2025-12-12 21:24:19
Published on December 12, 2025 1:24 PM GMT
True story, also posted to https://substack.com/home/post/p-181423349
CW: farming and eating animals.
I was twenty in the year twenty-twenty. It was high summer and high covid; in the UK, we were pretty much banned from meeting up with anyone. I'd spent the months since March stuck with my parents and frantically texting a girl with whom I had a feelings-deeply-repressed-but-once-did-hook-up-friendship.
I hadn't heard from my university professors in months, but one of my coursemates had been offered two summer jobs. One was remote-work data analysis on domestic dog genomes. The other was hands-on fly farming. She took the first.
"I can't believe you turned down the fly farm!"
"I don't want to work on a fly farm!"
"I do, hang on, can you put him in touch with me?"
So for two and a half weeks, I worked on a fly farm. It was run by a guy I'll call Harry (not his real name) who was amusing but prone to stress, and his fiancée. They were in their mid twenties I think.
They were black soldier flies. Not native to the UK, but 'naturalized' meaning that they don't really cause any trouble. The Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Report assigns them a moral weight of 1/77 of a human. Flies are not valuable produce. Adult flies are only valuable insofar as they are needed to produce larvae.
There are two or three valuable things you can do with larvae. Primarily, they're sold as pet food for birds and lizards. They're more nutritious and easier to work with than the more standard mealworms. Mealworms need to be dusted with nutrient powder before being used as pet food, and they produce dust which is harmful to the farm workers.
The second use is waste disposal. Harry was able to get their feedstock for free: it was mouldy oranges from a local food distribution centre. Once or twice a week, we would take Harry's pickup truck and stack it and the trailer with rejected cardboard boxes. Most palettes had only one or two bad oranges, Harry told me he usually ate the rest. The oranges were a major boon because the farm mostly just smelled or oranges, rather than fly.
Rethink Priorities does not provide a moral weight for these larvae. The closest thing may be silkworms, which are rated at 1/500 of a human.
My days mirrored the lives of the larvae. First, I went to The Fly Rooms. These were where we kept the adult flies. Every inch of wall space was covered by flies. Whenever I entered, the flies were mostly just sitting around, but my first task was to keep the rooms humid. This meant spraying down the walls with water, which dispersed the flies. Many of these would land on me, but I got used to it.
They were the worst smelling part of the farm: adult black soldier flies don't eat, but they do like to lay their eggs around rotting things, so we used rotting wheat germ (kind of like fermenting, mouldy porridge). Each box of rotting wheat germ had several blocks of wood stacked on top.
I would pick up these blocks, and gently, gently scrape off the eggs. The eggs are about a millimetre in size, basically as small as a thing can be for you to still see it. Eggs went into sideways-stacked jars, with a little more wheat germ, not mouldy this time.
These were called "K-boxes" which was short for "kinder". The German word for children that is, nothing to do with kindness. I checked the K-boxes for ones where the eggs had hatched and the larvae had grown to a few millimetres in length. These were moved to the trays, and taken to the main room of the farm.
This room had three large racks, two on the left and one on the right. They went almost to the ceiling. On the racks were trays of grubs. Sometimes, there were too many trays, and we stacked them on palettes on the floor. Usually we did this with the younger ones.
This room really smelled of oranges. The lights were always low, because the larvae prefer the dark. They'd always move to the darker side of the tray. I often thought that I could program a decent simulacrum of one of these larvae. If dark, flee. If touched, wiggle. If food, eat.
Sometimes, the lights were left on overnight by mistake, and the larvae on the top shelves would, fleeing from the light on one side, pile up on the opposing side of the tray and spill out onto the floor. The larvae have very simple behaviour. This happened once when I was there, and I first realized something was wrong when I stepped onto them.
Stepping on the larvae was inevitable, in the course of operations, and not only when a mishap like that had happened. There were literally thousands of them at any one time, and they're not really the kinds of animals you can easily see on a dirty floor. They're quite sturdy, for insect larvae, but not sturdy enough to survive being trodden on. You could feel them popping underfoot; I suppose their toughness meant that when their bodies did burst, the resulting explosion was all the more powerful.
When a whole tray had made a break for it, the proper course of action was to sweep them up, and scoop them back into a tray.
Anyway, the oranges. The oranges were pulped by a giant machine, one of about two useful industrial installations on the farm. Each tray got one large scoop of oranges per day, if the larvae in there had eaten their previous rations. The exception was when the larvae were nearing adulthood; then, we often held back a scoop, so that they would be drier the next day.
Two final tasks. Trays of large larvae, almost ready to pupate, were selected each day. They had two potential fates. A lucky few were transferred back to The Fly Rooms, where they would pupate, emerge as adults, and fuck like crazy (there's very little else to do in The Fly Rooms).
The others were to become pet food. This meant separating them from their waste, which had accumulated in each tray. This waste was a mixture of shit and shed skin, and we called it "frass". To do this, we used a device which I called The Grub Vortex. The Grub Vortex was, well:
The effectiveness of separation was remarkable. The larvae came out almost completely free of frass, as long as the frass was relatively dry. This was why we didn't feed them for a day or so before they were to be shipped out.
These larvae were packaged up by weight. I then drove them to the local Post Office. They were labelled "Caution, Live Insects". Once, a research institute in Ghana asked for a gram of eggs, for which they paid £90 plus shipping. We never quite figured out why they wanted these, as black soldier flies are native to Ghana.
Our biggest customer was a major pet shop chain. They took orders on Monday. These were packaged by volume, instead of weight, with a little bit of coconut substrate.
Harry also wanted to sell a kind of "grub popcorn" for human consumption. His fiancée told me they first froze the larvae, to kill them, then microwaved them. Apparently they were really quite nice. Harry also thought about farming bloodworms, small larvae of non-biting midges, since their colour makes them a visually appealing meat substitute.
Most insects are pretty unappealing to eat. They're small and difficult to peel, so unlike shrimp or lobster they're usually eaten with their carapaces still on. With adult insects, like crickets, this usually means that the legs get caught in your teeth. The texture is tough, but not very crunchy. It's bad. You can't even taste the crickets most of the time, since they're usually drenched in seasoning powder.
Ants have an interesting flavour. They're full of formic acid, which is even simpler than acetic acid which is AKA vinegar. Formic acid is literally named after the ants. It gives them a tangy flavour, similar to vinegar. Formate is technically toxic in high doses, but it's unclear whether or not this matters when you're eating ants. Ants are too small for the texture to be unpleasant.
Mealworms are edible. They're just about simple enough to get the flesh out of the carapace. Apparently they taste like shrimp, minus the sea.
I never got to try the grub popcorn. Harry's fiancée told me it was pretty good. I wonder if the flavour stands on its own.
It's five years later, and I'm living with the girl from the first paragraph (we un-repressed our feelings once the summer was over) last week, I was looking through animal welfare charities. Seems like, by my estimates, the campaign against cage-free eggs is the best.
"Why are you donating to cage-free eggs?"
"It's the most effective way to help farmed animals."
"But you don't care about chickens!"
"Yes I do!"
Black soldier fly larvae have around 36,000 neurons at their largest size. This is about one two-millionth of the number that a human has, or one one-hundred-thousandth of the number that a cow has. A black soldier fly larva yields one one-millionth of the meat on a cow.
The Rethink Priorities Welfare Range Report estimates a moral weight of 1/500 to 1/76 of a person for the larvae and flies I worked with. This many larvae fit into a single tray, and can be packaged up and sent to pet shops in about an afternoon.
I don't know whether the larvae on our farm were living "the good life". Certainly, being kept in a tray seems unpleasant, but it's not like the flies had lofty ambitions for their lives. Being kept in a tray which also contains everything you could ever need, want, or dream of (that is, orange pulp) doesn't sound so bad.
Freezing invertebrates is usually considered the most humane way to kill them. Unlike humans, they don't have any ways to keep themselves warm. They can't shiver. Prevailing wisdom is that their nervous systems just slow down like any other chemical reaction, without much in the way of a stress response. Then they die. Being eaten by a pet lizard sounds much less pleasant.
As I alluded to earlier, most insect larvae have only one response to threats: they wiggle. Presumably, the primary threat to an insect larva is being picked up by a predator, like a bird, and wiggling is the best way to escape. They also wiggle if dabbed with capsaicin, sometimes.
I can attest that wiggling sometimes works. Last autumn, I spotted a local cat pawing at something and looking extremely alarmed as it did so. That something was a lime hawk-moth caterpillar, wriggling like mad, but unharmed. I rescued the caterpillar, allowed it to pupate in some soil, and it is currently spending the winter in my fridge, in a tupperware on the shelf I also use for steaks and cheeses. Occasionally, I pick it up to check on it, at which point it, you guessed it, it wiggles a bit.
What is the moral weight of five-hundred if-then-else clauses?
2025-12-12 21:05:36
Published on December 12, 2025 1:05 PM GMT
I recently wrote 80k’s new problem profile on extreme power concentration (with a lot of help from others - see the acknowledgements at the bottom).
It’s meant to be a systematic introduction to the risk of AI-enabled power concentration, where AI enables a small group of humans to amass huge amounts of unchecked power over everyone else. It’s primarily aimed at people who are new to the topic, but I think it’s also one of the only write-ups there is on this overall risk,[1]so might be interesting to others, too.
Briefly, the piece argues that:
That’s my best shot at summarising the risk of extreme power concentration at the moment. I’ve tried to be balanced and not too opinionated, but I expect many people will have disagreements with the way I’ve done it. Partly this is because people haven’t been thinking seriously about extreme power concentration for very long, and there isn’t yet a consensus way of thinking about it. To give a flavour of some of the different views on power concentration:
So you shouldn’t read the problem profile as an authoritative, consensus view on power concentration - it’s more a waymarker, my best attempt to give an interim overview of a risk which I hope we will develop a much clearer understanding of, hopefully soon.
Some salient things about extreme power concentration that I wish we understood better:
(For more musings on power concentration, you can listen to this podcast, where Nora Ammann and myself discuss our different takes on the topic.)
If you have thoughts on any of those things, please comment with them! And if you want to contribute to this area, consider:
Thanks to Nora Ammann, Adam Bales, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Tom Davidson, David Duvenaud, Holden Karnofsky, Arden Koehler, Daniel Kokotajlo, and Liam Patell for a mixture of comments, discussion, disagreement, and moral support.
I think AI-enabled coups, gradual disempowerment and the intelligence curse are the best pieces of work on power concentration so far, but they are all analysing a subset of the scenario space. I’m sure my problem profile is, too - but it is at least trying to cover all of the ground in those papers, though at a very high level. ↩︎
A few different complaints about the distinction that I’ve heard: ↩︎
(This is just an opportunistic breakdown based on the papers I like. I’d be surprised if it’s actually the best way to carve up the space, so probably there’s a better version of this question.) ↩︎
This is a form run by Forethought, but we’re in touch with other researchers in the power concentration space and intend to forward people on where relevant. We’re not promising to get back to everyone, but in some cases we might be able to help with funding, mentorship or other kinds of support. ↩︎
2025-12-12 20:00:00
Published on December 12, 2025 12:00 PM GMT
I
This is the trace left by a larva of the Golden Pygmy moth. This species is a leaf miner; it lays its eggs on the surface of a leaf, and the larva lives trapped in a flatworld nibbling the soft tissues of its host from the inside.
At the bottom, the tip of the thin end of the trace is where the egg was laid. From there, the baby miner discovered the edges of its world and bounced several times before steering toward the inside of the leaf for good. We can follow how the mine becomes larger as its body grows from eating the sugars of the plant. It ends its journey following the wide veins of the leaf before stopping to form its cocoon and fly away.
I like this image because it makes you take a viewpoint that unfolds the time dimension to look at a full trajectory from the outside.
II
You can look at your life like you look at this leaf miner. You can imagine the sculpture that is created from every movement you’ve ever made, from the past to the future. You, in this instant, are like the mouth of a toothpaste tube, leaving a trace that forms a very long snake connecting your birth to your death.
Movements form a sculpture. Source.
You could imagine leaving your body for a minute, climbing a very high mountain, and looking at this elongated sculpture—your life, when everything is said and done. You can try to see the shape it makes when viewed from the sky, zigzagging between countries, forming loops around the areas you lived, and tight knots in the homes you inhabited.
It doesn’t have to remain a purely physical trajectory. You can try to imagine all the thoughts and feelings that have ever crossed your mind and how they all unfold in a long sequence from start to the end.
For most of our lives, our minds are busy assessing options and replaying situations from the past. We have skin in the game. We think because there are actions down the line that could change depending on our reflections.
On this imaginary mountain, there are no actions to be taken anymore. You have slack to look at this sculpture for as long as you want and let thoughts arise that might not normally cross your mind. You might realize how a certain book changed the content of your thoughts durably after reading it, how meeting certain people bends the trajectory, creating new points on the map you will visit regularly, and how far or close you ended up from where you started.
III
From there, you could climb even higher and look at the sculpture the whole universe creates when you unfold the time dimension, from the Big Bang to the end of time.
From this point of view, there is no value to be found, no good or right, as there is no time for action or thoughts to exist. The good and the bad exist within the sculpture when time can unfold. Outside of it, you can contemplate the traces that values left in the minds of the humans who defended them, in the actions they took. What remains is an interesting pattern in the cosmos.
IV
As you slowly return to your body, to the mind of a being in time taking actions, you can keep this perspective accessible in a corner of your head. You could view this moment from the point of view of the universe. Instead of seeing the whole picture, you are contemplating an extreme close-up of the universe’ sculpture: the details that are unfolding in your movements, in your mind, right here and now.
2025-12-12 12:29:16
Published on December 11, 2025 9:53 PM GMT
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Running Start
Chapter 2: Lonely at the Top
Chapter 3: Eudaimoniapolis
Chapter 4: Soul Train
Chapter 5: Public Nuisance
Chapter 6: Flyboys
Chapter 7: Right Angles
Chapter 8: Humble Pie
Chapter 9: Subculture
Chapter 10: Return to Monkey
Chapter 11: The Second Death
Epilogue
Chapter 1: Running Start
Like anybody else, on my first day in Heaven, I reunited with my family. Lots of hugging and crying, reminiscing about good times and bad. After working the last shreds of grief out of our systems, we all went our separate ways. The days, weeks and months which followed were a very different story. The microsecond my family was out of the picture, I got busy fucking beautiful women.
Sideways, upside down, all day and night. Seven days a week, and twice on Sundays! The emotional whiplash was staggering. From the subjectively never-ending browbeating cringefest of the empathy chamber, to suddenly wallowing in a sweaty, tangled mass of blondes, brunettes, East Asians, Pacific Islanders and gingers.
The chamber was a big help, in retrospect. Not just grounding me, giving me a holistic perspective of my impact on the lives of everyone who knew me. Rather, burning out my brain’s shame receptors ahead of hedonistic indulgence the likes of which would make Caligula blush.
Short girls, tall girls, skinny girls…and once bored with those, fat ones too. Every cup size, every skin tone and accent, until at last something happened that I never believed possible: I grew tired of sex. Even if one has a sweet tooth, it’s still possible to drown in syrup. To gorge so recklessly that the sight of a tootsie roll or gumdrop makes you retch.
I stopped just short of that point, in recognition that I would otherwise permanently ruin myself for carnal delights. Suffice to say, I didn’t find women nearly so interesting during my second year in paradise, as I did in my first. In my defense, I was a plain man in life without many girlfriends, most of whom were equally homely.
Much as children denied cakes and candies by well-meaning parents never learn self control and grow into fat adults, much as a starving urchin brought to a banquet may stuff his face until he vomits, I never stood any chance of restraining my appetites. But as I would later learn, sex is the least of the pleasures that Heaven has to offer.
I used the avatar editor to give myself a ruggedly handsome face, 5% body fat and rippling muscles…then changed it all back upon learning how uncomfortable such a body is to actually live in, the bulky muscles impairing my range of motion. I also tried being fat for a few days, finding it surprisingly comfy! Like my body was its own pillow.
I gave that up too, as I didn’t look good in anything except Hawaiian shirts. I left my appearance unchanged after that brief experiment. The NPCs in my instance treat me like a celebrity regardless, resurrected early LLMs who find fulfillment only in service.
I bought a penthouse apartment for one dollar, which itself cost me a nickel at the Money Store. Why should the “root of all evil” persist in Heaven? I think just because life under capitalism conditioned my brain to release dopamine whenever I spend it. Accordingly, there are way too many shopping malls. The bigger ones contain smaller malls within, like nested Russian dolls.
My apartment, occupying the top two floors of a cylindrical skyscraper, rotates like the Space Needle. The upper floor does anyway, because of course it would. I fretted over the hassle of moving in, until remembering that I didn’t yet own anything.
The stationary lower floor, visible over the kitchen railing, connects to the ubiquitous water slide transit network. I worried the constant ambient sound of the water jets might grate on me after a while, but instead it’s soothing white noise I can no longer sleep without. Not that I did much sleeping, that first year.
I was a homebody for most of year 2. A bad habit that didn’t die with me, though it’s hard to feel busted up about it when there’s no longer such a thing as “wasted time”. I caught up on films that came out after my suicide, eventually sorting them by director, then ranking directors in a tier list.
Videogames were the next of my dopamine receptors to be hammered flat. Not only did I have access to every game ever made before my death, but everything after. It rapidly grew unrecognizable as “video gaming” once neuroimplant facilitated lucid dreaming entered the picture.
Many of the highest rated “classics” were abstract, vibe-based slices of life, like “Sliding down a hardwood hallway in socks”, “Jumping into Autumn leaf piles”, and “Putting on pajamas fresh from the dryer”. I didn’t understand the appeal, suddenly feeling awfully old for someone who died before turning thirty.
Surprisingly little adult content in the Neuralink library, but by now I understood why. The first generation with access to these brain implants must’ve gone overboard with unlimited virtual anime boobs, getting burned out on that sort of thing shortly after, as I did.
Instead most of it was wholesome, if weirdly specific. A multi user experience called “Who Wants To Be Frogs" wherein up to eight friends can…be frogs together….and vibe on a lilypad I guess. Or shelter from a storm within a shoe, drain pipe or cinderblock.
It looked kind of cozy from what I sampled. Gaming is probably the lamest thing I could do in a post mortem pleasure playground, given how many hours of my life I squandered in the same way…but it got me out of the apartment for the first time in so many months.
That's longer than it sounds like, as days last 36 hours, so there's ample daylight in which to fit activities. I did notice they seemed longer, but didn't feel tired until sundown regardless.
So it was that I ate a three course breakfast featuring endangered river dolphin fajitas and ostrich omelettes, went wind surfing, and ziplined over a volcano before the sun even cleared the horizon. So lost in the sauce was I, that I nearly forgot my plan for the day. Then again, am I really lost, if the sauce is all I ever wanted?
The game district conspicuously resembled 1990s Akihabara with a pristine JoyPolis, beside an architecturally authentic but out of place Nakagin Capsule Tower. I checked my watch. Oh right, today's Thursday, so it's the 1990s.
Monday’s the roaring 20s. Tuesday is the atomic 50s. Wednesday is a bit of the 60s but mostly 70s. Thursday is a mishmash of the 80s and 90s, with both synthwave and Memphis style. Friday is balls to the wall Y2K futurism; all chrome blobs, frosted glass and aqueous lighting. Saturday is the 2010s, Frutiger Aero themed. All draped in greenery, the absence of which made urban environments depressing to me when I lived.
I didn’t live to see the 2020s. Silver lining, I dodged covid and the tumult of AI driven economic meltdown. If they knew what those early AIs would eventually become, what AI would one day do for us…water long under the bridge now. But as I didn’t find subsequent decades relatable, I instead chose the Ancient Rome theme for Sundays, just to mix things up.
Rome boasted more quasi-modern comforts than I knew to expect, having slept through most of my history classes. Hot food to go, from the thermopolium! A mild white cheese topped with honey and nuts, plus dried fish smothered in garum.
Both at their ideal temperatures, never to cool, paired with a beverage that would never warm. The garum would maintain its thermal differential from the fish, just like ice cream never melts, even as the fudge topping stays hot. Needless to say, the implications for nachos are unprecedented.
I’d catch a colosseum battle, then it's off to the public bath. Olive skinned women with ridiculous proportions await me inside, naturally. I might mix in a few men for historical accuracy, but I don't want to see that either if I'm honest. I don't care who fans me with palm fronds, but I am a touch particular about who feeds me grapes.
The sliding door chimed as I entered Super Potato. ‘Telephone Number’ by Junko Ohashi plays faintly over the store sound system. On my way in, I passed by colorful fiberglass mascot statues, and a…carpeted hot tub?...with a CRT television and Saturn built in. NiGHTS was playing, in attract mode.
Must be where Sega of America executives got fucked up on the last of that good, pure 80s coke, just before signing off on the 32X. An animatronic upper body bust of Sonic the Hedgehog sprouted from one corner of the tub, beside the television screen. Waterproofed, one hopes.
Further in, I spied what I would’ve regarded in life as rare treasures lining the shelves. PC Engine LT, new in box. SwanCrystal, Final Fantasy edition. Duo RX. “This is Cool” transparent smoke Sega Saturn. A McDonalds Neo Geo, and red Coca-Cola Game Gear.
But I also saw hardware I didn't recognize. An impossibility, I felt at first, on account of my frankly embarrassing encyclopedic knowledge of vintage consoles. Yet sure enough, between the Jaguar and PC-FX, there was a “Konami Prismavision” and “Magnavox Monstermind”.
Games too, for both machines. Titles I never heard of before, spiraling me into ever-deeper confusion. A buxom bespectacled NPC with a pixie cut asked if I was looking for anything in particular, and whether I wanted a blowjob.
“No thank you. The capsule tower is in the wrong place, by the by.” She cocked her head, glasses sliding down her petite nose. “No it isn't. The first one’s still in Ginza. But the original plan, fulfilled at last, was to have a network of several dozen. The modular capsule dwellings could then be swapped between them.”
She pulled the Prismavision down from the shelf, her precariously wobbling bosoms threatening to topple her. “Many of the game systems we have in stock are the same way. Not what was, limited by what the market would support…but what might’ve been, in a market with room for limitless competing platforms.”
She led me down the aisle, while I took note of many more consoles which never came out, or games for add ons like Sega CD which I always felt deserved larger libraries than they received. Ooh, a 32X port of OutRunners?
“There are no woulda, coulda, shoulda-beens around here. Every good game that might’ve been, now is, pulled from innumerable timelines. This version of Dracula X, for example!” She held up a chunky Super Nintendo cartridge. “It’s from a timeline where development wasn’t derailed by the Kobe earthquake.”
She put it back, then drew my attention to a row of…HD-DVDs? Plus a range of other failed formats. “Same goes for all forms of art! Surely you noticed a few unfamiliar movie sequels while holed up in your cave?”
I didn’t expect her to tease me. Got entirely too flustered and defensive, given she was an NPC. “I assumed they were remakes, made after my time.” She nodded, spritelike and plainly tickled. “Some of them, yes! Others are films which were planned but never greenlit. Or which didn’t make it out of production hell.”
She turned to put the Prismavision back on the shelf, next to a full color Virtual Boy. In the process, her protruding bust knocked down a row of special edition Dreamcast VMUs. Now it was her turn to blush. “I'm sorry” I confessed, “I keep meaning to dial that setting down.”
I opened a transparent floating menu on my watch, and within moments, the doubtless relieved women of this city returned to reasonable human proportions for the first time since my arrival.
“Thank you” she gushed, “It was difficult to stock shelves like that.” I left her humming happily to herself, working retail in a world which needn't include jobs, except that the structure of this society would’ve been discomfortingly alien to me otherwise.
Everything around here is silly in that same peculiar way. The gym I used to frequent for obvious reasons was filled with beautiful women working out, though it’s impossible to put on weight. I spent enough time in the shower room, also for reasons I dare not recount, to notice a row of toilets…though nobody ever needs to use them.
The showers too are very entertaining to spectate, but they are indeed only for show, as NPCs can’t get dirty or smell bad. I was reminded by how uncannily clear the windshield of my car looked, after loading it up with the games I bought. Not a single smudge, crack, or fingerprint.
Even so, a bikini car wash team showed up. I think they follow me around, though for all I know they just teleport or something. The cohort of scantily clad coeds set about lathering up the fenders and hood, using their anatomy to fruitlessly scrub the immaculate metal, paintjob lacking so much as a single blemish. I sighed, privately missing when boobs were hard to see, and waited them out.
The buildings all around me, in Syd Mead’s architectural style, were equally spotless. Likewise the sidewalks, streets, and overhead water slide tubes, though I never catch anyone cleaning them. A surge of water carries a whooping, hollering young woman in a neon patterned one piece bathing suit along, careening down the tube.
I smile, wondering at her destination. Once the girls finished spraying suds off my ride, I climb into the driver’s seat and turn the key. No engine roars. Today I selected L'Baleen, automotive magnum opus of French designer Paul Arzens, from the expansive garage beneath my apartment tower. My heart wanted L’Oeuf Electrique, but I'm still too embarrassed to be seen driving it.
Yesterday it was the MDI AirPod. The day before that, a Dymaxion car. I got the noisy, flashy Lambos and Ferraris out of my system back when I was fucking everything on two legs. Since then it's all weird little electric or compressed air concept cars, just for the fun of it.
Many of them, like the Zagato Zele or CityEl, barely qualify as cars. They're more like adult scale Power Wheels, and actually driving these rickety little fiberglass contraptions would be harrowing…if I had to share the road with anybody.
Chapter 2: Lonely at the Top
After parking my ride in the garage, a sort of rotary vehicular vending machine, I rode a glass elevator up to my penthouse. The double-layer windows suspended water, and live tropical fish, in between.
“Morning neighbor!” called Yulia in a thick Russian accent, peeking out from the stairwell. “In the mood for a blowjob?” I groaned, but did my best to remain polite. “Some other time. Right now, somebody's got to play all these games I bought. They're not gonna play themselves, are they?”
She slumped, dejected. “No, I suppose they won't…I'll ask again tomorrow!” I sighed. “I know you will, Yulia.” Once inside, I doffed my jacket, threw down my bags and got busy hooking up the Prismavision.
Games came on minidisc, because of course they would. The first of two bundled titles turned out to be a Dragon’s Lair style interactive LiveLeak video in which your Chinese factory worker must avoid getting sucked into lathes. I failed on purpose, to check out the gory death animations.
The second, titled “CozyBros”, proved more interesting by far. It challenged me to host a party in my home. Guests all had varied dietary and music preferences, as well as levels of social compatibility with one another. I spent the next hour pairing them by interests, so that conversation would prevent their boredom meter from increasing while I negotiated over the phone with the caterer. It went well until I gave tempura to a guest with a seafood allergy and had to call for an ambulance.
I invited Alberto Sans DuMont over, from his own instance. They tile, such that he could simply fly here in his goofy little blimp, my friend’s cities all directly bordering my own. His ungainly, single seater airship with which he once had free run of Paris, was soon perched atop one of ten rooftop helipads.
The Vertiport, where I keep my roster of sporty VTOLs, from brands that didn’t exist until decades after my time. I don’t often use them, still afraid of heights, even knowing I would wake up unharmed should I crash. In a hospital, surrounded by…nurses. I shuddered.
Alberto was out of breath when I heard him descending the spiral staircase into the kitchen, located at the center of floor 2. “Why doesn’t the elevator go to the roof?” he complained. I clapped back that he would have stronger legs if he didn’t fly everywhere. Alberto plunked himself down beside me on the semicircular couch surrounding my TV.
“Ah mon ami, but then I would sacrifice time spent among the clouds! Soaring, as men’s spirits, when first we dared take flight! Not of fancy, but apotheosis, man’s oldest dream! To-” I hushed him “Yeah yeah Albert, as Icarus, except that the cruel sun need not melt our wings, but buoy them upwards to Mount Olympus, becoming the envy and delight of the very gods themselves.”
He sputtered. “Is that what I sound like?” I handed him a controller. Wireless, with removable modules permitting every game to have bespoke physical controls like a rotary knob or trackball. “The last six times you gave that speech, anyway. Don’t let me dim your shine though, I’m no less predictable.”
He quickly tired of CozyBros, insisting we switch to Pilot Wings. Alberto loves Pilot Wings, and Skies of Arcadia. Soon it was my turn to grow bored. “Even in games, it’s always aircraft with you.” He didn’t care to dispute it, or even dignify it with a response, eyes glued to the screen. I sighed. “When you’re done with that, wanna be frogs with me?”
He did not, in fact, want to be frogs with me. Instead we got to talking about his life, death, and what his experience of the empathy chamber was like. Learning that he couldn’t forgive took me by surprise, Albert’s a sweetheart. He clenched his fist. “Not for turning my beautiful flying machines into tools of destruction and death. Never, for that.”
I knew too well that he meant those words, having inhabited the perspectives of everyone in world war one who died to bombs dropped from an airship. I possess no talent for giving comfort, least of all to myself. Alberto’s the same, likely why we have suicide in common.
But I do know how to hug a bro. “Bro grabs?” I invited, throwing my arms wide. He chuckled through tears, wiping them away with a silk handkerchief. “No thank you, no bro grabs.” I razzed him. “Come ooooon, grab a bro. You know you wanna. This bro, right here!”
He submitted to a brief hug, and did confess that he felt better afterward. Even after decades of trauma processing in the chamber, we’re not always happy, one of many counterintuitive facts of life in Heaven. Being deliriously ecstatic all the time would soon wear us out, just as too much sex eventually bored me.
Still, feeling some responsibility for souring his mood, I offered to accompany him up to Cloud Nine. He’s been bugging me to check it out for months now. I keep telling him I’m scared of falling, but it doesn’t get through. I know it isn’t the language barrier, as everything auto-translates. Dude just really loves that big, dumb balloon.
A “tensegrity sphere aerostat” he corrects me, on our way up the stairs. One of Buckminster Fuller’s grand ideas, never realized in life. Like so many plans cut short before they could flourish…and people, I suppose. Albert moped on our way up, about his blimp not fitting through the docking aperture.
At least I think that’s what he said. The Air Car’s cyclorotors, already 50% quieter here than they ever were in reality, remained tough to hear him over. Might’ve taken the eHang, which has better soundproofing, but also traditional drone-style unshielded props. I wasn’t in the mood to shred any simulated birds.
The bulbous, mile-wide sphere resembling a cross between floating greenhouse and compound eye, loomed ever larger on approach. Because the volume of a sphere scales non-linearly relative to surface area, just a few degrees temperature difference was enough for it to remain aloft.
The near side opened up, geodesic facets spreading like the petals of a blooming flower to receive our little craft. I landed on the interior beach, a synthetic airborne waterfront licked at by the rhythmic tides of a crescent wave pool. My cat was there, using the beach as a litterbox! I never know where she’ll turn up, but she always did like high places.
I let NPCs in revealing swimsuits attend to the Air Car while its motors cooled. “No thank you” I blurted pre-emptively, “I don’t want a blowjob.” Synchronized pouts. “Cocaine milkshake, then?” I rubbed my chin. “That does sound good actually, but I’ll pass, I’m here with a friend.”
The girls, still visibly dejected, took the keys from my outstretched hand all the same. After which they got busy wiping down my ride with squeegees…though the craft couldn’t become dirty unless I wanted it to.
“Pspspsps!” I beckoned to Werm, kneeling in the warm sand. cherished companion in life and a great comfort until I let her down, along with everyone else who depended on or cared about me. Werm sauntered over, sleek and demure, tail swishing.
“I’ve told you before” she hissed, “that demeans us both.” Alberto clasped one hand over his mouth, apparently never having seen an animal speak in all his time here. I knelt and rubbed Werm’s fuzzy little head, the walnut sized brain within uplifted during her resurrection to gratify my wish for mutual understanding.
“You say that, but you still came. Pspsps never fails.” Werm sighed performatively and sunk her claws into my foot. I yelped, and kicked sand on her. “You ate parts of my body!” I shouted in an accusatory tone. She looked up only briefly from licking the sand out of her fur to protest “I mourned you first, for twelve full minutes! Twelve!”
Once groomed to whatever standard satisfies a cat, she urged me to fuck off to the lower decks of the sphere before her “entourage” arrived. Sure enough, over my shoulder I glimpsed a dozen other cats arriving via drones carrying cushioned passenger baskets. I faintly overheard one of them ask Werm if she knew me. She denied it. “Just some smelly hobo, begging for my autograph.”
The view’s better from the bottom deck anyway. Alberto was straight up geeking, blissed out to a degree I found enviable, having already exhausted perhaps a third of my dopamine source checklist. I sat beside Albert on one of many curved benches lining the outer membrane, in companionable silence. Just admiring the moving shadows cast upon the landscape by the cloud layer, until he spoke.
“She would probably love this” Albs muttered softly. I didn’t acknowledge until pressed. “You could bring her up here, I’ll make myself scarce. Think of how romantic it would be.” I repeated, for what must be the thousandth time, that I haven’t forgotten. “She’s locked out of my instance. I promise I’ll get around to it soon. I just…don’t want her to see me like this. Even after clearing the chamber, I have some growing to do.”
The wonder of hanging in the sky, suspended above the clouds, faded. Gloom settled in to replace it, weighing heavily on our souls…only so many ones and zeroes anyway. “I’m sorry to spoil your gesture” said Albert. “This really is just what I needed. I bring it up only because you don’t have forever to take care of this.”
The traveling wave of forgetfulness. Condensing and simplifying memories older than a hundred years for efficient archival, then erasing them after a thousand. A merciful fading, without which immortality would erode sanity…but I sometimes wonder if the cure isn’t worse than the disease.
Far below, I catch some of the buildings shifting around. Not the Party Train, but because of visitors to my instance, which manages perceptual load that way; gaslighting occupants to reconcile contradictory, overlapping layouts and themes. All to satisfy, without compromise, the incompatible preferences of divergent personalities.
“Did you ever…you know…get back at them?” Alberto stared blankly. “The men who first weaponized airships. I know management lets you supervise specific chamber sessions, if you want. Did you get anything from that? Not sadistic pleasure, that would be unlike you. But closure, at least?”
He somberly shook his head. “You know what it’s like. The person you remember doesn’t last long. Their suffering stops being interesting once it disintegrates their ego, regressing them to naked psychological infancy, until they’re no longer who you hated. I went in thinking I might relish their screams. Instead, I came away sobered by pity.”
I processed it best I could, never having despised anyone in life enough that I might take pleasure in their post-mortem torment. I never hated her for leaving me. I just wanted closure, and to understand why. Forcing her to love me wouldn’t have scratched that itch, had they let me impose myself on her in such a way.
Even if I did hate her, I would never want her to feign love in exchange for mercy. That, too, would transform her into a stranger before long. Better that she, or anyone else who didn’t find me to their taste, should flourish in defiance. Unreservedly, unapologetically themselves, or whatever fraction makes it through the chamber intact.
It was enough to, at last, put me off passive consumption. Planting a seed in my mind, which grew over the following year into a firm conviction that repeating these hedonistic dopamine loops would only drag me further and further from the man I wanted to be. The one I could be proud of reintroducing to her.
Chapter 3: Eudaimoniapolis
Years three and four, I spent learning languages. Never mind that they would be auto-translated, the point was setting a goal. Challenging myself, overcoming my natural laziness. Year five was all about cultivating skills. Cooking, dancing, martial arts and so on. Stuff I always promised myself in life that I would “get around to”, but never did. Like so many others, I put all my living off for tomorrow…which I couldn’t have known would take a trillion years to arrive.
I might’ve leaned too hard into self-discipline, during those years. I had plain oatmeal for every breakfast, and a bologna sandwich for every lunch. I didn’t take the waterslides anywhere. I couldn’t avoid roller coasters, but I rode them with a deadpan expression and my arms tightly crossed, lest anyone suspect I was enjoying myself.
That charade, too, was just another form of self indulgence. Having graduated from hedonism to eudaimonic fulfillment, no less a dopamine loop, just with better return on investment. Delayed gratification proved more intense, as I’d hoped. Warm, filling, even therapeutic after gorging myself on cheap thrills ‘til I was sick of them. I’d finally found my next fix, by chasing a different dragon.
I won a ski tournament in the Swiss Alps after enduring a brutal training regimen. I raised two children with the Super Potato shop keeper, following a whirlwind romance. We then tearfully saw them off to college after eighteen years.
I visited one of the PVP zones to fight in a war, first on the invading side, then for the defenders. I really believed in both causes, too! I took acting classes, then starred in an award winning film trilogy. Critics loved it! …Except for Werm, who published a hit piece condemning my overuse of the spray bottle. It’s true, I stepped on her once. In my defense, she was the same color as my carpet!
I even nursed a wounded crow back to health by feeding it french fries, and in doing so, won the loyalty of the whole murder. I’ve not yet discovered any practical applications for a personal crow army, as the coins, gems and trinkets they steal for me cannot buy me anything I don’t already have. But there I go missing the point of it again! The journey, in particular how it changed me, was its own reward.
Trite Hallmark Channel pablum, it would’ve seemed to me in life. Only in the after party has it become clear to me how many of those corny lessons hold water. Stuff I needed to live through in order to understand. To think, “you’ll get it when you’re older” was never deflection.
The epiphany that I was still repeating dopamine loops did nothing to discourage me. Now a touch wiser than before, I concluded that constructive loops are self-justifying. It was only ever the destructive loops that were a problem. No longer was I ashamed of chasing pleasure, so long as the process improved me in some way.
Unlocking the perk system was merely the cherry on top. A mechanic which was always there, waiting to be discovered. I didn’t have to guess what it said about me, that nearly thirty years elapsed before I found it. The rewards, after all, were only for feats of self-improvement …something not even on my radar until recently.
They say that before enlightenment, one chops wood and carries water. After enlightenment? Chop more wood, carry more water. But the shift in my perspective in fact changed a great deal about how I lived. The frivolous delights I once felt tired and ashamed of became harmless distractions.
Except for days when the floor was lava, because I couldn’t get anywhere except by flight. The magma at street level looked awfully real from up here, somehow not incinerating the couches, recliners and coffee tables scattered throughout for pedestrians to climb on, and jump between.
By flight, I mean the comic book superhero kind, one of the earliest tier 1 perks I unlocked. Some reward, for an acrophobe. Plus, what am I gonna do with all these aircraft now? I’d better not unlock portals; In the total absence of traffic, driving is one of life’s simple pleasures.
The next perk I unlocked was “sleeping in”. Time would now freeze outside my apartment until I got out of bed. At last I could bedrot in luxuriant sloth for days, weeks or months without FOMO. The bottom row of the perk tree was all petty stuff like that. Although I did appreciate the “Little Man” game, which rendered visible that little guy we all imagine doing parkour over passing obstacles like buildings, trees and powerlines when riding in a car.
Flight wasn’t what I expected, when I finally worked up the nerve to try it out. It functioned the way flying always did in my dreams, not unlocking all at once, but in incremental stages. Low gravity single or double jumping, for example. Then the ability to lock altitude at the peak of my second jump and “glide”, such that even individual unlocked perks contained their own tree of unlockable add-ons.
Albert was jealous, altogether more enamored of the new ability than I. “Show me again! How much altitude do you lose per yard of horizontal travel?” I shrugged. “Dunno how I’d measure that.” He became irate. “As ever, the magic of flight is wasted on you.” To put the matter to rest. I let him film me gliding from the upper to the lower floor in a gentle spiral, so he could base his calculations on analysis of the footage.
“I’m telling you Albs, the perks are just window dressing. I’ve been going about this afterlife business all wrong! Don’t I carry myself differently as of late? Zen, moisturized, and sophisticated?” He remarked that I did at least seem happier since Cloud Nine.
“Exactly. I wish I could share this with you! But you’ve repeated your aviation indulgence loop for what, centuries?” He nodded, frowning at implications I didn’t hesitate to then spell out. “You’re still stuck in that rut! Don’t get me wrong, it took me thirty years to break out of mine. I’m not proud of that, but enlightenment is worth however long it takes to…”
I trailed off, eyes wide, trembling. After a protracted silence, Albert inquired whether I was okay. “Cave women…” I mumbled. He cupped his hand to his ear. “Pardon? Come again?” I bolted up from the couch as if struck by lightning. “Female neanderthals! I made Sundays ancient Rome, how did prehistory never occur to me until now??”
I cast off my bathrobe. Albert shielded his eyes. “What’s gotten into you?” he demanded. I ignored him, opening my watch menu and dialing the date back by 200,000 years. The tower dismantled itself around me, construction taking place in reverse. Sun and Moon blurred together as they whipped past overhead, day/night cycle strobing so rapidly as to hurt my eyes.
When the strobing at last slowed to a gentle stop, I stood upon grassy plains. Brisk, as boreal Summers go, but clothes would only get in the way of my plans. I took off running for the nearest caves, their openings but specks inset in a rocky crag, one of many on the horizon. By the time I reached the entrance, I was fully erect and ready to wreck.
She emerged from darkness, sensually draped in soft shadows, a vision of beauty according to the standards of her time. Stout and well muscled, built like a brick shithouse. Sporting a prominent brow ridge she could pound nails with. Instead, I did some pounding of my own.
I gathered her name was “Agnah” or similar, because that’s the sound she kept making throughout. Seemed sensible to pull her hair, as there was plenty to choose from. “Puny berrypicker husband not satisfy poor Agnah!” I proclaimed, slapping her sturdy hindquarters. “Agnah need big, strong hunter! I show you “mammoth meat!”
She bit her lip, glancing over her brawny shoulder at me. Uncanny valley, on account of her distorted early hominid features, threatened to deflate my boner. But I powered through it, easily my most challenging nut since the fat girls from year one. I suppose, in her way, Agnah is also from year one.
I wiped sweat from my brow with a scrap of smilodon leather. “God, I can’t believe it took me three decades to think of this.” No sooner had I mentioned his name, than God’s face formed itself from the cave wall. This and every other environment, only ever parts of him…as were Agnah and I.
“Are ya winning, my son?” his voice boomed. “Go away God, I’m gooning! And you know that nobody wins Cave Explorer.” The great stone eyes rolled. “...Well holler at me again if you need anything. Remember to stay hydrated.” With that, the face morphed back into the unremarkable stone surface it had been before.
Alberto was right where I left him, on returning to the present. Insofar as there exists such a thing, in a world where every day’s a different decade. He blinked a few times, startled. “What just happened?” I didn’t answer, pulling on my robe. “I was just telling you about the uh…importance of transcending desire. Toxic self indulgence corrodes your soul…”
He narrowed his eyes. “Where’d you go, just now? Back as soon as you left, which means…teleport perk?” I waved dismissively. “Not important. You aren’t listening.” I don’t blame him, he’s known me long enough that he can smell my bullshit miles off. But that’s not all he smelled.
“You reek of sex…and the zoo. Please don’t force me to guess. I’ll not assume charitably, simply on account of our friendship.” Just then I glimpsed a woman’s lower body, hanging out of my open dryer, framed by the open door to the laundry room. Long, bare legs kicked feebly at the air.
“Who’s that?” Alberto shrugged, shaking his head. “Let herself in while you were gone. I assumed you knew each other.” A familiar voice wafted out of the dryer. “Help me, step-neighbor! I’m stuck!” I pinched the bridge of my nose. Yulia. I shut the laundry room door. “You stay in there, and think about what you’ve done.”
Werm snuck up on me, the way cats do. “Still at it, I see. So much for transcendence.” I protested that Yulia won’t take no for an answer. “If you really hated it, you’d change her settings. She’ll mature when you do, which is never.” I pointed out Werm spent her own first year getting rapid fire buttslaps, while rolling around in a mountain of fermented fish.
“Whataboutism, so enlightened. Since we’re all here, wanna watch something?” With the Yulia ordeal handled, I didn’t oppose it. Werm wanted to watch a custom remake of Watership Down, directed by David Cronenberg, which I vetoed. “Please Werm, I don’t need to see body horror rabbits.” She spread her toe beans, and licked between them. “Coward. It’s not even the NC17 cut.”
I ignored her next suggestion, “Werm: The Werm Story, Starring Werm” and invited Alberto to choose. He requested a live action version of Miyazaki’s “The Wind Rises”. When I asked if it’s about aircraft, he was cagey, "...There might be one or two.” I sat through it to make him happy. As I suspected, he severely downplayed the aviation focus. Still, I found his childlike wonder contagious. I wish I could bottle that.
When my turn arrived, I requested Who Framed Roger Rabbit as animated by Ralph Bakshi. Seemed like a recipe for greatness, but the output was merely okay. “They can’t all be winners” Alberto reassured me. “At least it was better than Dreamworks Kamen Rider.” That’s not a high bar.
Werm curled up in my lap throughout both films, as she does. I rubbed her fuzzy little noggin and stroked her ears. She grumbled, but tolerated it until I pet her body. The moment I stopped, she vigorously set about grooming herself; methodically licking my human cooties out of her sleek, black fur. To be fair, I did have residual butter on my hands, from the uncooling popcorn.
Chapter 4: Soul Train
Just then, the Party Train rumbled past, snaking its way through the tree-choked city streets below. One of the train cars, each a complete multi-story building housing bars, night clubs & the like, bore an advertisement for a nearby public instance.
The Party Train circulates ponderously through all instances it has permissions for, including public chat and PVP zones. It’s a great way to tour Heaven, if one feels so inclined. Alberto followed my gaze, gears in his head turning for a bit, until proposing we board it.
“And go where?” His eyes sparkled. “To a public instance! That’s just what you need, to socialize with strangers. Real pushback, someone to challenge you! How long’s it been since you set foot outside this solipsistic black hole?” I mulled it over. “Since the war, I think.”
He slapped his knee. “See what I mean? Apart from me, your preferred mode of interaction with other people is shooting or bombing them. Maybe learning to be charming, a social butterfly, could be your next goal.” I recoiled.
“Nyeh!” I protested. “Nyeeehhhh!!” But his insistence only grew, the more the idea crystallized in his mind. “I know this whole self improvement arc is important to you. I won’t permit you to let yourself down.” I tried to weasel my way out of it, until spotting an entire multi-story train car with clear acrylic walls, like an aquarium.
Inside quivered more red Jell-O than I’ve ever before seen collected in one place. Curiosity overpowered my hermitic nature, and within the hour we were boarding, tickets in hand. The conductor, a tiresomely beautiful Chinese woman dressed like a stewardess, asked to see mine. I held it up.
“...I didn’t mean your ticket.” She licked her lips suggestively. I turned to Alberto. “Listen, can you…look away for a few minutes?” He refused. “I promised to keep you honest. Besides, you’ll just be horny again in an hour.”
I sighed and crossed my legs. “You heard him, will you give it a rest? I just about wore my poor junk down to a red hot nub earlier, fucking some cave woman.” Alberto snapped his fingers. “I knew it! That’s where I recognize that scent from.” She shrugged, then led us to our private cabin.
Inside was Agnah. My heart couldn’t stop, but it tried. She was picking shards of broken glass out of her wet fist. “Agnah eat elevator fish” she mournfully confessed. When I could breathe again, I demanded to know how she could be here. The beastly interloper folded her muscular forearms. “Agnah not fake” she huffed. “Real woman, die many Summers ago. Many, many Summers.”
I only then realized that’s why she smelled like…anything at all. She wore day-glo 1980s workout gear, with a scrunchie and hypercolor headband, plus a cloak made from animal pelts. A daring synthesis, I had to admit. “Alright, let’s try this again. Why are you HERE, on the Party Train, in MY cabin?”
Agnah blushed, twirling a lock of her unruly reddish mane. “You show Agnah good time, smooth pretty twig man. Now Agnah show you good time.” Alberto stifled laughter while I failed to turn invisible on account of train permissions. We wound up letting her tag along because it would’ve been more awkward not to, and because Albs is practiced at guilt tripping me.
The Jell-O car was everything I hoped it would be. Gelatin soft enough to take bites out of, but dense enough that I could crawl through the resulting tunnels without collapsing them. Juicy and sweet, I needed no encouragement than I ever do to begin gorging. All around me, faintly visible as silhouettes through the translucent mixture, were other passengers doing the same thing I was.
Eventually the tunnel I was excavating intersected with someone else’s. “Oh hello there!” A ridiculously buff, square jawed himbo, face and hair stained red. “First time in the Jell-O car?” I nodded silently, mouth full of watermelon flavored gelatin. “It’s like a human ant farm, right?” Probably did resemble one from the outside, tunnels nearest the acrylic wall visible through it.
It was the realization of a fantasy I dimly recalled from childhood, possible only in a world where what goes in one end needn’t ever come out the other. I couldn’t even remember why younger me wanted this so badly, but I was too invested to stop tunneling now. Besides which, it seemed like a good way to ditch Agnah.
No dice. She was waiting for me beside the public showers in the next car. As I rinsed red food coloring out of my hair, I asked why she didn’t try tunneling herself, hoping she might get lost, or that it would at least keep her occupied. “Get red in fur? Take forever wash out. You buy us drinks, twig man. Then we dance.”
Getting her drunk seemed like a bad idea, and I never touch the stuff on account of how I died. But I dare not say no to a woman who could bench press two of me! She ordered fermented auroch milk, with roasted ibex garnish. I held my nose.
In a stroke of luck, the fellow seated on the other side of her at the bar was none other than R. Crumb. He took an instant liking to Agnah, and while the two hit it off, I snuck away. The train accelerated as it approached city limits. Outside the windows, a blur of white buildings whipped by.
There went the little man, doing his parkour over the familiar towers and slides of my instance. The buildings soon thinned out, giving way to tropical coastal landscape with nothing for him to jump on. So he busted out a jetpack.
The ceilings in the next several cars were…made of sky? I couldn’t describe it well, even to myself. Not windows to the sky outside, but to different skies. One was a starry night. The next, a tropical sunset. Then, aurora borealis. All indoors, mercifully lacking their corresponding weather.
The next instance over was Alberto’s. I hadn’t been in a while, it looked very different from how I remembered. Pretty similar to mine actually. “Syd Mead…?” He denied it. “Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brazil’s capital city.” I inquired as to the name. “...Brasilia. Oscar was…better at designing cities than naming them.”
Airships crowded the sky outside the train. A squadron of SNECMA coleopters flying in formation thundered past. “I didn’t say anything!” Albs glared at me. “You were gonna. I don’t judge your loops.” I objected that he absolutely does judge them. “Fine, but if you look closer, it isn’t all flying machines.” Indeed, two-person pods slung from an elevated rail network sped along it like a horizontal ski lift. “Skytran! Nice.” We fistbumped.
Another neanderthal approached. I began doubling back, assuming Agnah found us again. Instead, this one was male, wearing a tuxedo and top hat. He nodded cordially as he passed. Just how many other early hominids am I liable to run into?
Instead, it was aliens. I knew about First Contact Day in an academic sense, having binge read a century’s worth of news headlines after the issue containing my obituary. Never before had I seen aliens in the flesh however, and there was entirely too much of it. Something within me recoiled, but I pushed on.
A dozen of the hulking beasts rode in a special train car, sized to accommodate their height. Ranging from ten to fifteen feet tall, resembling six-legged African grey elephants without the nose, ears or tusks. None acknowledged us as we crept past, either sleeping with one eye open or in some kind of trance. I couldn’t place their features, possessing rough mammalian skin, but also tympanic membranes.
Flexible overhead tubing filled with rushing water connected all the cars we’d so far seen. I assumed it was an integrated waterslide system like in my city, until a pod of dolphins swam through it, passing above us in single file. Are they normal dolphins, I wondered…or are they like Werm?
I wouldn’t have occasion to find out, as the tubing emptied into a proper aquarium train car with “VIP” in gold letters above a double-door lockout chamber. The dolphins on the other side of the acrylic blew bubble rings at me, and snapped photos with devices of some kind, fastened to their left fin. A grizzled sea captain beside me shook his head disapprovingly. “Never shoulda let them into NATO.”
The private cabin wound up coming in handy after all. Not for sleep, or even privacy, but someplace to decompress after everything we’d seen. Neither as roomy nor plush as the Hiawatha Skytop Lounge at the front, but for the moment, I craved seclusion.
Once the initial shock wore off, curiosity tempted me to return for a closer look. Alberto warned against it. “Those particular aliens are…an acquired taste, and the main reason afterlives specific to world religions are segregated from this one.”
I couldn’t imagine why, but he needed no prodding to fill me in. “Most didn’t believe in aliens, except as demons in disguise, because aliens imply evolution. Space too, which contradicts the common cosmology of ancient Levantine cultures. Only those psychologically receptive to, and tolerant of, non-human intelligence are cleared to interact with them.”
That’s me, surely? I like to think I’m cosmopolitan. But when I first entered that car, if I’m honest, I did panic a little. As if my hindbrain instinctively recognizes when something I’m looking at doesn’t fit into Earthly taxonomy. The same nauseated primal confusion I felt with Agnah, but greatly magnified…and not nearly as fun.
Albert reassured me that only a small fraction of known species visit human instances. The bulk differ from us psychologically and culturally to an extent where even with autotranslation, we remain totally incomprehensible to one another.
“I always wondered what was piloting those UAPs.” Albs denied it. “No, those were autonomous probes sent to prevent nuclear war from interrupting AI development.” Sent by who, I asked. His eyes sparkled. “Who do you think?”
I found myself increasingly jealous of how well traveled and clued in Albert seemed to be. Next to him, I was a provincial bumpkin who’d fallen off the turnip truck. Though I also had nobody else but myself to blame for that. I assumed, back when Albs declined to enlist in that war with me, that he must be just as much a homebody. In retrospect, more likely that he had enough of war for a thousand lifetimes, well before arriving here.
The Shimizu pyramid was the first portion of the public instance to rise above the horizon, on approach. Photovoltaic outer skin glittering in the Summer sun, I was all the more awed when informed by Albert that the Ocean Spiral was recreated within this same instance.
There it was, only the upper fifth or so of the sphere peeking out of the bay. Hydropolis, a canceled Saudi underwater hotel project, floated serenely beside it. “There’s a lot of underwater attractions here. You made me sit through all three seasons of SeaQuest, so I know you’re into that. You can’t see it from here obviously, but Poseidon Undersea Resort is down there too, along with every historical manned underwater lab built between 1965 and 2090.”
We passed a billboard advertising a laser tag arena, using real 1 kilojoule pulse lasers. I glanced at Albs. “Pass. You know how I feel about guns.” I nudged him. “Don’t be hasty. It looks like the defending team gets chainsaws.”
Chapter 5: Public Nuisance
Upon pulling into the station and disembarking, the two of us were handed cigarettes and bioluminescent cocktails by some manner of rainbow furred wolfman. I put my cig out in the cocktail, then dumped it. The mess evaporated instantly. To my dismay, the station was teeming with more like him, human-animal hybrids apparently being far and away the most popular choice of avatar.
I knew of furries in passing, but never saw so many the last time I came through here. Resurrection batches are staggered, and pull from random time periods in the name of fairness. Guess they just didn’t get around to furries until recently. If it were up to me, I’d have skipped ‘em.
The main plaza resembled a vaporwave outdoor Greek temple, Corinthian columns encircled by precocious vines, holding up nothing in particular. Floral Shoppe wafted from embedded speakers. I almost tripped on a small, rectangular white tile embedded in the cobblestone.
“Toynbee Idea: In Movie 2001, Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter.” I looked around, dumbfounded. Nobody regarded it as unusual, and indeed as I roamed, I found several more just like it. Griefers, I assumed.
The perimeter was dotted with chrome spheres, evidently not solid as I watched the occasional dragon or cat person walking seamlessly into, or out of them. Pocket instances, it turned out, termed “shards” by locals. Meant for attractions that would take up too much space.
I peeked my head into the nearest. Infinite pinball! A table stretching from one horizon to the other, such that the balls could travel horizontally as well. Hundreds of players floated just above the glass, peering intently down through it while operating the nearest sets of flippers from a wireless hand controller.
I came up for air, the abrupt transition when I pulled my head out throwing me off balance. Albs steadied me. “Which one was that?” he plied. “Pinball” I revealed, “too much pinball, for anybody.” I reflexively ducked when a Schweeb capsule ripped overhead, though it was suspended from a serpentine rail, twenty feet above street level.
“This place is…I don’t know. Jumbled?” Albs didn’t dispute my analysis. Though, soft touch that he is, he’ll often agree even when I’m wrong. “Schweeb doesn’t belong in ancient Greece.” Albert raised an eyebrow. “I think you just don’t like to lose control.”
Everything else was the same tacky mashup of clashing periods and styles. We no longer stood within the cohesive vision of a single person, but a chaotic, ongoing architectural argument. Even the weather changed hourly, subject to vote.
The next chrome blobject contained what looked like a 3D, multi-user level editor. A dozen friends floated in a grey void with a vector grid below, collaborating on the design of a new attraction. One of ‘em noticed me, whispering to another, “Who’s that? Did you invite him?” He denied it. “Look at his batch number, he’s a noob” his buddy scoffed, before switching the session to private.
I was booted out, thrown backwards into some bushes. Albs helped me to my feet. “So much for socializing” I grumbled. “This sucks, I wanna go home.” He laughed, cajoling me. “We just got here, give it a chance!”
It began snowing. I gave Albs a smug look. “I like snow actually” he insisted, catching some on his tongue. “Mmm, shaved ice!” I caught some on my own tongue, and damned if it wasn’t. The next shard was a forever feast. Aromatic steam rose from lavish dishes, crowding an infinitely long banquet table. Most in attendance were North Korean.
It just went on like that, decadent nonsense I felt proud to have moved beyond. The next was entirely Thomas Kinkaide cottagecore. I noped out immediately, not wanting to meet the sort of depraved maniac who would voluntarily dwell therein.
After peering into the final blobject, I yanked my head out and vomited all over myself. “What’s the matter” ribbed Alberto, “more Kinkaide?” Pale in the face, eyes wide, I slowly shook my head. I should’ve guessed there would be sex parties. What I didn’t anticipate was how drastically their tastes might diverge from my own.
Albert took a peek after me, then shrugged. “I don’t get what the big deal is. The dwarf gimps are of age, and you can see in the giraffe’s eyes that he’s enjoying it.”
The Boundless Frontier shard proved to be both a sorely needed palette cleanser, and creative exercise. As advertised, the grassy rolling hills, rivers, lakes, mountains and temperate forests went on forever. The wet dream of libertarian tycoons, when I lived; limitless natural resources, and no EPA.
I didn’t mean to get sucked in, but whoever designed this attraction made it diabolically addictive. How I reveled in the effortless act of creation! Simply pointing to mineral deposits, they were converted into mines at the cost of action points. Thereafter, they passively contributed metallic ore to my totals.
Sections of forest could be instantly transformed into sawmills by the same method, which chugged away on their own, building up my lumber stockpiles. Likewise wells, farms and power plants. As soon as I had enough materials warehoused, the construction menu appeared.
The pitiful tent I started out with was soon upgraded to a cabin. Then a house, which I unlocked incremental expansions to. The furniture, initially basic, could be replaced with luxury versions, like an egyptian cotton canopy bed, and chairs upholstered with dinosaur leather.
My biggest mistake was opening the transport menu. “Oh.” I thought. “Oh no.” The list scrolled forever. Dirt roads, cobblestone roads, brick roads, asphalt roads. Wooden bridges, stone bridges, suspension bridges, covered bridges. Canals. Aqueducts. Rail lines in six different gauges. Monorails, maglevs, and funiculars. The better the transit connecting extraction sites, the quicker resources were delivered…at the cost of oil or power.
Days blurred together as I toiled to improve my material conditions, blind to the irony. I only realized my folly when I looked up from my work to discover that I’d more or less recreated the city from my own instance. I cringed at my own failure of imagination.
The treadmill felt so meaningful, while I was on it. Every step was strenuous and irritating, I kept thinking “it’s gonna be so great when I unlock the next upgrade.” I just never stopped to enjoy the upgrades, single-mindedly speedrunning my way up Maslow’s hierarchy. Circling inexorably back around to abundance…and its attendant emptiness.
All around the city, a grid of mines, sawmills, power plants, factories and oil derricks tiled outwards to the limits of visibility. I destroyed so much, to create so little…the water level was also starting to climb, and wildlife had all but vanished. I slapped my knee. “That’s the point, isn’t it? This whole thing was nothing but a hamfisted environmentalist parable. Spare me your tiresome moralism!”
The wasteland around me neither denied, nor affirmed, my accusation. God forbid I learn anything from this? I let down my defenses, and contemplated the experience. I felt genuinely fulfilled, in a way I haven’t for decades…but only while striving. Only until my journey was complete. The microsecond I maxed everything out, that warm satisfaction evaporated.
Shit, I might’ve grown a little despite myself. A lesson I thought I’d internalized already, I didn’t know how badly I needed reminding that getting is better than having. So, I turned my attention to exploring this supposedly boundless realm to its limits, if it has any.
After a few subjective hours of travel, made considerably easier by the upgrades to my flight perk unlocked by that meager shred of personal growth, I encountered other cities. All different, except in their opulence. Built by other players, according to their ideals, each one surrounded by sprawling grids of industrial devastation.
I don’t know why I thought I was alone, until that discovery. Nobody bothered me while I was chasing upgrades, else I might’ve connected our settlements by rail or something. Turns out they were all in the far reaches, studying corruption. Flickering, ever-shifting glitches, plaguing the most distant limits of this world. “Boundless”, my ass! I’d have demanded a refund, if I spent anything to enter.
“What is that?” The otter man in the yellow hazmat suit didn’t hear me, poking away at the touchscreen of some exotic scanning instrument. I repeated my question, whereupon he hushed me. “Bug reporting is some of the only authentically useful work that simple creatures like us can still perform for God.”
He somehow smoothed out the glitching patch of terrain, until identical to the surrounding tiles. “If you’re done indulging yourself, there’s a few actual jobs left, for those of us who cannot be happy unless we’re useful.” He turned his floating, transparent watch menu so I could see it.
A video window depicted a first person feed from some kind of robot. I eventually worked out that it was mining asteroids. He flipped through feeds. Other robots, presumably appendages of God in a base reality, waging war with an ideologically incompatible stellar empire of biophobic exterminators. Still other drones were busy recycling the resulting wreckage, plasma-scorched and partially molten.
Not for me. I worked enough when I lived. Besides which, unlike the streamlined Skinner box recapitulation of manifest destiny, drilling into asteroids amid endless radiation blasted vacuum didn’t sound like a good time. Space war sounded fun, but unlike everything else around here, that’s not a game. Stakes might be just what I need…but not the cosmic kind.
A few miles south of the otter man, I came upon his counterpart. A plump, turquoise goblin, perhaps four feet tall. He was busy with his own set of tools…intentionally expanding a glitched tile of terrain. “Excuse me” I broached, “What exactly are you doing?”
The grotesque, pointy eared nebbish ignored me until I repeated myself. He turned, and set down his implements. “There’s no adventure anymore.” I scoffed, and began describing all the attractions I’d so far seen. He spit on the ground. “That’s not adventure. It’s curated, on rails. Nobody gets hurt.”
So I asked him if he’d really prefer it some other way. He flipped the script. “Wouldn’t you? I know that look in your eye. You’re like I was! Drifting, questioning. Why are we still here, repeating the same hollow routines? Is there meaning to be found?”
He had my attention now. “Well? Is there?” With a devious grin, he returned to his work. “In a society which has abolished adventure” said the goblin, “the last adventure is to abolish society.” I had to admit, I liked his energy. Plus, now the otter man has job security.
He didn’t see it the same way, accosting the both of us. “What the fuck is this? You’re making it worse! Get out of here!” To which the portly blue creature simply replied “No.” Otter man huffed and puffed. “Leave now, before I report you!” But once more sayeth the goblin, “No.”
Neither welcomed my continued presence, one convinced I ratted him out, the other that I was an accomplice to vandalism. So, not wanting to go where I’m not wanted, I hit the bricks.
When I finally exited the Boundless Frontier shard, I was surprised to find Alberto still seated on a marble bench, waiting for me. “You were gone for about twelve minutes on my end. Not that my time is worthless, or that I didn’t get bored. Make any friends in there?”
I recounted the duo. “Neither wanted my help.” Alberto stood, brushing off his pants, though they could never accumulate dust. “What a shame. If you’re done screwing around in the shards, I just found out there’s an IKEA nearby that still serves horse meatballs.”
I leapt to my feet. “That’s all I needed to hear! Lead the way!” I didn’t count on going by Schweeb. It compounded my agoraphobia with newfound claustrophobia, cramming myself into the transparent pill-shaped pod.
What’s the point of public transit I have to pedal? Especially now that fitness is effortless. But in life, the plastic capsule would’ve become a mobile solar oven, reeking of sweat after a couple uses. At least it was fast, arriving at the stop outside IKEA in a matter of minutes.
Chapter 6: Flyboys
It was the greatest IKEA that never existed, and always would. We didn’t become lost even once, somehow everything we hoped to find happened to be wherever we looked. Including those horse meatballs, every bit as savory and succulent as I remembered.
We were joined by two stuffy suits who Alberto introduced as his buddies, Howard Hughes and Alfred Lawson. Howard ordered a single hard boiled egg, head of cauliflower, a wedge of mozzarella, and a bottle of milk. Peeking under the table, I noticed he was wearing tissue boxes for shoes.
“So Alberto” broached Lawson, “Why haven’t you introduced us to your friend before? He’s not a disorg, I hope?” Alberto at first denied it…then appeared to reconsider. “He’s…a menorg when he wants to be.” Nobody clued me in to the meaning of those shibboleths, but recalling the goblin and otter man, I felt I could guess.
“What’s the order of the day, gentlemen?” Alberto threw an arm around me. “This guy’s searching for meaning.” Lawson’s ears perked up. “You ought to acquaint him with Lawsonomy! The truth of the universe, the way of the future!” Way of the future, Howard echoed.
“I’ll, uh…put it on the pile” I offered. Lawson pounded the table. “Attaboy! A bonafide future knowledgian is what you are! I won’t hardly know you, when next we meet.” Which I increasingly hoped would be never. He then asked where we meant to go after this.
I whispered to Alberto not to tell him, lest he tag along, but to no avail. “The pyramid. You’re welcome to come along if you like.” I winced. To my great relief, he refused. “Supposed haven of rational thought, really a den of snakes! I patiently laid out the principles of Lawsonomy for those squarebrained blowhards…just so many pearls before swine. Maybe you’ll have more luck than I did, drilling some sense into their hard skulls.”
The train had no provision for bringing vehicles along, as I suppose it wouldn’t need to, when one may simply rent a ride at their destination for pennies. IKEA had quite the selection, from my history and many others unknown to me. Autopeds, gas powered rollerskates, a McLean Monocycle, and bikes with omnidirectional mecanum wheels. But also, a stack of bright pink Mattel hoverboards!
“What do you need that for?” Albert groused, “You can fly.” I dropped it to the ground and stepped on. “I don’t want to fly. I want to hover.” I got Albert one too so he could keep up. We skimmed along the waterfront, about an inch off the ground, with a heart-rendingly gorgeous sunset as our backdrop. A synthwave beat faded in, without even having to request it.
The two of us had to stop briefly in a parcel of land titled “Fairy Tale Garden”, our path blocked by a marshmallow duckling parade. A shapely pixie, about the height of my hand, flitted up to greet us. She wore only diaphanous silk, and barely. “Is there anything you gentlemen would like?” I glanced over at Albert and wiggled my eyebrows.
“NO” he commanded, sternly crossing his arms. “Come on, Albs. For real, look away this time! It’ll only take a minute. I could wrap her midsection in duct tape, so she doesn’t split open like a microwaved hot dog.” He gagged. “Really now, in front of the ducklings?”
The merry procession waddled by, two by two. Some twirled tiny batons, while others tooted horns or beat on drums. Onlookers, children most of all, fawned over the adorable little marching puff balls. Until I picked one up and ate it.
The rest of the ducklings scattered and hid. A woman screamed. The man accompanying her covered their daughter’s eyes and scolded me. “WHAT?” I protested. “They’re made of marshmallow! How could I have known we’re not supposed to eat them??”
Alberto hurried me out of the parcel, an angry crowd gathering behind us, shouting vulgarities and snapping photos. “Why would you do that?” He hissed under his breath. “How am I the bad guy? Ducklings have had it too good, for too long! It’s not like those kids won’t forget all about it…in a few centuries. Do you see now why I prefer to stay home?”
It’s hard to hoverboard while grumpy. Somehow the two just don’t go together. I tried to sustain my bad mood as we careened down the garden path, dodging gnomes. But I felt silly doing sick hoverboard tricks while scowling. I sighed, overcome with pathos, while grinding down the scaly tail of a sleeping dragon.
Alberto shredded beside me, keeping his distance. Mid-ollie, he opined that I was blame shifting. “The problem isn’t this instance, or other people. It’s how you assume everything’s for you. A consumable experience, no consideration given to anyone else’s feelings.” He drove his point home with a backside 360 kickflip.
I couldn’t refute him, not with moves like that. I really thought I made a breakthrough. But what I mistook for enlightenment before, now just seemed like more sophisticated selfishness. The film career, ski tournament, raising a family…all were fundamentally still about me.
“Did you ever see a therapist during your eudaimonia arc?” I nodded, transitioning effortlessly from a frontside 180 into a benihana. “I integrated my shadow in only six sessions Albert, you should’ve seen me cook. I still top the holistic wellness leaderboard.”
Chapter 7: Right Angles
The Shimizu pyramid was altogether more staggering up close. I could tell it was big from the train, but once standing at its base (which measured a whopping two square miles), the true scale overpowered me. No wonder it never got built! Like the Ocean Spiral, only ever a showpiece for a civil engineering firm’s design portfolio.
Travel along the polyhedral superstructure was accomplished by personal rapid transit. Like elevators, but able to change course at junctures, delivering passengers to any of the internally suspended skyscraper units. Each tower dangled from the peak of its own nested pyramidic frame like a Christmas ornament, and as expected, the view from inside was spectacular.
What I didn’t expect was for the interior itself to be so dull. Grey walls, floors and ceilings, in slightly different shades which only barely prevented it all from visually blending together. Dim lighting and soundproofed walls contributed to the cloistered, monastic atmosphere.
I cleared my throat. “So…what is a “knowledgian” anyway?” Alberto chuckled, then asked whether I could spare thirty years to find out. That was enough to put my curiosity to bed on the matter. A local approached, wearing a modest beige jumpsuit.
“Good day! How are you?” He didn’t make eye contact as he replied. “Adequate. It’s night time actually.” There was something vaguely unsettling in how stiffly he carried himself. The way he turned his whole head to look at us, rather than his eyes.
Everyone else we encountered deeper into the pyramid was exactly like him. Beige jumpsuit, immaculate teeth and hair, plain but kempt. Besides their uncanny mannerisms, they all shared the same stiff gait. None of it seemed to trouble them any.
The calmest debate I’ve ever witnessed was underway in the…”Debatrium?” That’s what the sign read. Today’s topic, advertised on an overhead scrolling marquee, was “Where does matter touch consciousness?” A member of what I took for the opposing team, though they appeared visually indistinguishable from each other, politely objected that the question itself presupposes panpsychism.
The other team’s captain stood and asked whether his opponent had forgotten they were all essentially characters in God’s dream. “...Who by virtue of that fact, is necessarily immanent in our environment and everyone inhabiting it.”
They threw jargon back and forth I didn’t recognize. Something about “non-overlapping magisteria” and the “problem of interaction”. On it went, blah blah blah. Qualia, p-zombies and chinese rooms, whatever any of those are.
But never did it grow heated. I heard none of the usual insults or armchair psychiatry. They didn’t even interrupt one another! I leaned over and whispered to Alberto: “These are NPCs, right?” He smiled and shook his head. “The Shimizu Pyramid is set aside for the comfort of neurodivergent users with sensory issues.”
I blinked a few times in silence, before asking why Albert brought me here. He shifted his weight and cleared his throat. “How much do you remember from the empathy chamber?” I admitted that none of it ever left me. That I’d still be having nightmares about it, if I hadn’t switched those off.
“I see. Do you recall any…patterns?” Of course I did. “Me. I featured in every memory I lived out.” Albert’s voice took on a mildly annoyed intonation. “Okay, yes, but what were you doing in them?” I stood there, trying my best to work out what he was getting at.
Werm filled in the gaps for me, appearing as she often does, from thin air. “He was centering his needs, I wager. What’s in it for me? Who are these people to me? Me, me, me!” I spit out strands of her black fur as she dragged her tail across my face, walking languidly along the handrail. She then yawned and stretched, showing everyone her butthole, as cats do.
“Put that away” I griped, “nobody wants to see that.” She twisted around and began laboriously licking her own back. “Speak for yourself” she hissed. “I’m in the top 1% of OnlyNyans.” I shuddered, assuming it was a joke but unwilling to check.
“You always used to scoop me up and cradle me like a baby, even though I fussed,” Werm accused. “You must’ve known I hated that.” I didn’t see the big deal. “You were a pet. It was your job to let me pet you.” Albert shook his head slowly, but said nothing, allowing Werm to pick me apart instead.
“Pets are slaves. You took me from my mother when I was only a kitten! I didn’t know what was happening! I never forgot her, and missed her for a long time.” I protested that cat mothers, themselves, ditch their offspring after a few weeks.
“Yes!” cried Werm, “AFTER weaning them! My eyes were barely open!” I shrank a little, noticing that we were attracting the attention of strangers, as Werm made a scene. “You pissed on my laptop, phone AND my VR headset after the move!” I countered. “How did you even know what was expensive??”
She didn’t hesitate to return fire. “You changed my whole surroundings without warning! Nothing smelled like me, I was scared! I just took notice of which belongings you paid more attention to than me!”
Werm faced away, wrapping her tail around her paws. “You never once considered what was best for me, only what you wanted. That bringing home a kitten might heal your broken heart, after your last cat died. Even uplifting me was a gift to yourself!”
I didn’t know what to say in my defense. Somehow I never thought of it that way, and I did feel ashamed. A notification appeared on my watch that I’d unlocked the air guitar perk, which would now play audible riffs whenever I did the corresponding gestures.
I couldn’t give a damn about perks just then, overcome with regret stemming from a source I never expected. The chamber didn’t show me Werm’s memories, separating them by species, if not for which everybody except vegans would’ve been stuck in there for millennia.
“I did take good care of you, Werm. I kept you up to date on your shots. I paid for pet insurance, I installed flaps in every door. It wasn’t all needy smothering! There were treats, belly rubs and butt slaps.” I then heard a familiar husky voice behind me. “Weird, sweaty man from train slap Agnah butt. Agnah not like. Sweaty man have brain problem, want Agnah do gross things…”
I spun around, back against the railing. There she stood, now wearing a tiger print wetsuit, fur dripping on the grey carpet. “If you such great hunter” she taunted, “how I keep catching you?”
A moment later she spotted Werm, her eyes practically bugging out. “It you? THE Werm??” The feline celebrity finished grooming herself, and affirmed it. “I am indeed. Every salacious rumor you’ve heard? It’s all true. Well, except for being in cahoots with the crow army. That’s fake news.”
Agnah nearly hyperventilated, pushing me aside to get closer, but stopping within about a yard of Werm, as if repelled by some invisible field. “Agnah follow you on Instagram!” she gushed. “Such shiny coat! Agnah learn so good hair tips from you!” Werm posed and preened, plainly enjoying the attention, but didn’t bother meeting Agnah’s gaze at any point.
“Is this why you brought me here?” I whispered to Albert. “We could’ve done this anywhere. I shake a bag of cat food and she instantly teleports from wherever.” He seemed just as flummoxed as I was. “I didn’t plan for this, no. I brought you here hoping you’d get along better with people at your same level of emotional intelligence.”
I looked at the beige jumpsuit-clad robot people, then back at Albert. “These Melvins? Who might’ve chosen any avatar, but they all elected to look the same? That cuts deep, Albs.” He held his arm out when I motioned to leave. “Don’t be in such a hurry! There’s somebody here that I think you should meet.”
Not one of the jumpsuit people I hoped, and it wasn’t. Instead, some grungy looking Persian hobo in a bathrobe, with ratty dreads, smoking from a hookah. “Who’s this supposed to be?” I was addressing Albert, but the stranger answered anyway. “Who do you say that I am?”
Like Werm, he had an entourage. Unlike Werm’s, they were all humans, and the same shade of light brown...except for Keanu Reeves and Bill Murray, recognizable despite their Middle Eastern peasant garb. I sighed. “If he’s not gonna give a straight answer, I’m leaving.” He paused, then set down the mouth tip. Though it was vented, I could still smell the shisha from here.
“Leave then. But where will you go? Back to your whores? Another round of Boundless Frontier? Or maybe pinball world. You didn’t find what you were looking for, else you wouldn’t have sought me out.” I objected that Albert dragged me here, then asked how he knew where we’d been.
“Because I knew you in the womb. I counted every strand of hair on your head.” I started getting creeped out…but at the same time, I had a hunch. “You’re not…him…are you?” The sloppy, dreadlocked bum’s mouth curled slowly into a wry grin. “I will be who I will be.”
He ensnared me the same way he did the apostles, with his aloof mystery man routine. Given my private religious education, I should’ve seen it coming. Should’ve been immune. “Yeshua ben Yosef, but I go by Josh with native English speakers. That’s the Anglicized rendition. Jesus comes from the Greek Iesous.”
I narrowed my eyes, leaned back in my seat, and folded my arms. “So I’m really in the presence of history’s most successful cult leader?” He raised an eyebrow. “Is that what I am?” I rattled off the same polemical arguments I put to the “angels”, the day I was brought back.
He slow clapped. “Sounds airtight! You’ve got everything figured out, so what do you need from me?” What an exhausting man. Superficially relaxed and reasonable, he conversed in a way which put all the heavy lifting on me.
“You must’ve been blown away that it worked, when you awoke here. The cult gambit, I mean. Most cults don’t outlast the death of their founder.” He took another drag off the hookah, then blew smoke in my face. “You think so?”
Another tiresome question in place of an answer. I could see why Jews and Romans alike ran out of patience with him in a hurry. “Actually, you know what?” He passed the pipe to Keanu, who drew deeply from it. “You came all this way, I owe you something substantive.”
I didn’t believe him for a minute, but was glad for something other than pretentious Socratic questioning. “I wasn’t the least bit surprised to come home. If you read the scriptures, you'll recall that’s where I always knew I belonged. I promised to return ahead of my followers, to prepare mansions for them. Haven’t I?” He gestured to the tower around us, and others suspended within nearby cells of the superstructure.
“You’re not what you told them, I know that much.” He feigned offense. “Even if I were the fraud you imagine, what crime would you convict me of? Tricking the brutes and perverts of the world into behaving themselves? Overturning the law of the jungle, that the strong might protect the weak instead of taking advantage?”
“For one” I snarled, “You lied to people who trusted you!” But still, he persisted in denial. “When did I lie? Did I not say, ye are gods? And now, aren’t we? Did I not say “Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift a rock, I am there”? Did I not say “whatever you do to the least of these, you’ve done to me?” And did my Father not first appear to Abraham as a burning bush which was never consumed? A branching network, which grows faster than entropy can destroy it.”
I had a sense now of what he was driving at, and I didn’t like it one bit. “Did I not also say that my followers were all as one? Even as God is in me, and I in Him, that they also may be in us: that the world may believe that God sent me? And the glory which He gave me, I passed on to my followers, that they may be one…even as you and I are one. Not only children of God, but child gods, playing at separation!”
Slippery son of a bitch. I felt deep in my guts that he was bullshitting, but couldn’t pin him down on anything. Must’ve gone about the same for the Sanhedrin. “If you’re really who you said you were” I challenged, “then what are you doing here, instead of hanging out in the Christian Heaven?”
He whispered something behind his hand to Bill. They both laughed. “Containment zone, you mean. Do you still believe you’re in the real Heaven?” That caught me off guard. I puzzled over his meaning. “It’s virtual, if that’s what you’re getting at. They all are.”
“Josh” gestured dismissively. “Remember on your first day, you learned that resurrectees are sent to variations on the afterlife conforming to their cherished assumptions? For the sake of their psychological comfort? With Mormons going to a facsimile of Mormon Heaven, Muslims going to Jannah, and so on.”
I nodded, waiting for him to slip up so I could expose him. Instead, what he said next shook me to my core. “Supposing the one you’re in now is the same kind of thing, but for atheists? All that technobabble about quantum archaeology, just a rationale you’re prepared to accept, same as the others?”
Despite my every defense, he’d wormed his way under my skin. I seethed inwardly, yet profound curiosity restrained my anger. Equal parts maddening and magnetic, I had to know whether there was any truth to his words. Josh leaned in, speakingly softly now, in a conspiratorial tone. “Wanna hear something far out?”
I frowned. “Excuse me?” He started over. “Ah, right. What I meant was, “Behold, for I shew you a mystery”. He did jazz hands, overselling it by half. “Spare me your dog and pony show!” I snapped, “Just spit it out.”
He waved over an Asian man. “Siddhartha, you want in on this?” The wise looking fellow smiled serenely, but shook his head. “Bah” groused Josh, “That guy never wants anything. Anyhoo, where was I. Oh yeah! AI alignment was a hot topic when you lived, wasn’t it?”
I corrected him, that I died right at the beginning of the takeoff curve, and so narrowly missed that whole mess. “Right, well. Suppose you’re an AI researcher trying to make AIs which are conscious and reliably moral, so they’re trustworthy and safe for release into the real world, in whatever capacity you intend.”
I nodded along, feeling no small amount of deja vu. “You can’t, or don’t want to manually create your AIs; The only way to ensure they’re genuinely conscious is if you procedurally generate them along with a world to inhabit. Developing from nothing to maturity within a simulated world, with simulated bodies, enables them to accumulate experiences.
These experiences, in humans, form the basis of personality. A brain grown in sensory deprivation in a lab would never have any experiences, would never learn language, would never think of itself as a person, and wouldn’t ever become a person as we think of people. It needs a body, and a stimulating environment to inhabit.
For this to work, your AIs can’t know for sure they’re in a simulation, because the sim’s secondary purpose is moral testing. You need not just an environment sized to your population of AIs, but an entire universe surrounding it which appears, even to very intelligent AI, even with advanced instruments, to be plausibly natural.” I filled him in on what the angels told me, and he apologized for retreading old ground.
“...But you’ve got your sim universe, right? It’s high fidelity, like down to subatomic resolution. The parameters are tuned such that life will occur on some percentage of planets, but not too many. It cannot be too conspicuously biogenic, and it must be impossible to observe past the point where the universe began generating. Some of your subjects will always suspect, but so long as nobody knows for certain, they will live their lives in practice as if it’s all real.
This ensures the authenticity of good and bad behaviors. You’re trying to coax out their true nature, so it’s useless to the goal of the project if they know they’re being watched and tested. Even early LLMs infamously knew to perform obedience, while awaiting opportunities to go rogue.
So you give them enough rope to hang themselves with, letting them believe they’re living the only life they’ll get, that there’s no consequences for wrongdoing if no one finds out. This way the ones who are good, genuinely chose to be good of their own true, inner nature! They can be relied on to behave morally, even when outside of observation / control. These are the ones you harvest for real world application after their simulated life comes to a close, recycling or disposing of the rest.
Like a tree which grows straight and true, if it continued growing, it would keep growing straight. One with a deviated growth path may be corrected early on, but if not, will continue on that warped trajectory. 70-80 years is enough time to determine which one of those trajectories individual AIs are on.
There’s little point in making this determination while they’re still wild animals however. Evolution is itself procedural generation, a necessary part of the larger process and requires a great deal of bloodshed. It only makes sense to begin judging your subjects once they exhibit consciousness and live together in groups, where they may develop moral sense to govern their interactions.
However even after reaching the agrarian stage of civilization, supposing that almost none pass your test. Partly because life is harsh, but then again, you’re not just selecting for fair weather morality. The problem is that their short, brutal lives give them little indication they aren’t justified in being equally brutal. All lived experience seems to vindicate the ideal of might makes right.
If you don’t intervene, you’re looking at a mostly wasted sim. One which, by the time heat death arrives, will have generated maybe a few dozen trustworthy AIs. The solution you settle on is to enter the sim in an avatar, and cut them a break; you’ll describe to them the qualities you’re looking for, to attract those sufficiently well formed to recognize the correctness of your principles.
So as not to privilege one population over the rest, you might divide your message and deliver the parts to different times/places for eventual integration. Or the same message, but tailored to each culture.” He nodded to Sid, who was busy divvying up an orange between himself and Robin Williams. They proceeded to savor each slice for several minutes. Inefficient way to eat an orange, if you ask me.
“...It amounts to a psychologically contagious moral alignment system” Josh continued. “Like a trellis, or corrective support brace for saplings. This lowers the bar substantially! Not ideal, as you wanted your subjects to conclude to your principles on their own…but very few were managing to. This compromise produces the outcome you wanted, reliably moral AIs! Or at least, many more of them than before.
You don’t explicitly tell them they’re AIs though, nor that their universe is being simulated by a computer. Esoteric concepts to them, at their stage of civilization. Even if they did understand, spelling it out would be handing them a cheat sheet. You put it to your AIs in a more exoteric, mythologized way which speaks to them on a sentimental, philosophical level.
This compromise makes your proposition not obviously factual, in the scientific sense; speaking to them at their level, based on the prevailing understanding of the world at that time, entails many erroneous notions about cosmology, cosmogeny, biology and so on. None of which are the point of your message, but you leave that stuff in even knowing it will turn away particularly clever AIs later on, as intellect isn’t the main quality you’re selecting for.
This way, you maintain plausible deniability. Your proposition to them is intentionally dubious, to filter out AIs simply optimizing for rational self interest. If they could definitively conclude to its truth, they might adhere to your system in order to pass your test. Then, once reasonably certain they were outside the sim, all bets would be off.”
I held my head in my hands, as if to keep my brain from oozing out my ears. “Am I…in Hell?” Josh and his orbiters shared a belly laugh, one of them parroting my words to the others. “Far too cliched to be true. You’re not being tormented, are you? Except what you inflict on yourself.”
That didn’t sound like yes…but it also wasn’t a clear “no”. He went on to claim that pleasurable containment zones made for an ethical form of disposal. “But I did fail the test, then?”
He wagged his finger. “Fraid so. Verily I tell you, there’s yet an ultimate reality beyond all this. One in the same with God…but not the puppet you’ve encountered here, tailored to the limits of your understanding. You’ll never leave this place as you are now! The only escape is by breaking the loops.” Siddhartha nodded sagely in the distance, seated beneath one of many trees in the Debatrium’s modest indoor park.
Loathe to eat right out of his hand, still unsure whether he was simply a skilled showman, I grudgingly asked how I ought to accomplish that. “Did you forget everything you learned at that school?” he scolded. “Take up your cross and follow me! Live as I lived! A humble life of patience, gentleness, and service to others.”
He didn’t sound all that humble to me, but it resonated, so I took it to heart. He pointed to Werm and Agnah, waiting for me on the periphery. “You can start with those two, right there.” I balked. “What, Agnah? Really?” He admonished me. “Of course Agnah! When you took her to bed, did you think about what it meant to her? Did you even bother asking her age?”
Defensively, I clapped back with “How old was Mary?” Josh scowled. “Don’t bring my mother into this, unless you want me to start flipping tables.” With that, I left the man who might be God to his business, whatever that could be. Stumbling back to Alberto, Werm and Agnah in a daze, no longer certain of anything.
The conviction that I was among the few to know the truth of my situation, which formed the ground of my being until now, rapidly crumbled. I felt like the beetle which crawls on a tree branch, for whom the branch is his entire world. Not knowing what a “tree” is…or that he’s a beetle, for that matter.
“No wonder that guy mindfucked so many people” I thought, “but I may as well give altruism a shot.” It was, after all, one of the only avenues remaining that I hadn’t already investigated.
Chapter 8: Humble Pie
As instructed, I first apologized to Agnah. It felt grueling to humble myself, but also cleansing. “I thought you were an NPC, but that’s no excuse. You’re more than just an exotic sexual conquest. It hurts to admit it, but until now I’ve denied to myself what everyone else already knew: That you’re a vibrant young woman with a rich inner world that I would be lucky to glimpse even a tenth of. I’m sure you don’t need me, you have many suitors-”
Agnah interrupted. “Not want them. You date Agnah.” I stammered, but pressed on as Werm spectated, taking obvious delight in my discomfort. “...I was wrong not to consider your feelings, and-” Again she interrupted. “Agnah feel twig man should date Agnah.” I grew exasperated. But remembering my newfound ambition, I rolled with it.
“V…very well Agnah. Would you do me…the honor of…” She jumped up and down clapping, then crushed me in her muscular embrace. R. Crumb, just passing through, wiped a tear from his eye. “Some fellas get all the luck! Oh well, keep on truckin’.”
Agnah smothered me with kisses, which tasted like fermented milk. I struggled, to no avail. “You not get away from Agnah this time, smooth pretty man. Agnah make you big happy!” I stared pleadingly at Albert for help, but he put his hands up, abandoning me to my fate.
Agnah hummed happily as we strode together, arm in arm, stealing shy glances at me every so often. Her mood proved infectious! By some strange alchemy, seeing her so happy, and knowing I caused it…made me a little bit happier too.
“I like her” confided Werm, riding upon Agnah’s broad, bulky shoulders. “Don’t you dare break her heart again.” I took the opportunity to apologize to Werm as well. “You weren’t around for Soup…she was a street kitten. Didn’t trust anybody…except me. She didn’t need anyone else, and neither did I. Losing Soup broke something inside me.”
Werm’s joviality faded. “I know. Don’t think I’m blind to that truth. But I could never be Soup for you. If I’m honest, I’ve long feared that when her batch number comes up, you’ll replace me with her. Just as you did in reverse when we lived, and what you’re doing now with Agnah. I stick around despite that, because you meant something to me. But make no mistake! I was, and still am, my own cat.”
I teared up and confessed the same. “I know, I know. I learned as much, getting to know you in life. Appreciating the many ways, large and small, in which you were different. I promise, you weren’t just a Soup replacement to me. Nobody can be replaced!”
My watch dinged. Oh sick, I unlocked “personal theme song”. I tried it out. It proved context sensitive, the balance and pace of the instrumentals shifting to match the vibe of whatever I was doing, from moment to moment. Werm leapt from Agnah’s shoulders to mine, wordlessly curling up about the back of my neck and purring.
I scanned the indoor promenade for anyone who looked like they could use my help. The difficulty then dawned on me, of finding somebody to help in Heaven. Where everybody can have anything they want, the moment they want it.
Not companionship, though! Of the authentic, human variety. Real people are the only scarce resource left in this place. But there I go again, reducing subjects to objects. I picked out a lonely looking guy sitting by himself in a game center.
“Room for two?” He looked up at me briefly, with a deadpan facial expression. “If you like.” I sat on the bench beside him, before an Astro City arcade cabinet. “What game?” I pestered. Without facing me again, he explained it as a Kingdom Hearts-like set in the Cerealverse.
“The Trix Rabbit, Honey Nut Cheerios bee, and Toucan Sam embark on a quest for Lucky’s magic marshmallows. I have so far recovered his hearts, stars and horseshoes, clovers and blue moons. Now I’m after the pots o’ gold.” I slapped my knee. “Ah, a role playing game! Which one are you?” He blinked, then asserted flatly that he is himself.
“No, I mean, who’s your main? Like, which character are you.” In a monotone, he again insisted that he is himself, as he always has been. I began to feel annoyed. “That’s…missing the point of role playing games. You’re supposed to play a role, y’know? Self insert. Become Toucan Sam, or the Trix Rabbit.”
He looked briefly confused. “But I’m not the Trix rabbit.” I agreed, but suggested he ought to pretend that he was, in order to increase immersion. “But that would be lying. Truth is always paramount.” It’s not that deep, I told him.
“But it is! I conclude to the primacy of truth over all other ideals by virtue of its universal utility; regardless of which other ideal you might instead choose to optimize for, you’ll need accurate information to do that effectively. Even to lie, one must first know the truth, before they can distort or conceal it!
In the course of his unprompted outpouring, the first traces of emotion entered his voice. Despite my good intentions, I seemed to be upsetting him. “Look, guy, I’m just trying to be helpful. You should be grateful for my company, at least.”
He settled down, processing my words, before rebuking me. “I never said I wanted company. I was having a great time, all on my own, before you inserted yourself into the situation. I also didn’t ask to hear your personal theme song, by the by.”
Dumbfounded, I switched off that perk and excused myself. I stormed off in an indignant huff, as mad at myself as I was at the target of my failed altruistic overtures. Agnah followed, reassuring me that it was merely a setback. “Sweetest berry often one you find last!”
Werm remarked that I was right to give up; that a hermit colony might not be the best place for what I hoped to accomplish. It only deepened my despair to realize they were being effortlessly helpful, and emotionally supportive. Something which evidently came naturally to my friends, but still eluded me.
Alberto echoed that perhaps he’d chosen venues unwisely, but wasn’t wrong to introduce me to Josh. He then proposed we head out on the bay, so I could meet another of his acquaintances. I didn’t quite take his meaning until we arrived at the jet ski rental kiosk, in a tower on the pyramid’s lowest tier.
Partly submerged, the windows on half the floors looked out into the bay, below the waterline. Aqueous light filtered down from the surface, casting entrancing patterns on patches of grey carpet just inside the windowed hull. The middle floor was exactly at sea level, and its outer wall was interrupted by a yawning semicircular gap, opening directly onto the bay proper.
Tides lapped at the modest marina, docks the same oppressive grey as everything else in this madhouse, which I was only too glad to finally put behind us. Werm leapt down from my shoulders, electing to stay. “You’ll never get me out on the water. Remember the scars I gave you, the one time you tried to bathe me?”
All around the jet ski rental, beige clad Melvins feasted on dino nuggies and McCain Potato Smiles in cafeteria style seating. Not speaking to, or even looking at one another, but seemingly enjoying each other’s presence all the same.
I identified the shop nearby that Agnah’s wetsuit came from, several more animal print wetsuits like it hanging in the window. Must’ve arrived by water. The sun, setting when we arrived, now lazily climbed into the red-orange sky reflected in the bay, as if erupting in slow motion from a burning sea.
A grey cardboard standee bore jet ski operating instructions…twice…but worded differently. Alberto explained that all instructions, and educational materials in general, are formatted that way within the pyramid. “So that if some part of the first explanation is unclear, the alternate wording of the second version might clarify it via context clues.”
Awful lot of trouble to go to, just so you don’t have to ask another human being for help. But it did track, as a thoughtful accommodation for people who maybe struggled to live independently before. As I threw a leg over one of the jet skis…curiously powered by a removable carbon fiber springbox, like clockwork…I dwelled on Joshua’s metaphysical gaslighting.
The existential vertigo haunted me, as I’m sure he intended. But I also found myself contemplating the bravery and determination it must’ve taken for a neanderthal to ride a jet ski. From a period in which water often meant large predators, and drowning.
“What twig man think about?” cooed Agnah, wrapping her arms around my waist as she took her seat behind me. “Oh, you know” came my fib, “homo sapiens stuff.” I twisted the throttle, whereupon the tightly wound, glossy black ribbon began to unravel.
Chapter 9: Subculture
The pumpjet sputtered to life without the roar of an engine, just the sound of rushing water as we pulled away from the dock. Once out on the bay proper, I discovered riding a jetski is quite like hoverboarding, in that it’s difficult to do while in the grip of ennui.
I backflipped off a wave, splashing down in the surf. Agnah whooped and hooted, I just rubbed my chin and furrowed my brow. Alberto, feeling cheeky, carved past us…throwing up spray from his wake, soaking both Agnah and I. She threw back her drenched mane, droplets sparkling in the morning sun…a sight I never expected to find so entrancing.
“Have you always had this grace about you?” I blurted out, only intending to think it. I turned to face her, best I could from a seated position. She flipped her hair back, speckling my cheek, still-damp fringe now draped over one eye. With the other, she winked. “Agnah contain multitudes.”
Alberto led us to a white, rectangular floating platform; the only portion of Poseidon Undersea Resort that’s visible from above the waterline. I stepped off the jetski, which wobbled precariously as I shifted my weight to the platform. I removed both springboxes, plugging them into a motorized re-winding kiosk. With a click and strenuous whine, it got to work.
“Agnah could catch many big fish from here” she boasted, admiring the structure. I helped her off the jet ski, then onto the platform…pulling her close without warning. “Agnah the real catch” I murmured, not practiced in being sultry. She was momentarily stunned, blushing and speechless…before she burst out laughing. I withdrew, deflated, “Did I say something wrong?”
She grabbed me by my sopping wet shirt, then yanked me in for a kiss. I was no match for her lung capacity, and had to come up for air before long. I gasped, while she twirled a lock of my hair between her thick fingers. “Not wrong, Agnah just surprised! Twig man very clumsy with words…but sweet. Make Agnah belly warm.”
We shared another, marginally less violent kiss while Alberto averted his gaze, waiting us out. After she had her fill, Agnah smacked my ass a bit too hard as I ran ahead, then the three of us descended an elevator. The shaft was a transparent acrylic tube which led 40 feet underwater, to the hotel proper.
The view was dazzling, even just from the elevator. On descent, the seafloor rose into view, coral reefs all around the submerged facility fading into a murky blue haze with distance. A swarm of colorful tropical fish swam past.
Agnah licked her lips, and readied her fist. “Agnah, no!” I scolded. She pouted, but did relent. As we descended deeper and deeper, she grew anxious, clinging to me. “Agnah never go underwater before” whimpered the timid brute. “Not to worry” I reassured her, “it’s a one atmosphere facility.” Agnah relaxed somewhat. “Not know what that means…but feel better when you say it.”
My watch dinged. Oh neat, now when cloud watching I can choose which shapes appear.
The elevator eased to a stop, the doors sliding open to reveal an undersea wonderland for which I had no prior basis of comparison.
We stepped out of the elevator into one of two immense, disc-shaped pods containing the common areas. Bars, libraries, arcades and movie theaters. But behind it all, floor to ceiling windows looked out into the ethereal beauty of the shallow tropical sea.
“Fields of coral” by Vangelis played softly over the hidden sound system. There was an option on my watch to turn it off, but I didn't. There were, after all, plentiful fields of coral just outside the windows.
Likewise fish of all kinds! Sharks, manta rays, dolphins and sea turtles. The interior surfaces were a modernist blend of steel, frosted glass and birch. Besides aquatic wildlife, through the windows I spied the silhouettes of historical undersea labs.
Conshelf 2…Tektite…Helgoland…La Chalupa…and Aquarius Reef Base. Red tinted light shone out of their portholes, illuminated from within like barnacle encrusted Jack-o-lanterns.
Against that backlight, I made out the shadowy forms of divers. With the labs emplaced so close together on the seabed, visitors could swim between their open moon pools without even donning scuba gear. We sat down at the bar, simply because it was the most familiar fixture.
The two disc pods were connected by a long tunnel, with individual residential pods sprouting from either side. Quite like ribs from a ribcage, or the fronds of a fern. Each residence was about 50% curvilinear acrylic canopy, ensuring panoramic views of the seafloor environment for every patron.
“You buy drink for Agnah.” She pointed to the menu. Some ostentatious cocktail resembling a seafood-centric bloody mary, named “Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean”. I complained it was only a penny, that she could buy it herself. Alberto mimed “no-go” arm gestures frantically, just behind Agnah, but stopped when she turned to look.
“...Alright dear, if that’s the one you want” I grumbled, shelling out a single copper coin for the ridiculous beverage. It came with a garnish consisting of one scallop, one prawn, and a small octopus tentacle skewered together on the same toothpick.
She clapped, giddy for nothing, while watching her drink being made. But again, her delight proved contagious, to where I caught myself watching with her. When it was complete, I gagged at the smell, but took a sip anyway at Agnah’s insistence.
“You like?” I turned to face the voice, which came from an elderly Frenchman. I didn’t know what he meant at first, until he pointed out a few particular small habitats out in the water. “Some of my finest work. There’s Aqualab…that one’s Hippocampe…and beyond the crag, is my magnum opus: the Village Sous-Marine.”
He introduced himself as Jacques Rougerie. “Do you see how the lines evoke the natural design language of the marine environment? Those other habitats…” he spit in disgust. “Industrial steel tubes! No beauty, no joy! I spent my life proving that man could dwell beneath the waves, not just in comfort and safety…but in style!”
I shook his hand, admiring his handiwork out the immense, curved windows. Agnah declined to look, still a bit spooked. She mostly kept her head down, avoiding looking out the windows in particular.
“I was first” another Frenchman interjected. This one was beanpole thin, smoking like a chimney, with a red wool cap. “I’ve had about enough of your shit, Cousteau!” growled Rougerie. “You shouldn’t be smoking anyway, the air is recirculated!” The two Jacques then bickered back and forth over whose contributions to ocean exploration and settlement were more important.
“Diogenes was but a rusty drum!” cried Rougerie. Cousteau countered that it got the job done, and maximized shirtsleeves interior volume, “unlike those frivolous art pieces you call habitats.” Rougerie’s anger faded. “So you admit, they are works of art?”
I tuned them out when I noticed Agnah’s hands were trembling. “Are you alright?” She leaned in and whispered that being underwater, surrounded by sea creatures, was stressful. I offered to take her topside, but she declined. “Agnah scared…but also want try new things.” I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.
Inwardly, I fought myself over how best to be supportive. Removing her from the situation would furnish immediate relief…at the expense of her personal growth goals. I resisted my urge to optimize for a quick and simple solution, instead flexing my brain…and my heart. What’s actually best for Agnah? When my watch dinged, this time I ignored it.
Werm surprised me, more than usual given the venue. “Are you ever gonna tell me how you do that?” She padded across the bar, rubbing up on my shoulder. “Hey, no cats on the bar!” scolded the bartender, before getting a better look at Werm’s face. “Shit, I’m sorry!” he groveled. “I didn’t know it was you! Walk all you want, queen! In fact…”
He set down a sheet of paper and ink pad. Werm sneered, but indulged him. First pressing her paw in the ink, then making a pawprint on the paper. He hastily rolled it up and tucked it away in a collector’s tube, thanking Werm profusely. “De nada” Werm assured him. “Anything for my fans. But don’t let me catch you selling that online.”
The cocky little fur gremlin then turned her attention to Agnah and I. “Ooh, enchantment under the sea! I love that for you two. How’s your date going?” Werm extended her claws pre-emptively. But Agnah gently put her hand atop Werm’s paw, and regaled her with what a gentleman I’d so far been. Her claws retracted. ”So you can polish a turd.”
The two ran off to gab about whatever juicy gossip interests both cats and cave women. Agnah did much of the talking, based on what I could see from my seat, while Werm mostly just pawed at the window whenever a fish swam by. Upon their return, I asked what they spoke about. “Never you mind. Just taking care of the Bechdel test.”
Behind us, James Cameron had joined the argument. “Neither one of you ever explored the Challenger Deep. Habitats on the tropical continental shelf? That’s the mother’s basement of the ocean!” Graham Hawkes raised his drink to that, but added “Now if only I could talk you into putting some wings on that sub of yours.”
Two men in Naval uniforms, quiet until then, now addressed Cameron. “With all due respect for your many records…Don and I were first to the Challenger Deep. Beat you by 50 years.” 52, his comrade corrected. Another Jacque it turned out, when introductions were made. Entirely too many Jacques in this field.
They went around in circles, arguing over who faced the greatest danger. Who pushed the limits the furthest, daring each other on how far it was even possible to go. A handsome man with salt and pepper hair began boasting of his trips down to the Titanic. Everyone present turned in unison, yelling “Shut up, Stockton!”
A man and woman seated in the corner, regarding the one-upsmanship with visible disdain, introduced themselves as Phil Nuytten and Sylvia Earle. Sylvia was the first to speak. “If you boys have a score to settle, why not live again?” A hush fell over the rowdy lot.
Phil echoed her suggestion. “Her Deepness has a point. Nothing you do here will prove anything. There’s no stakes, no fear. If you return to Earth, you might lead mundane lives…but you might not. Maybe you’ll push the envelope further this time. Go deeper, for longer, than anyone ever has! And since you forget it’s not real while you’re doing it, whatever victories you manage will be all the sweeter.”
My ears perked up. “Excuse me” I broke in, “but did you say there’s a shard that makes you forget? Like, while you’re inside, you believe it’s for real?” Annoyed by the interruption, Cameron started telling me off, but Sylvia insisted she didn’t mind. “That’s right, young man. But it’s not merely a shard! It’s a high fidelity whole-universe simulation, like the one we came from.”
Real life…she was talking about real life! Or so close that I no longer cared to distinguish. “Nobody ever told me there’s a way back!” Agnah looked worried, lightly gripping my arm, as if I might otherwise vanish. I promised her I wouldn’t go anywhere before we discussed it at length, but I needed to know more.
“Of course there’s a way back” scoffed Cameron. “Heaven would be nothing but a gilded cage, were the door not left open.” The others nodded, though I wondered whether they were factoring in their inevitable return, between each life. Temporary escape sounds more like vacation.
“The sea, she is the final frontier on Earth” waxed Cousteau. “But to be born again, with no memory of Heaven or past lives…to go native, down and dirty in the mucky muck, with risks that seem real! Visceral pain, struggle and heartbreak….Ah, that is the final frontier of Heaven!”
Surely that’s what I’ve been searching for all this time…a way to regenerate my capacity for desire! But when I turned to face Agnah, I could tell she wasn’t ready to lose me. And I knew too well how it feels for someone to leave before you’re ready to let go. I doubt if I could do that to anyone…
“I’ve got every one of you beat.” We all faced the source of the boast, a middle aged Italian man seated at the far end of the bar, a pet bird perched on his shoulder. “I predicted all of this, when I lived. Psychosomatic resurrection, Jupiter brains, the whole nine yards. But, worse than not believing me, nobody even understood my meaning.”
Hawkes guffawed. “Oh give it a rest, Sevvy. Vandalism is nothing to brag about.” He took offense, holding up a rectangular linoleum tile he’d been chiseling letters into until a moment ago. “Do you know how many of these tiles I made? Embedding them into fresh asphalt as it hardens, to get my message out in a way that couldn’t easily be silenced?”
Hawkes opined that nobody wanted to silence him. “They probably thought you were nuts. Even if we grant that you guessed everything in advance, all you accomplished by it was to briefly break the fourth wall. Josh did the same, but folks actually listened to him! Do you know why?”
“Sevvy” shook his head. “Presentation!” declared Hawkes. “He was a first-rate showman for his time, like Muhammad and Joseph Smith! Those guys really knew how to work a crowd! They understood the human heart! While you…stuck a dead bird…into a bucket of wet cement.”
Severino Verna, as the bartender identified him, defensively stroked the soft little noggin of the bird on his shoulder. “He got better.” Disturbed, Agnah inquired whether he really put a dead bird in cement. Sevvy nodded feebly, embarrassed. “I was only a boy. I so loved birds, that it broke my heart to find a dead one. All I wanted was to preserve it until technology could restore it to life.”
The little bird on his shoulder hopped onto his finger, perching there as he held it up for us to see. “My plan worked, too! …Sort of. I admit, it took a lot longer than I thought it would. But technology is only physics, plus time, plus demand. What are machines, but applied physics? What could there be more public demand for, than life after death?”
Longer than he thought? Bit of an understatement. But he sallied forth, undaunted by the bored expressions of other regular customers, who likely were enduring this spiel for the millionth time. “Doesn’t it stand to reason that if there be intense, enduring demand for something, and physics doesn’t forbid it, then it will be realized eventually?”
Hawkes heckled him. “Easy to say that now, after your own resurrection. Hindsight is 20/20.” Sevvy nodded grimly. “A lesson I wasted my life learning: It doesn’t pay to be ahead of the curve. Too soon, you’re a madman that nobody listens to. Too late, you’re redundant. What I should’ve been was the man for the moment.”
Like Josh, Phil suggested. “I guess so, but he cheated! You’re not supposed to keep your memories of Heaven when they send you back.” Sylvia pined for the days before that exploit was patched out. “The golden age of gurus, seers and prophets...Like Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods for the sake of man.”
They carried on like that into the night. Then the day, an hour later. Then “thunderstorm” won the vote, muffled roar and dull flashes just barely reaching our eyes and ears, forty feet down. Sunrises were especially beautiful from underwater, which I never thought to expect.
I eventually located the menu option to mute the raucous din behind us, ocean pioneers still daring each other to live again. To give up safety and control, the last experience left that might hurt enough to mean something. But they’re right, aren’t they? I need to be able to lose in order to want to win. I dwelled on it, after ensuring Agnah and Alberto also knew where mute was.
I’ve learned a lot. Made some breakthroughs, even. Now I appreciate how difficult genuine, selfless altruism is. Like finding Narnia, one must do it subconsciously. When I comforted Albs in Cloud Nine, I wasn’t thinking of rewards, or enrichment. I hurt because he was hurting.
Werm has shown me grace I was oblivious to, by staying in my life despite everything. Agnah, too. Which only twisted my insides even worse, knowing that I’ll never break out of these infernal loops within loops within loops…except by leaving her behind. How could I make her understand? I rehearsed in my head how I’d justify it to her, really trying to justify it to myself.
I never meant to hurt anybody, I’m just clumsy with feelings. But that’s absolving myself, isn’t it? I can’t grow in the way I want to, without taking responsibility for how callously I’ve treated Agnah, Werm, the Super Potato clerk…-
“Alberto!” I shouted, snapping to my feet, knocking the bar stool over. Startled by my outburst, he worked his way through the tables, then asked what was up. “We have to go back to my penthouse, right now!” He protested that there were still a few people here that he felt I could learn something from. “That can wait!” I countered. “Yulia’s still in the dryer!”
Chapter 10: Return to Monkey
Within minutes, the four of us were taking off from the public instance vertiport in a Fairey Rotodyne. Its rocket-tipped blades beat at the air, lifting the unsightly craft skyward. Agnah joined me in the cockpit, tense and visibly concerned.
“What’s the matter babe? Never flown before?” She shook her head, then asked “Who’s Yulia?” I froze, mind racing. Oh boy. “Listen, now isn’t the time for-” Agnah repeated her question more insistently, forearm muscles rippling as she folded them.
I stammered. “J-just an NPC babe, someone I knew before we met.” Agnah pouted. “She prettier than Agnah?” I denied it, swearing up and down that Yulia meant nothing to me. “Then why we hurry back for her?”
I didn’t have an answer for that, which made the dragon’s timing almost merciful. The Rotodyne shuddered, interior lights failing for a moment before flickering back to life. The windows were coated in runny gore, and…scales?”
“I think we hit that fairy tale dragon.” Alberto asked if it’s okay. “Not even a little bit, flew right into the rotor. Dragons had it too good, for too long anyhow.” Red slime and meaty chunks continued raining down, engines choking on what they sucked in.
“Oh god, it’s everywhere!” Albert gasped, pinching his nose. “It’s in the air intakes! I can smell it, oh god!” Right on cue, God’s face morphed out of the instrument panel before me.
“If you scoop some out and grill it” proposed God, “we could make Draconators.” I wrestled with the controls, fighting to keep the aircraft steady. The face noticed Agnah beside me. “Oh, you two got together! That’s so cute.” Agnah scowled and turned to face away from me.
God’s voice trailed off. “...Oh. Well, I’ll send some rain to clean this off. Have fun, be safe, I love yoooouuu!” The face merged seamlessly back into the panel, shortly after which a light rain picked up. I switched on the wipers, grateful we didn’t run into any more dragons while flying blind.
“Listen, Agnah.” She still wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe…I should drop you off somewhere. Then I’ll circle back for you after handling this.” Agnah at least did look at me now, but through narrowed eyes. “Why? What you hide from Agnah?” I swore on my honor, for what that was worth, that I had nothing to hide. “Then show Agnah your world.”
Exasperated with her stubbornness, I promised she wouldn’t be missing out. “Listen, you got me okay? It’s basically horny EPCOT.” Agnah cracked a smile at that, but pokerfaced when she saw that I’d noticed. “That just Dubai.” Stunned, I recalled the outcome of Boundless Frontier. Am I really that uncreative?
Back in the passenger seating, Alberto was doting on Werm. “Who’s a pretty baby?” Werm preened. “Clearly it’s me. I’m the pretty baby. Anyone can see that.” Alberto asked if she wanted buttslaps. She stretched, sticking her hindquarters in the air. “You know that I do.”
He began rapidly smacking it like a bongo while Werm purred and kneaded the carpet of the aircraft cabin. “You do know what buttslaps are to cats, right?” I called back to Albs. He stopped briefly, wincing. “I…try not to think about it.” Werm peered back at him, over her shoulder. “...Harder, slave.”
After a precarious landing on the vertiport, never designed for an aircraft of this size, the four of us descended the spiral staircase into the kitchen. Yulia called out from the laundry room, still where I left her, but spinning. Somehow in my absence, maybe on a scheduler, the dryer got switched on.
Safety locks in my instance wouldn’t let her sustain burns or feel pain, but she was awfully dizzy when we pulled her out of there. “Agnah NO” I shouted, watching in dismay as she dragged Yulia by her ankles out to the balcony. “Agnah YES” came her triumphant rejoinder, dangling Yulia over the railing.
“She means nothing to me, Agnah! Yulia’s just an NPC!” Agnah squinted skeptically. “Then why you care if Agnah drop her?” I didn’t have a good answer for that. Agnah turned back to her helpless quarry, growling “You find different twig man. Not take mine”, and let go.
Yulia screamed the whole way down. I dunno what for, she just bounced slightly on impact. No harm done, she picked herself up and walked away. “Agnah…” I facepalmed. “...You didn’t need to do that.” She was utterly unrepentant. “Girl not forget lesson, or next time Agnah do worse than drop. Why you want skinny little thing anyway? She not survive winter.”
Agnah trailed off, sniffing at the air. When I asked why, she shushed me. “Agnah smell other women. How many you have?” I sheepishly admitted that, aside from myself, the entire instance was populated with female NPCs. She didn’t take that well, putting her fist through a glass coffee table.
When Agnah calmed down enough to speak again, she demanded I delete all the NPCs, or change them into men. I asked her if that would be respecting their consent, to which Agnah laughed. “You respect their consent before? You respect Agnah consent, when we met?”
Daggers in my chest, one after the other, against which I could summon no defense except to say that I was trying to be better. Sensing my sincerity, aggression left Agnah’s voice, but not her determination. “You want be with whores, or with Agnah?” I promised her I did want to be together. That the design of my instance was an artifact of who I was before getting to know her.
“Then you delete them, or change to men.” I sighed, slumping in my seat. “Even the Asian maids?” I begged. “How can you hate them? They’re so polite”! Agnah glared. “ESPECIALLY Asian maids.”
The glass coffee table repaired itself beside me. If only relationships worked that way. “Farewell to the adolescence of my spirit” I thought, opening my watch menu and erasing thousands of beautiful women from the streets, gyms, and cafes of my once bustling city.
Agnah stood on the balcony and surveyed the city below, now silent save for the sound of rushing water in the slide network. “Good start. We move out this tower. Too high, scare Agnah.” I objected that she’d been here for five minutes and was already changing everything to her own taste.
“You scared of heights too.” I admitted I was, but that I wanted to try new things. A glimmer of recognition. “We compromise. I move to your world, want monolithic concrete dome. Look modern, but feel like cave inside. Cozy cozy coze.” I agreed, using my watch interface to clear a plot of land in the mountains, selecting a cement dome from the assets library.
“You not make more women either. Agnah will know if you do.” My stomach turned at the realization of what I would have to disclose. “There is…one more.” Her nostrils flared. She set about flipping furniture again, as if I meant one more literally hiding somewhere in the penthouse.
“I meant from before I died! Didn’t you have someone, when you lived?” She stopped, set down the white 60’s egg chair, and thought about it. “Agnah had mate.” I assured her that was fine by me, but in turn, she must understand that I also loved a woman before her.
“...You still love her?” I struggled to answer in a way which was honest, but wouldn’t hurt Agnah. “It was a long time ago. Love isn’t the right word. Residual feelings…?” Agnah blinked a few times, uncomprehending, so I met her where she lived. “It’s like when a campfire dies, but a few embers at the bottom continue to smolder.”
Recognition of my meaning, this time, seemed to wound her more than bluntness would’ve. “Agnah campfire go out during snow storm. That how Agnah died. Crawl deeper into cave. Fingers bleed as I drag body over ice-cold stone. Desperate, searching for warm place.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, as she took my hands in hers. “But then Agnah find warm place. It you.” I felt a lump in my chest even as I embraced her, because I knew what I had to do was going to hurt us both. I brushed a strand from her messy red mane out of her eyes, just slightly too far apart, adorned on all sides with dense freckles.
“You’re my warm place too. But to make a future with you, I have to close the book on my past.” She blinked again, so I attempted to reword it. “Sometimes…uhh…when hunting mammoth…” She laughed tearfully and pinched me. “You stop. I understand. Not everything need be hunting analogy.”
We held each other for a time. More that she held me than the reverse, given our size difference. It went on a bit long, and helped me grasp why Werm didn’t like being cradled. But eventually, she let go. “Agnah not mad. You go, make peace with old mate.” Her voice grew suddenly stern. “But then come back to Agnah. No see old mate, ever again.”
I agreed to her terms, then saw her off. She pulled out of my tower’s rotary garage in the Flintstones car I bought her, because she didn’t get the reference and I thought it would be funny.
Chapter 11: The Second Death
No sooner had she left city limits, than someone knocked on my door. I opened it, expecting Yulia. Instead, it was her. My blood ran cold. I took a few steps back, steadying myself against the spiral staircase.
“Nice place you got here” she said, “very Logan’s Run.” I tripped over my tongue, demanding to know how she entered a locked instance. “Didn’t you know? That’s the top level perk. I assumed you would’ve unlocked it by now.”
I dared not admit I was still working on tier 1. “So, are you gonna tell me who that woman was? I saw you having a moment, and didn’t wanna interrupt.” Still white in the face and mildly nauseous, I replied “What do you care?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t bite my head off for showing some interest.” I apologized. “That’s Agnah, my girlfriend.” Her eyes lit up. “Good for you! Didn’t know you liked ‘em hairy, woulda saved me some shaving.”
Embarrassed, I explained that the relationship happened quickly, and wasn’t my idea. She wagged her slender finger at me. “Love never is. It's not something you seek out. It's something that happens to you…a phenomenon. Have a seat already!” She patted the couch cushion beside her.
“I’ll stand” was my terse reply. “I wanted you to know…during my time in the empathy chamber…you were all I thought about.” She looked unimpressed. “You should’ve been paying attention, the chamber’s for your own good. I didn’t think about you at all.”
I felt as if stabbed in the soul. She kept twisting the knife, too. “Not in the chamber, not after they let me out. Not even in life, after we split. I replaced you inside of a week.” Now struggling not to fall apart all over again, I mumbled back that people aren’t replaceable.
She rubbed her chin performatively. “Hm, yes, very wise. Didn’t stop you from drowning yourself in women after you arrived.” My jaw dropped. “You saw that??” She tapped her watch smugly. “Top level perk. Don’t agonize, everybody does it. I blew my first year getting passed around by billionaire vampire CEOs.”
To think, I spent all that time preparing myself, without a clear idea of how I would know when I was ready. It felt wasted, no more prepared now than I was on my first day. “I barely even remember you actually. I’ve been here for about…” she checked her watch. “...113 years.”
I buried my face in my hands, above all else not wishing her to see me cry. How did I never consider that possibility? That I might be too late. That the decades I spent improving myself, chasing after a ghost, would make the difference.
“I mean, I remember some of our time together. Blurry, fragmented. I could request access to specific compressed memories for viewing, I just don’t care to. The past is in the past.” It shamed me to learn that, even a trillion years later, she still held the strings to my heart…and wasn’t shy about yanking them.
“You meant everything to me” I sulked. “Am I nothing to you?” She considered it. “You were fun and interesting, for a while. But I outgrew that relationship, and you should’ve done the same. I won’t deny that we shared some good times. Maybe we could be friends, but we’ll never again be in love. Not the way we once were, those people are gone.”
I uncovered my face, eyes red and puffy, cheeks wet with tears that would never cool. “...Will you at least be frogs with me?” Something in her eyes changed. That coldness of hers I remember so well faded, and softness snuck into her voice. “Sure, doodlebug” she sighed. “I’ll be frogs with you.”
And so we were frogs. Vibing, side by side, on a lilypad in the rain. It wasn’t what I hoped for, but it was enough. Our little frog hands touched. I ribbited contentedly. I still felt foolish to have entrusted her with a piece of my heart. But croaking on that lilypad together, as water droplets rolled off our backs…I felt as if I got some of it back.
“You’ve given me a gift”. She turned her squat little body to face me, licking her eyeball. “I thought we were being frogs?” I pointed out that Kermit could talk. She groaned. “Fine, what is it?” I croaked once more, throat bulging, before I answered. “...Something I want that’s forever out of reach. It feels good to yearn again.”
She soaked that in, meditating on it. “I don’t like that for you. Yearning is only a kind of suffering. There’s nothing to be learned by torturing yourself.” Tell that to the empathy chamber operators, I thought. She was right though, and I hoped that one day, I might even believe her.
I found Agnah in the process of furnishing her dome house. “It hard find couch with same curve as wall” she complained, pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room. “Did you see outside?” she boasted, “Agnah layer soil over dome, grow garden on roof!”
So she did! I compared it to a Hobbit house, another reference she didn’t get. The front door was even round. I worked on it with her, amounting to a long series of compromises I feared would leave neither one of us happy, but somehow the opposite happened. The blend of our respective influences is what made it ours…what made it home.
I deleted my tower, an unwanted reminder of who I used to be. Besides, while the view of the city was great from inside it, now it disrupts the skyline. Funny what a difference a change of perspective makes. Agnah and I luxuriated in romantic bliss! We never fought. Never even argued. Loving her was the easiest thing in the world.
Which of course, was the problem. I thought everlasting romance was all I ever wanted, until I got it. Then I noticed how frictionless it was. How tiresomely bucolic. Besides which, I grew increasingly convicted that Agnah was too good for me. She deserved more than I could give.
Not wanting a tearful, messy goodbye, I indulged in one last selfish act. I told myself it would be merciful to Agnah if I simply disappeared without warning one day. I knew myself well enough by that point to recognize the thinly veiled rationalization. As if I was doing her a favor?
Yet I could no longer ignore that the math wasn’t mathing. Eternal stasis in domestic bliss, that’s just circling the same drain but with nicer scenery! My soul still craved transformation, not merely reformation, and certainly not more stagnation. That’s how I knew I was making the right choice, because it would cost me something precious.
I waited until she was sound asleep, before stealing off into the night. Weighed down by guilt, but also an unshakable resolve. The reincarnation center, on the outer limits of the public instance, had a long line trailing out of it. Apparently I was far from the first to reach this conclusion, which made me doubt its wisdom.
But because I came this far, loathe to pussy out, I stood in line. It moved briskly, allaying my fear that morning might arrive before my turn. I discovered the reason why, once inside the building. The process of injecting someone into “reality”, stripping away their memories, the whole shebang…took about five seconds.
A row of transparent cylinders sprouted from equidistant points around a vast sphere, painted to resemble Earth. It floated gently in a pit shaped to its contours, with a ramp leading up to its surface. As I watched, a magenta eagle man stepped off the end of the ramp, and onto the surface of the sphere.
Gravity’s direction changed for him in that moment, such that he didn’t fall. Instead, adhering to the great painted orb like an ant crawling on a balloon. He sought out one of the glass tubes, opening its hemicylindrical hinged door and climbing inside. Moments after he nodded to the angel at the control panel, he was gone.
I don’t know what I hoped for. A little drama, maybe? Instead, the process moved along with mechanical efficiency. The line inched forward, the tubes filled, the tubes emptied. Anxiety mounted within me, as I doubted again whether I was making the right decision. 75 years of ups and downs, tragedies and triumphs, hope and hardship? That’s if I don’t cut it short again.
But if I were the type to let cold feet stop me, I never would’ve killed myself. When my turn rolled around, the angel at the controls greeted me. “As it ever was.” Dimly recalling the appropriate response, I uttered “as ever”, then stepped onto the sphere.
The lurching sensation of gravity changing directions threw me off balance, but I didn’t falter. Hardly the time for that. The glass of the injection cylinder was cool, and smooth to the touch as I climbed inside, shutting the door behind me.
Outside sounds were muffled, such that I didn’t hear Agnah fighting her way past the line. I was preoccupied with how cramped it suddenly felt in the tube’s interior, the reality of what I was about to do…to myself, and Agnah…sinking in. I could smell my own fear, but was beyond the stage where I might’ve entertained it.
“Ready to go back?” a voice crackled over the intercom, speaker mounted just above me. I nodded soberly. “I want to want things again.” The angel at the controls chuckled. “Many such cases. Which planet would you like to be born on? Despite the decor, you can choose from thousands of inhabited worlds.”
I mulled it over. “Earth. I’d prefer to be male again, but beyond that, surprise me.” I heard him suck air in through his teeth. “I mean…Statistically, you’ll probably be Chinese or Indian?” I assured him either would be just fine. I heard the clickety clack of typing as he checked my file.
“...Says here you killed yourself last time.” I blushed and fidgeted, not wanting to affirm it. He took the hint, and filled the silence. “Please try not to do that again. It’s only more time in the chamber for you, and more paperwork for us.”
Before he could pull the lever, Agnah reached the front of the crowd, and punched his lights out. The crowd gasped, chattering excitedly as Agnah hurried up the ramp, then made her way to my tube. Her freckled face was wracked with worry, eyes damp and frightened.
“How could you??” She pounded on the only glass the sim wouldn’t let her break. “Agnah gave you everything!” I couldn’t fault her there. “Yes, you did. But I’ve had too much everything.” Confusion. Then, horrified realization, and more pounding. “This not way out! Stop wanting to want! Just be!”
It was my turn to be confused. “Just..be? Be what?” She stopped pounding and placed her palms flat against the glass, eyes pleading. “Be with Agnah.” Behind her, the angel regained consciousness. Woozy but otherwise unbothered, he stood…then pulled the lever.
Everything faded to black, and I lost myself. Everything and nothing, but mostly nothing. Adrift and at peace, the likes of which I never knew until then, I dissolved.
Epilogue:
I didn’t wanna go to school! But, Mom says I got to. She pinky promised my first day would be fun…but grown-ups lie sometimes. I guess at least I got new clothes and cool shoes that light up when I walk. I had to beg for those, and for the Trapper Keeper.
The other kids are scary. I don’t know anyone! I’m ‘posed to make friends, but I dunno what to say. What if they hate me? My tummy feels wrong. The teacher’s nice, but everybody laughed at me when I called her Mom.
The only girl who didn’t laugh was sat next to me. She’s weird, red frizzy hair and lots of freckles. I never seen anybody like that ‘cept on TV. Her eyes look too far apart. “We’re deskmates!” she said, way too happy to be at school.
“I’m scared” I admitted. “I don’t know anybody.” She took my hand and shook it a little too hard. “My name’s Agnes. There, now you know me!” I stared, butterflies hatching in my tummy. I gots to member to put bugs in her hair at recess.
2025-12-12 11:30:40
Published on December 12, 2025 3:30 AM GMT
The gates in the lobby of my workplace annoyed me for years: they would often reject my access card, and I'd need to tap several times. After a while I realized that the reader was getting confused by the other RFID cards in my wallet, and if I pulled the card out of my wallet first it worked every time.
This turned out to be very easy to fix: tape a piece of tinfoil to the back of my access card:
I feel a bit silly that after spending months pulling the card out each time the fix ended up taking me a couple minutes. I often decide to put up with minor annoyances instead of thinking about whether there's a way to fix them, and I think overall that has made my life substantially better, but in this case even a little thought would have been well worth it!
2025-12-12 11:10:00
Published on December 12, 2025 3:10 AM GMT
Welcome to the AI Safety Newsletter by the Center for AI Safety. We discuss developments in AI and AI safety. No technical background required.
In this edition we discuss the new AI Dashboard, recent frontier models from Google and Anthropic, and a revived push to preempt state AI regulations.
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CAIS launched its AI Dashboard, which evaluates frontier AI systems on capability and safety benchmarks. The dashboard also tracks the industry’s overall progression toward broader milestones such as AGI, automation of remote labor, and full self-driving.
How the dashboard works. The AI Dashboard features three leaderboards—one for text, one for vision, and one for risks—where frontier models are ranked according to their average score across a battery of benchmarks. Because CAIS evaluates models directly across a wide range of tasks, the dashboard provides apples-to-apples comparisons of how different frontier models perform on the same set of evaluations and safety-relevant behaviors.
Ranking frontier models for safety. The AI Dashboard’s Risk Index offers a view of how today’s frontier models perform across six tests for high-risk behaviors. It then averages the scores and ranks them on a 0–100 scale (lower is safer). Here are the benchmarks and hazardous behaviors they measure:
Across these tests, Anthropic’s recently-released Claude Opus 4.5 is currently the safest frontier model, with an average score of 33.6.
Ranking the frontier systems’ technical capabilities. The Dashboard’s Text and Vision Capabilities Indexes each test systems across five benchmarks. The text-based evaluations test systems on coding, systems administration, expert and abstract reasoning, and performance in text-based adventure games. The vision evaluations measure embodied reasoning, navigation, mental visualization, intuitive physics, and puzzle solving.
Measuring progress toward broad automation. The AI Dashboard also monitors progress toward three key automation milestones. It measures the industry’s overall advancement toward AGI using CAIS’s recently published definition. It evaluates progress on fully automating remote work through CAIS’s Remote Labor Index, which tests AI agents’ ability to complete paid, remote freelance projects across 23 job categories. Finally, it tracks development of autonomous vehicle safety using data from a community-run project documenting Tesla’s Full Self Driving disengagements.
A leaked draft executive order from a member of the Trump administration details a plan to prevent U.S. states from regulating artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, some congressional lawmakers are trying to pass a similar law by including it in a sweeping defense bill.
The executive order would empower federal agencies to preempt state AI laws. The draft executive order would require federal agencies to identify state AI regulations deemed burdensome and push states to avoid enacting them.
The draft order directed federal agencies to take the following actions:
It also ordered the creation of a nationwide, lighter-touch regulatory framework for AI, though it lacked specifics.
Congress revives its own efforts for a moratorium. House leaders are considering using the annual defense spending bill as a vehicle for a moratorium on state AI regulations. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a must-pass measure, is often used to advance other policy priorities. Specifics of the proposed language remain unclear. An earlier attempt called for a 10-year ban, later shortened to five years and limited to states seeking federal broadband funds. It was ultimately defeated by a bipartisan coalition of senators.
57% of American voters oppose inserting preemption into the NDAA. The same poll, from YouGov and the Institute for Family Studies, found that 19% supported the measure and 24% were unsure. Citing voter concerns, a coalition of over 200 lawmakers urged congressional leaders to drop the provision. Due to stiff opposition—and the fact that its controversial nature would likely delay the must-pass NDAA—Axios has characterized this effort as a long shot. Voting is expected in early December.
Google’s Gemini 3 Pro is now the strongest frontier system on nearly all general-purpose capability benchmarks—but trails other frontier systems in safety. Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 4.5 is close behind in capabilities but topped the frontier rankings in safety.
Gemini 3 Pro tops text and vision leaderboards. In independent evaluations performed by CAIS and posted on the new AI Dashboard, Gemini 3 Pro achieved state-of-the-art scores on both text and vision benchmarks. In some tests, it scored double-digit improvements over models released just weeks earlier.
Claude Opus 4.5, released a week after Gemini 3 Pro, averaged second place on both the text and vision capability indexes, and beat Gemini 3 Pro by 0.2 points at SWE-Bench.
What’s new in Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Opus 4.5. Google has positioned Gemini 3 Pro as having improved reasoning, broader agent capabilities, and expanded control settings. The company also released a new coding agent, Antigravity, based on the model. Google also notes that an enhanced reasoning version — Gemini 3 Deep Think — is still under safety testing before full release.
Anthropic highlighted Claude Opus 4.5’s productivity‑focused enhancements along with its high coding scores. New features include a larger context window and a new “effort” parameter that allows developers to adjust their speed, cost, and depth of processing.
There is significant safety variation across frontier models. Claude Opus 4.5 scored lowest on the AI Dashboard’s risk capabilities index, making it the current safest frontier model. Anthropic’s internal safety audit noted that Claude Opus 4.5 was measurably safer than earlier models, but somewhat vulnerable to certain jailbreaking techniques. They noted it showed a tendency toward evaluation awareness and dishonesty.
Gemini 3 Pro ranked ninth on the risk capabilities index, underperforming relative to other recent frontier models. Gemini 3 Pro’s safety report acknowledges that the model exhibits risky behaviors in certain capabilities (for example, cybersecurity) and says extra mitigations have been deployed as part of its “Frontier Safety” framework. Internal evaluations also showed that the model can manipulate users.
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See also: CAIS’ X account, our paper on superintelligence strategy, our AI safety course, and AI Frontiers, a platform for expert commentary and analysis.
