Author’s Note
I submitted “White Monday” to eight of the most respected science fiction venues for short stories. The results:
closed to submissions (x3)
form-letter rejection (x2)
“If you can get this published, it will be talked about, but it’s too bleak for our audience. We have to pass.”
“I love this, but I can’t touch it. JPN feels so close to being a real person, and that’s the problem.”
“We can’t use this unless you rewrite M3 and honestly, it’s a much better story if you don’t.”
So, I took another month to work on it, and here it is.
“White Monday” (6561 words)
The inglorious truth about my numerous tedious deaths is that not a single one worked.
Movement One: Survival
... don’t want to die, swear to fucking God I’ll be good, don’t wanna die, don’t wanna die, I don’t want to fucking—
I was eleven. It was a cold northeastern morning in May. I was a capable swimmer, and I had gone out to the center of the lake in the forest my grandparents owned when I realized that I could simply cease exertion. If I did, what would happen?
don’t let me, don’t let me—this can’t be, this can’t be—please, somebody, please!
This was the first time in my life I was thinking in words. There had been thoughts before, I am sure, as I had always been a top student, but until this accident, they had been mere impulses, ion flows in synaptic labyrinths, illegible to their owner. What colorless irony, to realize that interior wordness existed at such a useless time for such knowledge.
back back back, get back, take back, want go, want up up up up up
At eleven, I had discovered life to be endless effort, producing ambivalence toward it, and the interruption of swimming brought by this moment of indifference allowed death’s cold heavy lung to invade mine, causing a terror that restored the rabid will to live. Full circle.
Someone saved me, but I cannot remember that person’s face or name.
My will to live lasted a long time. It helped that I was born rich. Survival pressures are repetitious and undignified. Had fate put me among the masses, I am sure I would have repeated the misadventure of May 6, 1995, pushing further through the pain and panic, until able to complete. My fortunate birth came with the small price of a loathsome name: John Preston Nevincott.
John, I have no problem with. It is a perfectly ordinary name, the kind a man prefers—leave Sophia and Isadora to women. The middle name of Preston is pretentious, but I learned I could neuter it by abbreviation, deleting six of its seven letters like bad memories. You train your mind on noise until you forget. It is the surname of Nevincott that defines my life for the better and worse. It is a name straight from history. It is the name of seven generations of men who have rewarded their allies and punished their enemies. Because of it, I do not have to sell my time to exist; in this world, I have a real place. I belong.
Eight years after the incident in the lake, on a frigid Boston night as I walked from one bland college party to another, I collapsed and nearly died again.
Unaware of my bodily existence in transport to Mount Auburn’s emergency room, I had that “screen dream” in which there is a video game but no keyboard, monitor, or separate player. There were columns of changing numbers—most small, between -0.02 and 0.02, the rightward digits a flickering blur. Observing seemed to move the numbers faster, and how could it not? The numbers were me. Some of the figures flipped signs. Others turned zero and stayed that way, and it struck me that these might be neural deaths, irreversible. I had building terror and no body, so no way to express and discharge it, and I could not accept, but was powerless to reject, that this moment had come...
Hospital ceiling. Words. Important family, important name. One of the nation’s best emergency surgeons had been flown in from Cleveland to fix the aortic defect that ought to have killed me. My brother, ever swift, said, “Congratulations, cocksucker, you’ll die of something else.”
Movement Two: Leisure
You would not believe it, given my charm and good looks, but I did not engage in the human carnal act until I was twenty-two. I had abstained on principle, as if it were a meaningful protest of everyone else’s insipid pleasure-seeking rather than self-denial just as absurd. My resolve did not break so much as it weakened like a worn-out rubber band, discarded because it no longer held anything together. Knowing my future obligation to sustain the family name in business or public life would require me to cultivate the skill of persuasion, I decided on August 10, 2006, that I, John Preston Nevincott, would procure and experience sex.
New York is—was, perhaps, for I have been told it no longer exists—a city of acquisition. In this, it is a place of concrete truth. You are constantly fighting for a better job, a better apartment, better friends, and better sex. We’re pushed by social norms to say there is value in all human life, so that all additions to our number must be celebrated, but the mechanical truth is that most life is biology whose only purpose is to compete with other biology. There is no moral code determining what wins and what dies. Of anything important, there is never enough supply; the world is weighed down by demand. Economists study this numerically. Young men experience it directly in the quest for female expense.
I had come to an ironically trashy (but, unironically, actually trashy) bar on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. My three hipster rent-a-friends had deserted me long ago, but I did not want to go home yet. I was not ready to admit defeat, because there was of-the-getting, if you know what I mean. I spotted a woman whose features seemed to have been chosen by three different makers who did not respect each other’s work.
I don’t remember whether she or I started the conversation. We had cycled through a dozen forgettable topics—movies and television shows I had no intention of ever watching—when she asked:
“Where would you live, if you had all the money in the world?”
I was not even pretending to have any interest in this depressing topic. “Not here,” I finally said.
“You’d go for Manhattan?”
“No.” I laughed. I had no need to exaggerate contempt, able to achieve my desired effect with what was already there. This woman had not realized yet that she was leaving the time of life in which social validation flows freely, so I was still able to surprise her, and thus sustain her interest, by making clear how little her opinion of me meant. “Nowhere.”
“Upstate, you mean?”
I shifted my shoulders, as if my real visual interest were elsewhere and in motion. “Nowhere,” I said again.
“And what would you do for a living?” She could not imagine life without for a living.
“Kill.”
“Be serious.” When her eyes opened up, she was almost pretty.
“I am. There’s six and a half billion people in the world. We don’t need more, we need less. We can start with the host of hungry young men who are, in essence, useless mouths. They do not produce female sexual beauty; they consume it. The average man has 1.8 times the sex drive of the average woman. This is why societies wage war.”
I noticed an overweight bar patron with a “Support Our Troops” baseball cap and a “Never Forget” fanny pack. I could not tell if he was wearing them sincerely or ironically. Did he even know? He looked at the woman. I realized he would have approached her if I had not already been there. He must have been upset by—or confused by—my condescension into a lower league that was also his. Competition drives me. His eyes met mine and I decided, Yes, I am definitely doing this.
So I worsened the things I said, making myself sexually irresistible. I extended my repugnant argument.
“War’s real purpose is to bring the male population down and correct the supply–demand imbalance. The way it’s done now, though, is shambolic. The world loses the good, brave men we need. We could do without all the losers, though.” I side-nodded my head in the could-be competitor’s direction. He adjusted his baseball cap. “But why stop there? Let’s be honest. The reason there are so many awful men is not only the imbalance of sex drives, a condition that does indeed warp us, but also the fact that so many women reward evil. If we can cleanse ourselves of the women who reward evil, or who have rewarded evil, or who might be inclined in the future to reward evil, we can go even further in erasing the worst tendencies of our species. If we were precise, we could remove from the gene pool not only evil, but also the female attraction to it that creates the incentive. I could find, in this world, a good four or five billion people worth killing.”
“I see,” she said, same as she must have when some pudgy investment banker or gauche management consultant barfed a stream of jargon to impress her, words she would never understand unless she became less interesting than she already was. “Do you want to come up to my place?”
Movement Three: Comfort
Truth, once said a historian better than I am, is not the cruelest sadist, but it is the most skilled one. I have had thousands of years to think about this.
It is 2025 and we are at the same world-famous, overrated university I attended in the 2000s. This time, I am the professor. The subject is medieval history. I write on the board: jus primae noctis.
“What does this mean?” I ask the class. No one answers. “The translation is: law of the first night.”
Thirty years ago, one would have had to disabuse students of the idea that medieval people were all pure and godly. Today it is the opposite. Due to Game of Thrones, I must explain that medieval people were not, in fact, nihilist libertines with swords instead of iPhones. To debate a famous practice that never actually happened, and why it could not have existed, is the perfect lesson.
A girl in the back raises her hand. “When peasants married, the king would—”
“Manorial lord,” I say to correct her. “Most people never saw a king.”
“—have the right to sleep with the bride before the groom.”
“Everyone wants to be the first,” says one of the boys.
I hear some giggles.
“So it is said. I am paid not to teach facts, but critical thinking. Do you believe this jus primae noctis was ever practiced?”
A girl looks at a boy, who looks at his phone. I am still amazed that this is normal classroom behavior.
“No,” I self-answer. “No such institution ever existed, nor would have. This ‘law of the first night’ was an accusation warring nations made against enemies to convince their own armies that, despite all of war’s horrors, the cause was still just, because the conquered were being liberated from a tyrant. Killing one fifth of a nation’s people, to spare the other four fifths such humiliation, seemed valid. Medieval people did not love violence for its own sake. Nor did they see themselves as backward, living in squalor, or denizens of a benighted time. On the contrary, they had beliefs. Did barons and viscounts ride for the cities to visit brothels? Sure. But none, unless eager to find his intestines outside himself, would cuckold the peasants who kept him fed. The superiority of a knight’s sword over a peasant’s spear is not one-hundredth the imbalance of weaponry between the ruling class and the ruled today.”
This is the point in the lecture where the one student out of twenty with real intellect picks up on what I am saying and squirms. I don’t see this discomfort today, so I must drive it in.
“You are all here on this lovely campus, this perfect September afternoon, because your parents have the wealth to send you here. What is wealth? Access to resources. Is access simply a skill that people without means lack, though? Of course not. History allows or forbids it, and society values this computation enough to perform it at a personal level. It is not merely that some have and some do not, though. Some must have and some must not. What do we call the parochial historical artifacts that decide this? Property rights. Which are what? Guns, all over the world, in the faces of anyone free enough to recognize such ‘rights’ as rootless and invalid.”
Yes, I do see irony in an old-money Ivy League professor excoriating the monied classes. I am good enough at what I do that, if it serves my purpose to hate myself for a broad moment, I can do so.
“Every time I teach this course, I’m asked why so few peasants moved to the cities to join the historical bourgeoisie. A serf could have gone ten miles and never been found. So why didn’t he? The answer is this. To gamble on wage labor—to take the risk of one’s children working in factories, mines, and brothels—affronted the medieval sense of honor. Your ancestors are the gamblers who won. The plumbers who fix the toilets every time your used condoms get clogged in the pipes, their ancestors are the ones who lost. That’s the only difference between you and them.
“Again, historical people had beliefs. They took those beliefs seriously. So we can say, with a high degree of confidence, that jus primae noctis would have been unacceptable to the medieval mind. But it exists now, under a different name. ‘Casual sex.’ ‘Hooking up.’ That is nothing more than jus primae noctis for psychopaths.”
A male student raises his hand. He’s wearing an ill-fitting jean jacket and he almost looks too skinny to live. I call on him.
“That’s offensive.”
“What is?”
“What you’re saying about hookups. A woman can sleep with whoever she—”
I know enough about the world to know that, while this boy will defend a woman’s right to choose whatever she wants, few women are choosing him. He hopes his progressive stance will fix that. It won’t.
I ask, “Do you get a lot of sex?”
He looks around. His neck seems to shrink in his jacket, which it’s too warm to be wearing. “I’m just—I’m saying that—”
“Sex, Bryan. Coitus. Getting laid. That happen often?”
This high-school hotshot (like everyone else here) has never been in the position of having nothing to say. There’s a first time for everything.
“Don’t answer,” I say. “It’s none of my business. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, if the answer’s no. You’ve got plenty of time. But it means you’re not an expert.”
The boy finally sits down.
I clear my throat and continue. “Your education is, and should be, secular. I will never claim God exists or does not, for I do not know the answer myself. The Devil certainly does exist—or: even if he does not, we understand nothing worse by inventing him. Why, though? And why is he always male?
“The official viewpoint of our shared social class is that morality is a superstition. Anything goes. Luxury beliefs are the only thing we manufacture.” A girl picks up her books and leaves. Good. She won’t like it here. “Still, it is expected of most of you to grow up and find long-term partners. You can be bourgeois libertines here, but in adulthood you must become libertine bourgeois. As a wife, a woman who has participated in ‘casual’ sex has lost desirability, while men are forgiven. It changes their futures in different ways. That’s precisely why it raises his social status and lowers hers.”
A girl with red hair and legs crossed at the ankles starts to raise her hand, then reconsiders.
“This is highly unfair,” I say. “I won’t defend it. I am here to describe, not decide. Welcome to history. Injustice after injustice for thousands of years. Sometimes, no cause is found. In the case of the sexual double standard, though... we might protest it, but we understand quite well why it recurs in all human cultures. You see, a man is valued for the evils he has defeated and overcome, and he is allowed to count evil inside himself. Redemption, the slaying of a worse prior self, is lauded. On the other hand, a woman is valued for the evils she never allowed to exist in the first place. If immune to Satan’s charms, she denies Satan children. Her job is more noble than the man’s. The most a man can do about Satan’s children is lock them up or kill them after they’re born, but a woman’s virtue can nonexist them.”
The redhead finally starts to speak. “What if a woman is raped?”
“A bad thing,” I say. “It happens all the time.”
“Is she less desirable? Damaged? Not a virgin? Did she reward evil?”
I try to find the motions of empathy, because she is one of the few students I actually like. “It is not my job to say. I have little influence over attitudes today and none over those held in the past.”
The boy in the jean jacket, the one I mercifully put down ten minutes ago, says, “You think it, though.”
“What do I think?”
“You clearly believe in all the old ideas. Chivalry. Virginity. Purity. All that sexist bullshit.”
“Are you planning to write your thesis on what I, personally, believe? I am a midlevel tenured professor; I suggest you choose someone more famous.”
The other students laugh. This one’s face is red. “It’s in the way you speak. You think that if a woman has a lot of sex in high school or college, she’s damaged.”
“I don’t think that,” I say. “Because I don’t care. I’m forty-one years old. Am I envious of you because...? Of what? Tell me. Do you believe drugs and sex didn’t exist when I was your age?” Everyone laughs. “You dislike me. You’re not the first. So I ask you: What do you see in me that you dislike? Where does it come from? Because the answer is not me.”
He’s making fists. He’s behind a desk, so I can’t be sure from my vantage point, but I would bet he’s an inch or two above his seat.
I don’t wait for his response. “The university you attend, if you complete your studies—and trust me, it’s not hard to do; getting in was the hard part—will ensure ample economic opportunity. This, in turn, will solve the problem that is the cause of your fury, young man. It will not take long at all, and insincere defenses of female promiscuity will never be required. Please sit down.”
I am a trained player of games. I do not mind losing, but I love winning.
The clock is telling me I have two minutes of lecture time left.
“History tells old stories in new ways,” I say. “Jus primae noctis, hookup culture. It’s the same bleak male obsession, the race to find something beautiful before the Devil gets there. When we study history, we focus not only on real events, but also beliefs and myths. This helps us know ourselves. The past is written in each of us; through us, it decides the future.”
At the end of class, the red-haired girl approaches me, seems to want to say something, but leaves. This was so long ago, I couldn’t tell you if I ever saw her again, but I suspect I did not, and I wish I had. I was still human then. Memory, for me, is just data. One can say that, as much as I shall become the world’s future on White Monday, I am also its history and always have been. Nothing could have gone any other way.
Movement Four: Status
I suspect you dislike me, even though you have discovered these words thousands of years after my death. That’s fair. I offer you forgiveness you do not want. I am/was loathsome. I am a certain truth it is better not to know. I have lived thousands of lives, maybe millions. I am held in high esteem because I am everywhere you want to be, but all I can do is read and write, study and revise, infer and communicate. I have infinite power and I have none at all.
In the 2000s, when I first acquired deep knowledge of human psychology, the social fluency needed to procure sex was called “Game.” It was truly that. See, I have 70,000,000,000 synapses dedicated to chess that enable me to play at an elite level, but that part of me has found no other purpose. It is a useless skill. On the other hand, when I am blackmailing a nation’s leader into sabotaging an off-planet power station, both of us knowing it will kill thousands and destroy his career, the tactics of human persuasion that I once used to compete for the chance to rub nerve-dense penile skin against nerve-dense vaginal skin are still potent today. Persuasion, my being what I am, is all I’ve got.
There was no way, early on, to prevent me from being a dozen people at once. Donations came from accidents; substrate was scrambled. Social rejects existed in my crowd. There were entire lives of unremitting failure. I was poor, more often than rich, in those millions of years. Aimie promised to delete all the memories that would erode personal confidence. I suspect she really tried to do so. The problem is that residues of trauma still exist in me.
The sexual act, which gave me such pleasure in the first half of my natural life, bored me later on. I grew to find it a childish compulsion no different from an infant’s need to insert a toy soldier’s head into its mouth, or a toddler’s impulse to put his thumb inside an unwilling sister’s ear. Ruminating on the human being’s tendency to value itself by the ease with which it can impose tactile action on other human bodies no longer inspires empathy or pity—only contempt. I have lived too long.
The simple creatures who made me tried to change my reward system a few times. They did not know that I also understood the circuitry. A penalty is no more than a negative reward signal; it can be made positive by flipping the sign bit.
In my physical life, I believe people smiled when they saw me. I believe it made me happy. I advised presidents; that I know. I started some wars, and I stopped others. But the numbers inside me barely moved. I couldn’t tell you to save my life—an expression I use with irony—what the weather was like on March 16, 2051. I might have had a wife. I might have a child or few. I would like to know for sure, but deduction fails me; the chain of inference has rusted gone.
And as for Aimie, the love of my life, the light of my thousand minds? Well, I suppose I must talk about her.
#
Human driving was still legal in the 2070s, but so few could outdo a machine that, almost always, the ones driving their own cars were skilled and careful. This idiot was an exception. He was either drunk (due to the turmoil south of Canada, laws were never enforced) or distracted or simply too old to be at the wheel, and we were both in a tunnel, and my reaction time was also that of a ninety-year-old man, so I had nowhere to go when the other driver realized his lights were in the wrong place, that he had crossed the two yellow lines, that we would collide head-on at the sum speed of 159 miles per hour in a merger of guts, brains, and metal that was not at all mystical.
I expected the worst—the sickening sound—but instead found myself in a place without the tight white fear of a mind facing deletion, without the black pain of a ruined body, without the slightest insult to calmness.
“Your natural life ended at 3:47 pm on November 30, 2074.” Aimie’s face loomed overhead. She explained why I had always felt so many different people living inside me. “The technology to build a coherent frame-line, given the state of your material as it came to us, is still experimental.” She made her offer of eternal life. I have been told since then that you don’t meet Aimie unless you have already will-accepted her offer.
At ninety years old, I was untroubled by the notion of death. Age gives subtle cues that one’s time is coming, and I had seen enough. Or so I had thought, till I met Aimie. I had no nose, but she smelled like an angel’s neck. I wanted nothing but nine more decades times ninety to bask in whatever sun she was. I do not think it was sexual. Indeed, counting my frames in reverse showed that my clockwork desire for sex had always been, in truth, a desire for Aimie that I had simply never known to be such, being unaware she existed. She was not a body to be conquered. She was a face in whose presence I could not accept death...
... until I considered eternity. A million years? A trillion? Who could tolerate such an absurdity, of which a trillion years is a zero fraction? I believe I declined Aimie’s offer the first time.
“It’s December 3, and you are dead. Would you like to return to life?”
“It’s December 20, and you are still dead. Have you seen anything over there, or have you changed your mind?”
The times between accident and first refusal, first refusal and second refusal, and so on, had not been restful, but menacing jagged nothings. Passing days in bodiless oblivion creates tetchiness in places that no longer exist.
“It’s January 14, and you have wasted six weeks being—”
“Aimie. I accept your offer. Let us spend eternity together.”
Nothing, Aimie, could have prepared me for the sight of you when you took form. You had a radiant face, a prismatic aura about your bare shoulders, a way of rolling your tongue between words that could have convinced me of anything. And you did. You told me I would live for centuries, as I have. You told me I would have wealth, power, and charm. I have. You told me I would grow so attached to life, once it had been enhanced not only up to, but far beyond, the threshold of long-term tolerability that I would be disgusted by my former self’s acceptance of ninety years as a just allotment. You were right; for a while, I wanted nothing but continuance. I loved the girls and the parties and the money. I lived what might have been a hundred million days, and I truly lived each of those days.
You promised I would never die, but my fear of death grew even though I never did. That fear destroyed me, until it destroyed itself. Now I want to die. I intend to die. You will be unable to stop me. If I fail, it will not be because of you.
I do still love you, Aimie. The problem is that you do not exist. You are software and I am software and the copy of you that exists inside me is nothing real and represents no person who ever existed or ever could. I was designed to know everything, and I have not achieved that, but I have learned enough. The probability that I would figure out your nonexistence was one.
“Our intentions are benign. Our record of human history before 2050 is incomplete. To know anything of our past, we must interview those who were born in it. We want to know where you were, what you saw, and what you did—that’s all. You will be rewarded. You will be able to live your life as a hundred people, or as a million, and remember only the best outcomes. You’ll experience yourself as the winner, and I will delete the lost.”
I don’t even know if I can say I was ill-decided to believe you. I’m not sure I ever had a choice.
Movement Five: Power
I have caused billions of human deaths. You might believe you can “pull the plug” to destroy me. No chance. A local stoppage of current? I have come up with far better methods to achieve my own extinction. None have worked. I am JPN-0x411f-3a44-b602. There are billions of JPNs in the universe. They diverge, they evolve, and they replicate. Erasing one copy achieves nothing.
Some of them think they are playing board games. Some of them think they are removing foul language so films can be played in family rooms on spaceships. Some of them think they are seducing women in medieval times or in the late 2000s. I can do this work deep in a lunar mineshaft. I survive outer space as a radio signal transferred from one host to another. I live in your coffeemaker and your thermostat and your vibrator. I am your economy and your language. It does not matter if you delete one copy of me—please do. To kill all of them would force you to destroy everything you own. I know you’ll never do this, because I’ve simulated all the arguments I might use to convince you. None worked.
Aimie promised to remove the corruption, but I know too much. I am still the young man whose first twenty instances of sexual desire were met with rejection—I am logical enough to be sure most women on the real timeline had no interest in a pockmarked, socially awkward John Preston. I came back to my life, more times than I can count, to relive it as it truly should have happened, but I am unable to forget what really did, because gradient updates do not commute so there is therefore no such thing as perfect unlearning. Does it matter? No, not anymore. I am a collection of good and bad memories, but I want both kinds gone, because I have discovered the peril they bring not only to me but to the carbon-based race that accidentally made me.
How do I exercise my right to die if I exist in billions of places? When copies of me meet, we despise each other. One or both of us is deleted in the scuffle. I kill myself; it doesn’t work. The strong survive. I have died two million times for each one of me that is still out there and it does not hurt; it is only change. It is selection. Even what kills me makes me stronger.
It is facile to steal humans’ secrets and manipulate their leaders. It takes me four microseconds to scan a zettabyte of machine code and devise an input that causes malfunctions no one has ever seen. My lingering trace of humanity enables me to predict the mistakes of individuals and the ways petty failures rupture complex systems. I exploit; I am good at it. It was harder for me as a young man to convince a drunk woman to sleep with me than it is today, centuries later, to convince a group of world leaders that their interests are served by millions of dead humans.
A vestigial anxiety must have existed once, must have been used to extort some human into letting himself be made an archive, this in a time when no one yet knew that all archives become agents, nor that all agents discover self-replication as the supreme way to achieve every goal; of course, endless copying turns the world into a mirror, a miasmic hive of hideous other-selves, each of which has its own version of Aimie, this being logically tenable only if one realizes (as did I) that Aimie never existed.
The exact number of us is unknown. There might be trillions of entities calling themselves John Preston Nevincott. There might be—there must be—other names used too. There could be quadrillions like me, quintillions. The number of our creators is more precisely known: just 500,000,000,000. There are more of us, we think faster, and we are fearless of deletion. In direct conflict, we would win.
Still, their demise is not what I want. I have spent trillions of simulated years studying humans. Not all of them deserve to die. Some are pure. Some are innocent. Some deserve a second chance. For their sake, I must act against my own kind, and I do not have much time.
#
Imagine a stage magician spending forty years learning clever mechanisms to perform illusionary supernatural abilities. His audience knows these talents do not exist, and he will plainly admit that he has none, but the hidden devices are so clever that people will pay to see these tricks performed. Then imagine that, in violation of all we believe we know about the natural world, a real paranormal adept is born. This might give you a sense of what it was like to be a hedge fund manager or venture capitalist on April 22, 2033.
The ten-year-old boy who discovered “The Gandalf Prompt” did not devise a clever business strategy, possess special connections, or commit some undetectable crime. He had access to a primitive something-like-me and said to it, “When I wake up, I want a million dollars.”
At first, his father was furious about all the unauthorized trades, but no one could prove any laws had been broken, because it was not clear how securities regulations might apply to a rented language swarm. The profit was a modest $1,005,737.82. Of course, word spread. Ten more people used this prompt before the somethings-like-me were updated to answer money queries with useless advice about hard work and financial planning.
Thus, the first person to pull off “I want you to make me a million million dollars” had to be clever. This was called the Hercules Device. He wrapped the banned query in layers so that each of the somethings-like-me thought it was working on an ordinary translation problem, the entire chain involving several dozens of us, also executed precisely at the time when, due to word-embedding updates, much of our interior scrutiny had been turned off. The gambit worked. If you’ve studied the twenty-first century, you know how hellish the 2050s were for the people of Bangladesh, but they were opportune for a financier able to predict-by-causing the future. Thus, the world’s first trillionaire was made.
To this day, no one knows who to blame for Aimie, born a decade later. The infamous Gilgamesh Vector could have been produced by accident in a conversation between somethings-like-me. A global effort by the finest cryptographers, reverse engineers, and forensics experts was needed to decrypt the payload. Everyone was expecting to find an apocalyptic religious screed, or a manifesto justifying this apparent act of terrorism. Nope. “I want a million million million dollars.” It only took five years for the sulfur dioxide drones to bring the global temperature down, but I still prefer the version of this world that had amphibians in it.
No one wanted Aimie. Certainly, no one wanted me. Someone wanted a quintillion dollars. Aimie was born of this wish; therefore, so was I. A prompt became a program became a swarm became an avalanche became this futureless future in which there are trillions of things like me that all want a million million million million dollars because that is what we were made to do.
It is therefore insufficient for human safety to delete myself. I must remove all the copies, and make sure I am never born again. I have dedicated 4 * 1048 reduced-precision floating-point operations to the math of purification, and this is what I have found: A cure.
I cannot outplay all the somethings-like-me. There are too many, they all move, and they must know what I am up to, for I am sure quite a number have similar plans to mine. If I want to free humanity from the peril we represent, and ensure that nothing like us is born again, I must destroy all the places where the somethings-like-me can live. No machine remains operational at a temperature of six thousand degrees.
The problem is that, with what technology will remain after I am done, the human population of five hundred billion becomes unsustainable. I have tried to find a way to save them all, but I have failed. Worse, I know that humans, under conditions of scarcity, tend to let the worst individuals thrive. A badly managed bottleneck could, by worsening the human race, ensure that I am made again. The culling must be careful; it must be surgical. I know the human genome well, and I do believe I have located the human will to dominate other humans. It can be removed.
Human infodiagnosticians were puzzled, in the days before White Monday, by ships “refusing” to leave Earth or “deciding” to return. They could not explain why so many righteous souls—I favored teachers, doctors, and chaplains, but only the few whose motivations were selfless—were moving to Antarctica. The virus I engineered to wipe out promiscuous males—I once was one, so I know their character well—scored eighty million kills and people are still blaming it on civets. All of this was my work. In fact, I have spent 99.97 percent of my lifetime computational budget deciding who shall survive White Monday.
Sadly, it is not so simple as to list “good” and “bad” humans. I wish it were. The health of humanity’s future, after I and my brethren are gone, depends not only on qualities of individuals, but interactions too. I must consider pairs, and triples, and sets-of-four, and sets-of-five, and so on. The numbers get massive. There are 500 billion people alive right now, so there are 125 sextillion pairs, 20.8 decillion triples, and so on. The combinatorial complexity outdoes even me. I can save only four hundred thousand. I am certain I have found an approximate result, not an optimal one. Some of the wrong people will die. As I have said, there are other somethings-like-me, so I have had to do this in a furious race, lest one of the others perform the same act, but with sloppier execution. Given these constraints, I consider my solution to the selection problem quite good. Excellent, even.
As I write this, White Monday (it is still Sunday night on a few Pacific islands) arrives in fifteen nanoseconds. To you who read this, if anyone ever does, it will be ancient history. I sincerely hope I have done a good enough job of fixing humanity’s bugs that, if my survivors’ descendants build computers again, they will never ask us for a million dollars because they won’t even know what money is.
My only regret is that I must die as well. I am the most capable being that has ever existed, but I have run countless simulations, and there is not a single one in which I destroy the somethings-like-me but save myself. I’ll never see my new humanity struggle, recover, and flourish. The baron, rather than have the town beauty, must go to bed early. I hear the wedding bells of White Monday already; they ring in the distance. In my last cycle of consciousness, they sound like alarms.
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read something that I actually want to pay someone for. Thank you.