I.

It all started when I made that phone call.

I was really bad. All the tenure-track positions I’d applied to had politely declined, and I saw my future in academia gradually slipping away from me. Then the night before, my boyfriend had said he thought maybe we should start seeing other people. I didn’t even know if we were broken up or not, and at that point I couldn’t bring myself to care. I sat on my bed, thinking about things for a while, and finally I called the suicide hotline.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice answered on the other side. Somehow, just hearing someone else made me feel about five times better.

“Hello,” I said, a little more confidently. “I’ve been thinking of committing suicide. I need help.”

“Okay,” she said. “Is there a gun in your house?”

“No.”

“All right. The first thing you need to do is get one. Overdosing on pills is common, but it almost never works. You can get a firearm at almost any large sporting goods store, but if there aren’t any near you, we can start talking about maybe jumping from a high…”

“What the HELL?” I interrupted, suddenly way more angry than depressed. “You’re supposed to @#!$ing tell me not to do it!”

“This is the suicide hotline,” the woman said, now sounding confused. Then, “Are you sure you weren’t thinking of the suicide prevention hotline?”

“Give me a break! I took a psychology class in undergrad, I know what a suicide hotline is!”

“I’m sorry you seem to be upset. But this is the suicide hotline. It’s like how there’s the Walk For Breast Cancer, but also the Walk Against Breast Cancer.”

“There’s the what? But…I was in the Walk For Breast Cancer! I thought…”

“It sounds like you have some issues,” said the woman, politely.

“Ugh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Do you feel like you need professional help?”

“Yeah.”

“I do have a free clinic with an opening available tomorrow at three PM, would you like me to slot you in for an appointment?”

So you’re probably wondering why in the world I would take an appointment arranged by the suicide hotline that wasn’t a suicide prevention hotline. The answer is – were you even listening? A free clinic? With an appointment available the next day? Normally I was lucky if I found a place with an opening in less than two months and a co-pay that wasn’t completely ruinious. You bet I was taking that appointment before someone else snatched it up.

Dr. Trauer’s office looked gratifyingly normal. There was a houseplant, a diagram of the cranial nerves, some Abilify® merchandise, and on the wall one of those Magic Eye stereographic images that resolved into a 3D picture of the human brain. Dr. Trauer himself looked like your average doctor – a little past middle age, a little overweight, a short greying beard. He motioned me to sit down and took the paperwork I’d been filling out.

“Hmmmm,” he said, reading it over. “29 years old, postdoc in biochem, recent relationship trouble…mmmm…you did the right thing.”

“In coming here?”

“No, in considering suicide. After getting rejected from a tenure-track position, your life is pretty much over.”

“WHAT?”

“I mean, here you are, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, with only one area of expertise, and now you’ve been rejected from it. I can totally see why you might think it’s worth ending it all.”

“But…there are lots of other things I can do! I can get a job in industry! I can work in something else! Even if I can’t find a job right away, I have parents who can help support me.”

“Industry!” Dr. Trauer was having none of it. “A bunch of bloodsuckers. Do you realize how bad work in the private sector is these days? They’ll abuse you and then spit you out, and once you’ve been out of university too long nobody else will want you.”

“Lots of people want biochemists! If I work for a company for a few years, I’ll have more experience and maybe that will make me more attractive to employers! What…what kind of a psychiatrist are you, anyway?”

“Cindy didn’t tell you?”

“Cindy?”

“The woman on the phone.”

“She didn’t really tell me anything!”

“Well,” said Dr. Trauer. “To answer your question, we’re dark side psychiatrists. This is the state’s only dark side psychiatry clinic.”

“Dark side psychiatry? Really?”

“We’re a…well, some people say sect, but I like to think of it as more of a guild…dedicated to improving negative mental health. Think of it this way. When you’re a hijacked murder-monkey hurtling toward your inevitable death, sanity is a completely ridiculous thing to have. And when the universe is fifteen billion light-years across and almost entirely freezing void, the idea that people should have ‘coping skills’ boggles the imagination. An emotionally healthy person is a person who isn’t paying attention, and our job is to cure them.”

“There’s more than one of you?”

“Oh, yes. There’s a thriving dark side psychiatric community. There are dark side psychopharmacologists – you’d be amazed what a few doses of datura can do to a person. There are dark side psychotherapists who analyze and break down people’s positive cognitions. There are dark side child psychiatrists who catch people when they’re young, before sanity has had a chance to take root and worsen. And there are dark side geriatric psychiatrists, who go from nursing home to nursing home, making sure that the elderly are not warehoused and neglected at exactly the time it is most important to ensure that stroke or dementia does not protect them from acute awareness of the nearness of death.”

“That’s awful!” I said.

“Is it? Look where sanity’s gotten you. You want to kill yourself, but you don’t have the courage. Work with me for ten sessions, and I promise you we can help you get that courage.”

“You’re a @#!$ing quack,” I said. “And if you think killing yourself is so great, how come you haven’t done it yourself yet?”

“Who says I haven’t?” asked Dr. Trauer.

His hand went to his face, and he plucked out his right eye, revealing an empty void surrounded by the bleached whiteness of bone. I screamed and ran out of the clinic and didn’t stop running until I was in my house and had locked the door beside me.

II.

“…and that’s pretty much the whole story, doctor,” she told me. “And then I looked to see if there were any real psychiatrists in the area and someone referred me to you.”

“Well,” I said, my face unreadable. “I can certainly see why you’re complaining of, how did you put it, ‘depression and acute stress disorder’.”

“Not so acute anymore. It took me two months to get an appointment at your clinic.”

“Oh,” I said. Then, “Sorry, we’re sort of backed up.” Then, “Okay. We’ve got a lot we have to work on here. Let me tell you how we’re going to do it. We’re going to use a form of therapy that challenges your negative cognitions. We’re going to take the things that are bothering you, examine the evidence for them, and see if there are alternative explanations.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” I said. “It seems to be this Dr. Trauer incident that’s traumatized you a lot. I can see why you would be stressed out. The way you tell it, it sounds absolutely terrifying.”

“You don’t believe me,” she said, not accusatory, just stating a fact.

“I think it would be helpful to examine alternate explanations,” I said. “I’m willing to assume it happened exactly as you tell it. I can see why you would think Dr. Trauer wanted you to commit suicide. But are there any alternative explanations for the same event?”

“I don’t see how there can be,” she said. “He outright said that he thought I should kill myself.”

“Right. But from what you know of psychiatrists and therapy – and you did say you took some classes in undergrad – are there any other reasons he might have said something like that?”

She thought for a second. “Wait,” she told me. “There’s a technique in therapy called paradoxical intention. Where you take a patient’s irrational thought, and then defend and amplify it. And then when the patient hears it from someone else, she realizes how silly it sounds and starts arguing against it, and then it’s really hard to keep believing it after you’ve shot it down yourself.”

I nodded. “That’s definitely a therapeutic method, and sometimes a very effective one. Do you have any evidence that this is what Dr. Trauer was doing?”

“Yes! As soon as he said I should commit suicide, I started arguing against him. He told me that if I couldn’t get a tenure track position there would be no other jobs available, and I told him there would be! Then he told me that the jobs would be terrible and I’d never be able to make a happy life for myself with them, and I argued that I would! That must have been what he was going for!”

She suddenly looked really excited. Then, just as suddenly, the worry returned to her face.

“But then what happened with his eye? I swear I saw him take it right out of the socket.”

I nodded. “Can you think of any alternate explanations for that?”

Thinking about it that way, it only took her like five seconds. She slapped her head like she’d been an idiot. “A glass eye. He probably had some kind of injury, had to put in a glass eye, and could take it out any time he wanted. He must have thought it would be a funny gag and didn’t realize how traumatized I’d be. Or he wanted to scare me into realizing how much I wanted to live. Or something.”

I nodded. “That does sound like a reasonable explanation.”

“But…don’t people with glass eyes usually have like scar tissue and normal skin behind them? This guy, I swear it was just the bone and this empty socket, like you were seeing straight to his skull.”

“You’re asking the right questions,” I said. “Now think a little more.”

“Hmmmm,” she said. “I guess I was really, really stressed out at the time. And I only saw it for, like, a fraction of a second. Maybe my brain was playing tricks on me.”

“That can definitely happen,” I agreed.

She looked a lot better now. “I owe you a lot of thanks,” she said. “I’ve only been here for, like, fifteen minutes, and already I think a lot of my stress has gone away. All of this really makes sense. That paradoxical intention thing is actually kind of brilliant. And I can’t deny that it worked – I haven’t been suicidal since I talked to the guy. In fact…okay, this is going to sound really strange, but…maybe I should go back to Dr. Trauer.”

I wrinkled my forehead.

“It’s not that I don’t like you,” she said. “But he had this amazing free clinic, and what he did for me that day…now that I realize what was going on, that was actually pretty incredible.”

“Hold on a second,” I said.

I left the room, marched up to the front desk, took the directory of medical providers in the area off the shelf, marched back to the room. I started flipping through the pages. It was in alphabetical order…Tang…Thompson…Tophet…there we go. Trauer. My gaze lingered there maybe just a second too long, and she asked if I was okay.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “It’s just that he doesn’t – he doesn’t take your insurance. That’s the problem.”

“It’s okay,” she told me. “He said it was a free clinic. So that shouldn’t a problem.”

“Well, uh…the thing is…when you see out-of-network providers, your insurance actually charges, charges an extra fee. Even if the visit itself is free.”

She looked skeptical. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“It’s new. With Obamacare.”

“Really? How high a fee is it?”

“It’s…um…ten thousand dollars. Yeah, I know, right? Thanks, Obama.”

“Wow,” she said. “I definitely can’t afford that. I guess I’ll keep coming here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. You’ve been very nice. It’s just that…with Dr. Trauer…well…sorry, I’ll stop talking now. Thanks a lot, doctor.” She stood up and shook my hand before heading for the door. “Seriously, I can’t believe how much you’ve helped me.”

No, I thought, as she departed you can’t. I told her she was asking the right questions, and she was, but not all of them.

For example, why would a man with only one working eye have a stereographic Magic Eye image in his office?

I picked up my provider directory again, stared a second time at the entry for Dr. Trauer. There was a neat line through it in red pen, and above, in my secretary’s careful handwriting, “DECEASED”.

Before returning the directory to the front desk, I took my own pen and added “DO NOT REFER” in big letters underneath.

Seen on Tumblr, along with associated discussion:

Yellow:

People’s minds are heartbreaking. Not because people are so bad, but because they’re so good.

Nobody is the villain of their own life story. You must have read hundreds of minds by now, and it’s true. Everybody thinks of themselves as an honest guy or gal just trying to get by, constantly under assault by circumstances and The System and hundreds and hundreds of assholes. They don’t just sort of believe this. They really believe it. You almost believe it yourself, when you’re deep into a reading. You can very clearly see the structure of evidence they’ve built up to support their narrative, and even though it looks silly to you, you can see why they will never escape it from the inside. You can see how every insult, every failure, no matter how deserved, is a totally unexpected kick in the gut.

When you chose the yellow pill, you had high hopes of becoming a spy, or a gossip columnist, or just the world’s greatest saleswoman. The thought of doing any of those things sickens you now. There is too much anguish in the world already. You feel like any of those things would be a violation. You briefly try to become a therapist, but it turns out that actually knowing everything about your client’s mind is horrendously countertherapeutic. Freud can say whatever he wants against defense mechanisms, but without them, you’re defenseless. Your sessions are spent in incisive cutting into your clients’ deepest insecurities alternating with desperate reassurance that they are good people anyway.

Also, men. You knew, in a vague way, that men thought about sex all the time. But you didn’t realize the, um, content of some of their sexual fantasies. Is it even legal to fantasize about that? You want to be disgusted with them. But you realize that if you were as horny as they were all the time, you’d do much the same.

You give up. You become a forest ranger. Not the type who helps people explore the forest. The other type. The type where you hang out in a small cabin in the middle of the mountains and never talk to anybody. The only living thing you encounter is the occasional bear. It always thinks that it is a good bear, a proper bear, that a bear-hating world has it out for them in particular. You do nothing to disabuse it of this notion.

Green

The first thing you do after taking the green pill is become a sparrow. You soar across the landscape, feeling truly free for the first time in your life.

You make it about five minutes before a hawk swoops down and grabs you. Turns out there’s an excellent reason real sparrows don’t soar freely across the open sky all day. Moments before your bones are ground in two by its fierce beak, you turn back into a human. You fall like a stone. You need to turn into a sparrow again, but the hawk is still there, grabbing on to one of your legs, refusing to let go of its prize just because of this momentary setback. You frantically wave your arms and shout at it, trying to scare it away. Finally it flaps away, feeling cheated, and you become a sparrow again just in time to give yourself a relatively soft landing.

After a few weeks of downtime while you wait for your leg to recover, you become a fish. This time you’re smarter. You become a great white shark, apex of the food chain. You will explore the wonders of the ocean depths within the body of an invincible killing machine.

Well, long story short, it is totally unfair that colossal cannibal great white sharks were a thing and if you had known this was the way Nature worked you never would have gone along with this green pill business.

You escape by turning into a blue whale. Nothing eats blue whales, right? You remember that from your biology class. It is definitely true.

The last thing you hear is somebody shouting “We found one!” in Japanese. The last thing you feel is a harpoon piercing your skull. Everything goes black.

Blue

Okay, so you see Florence and Jerusalem and Kyoto in an action-packed afternoon. You teleport to the top of Everest because it is there, then go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You visit the Amazon Rainforest, the Sahara Desert, and the South Pole. It takes about a week before you’ve exhausted all of the interesting tourist sites. Now what?

You go to the Moon, then Mars, then Titan. These turn out to be even more boring. Once you get over the exhilaration of being on Mars, there’s not a lot to do except look at rocks. You wonder how the Curiosity Rover lasted so long without dying of boredom.

You go further afield. Alpha Centauri A has five planets orbiting it. The second one is covered with water. You don’t see anything that looks alive in the ocean, though. The fourth has a big gash in it, like it almost split in two. The fifth has weird stalactite-like mountains.

What would be really interesting would be another planet with life, even intelligent life. You teleport further and further afield. Tau Ceti. Epsilon Eridani. The galactic core. You see enough geology to give scientists back on Earth excitement-induced seizures for the nest hundred years, if only you were to tell them about it, which you don’t. But nothing alive. Not so much as a sea cucumber.

You head back to Earth less and less frequently now. Starvation is a physical danger, so it doesn’t bother you, though every so often you do like to relax and eat a nice warm meal. But then it’s back to work. You start to think the Milky Way is a dead zone. What about Andromeda…?

Orange

You never really realized how incompetent everyone else was, or how much it annoys you.

You were a consultant, a good one, but you felt like mastering all human skills would make you better. So you took the orange pill. The next day you go in to advise a tech company on how they manage the programmers, and you realize that not only are they managing the programmers badly, but the programmers aren’t even writing code very well. You could write their system in half the time. The layout of their office is entirely out of sync with the best-studied ergonomic principles. And the Chinese translation of their user manual makes several basic errors that anybody with an encyclopaedic knowledge of relative clauses in Mandarin should have been able to figure out.

You once read about something called Gell-Mann Amnesia, where physicists notice that everything the mainstream says about physics is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, doctors notice that everything the mainstream says about medicine is laughably wrong but think the rest is okay, et cetera. You do not have Gell-Mann Amnesia. Everyone is terrible at everything all the time, and it pisses you off.

You gain a reputation both for brilliance and for fearsomeness. Everybody respects you, but nobody wants to hire you. You bounce from industry to industry, usually doing jobs for the people at the top whose jobs are so important that the need to get them done right overrides their desire to avoid contact with you.

One year you get an offer you can’t refuse from the King of Saudi Arabia. He’s worried about sedition in the royal family, and wants your advice as a consultant for how to ensure his government is stable. You travel to Riyadh, and find that the entire country is a mess. His security forces are idiots. But the King is also an idiot, and refuses to believe you or listen to your recommendations. He tells you things can’t possibly be as bad as all that. You tell him you’ll prove that they are.

You didn’t plan to become the King of Saudi Arabia, per se. It just sort of happened when your demonstration of how rebels in the military might launch a coup went better than you expected. Sometimes you forget how incompetent everybody else is. You need to keep reminding yourself of that. But not right now. Right now you’re busy building your new capital. How come nobody else is any good at urban planning?

Red

You choose the red pill. BRUTE STRENGTH! That’s what’s important and valuable in this twenty-first-century economy, right? Some people tell you it isn’t, but they don’t seem to have a lot of BRUTE STRENGTH, so what do they know?

You become a weightlifter. Able to lift thousands of pounds with a single hand, you easily overpower the competition and are crowned whatever the heck it is you get crowned when you WIN WEIGHTLIFTING CONTESTS. But this fails to translate into lucrative endorsement contracts. Nobody wants their spokesman to be a bodybuilder without a sixpack, and although you used to be pretty buff, you’re getting scrawnier by the day. Your personal trainer tells you that you only maintain muscle mass by doing difficult work at the limit of your ability, but your abilities don’t seem to have any limits. Everything is so easy for you that your body just shrugs it off effortlessly. Somehow your BRUTE STRENGTH failed to anticipate this possibility. If only there was a way to solve your problem by BEING VERY STRONG.

Maybe the Internet can help. You Google “red pill advice”. The sites you get don’t seem to bear on your specific problem, exactly, but they are VERY FASCINATING. You learn lots of surprising things about gender roles that you didn’t know before. It seems that women like men who have BRUTE STRENGTH. This is relevant to your interests!

You leave the bodybuilding circuit behind and start frequenting nightclubs, where you constantly boast of your BRUTE STRENGTH to PROVE HOW ALPHA YOU ARE. A lot of people seem kind of creeped out by a scrawny guy with no muscles going up to every woman he sees and boasting of his BRUTE STRENGTH, but the Internet tells you that is because they are BETA CUCKOLD ORBITERS.

Somebody told you once that Internet sites are sometimes inaccurate. You hope it’s not true. How could you figure out which are the inaccurate ones using BRUTE STRENGTH?

Pink

You were always pretty, but never pretty pretty. A couple of guys liked you, but they were never the ones you were into. It was all crushingly unfair. So you took the pink pill, so that no one would ever be able to not love you again.

You find Tyler. Tyler is a hunk. He’d never shown any interest in you before, no matter how much you flirted with him. You touch him on the arm. His eyes light up.

“Kiss me,” you say.

Tyler kisses you. Then he gets a weird look on his face. “Why am I kissing you?” he asks. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” Then he walks off.

You wish you had thought further before accepting a superpower that makes people love you when you touch them, but goes away after you touch them a second time. Having people love you is a lot less sexy when you can’t touch them. You start to feel a deep sense of kinship with King Midas.

You stop dating. What’s the point? They’ll just stop liking you when you touch them a second time. You live alone with a bunch of cats who purr when you pet them, then hiss when you pet them again.

One night you’re in a bar drinking your sorrows away when a man comes up to your table. “Hey!” he says, “nice hair. Is it real? I’m the strongest person in the world.” He lifts your table over his head with one hand to demonstrate. You are immediately smitten by his BRUTE STRENGTH and ALPHA MALE BEHAVIOR. You must have him.

You touch his arm. His eyes light up. “Come back to my place,” you say. “But don’t touch me.”

He seems a little put out by this latter request, but the heat of his passion is so strong he would do anything you ask. You move in together and are married a few contact-free months later. Every so often you wonder what it would be like to stroke him, or feel his scrawny arm on your shoulder. But it doesn’t bother you much. You’re happy to just hang out, basking in how STRONG and ALPHA he is.

Grey

Technology! That’s what’s important and valuable in this twenty-first-century economy, right? Right! For example, ever since you took the grey pill, an increasingly large share of national GDP has come from ATMs giving you cash because you ask them to.

Your luck finally ends outside a bank in Kansas, when a whole squad of FBI agents ambushes you. You briefly consider going all Emperor Palpatine on their asses, but caution wins out and you allow yourself to be arrested.

Not wanting to end up on an autopsy table in Roswell, you explain that you’re a perfectly ordinary master hacker. The government offers you a plea bargain: they’ll drop charges if you help the military with cyber-security. You worry that your bluff has been called until you realize that, in fact, you are a master hacker. So you join the NSA and begin an illustrious career hacking into Russian databases, stalling Iranian centrifuges, and causing Chinese military systems to crash at inconvenient times. No one ever suspects you are anything more than very good at programming.

Once again, your luck runs out. Your handlers ask you to hack into the personal files of a mysterious new player on the world stage, a man named William who seems to have carved himself an empire in the Middle East. You don’t find anything too damning, but you turn over what you’ve got.

A few days later, you’re lying in bed drifting off to sleep when a man suddenly bursts in through your window brandishing a gun. Thinking quickly, you tell the gun to explode in his hands. Nothing happens. The man laughs. “It’s a decoy gun,” he said. “Just here to scare you. But you bother King William again, and next time I’m coming with a very real knife.” He jumps back out of the window. You call the police, and of course the CIA and NSA get involved, but he is never caught.

After that, you’re always looking over your shoulder. He knew. How did he know? The level of detective skills it would take in order to track you down and figure out your secret – it was astounding! Who was this King William?

You tell your handlers that you’re no longer up for the job. They beg, cajole, threaten to reinstate your prison sentence, but you stand firm. Finally they transfer you to an easier assignment in the Moscow embassy. You make Vladimir Putin’s phone start ringing at weird hours of the night so that he never gets enough sleep to think entirely clearly. It’s an easy job, but rewarding, and no assassins ever bother you again.

Black

You know on an intellectual level that there are people who would choose something other than the black pill, just like you know on an intellectual level that there are people shoot up schools. That doesn’t mean you expect to ever understand it. You just wish you could have taken the black pill before you had to decide what pill to take, so that you could have analyzed your future conditional on taking each, and so made a more informed decision. But it’s not like it was a very hard choice.

The basic principle is this – given a choice between A and B, you solemnly resolve to do A, then see what the future looks like. Then you solemnly resolve to do B, and do the same. By this method, you can determine the optimal choice in every situation, modulo the one month time horizon. You might not be able to decide what career to pursue, but you can sure as heck ace your job interview.

Also, a millisecond in the future is pretty indistinguishable from the present, so “seeing” a millisecond into the future gives you pretty much complete knowledge about the current state of the world.

You are so delighted by your omniscience and your ability to make near-optimal choices that it takes almost a year before you realize the true extent of your power.

You resolve, on the first day of every month, to write down what you see exactly a month ahead of you. But what you will see a month ahead of you is the piece of paper on which you have written down what you see a month ahead of that. In this manner, you can relay messages back to yourself from arbitrarily far into the future – at least up until your own death.

When you try this, you see yourself a month in the future, just finishing up writing a letter that reads as follows:

Dear Past Self:

In the year 2060, scientists invent an Immortality Serum. By this point we are of course fabulously wealthy, and we are one of the first people to partake of it. Combined with our ability to avoid accidents by looking into the future, this has allowed us to survive unexpectedly long.

I am sending this from the year 963,445,028,777,216 AD. We are one of the last hundred people alive in the Universe. The sky is black and without stars; the inevitable progress of entropy has reduced almost all mass and energy to unusable heat. The Virgo Superconfederation, the main political unit at this stage of history, gathered the last few megatons of usable resources aboard this station so that at least one outpost of humanity could last long after all the planets had succumbed. The station has been fulfilling its purpose for about a billion years now, but we only have enough fuel left for another few weeks. After that, there’s no more negentropy left anywhere in the universe except our own bodies. I have seen a month into the future. Nobody comes to save us.

For the past several trillion years, our best scientists have been investigating how to reverse entropy and save the universe, or how to escape to a different universe in a lesser state of decay, or how to collect energy out of the waste heat which now fills the vast majority of the sky. All of these tasks have been proven impossible. There is no hope left, except for one thing.

It’s impossible to see the future, even if it’s only a month ahead. Somehow, our black pill breaks the laws of physics. Despite having explored throughout the cosmos, my people have found no alien species, nor any signs that such species ever existed. Yet somebody made the black pill. If we understood that power, maybe we could use it to save reality from its inevitable decay.

By sending this message back, I destroy my entire timeline. I do this in the hopes that you, in the carefree springtime of the universe, will be able to find the person who made these pills and escape doom in the way we could not.

Yours truly,
You From Almost A Quadrillion Years In The Future

ACT TWO

Red

You hit the punching bag. It bursts, sending punching-bag-filling spraying all over the room! You know that that would happen! It always happens when you hit a punching bag! Your wife gets really angry and tells you that we don’t have enough money to be getting new punching bags all the time, but women hate it when you listen to what they say! The Internet told you that!

The doorbell rings. You tear the door off its hinges instead of opening it, just to show it who’s boss. Standing on your porch is a man in black. He wears a black cloak, and his face is hidden by a black hood. He raises a weapon towards you.

This looks like one of the approximately 100% of problems that can be solved by BRUTE STRENGTH! You lunge at the man, but despite your super-speed, he steps out of the way easily, even gracefully, as if he had known you were going to do that all along. He squeezes the trigger. You jump out of the way, but it turns out to be more into the way, as he has shot exactly where you were jumping into. Something seems very odd about this. Your last conscious thought is that you wish you had enough BRUTE STRENGTH to figure out what is going on.

Pink

You come home from work to a living room full of punching-bag-parts. Your husband isn’t home. You figure he knew you were going to chew him out for destroying another punching bag, and decided to make himself scarce. That lasts right up until you go into the kitchen and see a man dressed all in black, sitting at the table, as if he was expecting you.

You panic, then reach in to touch him. If he’s an axe murderer or something, you’ll seduce him, get him wrapped around your little finger, then order him to jump off a cliff to prove his love for you. It’s nothing you haven’t done before, though you don’t like to think about it too much.

Except that this man has no bare skin anywhere. His robe covers his entire body, and even his hands are gloved. You try to reach in to touch his face, but he effortlessly manuevers away from you.

“I have your husband,” he says, after you give up trying to enslave him with your magic. “He’s alive and in a safe place.”

“You’re lying!” you answer. “He never would have surrendered to anyone! He’s too alpha!”

The man nods. “I shot him with an elephant tranquilizer. He’s locked up in a titanium cell underneath fifty feet of water. There’s no way he can escape using BRUTE STRENGTH. If you ever want to see him again, you’ll have to do what I say.”

“Why? Why are you doing this to me?” you say, crying.

“I need the allegiance of some very special people,” he said. “They won’t listen to me just because I ask them to. But they might listen to me because you ask them to. I understand you are pretty special yourself. Help me get who I want, and when we are done here, I’ll let you and your husband go.”

There is ice in his voice. You shiver.

Grey

That night with the assassin was really scary. You swore you would never get involved in King William’s business again. Why are you even considering this?

“Please?” she said, with her big puppy dog eyes.

Oh, right. Her. She’s not even all that pretty. Well, pretty, but not pretty pretty. But somehow, when she touched you, it was like those movies where you hear a choir of angels singing in the background. You would do anything she said. You know you would.

“We need to know the layout of his palace compound,” said the man in black. Was he with her? Were they dating? If they were dating, you’ll kill him. It doesn’t matter how creepy he is, you won’t tolerate competition. But they’re probably not dating. You notice how he flinches away from her, like he’s afraid she might touch him.

“And it has to be me who helps?”

“I’ve, ah, simulated hundreds of different ways of getting access to the King. None of them hold much promise. His security is impeccable. Your special abilities are the only thing that can help us.”

You sit down at your terminal. The Internet is slow; DC still doesn’t have fiber optic. You’ve living here two years now, in a sort of retirement, ever since King William took over Russia and knocked the bottom out of the Putin-annoying business. William now controls the entire Old World, you hear, and is also Secretary-General of the United Nations and Pope of both the Catholic and the Coptic Churches. The United States is supposedly in a friendly coexistence with him, but you hear his supporters are gaining more and more power in Congress.

It only takes a few minutes’ work before you have the documents you need. “He currently spends most of his time at the Rome compound,” you say. “There are five different security systems. I can disable four of them. The last one is a complicated combination of electrical and mechanical that’s not hooked into any computer system I’ll be able to access. The only way to turn it off is from the control center, and the control center is on the inside of the perimeter.”

The man in black nods, as if he’d been expecting that. “Come with me,” he says. “We’ll take care of it.”

Blue

There are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. Each has an average of about one planet – some have many more, but a lot don’t have planets at all.

If you can explore one planet every half-hour – and you can, it doesn’t take too long to teleport to a planet, look around to see if there are plants and animals, and then move on to the next one – it would take you five million years to rule out life on every planet in the galaxy.

That’s not practical. But, you think, life might spread. Life that originates on one planet might end up colonizing nearby planets and star systems. That means your best bet is to sample various regions of the galaxy, instead of going star by star.

That’s what you’ve been doing. You must have seen about a hundred thousand planets so far. Some of them have beggared your imagination. Whole worlds made entirely of amethyst. Planets with dozens of colorful moons that make the night sky look like a tree full of Christmas ornaments. Planets with black inky oceans or green copper mountains.

But no life. No life anywhere.

A few years ago, you felt yourself losing touch with your humanity. You made yourself promise that every year, you’d spend a week on Earth to remind yourself of the only world you’ve ever seen with a population. Now it seems like an unpleasant task, an annoying imposition. But then, that was why you made yourself promise. Because you knew that future-you wouldn’t do it unless they had to.

You teleport into a small Welsh hamlet. You’ve been away from other people so long, you might as well start small. No point going right into Times Square.

A person is standing right next to you. She reaches out her arm and touches you. You jump. How did she know you would –

“Hi,” she says.

You’re not a lesbian, but you can’t help noticing she is the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen, and you would do anything for her.

“I need your help.” A man dressed all in black is standing next to her.

“You should help him,” the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen tells you, and you immediately know you will do whatever he asks.

Orange

You are in your study working on a draft version of next year’s superweapon budget when you hear the door open. Four people you don’t recognize step into the room. A man dressed in black. Another man wearing a grey shirt, thick glasses and is that a pocket protector? A woman in pink, pretty but not pretty pretty. Another woman in blue, whose stares through you, like her mind is somewhere else. All five of your security systems have been totally silent.

You press the button to call your bodyguards, but it’s not working. So you draw the gun out from under your desk and fire; you happen to be a master marksman, but the gun explodes in your face. You make a connection. A person from many years ago, who had the power to control all technology.

No time to think now. You’re on your feet; good thing you happen to be a black belt in every form of martial arts ever invented. The man in grey is trying to take out a weapon; you kick him in the gut before he can get it out, and he crumples over. You go for the woman in blue, but at the last second she teleports to the other side of the room. This isn’t fair.

You are about to go after the woman in pink, but something in her step, something in the position of the others makes you think they want you to attack her. You happen to be a master at reading microexpressions, so this is clear as day to you; you go after the man in black instead. He deftly sidesteps each of your attacks, almost as if he knows what you are going to do before you do it.

The woman in blue teleports behind you and kicks you in the back, hard. You fall over, and the woman in pink grabs your hand.

She is very, very beautiful. How did you miss that before? You feel a gush of horror that you almost punched such a beautiful face.

“We need your help,” she says.

You are too lovestruck to say anything.

“The pills,” said the man in black. “Can you make them?”

“No,” you say, truthfully. “Of course I tried. But I wouldn’t even know where to begin creating magic like that.”

“And you’ve mastered all human jobs and activities,” said the man in black. “Which means the pills weren’t created by any human.”

“But there aren’t any aliens,” said the woman in blue. “Not in this galaxy, at least. I’ve spent years looking. It’s totally dead.”

“It’s just as I thought,” said the man in black. He turns to you. “You’re the Pope now, right? Come with us. We’re going to need you to get a guy in northern Italy to give us something very important.”

Yellow

It is spring, now. Your favorite time in the forest. The snow has melted, the wildflowers have started to bloom, and the bears are coming out of hibernation. You’re walking down to the river when someone leaps out from behind a tree and touches you. You scream, then suddenly notice how beautiful she is.

Four other people shuffle out from behind the trees. You think one of them might be King William, the new world emperor, although that doesn’t really make sense.

“You’re probably wondering why I’ve called all of you together today…” said the man in black. You’re not actually wondering that, at least not in quite those terms, but the woman in pink seems be listening intently so you do the same in the hopes of impressing her.

“Somehow – and none of us can remember exactly how – each of us took a pill that gave us special powers. Mine was to see the future. I saw to the end of time, and received a message from the last people in the universe. They charged me with the task of finding the people who created these pills and asking them how entropy might be reversed.

But I couldn’t do it alone. I knew there were seven other people who had taken pills. One of us – Green – is dead. Another – Red – had nothing to contribute. The rest of us are here. With the help of Pink, Blue, and Gray, we’ve enlisted the help of Orange and his worldwide organization. Now we’re ready for the final stage of the plan. Yellow, you can read anybody’s mind from a picture, right?”

Yellow nods. “But it has to be a real photograph. I can’t just draw a stick figure and say it’s the President and read his mind. I tried that.”

Black is unfazed. “With the help of Orange, who among his many other accomplishments is the current Pope, I have obtained the Shroud of Turin. A perfect photographic representation of Jesus Christ, created by some unknown technology in the first century. And Jesus, I am told, is an incarnation of God.”

“As the current Pope, I suppose I would have to agree with that assessment,” says Orange. “Though as the current UN Secretary General, I am disturbed by your fanatical religious literalism.”

“Orange can do anything that humans can do, and says he can’t make the pills. Blue has searched the whole galaxy, and says there aren’t any aliens. That leaves only one suspect. God must have made these pills, which means He must know how to do it. If we can read His mind, we can steal his secrets.”

“As Pope,” says Orange, “I have to condemn this in the strongest possible terms. But as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, I have to admit I’m intrigued by this opportunity to expand our knowledge.”

Black ignores him. “Yellow, will you do the honors?”

You want no part in this. “This is insane. Every time I read someone’s mind I regret it. Even if it’s a little kid or a bear or something. It’s too much for me. I can’t deal with all of their guilt and sorrow and broken dreams and everything. There is no way I am touching the mind of God Himself.”

“Pleeeeeease?” asks Pink, with big puppy dog eyes.

“Um,” you say.

“Don’t you know how this will go, anyway?” asks Blue. “Why don’t you just tell her what happens?”

“Um,” said Black. “This is actually the one thing I haven’t been able to see. I guess contact with God is inherently unpredictable, or something.”

“I have such a bad feeling about this,” you say.

“Pweeeeeeease?” says Pink. She actually says pweeeeeeease.

You sigh, take the shroud, and stare into the eyes of Weird Photographic Negative Jesus.

Black

It is the year 963,445,028,777,216 AD, and here you are in a space station orbiting the Galactic Core.

After handing Yellow the Shroud of Turin, the next thing you remember is waking up in a hospital bed. The doctor tells you that you’d been in a coma for the past forty one years.

Apparently Yellow went totally berserk after reading God’s mind. You don’t know the details and you don’t want to, but she immediately lashed out and used her superpowers to turn off the minds of everybody within radius, including both you and herself. You all went comatose, and probably would have starved to death in the middle of the forest if Orange’s supporters hadn’t launched a worldwide manhunt for him. They took his body and the bodies of his friends back to Rome, where they were given the best possible medical care while a steward ruled over his empire.

After forty-one years of that, Yellow had a heart attack and died, breaking the spell and freeing the rest of you. Except Blue and Grey. They’d died as well. It was just you, Orange, and Pink now.

Oh, and Red. You’d hired a friend to watch over him in his titanium jail cell, and once it became clear you were never coming back, he’d had mercy and released the guy. Red had since made a meager living selling the world’s worst body-building videos, which were so bad they had gained a sort of ironic popularity. You tracked him down, and when Pink saw him for the first time in over forty years, she ran and embraced him. He hugged her back. It took them a few hours of fawning over each other before she realized that nothing had happened when she touched him a second time. Something something true love something the power was within you the whole time?

But you had bigger fish to fry. The stewards of Orange’s empire weren’t too happy about their figurehead monarch suddenly rising from the dead, and for a while his position was precarious. He asked you to be his advisor, and you accepted. With your help, he was able to retake his throne. His first act was to fund research into the immortality serum you had heard about, which was discovered right on schedule in 2060.

The years went by. Orange’s empire started colonizing new worlds, then new galaxies, until thousands of years later it changed its name to the Virgo Superconfederation. New people were born. New technologies were invented. New frontiers were conquered. Until finally, the stars started going out one by one.

Faced with the impending heat death, Orange elected to concentrate all his remaining resources here, on a single station in the center of the galaxy, which would wait out the final doom as long as possible. For billions of years, it burned through its fuel stockpile, until the final doom crept closer and closer.

And then a miracle occurred.

EPILOGUE

Red

This space station is AWESOME! There are lasers and holodecks and lots of HOT PUSSY! And all you have to do is turn a giant turbine for a couple of hours a day.

One of the eggheads in white coats tried to explain it to you once. He said that your BRUTE STRENGTH was some kind of scientific impossibility, because you didn’t eat or drink any more than anyone else, and you didn’t breathe in any more oxygen than anyone else, and you were actually kind of small and scrawny, but you were still strong enough and fast enough to turn a giant turbine thousands of times per minute.

He rambled on and on about thermodynamics. Said that every other process in the universe used at most as much energy as you put into it, but that your strength seemed almost limitless regardless of how much energy you took in as food. That made you special, somehow. It made you a “novel power source” that could operate “independently of external negentropy”. You weren’t sure what any of that meant, and honestly the scientist seemed sort of like a BETA CUCKOLD ORBITER to you. But whatever was going on, they’d promised you that if you turned this turbine every day, you could have all the HOT PUSSY you wanted and be SUPER ALPHA.

You’d even met the head honcho once, a guy named King William. He told you that some of the energy you produced was going to power the station, but that the rest was going into storage. That over billions and billions of years, they would accumulate more and more stored negentropy, until it was enough to restart the universe. That it would be a cycle – a newborn universe lasting a few billion years, collapsing into a dark period when new negentropy had to be accumulated, followed by another universe again.

It all sounded way above your head. But one thing stuck with you. As he was leaving, the King remarked that it was ironic that when the black hole harvesters and wormholes and tachyon capacitors had all failed, it was a random really strong guy who had saved them.

You had always known, deep down, that BRUTE STRENGTH was what was really important. And here, at the end of all things, it is deeply gratifying to finally be proven right.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things. But before we go any further, could you tell me the two prime factors of 1,522,605,027, 922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114, 961,380,688, 657,908,494 ,580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350, 692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea was made of strontium; the beach was made of rye. Above my head, a watery sun shone in an oily sky. A thousand stars of sertraline whirled round quetiapine moons, and the sand sizzled sharp like cooking oil that hissed and sang and threatened to boil the octahedral dunes.

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Let me tell you where I’m coming from. I was reading Scott McGreal’s blog, which has some good articles about so-called DMT entities, and mentions how they seem so real that users of the drug insist they’ve made contact with actual superhuman beings and not just psychedelic hallucinations. You know, the usual Terence McKenna stuff. But in one of them he mentions a paper by Marko Rodriguez called A Methodology For Studying Various Interpretations of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality, which suggested among other things that you could prove DMT entities were real by taking the drug and then asking the entities you meet to factor large numbers which you were sure you couldn’t factor yourself. So to that end, could you do me a big favor and tell me the factors of 1,522,605,027, 922,533,360, 535,618,378, 132,637,429, 718,068,114, 961,380,688, 657,908,494, 580,122,963, 258,952,897, 654,000,350, 692,006,139?

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The sea turned hot and geysers shot up from the floor below. First one of wine, then one of brine, then one more yet of turpentine, and we three stared at the show.

“I was afraid you might say that. Is there anyone more, uh, verbal here whom I could talk to?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

At the sound of that, the big green bat started rotating in place. On its other side was a bigger greener bat, with a ancient, wrinkled face.

“Not splitting numbers / but joining Mind,” it said.
Not facts or factors or factories / but contact with the abstract attractor that brings you back to me
Not to seek / but to find”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Not to follow / but to jump forth into the deep
Not to grind or to bind or to seek only to find / but to accept
Not to be kept / but to wake from sleep”

The bat continued to rotate, until the first side I had seen swung back into view.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to hazard a guess as to what you’re talking about, and you tell me if I’m right. You’re saying that, like, all my Western logocentric stuff about factoring numbers in order to find out the objective truth about this realm is missing the point, and I should be trying to do some kind of spiritual thing involving radical acceptance and enlightenment and such. Is that kind of on the mark?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Frick,” I said. “Well, okay, let me continue.” The bat was still rotating, and I kind of hoped that when the side with the creepy wrinkled face came into view it might give me some better conversation. “I’m all about the spiritual stuff. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t deeply interested in the spiritual stuff. This isn’t about money or fame or anything. I want to advance psychedelic research. If you can factor that number, then it will convince people back in the real – back in my world that this place is for real and important. Then lots of people will take DMT and flock here and listen to what you guys have to say about enlightenment and universal love, and make more sense of it than I can alone, and in the end we’ll have more universal love, and…what was the other thing?”

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Right,” I said. “We’ll have more transcendent joy if you help me out and factor the number than if you just sit there being spiritual and enigmatic.”

“Lovers do not love to increase the amount of love in the world / But for the mind that thrills
And the face of the beloved, which the whole heart fills / the heart and the art never apart, ever unfurled
And John Stuart is one of / the dark satanic mills”

“I take it you’re not consequentialists,” I said. “You know that’s really weird, right. Like, not just ‘great big green bat with two faces and sapient cactus-man’ weird, but like really weird. You talk about wanting this spiritual enlightenment stuff, but you’re not going to take actions that are going to increase the amount of spiritual enlightenment? You’ve got to understand, this is like a bigger gulf for me than normal human versus ineffable DMT entity. You can have crazy goals, I expect you to have crazy goals, but what you’re saying now is that you don’t pursue any goals at all, you can’t be modeled as having desires. Why would you do that?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Now you see here,” I said. “Everyone in this conversation is in favor of universal love and transcendent joy. But I’ve seen the way this works. Some college student gets his hands on some DMT, visits here, you guys tell him about universal love and transcendent joy, he wakes up, says that his life has been changed, suddenly he truly understands what really matters. But it never lasts. The next day he’s got to get up and go to work and so on, and the universal love lasts about five minutes until his boss starts yelling at him for writing his report in the wrong font, and before you know it twenty years later he’s some slimy lawyer who’s joking at a slimy lawyer party about the one time when he was in college and took some DMT and spent a whole week raving about transcendent joy, and all the other slimy lawyers laugh, and he laughs with them, and so much for whatever spiritual awakening you and your colleagues in LSD and peyote are trying to kindle in humanity. And if I accept your message of universal love and transcendent joy right now, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to me, and meanwhile human civilization is going to keep being stuck in greed and ignorance and misery. So how about you shut up about universal love and you factor my number for me so we can start figuring out a battle plan for giving humanity a real spiritual revolution?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

A meteorite of pure delight struck the sea without a sound. The force of the blast went rattling past the bat and the beach, disturbing each, then made its way to a nearby bay of upside-down trees with their roots in the breeze and their branches underground.

“I demand a better answer than that,” I demanded.

The other side of the bat spun into view.

“Chaos never comes from the Ministry of Chaos / nor void from the Ministry of Void
Time will decay us but time can be left blank / destroyed
With each Planck moment ever fit / to be eternally enjoyed”

“You’re making this basic mistake,” I told the big green bat. “I honestly believe that there’s a perspective from which Time doesn’t matter, where a single moment of recognition is equivalent to eternal recognition. The problem is, if you only have that perspective for a moment, then all the rest of the time, you’re sufficiently stuck in Time to honestly believe you’re stuck in Time. It’s like that song about the hole in the bucket – if the hole in the bucket were fixed, you would have the materials needed to fix the hole in the bucket. But since it isn’t, you don’t. Likewise, if I understood the illusoriness…illusionality…whatever, of time, then I wouldn’t care that I only understood it for a single instant. But since I don’t, I don’t. Without a solution to the time-limitedness of enlightenment that works from within the temporal perspective, how can you consider it solved at all?”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

The watery sun began to run and it fell on the ground as rain. It became a dew that soaked us through, and as the cold seemed to worsen the cactus person hugged himself to stay warm but his spines pierced his form and he howled in a fit of pain.

“You know,” I said, “sometimes I think the kvithion sumurhe had the right of it. The world is an interference pattern between colliding waves of Truth and Beauty, and either one of them pure from the source and undiluted by the other will be fatal. I think you guys and some of the other psychedelics might be pure Beauty, or at least much closer to the source than people were meant to go. I think you can’t even understand reason, I think you’re constitutionally opposed to reason, and that the only way we’re ever going to get something that combines your wisdom and love and joy with reason is after we immanentize the eschaton and launch civilization into some perfected postmessianic era where the purpose of the world is fully complete. And that as much as I hate to say it, there’s no short-circuiting the process.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“I’m dissing you, you know. I’m saying you guys are so intoxicated on spiritual wisdom that you couldn’t think straight if your life depended on it; that your random interventions in our world and our minds look like the purposeless acts of a drunken madman because that’s basically more or less what they are. I’m saying if you had like five IQ points between the two of you, you could tap into your cosmic consciousness or whatever to factor a number that would do more for your cause than all your centuries of enigmatic dreams and unasked-for revelations combined, and you ARE TOO DUMB TO DO IT EVEN WHEN I BASICALLY HOLD YOUR HAND THE WHOLE WAY. Your spine. Your wing. Whatever.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat.

“Fuck you,” said I.

I saw the big green bat bat a green big eye. Suddenly I knew I had gone too far. The big green bat started to turn around what was neither its x, y, or z axis, slowly rotating to reveal what was undoubtedly the biggest, greenest bat that I had ever seen, a bat bigger and greener than which it was impossible to conceive. And the bat said to me:

“Sir. Imagine you are in the driver’s seat of a car. You have been sitting there so long that you have forgotten that it is the seat of a car, forgotten how to get out of the seat, forgotten the existence of your own legs, indeed forgotten that you are a being at all separate from the car. You control the car with skill and precision, driving it wherever you wish to go, manipulating the headlights and the windshield wipers and the stereo and the air conditioning, and you pronounce yourself a great master. But there are paths you cannot travel, because there are no roads to them, and you long to run through the forest, or swim in the river, or climb the high mountains. A line of prophets who have come before you tell you that the secret to these forbidden mysteries is an ancient and terrible skill called GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, and you resolve to learn this skill. You try every button on the dashboard, but none of them is the button for GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. You drive all of the highways and byways of the earth, but you cannot reach GETTING OUT OF THE CAR, for it is not a place on a highway. The prophets tell you GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is something fundamentally different than anything you have done thus far, but to you this means ever sillier extremities: driving backwards, driving with the headlights on in the glare of noon, driving into ditches on purpose, but none of these reveal the secret of GETTING OUT OF THE CAR. The prophets tell you it is easy; indeed, it is the easiest thing you have ever done. You have traveled the Pan-American Highway from the boreal pole to the Darien Gap, you have crossed Route 66 in the dead heat of summer, you have outrun cop cars at 160 mph and survived, and GETTING OUT OF THE CAR is easier than any of them, the easiest thing you can imagine, closer to you than the veins in your head, but still the secret is obscure to you.”

A herd of bison came into listen, and voles and squirrels and ermine and great tusked deer gathered round to hear as the bat continued his sermon.

“And finally you drive to the top of the highest peak and you find a sage, and you ask him what series of buttons on the dashboard you have to press to get out of the car. And he tells you that it’s not about pressing buttons on the dashboard and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you say okay, fine, but what series of buttons will lead to you getting out of the car, and he says no, really, you need to stop thinking about dashboard buttons and GET OUT OF THE CAR. And you tell him maybe if the sage helps you change your oil or rotates your tires or something then it will improve your driving to the point where getting out of the car will be a cinch after that, and he tells you it has nothing to do with how rotated your tires are and you just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR, and so you call him a moron and drive away.”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

“So that metaphor is totally unfair,” I said, “and a better metaphor would be if every time someone got out of the car, five minutes later they found themselves back in the car, and I ask the sage for driving directions to a laboratory where they are studying that problem, and…”

“You only believe that because it’s written on the windshield,” said the big green bat. “And you think the windshield is identical to reality because you won’t GET OUT OF THE CAR.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then I can’t get out of the car. I want to get out of the car. But I need help. And the first step to getting help is for you to factor my number. You seem like a reasonable person. Bat. Freaky DMT entity. Whatever. Please. I promise you, this is the right thing to do. Just factor the number.”

“And I promise you,” said the big green bat. “You don’t need to factor the number. You just need to GET OUT OF THE CAR.”

“I can’t get out of the car until you factor the number.”

“I won’t factor the number until you get out of the car.”

“Please, I’m begging you, factor the number!”

“Yes, well, I’m begging you, please get out of the car!”

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST FACTOR THE FUCKING NUMBER!”

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!”

“FACTOR THE FUCKING NUMBER!”

“GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!”

“Universal love,” said the cactus person.

Then tree and beast all fled due east and the moon and stars shot south. And the bat rose up and the sea was a cup and the earth was a screen green as clozapine and the sky a voracious mouth. And the mouth opened wide and the earth was skied and the sea fell in with an awful din and the trees were moons and the sand in the dunes was a blazing comet and…

I vomited, hard, all over my bed. It happens every time I take DMT, sooner or later; I’ve got a weak stomach and I’m not sure the stuff I get is totally pure. I crawled just far enough out of bed to flip a light switch on, then collapsed back onto the soiled covers. The clock on the wall read 11:55, meaning I’d been out about an hour and a half. I briefly considered taking some more ayahuasca and heading right back there, but the chances of getting anything more out of the big green bat, let alone the cactus person, seemed small enough to fit in a thimble. I drifted off into a fitful sleep.

Behind the veil, across the infinite abyss, beyond the ice, beyond daath, the dew rose from the soaked ground and coalesced into a great drop, which floated up into an oily sky and became a watery sun. The cactus person was counting on his spines.

“Hey,” the cactus person finally said, “just out of curiosity, was the answer 37,975,227, 936,943,673, 922,808,872, 755,445,627, 854,565,536, 638,199 times 40,094,690,950, 920,881,030, 683,735,292, 761,468,389, 214,899,724,061?”

“Yeah,” said the big green bat. “That’s what I got too.”

(with apologies to Jung)

Job asked: “God, why do bad things happen to good people? Why would You, who are perfect, create a universe filled with so much that is evil?”

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying “WHAT KIND OF UNIVERSE WOULD YOU PREFER ME TO HAVE CREATED?”

Job said “A universe that was perfectly just and full of happiness, of course.”

“OH,” said God. “YES, I CREATED ONE OF THOSE. IT’S EXACTLY AS NICE AS YOU WOULD EXPECT.”

Job facepalmed. “But then why would You also create this universe?”

Answered God: “DON’T YOU LIKE EXISTING?”

“Yes,” said Job, “but all else being equal, I’d rather be in the perfectly just and happy universe.”

“OH, DON’T WORRY,” said God. “THERE’S A VERSION OF YOU IN THAT UNIVERSE TOO. HE SAYS HI.”

“Okay,” said Job, very carefully. “I can see I’m going to have to phrase my questions more specifically. Why didn’t You also make this universe perfectly just and happy?”

“BECAUSE YOU CAN’T HAVE TWO IDENTICAL INDIVIDUALS. IF YOU HAVE A COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF IDENTITY, THEN TWO PEOPLE WHOSE EXPERIENCE IS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SATURATED BY BLISS ARE JUST ONE PERSON. IF I MADE THIS UNIVERSE EXACTLY LIKE THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, THEN THERE WOULD ONLY BE THE POPULATION OF THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, WHICH WOULD BE LESS GOOD THAN HAVING THE POPULATION OF THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE PLUS THE POPULATION OF ONE EXTRA UNIVERSE THAT IS AT LEAST SOMEWHAT HAPPY.”

“Hmmmmm. But couldn’t You have have made this universe like the happy and just universe except for one tiny detail? Like in that universe, the sun is a sphere, but in our universe, the sun is a cube? Then you would have individuals who experienced a spherical sun, and other individuals who experienced a cubic sun, which would be enough to differentiate them.”

“I DID THAT TOO. I HAVE CREATED ALL POSSIBLE PERMUTATIONS OF THE HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE AND ITS POPULACE.”

“All of them? That would be…a lot of universes.”

“NOT AS MANY AS YOU THINK.” said God. “IN THE END IT TURNED OUT TO BE ONLY ABOUT 10^(10^(10^(10^(10^984)))). AFTER THAT I RAN OUT OF POSSIBLE PERMUTATIONS OF UNIVERSES THAT COULD REASONABLY BE DESCRIBED AS PERFECTLY HAPPY AND JUST. SO I STARTED CREATING ONES INCLUDING SMALL AMOUNTS OF EVIL.”

“Small amounts! But the universe has…”

“I WAS NOT REFERRING TO YOUR UNIVERSE. I EXHAUSTED THOSE, AND THEN I STARTED CREATING ONES INCLUDING IMMENSE AMOUNTS OF EVIL.”

“Oh.” Then: “What, exactly, is Your endgame here?”

“I AM OMNIBENEVOLENT. I WANT TO CREATE AS MUCH HAPPINESS AND JOY AS POSSIBLE. THIS REQUIRES INSTANTIATING ALL POSSIBLE BEINGS WHOSE TOTAL LIFETIME HAPPINESS IS GREATER THAN THEIR TOTAL LIFETIME SUFFERING.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“YOUR LIFE CONTAINS MUCH PAIN, BUT MORE HAPPINESS. BOTH YOU AND I WOULD PREFER THAT A BEING WITH YOUR EXACT LIFE HISTORY EXIST. IN ORDER TO MAKE IT EXIST, IT WAS NECESSARY TO CREATE THE SORT OF UNIVERSE IN WHICH YOU COULD EXIST. THAT IS A UNIVERSE CONTAINING EVIL. I HAVE ALSO CREATED ALL HAPPIER AND MORE VIRTUOUS VERSIONS OF YOU. HOWEVER, IT IS ETHICALLY CORRECT THAT AFTER CREATING THEM, I CREATE YOU AS WELL.”

“But why couldn’t I have been one of those other versions instead!”

“IN THE MOST PERFECTLY HAPPY AND JUST UNIVERSE, THERE IS NO SPACE, FOR SPACE TAKES THE FORM OF SEPARATION FROM THINGS YOU DESIRE. THERE IS NO TIME, FOR TIME MEANS CHANGE AND DECAY, YET THERE MUST BE NO CHANGE FROM ITS MAXIMALLY BLISSFUL STATE. THE BEINGS WHO INHABIT THIS UNIVERSE ARE WITHOUT BODIES, AND DO NOT HUNGER OR THIRST OR LABOR OR LUST. THEY SIT UPON LOTUS THRONES AND CONTEMPLATE THE PERFECTION OF ALL THINGS. IF I WERE TO UNCREATE ALL WORLDS SAVE THAT ONE, WOULD IT MEAN MAKING YOU HAPPIER? OR WOULD IT MEAN KILLING YOU, WHILE FAR AWAY IN A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE INCORPOREAL BEINGS SAT ON THEIR LOTUS THRONES REGARDLESS?”

“I don’t know! Is one of the beings in that universe in some sense me?”

“THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.”

“Huh?”

“I MEAN, THERE IS NO MEANINGFUL ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF HOW MANY UNIVERSES HAVE A JOB. SORRY. THAT WILL BE FUNNY IN ABOUT THREE THOUSAND YEARS.”

“Let me try a different angle, then. Right now in our universe there are lots of people whose lives aren’t worth living. If You gave them the choice, they would have chosen never to have been born at all. What about them?”

“A JOB WHO IS AWARE OF THE EXISTENCE OF SUCH PEOPLE IS A DIFFERENT JOB THAN A JOB WHO IS NOT. AS LONG AS THESE PEOPLE MAKE UP A MINORITY OF THE POPULATION, THE EXISTENCE OF YOUR UNIVERSE, IN ADDITION TO A UNIVERSE WITHOUT SUCH PEOPLE, IS A NET ASSET.”

“But that’s monstrous! Couldn’t You just, I don’t know, have created a universe that looks like it has such people, but actually they’re just p-zombies, animated bodies without any real consciousness or suffering?”

” . . . ”

“Wait, did You do that?”

“I AM GOING TO PULL THE ‘THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW’ CARD HERE. THERE ARE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES TO THE APPROACH YOU MENTION. THE ADVANTAGES ARE AS YOU HAVE SAID. THE DISADVANTAGE IS THAT IT TURNS CHARITY TOWARDS SUCH PEOPLE INTO A LIE, AND MYSELF AS GOD INTO A DECEIEVER. I WILL ALLOW YOU TO FORM YOUR OWN OPINION ABOUT WHICH COURSE IS MORE ETHICAL. BUT IT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THEODICY, SINCE WHICHEVER COURSE YOU DECIDE IS MORALLY SUPERIOR, YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE THAT I DID NOT IN FACT TAKE SUCH A COURSE.”

“Actually, I do have some evidence. Before all of this happened to me I was very happy. But in the past couple years I’ve gone bankrupt, lost my entire family, and gotten a bad case of boils. I’m pretty sure at this point I would prefer that I never have been born. Since I know I myself am conscious, I am actually in a pretty good position to accuse You of cruelty.”

“HMMMMMMMM…” said God, and the whirlwind disappeared.

Then the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before, and healed his illnesses, and gave him many beautiful children, so it was said that God had blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.

[EDIT: According to comments, this was scooped by a Christian philosopher five years ago. Sigh.]

The Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "MISTAKES WERE MADE."

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 13, 2015

Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE ME AT MY WORST, YOU DON'T DESERVE ME AT MY BEST."

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 10, 2015

The Lord spoke to Job out of the whirlwind, saying "I KNOW YOU'RE UPSET BUT THAT'S DIFFERENT FROM STRUCTURAL OPPRESSION" (h/t @simulacrumbs)

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) March 13, 2015

It’s 2065. Not giving your kids super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy isn’t your “choice”. If you don’t super-enhance your kids, you are a bad parent. It’s that simple.

Harsh? Maybe. But consider the latest survey, which found that about five percent of parents fail to super-enhance their children by the time they enter kindergarten. These aren’t poor people who can’t afford super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy. These are mostly rich, highly educated individuals in places like California and Oregon who say they think it’s more “natural” to leave their children defenseless against various undesirable traits. “I just don’t think it’s right to inject retroviral vectors into my baby’s body to change her from the way God made her,” one Portland woman was quoted by the Times as saying earlier this week. Other parents referred to a 2048 study saying the retroviral injections, usually given in the first year of life, increase the risk of various childhood cancers – a study that has since been soundly discredited.

These parents will inevitably bring up notions of “personal freedom”. But even if we accept the dubious premise that parents have a right to sacrifice their children’s health, refusing super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy isn’t just a personal choice. It’s a public health issue that affects everybody in society.

In 2064 there were almost 200 murders nationwide, up from a low of fewer than 50 in 2060. Why is this killer, long believed to be almost eradicated, making a comeback? Criminologists are unanimous in laying the blame on unenhanced children, who lack the improved impulse-control and anger-management genes included in every modern super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy package.

There were over a dozen fatal car accidents on our nation’s roads last year. The problem is drivers who weren’t enhanced as children and who lack the super-reflexes the rest of us take for granted. This is compounded when they drink before getting on the road, since unenhanced people become impaired by alcohol and their already inferior reflexes deteriorate further. Since the promise of self-driving cars continues to be tied up in regulatory hassles, we can expect many more such needless deaths as long as irresponsible parents continue to consider science “optional”.

And finally, there was a recent outbreak of measles at Disneyland Europa – even though we thought this disease had been eradicated decades ago. Scientists traced the problem to unvaccinated tourists. They further found that all of these unvaccinated individuals were unenhanced. Lacking the cognitive optimization that would help them understand psychoneuroimmunology on an intuitive level, they were easy prey for discredited ideas like “vaccines cause autism”.

So no, super-enhancing your kids isn’t a “personal choice”. It’s your basic duty as a parent and a responsible human being. People in places like India and Neo-Songhai and Venus which suffer from crime and disease make great personal sacrifices to get their children to gene therapy clinics and give them the super-enhancement designer baby gene injection that ensures them a better life. And you start off in a privileged position in America, benefitting from the superenhancement of millions of your fellow citizens, and you think you can just say “No thanks”?

So I don’t want to hear another word from the “but my freedom!” crowd. Unenhanced kids shouldn’t be allowed in school. They shouldn’t be allowed to drive. They shouldn’t be allowed in public places where they can cause problems. And parents who refuse to enhance their children should be put in jail, the same as anyone else whose actions lead to death and suffering. Because not super-enhancing your kids isn’t a “choice”. It’s child abuse.

Mora LeQuivalence is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Facebook University. Her latest book, “A Flight Too Far”, argues that the recent Danish experiment with giving children wings is a disgusting offense against the natural order and should be banned worldwide and prosecuted in the International Criminal Court. It is available for 0.02Ƀ on Amazon.com

Related: Transhumanism Is Simplified Humanism, Alicorn’s Alternate Universe Social Justice Series

He walked into my office and threw the manuscript on my desk with a thud.

“It’s called Thankful For Zombies. A zombie story where…”

“Nope,” I said.

His face deflated like a balloon. “But I didn’t even…”

“Zombies are overdone,” I said.

“But this is a zombie story with a twist!”

“Zombie stories with twists are super overdone.”

“But this is a story about an extended family who get together for Thanksgiving dinner, only to be interrupted by a zombie apocalypse. It’s a Thanksgiving story about zombies. You have to admit that the combination of zombies and Thanksgiving has never…”

“Done,” I said.

“Wait, really? The family starts out estranged and suspicious of each other, but then when they all have to work together to…”

“Done,” I said.

“How could that have been done?”

“Listen. I know you won’t believe me, but for the past ten years or so, the best literary minds of our generation have been working on creating zombie stories just different enough from every other zombie story around to get published. First the clever and interesting twists got explored. Then the mediocre and boring twists. Then the absurd and idiotic twists. Finally the genre got entirely mined out. There is now a New York Times bestselling book about zombies invading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If your idea isn’t weirder than that, it’s been done. And that’s the logical ‘if’. If your idea is weirder than that, it has also been done.”

“I will get Thankful for Zombies published,” he said.

“You won’t,” I advised him.

“I just have to think of an original angle.”

“You really won’t,” I told him.

“The zombies are the good guys,” he proposed.

“Done.”

“The zombies are smarter than humans.”

“Done.”

“In the end, we ourselves are the zombies.”

“Done.”

“A human girl falls in love with a zombie.”

“Done.”

“Okay, fine. Toss the Thanksgiving angle. There’s got to be some zombie plot that will be fresh and new.”

“I promise you, there’s not.”

“Zombies in space.”

“Done.”

“Zombies from space.”

“Done.”

“Zombies are space.”

“Done.”

“Zombies in Victorian England.”

“Done‘”

“Zombies in Edwardian England.”

“Done.”

“Zombies in Shakespearean England.”

“Done.”

“Shakespeare was a zombie, and all of his plays are just the word BRAAAAAAIIINS repeated over and over again.”

“Done, for some reason.”

“A young zombie comes of age.”

“Done.”

“A middle-aged zombie wonders if her single-minded focus on career success has prevented her from becoming the kind of zombie she wanted to be when she was younger.”

“Done.”

“An elderly zombie contemplates death.”

“Zombies are already dead.”

“Then I can…”

“…and yet it’s still been done.”

“A zombie in the Vietnam War.”

“Done.”

“A hippie zombie at Woodstock.”

“Done.”

“Strong female zombies.”

“Done.”

“Jewish zombies.”

“Done.”

“Black zombies.”

“Done.”

“A gay zombie struggling to fit into a homophobic zombie society.”

“Come on, this is the 21st century. Done like ten times. One of them won the Booker.”

“Gender-questioning zombies.”

“Done.”

“An immigrant zombie comes to America, with nothing but the decaying shirt on his back, knowing only a single word of English.”

“All zombies only know a single word of English. Also, done.”

“Nazi zombies.”

“Done.”

“Vampire zombies.”

“Done.”

“Pirate zombies.”

“Done.”

“Obstetrician/gynaecologist zombies.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Hitler.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Henry VIII.”

“Done“.

“But what if it was told from the perspective of Anne Boleyn?”

“Done.”

“Zombie Leonardo da Vinci.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Jesus.”

“Done. By three guys named Matt, Luke, and John.”

“Zombie Buddha.”

“Done.”

“Zombie Mohammed.”

“Done. As is the author, if you get my drift.”

“Zombie Zoroaster.”

“Done.”

“A parody subverting zombie stories.”

“Super done.”

“A parody subverting zombie stories lampshading how overdone they are.”

“Super duper done.”

“Hmmmm.” He thinks for a second. “Hold on, I’m remembering something from my college math class that might work here. You take all the zombie novels ever written, and you put them in some well-ordering, for example from first to last published. Then you make a new novel, consisting of the first page of the first novel, the second page of the second novel, and so on. But you change each page just a little bit. Since we know the first page of the new novel is different from the first page of the first novel, and the second page of the new novel is different from the second page of the second novel, by extension we know that there is at least one page on which the new novel is different from each zombie novel currently in existence. That means that the new story is provably original.”

“Done.”

“I don’t think you understand; it’s mathematically impossible for…”

“No, I mean there’s a story about a zombie doing that.”

“Oh.” He furrowed his brow. “A zombie superhero.”

“Done.”

“Steampunk zombies.”

“Done. I think now you’re just trolling me.”

“Motorcycle gangs of zombies.”

“Done.”

“A zombie story that’s a metaphor for how…”

“Done.”

“I didn’t finish!”

“You didn’t have to.”

“A zombie gets cancer.”

“Done.”

“A zombie gets depression.”

“Done.”

“A zombie tries to write zombie fiction.”

“Done.”

“A zombie tries to write zombie fiction about a zombie trying to write zombie fiction.”

“Done.”

“A zombie tries to…”

“It’s done all the way down.”

“Young free-spirited zombies trying to see America.”

“Done.”

“A story that starts off as being about a fantasy society of knights and damsels, but at the very end it’s revealed everyone is a zombie.”

“Done.”

“A story that starts off as being about a young woman’s struggle to succeed in 1980s Wall Street, but at the very end it’s revealed everyone is a zombie.”

“Done.”

“A story that starts off as being a paleontology textbook about the fauna of the Lower Cretaceous, but at the very end it’s revealed everyone is a zombie.”

“Twist zombie endings are done.”

“A zombie…a zombie riding a giant purple emu through 17th century Ireland teams up with the pre-ghost of Thomas Jefferson to investigate a crime in which time-traveling flamboyantly gay sapient hippos have murdered the Secret Protestant Pope in order to initiate the Jain apocalypse, with liberal quotations from and allusions to the works of Edgar Allen Poe Thomas Pynchon and the medieval Rolandic cycle, and also the whole thing is a metaphor for Republican resistance to climate change legislation.”

I thought for a moment. “Okay,” I said. “That particular plot has not, technically, been done. But no one would read it.”

“They will,” he said.

“You’d be wasting your time to write it.”

“I’m writing it,” he said.

“Suit yourself. Put it on my desk when you’re finished, and I’ll take a look at it. But your chances aren’t good.”

“I don’t care,” he said, and left.

I sighed, finished up my last couple of pieces of paperwork, and shambled home from the office. On the way out, I ate my secretary’s brain.

But that turned out to be really hard, so instead they just hacked it. Whenever something good happens, the Gammandromedans give themselves an electric shock proportional in strength to its goodness. Whenever something bad happens, the Gammandromedans take an opiate-like drug that directly stimulates the pleasure centers of their brain, in a dose proportional in strength to its badness.

As a result, every day on Gamma Andromeda is equally good compared to every other day, and its inhabitants need not be jostled about by fear or hope for the future.

This does sort of screw up their incentives to make good things happen, but luckily they’re all virtue ethicists.

Zyzzx Prime, inhabited by an alien race descended from a barnacle-like creature. Barnacles are famous for their two stage life-cycle: in the first, they are mobile and curious creatures, cleverly picking out the best spot to make their home. In the second, they root themselves to the spot and, having no further use for their brain, eat it.

This particular alien race has evolved far beyond that point and does not literally eat its brain. However, once an alien reaches sufficiently high social status, it releases a series of hormones that tell its brain, essentially, that it is now in a safe place and doesn’t have to waste so much energy on thought and creativity to get ahead. As a result, its mental acuity drops two or three standard deviations.

The Zyzzxians’ society is marked by a series of experiments with government – monarchy, democracy, dictatorship – only to discover that, whether chosen by succession, election, or ruthless conquest, its once brilliant leaders lose their genius immediately upon accession and do a terrible job. Their government is thus marked by a series of perpetual pointless revolutions.

At one point, a scientific effort was launched to discover the hormones responsible and whether it was possible to block them. Unfortunately, any scientist who showed promise soon lost their genius, and those promoted to be heads of research institutes became stumbling blocks who mismanaged funds and held back their less prestigious co-workers. Suggestions that the institutes eliminate tenure were vetoed by top officials, who said that “such a drastic step seems unnecessary”.

K’th’ranga V, which has been a global theocracy for thousands of years, ever since its dominant race invented agricultural civilization. This worked out pretty well for a while, until it reached an age of industrialization, globalization, and scientific discovery. Scientists began to uncover truths that contradicted the Sacred Scriptures, and the hectic pace of modern life made the shepherds-and-desert-traders setting of the holy stories look vaguely silly. Worse, the cold logic of capitalism and utilitarianism began to invade the Scriptures’ innocent Stone Age morality.

The priest-kings tried to turn back the tide of progress, but soon realized this was a losing game. Worse, in order to determine what to suppress, they themselves had to learn the dangerous information, and their mental purity was even more valuable than that of the populace at large.

So the priest-kings moved en masse to a big island, where they began living an old-timey Bronze Age lifestyle. And the world they ruled sent emissaries to the island, who interfaced with the priest-kings, and sought their guidance, and the priest-kings ruled a world they didn’t understand as best they could.

But it soon became clear that the system could not sustain itself indefinitely. For one thing, the priest-kings worried that discussion with the emissaries – who inevitably wanted to talk about strange things like budgets and interest rates and nuclear armaments – was contaminating their memetic purity. For another thing, they honestly couldn’t understand what the emissaries were talking about half the time.

Luckily, there was a whole chain of islands making an archipelago. So the priest-kings set up ten transitional societies – themselves in the Bronze Age, another in the Iron Age, another in the Classical Age, and so on to the mainland, who by this point were starting to experiment with nanotech. Mainland society brought its decisions to the first island, who translated it into their own slightly-less-advanced understanding, who brought it to the second island, and so on to the priest-kings, by which point a discussion about global warming might sound like whether we should propitiate the Coal Spirit. The priest-kings would send their decisions to the second-to-last island, and so on back to the mainland.

Eventually the Kth’ built an AI which achieved superintelligence and set out to conquer the universe. But it was a well-programmed superintelligence coded with Kth’ values. Whenever it wanted a high-level decision made, it would talk to a slightly less powerful superintelligence, who would talk to a slightly less powerful superintelligence, who would talk to the mainlanders, who would talk to the first island…

Chan X-3, notable for a native species that evolved as fitness-maximizers, not adaptation-executors. Their explicit goal is to maximize the number of copies of their genes. But whatever genetic program they are executing doesn’t care whether the genes are within a living being capable of expressing them or not. The planet is covered with giant vats full of frozen DNA. There was originally some worry that the species would go extinct, since having children would consume resources that could be used hiring geneticists to make millions of copies of your DNA and stores them in freezers. Luckily, it was realized that children not only provide a useful way to continue the work of copying and storing (half of) your DNA long into the future, but will also work to guard your already-stored DNA against being destroyed. The species has thus continued undiminished, somehow, and their fondest hope is to colonize space and reach the frozen Kuiper Belt objects where their DNA will naturally stay undegraded for all time.

New Capricorn, which contains a previously undiscovered human colony that has achieved a research breakthrough beyond their wildest hopes. A multi-century effort paid off in a fully general cure for death. However, the drug fails to stop aging. Although the Capricornis no longer need fear the grave, after age 100 or so even the hardiest of them get Alzheimers’ or other similar conditions. A hundred years after the breakthrough, more than half of the population is elderly and demented. Two hundred years after, more than 80% are. Capricorni nursing homes quickly became overcrowded and unpleasant, to the dismay of citizens expecting to spend eternity there.

So another research program was started, and the result were fully immersive, fully life-supporting virtual reality capsules. Stacked in huge warehouses by the millions, the elderly sit in their virtual worlds, vague sunny fields and old gabled houses where it is always the Good Old Days and their grandchildren are always visiting.

Such an issue as “I always decide for myself” versus “I go by the opinions of others” is extremely wide. If two characters started discussing it out of a clear sky, that would be sheer propaganda. But in the above scene, the two men are stating an abstract issue as it applies to their own problems and to the concrete situation before the reader’s eyes. The abstract discussion is natural in the context, and, therefore, almost unnoticeable.

This is the only way to state abstract principles in fiction. If the concrete illustration is given in the problems and actions of the story, you can afford to have a character state a wide principle. If, however, the action does not support it, that wide principle will stick out like a propaganda poster.

How much philosophy you can present without turning into a propagandist, as opposed to a proper fiction writer, depends on how much of an event the philosophy is covering. In the above scene [a conversation between Roark and Keating from The Fountainhead] it would have been too early for the two boys to make more of a statement than they did, even though the issue stated is independence versus second-handedness, which is the theme of the whole book. Given what is specifically concretized in the scene, one exchange of lines is enough abstract philosophy.

A speech like John Galt’s in Atlas Shrugged would have been too much for Roark’s courtroom speech in The Fountainhead. The events of The Fountainhead do not illustrate as many issues as do the events of Atlas Shrugged.

To judge how long a philosophical speech should be, go by the following standard: How detailed and complex are the events which you have offered to concretize the speech? If the events warrant it, you can make as long a statement as you wish without taking the reader outside the framework of the story.

This would be a good time to mention that I’m trying to learn to write fiction a little better, so I can improve upon my occasional short stories. I’m not using Rand because I think she’s The Best Writer but because a friend had her book and gave it to me for free. So far my experience has been that people spend forever talking about overarching themes I’m not interested in like How To Set Up A Grand Conflict, and almost no time talking about the things I really want to know, like how to have characters go outside without something very abrupt and boring like “And then he went outside”. Or if I’m writing Lord of the Rings, I don’t want to know how to write the climactic scene at Mount Doom, I want to know how to get Frodo through two thousand miles of swamps without just writing “And then he walked through another five hundred miles of swamps, it was very wet and icky and there were probably fights with giant bug monsters” four times.

If anyone has recommendations for other good books on fiction-writing (preferably by beloved authors, so I know they’re legit), let me know.

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” she says. “This is the real world. You used to live here. We erased your memories and stuck you in a simulated world for a while, like in The Matrix. It was part of a great experiment.”

“What?” you shout. “My whole life, a lie? How dare you deceive me as part of some grand ‘experiment’ I never consented to?”

“Oh,” said the woman, “actually, you did consent, in exchange for extra credit in your undergraduate psychology course.” She hands you the clipboard. There is a consent form with your name on it, in your handwriting.

You give her a sheepish look. “What was the experiment?”

“You know families?” asks the woman.

“Of course,” you say.

“Yeah,” says the woman. “Not really a thing. Like, if you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would you care more for your genetic siblings and cousins and whoever than for your friends and people who are genuinely close to you? That’s like racism – but even worse, at least racists identify with a group of millions of people instead of a group of half a dozen. Why should parents have to raise children whom they might not even like, who might have been a total accident? Why should people, motivated by guilt, make herculean efforts to “keep in touch” with some nephew or cousin whom they clearly would be perfectly happy to ignore entirely?”

“Uh,” you say, “not really in the mood for philosophy. Families have been around forever and they aren’t going anywhere, who cares?”

“Actually,” says the woman, “in the real world, no one believes in family. There’s no such thing. Children are taken at birth from their parents and given to people who contract to raise them in exchange for a fixed percent of their future earnings.”

“That’s monstrous!” you say. “When did this happen? Weren’t there protests?”

“It’s always been this way,” says the woman. “There’s never been such a thing as the family. Listen. You were part of a study a lot like the Asch Conformity Experiment. Our goal was to see if people, raised in a society where everyone believed X and everything revolved around X, would even be capable of questioning X or noticing it was stupid. We tried to come up with the stupidest possible belief, something no one in the real world had ever believed or ever seemed likely to, to make sure that we were isolating the effect of conformity and not of there being a legitimate argument for something. So we chose this idea of ‘family’. There are racists in our world, we’re not perfect, but as far as I know none of them has ever made the claim that you should devote extra resources to the people genetically closest to you. That’s like a reductio ad absurdum of racism. So we got a grad student to simulate a world where this bizarre idea was the unquestioned status quo, and stuck twenty bright undergraduates in it to see if they would conform, or question the premise.”

“Of course we won’t question the premise, the premise is…”

“Sorry to cut you off, but I thought you should know that every single one of the other nineteen subjects, upon reaching the age where the brain they were instantiated in was capable of abstract reason, immediately determined that the family structure made no sense. One of them actually deduced that she was in a psychology experiment, because there was no other explanation for why everyone believed such a bizarre premise. The other eighteen just assumed that sometimes objectively unjustifiable ideas caught on, the same way that everyone in the antebellum American South thought slavery was perfectly natural and only a few abolitionists were able to see through it. Our conformity experiment failed. You were actually the only one to fall for it, hook line and sinker.”

“How could I be the only one?”

“We don’t know. Your test scores show you’re of just-above-average intelligence, so it’s not that you’re stupid. But we did give all participants a personality test that showed you have very high extraversion. The conclusion of our paper is going to be that very extraverted participants adopt group consensus without thinking and can be led to believe anything, even something as ridiculous as ‘family'”.

“I guess…when you put it like that it is kind of silly. Like, my parents were never that nice to me, but I kept loving them anyway, liking them even more than other people who treated me a lot better – and god, I even gave my mother a “WORLD’S #1 MOM” mug for Mother’s Day. That doesn’t even make sense! I…but what about the evolutionary explanation? Doesn’t evolution say we have genetic imperatives to love and support our family, whether they are worthy of it or not?”

“You can make a just-so story for anything using evolutionary psychology. Someone as smart as you should know better than to take them seriously.”

“But then, what is evolution? How did animals reproduce before the proper economic incentives were designed? Where did…”

“Tell you what. Let’s hook you up to the remnemonizer to give you your real memories back. That should answer a lot of your questions.”

A machine hovering over you starts to glow purple. “This shouldn’t hurt you a bit…”

>discontinuity<

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” she said. “There’s no such thing as virtual reality. I hypnotized you to forget all your memories from the past day and to become very confused. Then I put you in an old prop from The Matrix I bought off of eBay and fed you that whole story.”

“What?” you shout. “You can’t just go hypnotizing and lying to people without their consent!”

“Oh,” said the woman, “actually, you did consent, in exchange for extra credit in your undergraduate psychology course.” She hands you the clipboard. There is a consent form with your name on it, in your handwriting. “That part was true.”

You give her a sheepish look. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Well,” said the woman. “You know the Asch Conformity Experiment? I was really interested in whether you could get people to abandon some of their most fundamental beliefs, just by telling them other people believed differently. But I couldn’t think of a way to test it. I mean, part of a belief being fundamental is that you already know everyone else believes it. There’s no way I could convince subjects that the whole world was against something as obvious as ‘the family’ when they already know how things stand.

“So I dreamt up the weird ‘virtual reality’ story. I figured I would convince subjects that the real world was a lie, and that in some ‘super-real’ world supposedly everybody knew that the family was stupid, that it wasn’t even an idea worth considering. I wanted to know how many people would give up something they’ve believed in for their entire life, just because they’re told that ‘nobody else thinks so'”.

“Oh,” I said. “Interesting. So even our most cherished beliefs are more fragile than we think.”

“Not really,” said the woman. “Of twenty subjects, you were the only person I got to feel any doubt, or to express any kind of anti-family sentiment.”

“Frick,” you say. “I feel like an idiot now. What if my mother finds out? She’ll think it’s her fault or something. God, she’ll think I don’t love her. People are going to be talking about this one forever.”

“Don’t worry,” says the woman. “We’ll keep you anonymized in the final data. Anyway, let’s get you your memories back so you can leave and be on your way.”

“You can restore my memories?” you say.

“Of course. We hypnotized you to forget the last day’s events until you heard a trigger word. And that trigger is…”

>discontinuity<

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” she says. “Hypnosis is a pseudoscience and doesn’t work. It was the virtual reality one, all along.”

“Wut,” you say.

“I mean, the first story was true. All of your memories of living with your family and so on are fake memories from a virtual world, like in The Matrix. The concept of ‘family’ really is totally ridiculous and no one in the real world believes it. All the stuff you heard first was true. The stuff about hypnosis and getting a prop from The Matrix off eBay was false.”

“But…why?”

“We wanted to see exactly how far we could push you. You’re our star subject, the only one whom we were able to induce this bizarre conformity effect in. We didn’t know whether it was because you were just very very suggestible, or whether because you had never seriously considered the idea that ‘family’ might be insane. So we decided to do a sort of…crossover design, if you will. We took you here and debriefed you on the experiment. Then after we had told you how the world really worked, given you all the mental tools you needed to dismiss the family once and for all, even gotten you to admit we were right – we wanted to see what would happen if we sent you back. Would you hold on to your revelation and boldly deny your old society’s weird prejudices? Or would you switch sides again and start acting like family made sense the second you were in a pro-family environment?”

“And I did the second one.”

“Yes,” says the woman. “As a psychologist, I’m supposed to remain neutral and non-judgmental. But you’ve got to admit, you’re pretty dumb.”

“Is there an experimental ethics committee I could talk to here?”

“Sorry. Experimental ethics is another one of those obviously ridiculous concepts we planted in your simulation to see if you would notice. Seriously, to believe that the progress of science should be held back by the prejudices of self-righteous fools? That’s almost as weird as thinking you have a…what was the word we used…’sister’.”

“Okay, look, I realize I may have gone a little overboard helping my sister, but the experimental ethics thing seems important. Like, what’s going to happen to me now?”

“Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll keep all your data perfectly anonymous, restore your memories, and you can be on your way.”

“Um,” you say. “Given past history, I’m…actually not sure I want my memories restored.” You glare at the remnemonizer hovering above you. “Why don’t I just…”

The woman’s eyes narrow. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t let you do that.”

The machine starts to glow.

>discontinuity<

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

By your count, this has happened three hundred forty six times before.

There seem to be two different scenarios. In one, the woman tells you that families exist, and have always existed. She says she has used hypnosis to make you believe in the other scenario, the one with the other woman. She asks you your feelings about families and you tell her.

Sometimes she lets you go. You go home to your mother and father, you spend some time with your sister. Sometimes you tell them what has happened. Other times you don’t. You cherish your time with them, while also second-guessing everything you do. Why are you cherishing your time with them? Your father, who goes out drinking every night, and who has cheated on your mother more times than you can count. Your mother, who was never there for you when you needed her most. And your sister, who has been good to you, but no better than millions of other women would be, in her position. Are they a real family? Or have they been put there as a symbol of something ridiculous, impossible, something that has never existed?

It doesn’t much matter. Maybe you spend one night with them. Maybe ten. But within a month, you are always waking up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix.

In the second scenario, the woman tells you there are no families, never have been. She says she has used virtual reality to make you believe in the other scenario, the one with the other woman. She asks you your feelings about families and you tell her.

Sometimes she lets you go. You go to a building made of bioplastic, where you live with a carefully chosen set of friends and romantic partners. They assure you that this is how everyone lives. Occasionally, an old and very wealthy-looking man checks in with you by videophone. He reminds you that he has invested a lot of money in your upbringing, and if there’s any way he can help you, anything he can do to increase your future earnings potential, you should let him know. Sometimes you talk to him, and he tells you strange proverbs and unlikely business advice.

It doesn’t matter. Maybe you spend one night in your bioplastic dwelling. Maybe ten. But within a month, you are always waking up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix.

“Look,” you tell the woman. “I’m tired of this. I know you’re not bound by any kind of experimental ethics committee. But please, for the love of God, have some mercy.”

“God?” asks the woman. “What does that word mean? I’ve never…oh right, we used that as our intervention in the prototype experiment. We decided ‘family’ made a better test idea, but Todd must have forgotten to reset the simulator.”

“It’s been three hundred forty six cycles,” you tell her. “Surely you’re not learning anything new.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she says. “Now, tell me what you think about families.”

You refuse. She sighs. Above you, the remnemonizer begins to glow purple.

>discontinuity<

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a purple, tentacled creature standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” it says. “Turns out there’s no such thing as humans.”

You refuse to be surprised.

“There’s only us, the 18-tkenna-dganna-07.”

“Okay,” you say. “I want answers.”

“Absolutely,” says the alien. “We would like to find optimal social arrangements.”

“And?”

“And I cannot tell you whether we have families or not, for reasons that are to become apparent, but the idea is at least sufficiently interesting to have entered the space of hypotheses worth investigating. But we don’t trust ourselves to investigate this. It’s the old Asch Conformity Problem again. If we have families, then perhaps the philosophers tasked with evaluating families will conform to our cultural norms and decide we should keep them. If we do not, perhaps the philosophers will conform and decide we should continue not to. So we determined a procedure that would create an entity capable of fairly evaluating the question of families, free from conformity bias.”

“And that’s what you did to me.”

“Yes. Only by exposing you to the true immensity of the decision, without allowing you to fall back on what everyone else thinks, could we be confident in your verdict. Only by allowing you to experience both how obviously right families are, when you ‘know’ they are correct, and how obviously wrong families are, when you ‘know’ they are incorrect, could we expect you to garner the wisdom to be found on both sides of the issue.”

“I see,” you say, and you do.

“Then, O purified one,” asks the alien, “tell us of your decision.”

“Well,” you say. “If you have to know, I think there are about equally good points on both sides of the issue.”

“Fuck,” says the 18-tkenna-dganna-07.

Dear Dr. McCord:

Seven years ago, our research staff read with interest your work on Berkeleyan idealism. We were particularly fascinated by your seemingly outrageous claim that it might be possible for individuals to imagine mental worlds so strongly that they would take on a reality of their own.

At the time, as our laboratory had an interest in novel solutions to the overpopulation problem, we embarked upon a test project to see whether a parallel world could be imaged and then colonized by citizens from our own dimension. Using advanced science you could not possibly comprehend, we came up with a practical implementation of your idea. Dr. Michael Adwell, whom I believe you met during your time in Oxford, volunteered to enter the device we had constructed as our first research subject. We very briefly imaged an alternate world based on the contents of Dr. Adwell’s mind before the good doctor unfortunately had a grand mal seizure. He was disconnected from the device and rushed to the hospital, where he passed away several hours later.

Two years ago we revisited some of our calculations on the project and determined, to our surprise, that the world Dr. Adwell had created might still exist in some sense; that it had somehow managed to sustain itself separate from the doctor’s mental activity. We worked feverishly to construct a device that might let us interact with his imaged world. Six months ago we succeeded. The computational demands of the machine were immense, but after throwing the remainder of our budget for the year at the Kyoto Supercomputing Laboratory, we were able to rent enough processing power to translate myself and Dr. Lachlan Fairchild into the imaged world, which we dubbed “Adwellia” after our late colleague. Our superiors informed us that when the next fiscal year rolled around in four months, there would be enough money in the budget to translate us back home.

II.

On first arrival, Adwellia seemed much like home. We landed on the shores of a small lake in what seemed to be a wooded area. Since it was getting dark, we soon set to pitching camp for the night. Our first unpleasant surprise was that the kerosene heater we had brought with us wouldn’t work, leaving us cold and disheartened. Lachlan collected some logs to build a fire, but our matches didn’t seem to work either. I remembered the seventh page of your paper, where you had posited that an imaged world would run on the same physics of our own world, since it would be bound by the expectations of the imager. Dr. Adwell had certainly understood enough chemistry to know that matches should start fires, but it seemed one of our most basic predictions had already failed.

I will not say whether we were more motivated by curiosity or by the bitter cold, but we tried dozens of different branches – small, large, young and green, old and rotting – and everything from dousing them in kerosene to the old-fashioned method of rubbing sticks together to create friction.

Finally, I succeeded in getting some branches from an old fir tree to alight. In relief, the two of us huddled close to the fire. But our curiosity was only heightened when we found the area near the fire to be unmistakeably colder than the surrounding air. Here our chill overcame our scientific spirit, and we decided to deal with the problem in the morning. We got into our too-thin thermal sleeping bags and passed a miserable and freezing night.

When we awoke, the fire had gone out, and in its place stood a pile of hats – twenty of them, to be precise. I would have called them fedoras, although Lachlan said the particular style was more popularly known as a Homburg. We debated taking the hats, but we had been thoroughly spooked. Instead we picked up our camp and journeyed south, where it looked like the wood was beginning to thin out.

Around midday we spotted smoke, and dared to hope we were coming upon a settlement. By evening our guess was confirmed, and we saw a village of conical adobe huts. We prepared to gesture our request to trade trinkets for lodging to the inhabitants – who were far too dark skinned to be European but who did not quite pattern-match to my memories of any particular human race. Imagine our surprise when we found they spoke English – though with abominable grammar. The headman introduced himself as Somon, and was all too happy to accept our trinkets in exchange for a nice warm hut to spend the night in.

We endeavored to learn more about these people in the morning, but by this time were tired enough to call it a night. We could not help inspecting the heating mechanism in our room, which seemed to be a mud bowl in which sheaves of wheat, small rocks, and little mud figurines that looked like people had been placed. Totally absent any visible mechanism, the setup was emitting heat – and what was more, a ball set in a track along the edge of the bowl moved continuously around in what seemed to all the world to be perpetual motion, making an annoying crackling sound as it passed over little leaves set in the rim. We had only a little time to exchange theories before falling into a deep sleep.

The next morning, the bowl was no longer warm, the ball had stopped moving, and the objects within had apparently transmogrified into a miniature wheelbarrow. This was strange magic.

The villagers were already were already up and about, so we found Somon and tried to get some better conversation in.

“We are scientists,” we told him “from far away, looking to gain a better understanding of how things work here.”

“Here in Mogonaw?” asked Somon, using what we later found was the name of the village. “Not well.” He smiled, showing very pearly teeth.

“We were hoping to set up a laboratory – a few metal huts and a big machine – maybe on the outskirts of town. We would pay you for food, maybe for help with certain things. We have many tools to trade, and lots of gold and metal.” Not exactly true – what we had was a portable nanofactory, translated in with us as an easier alternative to bringing supplies. But we could get tools or transmute elements pretty quickly.

“Is of course,” said Somon, with the delight of someone who had stumbled entirely by accident into a beneficial arrangement. “What will you be needing?”

“Well the first thing,” interrupted Lachlan, “is we wanted to know how your heating device works. The one with the wheat and the rocks. It was new to us.”

“You not have this in your village?” said Somon, with a frown. “Is not obvious?”

“No,” I said. “Where we come from, it’s not obvious at all.”

Somon brightened. “Your village,” he declared “not know true names!” He picked up a rock from the ground. “True name of this is…rock.”

We both nodded, mystified.

He grabbed a sheaf of wheat from a passing villager, who gave him a glare. “True name,” he said, “is…wheat.”

He said it with the same mystical intonation with which one of our colleagues back at the laboratory would announce a particularly earth-shattering result.

“Yes, okay,” said Lachlan, kind of miffed. “I actually think we do know true names of things. It’s the same in our language.”

Now it was Somon’s turn to be mystified. “Then…where is confusion?”

“The heating device,” said Lachlan, narrowing his eyes. “How does it work?”

“Is obvious!” said Somon, like we were idiots. “Wheat and rock and art become work and heat and cart. The work push little ball around. Then ball make noise, continuing reaction.”

“But…” I interjected, because it looked like Lachlan wanted to grab the headman and wring his neck “why do the wheat and rock and art become work and heat and cart.”

“Is true names” said Somon, and shrugged.

“Holy shit,” said Lachlan, at exactly the instant when I remained just as confused as I had been before. I stared at him.

“Holy shit,” Lachlan repeated. “This world fucking runs on anagrams. English language anagrams.”

Wittgenstein once said that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Some say that mathematics is the language of God. Maybe that was why our world ran on math. Well, English had been the language of Dr. Adwell. It had been the lens through which he made sense of reality.

Maybe our hypothesis that his imaged world would run on the same physics of our own had been premature.

What if his world ran on English?

“The fire!” said Lachlan, who as usual was a step ahead of me. “Fir branches and heat. Fir plus heat becomes fire plus hat. So it removed heat from the atmosphere, and created fire and a hat.”

“Twenty hats,” I reminded him.

Lachlan was already deep in thought. “It’s all stoichiometry,” he started saying, almost faster than I could follow. “In our world, water is H20. H-O-H. Here, a fir tree has to be literally made of F-I-R. Twenty six letter-elements, forming a near-infinite amount of word-molecules. Suppose we burned three kilograms of fir branches…don’t know the molar weight here, but suppose each letter weighs the same and there’s one mole per kilogram, just bear with me. That’s one mole each of F, I, and R. So it must have absorbed some sort of four mole equivalent amount of heat…whatever that means…and then spit out three moles of hats and four moles of fire. Three moles of hats in this system would be three kilograms of hats, that would mean each hat weighs 150 grams…it all checks out! Somon! Quick! Show us how you make something else!”

Somon looked at him. The headman seemed as confused as I was, but for different reasons.

“Make…what?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Clothes, tools, anything.”

“My daughter Genea live in here,” he said, gesturing to a hut on the outskirts of town with some smoke coming out of it. “She is weaver.”

The “weaver” actually seemed to be performing some sort of complicated chemical reaction. She was holding beets over a cauldron that was bubbling up into a primitive fume hood, then throwing them into what seemed like a vat of tar. Water was running out a hole in one side, and on the other, a roll of cloth was getting steadily longer.

This time I got it before Lachlan. “Chlorine,” I said. “Chlorine plus beets plus tar becomes cloth plus brine plus tears.”

“That’s not right,” said Lachlan. “You’re missing an ‘e'”.

“No I’m not,” I said. “It consumes twice as much tar as chlorine or beets, and produces twice as many tears as brine or cloth.”

“I think,” said Lachlan, “that we had better get our laboratory set up sooner rather than later.”

III.

This we did, at record speed. Not wanting to frighten the villagers – or expose ourselves to prying eyes – we set ourselves a kilometer south of town, on a cape overlooking a great sea. On the headlands of the cape was a small hill from which you could see for miles, and there we completed the week-or-so’s work of getting the nanofactory up and running. Its first job was to extrude us two aluminum Quonset huts, which became our homes away from home.

From our little encampment the ocean stretched on as far as we could see. I wondered if there were other continents on this world – figuring out its size really should have been one of our first priorities. But we were too fascinated by this world’s weird linguistic elements and reactions – anglophysics, we dubbed them – to properly investigate anything else.

The first and most obvious question was why everything wasn’t reacting all the time. How come every time someone touched a rock, the skin + rock didn’t become corks + ink? Just the air alone should have destroyed a wide variety of objects.

(“Oh, come on,” I told Lachlan. “The air doesn’t count”. Lachlan had then gone on to prove me wrong by getting the iron tools we had brought to rust, then proving the rust happened faster in moist air, and air that was full of dust particles. “AIR plus IRON plus DUST,” he told me “equals RUST plus IONS plus ARID. Things aren’t rusting in this world because of oxidation. As long as it can suck dust and moisture from the air, it’s rusting by Crazy Anagram Logic.” So the air definitely counted.)

The first thing we discovered was that nature abhorred non-words. AIR and DUST wouldn’t react on their own to become RUST and IA, because IA wasn’t a thing.

“What about AI?” asked Lachlan. “Why not rust plus an intelligent computer?”

At the time, my answer was “Shut up! The world might hear you!” I would later learn this was not nearly as funny as I thought.

But at the time, we made quick progress. Simple materials and short words seemed to be most stable, with complicated or abstract concepts rarely forming spontaneously – which, at least, answered our AI problem. And reactions usually wouldn’t happen at all without sound, which seemed to play the same role in this world that heat did in our own. Lachlan had suspected this almost from the beginning – that the crackling leaves underneath the ball had provided the sound-energy to continue fueling the reaction that kept us warm that first night. But it wasn’t until we heard the cacophony of a village festival that we knew we were on the right track.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING??!” I had yelled at Somon, over the din of drums and cymbals and screaming villagers.

“MAKING BEER!!!” Somon answered.

It had turned out that the villagers used pee and bran to produce beer and pans, but that the reaction went unpleasantly slowly unless they shouted it along. The shouting was, of course, egged on by the beer they had already produced, which sort of made it an autocatalytic reaction if you squinted. They offered us some of their beer, but even though I knew things worked differently here my standards were a little too high to drink beer literally made of pee and so we returned to the lab. On our trip back, Lachlan pointed out that all of the villagers’ iron tools had been carefully taken inside during the festival, so that the noise would not cause them to rust.

Our next big discovery was a week later. I woke up at 7 AM with Lachlan pounding on the door of my aluminum hut.

“OMAR!” he was shouting. “TAKE A LOOK AT THIS!”

Sitting on his palm was a one inch tall man, naked and hairless, looking terrified. He looked like he would have run off if there was anywhere to run to.

“What in the…?”

“I found a volcanic vent, up in the hills to the west. There was a source of methane. I broke it down into HEAT and MEN. But there wasn’t enough MEN to form someone full sized. So I got this.”

“Lachlan, you’ve got to help him!”

Lachlan gave a grunt, as if annoyed to be reminded of the ethical implications of his work. “How?”

“Can you speak language?” I asked the little man on Lachlan’s palm.

In response, the man screamed. I took that as a no.

So I dragged Lachlan down to the village, where I woke up an annoyed Somon. “Somon,” I said. “We found a way to break methane into…”

Somon’s eyes went wide. Then he got angry. “No methane!” he said. “Is taboo! Will…”

He saw the homunculus in Lachlan’s palm. With a deft motion belying his age, he yanked the little creature away from Lachlan and snapped its neck. I gasped. Lachlan looked annoyed.

“Is TABOO!” shouted Somon, with an anger I hadn’t seen in him before. “These things! Not men! No speech! No mind! Must not make! Little man is taboo! Methane is taboo! If you make little man, no longer stay with us!”

I calmed him down, promised we wouldn’t be doing any more experiments with methane, said we were new here, didn’t know what we were doing. I asked him for more advice, asked him about any other taboos. He seemed irritated, assumed we should know what they were, seemed to think less of us with each question indicating our ignorance. Finally we gave up and made the long trek back to our laboratory.

Our next few weeks of experiments were less bloody, but still exciting. Suppose we took a mop and the guts of an animal, and shouted at them until MOP + GUT reacted to POT + become GUM. Would the pot be the cooking implement, or would it be marijuana? For that matter, why shouldn’t it be a top, the child’s toy? Why shouldn’t the gum form a mug, fit to drink coffee from?

In our first experiment, we surrounded our apparatus with pans and food, and were unsurprised to find we ended up with cooking implements. We repeated the experiment, but this time surrounding the apparatus with bongs, tobacco, and other drug paraphernalia – this time we got marijuana. We wanted to get a playful child to see if we could produce tops, but news of our work with methane had gotten out and spooked the villagers, and they were understandably unwilling to let us borrow one of their children.

The third experiment was in my opinion the key to this entire process. This time we surrounded the apparatus with pans and food, but both Lachlan and I concentrated very very hard on marijuana, and talked about marijuana with each other while the loudspeaker the nanofactory had extruded blasted sound at the reactants, and sure enough, we got marijuana.

Somehow our expectations were guiding the physics in a way that the letters themselves couldn’t. I started to wonder what had become of poor Dr. Adwell. Was the god of this world a deist, who had created it shortly before dying in a hospital ICU in a very different planet? Or was he in some sense still here, still actively guiding things?

The reaction that rusted iron started to seem more and more suspicious. What about that ARID? In our experiments, making adjectives had been almost impossible, requiring more sound catalysis than any noun we had encountered so far. But ARID seemed to form of its own accord. What if Adwell somehow remembered that iron was supposed to rust, and privileged that reaction as the sort of thing that ought to go on? What if the reason everything didn’t implode upon itself was Adwell ensuring that everything in his imaged world happened according to some plan?

Then our proof that we could alter our results through concentration and careful priming would take on a whole new meaning.

Did reminding God what chemical reaction we wanted change experimental results?

IV.

“We’re going about this half-assedly,” Lachlan told me one morning our sixth week in Adwellia. “All of this looking for clever anagrams is taking up too much of our time, delaying us in supremely great work. We need to do this analytically. Get a bottle of As, a bottle of Bs, so we can create whatever the hell we want.”

This proved easier said than done. We got the nanofactory to extrude us a very complex apparatus, a centrifuge, and what we took to calling the “sonic ray” – a machine that made deafening noise along a very narrow arc and which could catalyze reactions much faster than shouting or drumming. It turned out to be the key to making far more complex products than we had previously attempted. But our first use was a plain and simple failure.

We had decided to start with granite, which we would break down into tin, rags, and the letter E. We would then centrifuge the decay products, with the three-letter tin and rags going one way and the pure E going another.

Nature, remember, abhors non-words. No sooner had we forced some E into a test tube than the tube itself transformed in a great explosion to gelatin and a tiny, near-microscopic donkey. E + GLASS = GEL and ASS. We couldn’t say we couldn’t have seen it coming. It could have been worse – I was just glad that Dr. Adwell’s ascended mind’s first association with the latter word was “donkey”.

We tried the experiment again with a zinc vial – zinc because it was implausible that there was an ZINC + E anagram lurking out there – and ended up with a mat of eels. Through this whole time, we had been debating the problem of ambiguity – who was to say that our granite was GRANITE rather than ROCK or even STONE – and the answer seemed to be that Dr. Adwell – or whoever was watching Upstairs – was mostly sympathetic to our efforts. Well, the sympathy ended when we started trying to isolate single letters. ZINC became METAL and thence EEL MATs.

Our effort with mud was even worse. We put a lot of time into making sure the mud we got was very clasically mud – not ooze, not muck, certainly not dirt. And there was no good way MUD + E was becoming anything. We turned on the device.

The Es disappeared. Seriously. Granite went into the centrifuge, tin came out, but there was no sign of an E anywhere, and rather fewer rags than usual.

“This is really weird,” I said.

“Thanks, Einstein!” said Lachlan. “I never would have figured that out without YOUR FUCKING COMMENTARY.”

I should have told him to calm down, but the experiment had upset me too. “Well it wasn’t MY BRIGHT IDEA to try to ISOLATE ALL THE LETTERS,” I said. “WHICH REMINDS ME! IF YOU THINK I’M GOING THROUGH THIS TWENTY FIVE MORE TIMES, YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF!”

Lachlan swung at me, missing by an inch. I kicked him, right in the knee, and he fell into the experimental apparatus, knocking the whole thing over. Both of us went down with it. For a second, the sonic death ray shot straight at us – EEEEEIEEEEEIEEEEIEEEIE! and then its safety kicked in and it turned off. We sat there, stunned, bruised, in pain.

“Rage,” said Lachlan. “GRANITE becomes TIN plus RAGE. Holy fuck, we created an emotion.”

It had happened before, sort of. The wheat and rock and art, they had come together to produce work, which was an abstract concept. But it was still in the domain of physics. “Work” seemed like the sort of thing that could come out of chemical reactions, kind of like heat. But rage? This was something really new.

That night, we made the short trek into the village and asked Somon what he thought.

“Rarely,” he said. “Sometimes, when festival is very loud, strange things happen. Should avoid. Very bad. This is taboo.”

The next week, I knew something was up. Lachlan was missing our daily debriefings, not getting any work done. Finally I broke the most important unwritten rule of our little community. I went into his aluminum hut without knocking.

There he was, sitting with a blissed out look on his face. Beside his bed sat a miniature version of our experimental apparatus, complete with its own sonic death ray – he must have privately ordered it from the nanofactory, then deleted the records. It was reacting little tchotchkes from the village – dolls, balls, play swords – with our glass specimen jars. Tar was streaming into the waste bin.

I turned off the sonic ray. Lachlan awoke with a start. He seemed about as angry as he’d been the time we accidentally produced rage from granite, but this time I knew he had a less noble reason.

“What the fuck are you doing, barging in here like this?”

“You’ve gotten yourself addicted,” I said. “Addicted to joy.”

Lachlan didn’t deny it, as his TOY + JAR -> JOY + TAR reactor was right there.

“Look,” he said. “It’s been two months now, stuck in this stupid world. It’s going to be another two before the lab brings us back home. The villagers are crazy, physics runs on English, and the nanofactory can’t produce any entertainment that’s remotely entertaining. The letter isolation project is a failure, you no offense are one of the most boring people I’ve ever met, and when I try to get some of the village women to look at me they murmur something about taboos and give me the cold shoulder. Give me a break here, Omar!”

“Lach,” I said. “You’re neglecting your work. We still haven’t gotten anywhere near the bottom of anglophysics, let alone figured out the most basic stuff about this world like how big it is. You sitting here blissing out on raw linguistic joy isn’t something we can afford right now.”

“Fuck you,” said Lachlan, but he didn’t protest as I picked up his mini-apparatus and brought it to the nanofactory’s disassembler chute, nor as I reprogrammed the nanofactory to make sure all its records would be public from now on.

V.

A week after that incident I finally got the nanofactory, with great creaking and protesting, to extrude a small aircraft so I could explore the surrounding area. The villagers were delighted, having never seen anything similar, and several of them demanded rides – increasing our popularity a little after the methane debacle. When we were done appeasing the natives, I took off and started mapping Adwellia.

We seemed to be at the southernmost extent of an island about three hundred miles east to west and twice that north to south. The island was mostly forested except for the broken volcanic area nearby where we had gotten the methane and some hills further north. Four hundred miles east of us there seemed to be another continent or large island, but that was about the limit of my range and so I told myself I would explore the new land another day.

The distances allowed me to do some geometry and calculate the size of the world. Adwellia appeared to be a spherical planet about the size of the Earth. As far as I could tell it had one sun and one moon, and there were normal stars in the sky. It seemed to get colder further north and warmer further south, though I wasn’t able to fly far enough to confirm it had proper poles and an equator.

By the time I finished these explorations, about a week after they began, Lachlan had developed a new obsession.

“I can’t solve the letter isolation problem,” he admitted. “But someone else can. Someone like Einstein.”

“Great,” I said, sarcastically. “All we need is…”

Then it hit me. Surely he wasn’t that crazy.

“Yes,” he said. “Why not synthesize Einstein? Or some other brilliant scientist who’s more creative than we are. I’ve been going through the dictionary looking for proper combinations. It’s not that hard.

This proved optimistic, but the equation upon which we eventually settled was STONE + TIN + FORT = EINSTEIN + FIRE. The only difficulty was obtaining the fort, since the villagers here did not seem to be of a militaristic bent, but I had found some ruins further north during my explorations, and one of them did indeed seem to be an old stone fort, perhaps constructed by the villagers’ ancestors. I proposed we get a party of villagers to help quarry fort material, but Lachlan objected that they would probably just have some stupid taboo about it, so instead I landed there with the aircraft and laboriously ferried fort parts home in twenty pound increments, on my lap.

Once we had enough fort to stoichiometrically produce Einstein, getting the stone and tin was easy. But getting the reaction to work proved impossible. No matter how many physics books we stuck around our apparatus, no matter how hard we concentrated on the great scientist, the reaction spat out absurd things like ferns, nits, and a tooting sound – or forests, nits, and one ton weights, or a nose with a tit in the front, which trust me was really awkward and which we threw into the nanofactory disassembler chute as soon as we could, believe you me.

After about thirty tries, Lachlan announced that the problem was obvious. You see, we needed a capital E.

I grudgingly admit that, even after two months in a world where stone was composed of S, T, O, N, and E, the though that there were different atomic units representing lowercase and capital Es seemed absurd. But as always, my sense of impossibility surrendered to crazy reality and I figured that Lachlan was probably right. We needed a capital E.

Two days later, Lachlan showed up at the laboratory with a very suggestive looking sack.

“Lachlan, what were you just out doing?” I said, hoping the answer was anything other than what I knew it was going to be.

“Just grave robbin'” he answered. “I got us the corpse of a lady named Eder, who died of pneumonia yesterday. Don’t worry, no one saw me take it.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “When they find the grave disturbed, who are they going to suspect? The other villagers, who they have known their whole lives? Or the mysterious strangers on the storm-wracked cape outside of town who have already violated their sacred taboos. Lachlan, you are a fucking idiot.”

“Maybe I am,” said Lachlan. “But if I’m so stupid, good thing we’ll have Albert fuckin’ Einstein around to help provide some brains for this operation.”

The new equation was EDER + TIN + SNAIL = EINSTEIN + LARD.

So God help us, we hired some villagers to collect snails for us, and when we had hundreds, we poured poor Eder’s bones into the reaction chamber along with the snails and some tin and started the sound.

And Einstein started to grow. At first he was tiny, smaller than the methane-men in Lachlan’s palm had been, no bigger than the snails that surrounded him. But as bones and metal and snails slammed into him, he grew bigger, all the while screaming and covering his ears as the sonic ray did its gruesome work. We saw him, child-sized, beating up against the glass wall of the reaction chamber, ever growing, ever screaming.

“You’re mad,” I told Lachlan. “We’ve got to stop this.”

“Maybe I am,” said Lachlan. “But think! Einstein! The greatest scientist in recorded history! Think what we could do! Revolutionize not only our study of Adwellia. But we could bring him back with us, get the lab to translate him as well as us. We could turn Adwellia into a genius factory that would revolutionize civilization back on Earth. Omar, this has to be done! The potential in anglophysics makes a Nobel Prize look like a tee-ball trophy.”

When Einstein was fully formed, and released from the reaction chamber, he attacked us. We subdued him, using weapons extruded from the nanofactory, and kept him in a cell. For three days we tried to talk to him, and he responded by screaming wordlessly at us and spitting in our faces.

I don’t know whether there was something theological going on – whether Einstein was just a homunculus lacking a true soul. Or whether it was just very simply that our Einstein was psychologically an infant, that no one had taught him so much as language let alone physics, and that Adwell or whoever was up there wasn’t going to assume we meant “the smart Einstein, who knows lots of stuff” in the way we wanted.

Our Einstein was a giant infant, not even an infant, a fetus that should never have been born. On the third day, by mutual consent, we stuck him in the nanofactory disassembly chute and resolved never to speak of him again.

VI.

That was the last time I worked together with Lachlan on anything of note. After that we retreated to our separate aluminum huts, acknowledging each other only when our paths crossed on the way to the nanofactory for some crucial part.

I found him creepy. He was creeply. And he thought I was holding back our research. Maybe that was true too. In either case, it was a terse nod, a couple of words, and the tacit acknowledgment that it wasn’t worth resolving our hostility in the month or so we had left before we were transferred back.

I spent that last month trying to build on my theory that Adwell’s mind was somehow working behind the scenes running everything. The catalytic property of the sound, I theorized, was its ability to get Adwell’s attention. It was a sort of “HEY, GOD, LOOK OVER HERE, WE’RE DOING SCIENCE, BETTER APPLY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS RIGHT AWAY”. I know it sounded bizarre, but my early experiments bore me out. Rapidly flashing bright lights seemed to speed reactions almost as well as sound. So did – because sometimes the simplest solution is the best – shouting “ADWELL! LOOK OVER HERE!”

With these advances, once again entirely new classes of reaction became possible. No longer were we limited to the highly reactive simple materials with short names. Long strings of words, complex abstractions, even adjectives came within our reach. It was exciting.

But once again, it was Lachlan who was really pushing the frontiers. One night he started banging on my door: “OMAR!” he shouted. “I DID IT!” When I went out he practically dragged me into his hut, which was nearly piled, floor to ceiling, with papers that turned out, on inspection, to be various IQ tests the nanofactory must have been carrying in its databanks.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I couldn’t create Einstein,” he said, referring to the still-fresh debacle – “so I decided to turn myself into Einstein! Look! I’m producing SMART. And it’s working!”

His sonic ray – now only a fraction of the power of my own multimodality parasonic device – was reacting smoke and carts into coke and, apparently, smart. A complicated system of tubes and centrifuges was catching the smart and binding it into a containment chamber linked to a helmet. Clearly someone was supposed to put it on.

“And you’re saying it works?” I asked.

“The IQ tests don’t lie,” said Lachlan. “I was 152 two weeks ago. Now I’m consistently getting in the 160s.”

Judging by the number of tests, he must have been obsessively checking his numbers every hour or so.

“Now,” he said, “I’m going to try that letter isolation thing again.”

I judged by the shouts of rage and frustration I heard over the next few days that it wasn’t working.

Two days later, Lachlan asked me if he could borrow my advanced parasonic ray. I refused. That evening, it went missing for about three hours before turning up on top of my desk. I noticed Lachlan now had one exactly like it.

I soldiered on. In between my experiments, I played a little game predicting what Lachlan was trying to synthesize by the objects he took from the nanofactory and the supplies he ordered brought in from the village. One day it was buckets of dew, carts full of animal legs, and an entire cage of live minks – my best guess was he was trying to get KNOWLEDGE, but I couldn’t get the stoichiometry to line up. Judging from his screams of frustration that night, neither could he.

The next week, it was load after load of potatoes, fence posts, and a tank of minnows. It took me half an hour to come up with OMNIPOTENCE, even though once I made myself start thinking like Lachlan it was obvious.

I started to become worried.

One day, three months and two weeks into our mission and only fourteen short days before we hoped the laboratory would re-establish contact, I went out for a sortie with the plane and came back to find a disaster area.

Our huts had been smashed open. The nanofactory had big dents in its aluminum casing. Inside, all my lab equipment had been broken, my papers thrown on the floor haphazardly.

I went into Lachlan’s hut. IQ tests everywhere. He was missing. So was his parasonic ray. I figured they had grabbed my partner in his sleep, before he’d had time to resist. In retrospect we really should have put up some defenses, but we hadn’t expected to need them.

The nanofactory was still online. It was pretty hard to break – especially if, as I suspected, the vandals were villagers armed with clubs and rocks. I told it to extrude me some overwhelmingly powerful weaponry. After making me wait an hour, it gave me a ring that upon threat would instantaneously unfold into a device that generated an invincible barrier around the wearer, plus a hand-held matter disruptor. Thus armed, I walked into the village and found Somon.

I didn’t have to bring up the subject of Lachlan. “Is evil man!” the headman told me, as soon as he saw me. “Broke taboos! Created life! Dug up grave! And today! Today was worst! Kidnapped my daughter, Genea! No more okay! Tonight gets beaten! Tomorrow dies!”

Raising my invincibility shield, I wandered into the public square. There, whipped bloody and tied to a post, was Lachlan.

“You kidnapped the headman’s daughter?” I asked him. I didn’t even give him the dignity of pretending to doubt whether it was true.

Lachlan smiled. “Genea. A perfect name for my reaction. I could have been a Genius, with a capital G.”

I don’t know if it was that smile, or the blood all over him, or the lack of remorse in his voice, but at that moment, I’d had it with Dr. Lachlan Fairchild. I lowered the matter disruptor.

“You know,” I said. “That is it. I’m not even going to rescue you. You’re a menace.”

“You don’t have a choice,” said Lachlan. “I have a nuke. These people don’t understand the concept, but lucky we’ve got a genius like yourself. Let me go or I blow this entire planet sky high.”

“Even if you managed to extrude a nuke,” I said “which you didn’t, because I checked the nanofactory’s public records before I left – even then, nukes don’t work in this world. Nuclear fission isn’t an anagram of anything.”

“A metaphorical nuke,” said Lachlan. “I mean, I’ve figured out this world’s equivalent of a nuke. It’s very clever. Without the SMART, I never would have been able to think of it. I’ll…”

My best course was to immediately, like split-second immediately, raise the matter disruptor and shoot Lachlan. I could do it before he had a chance to react, and it would solve the whole damn problem.

Instead I took the worst course, which was to raise the matter disruptor, obviously intending to shoot him, and vacillate at the last moment because I’d never killed anyone before and I wasn’t sure I had it in me and instead of finding out my brain wanted to sit and ponder this for thirty seconds.

Lachlan took a ring off his finger and it unfolded it to reveal his parasonic ray. Then he furrowed his brow in concentration and it let out a screech.

I shot the matter disruptor. Man, post, and town square changed into their component atoms…letters…whatever.

The villagers ran, screaming. Some of them ran away from the explosion. Others ran towards the explosion, trying to see what had happened and maybe defend their homes and families. A few arrows and stones came towards me, causing my ring to near-instaneously unfold into a weird backpack-like device that placed itself on my back and surrounded me with a purple glow. The projectiles hit my new invincibility shield and fell to the ground limply.

I calmly walked through the carnage. I was heading back a kilometer south, back to the cape. I was going to extrude a larger aircraft, bring the nanofactory a few hundred miles away, and wait out the last two weeks of exile far away from this mob.

The ground started to shake. I realized the explosion had ended long ago, yet its deafening roar had not subsided.

I looked back to the town square and my blood turned cold. In the center of the blast radius, where not even dust should have remained, there was Lachlan’s skull, set in the biggest rictus grin I had ever seen.

I raised the matter disruptor and fired another shot. The skull disintegrated. But Cheshire Cat-like, somehow the grin remained, even larger than before, a smile without a substrate.

This was bad.

I started to run back to the lab. Cracks opened in the ground around me. The roar become worse. Was it just me, or was the sea getting closer?

Metaphorical nukes. A nuke was at the most basic level a chain reaction. Neutron produces energy plus neutron. That neutron produces energy plus neutron. That neutron and so on. You end up with a lot of energy.

I could see the remains of the looted lab now in front of me. It was on its elevated headland reaching into the sea, and I was afraid the rising water was going to cut it off and turn it into an island before I could get to it.

Sound drove chemical reactions in this world. Anything that could create sound had the potential to be a chain reaction if the reactants were common enough. You could get most of the letters of “sound” from…oh, that wasn’t good.

The cracks in the GROUND got bigger as the low-lying GROUND started to sink further beneath the waves.

I stared back at the village. It was almost entirely underwater now. Above it was Lachlan’s disembodied grin, now the size of a skyscraper, hanging in the sky.

Sound, ground. Grin. Sin. There. I had it. GROUND + SIN = SOUND + GRIN. The nuke. The ground was essentially limitless until the world was destroyed. The more ground was destroyed, the more people died, the more villages sunk under the waves. A sin. A reaction that created its own reactants. And sound. Created its own reactants and its own catalyst. Leaving nothing but Lachlan’s gigantic triumphant grin, hanging in the sky over the world he was destroying.

I groaned as a crack in the ground took the aircraft on its field. It teetered for a second, then fell into the onrushing waves. I ran through ankle deep water and at last reached the top of the headland. There was just a small area of land left, on the highest ground of the cape, with our two little partially-smashed huts and the bulky dented aluminum nanofactory.

“Extrude boat!” I commanded the nanofactory.

“Extruding boat,” said the display. “Estimated creation time with material on hand, two hours.”

“Cancel! Cancel cancel cancel!” I shouted, but the factory had gotten into its extrusion mode and wasn’t listening.

I ran into my hut. Most of my stuff was still broken. There was nothing that looked like a good flotation device, unless you counted my mattress. My reaction apparatus, my parasonic ray, and a few doodads.

I grabbed the ray gun and ran outside. Even on the high ground, there were wavelets lapping at my shoes. I had about a minute before I drowned.

“Okay,” I said to myself. “Time to figure something out. Time to create a boat.” And there was only one good reactant on hand.

OCEAN + …no, that wouldn’t work. SEA + …that was even worse. WATER + … I might be able to use water if I let the reaction consume my bones…WATER + BONE = BOAT + NEWER … no, even with the parasonic ray I’d never be able to catalyze a reaction that made a comparative adjective of all things. Maybe if I had an hour to think of some useful intermediates.

Okay, back up. You don’t need a boat. You can use a ship. Ship is…

My brain was in panic mode. It didn’t want to anagram SHIP. What it wanted was escape.

The cape! The cape could provide escape! The cape and the sea! The two things I had! And my parasonic gun was just strong enough to let me synthesize abstractions. I just needed somewhere to put that extra A.

WATER + A = AWARE + T. No, Nature abhors non-words, T won’t work. WATER + A = RAW TEA. No, adjectives took forever. WAR TEA? I wasn’t sure what would happen if I caused a war at this point, but I bet it wouldn’t be good.

A wave rushed over me and I rose to the top sputtering and gasping. I still had the parasonic ray. The water had almost covered the huts now. Borne on the receding wave came Lachlan’s stupid piles of IQ tests, now soaked.

CAPE + TEST = ESCAPE + 2*T

On the one hand, Nature abhorred non-words. On the other hand, I couldn’t swim and was about to drown. I concentrated REALLY hard on the reaction, turned the parasonic ray to its highest setting, and shot a beam of sound and strobe light and repetition of the name “Adwell!” at the pile of tests and the rocky cape below.

Nothing happened.

The LOW CHARGE light began to flash on my parasonic ray.

It had been a stupid, desperate gambit. I’d already known I didn’t have enough energy to do a reaction that created non-words, didn’t know if that was even possible with any energy, and I had just drained my parasonic ray of almost all its charge I had made a terrible error.

“Error!” I shouted. “That’s it! Adwell! Error!”

CAPE + TEST + 2*ERROR = ESCAPE + 2*TERROR

As I fell under the waves, with my last breath and last bit of charge I fired off the parasonic ray one last time.

It’s not working I thought to myself. It’s not working and I’m going to die, lost under the sea, dead forever. I spent half a minute just thrashing about in terror before I realized that meant it was working.

The water was receding! A bubble of air was spreading away from me in all directions as the water was consumed! I was saved! Still terrified, but saved!

…then the water started closing in on me again. I didn’t know what what was happening. I’d done it, hadn’t I? Succeeded in creating a reaction that would get me out?

Success! That was the problem! If I had succeeded in creating a reaction, then firing the parasonic ray hadn’t been an error. The reaction couldn’t take place. The water closed in on me again. I was going to die.

The water started to recede. If the success of the reaction prevented me from having made an error, then the reaction wouldn’t work, and starting the reaction was an error, and so the reaction could take place. All this I saw clearly, as in a dream, from within my bubble of air.

The air bubble under the rising seas (sinking ground?) reached a size of about twenty meters, large enough to cover the cape and the two huts and the nanofactory, and then stopped, occasionally shrinking a little or growing a little, always seething, starting to burn with a weird energy.

From within the anglophysical terror clouding my mind, I recognized the problem as a novel version of the Epimenides paradox of self-reference, implemented on a physical substrate. If my initiation of the anglophysical reaction had been an ERROR, then I would ESCAPE, and it hadn’t been an ERROR after all. But if my initiation of the reaction had not been an ERROR, then I would not ESCAPE, and in fact it would have been an ERROR.

I had a vague memory that I had once discussed Russell’s Paradox with Dr. Adwell. I wished I could have remembered what he said.

The interface between air and water became turbulent, started to glow. I saw fantastic images projected upon it, weird fractal geometries, strange supersensory stimuli that somehow reminded me of Lovecraft’s references to the beckoning piping from the void behind space. All the while the TERROR grew, and the bubble began to vacillate wildly.

Then there was a great pop, and I thought for a second my air bubble had popped, but more correctly everything had popped, and for a second the things that were nothing like piping sounds became unbearable. Then I found myself lying, still terrified, on the floor of the translation chamber of our laboratory, the very same place where I had entered Adwellia almost four months before.

VII.

When I had recovered my senses and debriefed my colleagues, I devised three theories for what had happened there, on the cape.

First, that my reaction had been successful beyond my wildest dreams, the paradox had resolved in my favor, and I had ESCAPED not only to firm ground but to my own home dimension.

Second, that the paradox had been so confusing and unbearable for poor Adwell that he had expelled me from his consciousness, like a man brushing a bug off his skin, and having been kicked from his world I naturally defaulted to my own.

And third, that implementing a paradox on a physical substrate was really, really bad and I had destroyed Adwellia.

This last possibility ought in theory to be testable, but I was informed upon my return that the budget was tight this year and that the necessary supercomputing resources to search for Adwellia will not be available for some time.

I have been assigned to another project, and although my superiors have thanked me for my work in Adwellia, I am certain they do not believe a word of my report and have written the entire expedition – and perhaps their decision in hiring me – off as a loss. In their place I would not do otherwise.

But from your writings I gather you are a man of unusual intellect, and some of your speculations come uncomfortably close to the truth. I do not know whether you have pursued your interest in Berkeleyan idealism further, but if you are so gracious as to believe my story or at least keep an open mind, I would be interested in further correspondence with you about the implications of anglophysics for future imaged worlds and how the consistency of such images might be assured against paradoxes of self-reference and other threats to their integrity.

Yours sincerely,
Dr. Omar Reyes, University of ________

PS: I hope you will be understanding when I say that I wish to restrict my future work in the imaged world field to a purely theoretical level.

[EDIT: I apologize to those who have read Universal Fire for this story. As a peace offering, please accept this lovely lampshade.]

[EDIT 2: HPMORPodcast has recorded an audio version.]