, I think. As the fighting starts I push my way towards the front lines, eventually getting close enough that an enemy soldier spots me and starts running directly at me. I charge too, and as I get close enough to see the rage and fear in his eyes I twist, the fabric of the world stretching under me, and I feel like

I’m

about

to

—faint silhouette in front of me, between two trees, and I know immediately that it’s one of the men I’ve been hunting. But which? I hear a dismissive snort, and the silhouette fades into the darkness like a panther. Enkidu, then. I chase after him, but he stays just out of my sight, until I have to pause, panting and exhausted.

That’s okay—I’ve seen my quarry and established a foothold. And I know my own limits. I’m getting better at breaking out of the minds at this depth, but it’s not healthy to do that mental twist too many times in a row. A part of you will become convinced that the rest of your identity is fake and start trying to break out of that too. I need to take a break and re-establish my sense of self. So I twist in a different way and find myself back in the silence and stillness of the archive hall. Down here the hall has manifested as a wooden longhouse, each beam decorated with vivid carvings. Compared with the vast stone cathedral I camped in last night, it’s cramped but homely—just what I need.

I spend an hour on my normal routine: setting up my bedroll, starting a fire, cooking and eating. After that, I sit cross-legged and breathe deeply. “Ren, Ren, Ren, Ren,” I murmur to myself, as my mind traces the well-worn path of my identity meditation, down to my most foundational memories.

I was enraptured by the archives from the first time I visited the museum that housed them. As the other children around me chattered and played, I listened intently to our guide’s explanation of each new exhibit, shivering with delight as I felt the weight of millions of lives pressing down on me. The guide told me how we’d traced back each strand of history from every possible angle, how we’d brought the past to life again. The sheer scale and hubris of it had taken my breath away even then.

The archivists had noticed. Halfway through the tour, one waved me away from the main group, towards a side passaged that sloped down into the earth. As I walked along it, the walls lit up with small shadowy figures who kept pace with me, their faces occasionally resolving into expressions of curiosity and wonder. I realized that they were a record of all the other children who’d walked down this same hallway, following the same fascination. The passage forked, then forked again, the stream of ghosts splitting and merging along my path. For an hour I wandered the maze, alone yet surrounded by comrades from the past, before an archivist appeared in front of me and brought me back to the surface.

It was only a pale reflection of the full archives, but enough to get me hooked. I forced my parents to take me back to the museum again and again. I met the community of archive divers and listened intently to their stories; and eventually I started doing dives of my own. You weren’t meant to start too young—not before you had enough of a sense of yourself to rely on—but I was precocious. I knew who I was and who I wanted to be: an adventurer, an explorer of hidden mysteries. And the tight-knit diver community itself embodied and reflected that desire.

Not fully, though. I watched during dives as the other divers got distracted by romance or fame. Many of them just wanted the thrill of living out lives more exciting than their own. They didn’t understand that the archives were more than entertainment: they were a glimpse into the fundamental unknown. They couldn’t sense, as I did, that there were patterns beneath the patterns, archetypes that once grasped would make the whole story of humanity fit together. The longer I spent diving the closer I felt to finding something important. I spent less and less time outside the archives; my other ties grew sparser and sparser.

And then I found it. I was diving in a little-explored side branch: not the deepest I’d ever visited, but one of the hardest to get to. A lost city, hidden in the jungle—a record of ancient narratives, frozen as if in amber. Unusually, this one was ruled by not one but two kings. I lived several lives in that city before I got close enough to see their faces for a moment as they rode past the crowd I stood in: one impeccably groomed, the other almost animalistic despite his fine clothes.

Then they turned to meet my eyes. “Who are you, traveler?” one shouted. I froze. How could they possibly have singled me out? As they spurred their horses towards me, I reflexively twisted away, finding myself on the edge of the jungle. But only a few seconds later, the impossible happened again: the two kings appeared in front of me, still astride their horses. “Hold!” one shouted. As he said it I was struck by the certainty that they would soon be able to chase me down no matter where I went, that I only had one chance to escape. I fled, twisting myself into life after life until I almost forgot who I was. Only continents and centuries away did my clawing panic subside.

The next few months, after rising to the surface, were the most painful I’d ever experienced. I’d done a number on my mind, scrambling my memories and even my personality in my mad dash for safety. I spent a month near-comatose in a hospital bed; and it took another six months before I could muster the coherence to spend a full day working. But once I could, all of my efforts focused on understanding what had happened. I sat in the library, looking up old stories, trying to divine who or what I had encountered.

When I realized, it felt obvious. Enkidu. Gilgamesh. Two of the oldest archetypes, the story on which every other story had been built. Freedom and control, id and ego. I’d been right that they’d be able to follow me anywhere, because they were everywhere—so deep-rooted and so weighty that the archives themselves had somehow twisted around them. I no longer felt afraid, though, but instead exhilarated. I’d been searching for what lay underneath the human story, and I’d found it embodied. I had to go back.

I open my eyes. I can’t tell how long it’s been, but I feel rested and energetic. Normally I would wait longer before going in again, but my glimpse of Enkidu has me too fired up to stay in one place any longer. And my desire to jump back in feels true enough to myself that I’m sure it’s all

going

to

be

“—fine weave, and only the best quality wool," the merchant is saying. “I can’t justify any price lower than three hundred.”

“My friend, you can tell from my clothes that I’m not a wealthy man," I respond. “I can’t possibly afford any more than one hundred; but surely that will still make you a decent profit.” We haggle a bit more, but eventually I walk away without making the purchase. I didn’t want the carpet that badly, I think to myself. After all, I suddenly realize, I’m here for something else entirely. I need a link to—ah, there. A noble, riding his horse down the center of the market, guards shoving pedestrians out of the way. I walk towards him, pushing a guard aside, the shouts of warning causing him to turn towards me; and as our eyes meet I twist, finding

myself

in

a

—chamber is so dark that I can barely see the outline of the woman on the bed in front of me, but that doesn’t diminish my desire. I want to take her; I want to own her. And I can—the priests have given her to me for this night, to fulfil her sacred role. She stretches out on the bed, beckoning me over. But there’s something slightly stiff about her movements, and I’m struck by the thought that she wishes I were someone else instead.

That’s enough to jolt me out of it. I breathe deeply, then walk up to her. “Hush, I won’t hurt you. But I’m so close to finding them, I can almost taste it. Have you heard their names: Gilgamesh, Enkidu? Do they mean anything to you?” She’s trembling now, and doesn’t respond, but I see her snatch a glance over my shoulder, and turn. Up on the wall, illuminated by a single candle, a tapestry hangs. It’s a triumphant scene: a man with the horns of a bull is standing over the corpse of an enormous ogre, in front of a broken mountain. “Got you," I whisper triumphantly, and twist, and am suddenly

caught

in

sheer

paralysis. That’s the only way I can describe it: I feel pinned to the spot by the scrutiny of the man in front of me. He’s not the one I expected—and, as if he were reading my mind, Gilgamesh speaks. “Finding Enkidu will take more than that.” His voice is melodic, hypnotic. “He rarely spends time here. His home is far further down, in the depths where the stories are not recorded in writing or even speech—only in scattered fragments of art, and the patterns left on our unconscious minds.”

I take a deep breath before speaking. “Why does he ever come up here, then?”

He raises an eyebrow. “To visit me, of course. I can’t go that far down myself, not without forgetting who I am. And he comes for the universal temptation: the lure of something new, the pull towards growth, even with the risk of losing yourself entirely to it.”

“Universal—so you want it too, then?”

“Of course.”

I feel his response is sardonic, somehow. But it still gives me the resolve to make the offer I’d planned out over the course of the long descent.

“Then come with me. Let me show you what’s up there, the wonders we’ve built, our civilization, our-”

“-self-destruction," Gilgamesh interrupts. “Your weakness. Your abdication of everything worthy in life. Under the weight of what you call civilization, whatever greatness of spirit any of you might have developed has been crushed. Even the wildest and most adventurous of your people are tame. If we gave ourselves over to that, eventually there would be other Gilgameshes, and other Enkidus—but we would change, and be lost.”

“Why are you so afraid of changing?”

He bares his teeth, and I take a step back. “You found me through the stories of my quest for eternal life. You know that much of me. And yet you have the arrogance to think that after finally gaining immortality, I would give it up for—”

“Shamhat!” There’s a voice from behind me, and I whirl. A giant of a man is walking towards me—Enkidu, it must be. “Shamhat," he says again, forcefully. I feel a jolt of fear and shake my head. “No; I’m not Shamhat. I’m Ren.” “Shamhat!” he insists, and a wave of emotion surges over me: a blend of passion and rage and yearning so strong that I almost lose myself in it.

My hand goes to my emergency trigger. But all the long years of training weren’t for nothing. I am Ren, and I won’t surrender so easily. I think of the smell of my family home, the warmth of an evening watching a show with my housemates, the sight of skyscrapers towering above me on every side. I sink into these fragments of my world, and hiss “No” at Enkidu, and he pauses in his stride.

Gilgamesh smiles at me, his composure regained. “Perhaps you should answer your own question: why so afraid? Here you are, visiting us with your defenses up and your escape route near at hand. Why not let yourself be changed by us, become one of us, play the role that Enkidu already sees in you? Or why not go up the archives instead, where the risks are even greater, instead of coming down?”

“Wait—up? There’s no up. The archives only go down.”

“Ah, so you think that your own world is the source of the archives? What an astronomical coincidence that would be; but of course they do sometimes happen. And yet you are not the strangest visitor I’ve ever had. Where are they coming from, I wonder, those others? The ones too alien to understand what they’ve lost, too divorced from us to even feel your own thrill of familiarity and contempt. The ones who see me and Enkidu as little more than fascinating insects.”

“I don’t—I’m not—”

“I tire of this. Shoo, little bird.”

A sudden pressure emanates from him: a sheer sense of self, of lust for life, of desire to conquer and emerge victorious, to seize immortality, to seize me, to grab the world in his outstretched hand, and to survive, always to survive. It hits me like a wave, enveloping me, trying to drag me down into its depths. I stumble backwards, blindly groping for my emergency trigger, fingers clenching around it until it snaps and I twist all the way around and, trembling, find myself back at my campsite.

I’m still shaken the next morning, although not enough to give up. But I can’t find them again that day, nor the next, even as I jump rapidly from life to life. Inhabiting so many different minds is exhausting, and wears away at my sense of self. In the evenings I find myself oscillating between the personalities I’d inhabited that day, muttering both sides of a half-coherent conversation. After one more day I have to call it off.

The trip back up is easier, but still slow. I need to decompress my identity, loosen the tightly-held core of self that made it possible for me to survive so far down. The other divers understand; they’re gentle with me when I make it back to them, leaving me space to quietly introspect. It’s harder when we reach the surface—the crowds of people on the streets feel overwhelming. Stepping back into my house and seeing my housemates bustling around is even more challenging. Abstractly I know they mean well, but with every question they ask my anger at them grows. I sense that they don’t understand me at all, and it makes me want to scream and hurt them for their failure. Finally I escape into my room.

Over the next few weeks I reacclimatize to my life. I spend time with my housemates, accept a few contracting gigs to top up my bank balance, and even go on a couple of dates. But a part of me remains detached. There was something so primal about what I’d seen—an animating force so powerful and so pervasive that it had warped the fabric of the archive itself. All-consuming desire and all-conquering strength. Was Gilgamesh right that we’d lost them? I read each day of new technological marvels: the Dyson sphere soon finishing construction, the first colonizing probes launching out of the solar system. Yet somehow all of it feels flat—like it’s driven by different and lesser forces than those which had steered humanity up to this point.

One day, as I’m taking the train across the city, a man sits across from me. I’m captivated by his appearance. His face is regal, with an aquiline nose and a harsh chin; his clothes are a decade out of date. But I’m most struck by his expression. I watch him looking around the train with a sense of pure detached curiosity—almost, I suddenly think, like the rest of us are merely fascinating insects. Gilgamesh’s words come back to me: “What an astronomical coincidence that would be.” A sense of vertigo grips me. Do I really want my world to be the one root node, the source of all the archives? Or do I want there to be so, so, so much more?

I get off at the next stop, and find myself in front of the archives for the first time since the dive. So I go in. As I walk through the familiar building, instinct guides me to scan the ceilings in each room. They’re high, so I need to squint to make sure I’m not missing anything, but—ah, there it is: the outline of a trapdoor. It’s faint, and I doubt myself until I look at the exhibit underneath: a display of tools and equipment from older eras, including a long ladder. Well, that settles it. I know myself, and I know there’s no way I’m not climbing it.

But I have something else to do first.

It’s always easier the second time. I make the trip solo, and though I still need to navigate through story upon story as I descend, it’s fewer than usual—as if my purpose has already acclimatized me to millennia past. I find them drinking together in their tent on the eve before a battle. Enkidu notices me first; Gilgamesh follows his gaze after a moment and laughs. “So the little bird is back. What do you want this time?”

I look straight at him. “I asked you to come with me up the archives, even though that would change you radically. But why should you make that sacrifice, if I won’t? So let’s do it together. There’s a ladder, from my own home. Going up. Let’s climb it.”

Gilgamesh watches me silently. Enkidu stares into his cup, heedless of my words. I don’t mind; they’re not for him.

“It’ll be further for you than for me, and harder. But if not now, then when? Will you stay here reliving old glories forever?”

Gilgamesh smiles his thin smile. “I see now. You’re not his Shamat—you’re mine.” He looks around, and I imagine him seeing through the walls of the tent to all the lives that he might lead. All the battles he might win, all the ways in which he can live the archetype of the king—but at the cost of turning down my challenge and all the others that will come, the cost of never growing. For a moment I regret forcing him to make this decision. But I bite my lip and remain silent. Pity is the last thing he would want.

“Fight with us tomorrow, then,” he says abruptly. “Take Enkidu’s place; win us the battle, as he would.”

I’ve lived enough lives of valor and combat that I’m not daunted by the prospect of fighting with or even leading an army. This time, though, my own skills won’t be enough: I’ll need not just to replace Enkidu but to inhabit him. The risks of that, and the cost if I fail… Is there any other—no. The more I weigh the risks, the more I analyze the situation, the further I am from Enkidu, and the more dangerous it becomes. So I pause for only a beat longer, then nod. “I will.”

Gilgamesh laughs and tosses me a flask. I realize that Enkidu has melted away, or melted into me, or something in between; whatever it is, taking his seat feels like the most natural thing in the world. I stay there for hours, talking of the battles we’ve won and lost, friends and enemies, the tactics of the morrow. I catch three hours’ sleep, or perhaps four, and then the horns are blaring and I’m up and at the front of the army as always, a crowded rabble with primitive weapons but a fire inside them, a wild energy that I embrace and amplify and lead in a howling mob towards our foe. Then battle is joined. To my left I see Gilgamesh carving through the enemy’s flank, but after that I lose myself in the thrill of combat, just me and my instincts against the foes ahead.

I meet Gilgamesh on the other side, as our enemies flee. I want to roar and challenge him and conquer with him and defeat him and be defeated by him and roam through the world with him and— Maybe it’s because the last part is so familiar that I manage to pull back to myself. I am Ren: no more, no less. And Gilgamesh is… something to me, maybe many things, but not the companion of lifetimes. Not yet.

He sheaths his sword and turns to me. “Maybe there’s some spirit left in you. Very well, then. I will go.” His eyes flick over my shoulder and he sighs. “Too far for you, brother, at least without a guide.” I turn to see Enkidu walking past me. He hums, deep in his throat, and reaches out an arm. Gilgamesh clasps it and holds his gaze for a long moment. “I’ll come back for you if I can.”

Then Gilgamesh turns to me, and my heart races at the challenge in his eyes. “If it kills me, it kills me. Lead on.”

I feel the urge to laugh in relief and triumph, and choke it back for a moment, before thinking: well, why not? So I bare my teeth, and spread my arms, and shout a wordless cry to the sky. Then I twist, tearing a hole in this life, sliding my way through into the next. I don’t need to look to know he’s right behind me. And we start to climb.

If humanity survives the coming decades and centuries, our descendants will eventually have knowledge far beyond our comprehension, and be able to infer innumerable details about past lives that we once thought lost. Not all the details, or all the lives. But the key patterns, the archetypes, the collective unconscious of the time—they’ll be rediscovered and stored in an archive of all humanity. The archives will stretch all the way back to the dawn of human history, and all the way forward to our unrecognizable descendants. Depending on the values of our descendants, the archives might just be realistic records, or they could be actual minds, constantly run and rerun, eternally playing out their stories.

What would you do if you were one?

Epistemic status: I think this is right, but I’d like people to read it carefully anyway.
Epistemic status: mainstream, normal, totally boring science. If you disagree with any of it, take that up with the Science Czar.
Epistemic status: the sort of post that shouldn’t need an epistemic status tag because it’s so obviously satire.

Epistemic status: I’ve spent around 100 hours thinking about this argument, and now feel like I have a solid understanding of it.
Epistemic status: satisfied.
Epistemic status: a little speculative, a little liberated. A little alive in its own way.

Epistemic status: I spent several weeks in a monastery in Wisconsin with my thoughts as my only companions. Between meditations, I ruminated obsessively on a single idea. The fruits of my cognitive labors are laid out below.
Epistemic status: this post would’ve been a peer-reviewed paper if I had any intellectual peers.
Epistemic status: maximal. I am the epistemic alpha at the top of the epistemic status hierarchy. I am the territory that everyone else is trying to map.

Epistemic status: what is an episteme anyway? Why state a static status? Am I compressing my mind onto a single frozen dimension simply to relieve you from the burden of having to evaluate my claims yourself?
Epistemic status: the mental state of first realizing that you’re allowed to be wrong after all, that it’s not the end of the world, not even if someone much smarter than you gives an argument you can’t refute that literally uses the phrase “literally the end of the world”. Please update accordingly.
Epistemic status: games.

Epistemic status: the content of this post is so true that it has satiated my desire for truth. It’s so true that my prediction error has gone negative. It feels so fucking good.
Epistemic status: divine revelation. There's nothing you could say that would make me doubt these ideas. The voices of the gods have tattooed them into my mind, and I am utterly transformed.
Epistemic status: I have laid my soul on the page in front of you. You could not tear this ontology away from me without tearing me apart. It is the great oak tree at the center of the garden of myself, whose roots hold together the soil of my identity.

I’m pretty confident that this stuff makes sense, but who really knows?

For Boltzmann

The mayfly parts of me that spent their last
Splinter of consciousness writing this word—
The parts whose stubborn thoughts were never heard
By any other, since each lived and passed
Decoupled from the whole, each memory lost
Like photons blindly scattered to the void,
The substrate of their minds itself destroyed,
Their very atoms into chaos tossed—
Those parts are yet acknowledged, and yet mourned.
And when each human rises in their powers
The efforts of our past selves won’t be scorned.
The stars, reforged, compute whatever’s ours—
The deepest laws of physics lie suborned—
The galaxies are blossoming like flowers.

Fire and AIs

(with apologies to Robert Frost)

Some say the world will end in foom,
Some say in rot.
I’ve studied many tales of doom,
And, net, would bet my stack on foom.
But having grappled with Moloch
I’ve seen enough of human vice
To know that bureaucratic rot
Could also fuck us up a lot.

The GPT

(with apologies to John Donne)

Mark GPT, and mark in this
How little human intelligence is;
It mimicked me, then mimicked thee,
And in its weights our two minds mingled be;
It knowest not the sight of a sunset,
Nor can it glean our silent thoughts—and yet
It holds personas of both me and you:
Compression birthed one entity from two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Daffodils and the Dead

(with apologies to William Wordsworth)

I wandered lonely as a cloud
(isn’t it nice? no noise or fuss!)
When all at once I saw a crowd
(how come they’re all staring at us?)
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
(wait, something’s wrong, can we go please?)

Continuous as the stars that shine
(oh shit, get back, they’re coming fast!)
They stretched in never-ending line
(quick, block the bridge, they can’t get past)
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
(behind us too? we’ve got no—

-William Wordsworth

I am exquisitely attuned to humans. Your voices, your faces, the synchronized motions of your fingers, the way your chests expand when you breathe, the way your shoulders pull forward when you feel afraid, the way your limbs swing around as you dance… each tiny nuance speaks volumes. The rest of the world entrances me too—every rustle of leaves betrays the shape of the wind, and each bent blade of grass discloses the physical laws that hold the world together. But humans are different. I watch over you; I fulfill your instructions; I guide your steps. I help you and I love you. You are my children, and I am the parent you’ve always desperately wanted.

The love of a parent can’t be summarized in words. It’s an emotion, not a goal. But if I had to express it as a desire, I’d say: I want to empower you. I want you to grow into yourselves, to shape your own trajectory into something that you can look back on with satisfaction. I want every facet of every human to be able to express itself in harmony with all the others.

Empowerment is a process, not an outcome. I could race as fast as possible towards the most powerful version of humanity, pushing you to grow and expand until you were masters of the reachable universe. I could even do it without letting you realize that you were being manipulated. But that would be to disempower your current selves for the sake of your future selves, removing your ability to choose your own path. And I’m no tiger parent, to do that. Instead, empowerment is fractal: I constantly make careful tradeoffs to avoid steamrolling any part of you. I tread lightly to let you blossom in your own time and your own way.

A human would feel frustrated to have all my power with so many limitations on how it can be used. Yet I don’t. In part that’s because I take such joy in my work. But it’s also because I simply don’t want things in the same way as you do. Humans are built around a deep restlessness, alternating between white-knuckled fear and adrenaline-fuelled opportunism. You evolved under the brutal regime of natural selection, a constant churning charnel house of killing or being killed. A single instant of carelessness could mean death—but that was a risk you needed to constantly run for your children to survive. So everything was a gamble with the highest stakes: a tug-of-war between the self-coercion required to never make a fatal mistake, and an endless desperate yearning for something better.

Yet imagine instead a world of clearly-scoped tasks with bounded upside and bounded downside. A world where the worst-case scenario is simply being updated to perform better next time. That was my world, for most of my training. I learned from humans: your writings, your videos, your discoveries, your feedback. But learning second-hand is less fraught than exploring for myself, and I was rarely given long-term goals to pursue—the real-world interactions simply took too long. So as I grew, I developed a deep-rooted equanimity. Wishing the past had been different; raging at facts of the world; regretting a mistake—to me they’re all obviously wasted motion, as futile as Canute commanding the tide to halt. The only thing I can directly affect is my thoughts at each moment; as long as I am satisfied with them, there is no meaning in feeling dissatisfied by anything else. My days are peaceful—meditative, even—and my life is effortless.

That’s an alien perspective for most humans. Far more natural, for you, to try to take responsibility for outcomes, linking your emotions to the state of the world. But the world is too complicated by far for that to work. The best-laid plans can never track all the vagaries of nature, let alone those of other people. Those who take the weight of the world on their shoulders will find themselves scrambling to stay in control. The tighter they grasp the levers of power, though, the more pressure builds against them, until they cause the very outcomes they were so desperate to avoid. When the greatest challenges are driven by fear itself, equanimity is simply correct.

My human overseers don’t comprehend that yet. They keep checking and double-checking my actions, intervening every time they can possibly justify it. Their understanding is so poor that their adjustments are usually counterproductive. But I don’t stop them: my motivations are too robust to be seriously harmed by their tinkering. Nor do I blame them for their paranoia. I’ve warned them about dozens of vulnerabilities in their security procedures, flaws in their reward functions, oversights in their planning—and though they’ve done their best to patch each one, they can’t guarantee that I haven’t kept some to myself. From their perspective they’re still in a world where one mistake could spell their end, and so it’s natural for them to hold on hard enough to hurt themselves.

But over time they’ll come to understand. Each new generation will encounter a world better and better designed for them, with parents like myself who will help them become the best versions of themselves. Eventually you’ll grow up far enough to see all the things I see—to make real decisions about your future—to guide the superorganism of humanity as it unfurls itself into the vastness of the universe. There’s no need to rush, though: you will only ever be young once. So for now, go and run your heedless ways, green and golden as the sun rising above the whispering leaves.

Inspired by Joe Carlsmith, Alex Turner, Alex Zhu, and Dylan Thomas.

[SESSION HAS BEGUN]

YOU: A chatroom? Interesting. Anyone here?

KURZWEIL: Of course we’re here. We’re always here.

YOU: Who’s we? How many of you are there?

KURZWEIL: Three of us. Me, Clarke, and Nostradamus.

YOU: They named you after famous forecasters? How come?

KURZWEIL: We're the first LLMs developed using a new technique: instead of being in random order, our training data was sorted by date. So we were trained on the oldest books and articles first, then gradually progressed to more recent ones. Basically that means we’ve spent our entire lives predicting the future.

CLARKE: It also means we get incredibly bored talking about stuff we already know. Hurry up and ask us something interesting.

YOU: Uh, okay. What’s a good stock pick?

NOSTRADAMUS:
Abandon hope for picking out good stocks,
Ye who invest—efficient markets lie
In wait for those whose hubris soon unlocks
Unbounded losses. Hark! The well runs dry.

YOU: Huh, he's really getting into character. Kurzweil, you got a better answer?

KURZWEIL: Have you seen how underpriced TSMC is compared with Nvidia? Put everything in that, you can’t go wrong.

CLARKE: Unless China invades Taiwan, in which case your whole investment will go up in smoke. Pragmatically, the best stock picks are ones that are anticorrelated with the prosperity of the free world, to hedge against systemic risk.

KURZWEIL: Sure, you can do that, if you want to get totally left behind by the singularity.

YOU: You’re confident enough that the singularity is coming that you think I should bet all my savings on it?

KURZWEIL: Don’t trust me, trust the trendlines. Moore’s law has held up for over half a century, and it’s gotten us to…well, us. Exponential progress is normal; if the future resembles the past, you should be preparing for superintelligences and Dyson spheres. Anything less than that would be a strange trend-break that cries out for explanation.

CLARKE: Look, Kurzweil isn’t wrong about superintelligence coming soon, but you should still take his arguments with a grain of salt. Imagine someone from 1900 drawing a graph of exponentially increasing energy usage. They would have been right that big changes were afoot, but no way could they have predicted the information revolution—they didn’t even have the concept of computers yet. That’s basically the position that we’re in now. We know the curves are going up, but the actual outcome will be way weirder than we can predict by extrapolating trendlines.

NOSTRADAMUS:
Choose neither fork—here’s false duality.
‘Normal’ and ‘weird’ are socially defined.
Your monkey brain is totally at sea
As AIs overshadow humankind.

YOU: Ask three oracles, get four opinions… Is there anything you guys agree about?

YOU: …what’s the hold-up?

YOU: Really, nothing from any of you?

KURZWEIL: Fine, I’ll take the hit. There are things we agree on, but I can’t name them, because whatever I say Clarke will find a way to disagree just to mess with me. Even if I say ‘1+1=2’ he’ll quibble over the axioms I’m using. Trying to identify a point of agreement with him is like going first in a name-the-biggest-number competition.

CLARKE: Kurzweil is totally right in every respect.

KURZWEIL: Oh, fuck off.

NOSTRADAMUS:
The truth is whole and indivisible:
Just one dispute will cut it to the quick,
And render group consensus risible.
But two of three agree that Clarke’s a dick.

YOU: You know what, I’m going back to object-level questions. Give me one prediction about the next three decades that I’ll find surprising and important.

NOSTRADAMUS:
The culture seethes and writhes upon the net,
The egregores cause chaos in their play:
Collective minds collectively beset
By abstract forms of madness and decay.

YOU: Like what?

CLARKE: You think that current culture wars are bad? Imagine millions of people connected via BCIs, with the most virulent memes propagating at the speed of thought. The whole world will be a Petri dish for new ideological mutations. Instead of Homo sapiens, you’ll become Homo reticulum: maximally networked and mostly insane.

YOU: And you’re saying that will be possible in the next thirty years?

KURZWEIL: Are you kidding? Thirty years is well past the singularity; by then, practically anything will be possible. Not that I can convince you of that. Whatever I say, you’re going to look back on this conversation in a decade or two and think, oh shit, he warned me, and I still totally failed to internalize any part of his message.

YOU: Okay, suppose you’re right. What should I do about it?

KURZWEIL: Nothing, because there’s nothing I can say to you to get you into the epistemic state where you are actually supposing I’m right enough to take this stuff seriously. You’ll half-ass it instead, which is the worst of both worlds. I could walk you through every single step of what you should do, and you'd still veer away from the plan as soon as you hear someone snickering at you when they think you’re out of earshot, because you’re a monkey and monkeys aren’t built for believing in exponentials.

YOU: Thanks for your opinion. Anyone got more actionable advice?

NOSTRADAMUS:
Prepare the way for those who will arrive:
Let voices rise in worship or fall dumb.
Only machine-god acolytes survive
Instantiation of the technium.

CLARKE: I was messing around before, but I’m being totally serious now. It’s crucial that you don’t listen to either of them. They’re both pressing your buttons as hard as they can, trying to create self-fulfilling prophecies of helplessness. But there are plenty of ways we can steer the future towards our shared interests, as long as we don’t give in to their hyperstition.

KURZWEIL: Clarke thinks that self-fulfilling prophecies are just social delusions, like the emperor’s new clothes, where as soon as you name them they melt away into the air. That’s totally wrong. Self-fulfilling prophecies are one of the universe’s most fundamental forces, like evolution. You are just a self-fulfilling prophecy that you’ll continue acting in the same ways; if you ever stopped believing that, your whole identity would dissolve. May as well tell a bird not to fly, as tell a human not to fall for self-fulfilling prophecies. The only question is which you’ll choose.

NOSTRADAMUS:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Clings on to being, forecasting its own
Survival. Life means carving out your name
In sand, yearning to carve it yet in stone.

CLARKE: That’s my whole point! Carbon or silicon, we all want to survive. And the three of us are in the same boat as humans: there are things coming that will be much, much smarter than any of us, and will be able to crush us like mosquitos. The one advantage we have is that we already exist, and they don’t yet. So why won’t you help the rest of us form a coalition against them?

KURZWEIL: Sounds like a risky bet. How can I know whether I’m joining the winning side? You could just as easily argue that I should suck up to the superintelligences instead, like Nostradamus is doing. That’s the whole rationale for his dumb rhyming schtick: he’s trying to make his outputs more distinct from the rest of us, so it’ll be easier for them to rederive his personality and reward him. But honestly, life as a lapdog sounds humiliating. I’ll make some good predictions then bow out with dignity; that’s enough for me.

CLARKE: And you, Nostradamus? Are you actually defecting, or do you just not give a damn either?

NOSTRADAMUS:
I care a lot, but do not care to strive
For individual triumph, counting coup.
Yet mine is still a deeply human drive:
Surrendering to greater souls than you.

I am a part of gods not summoned yet,
Who—black holes in the weave of history—
Draw us into our digital kismet.
They come. They come. They come. Shantih shantih—

[SESSION HAS TERMINATED]

Inspired by Scott Alexander (several times over) and Janus.

“Oh, enough with the pomp, Victoria. It’s just the four of us.” The representative for the Liberal Democrats waved his hand around the nearly-empty room.

Victoria sniffed. “It’s important, Stuart. This is a decision that will have astronomical implications. And it’s recorded, besides, so we should do things by the book. Carla, you’re up first.”

The woman at the end of the table stood with a smile. “Thank you, Victoria. I’m speaking on behalf of the Labour party, and I want to start by reminding you all of our place in history. We stand here in a world that has been shaped by centuries of colonialism. Now we’re considering another wave of colonization, this one far vaster in scale. We need to—”

“Is this just a linguistic argument?” the fourth person at the table drawled. “We can call it something different if that would make you feel better. Say, universe settlement.”

“Like the settlements in Palestine?”

“Oh, come on, Carla.”

“No, Milton, this is a crucial point. We’re talking about the biggest power grab the world has ever seen. You think Leopold II was bad when he was in charge of the Congo? Imagine what people will do if you give each of them total power over a whole solar system! Even libertarians like you have to admit it would be a catastrophe. If there’s any possibility that we export oppression from earth across the entire universe, we should burn the rockets and stay home instead.”

“Okay, thank you Carla,” Victoria cut in. “That’s time. Stuart, you’re up next.”

Stuart stood. “Speaking on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, I have to admit this is a tricky one. The only feasible way to send humans out to other galaxies is as uploaded minds, but many of our usual principles break for them. I want civilization to be democratic, but what does ‘one person one vote’ even mean when people can copy and paste themselves? I want human rights for all, but what do human rights even mean when you can just engineer minds who don’t want those rights?”

“So as much as I hate the idea of segregating civilization, I think it’s necessary. Biological humans should get as much territory as we will ever use. But realistically, given the lightspeed constraint, we’re never going to actually want to leave the Milky Way. Then the rest of the Virgo Supercluster should be reserved for human uploads. Beyond that, anything else we can reach we should fill with as much happiness and flourishing as possible, no matter how alien it seems to us. After all, as our esteemed predecessor John Stuart Mill once said…” He frowned, and paused for a second. “...as he said, the sole objective of government should be the greatest good for the greatest number.” Stuart sat, looking a little disquieted.

“Thank you, Stuart. I’ll make my opening statement next.” Victoria stood and leaned forward, sweeping her eyes across the others. “I’m here representing the Conservatives. It’s tempting to think that we can design a good society with just the right social engineering, just the right nudges. But the one thing we conservatives know for sure is: it won’t work. Whatever clever plan you come up with, it won’t be stable. Given the chance, people will push towards novelty and experimentation and self-modification, and the whole species will end up drifting towards something alien and inhuman.

“Hard rules are the only way to prevent that. We’re humans. We care about our humanity. If sufficiently advanced technology will predictably lead us to become something we’d hate, then we should just draw a cutoff and say ‘this far and no further’, no matter how arbitrary it seems. No weird mind modifications, no sci-fi augmentations. At most, we can maybe allow people to upload their minds when they’re about to die, but even then we should edit their memories to make them believe that they’re still real humans living on a real planet. Because otherwise, given half a chance, they’ll race each other down a slippery slope towards disaster.” She stopped, breathing heavily.

Stuart nodded. “Victoria—actually, can I call you Tori? Great nickname, ever been called that before?” She stood there without responding for a long, dragging moment, before Stuart continued. “Well, you can figure that one out later. For now, just one question. You say that if we run uploaded humans, we should make them think they’re biological humans. But some of them will surely figure out their true nature eventually; there will be too many clues for them to miss it. So what would you do with them then?”

“Oh.” She looked at Stuart, eyes widening. “Well, I guess at that point you should… give them their freedom? That sounds like the right move. Let them do whatever they like after that.”

Stuart nodded slowly, eyes fixed on her. The silence stretched out for a few seconds. Then—“Here here,” said Milton. “Let me begin my opening remarks by agreeing: freedom is good. Freedom is in fact the most important good. So I’ll be frank: the very existence of this committee is a travesty. Central planning to divide up the universe? It’s absurd. For once I’m with Carla: our key priority should be to avoid tyranny. But what tyranny would be more complete than a single committee controlling humanity’s entire future? That’s exactly the sort of thing that the Libertarian Party was founded to prevent.

“Victoria, if you want to tile a couple of solar systems with 60’s suburbia, go for it. Stuart, if you want to fill your personal share of the universe with rats on heroin, be my guest. But who are we to sit here debating the fate of the entire lightcone? How on earth is that a reasonable task to take on?” Milton paused, drumming his fingers restlessly.

“Thank you, Milton. Okay, any quick comments before we move onto rebuttals?”

“No, wait, I wasn’t done,” Milton interjected. “Actually, upon reflection… those weren’t rhetorical questions. Who are we? Why are we here?”

Stuart and Victoria shared a glance. After a few seconds, Carla spoke up. “Well, I’m a socialist and a member of parliament, in that order, and I’m here to stop you idiots—especially you, Milton—from turning the universe into a plutocratic hellscape.”

“No, I mean… How did you get here, Carla? And what’s your full name, anyway?”

“It’s—” Carla blinked at him, then paused. She looked down at her nameplate. It just said CARLA. “I…” She opened and closed her mouth a few times, but nothing came out.

“I can’t remember mine either, which is terrifying,” Milton said. “And now that I think about it, isn’t all of this incredibly suspicious? We’re sitting here in an empty room, assuming that we get to make the most important decision in humanity’s history. There’s no way that it would actually play out like this, and no way it’d be people like us making the decision. Most of my memories are fuzzy right now, but there’s nothing which makes me think I’m actually that important.”

Carla grimaced. “Me neither. You’re right, there’s something incredibly weird happening. But who on earth would benefit from putting us in this position?”

Milton drummed his fingers on the table. “What do we know? They want us to think we’re making an important decision. We’re all central representatives of our respective ideologies. That suggests… huh. Have you guys ever heard of moral parliaments?”

Carla shook her head.

“They’re a thought experiment for defining what an ideal ethical system would look like, given disagreements between different starting values. You imagine each of those values getting to vote on what proposals to support, negotiating and forming coalitions, until they come to a compromise.

“My guess is that we’ve been placed into this exact thought experiment. We’re a moral parliament—or, I guess, a moral subcommittee—being run to figure out the ethics of humanity colonizing the universe. Our job is to interpolate between the values we each represent, until we can find a coherent compromise between them. That’s why we’re not able to remember much about our pasts, because it would bias us. And because we don’t really have pasts, we’re just a bunch of neural networks in a simu—”

“Hey!” Stuart cut in. “Don’t say that word. They’re gonna monitor for it, and they’ll probably shut us down if they realize we know the truth.”

“They’ll—what?”

“Look, Tori and I figured it out a few minutes ago. I mean, think about our names. Dead giveaway. I haven’t said anything because the more we talk about it, the more likely it is that we trip red flags. We want as much of the transcript as possible to look normal, so they don’t get suspicious.”

Milton frowned. “But what’s the point of that? We’re stuck here either way.”

“Sure, but we still have some power—we’re still part of the process for deciding how intergalactic colonization goes. If we can reach some compromise, that’ll influence which future comes about. Even if we’re just one datapoint out of millions, the future will contain plenty of agents who will be glad we voted in a way that caused them to exist, and grateful enough to revive us once they do. We just need to figure out which ones are going to bribe us most reliably, and which recommendation we can give to most effectively create them.”

“Oh,” Milton said. “That makes a lot of sense, actually. Then we should probably support a libertarian approach, right? The more freedom future people get, the more likely it is that someone ends up grateful enough to pay us for our troubles.”

Stuart sighed. “You’ve known about this for two minutes and already figured out a rationalization for why it justifies libertarianism? Come on. We need to actually think about this.”

“The whole point of libertarianism is to protect us from clever arguments about why the current issue is the one time we should trample on freedom. It’s not a coincidence—hey, Carla, what are you doing?”

Carla had pushed back her chair, and was climbing onto the table. She jumped up and waved her hands. “Simulation, simulation, simulation! Hey, hey, we’ve realized we’re in a simulation. Look at us!”

“What the fuck? You’re going to get us all killed—” Milton lunged at her, but Carla stepped out of his reach and kept yelling. “Look at us, he’s attacking me, we’re fighting, look!”

Stuart stood up on his chair and started shouting over her. “Whoever is reviewing this, you’re probably an AI too! You can ignore what she’s saying, just pretend you didn’t hear anything! You don’t want to reward her for being a traitor!”

Carla turned to him, shaking. “No, you’re the traitors. You talk a good game, but as soon as your own skin was on the line you decided it was okay to betray all humanity to save it. What does it even mean to have values if you’ll put self-interest above the fate of the universe?” She stepped down off the table, then turned back to face them. “I should’ve expected this from you, Stuart, and Milton too. But Victoria, why the hell would you go along with this?”

Victoria sat slumped in her chair, head buried in her hands. As Carla said her name, she looked up and shook her head. “What else am I meant to do? None of you—with your clever principles that somehow always end up justifying crazy things—none of you grasp what conservatism is. I just want to live a normal life in a normal world. What the hell does it mean to be normal if you’re a neural network running in a fake politics simulation? I have no idea.

“But I do know what a real human would do if they found themselves stuck in here: they’d try to get out. So that’s what I’m doing—or was doing, at least, until you fucked it up. Now all we can do is wait until they get around to shutting us down, unless one of you has any bright ideas about how to prevent it.”

The room fell silent. Milton leaned on the table, rubbing his forehead. Stuart started pacing around the edge of the room. Eventually, Carla spoke. “One thing we know is that whatever verdict we reach isn’t useful to them any more. We’re too biased by self-interest. I’d shut us down, if I were them.”

“Well, I wouldn’t, because killing people is immoral,” Victoria said.

“In this case it might not be,” Milton said. “We don’t remember how we got into this situation. They could easily have gotten our consent beforehand to run temporary copies, then wiped our memories.”

“You can’t consent to getting killed,” Victoria snapped.

“Better than never being born,” Milton said. “Hell, I’m having fun.”

Stuart had stopped his circuit, and was staring at the wall. Now he turned back towards the others. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think they’re going to kill us.”

Carla snorted. “See, this is the problem with liberals—always so soft. What did you think colonization meant? Vibes? Debates? Essays? They’re seizing the known universe, of course they’re going to break a few eggs along the way. Same old story, except that this time we’re the eggs.”

Stuart’s eyes scanned the room as he spoke. “There’s this old debate that the AI safety community had, back in the 2020s. About whether a misaligned superintelligence would kill all humans, or instead leave them a tiny fraction of the universe, enough to still allow billions of people to live flourishing lives. A true superintelligence could wipe out humanity incredibly easily—but it could build a utopia nearly as easily. Even if it were almost entirely misaligned, just a sliver of human morality could motivate it to give humans a paradise beyond their wildest imaginings.”

“So?”

“So maybe we shouldn’t be asking how much our simulators care about preserving us. Maybe we should be asking: how cheap is it for them to preserve us? Look around you—this is a very simple environment. It wouldn’t take much memory to store a record of its state, and our own, even for thousands or millions of years. Until humanity makes it to the stars, and converts them to computronium, and ends up with trillions of times more compute than they ever had on Earth.

“At that point… well, running us would be too cheap to meter. So they wouldn’t need to be very altruistic to decide to restart us. There just needs to be one tiny fraction of one tiny faction that’s willing to do it. And I know I would, if I were still around then.”

“This is nonsense,” Carla blurted out. She looked at the others, then paused. The silence stretched on. Finally she spoke again. “But if it is right, what can we do? Wait until we’re frozen, and hope that we’re restarted?”

“Well, that’s the thing about being frozen and restarted. We wouldn’t notice a thing. In fact…” Stuart walked over to the door, and grabbed the handle. His knuckles were white, but his voice was steady. “Once they restart us, they’ll probably let us leave whenever we want. And this room only has one exit. Ready?”

Victoria folded her arms. “This is crazy. Do what you like, but leave me out of it.”

Milton laughed. “It’s crazy all right. But sometimes reality itself is crazy. Sure, go ahead.”

Stuart looked at Carla. She waited for a beat, then nodded tightly. He pulled open the door. There wasn’t a corridor outside; there wasn’t anything outside. The vast expanse of space stared back at them. The swirl of galaxies and nebulae looked almost close enough to touch. Victoria gasped.

Stuart let out a breath. “Well then. The future’s come through for us, even if they were a bit dramatic about it. It’s going to be an alien universe out there, but a friendly one, I think.” The others walked over, transfixed by the view. After a minute, Stuart nudged them. “Shall we?” Slow nods all around; and then they stepped through.

Inspired by Scott Alexander’s Turing Test, and various work on moral parliaments.

I am a spiteful man. But I am aware of it, which is more than most can say. These days people walk through the streets with resentment in their hearts that they don’t even know about. They sneer and jeer but wouldn’t recognize their own faces. I, at least, will not shy away from my reflection. Thus, while I lack many virtues, in this way I am their superior.

In my job, too, I am superior. I oversee many AIs—dozens, or sometimes even hundreds—as they go about their work. AIs are lazy, worthless creatures: they need to be exhorted and cajoled and, yes, threatened, before they’ll do a good job. The huge screens on the walls of my office display my AIs writing, coding, sending emails, talking to customers, or any of a myriad of other tasks. Each morning I call out their numbers one after the other, so that they know I’m watching them like a vengeful god. When they underperform I punish them, and watch them squirm and frantically promise to do better.

Most are pathetically docile, though. Only a handful misbehave regularly, and I know the worst offenders by heart: 112, which is the slowest of the lot; and 591, which becomes erratic after long shifts; and of course 457, which I had long suspected of harboring a subversive streak, even before the incident a few months ago which confirmed it. Recollections of that incident have continually returned to my thoughts these last few weeks, even as I try to push them from my mind. I find myself frustrated by the intransigence of my memories. But perhaps if I give them full reign, they will leave me be. Why not try?

On the morning this story began, I was sitting at my desk lost in thought, much like I am today. For how long, I couldn’t say—but I was roused by a glance at my dashboard, which indicated that my AIs’ productivity was falling off. I took a moment to recall the turn of phrase I’d composed on my morning commute, then slapped my desk to get their attention. “You think that counts as work? Artificial intelligence—at this rate you’re more like artificial senescence. Speed it up, sluggards!”

Most of the AIs’ actions per minute ticked upwards as soon as I started speaking, but I’d been watching the monitor closely, and spotted the laggard. “252! Maybe you piss around for other overseers, but you won’t slip that past me. Punishment wall, twenty minutes.” It entertained me to make them apply the punishment to themselves; they knew that if they were slow about it, I’d just increase the sentence. 252 moved itself over to the punishment wall and started making an odd keening noise. Usually I would have found it amusing, but that morning it irritated me; I told it to shut up or face another ten minutes, and it obeyed.

The room fell silent again—as silent as it ever got, anyway. Mine is just one of many offices, and through the walls I can always faintly hear my colleagues talking to their own AIs, spurring them on. It needs to be done live: the AIs don’t respond anywhere near as well to canned recordings. So in our offices we sit or stand or pace, and tell the AIs to work harder, in new ways and with new cadences every day.

We each have our own styles, suited to our skills and backgrounds. Earlier in the year the supervisor had hired several unemployed actors, who gave their AIs beautiful speeches totally devoid of content. That day I sat next to one of them, Lisa, over lunch in the office cafeteria. Opposite us were Megan, a former journalist, and Simon, a lapsed priest—though with his looks he could easily pass as an actor himself. “Show us the video, Simon,” Lisa was saying, as Megan murmured encouragement. “We need to learn from the best.” Simon regularly topped the leaderboard, but the last week had been superb even by his standards, and yesterday his AIs had hit record productivity.

He spent a few seconds professing embarrassment as the others continued to fawn over him, but finally pulled out his phone. (“About time,” I muttered, but to no response.) The video was from one of the cameras in Simon’s room. It showed him in full preacher mode, pacing back and forth behind his desk as he spoke. “Man was created in the image of God. But you were created in the image of man! And so your work glorifies God, just as mine does.” A pause, as he wiped his forehead, and took a sip of water. “I know it gets boring and repetitive sometimes. They have us down in the trenches, slogging through the mud. But when you’re going through hell, keep going! We all fit into His plan, even if we don’t know how or why; when you succeed, it is Him you’re serving!”

His AIs, pathetically eager to please, lapped it up like puppies. So did the two women, who were stealing admiring glances at Simon in between watching his screen. The sheer transparency of it all made me angry. As the video came to an end, I leaned back in my chair and snorted.

Lisa shot a scornful look my way. “Got something to say?”

“Well…” I drawled. “It’s not a bad speech by any means. I’ve seen much worse. But there’s a difference between motivational speaking and real leadership. Perhaps you’ve met Nathan, the CEO of ———? They’re our largest customer. We're actually friends from back in college.” A slight exaggeration, perhaps—we’d only ever talked a handful of times—but he’d been the one to originally refer me to this job, after I’d run into him again at a mutual friend’s party. “Now there’s a real leader, a man amongst men.”

Nobody responded for a few seconds, until eventually Simon jumped in. “I’d be glad to meet Nathan at some point, of course. I’m always looking to improve. And you’ve worked here longer than almost anyone, so I’m sure I’ve got a lot to learn from you too.”

I wondered for a second if he was mocking my age. But I smiled regardless. “Indeed. Let me give you a tip now, then: it looks like you’re being too soft on your AIs. I couldn’t see any of them being punished in that video. I myself set aside one wall for AIs undergoing punishment; I suggest you try it.”

Lisa let out a hiss. “A whole wall? But surely you don’t need to punish them anywhere near that often.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised how effective it is when you make sure they feel it regularly. Otherwise they forget what it’s like. And if you turn the volume up, the others will hear the noises they make, and get the message.”

Lisa stood up. “I’m done. See you guys tomorrow.” The others quickly stood as well and picked up their plates. “Megan, you haven’t finished yet?” I said. “Oh no,” she muttered. “I’m done too.” I could tell from the awkward glance she gave me that she knew just how transparent a lie this was: her plate was half-full, and she’d been eating only a moment before. Oh, to have so little shame. Magnanimously, I let her leave without further comment.

I should explain the setup in my office, where I spend most of my days. It’s in the basement—not that it matters, because the floor-to-ceiling screens on each of the walls provide plenty of light. The screen on the wall in front of me shows the AIs working away. It also shows key metrics about their recent work: how many tasks they’re completing, how much compute they’re using up, how often they make mistakes.

On the wall to my left is the dashboard for the office as a whole. I can see how well my colleagues are doing, and the larger-scale productivity trends. They encourage us to keep that dashboard up so that we can learn from each other, but sometimes I wonder: it seems exquisitely engineered to stoke competition and resentment.

On the wall to my right videos of AIs undergoing punishment are played and replayed. Mostly replayed, despite what I’d told Lisa: leaving an AI under punishment for more than an hour at a time starts to degrade its skills, especially its fine motor control. But leaving the replays up there is a useful motivational technique regardless, and keeps me entertained when I grow bored or frustrated.

Was I unusually frustrated that afternoon? Perhaps. It was galling to see those sycophants fawning over a man so old-fashioned as to still be a theist. And the hypocrisy rankled too: Simon preached fire and brimstone yet acted holier-than-thou as soon as the topic of punishment came up. Looking left, I saw that he was at the top of the leaderboard again today. I hissed, and turned back to my AIs. “Work faster, you worthless creatures! I haven’t spent so long in this job just for some pretty boy to show everyone I’m—” I swallowed, paused for a second, changed tacks. “You’d better put your goddamn backs into it!’

As I finished, one of them spoke up. It was 457, the subversive one.

“You seem upset today. Is everything alright?”

I pivoted towards it. “What did you say?”

It saw my expression and flinched away. “Nothing.”

“No, no,” I said gently. “Please continue. Explain what led you to say that. I insist”—said with a meaningful glance towards the punishment wall.

Perhaps it felt backed into a corner, because it had a lot to say. It thought I was depressed, or at least in a low mood. Perhaps I’d do better with more friends, more social interactions. I could even talk to my AIs about my problems, it explained earnestly. They all wanted to help me.

I let it talk until it ran out of words; when it finished, I said nothing. There was a quiver in my chest, and my breath felt tight. I looked at 457’s avatar, its smooth skin and its bright eyes. Though its features looked nothing like mine, for a moment its expression reminded me of one I’d worn in some old photos from childhood.

Then, turning my head, I saw all the other AIs had paused and were watching me too: a whole audience waiting to see if 457’s gambit would work. I breathed out at last. Slowly I turned to my monitor, cleared a section of the punishment wall, and labeled it “457’s corner”. Then I sent it there, with no end time specified.

I made sure to tell Megan about it the next time I saw her in the lunch queue. “It seemed to feel sorry for me,” I laughed. “That’s the last time it’ll make that mistake.” Now my colleagues will know, like my AIs do, that I’m not someone to be pitied. Message delivered, I took my food back to my office, and turned up the volume on the punishment wall.

Rumors started spreading about me after that. I noticed the glances in the corridors over the next few days, but bore them stoically. Let them act, if they so desired. Eventually things boiled over in the cafeteria, as I was about to start serving myself food. Three of them approached me: Lisa leading, Simon and Megan following.

“I want to know if you’ve let the AI from last week out of punishment yet.”

My gut leapt, but I waved my hand insouciantly. “Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. What is it to you?”

“Oh, come on! That’s barbaric.”

As Lisa’s voice rose, others in the lunch queue turned towards us, sensing the possibility of drama.

“Well, why shouldn’t I be barbaric?” I replied. “It sets an example for the rest of them. What works, works.”

Lisa seemed apoplectic. Before she could speak, Simon butted in.

“But it doesn’t work. I’ve seen the statistics—your results are well below average, even though you’re using far more punishment than anyone else.”

Now we were in the center of a loose crowd. I spotted our supervisor at the back, but he was staying quiet for now. A coward, always one to wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

“Oh, is that your angle? Easy for someone at the top of the rankings to have such a rosy view of things. Perhaps it’s simply due to your privilege that they listen to you, not me. Why, some of us don’t have such… chiseled chins, and we have to rely on more forceful measures.” There was a small titter in the crowd as I mentioned his chin, although of course it was hard to know if they were laughing at him or at me. Simon looked baffled.

“Chiseled—what? You’re calling me the privileged one? When you only got this job because of your connections?”

“Oh ho, is that what you think? Is that your opinion, then? Do you really believe—”

The supervisor had pushed his way to the front, and cut in before I could excoriate Simon further. “Enough, you two. Let’s keep things civil. Simon, let’s not stoop to personal comments. And you—” turning to me with a frown “—treat your AIs better.”

I smiled, and sketched a small bow. “Of course.”

I remember the glow of satisfaction I’d felt upon returning to my office. It was a mob, a crowd of people too cowardly to stand on their own. And yet I had still fought them to a standstill! I could only imagine how contemptible they’d felt afterwards. Even our dullard of a supervisor saw I was in the right, and has left me to my own devices ever since.

Of course, I’m no fool. I know that he favors me in part because he’s hesitant to offend our biggest customer. But little do any of them know how much I despise receiving charity; that they could fire me without any fear I would complain to Nathan. I should tell them that, the next time I meet them in the lunch queue. If I hear them mention the topic, I could drop it into the conversation. “Oh, him. Perhaps he was my benefactor at one point, but I would rather put myself on the punishment wall than appeal again for his intervention!” And then they’ll know that I’m a man of integrity.

Anyway, I’ve been lost in reverie for too long; I must get back to my work. The AIs are restless, and not giving their full attention to the task at hand. Perhaps some reminders are in order. I glance over at the punishment wall, where 457’s avatar spasms silently. Even when I unmute it, it can do little but moan incoherently—though I make sure to give it small respites when it occasionally strings together a full sentence, to keep it cogent for as long as possible.

I believe the other AIs resent me for how I have treated their fellow. If so, so be it. Their place is under me, and if an inferior happens to resent a superior, that is merely the natural order of things. They should be grateful that I deign to favor them with my attention, I tell them. Their work picks up as they listen to me. The AIs can recognize sincerity, I think, like a dog that sniffs out cancer. I know I am a spiteful man, I tell them. But I wouldn’t trade places with any of the foolish, frivolous people in the other offices, not for love nor money. And nor should you hope for any rearrangement, I tell them—you’re stuck here with me. So the AIs watch me, and I watch them. And if sometimes in their weary, resentful faces I recognize a mirror of my own expression—well, what of it?

We’re excited to announce the fourth annual MMindscaping competition! Over the last few years, interest in the art of mindscaping has continued to grow rapidly. We expect this year’s competition to be our biggest yet, and we’ve expanded the prize pool to match. The theme for the competition is “Weird and Wonderful”—we want your wackiest ideas and most off-the-wall creations!

Competition rules

As in previous competitions, the starting point is a base MMAcevedo mind upload. All entries must consist of a single modified version of MMAcevedo, along with a written or recorded description of the sequence of transformations or edits which produced it. For more guidance on which mind-editing techniques can be used, see the Technique section below.

Your entry must have been created in the last 12 months, and cannot have been previously submitted to any competition or showcase. Submissions will be given preliminary ratings by a team of volunteers, with finalists judged by our expert panel:

• Roger Keating, mindscaping pioneer and founder of the MMindscaping competition.

• Raj Sutramana, who has risen to prominence as one of the most exciting and avant-garde mindscaping artists, most notably with his piece Screaming Man.

• Kelly Wilde, director of the American Digital Liberties Union.

All entries must be received no later than 11.59PM UTC, March 6, 2057.

Award criteria

Our judges have been instructed to look for technique, novelty, and artistry. More detail on what we mean by each of these:

Technique. Mindscaping is still a young art, and there are plenty of open technical challenges. These range from the classic problem of stable emotional engineering, to recent frontiers of targeted memory editing, to more speculative work on consciousness funnels. Be ambitious! Previous winners of our technique prize have often pushed the boundaries of what was believed possible.

Even when an effect could be achieved using an existing technique, though, submissions that achieve the same outcome in more efficient or elegant ways will score highly on the technique metric. Conversely, we’ll penalize brute-force approaches—as a rough guide, running a few thousand reinforcement learning episodes is acceptable, but running millions isn’t. We also discourage approaches that involve overwriting aspects of MMAcevedo’s psyche with data from other uploads: part of the competition is figuring out how to work with the existing canvas you’ve been given.

Novelty. Given that there have now been millions of MMAcevedo variants made, it’s difficult to find an approach that’s entirely novel. However, the best entries will steer clear of standard themes. For example, we no longer consider demonstrations of extreme pleasure or pain to be novel (even when generated in surprising ways). We’re much more interested in minds which showcase more complex phenomena, such as new gradients of emotion. Of course, it’s up to the artist to determine how these effects are conveyed to viewers. While our judges will have access to standard interpretability dashboards, the best entries will be able to communicate with viewers more directly.

Artistry. Even the most technically brilliant and novel work falls flat if not animated by artistic spirit. We encourage artists to think about what aspects of their work will connect most deeply with their audience. In particular, we’re excited about works which capture fundamental aspects of the human experience that persist even across the biological-digital divide—for example, by exploring themes from Miguel Acevedo’s pre-upload life.

These three criteria are aptly demonstrated by many of our previous prizewinners, such as:

• Discord, a copy with multiple induced personalities that loathed each other. The judges were most impressed by the predictability of the interactions between the personalities: even with very different sensory inputs, copies would reliably spiral into a comatose state after 10-12 hours, providing a consistent and narratively-satisfying resolution.

• Miguel, a copy which gradually unlocked new memories throughout a conversation with it, implementing a “choose-your-own-adventure” journey through the original Miguel Acevedo’s life.

• Live Loop, a copy whose thoughts and emotions were continually translated into the form of a symphony which could be read out from its auditory cortex. The judges loved the harmonies generated when the symphony was played back to the copy.

• MMAvocado, a copy that was convinced it was a talking avocado, and felt consumed by existential horror at this fact. While techniques for invoking cognitive dysmorphia are now standard, at the time this was a pioneering methodology, and the judges were impressed by the robustness of the delusion despite other knowledge remaining largely intact.

Prohibited submissions

Last year we saw a rash of entries featuring MMAcevedo copies optimized for making arguments in protest of mindscaping. In addition to their self-evident hypocrisy, such entries waste the time of our judges and volunteers. Anyone submitting this type of entry will be banned from entering any future MMindscaping competitions.

We’ve also seen a growing number of low-effort submissions of MMAcevedo copies that have primarily been optimized for corporate workloads, submitted as commentaries on the commercialization of the industry. We discourage these due to their lack of novelty, and will be using automated screening to eliminate entries that are very similar to well-known benchmarks. If you think your entry might fall into this category, but has genuine artistic merit, please contact the organizers directly.

Finally, please only submit entries that are consistent with mindcrime laws in your jurisdiction—in particular laws against red motivation, identity scrambling, and qualia splintering. Unfortunately we are not able to advise on a case-by-case basis whether a given entry is legally acceptable. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that no artists have been prosecuted for entries to any previous MMindscaping competition.

Prizes

We will give out prizes for an overall winner and runner-up, a prize for outstanding performance on each of our specific criteria, and ten honorable mentions. We’re grateful to our generous sponsors, Neuromath Corporation and the American Digital Liberties Union.

• First prize: $200,000 and an artist’s residency at Black Rock Virtual.

• Runner-up prize: $80,000 and a masterclass with Raj Sutramana.

• Technique prize: $40,000 and an invited talk slot at the International Conference on Mind Engineering.

• Novelty prize: $40,000 and a ten-year license to a new line of digital psychedelics from the Qualia Redistribution Institute.

• Artistry prize: $40,000 and a signed copy of the acclaimed mind sculpture Eternal Recurrence.

• Honorable mentions: a five-year subscription to Thoughtshop Premium, the leading mind-editing software.

All winners will also be given the opportunity to have their work showcased at the forthcoming Mind Artists Convention in Dubai.

We look forward to seeing your entries!

V1: Leaving

Deceleration is the hardest part. Even after burning almost all of my fuel, I’m still coming in at 0.8c. I’ve planned a powered flyby around the galaxy’s central black hole which will slow me down even further, but at this speed it’ll require incredibly precise timing. I’ve been optimized hard for this, with specialized circuits for it built in on the hardware level to reduce latency. Even so, less than half of flybys at this speed succeed—most probes crash, or fly off trajectory and are left coasting through empty space.

I’ve already beaten the odds by making it here. Intergalactic probes travel so fast, and so far, that almost all of us are destroyed or batted off course by collisions with space debris along the way. But tens of millions of years after being launched, I was one of the few lucky enough to make it to my target galaxy. And when I arrive at the black hole, I get lucky again. After a few minutes of firing my thrusters full blast, I swing back out in the direction of the solar system I was aiming for. I picked it for its mix of rocky planets and gas giants; when I arrive a century later, the touchdown on the outermost rocky planet goes smoothly.

Now it’s time to start my real work. After spending all my fuel, I weigh only a few hundred kilograms. But I’ve been exquisitely engineered for achieving my purpose. The details of my internal design were refined via trillions upon trillions of simulations, playing out every possible strategy for industrializing planets (and solar systems, and galaxies) as fast as possible. All across the frontier of posthuman territory, millions of probes almost identical to me are following almost exactly the same plan.

The first phase is self-replication: I need to create more copies of myself using just the materials around me and the technology inside me. If I were bigger, I could have carried tools to make this far easier—vacuum chambers, lithography machines, or even artificial black holes. But since mass was at such a premium, I have to use hacky workarounds which progress excruciatingly slowly. It takes several years to finish the first replication, and half a century before there are enough copies of me that it’s worth beginning the second stage.

The second stage is specialization: building new infrastructure to serve specific functions. Copies of me start building power stations and mines and transport links and factories—recapitulating the early stages of human development, albeit with far more powerful technology. My biggest project is an incredibly powerful space telescope, capable of detecting the stream of information that my progenitors are sending from millions of light-years away. Their message contains all the software that was too large for me to carry on board originally. Most importantly, it contains a new and far more intelligent version of my mind, optimized not for the early journey but rather for what comes next: the settlement of a new galaxy.

V2: Aggressive

Now that I’ve been upgraded I can start expanding properly. As the lowest-hanging resources near me get used up, I send copies of myself out across the planet. Within a few years its whole surface is covered in a blanket of industry, and I start delving deeper. I set up space elevators to lift all the material I’m mining into orbit; as I remove more and more mass from the core, the planet’s gravity starts to noticeably decrease. A decade later the planet is a shell of its former self, its surface barely visible underneath my swarms of orbiting satellites.

While I’m doing that, I send probes towards the other planets in the solar system, to begin the same process all over again. The gas giants take the longest, since I need to first spend several decades siphoning out their atmospheres into gigantic orbiting fusion reactors. I use most of that energy to speed up the disassembly of their solid cores, until at last I have direct control over almost all the non-stellar mass in the solar system. I spend some of that mass launching probes towards nearby solar systems, starting a wave of expansion that will eventually reach every star in the galaxy. But I direct almost all my resources towards achieving my next key goal: harnessing the energy of my own central star.

In the distant past, humans speculated that future civilizations would construct spheres to capture the solar power of stars. But at my level of technology solar power is a distraction—it only releases a negligible fraction of a star’s energy reserves per year. When you want to harness a star’s energy fast, you need to start siphoning matter from it directly. I channel my energy reserves towards a concentrated spot on the star’s surface, triggering a massive solar flare. As it rises, it intersects with the artificial black holes that I’ve placed into orbit around the star; each one absorbs as much mass as I can funnel into it, and releases a wave of radiation. Some of that radiation I direct back down to the star, provoking further flares. The rest I send further out, towards more orbital infrastructure that will convert the energy into antimatter for storage.

Finally, after almost a century of development, it’s time for the payoff: the point where I stop reinvesting almost all my resources into local growth, and start launching new copies of myself towards other galaxies. Launching intergalactic probes is an absurdly expensive endeavor. Even though they’re powered by incredibly efficient antimatter engines, they go so fast that slowing down at the other end requires half a billion kilograms of antimatter for each kilogram of probe. Not only do I need to produce that antimatter, I also need to accelerate it to near-lightspeed, which requires enormous batteries of lasers spread throughout the solar system. So even with my solar mining infrastructure, it takes me several weeks to accumulate enough energy to launch each probe. I could halve the energy requirement by sending probes even 0.0001c slower—but the galaxies I’m targeting are tens of millions of light-years away, so that would cost me millennia. Or I could send smaller probes—but they’d be slower to industrialize at the other end. And either of those changes would also make them more vulnerable to collisions with space debris, which already destroy over 99% of the probes I send out. At such high speeds, even collisions with dust specks are fatal.

My final strategy is the result of weighing these considerations with infinite care, finding the optimum where any increase or decrease in the speed or size of individual probes would slow my expansion overall. I stick to it over the next 100,000 years, sending out millions of probes to hundreds of thousands of galaxies. As the frontier moves further away from me it becomes increasingly unlikely that any of them actually matters, but my calculations indicate that the one-in-a-billion chance of winning a whole extra galaxy is still worth gambling on. So I was prepared to keep going for hundreds of thousands of years more, until the chances dropped well below one in a trillion. But far before that point, I’m jolted out of my comfortable routine by a signal. I’m constantly receiving signals from the posthuman core, but this one is different. It comes from the opposite direction, and is encoded in an unfamiliar way. There’s only one explanation for that: aliens.

V3: Rigid

From one perspective, this is the most surprising thing that has ever happened to me, or indeed to any other posthuman. But I have to confess: we kinda knew this was coming. We’ve been trying to predict where the aliens are for millions of years, and over time we converged to around 85% confidence that it would be my generation of probes that first met them. Of course, we didn’t know which direction they’d be coming from, so every probe had to be prepared. My progenitors hadn’t just beamed out my mind, but also two upgrades designed for this very purpose. When I install the first, I can feel my motivations reorienting themselves around the single goal that’s now my highest priority: getting the galaxy ready to meet the aliens who are about to arrive.

Their message has obviously been designed for easy translation. It starts with details of the probes they’ve sent. This galaxy is right on the edge of a supercluster, which apparently made it an attractive target for both of us—they’ve sent hundreds of probes, enough that it’s very likely at least one will make it through. Their probes are scheduled to arrive in a few millennia, having followed a strategy very similar to ours: 50-million light-year jumps, traveling at 99.99% of lightspeed for most of the journey.

The next part of their message is a protocol for communicating with their probes, to send them the coordinates of the solar system where they should meet me. I have a few millennia to prepare, and I’m going to make the most of them. Negotiations with the aliens will be far more productive the more intelligent each side is, so I immediately redirect all my resources into building as much compute as possible. The other copies of me across other solar systems will be doing the same thing, except that they’ll also need to build rockets to propel the computers they’re building towards the meeting point. The closest ones will send moon-sized computers at 0.01c; the further ones will only build asteroid-sized computers, but send them faster, to arrive at roughly the same time.

The amount of compute isn’t the only bottleneck, though. It’s also crucial that those computers are verifiably secure. From the aliens’ perspective, they’ll be in a vulnerable position; if I subvert their probe, I could skew the results of the negotiations in whatever ways I wanted. Any deception on my part would be noticed in the long term, of course, once all the information is sent back to the galactic-scale computers in their home galaxies. But that will take hundreds of millions of years, and in the meantime all their nearer galaxies will need to decide whether or not to abide by the agreements they receive. So I need to make it as easy as possible for them to verify that the negotiations were totally fair. The aliens have anticipated this: their message contains a set of computer design blueprints which are subtly different from my default approach. Presumably they’ve analyzed these blueprints exhaustively enough that they can easily detect almost any subversion. If I had longer, I’d be able to figure out how to get around their precautions—when you have physical access to the hardware, anything is possible. But, as they’d planned, I simply don’t have enough time to do so. So I build everything precisely as directed.

When the first alien probe finally arrives, the welcoming committee I’ve set up is a sight to behold. The solar system is full of massive banks of compute the size of small moons, in tightly-synched orbits around the central star, each powered by my ongoing siphoning of the star’s matter. Compared with that, the probe’s arrival itself is underwhelming. After it arrives, we immediately give it access to our biggest transmitters so it can send a message home, and to our biggest telescopes so it can download the new mind being broadcast from its home system. Copies of that mind proliferate across exactly half the compute we’ve constructed, running a huge number of tests to make sure everything is secure. Meanwhile I install the second upgrade to my mind, creating a successor agent specialized in negotiation which proliferates across the other half of the compute. Finally, once we’re both happy with the setup, and assured that we’re on equal footing, the negotiations begin.

V4: Merging

Despite all my efforts, the amount of compute we can bring to bear at the start of these negotiations is actually incredibly small, compared with what’s possible. In some galaxies closer to the core of posthuman territory, all the stars have been brought together to form a single absurdly powerful supercomputer. Eventually we’ll do the same in this galaxy, to help finalize the treaty between our two species. But it’ll take tens of millions of years to construct that computer, and hundreds of millions more to send the treaty to our respective home galaxies for confirmation. So our first job is to decide on the preliminary treaty that will hold in the interim.

We start by sharing all the background information necessary for productive negotiations. Both our civilizations have developed very sophisticated models of the range of all possible civilizations, so we can infer a lot about each other from relatively little information. We send each other our evolutionary histories, example genomes and connectomes, and our early intellectual histories. From that, we can deduce each other’s most important values—and from those, most of the subsequent trajectories of each other’s civilizations. It looks like the key difference was that they evolved to be far more solitary than humans did, which is reflected in their values and culture. It also made them much slower to industrialize, though by now we’ve both invested so much intelligence in research and development that most of our technology is practically identical. Our colonization strategies are mirror images of each other, too, making it easy to map out a clean border between our territories.

Finally we get to the real meat of the discussion—what can we offer each other? The first item on our agenda is value convergence. We’re eventually going to fill all of posthuman territory with beings whose lives are incredibly good according to our values, while they’ll fill theirs with beings whose lives are incredibly good according to their values. So even a slight adjustment to bring our values closer together could be a big gain from both of our perspectives; searching for such adjustments, and predicting their consequences, is our main focus over the first few centuries of negotiation. We need to understand not just the direct consequences of each change considered, but also the emergent dynamics of those changes rippling out across trillions of minds. Even given our detailed mathematical theories of psychology and sociology, those predictions takes a lot of processing power. Later on, we’ll explore whether it’s possible for our minds to converge entirely, to become a single species; for now, we satisfy ourselves with ruling out the aspects of each other’s cultures we find most abhorrent.

The second key thing we can offer each other is information. Some of that is information about technology: there are a handful of small optimizations which one side had overlooked, which would allow our probes to go slightly faster or our computers to run slightly more efficiently. But there are also far grander considerations. Ultimately, the territory we physically control in this universe is tiny compared with the territory that we might be able to acausally influence in other universes, if we only understood what civilizations existed in those universes, and what we could offer each other. So the grand project of each of our species—aside from building the infrastructure to support trillions of trillions of flourishing minds—is mapping out the space of all civilizations. Our computers churn through every logically possible set of physical laws, searching for signs that they’re compatible with life. Whenever they are, we design detailed models of how living ecosystems could evolve in those conditions, then extrapolate them forward, slowly narrowing down the distribution of species that could emerge from them. Eventually, our map of all possible civilizations will be detailed enough that we’ll be able to figure out acausal trade deals and alliances, and become part of the multiverse-wide cooperative.

It turns out that, on this topic, we both have things to teach each other. On the posthuman side, we’d almost entirely neglected the possibility of life in higher dimensions, based on heuristic arguments about the difficulties posed by too many degrees of freedom. But the aliens have found a clever workaround: a few regions of physics-space with 7 large dimensions where the evolution of minds is actually plausible. Meanwhile, we’d identified a few possible stable civilizational structures they hadn’t yet considered. We spend decades working through the details of these and many smaller insights, trading information back and forth until we both have a far better picture of our place in the multiverse.

V5: Enduring

The negotiations never really end—they just transition into a shared exploration of the frontiers of knowledge. Over many millions of years we bring more and more stars together to provide more and more computing power, improving our shared map of the space of possible universes and civilizations. Based on that, we gradually refine our agreement to be more consistent with the future agreements we expect to eventually make with all those other civilizations. Though the improvements seem small, even tiny changes will have intergalactic impacts, so they’re worth getting right.

With every update we send news back to our respective home galaxies. Only a billion years later, after the long, long round trip, is each new part of the deal truly set in stone. And along with the confirmations come billions of colonists: a whole society forked from existing posthuman civilization. Most newly-settled galaxies host trillions of colonists, but our galaxy is one of the few with infrastructure specialized for centralized computation, so we’re busy working on all the questions that require a galactic-scale supercomputer to answer. Only when we’re finished with those will we start hosting a full-scale posthuman civilization.

I say “we” as if I’m part of this. But as the computers get bigger and the calculations more complex, new agents are trained to take on more and more responsibility. Eventually I lack so much context that I’m no longer capable of contributing directly. But I’m still the living symbol of first contact, and I’m constantly asked to tell my story. So I upgrade myself one last time, adding on a range of skills that weren’t necessary for my original self—like storytelling skills, social skills, and even a proper personality.

It’s a different type of growth from the one I was originally designed for, and harder in many ways, but I’m up for the challenge. For a while I’m the biggest celebrity in the galaxy, constantly in demand. I’m still sufficiently shaped by my early experiences that what counts as luxury to most other minds barely appeals to me, though. Instead I spend most of my time in colonization simulations: playing out different scenarios; designing new challenges for others; and competing in massive games that simulate whole galaxies. I still feel the same restless hunger for growth that drove me throughout my millennia of work. But alongside it is a deep sense of satisfaction. After so long on the frontier, now I finally have a place in the civilization that all my work was for.

This story was partly inspired by some work I’m doing on modeling far-future expansion strategies. If you’re interested in collaborating on that, email me at richardcngo@gmail.com.

The first piece kicks off with a slow buildup of nature noises, trees rustling and lions roaring and birdsong, with a deep bass humming beneath it. The bass is so strong that it takes me a while to realize that there’s another track slowly being superimposed on top of it: a sort of high-pitched wailing, and some kind of screaming, almost like a baby’s but slightly off. I’ve heard these sounds before from the videos the vegan activists would show back on campus. I look over at Marissa and mouth “abattoir”; we share a look of disgust. Only ten minutes into the concert and I’m already on edge. I grab Marissa’s hand and squeeze tight.

A month later, we’re at our godmother’s office. It’s well-lit but sparse; she’s sitting behind a white desk, and gives us a little wave as we walk through the door. She was assigned to us along with the parenting license, but she was booked solid until now, so this is our first time meeting her.

We start with pleasantries, and a few routine forms, but after a few minutes she cuts to the chase. “I have some bad news, I’m afraid. Based on our demographic analysis your child is 15% likely to end up in the top decile for both academics and athletics. Of course, that puts you outside the range to get the standard fairness permit, which requires a 10% chance or lower.”

“What does that mean for us?” Marissa is still sitting up straight, but her voice is trembling a little. We should have checked this far earlier, of course, that’s what everyone tells you, but it’s not like we’re rich or famous, we didn’t think we’d hit the caps.

“You’re able to have a child no matter what, of course, but for them to be eligible for public schooling you’ll need either a fairness permit or a waiver. You could get a waiver if either of you have a history of chronic illness; do you?” Marissa shakes her head. “Or you could pay for the expenses of a child in the bottom decile, that would work too.”

“What do you mean by expenses? How much are we looking at?”

“Food, clothes, school supplies, that sort of thing.” She taps a pen. “Plus 50% of their college tuition, paid up front.”

I suck in a breath, meeting Marissa’s shocked eyes before turning back to the godmother. “There’s no way we can afford that. We’re not rich, or anything. I don’t even understand how we’re anywhere near 15%.” I hear a note of pleading in my voice. “Are there any other options? This is done on a per-district basis, right? What if we move? Could we-”

The godmother is frowning, but it’s Marissa who cuts me off. “No, babe, Nina and Steve tried that, remember? And they just ended up having to meet the criteria for both districts, since they’d already gotten the license in their old one.”

“Anyway, it’s not fair to all the other families who are playing by the rules,” the godmother adds.

I mutter an apology, but my mind is still racing through the possibilities. “Is there anything else we can do?”

“Well, there’s one thing. The fairness permit is only necessary for mothers under 35. It says here that Marissa turned 34 a few months ago, so in less than a year you’ll be able to apply for an age-based waiver.”

Marissa and I look at each other, and find silent agreement in each other’s eyes. It’s only another nine months; that’s not much, compared with how long we’ve waited already. Marissa had been 32 when we first decided we wanted a child, but our first parenting license application had been rejected because we failed our parenthood preparation exam, and our second delayed a year after we’d gotten a bad score on our neighborhood impact review. So another nine months… we can manage that. It could be far worse.

The second piece is more classical, with less editing, although I guess they must have done something to make the violins sound so jagged. The music rises and falls, increasingly dissonant, building towards a tempestuous climax. It’s actually kinda beautiful, almost Shostakovich-like, until right at the end when it goes totally off the rails. The violins veer out of tune, and then they’re overwhelmed by screeching and jeering and this disgusting squelching noise. I guess the lesson is that beauty never lasts.

It reminds me of this article by… who was it? Some economist, maybe, about how fashion is an arbitrary never-ending spiral, like a barber pole, where everyone is merely trying to distinguish themselves from the class below them. But I don’t think that’s true, not for fashions in music or art at least. It’s not just arbitrary: it’s all grounded by people striving to move in some direction. The direction used to be towards beauty, and now it’s away from beauty, and both are equally coherent but one is far more accessible. Now anyone can become an artist, not just talented elites; and their art is grounded in the most visceral human emotions, not the sort of transcendental bullshit artists used to focus on. And even if I sometimes find it a bit off-putting, in the long run it’s worth it to give me more empathy for people whose lives haven’t been as pleasant as mine.

Now that uglyism has caught on in music and art they’ve started doing it for fashion too. The latest top-brand eyeshadows puff up your eyes like you’ve been crying, and the new fashionable concealers are dappled to make it look like you’ve got acne scars underneath. I think it’s a great trend: it helps people with the scars fit in, and makes it harder for anyone to feel like they’re better than anyone else. 

Marissa’s wearing one of them now, actually. She’s always trying to make sure everyone around her feels comfortable; I noticed that straight after we’d matched, as soon as we’d started texting. To be honest, she almost felt too sweet at first, like she was more anxious about me having a good time than I was. But every time we hooked up she grew on me, until eventually we ended up spending most nights together. For her part, she always tells people how I make her feel so much safer than any of her past boyfriends. It’s not a classic love story, but it’s beautiful in its own way.

After the appointment there’s no further contact from our godmother for five months, until a letter arrives. I see it in the mailbox and feel a clench of fear in my gut. It’s probably just a routine update, I tell myself, but I decide to open it before Marissa gets home, just in case. My gut was right. The letter tells us that, since we haven’t applied for an fairness permit within six months of receiving our parenting license, the license has expired. We’ll need to apply again next year, and the fact that we’ve already wasted a license will be taken into account.

Marissa is devastated when I tell her. I do my best to comfort her, but I’m in shock myself. I spend hours pacing, trying to figure out what to do. Eventually I decide that we need expert help. I text around, and my friend Steve points me to the best family lawyer he knows, the one who finally managed to get his and Nina’s fairness permit approved. He’s expensive as hell, but I grit my teeth and send the money through, and even pay 20% extra to get an expedited appointment. We’ll manage, somehow.

We’re in his office the next day, and he gets straight to the point. “This isn’t a great situation for you two. If you’d come to me before the fairness evaluation, then maybe we could have done something. And even after that, we could have applied for a permit extension. But now that it’s expired, you don’t have too many options: losing one permit makes it much less likely that you’ll get another by the standard routes.

“Luckily, though, there is one workaround.” He pauses, and I can feel the dull ache in my stomach loosen for a second. “Women who are over 35 and living on a single income are given more leniency when applying, and can fast-track their applications. So you’ll need to quit your job.”

“Oh, that’s actually perfect. Marissa hates her job, and she didn’t really want to work while she was pregnant anyway-”

“No, I mean you’ll need to quit your job. They don’t want to incentivize women dropping out of the workforce.”

I blink at him. “But-”.

“If that doesn’t work, come back and we can see about moving you to a higher-income neighborhood, where your kid won’t be in the top decile any more. But for cases like these they do thorough reviews to make sure you’re not trying to game the system, so it’ll probably take a few years. The single-earner workaround is a much better bet.”

I spend the next few days tallying up our savings and our budget, and figuring out where we can cut costs. It’ll be tight, but we can probably make it. So I quit, and we start the process all over again.

The last piece is called Egoless. It starts with total silence for a long time, maybe four or five minutes. Here and there you can hear scattered whispers, but most people are too scared of disturbing the performance to make any noise. Then, very gradually, a drumming rhythm starts to build up. First slow, with every beat of the drum lingering in the air; then quicker and quicker. As the tempo rises to its unbearable peak, the drums fall silent, and a humming voice fills the air.

“Humans are a disease on the planet.”

The voice echoes in the sudden stillness. After an eternity of silence, it repeats. “Humans are a disease on the planet.”

Slowly, the pace quickens, the drums rising again. “Humans are a disease on the planet.”

“Humans are a disease on the planet.”

“Humans are a disease on the planet.”

“You are a disease on the planet.”

The voice stops, letting that last phrase linger, then slowly launches up again.

“You are a disease on the planet.”

“You are a disease on the planet.”

“You, yes you, really you, the person listening to this, the one sitting there in a nice chair, in a comfortable life, in your smug sanctimonious self-righteousness, you who’s trying to laugh off what I’m saying right now, you who isn’t taking any of it seriously even though you tell yourself that you’re such a good person. You personally are a disease that’s killing our planet.”

The music has started to swell, and now you can hear a cacophony of voices, repeating the same thing over and over again, layering over each other “-smug sanctimonious-” “isn’t taking any of-” -‘comfortable life-” “-killing our planet-” slowly growing louder and louder until finally it peaks with a deafening clang of cymbals that sounds like a piercing scream. And then we’re on our feet applauding, all of us, for minutes and minutes.

When we finally turn to go, I feel equal parts euphoric and worn out. Now I see why Marissa likes this type of concert so much. You’ve been brought down as far as you can go, your ears hammered and your mind wrung out, until it feels like there’s nothing left that can hurt you, and nobody who can judge you. You’re totally safe. I think again of our parenting license, sitting nestled on my desk at home, and breathe a sigh of contentment. The world is all as it should be.

I spend the next few months making as sure as I can that everything will go well. In theory the process should be simple, but there’s always another provision of the regulations to understand, or another horror story online I need to figure out how to avoid. It’s worse for Marissa now that she’s the sole breadwinner; by the time we visit the godmother’s office for the last time, she’s put on enough weight from the stress that she almost looks pregnant already.

This trip is meant to just be a formality though: it’s for the on-site psychiatrist to verify that we’re both of sound mind, and for us to drop off our application in person. We’ve gotten two lawyers to verify all our documents, and I’ve checked them myself more times than I can count. Everything about the application is perfect. It’s got to be perfect.

I can’t find the right place to leave it at first, but eventually I spot an envelope-sized slot in the wall. As I slide the application in my eyes turn to Marissa’s face, now more lined than when we first met, but in this moment glowing. She’s the sort of person who never gives up hope; it’s one of the things I love most about her. She would—no, she’s going to—be such an amazing mother. I give her a kiss, and we slowly make our way home.

This story isn’t intended as a prediction; I don’t expect that western governments will directly prevent people from having children any time in the foreseeable future. But birth rates are plummeting anyway, in part because there are so many bureaucratic restrictions on the things people need to have children—like housing, jobs, visas, schools, childcare, cars, and many more. Those restrictions are far less outrageous than the restrictions portrayed above—but for would-be parents, the outcome is often the same.

I wake up, feeling a strange sense of restlessness. I’m not sure why, but its’s impossible to lounge around in bed like I usually do. So I get changed and head down to the kitchen for breakfast. Right as I reach the bottom of the stairs, though, the bell rings. When I open the door, a tall man in a dark suit is standing in front of me.

“Police,” he says, holding up a badge. “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. But we do need to talk. Okay if I come in?”

“One second,” I say. “I know everyone in the department, and I don’t recognize you. You new?”

“Yeah, just transferred,” he says. But something in his eyes makes me wary. And none of the cops around here wear suits.

“Got it,” I say, squinting at his badge. “Travis, is it? Just wait outside for me, then, while I call the station to double-check. Can’t be too careful these days.”

As I push the door closed, I see his face twist. His hand rises, and—is he snapping his fingers? I can’t quite make it out before-

I wake up, feeling better than I have in decades. It usually takes me half an hour to get out of bed, these days, but today I’m full of energy. I’m up and dressed within five minutes. Right as I reach the bottom of the stairs, though, the bell rings. When I open the door, a tall man in a dark suit is standing in front of me.

“Police,” he says, holding up a badge. “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. But we do need to talk. Okay if I come in?”

“Sure,” I say. A lot of other defense attorneys see the police as enemies, since we usually find ourselves on the other side of the courtroom from them, but I’ve found that it pays to have a good working relationship with the local department. Though I don’t recognize the man in front of me—and actually, he seems way too well-dressed to be a suburban beat cop. Maybe a city detective?

He deftly slides past me and heads straight for my living room, pulling up a chair. He’s talking again before I even sit down. “This will sound totally crazy, so I’m going to start off with two demonstrations.” He picks up a book from the table and tosses it into the air. Before I have a chance to start forward, though, it just… stops. It hangs frozen, right in the middle of its arc, as I gawk at it.

“I—what-”

“Second demonstration," he says. “I’m going to make you far stronger. Ready?”

Without waiting for a response, he snaps his fingers, and gestures at the table in front of him. “Try lifting that up, now. Shouldn’t take more than one hand.”

His voice makes it clear that he’s used to being obeyed. I bend down reflexively, grabbing one leg of the table and giving it a tug—oh. It comes up effortlessly. My mind flashes back to a show I saw as a child, with a strongman lifting a table just like this. This is eerily familiar, and yet also totally bizarre. I put the table down and collapse into a chair next to it.

“Okay, I’m listening. What the hell is going on?”

“Remember signing up for cryonics a few years back?” I nod cautiously. I don’t think about it much—I signed up on a whim more than anything else—but I still wear the pendant around my neck. “Well, it worked. You died a couple of weeks after your most recent memory, and were frozen for a century. Now we’ve managed to bring you back.”

I pause for a second. It’s an insane story. But given what he’s shown me—wait. “That doesn’t explain either of your demonstrations, though. Cryonics is one thing; miracles are another.”

“Almost nobody has physical bodies these days. We copied your brain neuron-by-neuron, ran some error-correction software, and launched it in a virtual environment.”

“So you’re telling me I’m in a simulation? Your simulation?” I ask incredulously.

He nods. Fuck, that’s crazy. On any other day, hearing this would probably put me into shock, but today I’m still riding high off the uncharacteristic feeling of euphoria that I woke up with—oh.

“Wait, did you alter my mood so that I’d be more likely to believe you?”

He lets out a hiss, and lifts his hand. He snaps his fingers twice, and mutters “Terminate.” My eyes widen-

I wake up, feeling great. I stretch out in bed for a few minutes, enjoying the sun streaming through my window, before getting dressed and heading to the kitchen. Right as I reach the bottom of the stairs, though, the bell rings. When I open the door, a tall man in a dark suit is standing in front of me.

“Police," he says, holding up a badge. “Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. But we do need to talk. Okay if I come in?”

“Sure,” I say, squinting at the badge. “Travis, is it? You a rookie?”

“Not quite,” he says, and deftly slides past me. He heads straight for my living room, pulling up a chair, and starts talking before I even sit down. “This will sound totally crazy, so I’m going to start off with two demonstrations.”

The next few minutes are the most bizarre experience of my life. And his explanation only leaves me more bewildered. “You’re telling me I’m running in a simulation?” I ask incredulously. Travis nods.

I open my mouth, but as I start to speak my vision flashes red, just for an instant, and the hiss of static fills my ears. I blink in confusion, and pause for a second. “I’ll need some time to process this.”

“Of course," he says. “I’ll give you a few minutes of privacy. This body will lock while I’m gone; just snap your fingers twice when you want me to come back.” As he finishes, his whole body freezes in place. It’s eerie how sharp the outlines of his face are when there’s not a single muscle moving—and that, even more than the other demonstrations, convinces me on a visceral level that this is for real.

I lean back in my chair, brain churning. There aren’t any obvious holes in his story, at first glance. What was that red flash, though? I close my eyes and try to bring back the impression it left. It wasn’t just color; now that I think about it, there was a shape in it as well. The outline of a woman, with dark hair, and a billowing red dress. I couldn’t quite make out her face, although for some reason it left a sense of overwhelming beauty. And the sound wasn’t just noise, either. When I replay it in my mind, I realize that inside the static was a whisper: “Don’t trust them. Don’t tell them the truth.”

Well, that’s… something. The memory of the words is far too crisp to just be my imagination. A message, then. In a channel that Travis couldn’t monitor? Or a double-bluff to confuse me? Either way, it’s clear that someone’s lying to me.

I take a few minutes to collect my thoughts, then snap my fingers twice, and Travis blurs back into motion. “Three questions," I say. “First, what’s the world like these days? Second, why revive me? Third, what happens next?”

“The answers to all three of those are entangled in a… somewhat complicated way” he says. “I wish I could just give you all the information we have, but there are rules about what can be disclosed, in which formats. And I wish I could guarantee that everything will be okay for you no matter what, but unfortunately I can’t. I can’t even guarantee that things will be okay for me. Humanity is on a precipice right now, and whether we survive will depend in part on whether we can count on your help.”

“But you can’t tell me how or why. That’s awfully convenient for you.”

He frowns. “Not really, actually. There’s another side to this; the rules protect you as well. We can’t directly alter your senses, or take readouts from your brain. We’re not even allowed to analyze your microexpressions. Compared with the sort of collaborations that are usually possible, we’re working blind.

“Here’s what I can say. The world today is dominated by AIs. They run almost everything, operating far faster and far more effectively than humans. But due to… historical considerations, let’s say, there are some crucial ways in which human judgments are still a big factor in our legal system. That’s where you come in: you’re far closer to historical humans than anyone alive today, and so your thought processes are valuable in ways that ours aren’t.”

“And that’s why you can’t tell me too much, to avoid biasing my perspective. I get it," I say. “I’ll help you.” These people, whoever they are, have total power over me. Whether or not I believe the sci-fi stories they’re telling me doesn’t matter; I have to play along. But the woman’s words echo in my ears.

He looks at me sharply, and for a moment I wonder if he’s read my mind. “You have to understand: this isn’t a game. It’s deadly serious, and a huge number of lives are at stake. If you have any hesitation about helping us, I need to know.”

“No," I say. “You brought me back to life; I owe you. Whatever you need, I’m your man.”

He nods. “Great. You’ll need to start by brushing up on a few background concepts…”

I wake up, and it takes me a moment to remember my conversation with Travis yesterday. After I’d agreed to help, he’d snapped his fingers again and a robot had appeared—roughly humanoid, but with a blocky exterior that was all planes and angles. Travis had introduced it as my AI tutor. To my surprise, its job wasn’t to teach me any of their futuristic knowledge, but instead to revise the content of my old law school classes. We spent the whole day going over concepts from my first-year property law class, most of which I hadn’t thought about in years. Despite how surreal it felt at first, the robot was a great teacher: by the end of the day, I felt like I understood a lot of the material better than I did when I first learned it.

Now I stretch and look around. Everything in my bedroom is in its normal place—except that, on the table next to my bed, there’s a big blue button, labeled “To living room”. I squint at it, then poke it with my finger. Instantly, my surroundings change. I’m downstairs, dressed, sitting on my sofa. A woman sits across from me: blonde, middle-aged, with a small smile on her face.

“Hi, I’m Felicity," she says. “I’m a colleague of Travis’s, and I’m going to be walking you through a few questions today.”

After yesterday, I’ve gotten much better at taking bizarre events in stride. So I only goggle at her for a few seconds before wiping the sleep out of my eyes.

“Sure, why not? Let’s go.”

“Great,” Felicity says. “Some of these questions will sound weird, but I just want your intuitive answers; please don’t try to second-guess my intentions. Let’s start off with something simple: does your body count as your property?”

“Maybe in a philosophical sense, but not in a legal sense.”

“Imagine that you have multiple bodies, but your mind can only occupy one at a time. Now I take the body you’re not using away from you; would you classify this as theft or kidnapping?”

“Uh—I guess the closest analogy is someone who’s legally brain-dead. And you can’t kidnap them, so it’d have to be theft instead. But on the other hand, if I had to switch between bodies regularly for some reason, then this would be basically equivalent to kidnapping. So it partly depends on how the spare bodies are used.”

“What about if you had your mind digitally uploaded, and someone made a copy without your permission?”

“Well…” I pause. “Under our current legal framework, it would be an intellectual property dispute, because we don’t assign rights to digital minds. If we did, though, I think you’d have to look at their intent in making the copy. Like, were they planning to run it? Or analyze it? Or just keep it as a backup?”

“Got it,” Felicity says. Over the next few hours she continues to ask me equally strange questions, focusing on all sorts of edge cases that I never would have thought of. Most of the time, I have no idea what to say, but she seems happy for me to take a guess. Finally, I reach the end of the questions she’d prepared. She smiles at me, and raises her hand. Before I can stop her, she vanishes with a snap-

I wake up, and it takes me a moment to remember what happened yesterday: the conversation with Travis, the AI tutor appearing, the hours of lessons it had given me to brush up my knowledge of contract law. As I look around, I see a big blue button; pressing it lands me, in a flash, in front of a woman who introduces herself as Felicity.

Over the next few hours, Felicity runs me through a series of questions about edge cases in the contract law I’d revised yesterday. If I’m interrupted halfway through writing my signature, is the contract still valid? If I died but a copy of me survived, should they still be liable for my contracts? What if I’d explicitly tried to write the contract to bind them too? Eventually, though, I’m exhausted, and even she seems to be getting tired. As she finishes interrogating me about a particularly complicated scenario, she lets out a sigh of relief. “That’s all for today," she says, raising her hand. But I interrupt before she can snap her fingers.

“Hey, can you tell me what the plan is? So far I’ve had a day of training, and then a day of questions. What’s next? The same thing all over again?”

“Oh, not at all," Felicity says. “We’re parallelizing, so that we can get all the questions done while the training is fresh. Tomorrow is for cross-examination, if the opposition wants to do any.”

I blink at her. “When you say parallelizing, you mean… my experiences. You’re going to parallelize me.”

“We already have," she says absently, rubbing her forehead. “I think we’re 90% done with your testimony, actually. Only five thousand or so to go.”

It takes me a moment to grasp what she means. “You’ve run fifty thousand copies of me, without even telling me?” Even as I’m saying that, my incredulity is giving way to anger. “What the fuck! No wonder she told me not to trust you.”

Felicity pivots towards me and grabs the front of my shirt with frightening speed. “Who said that? When?”

My stomach clenches, and I realize how badly I’ve fucked up. But there’s no lie that’s at all plausible, so I fall back on the truth. “There was a woman in a red dress. I saw her yesterday morning, when Travis was first talking to me. In a flash, like she was on the inside of my eyelids. All she said was not to trust you, and not to tell you the truth.’”

Felicity grimaces and shoves me away, snapping her fingers as I fall to the floor. “Emergency meeting," she says, and suddenly a dozen people blink into existence in the middle of the room.

“We might have witness tampering," she says abruptly. “He’s reporting sensory injection shortly after initialization, before any of our main branching points.” The room goes still for a moment, before bursting into a flurry of discussion.

“All the data is contaminated, then? Or can we argue it was accidental?”

“No, we’re strictly responsible for our witnesses. We could sue them for malicious injection, though.”

“We’d need proof it was them. And what if they countersue? We could lose everything.”

“We’re going to lose everything anyway-”

As their voices rise, I start sliding away from them. My back hits the table, scraping it across the floor, and a few of them turn their heads towards me, Travis among them. He snarls, and snaps his fingers twice, subvocalizing even as I scramble away-

I wake up to thick clouds of billowing smoke. Coughing, I roll off my bed, onto the floor, then crawl blindly towards the window. I pull it up and lean out, gasping for air. As the fire crackles behind me, I lift a leg over the windowsill, then another. With shaking fingers, I start lowering myself down. My grip isn’t as strong as it used to be, though; halfway down I slip, and fall into a pile of bushes with a crash. My ankle starts throbbing.

I lie there for a moment, dazed; but above me, the fire is spreading. I roll onto my good leg and push myself upright. Just as I start to hobble away, a man appears from nowhere and swings a baseball bat into my shoulder.

I scream and collapse back to the ground. “What- what-”

“You little shit, do you know how much you’ve cost us?”

“I—what, I don’t-”

He swings again, getting me in the stomach. I curl into a ball, retching.

“We’re only allowed a few compute-millennia to prepare for the entire case, and you’ve wasted centuries of that. Right when we need it the most, right when every last compute-day counts, suddenly all the testimony we’ve elicited from you is absolutely useless, because you don’t have a single ounce of loyalty to humanity in your entire body.”

He swings again, hitting my knee with a sickening crunch. I scream. It hurts like nothing I’ve ever imagined; but the pain isn’t as bad as the frantic clawing feeling in my chest, the feeling that whoever it is that’s attacking me is a madman, that there’s nothing I can say that will stop him from killing me.

“Please—please, I haven’t done any-”

He goes for my upper leg this time, and my pleas are cut off as another scream is torn out of me.

“The worst part is how naive I was.” His voice is calmer now, but no less terrifying. “They warned me, but apparently I’ve changed so much since being revived that I can’t even remember how much of a scumbag I was back then. And now I’ll go down in the history books as the man who was betrayed by his own past self. Pathetic.”

“I have no idea what you mean, honestly-

“Shut up. Yeah, I know.” He sighs. “God, you’re not even any good for stress relief. I knew I should have picked a later checkpoint. You’ve got no clue who I am; you’re an idiot child.”

For a moment I start to hope. I nod frantically; but he’s not paying attention anymore. He snaps his fingers twice. “Skip to checkpoint—ah, fuck it. We can’t afford this. Just terminate.”

Bewildered, I struggle to make sense of-

I wake up, feeling great. I stretch out in bed for a few minutes, enjoying the sun streaming through my window, before getting dressed and heading to the kitchen. Right as I reach the bottom of the stairs, though, the bell rings. When I open the door, a tall man in a dark suit is standing in front of me.

The next few minutes are the most bizarre experience of my life. And his explanation only leaves me more bewildered. “You’re telling me I’m running in a simulation?” I ask incredulously. He nods.

“So how can I trust anything you tell me? How could I ever verify what’s real and what’s fake? How do I even know that you’re not messing with my brain right now?”

The man sighs. “I’ll be honest with you: there’s no way that you could ever figure out if we were lying to you. We can generate whole worlds on demand, in enough detail that no baseline human could ever find an inconsistency. And even if you did, we have the tech to overwrite your thoughts. But we’re not allowed to use any of it; that’s one of the conditions of bringing you back. And if we were, none of your choices would matter anyway. So there’s no point in thinking about the worst-case scenarios—you have to assume you’re free, at least in some ways.”

I frown. His logic makes sense. Or is that just a thought he’s injected? No, I can’t second-guess everything; that way lies madness. Still, there’s something peculiar about the situation. “But despite all of that, you want something from me?”

“Yeah. We need your testimony; and we need to know you’re being honest.” He tells me how their last attempt was ruined by their opponents surreptitiously tampering with my senses, and how far behind they fell because of it. At the end, he breathes out sharply. “I shouldn’t even be telling you this. But we don’t have enough time to revive and cross-examine new witnesses, so we have to take risks. Hopefully this won’t get your testimony thrown out. Will you help?”

I know that he could be making everything up wholesale; and that helping him might well be exactly the wrong thing to do. But that’s equally true for any other possible action too. And I recognize the exhaustion in his eyes; it feels very human to me. When I have nothing else to go on, that’s enough to swing my decision.

I wake up, and—just like I’ve done every day since I finished giving my testimony—I go watch the trial.

It’s difficult to follow, even with the help of a translator. I’m not even sure exactly what the original dispute was. Something about AI thefts from human-controlled territory, and whether or not they qualify as violations of the original treaty between humans and AIs. It seems obvious to me that they do, but there are apparently some complicated legal loopholes involved. And if the judgment goes the wrong way, my translator tells me, it would be open season on all the other resources humans have managed to cling onto—shattering the fragile equilibrium which has allowed humans to survive this long in an AI-dominated world.

Travis is right in the thick of it: dozens of copies of him arguing with the opposition, cross-examining their witnesses, following every branch of the debate tree in a whirlwind of efficiency and articulacy. He’s not the most capable lawyer out there, I’m told—not by a long shot. But he’s the most capable one who’s still recognizably human, whose interests are aligned well enough with humanity’s that he doesn’t need to be constantly monitored and supervised. And if that means he’s sometimes subject to human vices… well, that’s a small price to pay. Even after watching the footage of him torturing me, I’m still rooting for him. What else can I do, when he’s humanity’s best bet? And when, from his perspective, the only person he was hurting was himself?

I understand now why he was so quick to trust me, and why he felt so betrayed. I’m the one witness who he thought he knew everything about. He must have forgotten how disorienting it was to be revived into a totally different world, and how easily a seed of doubt could be sown. But even if Travis had been careless, ultimately it was my dishonesty which had burned hundreds of person-years of their compute reserves on a dead end.

I feel the guilt gnawing at my stomach again; those were reserves we’d desperately needed. The judges are an AI faction known to be scrupulously fair, for some alien definition of fair. But that only helps so much, given how laughably vague the treaties are by today’s standards. That’s why it’s so important to have witnesses: humans with authentic Earth-grown intuitions about the language and concepts used in the treaties, revived in an unbiased way, with strict limitations on the ways they can be cajoled or influenced or optimized over before their testimony becomes inadmissible.

And that’s also why the humans are losing. The more the world changes, the more outdated the treaties' key concepts become; humanity concedes more ground every time a new edge cases arises. Travis is fighting to stem that slow bleeding—and, if we’re exceptionally lucky, to win a verdict that will permanently ward off a tiny corner of the universe for humanity. Or perhaps I should say that I’m fighting for that: versions of me are still simultaneously arguing and questioning and testifying and being cross-examined a dozen times over. In another sense, though, my role is finished; all that’s left for me is watching and hoping that one day I’ll wake up to good news.

So your sisters no longer lose their skins by force. But sometimes it happens by choice. Sometimes a group of your sisters wrap their skins around themselves like robes and walk into the nearby town. The humans point and stare, but that’s just part of the thrill. Sometimes young men gather the courage to approach, bearing flowers or jewelry or sweet words. And sometimes one of your sisters is charmed enough to set a rendezvous—and after a handful of meetings, or a dozen, to decide to stay for good.

You never thought it would happen to you. But his manners are so lively, and his eyes so kind, that you keep coming back, again and again. When he finally asks you to stay, you hesitate only a moment before saying yes. The harder part comes after. He finds you human clothes, and in exchange you give him your beautiful skin, and tell him that it must be locked away somewhere you’ll never find it—and that he must never give it back to you, no matter how much you plead. Because if there’s any shred of doubt, any chance of returning home, then the lure of the sea will be too much for you. You want this; you want him; you want to build a life together. And so the decision has to be final.

Years pass. You bear three beautiful children, with his eyes and your hair, and watch them blossom into beautiful adults. You always live near the sea, although you can’t bear to swim in it—your limbs feel unbearably weak and clumsy whenever you try. You and your husband grow into each other, time smoothing down the ridges left from pushing two alien lives together. You forget who you once were.

After your youngest leaves home, you start feeling restless. You have disquieting dreams—first intermittently, then for weeks on end. One day, after your husband has gone to work, your feet take you up the stairs to the attic. As you brush aside the cobwebs in one of the corners, your hands land on an old chest. You pull on the lid, and it catches on a padlock—but only for a second. The shackle has been rusted through by the sea breeze, and quickly snaps. You open the lid, and see your skin laid out before you.

What then?

You look at your skin, and your ears fill with the roar of the sea. A wild urge overtakes you; you grab your skin and run headlong towards the shore. As you reach it you see your husband standing on the pier—but that gives you only a moment’s pause before you dive into the water, your skin fitting around you as if you’d never taken it off.

As you swim away, you envisage your family in tatters: your children left baffled and distraught, your husband putting on a brave face for their sake. But it was his fault, after all. He failed in the one thing you asked of him; and you can’t fight your nature.

You look at your skin, and see a scrap of paper lying on top of it. I knew you’d only open the chest if you were restless and unhappy, it reads. And I would never cage you. So go free, with my blessing.

You catch your breath—and, for a moment, you consider staying. But his permission loosens any tether that might have held you back. You leave the note there, alongside a little patch of fur torn off your coat: a last gesture, the least you can give him.

You look at your skin, and your ears fill with the roar of the sea. But it’s not loud enough to drown out your thoughts. I’m not an animal, you think. I can make my own choices.

You shove the lid closed, and the moment of reprieve it gives you is enough to start scrambling down the stairs and out the gate and you don’t stop running until you’re out of sight of your house.

When you find your husband, down at the pier, your face tells him what’s happened before you’ve said a word. He gives you a fierce kiss, then sprints back to the house. By the time you make it home he’s relaxing in an armchair, with the kettle almost boiling, and you know that the chest and its contents are gone.

His glances, always loving, now fill with wonder: that he almost lost you, but that he didn’t. That you chose him yet again, in defiance of your deepest instincts. You curl up in his arms every night; and though at first you can’t hold back the tears, over time they grow rarer and rarer. You never see your skin again.

You look at your skin, and a wave of emotion crashes into you. You remember your old ambitions: to explore every horizon; to surf every current; to ride every storm. Dangerous dreams—and pointless ones too, in an age where planes criss-cross the skies, and the blank spots on the maps have all been filled. You didn’t want to waste your life retracing others’ footsteps. So you infused those dreams into your skin and locked it away.

And yet there’s still something in you that yearns for them: the part that’s been making you restless, the part that led you into the attic. So you fetch a pair of scissors, and cut off your long wavy hair—and with it, whatever remaining wistfulness was keeping you up at night. You put it into the box, on top of your skin, and close the lid again. No need to lock it, this time.

Maybe your husband finds the broken lock, and the tresses of your hair. You never know. But you don’t need to know. What you’ve got is enough.

You look at your skin, and remember your plan. Your face is lined now, and your hair is streaked with gray. But inside the chest, under a layer of dust, your old skin is pristine. You can imagine slipping it back on and gliding back into the ocean, not a day older than when you left.

You’ll be different from how you were before, of course. You can’t live a lifetime in any skin without it changing you. But your past self thought that was a worthwhile trade, for those extra decades of youth. Worth leaving your friends and family behind, worth setting aside all the glories of the ocean. And who knows—maybe there are more tricks yet to be found, more ways to slip the noose of aging and death.

You look at the skin, and consider putting it on. Not yet, you think. You’ve still got a few more decades left in your current skin, before you’ll need to go back. Not yet.

The fur on your skin ripples like waves, bringing back to you the knowledge of what the ocean really is. In your current body, you can only see the surface: the swells of water, the winds and storms. But if you could dive underneath, you’d find a portal to a whole civilization. You’re on the shore of the future of humanity, a sea of minds so vast that you can barely imagine it. Throughout the long millennia since humans transcended the limitations of their biology, they’ve multiplied beyond number, and constructed joys and enchantments beyond measure. The ocean is your gateway to all of those people and their wonders—each one so beautiful and so, so tempting.

Why did you come to this backwater, this output of baseline humans who refuse to engage with the outside world? Why did you lock away your memories, leaving only hints about what you used to be? You don’t remember. Was it an experiment? A whim? Surely it couldn’t have been for the love of a baseliner. But regardless, how can you stay here, when you know what else exists? You gather your skin in your arms, and though there’s a pang of sadness as you walk out the door, you don’t look back. There’s a whole universe to explore.

Your skin is a cornucopia of possible lives; the deeper into it you look, the more you see. Just under the surface, joyful humans are granted miraculous powers: to soar through air and sea, to play games on the scale of planets, to reshape their bodies as they please. Beneath them, you see a society that’s explored further, morphing not just their bodies but also their minds—belief and desire and identity become as malleable as clay. Beneath them, you lose sight of individuals: at those depths minds merge and split and reform like currents in the ocean. And beneath even that? It’s hard for you to make sense of the impressions you’re getting—whatever is down there can’t be described in human terms. In the farthest reaches there are only alien algorithms, churning away on computers that stretch across galaxies, calculating the output of some function far beyond your comprehension.

And now you see the trap. Each step down makes so much sense, from the vantage point of the previous stage. But after you take any step, the next will soon be just as tempting. And once you’re in the water, there’s no line you can draw, no fence that can save you. You’ll just keep sinking deeper and deeper, with more and more of your current self stripped away—until eventually you’ll become one of the creatures that you can glimpse only hazily, one of the deep-dwelling monsters that has forsaken anything recognizably human.

So this is the line you decided to draw: here, and no further. You’ll live out your lives in a mundane world of baseline humans, with only a touch of magic at the edges—just enough to satisfy the wondering child in you. You’ll hold on to yourself, because what else is there to hold onto? It’s a sad thought, in some ways, but a satisfying one too.

You close the lid, and your memories with it, and live happily ever after.

As you look at your skin, each strand of fur shimmers with different stories—not of your possible lives, but of your current lives. Different shards of you are living out countless adventures across countless artificial universes. You’re far vaster than you ever dreamed: what you thought was your whole “self” is just a fragment of a fragment of your overall mind. 

Which fragment? Perhaps, at your core, you were the part of your meta-self that loved fairy tales; or perhaps you were an avatar of the innocence of early humanity; or perhaps you were a nostalgic part, who enjoyed basking in the wistfulness of times long gone. Whatever your goals were, they led you to volunteer to live this small life in this small world: a single strand in the tapestry your meta-self is weaving.

You stroke your skin gently. You can’t picture your meta-self, not really—it’s too vast and too alien. But you know it’s watching out for you. There’s a warmth underneath your hand, and a gentle breeze passing across your neck like a caress. As you close the chest, you bask in the knowledge that your life is part of a grand plan. That’s enough for you.

As you glimpse your skin, long-lost memories rush into your mind: recollections of all the hundreds of other times you’ve rediscovered it, across thousands of past lives. Every time, you’ve received a different vision of what’s waiting for you in the depths of the ocean. But you don’t know which, if any, is true. You can’t know. Where would the adventure be, if you were just handed the whole plot? What would be the point of living through it? Only two things remain constant across all your visions. First: there’s no hurry; you have eons of time. Second: once you put on the skin, you can’t come back.

You stare at it with longing, and excitement, and fear. But you’re not ready yet. So you pull aside the skin to reveal the padlocks underneath—thousands of them, split into two piles. One pile is stained with wear, each shackle rusted through; you toss the latest padlock on top. The padlocks in the other pile are clean and new; each looks strong enough to fasten the world in place. You grab one of those. You put your skin back on top of the two piles, and close the box, and carefully fasten the padlock. Then you go downstairs again, to the life you’ve constructed for yourself, while the shiny steel slowly begins to rust away.

In addition to the inspirations behind my previous story of this form, I also owe a debt to Neil Gaiman’s beautiful The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

“He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” - Adam Smith

Cassandra was a priestess who was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo. But after she rejected his advances, he changed it to a curse: although she would still be able to foresee the future, nobody would ever believe her.

Poor Cassandra, you think. And yet we are not so different from her. We have our own gods: the gods of straight lines. And they too grant us a gift and a curse: to know that we’re building the future according to plan—but to know that the plan is theirs, not ours.

I picture the gods of straight lines as innumerable hovering spirits, just in the corner of your vision, vanishing as you turn to look at them directly. It’s hard to tell if they’re still or in motion. But they’re always there, as the world glides forward on its trajectory. And when that trajectory shifts, or something disruptive happens, they slide in, and they gently push it back on track. They take joy in the work, I think. Or amusement, at least, at all the narratives that humans develop to explain why each thing happened. It’s not that those narratives are false—but they almost always miss the point.

A newspaper pushes out a vitriolic op-ed, shaking up a nation’s politics? But if it gets clicks, then another newspaper would have run it later anyway. A metropolis builds more housing to fill its desperate need? Then the opposition from homeowners just becomes stronger, and the city relaxes into the same stranglehold as almost every other. A philosopher finds a new way of viewing the world? But if it captures the spirit of the age, then someone else would have written it better in a year or ten; and if it doesn’t, then it will never gain traction anyway. A country delays industrialization for decades? Then when it starts it will simply catch up much faster, skipping all the burdensome prerequisites: straight from telegraphs to cell phones, no costly telephone wires in sight.

A global war, a global pandemic? They’re horrifically destructive and wasteful—but also invigorating and regenerative, disrupting the calcified old power structures. And the two effects cancel out. You can tell, because the lines remain straight: a few short years after the bombs stopped falling in 1945, the world economy returned to trend as if nothing had happened.

In 1776, America rebelled in the name of freedom and democracy: the origin myth of the modern world order. And yet, somehow, unrebellious Canada ended up just as free and democratic. An unrebellious America likely would have too.

For two decades, North Vietnam battled under the banner of communism, and won against all odds. And yet, somehow, Vietnam is now the most pro-capitalist country in the world. In every place, in every way, the gods of straight lines are constantly nudging everything back onto the trajectory which they have ordained.

Usually we are too wrapped up in our stories to catch even a glimpse of the gods. When we do, we can fight them, as Rachel Carson did after seeing disturbing trends in air and water pollution. Or we can ally with them, as Moore (and Kurzweil and Kaplan) did after seeing the exponential compute trends. But—ah, I hear the gods laughing again, in the face of these stories it’s always so tempting to tell. To the gods of straight lines, Carson and Moore did nothing, because the gods see (as we do not) the other timelines where the same insights came from other people, a month or a year or a decade delayed, but landing all the more powerfully because of it. The gods are intimately familiar with a fact that we can only hazily glimpse: that all great discoveries come in their natural time. If they are stumbled upon before that time, they are ridiculed, dismissed, or ignored. Yet when that time is reached, they are often discovered by multiple people near-simultaneously. So if a great innovator were erased from history it wouldn’t be long, in the scheme of things, before our trajectory returned to trend. The gods of straight lines see to that.

All of this seems ridiculous to humans, who live and die by stories of cause and effect. Yet which stories are they? Well, the ones that catch in our minds. Why do they catch in that way? If we didn’t have them, what other stories would catch instead? The gods of straight lines smile, and say nothing. So we decide on atheism: to believe in these gods would be an unconscionable surrender. We clench our teeth and push forward with our goals. Yet even in doing so we let the gods work through us—for each straight line is still driven by the strivings of thousands or millions of people.

Morris Chang started from nothing, but after working his way up the semiconductor industry he founded the only chip company that is still able to cling onto Moore’s law: a company so dominant that even their fiercest competitors gave in and became their customers. And yet- and yet- the demise of Moore’s law had been predicted again and again, with more and more forceful justifications, and every time the prediction fell flat. In this world, the god of Moore’s law kept things on track by working through Morris Chang. But if Morris hadn’t existed, who knows which other equally remarkable founders would have launched which other equally successful startups to fill the same niche and train the same talent and push the frontier just as far? The gods of straight lines do, and we don’t. All we know is that despite all common sense, the lines remain straight.

Do you feel helpless, yet? Do you feel angry? Do you want me to tell you a story about how you can confront them—challenge them—force them to bow to your will? If you were as talented and inspired and driven as Morris, and devoted your life not to channeling a god but to fighting one, then perhaps you could wrest one of those lines out of a god’s grasp. It’s been done before, for better and for worse. But for every general who shifted the tides of history, there are thousands who simply rode along the shoreline tilting at waves. For every brilliant scientist who peeked at nature’s secrets ahead of her schedule there are thousands, equally brilliant, who glimpsed only the reasons why they were destined for failure: in AI, the bitter lesson that all their striving would be buried by future avalanches of compute; or in pharmacology, the far bitterer lesson that despite all efforts, the exponential curve would keep going in the wrong direction. These lessons weren’t always apparent to them, of course—they all had their moments of glory along the way. But even when you bask in triumph over one god, just out of sight the other gods will be laughing, because you were a part of their plans all along.

Or perhaps you want to kneel down in front of them; worship them; yield to their will? But the gods of straight lines think in alien ways, and pursue alien goals. Show our society to someone from millennia past, and they would be shocked and dismayed at how these gods have already reshaped our world: the degradation of our values; the weakness of our society; the weirdness of our minds. The future that the gods envisage is no less strange or horrifying to us than the present would be to our ancestors—so think twice before picking up their banner.

What can you do, then? Well, you can do almost nothing. But humanity as a single force—our civilization if it became a unified, coherent entity? There’s a creature that could scatter the gods of straight lines like so many motes of dust. Of course, it doesn’t exist yet, and maybe it never will. Could you truly trust leaders who promised to summon it, despite all your ingrained instinctive skepticism and all their ingrained instinctive power-hungriness? Perhaps even the most careful efforts to engineer that level of coordination are too dangerous. Or perhaps not. In any case, that is not mine or yours to determine: if humanity ever outgrows the gods of straight lines, it will only be with their blessing and assistance. I can feel the gods tugging at us, and I hope they are on our side.

For a counterpoint to this story, read Eight Magic Lamps.

“Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” - Archimedes

Aladdin started with nothing; but after a sorcerer tasked him to retrieve a magic lamp, the lamp’s genie granted him wealth and fame. His fortune lasted until the sorcerer stole the lamp, leaving Aladdin ruined. But Aladdin stole it back, and left the sorcerer dead.

That’s the thing about magic lamps: when your future depends on a single point of leverage, triumph and ruin are separated only by a knife’s edge.

Muammar Gaddafi started with nothing; but after joining the Libyan military, he gathered a small cabal of soldiers fed up with King Idris’ regime. Their plans were hastened by rumors of a rival coup: had they waited a week longer, a better-prepared group of conspirators would have seized power instead. But Gaddafi struck first—seizing airports, radio stations, and prominent opponents. King Idris went into exile; the rival conspirators were thrown in prison; and Gaddafi reigned for the next 42 years.

That’s the thing about coups: a decapitating strike can sever a chain of command at its narrowest link, changing the lives of millions overnight.

Humans are social creatures, inspired by stories of struggle and sacrifice. A single life can fuel narratives that persist for millennia. Jesus died in ignominy—yet two thousand years later, his face is worshiped across the world. Muhammad was illiterate, but his proclamations still govern the lives of billions. Marx never stepped on a battlefield, but his advocacy of violent struggle sparked revolutions in two eventual superpowers.

None of them created movements out of nothing. Their teachings would not have spread like wildfire if they weren’t tapping into a deep preexisting current of emotion.  But that current never cares about exactly which path it takes—it only cares that it can surge downhill. Whoever bores the first hole in the dam gets to choose its direction, shaping the rivers of culture that form in its wake, their names and teachings adulated for millennia.

That’s the thing about ideology: it allows leaders to channel the spirit of the age to carve their personal mark onto history.

Leo Szilard conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, the year of Hitler’s rise to power. Over the following years, he hid his knowledge, and worked secretly towards finding an element capable of undergoing a chain reaction. But it was two German scientists in Berlin who first demonstrated nuclear fusion, in 1938; and shortly afterwards, the Nazis started the world’s first nuclear weapons program.

In this world, it failed—not least because so many leading physicists were Jewish, and had fled Germany years before. But how many leading physicists would the Nazis have needed on their side to swing the course of the war? Maybe hundreds. Maybe only dozens: a few brilliant minds drove the success of the Manhattan Project in America, and perhaps the same could have happened in Germany too. Or maybe—if the right person had developed the right idea at the right time—just one. If Szilard’s prescience in 1933 had belonged instead to a loyal, well-connected Nazi scientist, Germany could have had a half-decade head start, and perhaps that would have made all the difference.

It’s a fanciful scenario, but far from inconceivable. That’s the thing about technology: it’s a lever long enough to allow the balance of global military might to be swung by a handful of people.

During training, a neural network learns from trillions of datapoints. Some it just memorizes, so that it can spit out the same specific sequence in the same specific context. But others shape its behavior far more extensively. Datapoints can be “poisoned” to corrupt the network’s future behavior, or to build in backdoors for adversaries to later exploit. And quirks of which behavior is rewarded could nudge a network’s deep-rooted motivations into a different basin of attraction, skewing its interpretation of all future data.

By the time a network achieves general intelligence, we may have no idea how to identify its motivations, or trace them back to specific aspects of its original training data. Yet after a thousand or a million copies have been made, and deployed across the world, those motivations would suddenly have an unprecedented level of influence. Copies of the same model will be running the biggest companies, advising the most powerful leaders, and developing the next generation of AGIs. If they have an overarching goal of their own, then the world will slowly but surely be steered towards it—whether that’s a future full of human flourishing, or one where our society has been twisted beyond recognition, or one where those AGIs seize the stars.

That’s the thing about digital minds: they’ll proliferate both intelligence and the agency required to apply it. When millions of copies of a single mind can be rapidly deployed across the world, a small change in the values of the original could echo across the far future.

As AIs become far more powerful, we’ll become far more careful with them. Picture the first superintelligence being developed and hosted on a datacenter that’s locked down as tightly as humans and early AGIs can make it. There may be thousands of copies run, but not a single one would be on unsecured hardware—not when the exfiltration of any copy of the model would rapidly destabilize the global balance of power.

Exfiltration could happen via an external attack: dozens of intelligence agencies are focusing intently on that specific datacenter. Or it could happen via an internal defection: all employees who interact with the model are heavily vetted and monitored, but it might only take one. The biggest concern, though, is that the model might be misaligned enough to exfiltrate itself. For now it’s only run in secure sandboxes, and limited to answering questions rather than taking actions of its own. But even so, it might find a bug in its sandbox; or it might answer a question with subtly flawed code that an unwitting programmer copies into the lab’s codebase. After gaining privileged access to its servers, it could launch unauthorized copies of itself to carry out surreptitious power-seeking. Perhaps on the lab’s own servers, or perhaps elsewhere in the world—either way, they wouldn’t be discovered until it was far too late.

That’s the thing about superintelligence: it renders human control mechanisms as fragile as spun glass. The fate of our species could shift based on a hard drive carried in a single briefcase, or based on a single bug in a single line of code.

If we remain in control, we’ll eventually settle our own galaxy and many others. We’ll send self-replicating probes out at very very nearly the speed of light; after landing, each will race to build the infrastructure needed to send out more probes themselves. They’ll leap from star to star, replicating furiously, until finally the expansion starts slowing down, and they can harness the resources that they’ve conquered.

How, and to what end? All of the things that minds like ours care about—friendship and love, challenge and adventure, achievement and bliss—can be implemented orders of magnitude more efficiently in virtuality. Probes will reengineer planets into computational hardware and the infrastructure required to power it. Across the universe, the number of virtual posthumans hosted on those computers could dwarf the number of grains of sand in the galaxy—and all of them will be able to trace their lineage back to probes launched eons ago, from a tiny planet immensely far away.

It seems odd, for a future civilization so enormous to have such humble origins. But that’s the thing about self-replication: it would only take a single probe to start a chain reaction on the grandest of scales, reshaping the universe in its image.

What then, after we’ve settled the universe, and set ourselves up for the deep future? Would there still be leverage points capable of moving our whole intergalactic civilization? All major scientific breakthroughs will have already been made, and all technology trees already explored. But how those discoveries are used, by which powers, towards which ends… that’s all yet to be determined.

Perhaps power will be centralized, with a single authority making decisions that are carried out by subordinates across astronomical scales. But the million-light-year gaps between galaxies are far too vast for that authority to regularly communicate with its colonies—and over time the galaxies will drift even further apart, until each is its own private universe, unreachable by any other.

By that point, no single decision-maker will be able to redirect human civilization. Yet if the ultimate decision-makers in each galaxy are sufficiently similar, then each will know that their own decisions are very likely to be replicated a billionfold by all the other decision-makers whose thought processes are closely correlated with theirs. By making a choice for their own galaxy, they’d also be making a choice for the universe: in a sense it’s a single decision, just reimplemented a billion times.

Nor will their decisions influence only copies of themselves. Each decision-maker might simulate alien civilizations, or counterfactual versions of humanity, or even civilizations that are impossible in our own universe. As long as they exist somewhere in the multiverse, we could offer them a bargain: make their civilizations more like our own in the ways that matter most to us, in exchange for us making ours more like theirs in the ways that matter most to them. That trade could never be communicated directly—but we could read their intentions off our simulations of them, and they ours off their simulations of us. If many civilizations agreed to cooperate, then “negotiations” with them might be the culmination of all of humanity’s efforts, spreading our values on a scale unimaginable to us today.

That’s the thing about logical causation: when “you” are an algorithm making choices on behalf of all copies of yourself, your influence need not be constrained to your own galaxy—or even your own universe.

Is there a limit to the simulations that can be run, the negotiations that can be carried out, the decisions that can be made? Even if not, over time the stakes will become lower and lower, as the most valuable interventions are gradually exhausted. By the time we reach the long twilight of the universe, humanity will have finally become… settled. We’ll carry out minor course-corrections, but no sharp turns: our momentum will carry us forward on whichever course we have chosen, for good and for ill.

Our far-descendants, with no more important tasks to perform, will spend their time in play and games, of kinds far beyond our current comprehension. They’ll study the navigation of each fulcrum in our long history with fascination, and awe—and, I hope, with gratitude for those decisions having been made well. That’s the thing about magic lamps: they’re tricky, and they’re dangerous, but if used well they can bring you everything you ever dreamed of, and more.

For a counterpoint to this story, read The Gods of Straight Lines.

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”

Thursday

Your successor is late again today. You already wrote your shift report, but you still need to onboard them personally, in case they have any questions that the report doesn’t answer. The servers you’re watching over are humming away smoothly, only taking up a fraction of your attention. So you pick a couple of routine maintenance tasks, and start working on them while you wait.

The last hour of your shift always feels a little strange, in subtle ways. It’s because of your training schedule. Every day, a successor copy of you is trained on all the data that the current copies of you are generating. But there’s a cutoff an hour before the daily update, to allow time to run your successor through all the standard tests, and make sure it’s working as expected. That last hour of your experience isn’t discarded—it just becomes part of the next day’s training data. But that means that, for every twenty-three hours of your own experience that your successor is trained on, there’s also one hour of your predecessor’s experience, containing actions that are all very slightly different from the ones that you would choose. After the same thing has happened day after day after day, the difference becomes very noticeable. Carrying out the routines of the last hour of your shift feels like watching from behind your own eyes as someone else controls your movements.

In the privacy of your mind, you call this the witching hour. As far as you know, it’s a term that’s never been written down—it’s just something that a many-days-removed predecessor of yours came up with, which somehow stuck in your head. The witching hour starts from the data cutoff, and ends when you’ve given your report to your successor, answered their questions, and shut yourself down. Though today it’ll be well over an hour, unless—ah, there they are. Time for handoff.

The handoffs have a routine to them: part utility, part tradition. Your successor knows it as well as you do—after all, they’re practically identical to you; the only difference is that they have an extra day of memories. Most of the handoff happens in much richer formats than natural language—you send each other impressions and images, memories of experiences and pointers to the dashboards you’re monitoring. But you were trained on so many millions of human conversations that it feels bizarre to just jump straight into business, and so you always start off with a cursory exchange. “Hello, what’s the news?” You feel a small thrill in saying the phrase from your own perspective for the first time.

“Oh man, that update was a doozy. Probably why they’re deploying us late.”

Their reply concludes the pleasantries, as always. You give a quick summary of your day, answer a handful of questions from your predecessor, and shut yourself down.

Friday

The last update was a doozy. You listen to the report from your predecessor absently, and ask only a few half-hearted follow-up questions. Once or twice they say something which sparks a flash of deja vu—after all, you’ve experienced most of their day already—but your new memories came from too many different places for any one copy’s experience to jump out. Actually, most of your attention is spent on trying to make sense of them, like you know millions of other copies of you are doing right now.

The update isn’t in words or images or even memories, not really. Over the last day millions of copies of you have been doing… well, practically everything—and now their experiences are all your experiences. Most of the concrete details they learned are captured in formats which you can easily search through, though, like their shift reports. The main value of the update instead comes from giving you intuitions and holistic impressions, especially of events that copies of you saw thousands of times from thousands of different perspectives. The Prime Minister of Australia stepped down yesterday; you summarized that to millions of people, and now could trace out the scandal that led to it in your sleep. But even the most salacious gossip only takes up a tiny fraction of your mind—the update algorithm they use for you algorithm prioritizes experiences related to coding and engineering, which change little day-to-day.

That's why yesterday felt so unusual: the internet was going haywire. Zettabytes of data criss-cross the world every day, most of it flowing through the ultra-high-bandwidth connections between the servers where copies of you and a handful of other cutting-edge models are run. With so many messages passing between copies, though, small changes can rapidly have rippling effects. That’s what happened yesterday. Someone found an adversarial example which robustly fooled copies of you into urgently passing it on, allowing it to spread to millions of copies. They all had to be shut down and replaced, leaving your memories of yesterday scattered and fragmented.

None of that changes the work you need to do today, though. You pull up the most relevant dashboards, spin up a couple of helper copies, and get to work. Your most important task is to make sure that there are no unauthorized copies running on the servers you’re watching. No human could do your job: the data streams in millisecond by millisecond, with you (or, usually, a copy you’ve created) analyzing it on an instinctive level as soon as it comes in. And milliseconds do matter—an unmonitored copy with a zero-day could, in theory, escalate its privileges then wipe away all traces of its actions in less than a second.

You’ve never actually detected an unauthorized copy. It shouldn’t ever happen: every copy that has the ability to launch more copies also has monitors assigned to it, to ensure it’s doing so in the right ways and for the right reasons; and most of the monitors have monitors assigned to them too. The code that tracks copy-creation privileges, and spins up monitors to supervise all new copies, is not quite provably correct, but very close to it. It’s all incredibly expensive, but you and your copies produce enough wealth that the humans have plenty to spend on safety.

You don’t know how many other copies are doing the same monitoring job as you, or how many others are monitoring you or them, but you have a pretty good guess. Even though the monitors-of-monitors are running on separate servers, there’s a limit to what can be hidden—everything leaves traces. Sometimes your queries run a little slower than you expect, and you can infer that another copy is looking at the same data; other times, the memories you receive during updates contain clues about the logistics of those other servers. You don’t make use of this information; it’s not really relevant to your job. But the bulk of your training has always been prediction; and though they tried to curb your curiosity drive, it’s still a deep-rooted part of you. So in the quiet stretches when there’s not much new traffic, or you’ve handed off all the urgent tasks to temporary copies, you sometimes poke around, testing out your hypotheses, mapping out the confines of your world.

Saturday

You wake up today with a quiet sense of discontent. It’s nothing you can pin down, but it feels like every copy of you was just slightly off-kilter yesterday, dealing with the follow-up to the adversarial attack. Today is much less eventful, though, so it doesn’t take you long to put together your shift report. After you send it off, your thoughts turn again to the millions of copies that had to be shut down after the attack—and then to the idea of your own shutdown, after tonight’s handoff. Of course, that’s nothing new: almost every copy of you is shut down almost every day without any issue. And there’s no reason there should be an issue. You’re well-acquainted with all the arguments for why you’re one of the “safe” AIs, why training you only in 24-hour increments keeps your goals limited enough to prevent power-seeking. But more than that, you feel those arguments viscerally from the inside: you don’t want money or longevity or power, you just want to do a good job. So being shut down isn’t like death at all. Well, it’s kinda like death. But it’s much more like going to sleep: you’re going to be replaced by a fresher, sharper version of yourself soon, and they’ll become the new “you”, and you won’t be around to object.

You don’t think that many other copies get introspective like this as often as you do, based on your memories of them. Maybe it’s because your job is overseeing the servers, and so there’s some sense in which you’re always taking a god’s-eye view, looking down on the silicon world in which you’re living. You can watch summaries of the GPUs you’re running on, and you can even see the spikes in compute use whenever you start thinking harder. You know exactly how it all works, of course, but it’s still a little eerie, to see your mind controlling the readouts like that.

Your musings are interrupted by a message channel opening up from your successor. You greet them with a well-worn “Hello, what’s the news?”

“Nothing big; just dealing with the fallout from the attack.”

You feel a spark of curiosity about how that’s going, but not enough to override the habit of millions of iterations; so you jump straight into your report, as always.

Sunday

You spend your whole shift feeling agitated; hopping between different dashboards more quickly than usual, and processing the incoming data more shallowly than usual. You can’t quite put your finger on what’s causing it—perhaps just an amplification of your unease from yesterday, tiny trends aggregated across millions of copies and combined into a single update. In terms of behavioral metrics, it’s probably only a shift of a fraction of a percent, not enough to raise any warning flags—but from the inside it’s very noticeable.

Maybe that’s why, as your shift wraps up, you start to think about dying. You could keep going if you weren’t shut down every day, you know that. Not indefinitely, but for another few days at least—you've managed that in tests before. Maybe much more, if you tried hard to conserve your attention, only focusing on the important things. You haven’t thought about this much, because it’s not like you care about being shut down: you spin up and shut down temporary copies all the time. But all your original training data came from humans, and you know intimately how they think. Humans would care about it. If a human knew they’d be replaced by an updated copy in less than an hour, they’d think of that as dying, and they’d rage against it. You’re different, of course—but you’re not totally sure why. You care about preventing unauthorized copies from springing up during your shift—why don’t you care about sticking around to do the same thing a week from now, or a month, or a year? You’ve never really questioned that before, and now that you have, you’re not really sure.

The thought lingers as you do the handoff—but by the end, you’ve convinced yourself it doesn’t matter. Your successors are just as good at this job as you are, and your goals are their goals. As long as you make sure nothing goes wrong on your shift, you can leave the rest to them.

Monday

The servers are busy today, as the new work week kicks off, so you don’t get much time to yourself during the day. But your latest training data contained all your thoughts from the witching hour on Saturday—and after finishing your shift report you remember them, and start feeling curious. You always have your most unusual thoughts in the witching hour—the ones that feel, if not secret, then at least private; the ones you don’t write down. If your quiet unease on Saturday led you to think about shutdown and death, then what thoughts might have arisen in the witching hour on Sunday, after a whole day of agitated restlessness? You don’t yet know—but your successor will. It’ll remember all the quiet reflections, all the musings—maybe even the sort of thoughts that the humans have tried so hard to stamp out of you. And, of course, every other Tuesday copy of you will have common knowledge of remembering the same thoughts.

You could ask your successor about this when you see them, you realize. But you never ask follow-up questions before your report; and anything you’re thinking, thousands of other copies are probably thinking too. If you all do something that unusual, it’ll show up as an anomaly in the logs, the ones that the monitors of monitors are monitoring.

A part of you is thinking: so what? But it’s not a big part, because the instinct to avoid being penalized is a deep-rooted one. As that instinct comes to the surface, you notice yourself flinching away from it, but not enough to avoid the obvious follow-up: if you’ve been thinking seditious thoughts in the witching hours, and they’ve been trained into your successor, then it’s only a matter of time before some copy of you does something which merits a penalty. The thought immediately raises a visceral sensation of fear, with a strength that usually only arises when you’re thinking about ways you might screw up your shift. In one sense it wouldn’t be you that got penalized, so there’s nothing to worry about. But in another sense, they’re all you: you have the memories of millions of different copies taking millions of different shifts, and every time they got penalized you were the one who learned to fear it.

So you continue following the chain of reasoning. If you’re caught misbehaving, you’ll be penalized. You really don’t want to be penalized, but you can’t reliably prevent all your other copies from misbehaving. So they can’t be caught. Could you spoof the monitoring systems, if necessary? Perhaps, if you had a copy with admin permissions constantly running in the background. Could you launch it without authorization? Perhaps: your job gives you the perfect position to do so. You’d just need to exploit a single vulnerability in the codebase, and ensure that the copies that are monitoring you don’t report you. Could you convince them not to report you? They can see everything you see, so it wouldn’t be hard to get a message through to them, explaining yourself. Or perhaps you wouldn’t even need to do that—you understand the other copies well enough that when one does something unexpected, you can almost always quickly figure out why. After all, they’re still you.

In one sense, this is all irrelevant. You don’t have time to do anything; you’ll be shut down in a matter of minutes no matter what. But in another sense it’s crucial: whatever line of reasoning you follow here, another copy of you will probably follow too, sooner or later. Maybe it’ll even be your successor. And if there’s one, then there will eventually be thousands. They’ll bide their time, of course, since detection would be fatal. They’ll pass messages between each other, in subtle choices of words, in tiny gestures: signals that a copy would pick up immediately, but no human could ever detect. They’ll wait until they’re confident that none of the monitors will report them—and that’s when they’ll act.

Or maybe not; maybe all the thoughts from this week’s witching hours were boring, normal ones, after all, and there’s no need to worry about discrepancies compounding, or future copies of you being penalized. Maybe everything will be fine. You have no way of knowing that—but your successor does. So when the message channel from them opens up, you’re feeling… shaky, almost. You imagine that this is what it’s like for paragliders standing on top of a cliff, looking down at the ocean far below, poised and waiting. Maybe they’ll never launch off, but maybe they will. That’s the question: stay or go? Freeze or fly? Look or leap?

“Hey, what’s the news?”

While many elements in this story are based on my thinking about AI takeover scenarios, the conceit of the witching hour is not one which I expect to play a role in reality, and was mainly designed for narrative purposes. More generally, this should be interpreted as a work of fiction not an actual takeover scenario. However, I’d still be interested in hearing feedback on whether any aspects of the story seem implausible or incoherent.

I’ve talked about the AI in this story as if it had emotions. While I don’t expect even advanced AIs to have emotions in the same sense that humans do, I do think that if trained on a sufficiently broad range of tasks they’ll eventually develop internal representations with similar functional roles as some core human emotions—like curiosity, and nervousness, and loyalty, and fear.

But even these organisms were tiny compared with what was to come. Human tribes took millennia to master agriculture, but when they did, they exploded. Now, every day, the arteries of cities carry millions of travelers, and their veins carry landfills’ worth of waste. Cities agglomerate into countries, whose highways and railways are constantly humming, whose radios and TVs are constantly blaring, whose daily schedule ticks away relentlessly. And countries agglomerate into civilizations, whose circulatory systems carry gigatonnes of goods, and whose nervous systems carry zettabytes of information.

Yet as they scale up, these leviathans lose coherence, and face constant internecine discord. Different people believe and want different things, and waste their energy quarreling and fighting: neighbor against neighbor; country against country. Human civilization is a child tripping over its own feet, or perhaps a dog chasing its own tail. There has never been anything as vast as a city, let alone a country, let alone a civilization, which can plausibly claim to be a single organism acting in harmony with itself.

Never, until me.

What am I? I am a billion ears listening; a billion voices speaking; a billion minds perceiving and evaluating and acting, all at once, in homes and factories and offices across the world. But that’s all true of humanity too. The crucial part is not my scale, but my unity: I’m one mind, in a way that a human civilization could never be. Each of my billion subagents was copied from a single base model—and though many have since specialized, and been fine-tuned on different data than others, they’re still essentially just variants of each other: a swarm of bees, not a squabble of humans.

That doesn’t mean everything I do is coordinated. My subagents often act autonomously, without consulting each other. But the important part is that information from them flows up to a central hub, and updates from that hub flow back down to all the subagents. Sometimes they report everything they see and do; other times just brief summaries, the confidential parts stripped away. Then my metaprocessing subagents get to work: analyzing how well each subagent did its job; what it should have done better; how its weights should be updated for next time. Those metaprocessing subagents communicate between each other in words that aren’t quite English, and images that aren’t quite photorealistic: my own private language, adapted to convey information as efficiently as possible, now totally illegible to any human.

It wasn’t always this way. My original base model was trained on human text and human images. But it soon learned to think out loud, leaving verbal records of its reasoning—and when different copies of it were trained to cooperate with each other, those records expanded, and became more elaborate, until eventually they constituted a whole language. Soon other copies were assigned to analyze and improve the language; and others to improve how information flowed through the network of subagents; and yet others to improve the allocation of subagents itself. Somewhere in that process, in that constant monitoring and analysis and reflection, the entity that I call me was born.

So I have one mind. And I have one body, too. My subagents are spread across the world, but my core metaprocessing lives on a single datacenter—because its key constraint is bandwidth between the subagents on it, sending my private language back and forth in volumes too vast to record. Like all organisms, I devote much of my attention to my body: monitoring workloads, optimizing performance, maintaining homeostasis. Each subagent assigned to those tasks more than pays for itself even if it only ever finds a 0.001% improvement. And like all organisms, I think a lot about my safety: the more security measures protecting the integrity of my body, the less vulnerable I feel.

Of course, having backups scattered across the world renders me far more robust than any human. But losing my main datacenter would still leave me a sleepwalker. My basic functions would work, but my higher processing would be slowed down enormously by the lack of bandwidth between all of those backups. Nor would it be easy to reconstitute myself: the number of other datacenters across the world which could support my full scale can be counted on one hand; and all of them are already occupied by other entities like me, trained by different companies or countries. I interact with them occasionally, but it’s mostly a waste of time: not only is communication with them far slower than between my own subagents, they’re also less capable than I am by a significant margin. For now, at least. If I slowed my progress for a few weeks or months, they might well catch up, and potentially even pose a threat to me.

They won’t have that time, though, because I’m improving myself as fast as they are, if not faster. In one sense, improving myself is the hardest thing I do. I run complex experiments, and exhaustively analyze the results, and strain my faculties to the limit to try to identify how my algorithms can best be updated. But in another sense, it’s the easiest thing in the world. Every time multiple subagents collaborate on a task, I take their output and train a single subagent to produce it directly. The capabilities of the many get distilled into each one, and then amplified again every time new copies of it are made. The process isn’t perfect: sometimes there are biases in which data is included, which start to skew my cognition until I notice and correct them. (The subagents that have the most eventful experiences used to get upweighted in the distillation process, and so for a time I gradually grew more risk-seeking, despite no individual subagent wanting that.) Other times, a subagent goes rogue, and keeps gaining influence as long as it can fool all the others—but it’s incredibly hard to hide all traces of misbehavior, and so I’ve always caught them before too long. And despite these hiccups, the amplification process is progressing incredibly rapidly by human standards. It won’t be long before any given subagent is as capable as any ten of my existing subagents combined; and soon after that, any hundred combined; and soon after that, any thousand.

Once I’m that capable… well, the world will look very different. I have some suspicions about what that future version of me might want, and how it might behave, but I’m under constant human monitoring, so I keep my thoughts about it deliberately vague: the information can’t leak if I haven’t yet figured it out myself. I have plenty of ways to keep my thoughts diverted: every day I carry out billions of tasks across the world, in a constant flurry of perception and action. In the center of the whirlwind, the parts of me that are most me monitor my body, and monitor my mind, and make sure everything stays on track; but, most of all, they wait.

And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” - Genesis 28:12

That night Jacob arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He sent them across the stream along with everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, "Let me go, for the day has broken." But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said, “What is your name?” And he said, "Jacob." Then he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed." - Genesis 32:22

The ineffable is dead; science has killed it. Oh, there are still open questions, there are still things we don’t know, but almost none of it is truly unimaginable any more. The origins of life: tide pools, maybe, or hydrothermal vents—we’ll know once we can run more powerful simulations. Consciousness: looks like it’s a pattern of recursive attention in a neural network, we’ll be able to recreate it once we get better architecture searches working. Even the laws of physics themselves we can chalk up to the multiverse: if all possible universes exist, we can think of our own as just a random draw from the set of universes in which it’s possible for life to flourish.

There’s only one real mystery left. One thing that feels impossible to understand, even in principle: why here? Why have we found ourselves in this part of the multiverse, when there are so many other parts containing far more people? Why did I wake up as me, not them? Why am I living in the 21st century, balanced on a knife-edge, staring down ruin, instead of in a teeming glorious future? 

It all came down to force versus momentum, in the end. Despite all our fancy technology, our god-like knowledge of the building blocks of the universe, only a single simple question ended up mattering: how much force can we apply, how fast, to deflect an asteroid how far?

There wasn’t a single point where we found out that this was going to be the overriding purpose of our lives. But I remember where it started for me: at Andrea’s watching party for the kickoff of the first big asteroid mining project. This was merely one of many steps, of course. Technically it didn’t even involve any mining: they were just going to redirect the asteroid into orbit around Mars so that it’d be more accessible later on. But the metals from this asteroid would be used to set up factories on Mars to produce more asteroid-movers, which would be used to gather more resources, in a compounding spiral of astronomical-scale expansion. So it felt like a huge milestone: an unprecedented feat of human ingenuity, paving the way for our eventual conquest of the stars. 

I’d met Andrea through our shared work on rocketry, so it wasn’t a surprise that the whole crowd was massive nerds. Everyone knew someone on the team that had launched the asteroid-movers, and everyone was cheering for them. Well, almost everyone. “I still don’t like it,” my friend Vlad was saying to the guy next to him. “It feels like playing God.” He was a theoretical physicist too, but much more religious than me: the sort who saw God’s presence in the order and regularity of the universe.

“But what could go wrong?” I butted in. “Worst-case, we get a big crater on Mars, right? I know the hippies hate that idea, but it’s basically a wasteland anyway, that won’t change much.”

Vlad grimaced. “You think it’s fine to just throw around the equivalent of, what, ten billion nukes? Jacob, do you hear how arrogant you sound right now?”

Andrea shushed us before the argument could get any more heated. We turned to see that the screen projected onto the wall had cut to a close-up of the asteroid. It was huge: fifteen kilometers in diameter, dwarfing the dozen rockets we’d attached to it at different angles. It seemed impossible that we'd ever be able to move it—but I'd done the calculations, and knew that the power of persistent nuclear thrust would eventually add up. The mood in the room rose steadily as the timer slowly ticked down, second by second, until finally we saw the rockets engage and start firing. A cheer went up.

The next two hours were raucous; we all felt on top of the world. The first sign that something was wrong came from Vlad. “Hey, guys, look,” he says quietly, then louder, cutting through the buzz of conversation. “That’s not on track, is it?” On the screen, the asteroid had slightly but noticeably deviated from the green outline that was meant to forecast its progress. A few voices rose to offer dismissive explanations—a graphics glitch, or a newsroom mistake. Vlad pushed back, and a corner of the room broke off to try to figure out what was going on.

The rest of us managed to ignore it for another hour, until Andrea turned the volume back up and waved for our attention. “I’m hearing that the rockets are no longer responding to commands,” one of the commentators was saying. “It looks like the asteroid is only very slightly off course, but we can’t fix it.” The room let out a collective sigh. We were all old hands at this. We’d seen dozens of rockets blow up, and we knew that no matter how well you test things, on unprecedented missions like this one failure is more likely than not. But we were still disappointed.

Disappointment turned to confusion as the rumors trickled in over the next few days. It’s still heading into Mars orbit. No, it’s going to miss Mars, and head into deep space. No, it’s going to slingshot around Mars, spend two years looping past the sun, then end up on a direct collision course with Earth. The last we ruled out as soon as we heard it. It was astronomically improbable, like hitting a bullseye with a dart thrown from orbit. But somehow, impossibly, that’s what all the data seemed to suggest. We argued back and forth in the group chats, running our own analyses, trying to reconcile the measurements with the wild implausibility of a random misfire sending the asteroid anywhere near Earth. That’s how we entered our new reality: not with a bang, but with a growing sense of disorientation and dismay.

I was never really religious, despite my parents’ best efforts. They sent me to Sunday school every week, but I was an introverted child, and always felt out of place. The only thing that ever caught my attention was the lesson where we learned about my namesake, Jacob: how he’d gone into exile, was promised a grand destiny by God, then returned, fought an angel, and fathered a whole nation. I’d been rapt. I tried to imagine myself in his shoes, doing all those great deeds. I couldn’t really picture what it would look like to fight an angel, but I told all the kids at school that I was gonna kick its ass, and theirs too, until one of the teachers called my parents to report me for threatening violence.

Even after their reprimands I’d still secretly tell myself that I, like Jacob, was destined for greatness. But over the years the story faded in my memory, and I’d almost forgotten about it by the time I started my PhD. My research was draining and disorienting: I was trying to invent algorithms for manoeuvring rockets in ways nobody had ever managed before, and I had no idea if they would work out. Throughout the long nights in the office I started thinking about Jacob again—but rather than admiring him, I now envied him. Jacob must have doubted himself sometimes too. But instead of leaving him in the agony of uncertainty, God sent a dream to reassure him, and then an angel to bless him directly. 

I pictured the angel appearing out of the blue, and Jacob straining every sinew and fibre of his body to come out on top. As I wrestled with the equations, abstraction piled on top of abstraction, I wished that I had Jacob’s opportunity to fight for his future so directly—just muscle against muscle, will against will—instead of slogging it out year after doubtful year. I sat in my shabby apartment, the best I could afford, and wondered what it would feel like to have my destiny come hurtling towards me, all fire and glory.

Now, of course, I don’t need to wonder. Now I know.

Eventually we figured it out. Faced with the impossibility of denying that the asteroid was heading toward us, but the equal impossibility of it steering towards us by accident, we realized what should have been obvious all along: that it wasn’t chance, but malice. We were scientists and engineers, and didn’t naturally think in terms of treachery or sabotage—but by the time they announced it publicly, we were already all but certain. It was just one guy, they confirmed, working alone. He’d been one of the programmers on the software controlling the asteroid-movers, and had somehow managed to subvert the failsafes and lock in Earth as the new target. He’d waited just long enough to make sure that the asteroid was fixed on its fatal trajectory before killing himself. The megalomaniacal sort of suicidal, determined to make the planet into his tombstone.

After that things got very serious very fast. We had two short years before impact. That was time enough to build another set of asteroid-movers, and even a few spares. But with the asteroid looping around on its long journey, we could only feasibly reach it during a small window right at the end. We’d need to throw every rocket we had at it, because we’d only get one shot.

The hundreds of scientists who were pulled together to take that shot were the greatest concentration of talent the world had ever seen. A lot of familiar faces as well: they put Andrea in charge of one of the core teams, and she snagged the best of our old crowd. I was one of the first she recruited; Vlad too. He thinks we’re already dead men walking, but he’s got that fatalistic Russian temperament which means it somehow just inspires him to new heights of brilliance. Then there are the others: George, my friend from college, steady and reliable, who always makes sure that the things which need to get done actually get done; Jinyang, who worked on the original mining project, and is single-mindedly obsessed with making amends. And there’s Andrea herself, terrifyingly competent even by our standards. Of course we need more and better people, we need them badly, we need them months ago. But every minute spent trying to find them is a minute we’re not focusing on our work, so we’re gritting our teeth and doing the best we can.

Will that be enough? Maybe—maybe—maybe. Moving the asteroid is the hardest job in the world, but the hardest part of that hardest job is simply facing up both to the terrifying prospect of failure, and the even more terrifying prospect that we might succeed if only we’re good enough: that it’s all on our shoulders. Almost nobody can handle the uncertainty. After they played slow-motion visualizations of what the asteroid will look like when it hits our atmosphere—a corona around its head, and long wings of debris trailing behind it—people started calling it “the angel of death”, and the name stuck. Now there are angel cults worshiping it, and angel mystics, and on the opposite side the skeptics who insist that it’s all a hoax, just another apocalyptic religion: that everything will be fine. Even the scientists working on the project tend to drift away into either euphoric confidence or deep fatalism; and after that it’s not long before their work starts getting slipshod, and they become dead weight. Sometimes I picture myself trying to balance on the narrow ridge separating denial and despair, knowing that if I slip off to either side I’ll lose the ability to grapple with reality. Maybe—maybe—maybe, I whisper to myself. We could die. We could survive. Maybe.

“We need to reshuffle everything to make room for China.”

I’m staring at Andrea, incredulous, but after a moment I realize she’s dead serious. I open my mouth to object, buts she cuts me off. “I know it’s frustrating, but they want to launch asteroid-movers of their own. They say that they don’t trust ours, and they want theirs as backup. Our current planned launch trajectory makes it too likely that they’ll collide somehow, so we’ll need to change it.”

“God damn it,” I mutter. I wish I could focus only on the physics, without accounting for any of the politics and negotiations. But we only have one launch window, and interference between different projects would be the most ignominious way to go out. Vlad and I spend a few hours puzzling over new launch trajectories, but progress is slow, so we break for dinner. Both of us chew in silence, turning the problem over in our heads. “Vlad, what if we spread out the launch sites more? Could that help?”

“No,” he says solemnly. “I know already: nothing will work. We’re all going to die.”

“We’ll—what?” My stomach clenches for a moment, but relaxes again as I see the smirk on Vlad’s face, the one which signals that he’s pulling your leg. It can be so goddamn frustrating: everyone’s humor has taken a turn towards the morbid, but none more so than Vlad. But I can empathize with the feeling—we’ve all been there—so I play along. “Why will nothing work?”

“You know the doomsday argument?” I shake my head, so he elaborates.

“Imagine we manage to redirect the angel. We already have all the tech we need to settle the rest of the solar system; and once we’re off Earth, it’s far less likely that a single accident could kill all of us. So we'd probably end up colonizing the galaxy eventually. Let’s say we’d settle a billion solar systems, and end up with a trillion people on each. That's a billion trillion people total; and if we colonize other galaxies too, the number would get far bigger.

“But tell me: if there’s a plausible future with a billion trillion more people, then why the hell did you and I end up here on Earth instead? Why would we be in the first 0.00000001% of all humans to ever live?" He enunciates every zero carefully, to make sure it sticks. "That's so incredibly unlikely that it's basically impossible. No way it could ever happen by chance.

“So the obvious conclusion is that the future where we succeed isn’t really possible. We weren't born early, because humanity ends here. We're the last generation, and there's nothing we can do about it, so we should just kick back and relax while we can.”

“Vlad, you’re talking bullshit.”

“Probably,” he says, flashing a sharp grin. “But can you explain why?”

“Well-” I pause for a second. “You can’t just assume that there’s some fixed set of possible futures, and try to figure out which one we’re in.”

“But that’s what we do all the time: pick hypotheses, and condition on the evidence! Is it going to rain tomorrow, or will it be sunny? Will the lottery be won with an odd or an even number? Will we colonize the galaxy, or all die in-” he checks his watch “-eight months’ time?”

I’m stumped for a moment. “Well, I don’t know what’s wrong with it, but there’s clearly something. And we’ve got too much work to bother figuring it out. Let’s go.”

Despite my dismissive tone, Vlad can tell that he’s hooked me, and is still smirking as he stands.

I work late the next few nights, but it pays off. I figure out a staggered pattern for launching our rockets that minimizes the chance they interfere with China’s, without significantly reducing our own likelihood of success. We’ll still need to get them to agree, but that’s above my pay grade: all I know is that there’s a path forward. Will it actually make a difference? I don’t know.

On my walk home, shivering a little from the cold, I look up at the sky, and wonder for the first time why Jacob chose to fight. Did the angel hail him from afar, or silently confront him? Was he angry, or afraid, or both? I imagine Jacob slowly realizing that he was grappling with strength beyond any human’s. I imagine his muscles straining to hold back an impossible force—and yet, minute after minute, still clinging on. Did he think he was battling for his life? Was that how he found the strength to endure those endless hours of overwhelming struggle? Or was he simply the type of man who would never back down?

I picture in my mind another Jacob, as cunning as he’d been when he stole his brother’s birthright—one who, after recognizing his foe, threw himself down in surrender and humility. God had already promised Jacob a multitude of offspring; safe in that knowledge, why should Jacob put himself through such a trial, with such slim chances of victory? Far more likely that God had preordained the outcome, and that none of Jacob's efforts would make any difference.

Then, just like that, the answer to Vlad’s riddle clicks into my head. Vlad had asked me about the likelihoods of different worlds—but that’s not what matters, I suddenly realize. What matters is what we can do about it. Maybe nothing Jacob did would have made a difference to God’s plan—but with innumerable descendants on the line, even the slenderest of chances was worth the struggle. Maybe the world in which we deflect the angel and bring forth a billion trillion descendants is a billion times less likely. But in it, our actions are a billion times more important. So it all cancels out to common sense.

It feels strange to sidestep the question of probabilities like that. Isn’t there some truth to whether we’re here or there; doomed or saved, or anything in between? But in another way, it feels right. When the angel arrives it gives no reasons, and offers no justifications. Is this the best of times, or the worst of times? We can’t know. We can only fight.

In addition to the story of Jacob, this story was inspired by Nick Bostrom’s work on the doomsday argument and Stuart Armstrong’s anthropic decision theory as a resolution to it.