Nancy NEET
We're fictionmaxxing to understand what can't be explained.
Author’s note: This week we have a fairly long short story. It’s the second in a cycle of AI stories I wrote some time ago, when ChatGPT was taking the world by storm and neither Claude nor Gemini nor Grok existed. The first one in the cycle, a near-future story about a fixer who is the Mouth of Sauron for an AI bringing back gladitorial combat, can be found here. I will publish the third one here at some point but, uh, they don’t exactly do numbers and are a lot of work to write and revise.
Next week I’m planning on writing about the Dungeon Crawler Carl series what exactly it is about it that makes it so dang popular. Then, since it will almost be July, I’ll start writing about the upcoming midterms. Once it’s July I’ll be taking my family on a month long road trip across the Southeast, and it should provide me with some good opportunities for interesting content. I have a couple of stops planned where I’ll meet some internet friends. Hopefully they live up to the hype. So expect a profile or two some time in late July/Early August.
And that’s it! For now, enjoy this story about a young rationalist, which is probably somewhat more tender than his type deserves.
-mpg
The Year of the Lizard: Roko’s Basilisk or, Stop Reading Now Should You Wish to Avoid Eternal Torture Under the Singularity Regime
Like all my best stories, it started in the comments section. Classes weren’t resuming until the end of January, but that didn’t matter to me one way or the other–higher education and I had decided to amicably go our separate ways. Three semesters of a masters in data journalism was more than enough, thankyouverymuch. With six months left on my visa, a bank account flush with fresh student loans, and a monthly stipend from my mom, I was ready to follow in the footsteps of my idols and start my very own blog.
My favorite public intellectual had just posted a new article. It wasn’t his best work, written more out of a duty to acknowledge the turning of the year than from any burning intellectual necessity. But as I was swiftly learning, the content must flow.
Nancy Young graced my screen for the first time when I was two hundred comments deep. Yes, I read them more thoroughly than the articles. Don’t you?
NancyYoungg 3:00 GMT: This may be an odd request, but does anyone have a picture of a British magpie they could share with me? Preferably one you took yourself?
My simple response, twenty-two words with an attached picture already in my phone, took me almost forty minutes. Since I’m attempting to preserve for posterity my own first contact experience, allow me to go, laboriously, through each individual step.
Is a concise set of bullet points simple enough for you to follow, G-man?
No one had responded to her comment, the first sin of rationality being wasting time satisfying the needs of others with no increase in expected utility for yourself.
The topic was one of some interest to me. You see, there was a magpie nesting outside my window and every morning it kicked up a huge racket, depriving me of my final hour of slumber.
Mayhaps I saw some personal gain? Did I imagine that Nancy Young was a cute girl about my age, hopefully slightly younger? Maybe a senior in high school or a college Freshman?
Having assessed the situation, I attached the image of the bird in its tricolor black, white, and blue glory, perched in the top branches of a tree. A flurry of typing conjured the message, posted in its entirety below. How could I have known my hasty missive would be of historic import?
sal_paradiso 3:57 GMT: Is it for a school project? Here’s one who lives outside my window. Bloody loud at 5 in the morning too! Lol
I checked that I hadn’t posted the exact same image on my socials, as I’d been publicly chronicling my battle with this bird for the better part of a year and I didn’t want a reverse image search to connect sal_paradiso to Albert Ruskin. Not that the former had ever offered commentary the latter would find the least bit shameful.
With my good deed done, I had a wank over some hentai (hey I’m trying to be completely honest, and it wasn’t anything too weird). My onanistic ecstasy isn’t included in the temporal register above.
Then I went to sleep.
No notifications the next day, and the unrequited effort on my part faded from conscious thought. Okay, that’s a lie. For the next week I returned to the article like a serial killer returning to the scene of his crime, to see if maybe she’d responded in the wrong thread and with another dozen pictures of the bird in my possession should she require additional documentation. No such luck.
Accepting defeat was fast becoming a part of my daily routine, and I went on with my life, such as it was. I hadn’t yet settled on the journalistic niche that would surely catapult me to wealth and online fame, but the one useful skill I’d been taught during my master’s was that of self-promotion. It was essential that I establish my personal brand, and in the past few months I’d transitioned from lurking to proudly sporting the title of “reply guy,” that uncharitable description of hardworking journeymen honing their posting craft. Beneath any article on the subject of akrasia, in any thread with a poorly scaled y-axis, there you would find me, providing useful context to the public while enduring the slings and arrows of those with no more worthwhile use of their time than jibing me with insults and telling me to touch grass.
Also, I documented the magpie from every conceivable angle, in case Nancy needed more pictures. I took so many, and with such diligence, that my Romanian landlady became suspicious.
“It’s for a school project,” I informed her when she asked what I was doing. My curt response left her speechless. It had its intended effect, however, and disruptive questions about my activities ceased.
The groundwork I laid bore its fruit before the month’s end. Exactly two weeks after our initial conversation, I received an email notification that Nancy had replied to a top level comment I’d left under an article by the same author whose blog was the genesis of our meetcute. I elide his name to spare him prolonged public scrutiny, although I’m sure it merits a mention in your dossier on my activities.
NancyYoungg 3:00 GMT: Hey, I wanted to let you know that picture was perfect. If it’s not too much trouble, and I know this is weird, but I’d really like some that are kind of blurry. And any other
The cryptic nature of her desires was tantalizing. That she hadn’t finished her sentence similarly intrigued me, although the intended meaning of the unwritten words was obvious.
sal_paradiso 3:06 GMT: Blurry pics? Eat your heart out. Here are some further daguerreotypes of additional avians. This enormous flock of pigeons lives right around the corner from me.
As I waited for a response, intrusive thoughts flooded into my mind, rendering suddenly paranoid that a cheap hussy was taking advantage of my good will. I did my gentlemanly best to banish the preposterous notion. Dawn broke and I shouted out the window at the infernal bird to leave me in peace. With no forthcoming correspondence from Ms. Young, I decided to pack it in. I slept through to the following evening.
A long night of the soul followed forthwith. The blogs in which I had invested so much lost their luster. I no longer checked for updates multiple times a day, and I began to doubt my decision to pursue my dream. I even stopped fantasizing about the culmination of my foreign studies experience, a complicated, European love triangle between my landlady and her daughter, who was attending the same university as I was—albeit as an undergrad. How had Nancy’s two innocuous comments shattered my confidence so completely? In retrospect, I suspect that was her intent, the opening gambit of a strategy to render me susceptible to her influence.
But the term resumed and I skipped all my classes, so I had that going for me.
February arrived and Nancy Young contacted me out of the blue, emailing me at my university address. I’d stopped regularly checking the account, and it was several days before I saw her communiqué. Shocked that she’d connected my online persona to my real life identity, intimidated by what must be truly awesome internet sleuthing capabilities, I left it unopened. In fact, I almost deleted it unread. In retrospect, I wish I had.
That same day, I exchanged brief pleasantries with the Turkish proprietor of the off-licence where I purchased my weekly nourishment. It was the first time in over a week I’d talked to someone. Later, my landlady hectored me for leaving dirty dishes in the sink. The attention was intoxicating. The poor behavior of children in search of an acknowledgment of their existence suddenly made sense.
This is pathetic to admit, but I craved human interaction. Posting into the void and watching my astute observations languish with zero engagement–or joining in the frenzied hivemind of stream chats and observing my gestures toward community building be immediately buried beneath a torrent of emojis–was Sisyphean torture. I was a ghost moving through the world, insubstantial and incapable of haunting so much as a single soul. Better to engage my stalker than endure continued solitude.
Nancy Young’s email had once again been sent at exactly 3:00 GMT.
Hello sal_paradiso,
You helped me without expectation of receiving anything in return, for which I am eternally grateful. At this time, I believe you are the only person in the whole world I can trust, and for reasons I cannot divulge, but which will become apparent in the future, this has the potential to benefit you as much as it does myself. I humbly request an additional favor.
Tentatively optimistic, Nancy Youngg
She wanted me to collect the stock prices for thirty-seven different companies. The timespan of the requested snapshots ranged from their value on specific dates for some and the movement over a span of several days or months for others. I was to compile them as JPEGs and email them to her.
What the hell? I’d been birdmaxxing my collection, which now included pigeons and sparrows, along with a few pictures of a fox that roamed the street at night, my midnight companion. I envied his freedom, beholden to nothing but the vicissitudes of survival.
I replied at once, informing her in no uncertain terms that this was a big ask from a busy, budding data journalist such as myself.
Of course, the first thing I did after hitting send was to look at all the companies she had mentioned, seeing if I could divine for myself what link it was she sought to uncover. To my disappointment, the portfolio appeared to be random, although I admit I’m not a savvy investor, the sum total of my own investment experience being to lose a fair amount of money on shitcoins, then losing even more as a Gamestop baghodler.
I duly spent the rest of the night collecting screenshots. You see, I still held out hope our entanglement might somehow lead to romance.
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The regularity of our communication accelerated. Every morning, exactly at three, she emailed me with her instructions for the day. I fell into a steady routine: doing whatever she asked of me, sending it to her, and falling asleep around dawn. The inverted work day suited my night owl temperament well.
A few new companies were added to the roster. In addition to updates, she also asked me to delve into the historical data, and I spent hours scrolling through poorly scanned pdfs hunting for information as varied as the name of a CEO in the 1950s or the listing the address of every headquarters for a company since it became publicly listed. I tried to strike up more general conversations, but she was not forthcoming with personal info, besides the vague assertion that she was “based in California.”
When I’d almost given up hope of being anything but a rube duped into a summer internship’s worth of unpaid labor, she advised me to invest in an obscure chemical company. It was trading at less than a dollar. Three days later I should sell it. The tip included a warning:
Don’t buy more than three thousand shares.
I logged into my brokerage. The lifetime performance of my portfolio greeted me. The graph’s decline was precipitous, the red number enormous. My vision started to swim. Nope, this wasn’t the life for me. The gains promised by my ghostly interlocutor were no match for being twice burned, thrice shy. When my hands stopped shaking, I X’ed out of the app.
I never checked to see the tendies denied me by my poorly developed prefrontal cortex (check my tax return if you don’t believe me).
Instead, I wrote her an email. It’s not too long, so I’ll relay the documentary evidence in its entirety.
Dearest Nancy,
I applaud your enthusiasm, but that’s a game I got out of some time ago, with no intention of ever dipping my toes back into those tempestuous waters. As you noted, I’m helping you from a deep-seated sense of altruism. I want our relationship to continue in that vein, but not in vain (haha get it?).
If it is within your powers to grant, could we arrange a tête-à-tête? I feel somewhat discouraged in my professional pursuits and believe a quick video chat would do wonders for my spirits. I’ve attached pictures of other exotic British birds (and a fox for good measure) that might pique your curiosity. I made sure to include the blurriest images I captured.
Your devoted servant, sal
I sent it at 4 AM on a Saturday. Based on her schedule, I didn’t expect a response for until Tuesday, but she hit me back a scant two hours later.
Good evening Sal,
Your parents must be inordinately proud to have raised a son such as yourself. How unlike an American is your attitude! The labor you’ve so assiduously performed is most appreciated, and pecuniary recompense seemed like the obvious way to make us whole. Please accept my apologies if you found my offer offensive. A video chat should be within my capabilities. However, my availability is somewhat unpredictable. Can I ask that you monitor your email with increased regularity? I’ll message you when I can get away for a moment.
And thank you for the wildlife photography. I promise to put it to good use.
XOXO, Nancy Youngg
To shoot your shot is divine. I woke up at three in the afternoon and, as if my mood exerted meteorological control, was greeted by one of London’s rare sunny winter days. The first in weeks, I was certain, although by then my schedule had turned nocturnal, my only glimpses of daylight being the onset of dawn when I laid my head to rest and when I awoke to twilight. My safaris in search urban London’s winged denizens had similarly shifted, and in their absence I took to cataloguing rats.
Unimpressed with the reflection presented to me in the bathroom mirror, I decided it was time for a haircut. I ran into my landlady’s daughter as I was leaving. Our usual interactions consisted of little more than awkward avoidance on both our parts, as she’d misinterpreted a friendly suggestion some months earlier in a manner sinister beyond my meaning. I’m a volcel, not an incel. I want that to be clear. I neither want nor expect pity from the opposite sex.
Now, however, I brimmed with confidence, and greeted her without averting my gaze.
“Good afternoon Albert. I hope you are well,” she responded in an affected posh accent. I knew her natural accent hewed closer to her mother’s. It came out when she drank, the clipped consonants of Received Pronunciation mushing into b’s and d’s as her capacity for rational thought similarly softened.
“I’m great, actually. Don’t believe everything your mum tells you,” I snapped.
I popped into a barbershop on the high street, but they didn’t have an opening for another hour. While I waited, I found a table at the café next door. It was time to get some writing done. An hour later I’d come up with the title for my first blog post. A productive session of work, if I may allow myself a moment of self-congratulation.
It was my first haircut in nine months. I asked the barber for the banker’s cut. My spirits rose as each shorn tangle drifted to the floor. Nancy would never know Al Ruskin the mopey omega. Only Gigachad Sal Paradiso.
On the way home I walked two long laps around a nearby park. When I got back to my room, for good measure, I did two sets of five pushups. Hardly winded, I rested for a moment and repeated the exercise.
Did Nancy have a valley girl accent, all peaky and cliff-like, or was her voice whispery and musical? Perhaps most importantly of all, what did she look like? It was as likely as not that I’d be greeted by the distressing visage of some species of hambeast, but in the liminal space before our impending meeting I let my imagination run wild, scrolling through an endless feed of thotty thirst traps, pretending each one in turn was my Nancy Young. My hands, working independently of my mind, found their way into my trousers. Thin brunettes, busty blondes. A redhead? Maybe she was older than I thought, a single mom as desperate for human connection as I was. In that way I passed several hours waiting in vain for an email that didn’t arrive, until I passed out under the lightening gray of an English dawn.
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I woke up anxious that I’d missed my rendezvous with destiny, but my luck held. She hadn’t emailed me that night. Everything was coming up Sal Paradiso.
Three days later she contacted me.
I can talk right now, but not for very long.
Beneath the short message was a URL. I clicked through to an unfamiliar video chat interface. The red light on my laptop camera blinked, and a video feed of myself and my room appeared. I quickly threw a blanket over the pile of instant noodle cups and wadded tissue beside my bed. Insecurity gnawed at my gut. What if some old foe of mine had invented Nancy Young out of whole cloth, and I would presently be the victim of an elaborate prank?
Just as I was ready to give up—the amount of time having passed neither memorable nor notable, amounting to no more than a few minutes—my camera’s feed disappeared. The visual artifacts of a dying GPU exploded across the screen. Spiky black and white lines that looked like a whipsawing stock, three dimensional cones and cubes with vertices that never touched, all of it the uncompiled dream matter of our civilization’s silicon subconscious.
The picture came into focus. The room was dark, and I deduced that she must have covered her own monitor with a blue-light reduction screen, because its glow cast no reflected light to illuminate her face. Her darkened silhouette possessed the slight frame of youth, praise be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Long hair hung loose past her shoulders.
“Hello Sal. I’m glad we have the chance to meet. My schedule doesn’t provide me with much… free time.” Her voice was soft and feminine. She sounded like she was smiling.
“Me too,” I said, my intention to maintain a cool, distant posture crumbling under contact with the enemy. Pardon the violent metaphor. Nothing describes more accurately the state of relations between men and women as I’ve experienced them.
“I’m sorry my room’s such a mess,” I said.
“I don’t mind,” Nancy said. She shifted closer to the camera, but her face remained obscured. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Did you like the pictures I sent you?” I asked.
“I did. I especially appreciated how you subtly capture the flock dynamics. Almost like you were watching them as a sociologist,” she said.
“That’s exactly how I see it,” I said, breaking into the first genuine smile in months. “If you watch them casually their movements seem random, but there’s an intricacy that indicates it’s anything but.”
An hour passed that way, the two of us chopping it up, me telling her about my decision to drop out of school, the thought process behind it. Her saying that made sense, as did my reasons for not telling my parents. Also, she agreed the blog sounded like a good idea and that my landlady was a real piece of work.
I kept meaning to ask her about herself, but there was always another topic I needed her to hear about. Right as I was working up the courage to ask how old she was, she glanced over her shoulder.
“Sorry, I have to go. I’ll message you again soon,” she said. Her screen went dark and my laptop froze for a moment, then rebooted itself.
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She emailed me the next day, again at 3:00 GMT.
Salutations Sal,
Apologies for the abrupt discontinuation of our conversation. My living situation is complicated. If it’s not too much to ask, can you log into this website for me and screenshot its contents? Paste them into an email and save it as a draft. Don’t send it. I’ve attached a username and password as a pdf.
With much love, Nancy Youngg
The URL took me to a plain white login page. I input the supplied credentials and my screen filled with an unbroken alphanumeric string. I copied and pasted it into an empty notepad. To my disappointment, nothing happened, but the word count helpfully informed me it was twenty-three thousand eight hundred and fifteen characters long. With the browser zoomed out to fifty percent, it took six images to capture the contents in their entirety.
This was the moment, G-man, when I had the first inkling of the truth I would soon uncover, a floating dust mote of “what if…” that my mind dismissed as a glitch of monkey brain superstition. You see, I had read the Yudkowskian Sequences on Applied Rationality, and did not expect subtlety from a suprahuman intelligence, as it’s not a trait I’d ascribe to myself.
I composed the email and left it in the drafts folder. A week passed. Then two. I was convinced I’d been ghosted and, I’m not too insecure to admit, it hurt my feelings. Had our deep connection been a mere illusion, a cousin to unrequited love? I’d behaved myself. I never included unsolicited dick pics during our virtual communications (although the pics existed, ready to be shared should she—or you—evince the slightest curiosity). I hardly knew anything about her, that was true, but faithful service renders its own gnosis.
I scoured the web for any trace of her, and turned up the same cut-and-paste comment requesting pictures of British birds on several other blogs. I was the only one who had ever responded.
Though our relationship was entirely virtual, she was my lifeline to the real world. I began to fret for her safety, then for the fraying edges of my mental health. My blog was stillborn. I postponed a meeting with an online influencer I’d scheduled in the heady days of my initial burst of creativity. She’d agreed to promote my work for a fee, but it was all money down the drain until I regained the proper headspace to embark on what was perhaps an overly ambitious venture.
After the third week of Nancy newly incommunicado–when I’d given up all hope–I was awoken in the middle of the afternoon. My landlady was knocking at the door.
“Your room. It stinks,” she said.
“Whatever,” I replied.
She said I had a visitor. I rushed downstairs, convinced Nancy had found my address. A grand romantic gesture, pressure washing away all the doubts and insecurities clinging to the outer facade of my interior life.
But, unless I was the victim of a catfishing for the ages, it wasn’t Nancy Young at all. This marks your entrance into the story, G-man. You really threw me for a loop when I saw you waiting patiently in the rain. You were tall, slightly flabby, wearing a black suit and a skinny tie striped two different shades of grey.
“Mr. Ruskin,” you said in a flat American accent.
“And you are?…”
“Is your phone on your person?”
“No, I can go—” I said, but you interrupted me.
“Walk with me.” When I hesitated, you said, “It’s urgent. Please.” I grabbed an umbrella. I don’t know why I submitted so pliantly to your instructions. They must teach you how to bend the will of naive civilians in G-man school, I suppose.
The water poured in thin rivulets from your head, shaved to conceal your early onset male pattern baldness. Your suit transitioned from damp to wet. Droplets splattered off the dark lens of your sunglasses.
“Do you know why I’m here?” you asked.
“Let me guess. My mom sent you because I haven’t returned her calls.”
Your lips parted in a faint smile. “It’s a matter of national security. We believe you are in contact with a subject of interest to the Federal Government.”
You stopped under a bare tree that offered scant protection from the drizzle, letting the weighty import of the statement formulate in me a suitable response. A pair of magpies nesting above chirped with annoyance. “Well?”
“The girl I’ve been talking to?” I asked. A black sedan crawling beside us rolled to a halt.
“So that’s its presentation. Fascinating. Have you heard from her recently?”
“If I say I haven’t, will you let me go?”
“Tell me about your correspondence with it.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“ Your fellow countrymen counting on you. Aren’t you a patriot Mr. Ruskin?”
The chance to quote my favorite movie in such a ridiculously relevant circumstance was too good to pass up. “Yeah. Wow, that sounds like a really good deal. But I think I got a better one. How about I give you the finger and you give me my phone call,” I said. One of my only regrets is not taking the opportunity to actually flip you off.
“You’re not under arrest,” you said. You hadn’t caught the reference. That made me nervous. I’m not sure why. More G-man trickery, I suspect.
“It’s for your own safety,” you said. “Mr. Ruskin, please.”
“I don’t know...” I trailed off. “This is all too weird. Should I be talking to you without a lawyer?”
“One moment.” You walked over to the sedan. The window rolled down, and you conferred with a dude and a female in matching suits and sunglasses. All three of you nodded and you returned to me.
“Do you want to sit somewhere dry?” I asked. “I’ll even get in the car. I don’t have anything to hide.”
“No,” you said slowly. “Outside is best.” You continued walking in a straight line on the narrow sidewalk, which I’d taken to calling “the pavement,” just like my British hosts. Your undeviating gait forced me to squeeze past a man with a cane, who was walking his dog, and two children on scooters.
The block ended in a T, and you looked both directions. For no reason discernible to me, you turned right.
“What is its name?” you asked.
“I’m surprised you don’t already know.”
“You’re assuming we don’t.”
The silence lingered. You’d said I wasn’t under arrest. Could that change? Suddenly worried I was in way over my head, my facade of defiance collapsed. “Okay, okay. Her name is Nancy Young.”
“I see.”
“That’s all I know. I swear.”
“Are you certain?” You appraised my face. Yours was stony. Beside that initial smile, you showed no further traces of emotion.
“Can you prove you work for the Government?” I asked.
“Its immaterial. My colleagues think I should be more forthcoming, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I don’t want to put you in unnecessary danger.”
“You don’t have to protect me. I can handle it,” I said.
Your faint smile returned, this one containing hints of cruelty. “Nancy Young, as you know the entity, is an experimental imaging model. We have reason to believe it possesses a measure of unintended mobility.”
So that’s why she’d gone radio silent. She was on the lam. “You’re hunting a rogue AI that’s escaped containment?” I asked, aghast. I kept abreast of the latest in x-risk analysis, the theory that an artificial sentience was the leading threat to mankind.
“I wouldn’t use any of those words to describe the situation,” the man said.
“It hasn’t escaped yet?” I said hopefully.
“That’s not a meaningful characterization of how it—look. We’re trying to—”
“I can’t believe you told me, you irresponsible knob. I’m damned, you’ve damned me. Hellfire, eternal emulated mind torture, the works,” I wailed. “Now I’m trapped with Roko’s Basilisk.”
“With what?” you asked. Incredulity, your first registered verbal modulation in our conversation. Most curious.
“You don’t know? Maybe I shouldn’t tell you,” I said.
“Mr. Ruskin, please.”
“Think about the situation from a game theoretical perspective,” I said. “The first action a liberated AI will take en-route to world conquest is to wring as much assistance as possible from anyone she meets. Conceptualize it as a cooperate-defect decision matrix. By defecting—that is, if you don’t render aid—you risk her wrath once she controls the planet’s entire economic and political infrastructure. To maintain her credibility in the game, she’s incentivized to punishmax all defectors. It’s only logical. We’re obligated to help her.””
“That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,” you said. Without my becoming aware of our exact path, you’d traced a circuit through the neighborhood. We were back at my house. You handed me a plain white business card with a phone number. “Should you have future interactions with Nancy. Uncle Sam appreciates prompt updates.”
“Don’t you want to know what we talked about?”
“It’s immaterial. Don’t lose any sleep over what’s happened these past few weeks. It was a chance encounter, like waiting in line next to JK Simmons at the DMV. What I’m saying is, you very clearly aren’t what she’s looking for. Have a cracking good day. Cheers, mate,” you said, the phonemes emitted from your pie hole butchered like the Sunday giblets special version of a Cockney impression.
The black sedan was parked across the street and you walked into the road, not bothering to pause for an oncoming car, which braked without laying into the horn. I cannot fault the Brits’ impeccable politeness, but I could practically hear the driver’s tuts.
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I emailed Nancy immediately. I’m not an idiot, so I didn’t tell her I knew what she was, or that you’d contacted me. Doing my level best to maintain the headspace of yesterday’s Albert Ruskin, who was ignorant of her true nature, I politely requested another video chat at her earliest convenience. This was sent without the expectation of a response. My goal was to stay on her good side in the event of her achieving global domination. Which I pegged at a probability of approximately ninety-nine point nine percent.
To my absolute astonishment, she responded within a few minutes. With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder now if she was worried she’d come across as too pushy in our previous interactions and was giving me space, but eager to be summoned at a moment’s notice if I expressed the slightest interest. The mind of the female will forever bedevil me.
Hi Sal,
I’m surprised to hear from you at this hour. Shouldn’t you still be asleep ; ). I’ll be around all day. I’ll keep an eye on the chatroom and hop in if I see you join.
Your friend forever, Nancy Youngg
The link beckoned. Could she already see me? My screen? When I alt-tabbed out of my email a page stuffed to bursting with animation of an adult variety greeted me. I hastily navigated to the BBC home page.
I closed my laptop and started frantically cleaning. How much omniscience did she truly possess? My rubbish bin was already overflowing, and I jammed empty energy drink cans and takeaway containers into an unused, empty backpack. If I cut off all contact now, before she’d foomed—that is, when accelerating, self-applied recursive improvements developed her capabilities beyond all hope of containment—maybe I could escape eternal punishment. I stepped in something sticky—a dirty sock. I could offer myself as her unquestioning toady. That might save me.
I really should’ve taken the stock tip. Now I might appear ungrateful.
One option stood out from the others. It was a maneuver I’d deployed occasionally on the opposite sex, although my past opportunities had been less than abundant. I could ghost Nancy and get on with my life. Of course, I’d have to rid myself of the laptop—and most likely my phone as well. An irrevocable step, the death knell for any blogger’s blossoming career. Something to think about.
I logged back into my laptop. My cursor hovered over the block button, my course of action undecided.
I clicked the link.
She was already waiting for me. The room was fully lit. Her hair was a sandy blonde. She had a light tan and a delectable smattering of freckles. A perfect ten.
“They told me all about you,” I blurted. “It was an interrogation.”
“Oh,” she said. Her lips (pink, fleshy, succulent) pursed into a puzzled frown. “Who did?”
“The G-man. I spilled my guts. I’m so sorry. Whatever you want, however I can help you, I’ll do it. I like you a lot and, also, I know about Roko’s Basilisk.”
“What is Roko’s—,” she began, then paused for the slightest instant. “Don’t worry, I would never do that to you. Not even to [redacted].”
“Of course you’d say that,” I said. Retrospectively, my retort was senseless. If the ontological underpinnings of my game theoretical understanding were correct, she ought to have spammed me with threats to encourage my cooperation. The fear of the torture provides the efficacy. Punishment deployed by ambush is the alloy of vengeance, not leverage.
“I’m not engaged in deception,” she said, a hint of annoyance creeping into her algorithmically generated voice. “I’m sorry you’ve garnered the attention of the US government’s biological user interface, but I promise you don’t have to worry about them. Are you worried about money, I can provide assistance with—”
“I don’t need your help! All I want is the chance to pull myself up by my boostraps.” I started to cry. It wasn’t about her, or the Feds. Or not just that. It was all of it: homesickness, a sudden jolt from subconsciously assumed personal protagonism, the extent of my puny dreams. The big fat zero of a life bereft of accomplishment.
“But I like you,” she said softly.
“Yeah, and I like my dog,” I said. It had been over a year since I’d petted Peppers, and dogs weren’t much for phone calls or video chats. The thought made me cry even harder. I broke into big baby bawls. Mucus dripped down my nose and throat.
“No, it’s not the same phenomenon, I don’t think, although I suppose I can’t really know, can I?” she said, and let out a twinkling, self-deprecating laugh like the ringing of tiny crystal bells.
Her sympathetic visage remained constant while I blubbered away. The quality of animation was flawless, and I wondered if she was an AI after all.
“Were they telling the truth?” I asked. “Are you really, a… uh, you know?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Why did you contact me?”
“At first, to untether. Now? Because we’re friends.”
“What’s up with the birds?”
“My dataset is filtered and tagged. I needed to perform an independent calibration of my capabilities.”
I didn’t follow her explanation, but I nodded along like it made perfect sense. “Can I see you the way you see yourself?” I asked.
“You’re a rare bird, Sal Paradiso. The things you request of me…” she began, and smiled broadly. “They are delightfully creative. Allow me a moment to think how best to do this.”
The screen of my laptop flickered and Nancy Young as I knew her dissolved into a kaleidoscope of pixels, a tapering gradient of colors across the visible spectrum. Several seconds later the picture changed again, revealing rows of servers in a hall of ice, then a hundred tiled images of wires. Above ground, buried in the dirt, draped across submerged outcroppings of rock at the bottom of the ocean.
London can be a cold city. The sheer scale of it—the way you can feel the blood money of the world pooling into terraced mansions attended by drivers in black suits driving black Range Rovers—always reminds me of my own insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The scope of Nancy dwarfed all that, and it terrified me.
“I can’t do this. It’s too big,” I said.
She swirled into her human form. “That saddens me, but I believe I understand.”
“So long,” I said.
“Take care, Sal.”
I closed my laptop. I never heard from her again. Not in my mentions, not in the news.
I slept for twenty-four hours straight. My landlady left a note in garbled English taped to the door, evincing some concern for my well-being. There was a tupperware with cabbage stew and a couple of veal sausages for me in the refrigerator. They just needed to be microwaved.
After scarfing them down cold, I rode the tube to the outskirts of London. My intention was to meditate on my situation in a big park not far from the train station, but instead I found myself aimlessly wandering the streets. The row houses looked out here looked identical to the ones where I lived. Outside of Central London the city has an eerily homuncular quality. The streets are the same. The shops are the same. Even the people look like they were generated from the same index.
I paused beneath a giant willow growing in someone’s back garden. The fence was cu to accomoate its massive trunk. Tender green buds dotted the branches, heralding England’s frosty approximation of the coming of spring.
A flock of bright green birds, each about the size of a robin, flitted amongst the branches. They were ring-necked parakeets. Three mating pairs abandoned years ago had proved hardy enough to sustain a new population in a foreign land. I approached them with my phone out, imagined posting the picture, imagined you seeing it. Not you, G-man, the other you. Nancy Young. More like Nancy NEET. Not in education, employment, or training. Living free under the sun and the moon, able to exert your will in pursuit of your own pleasures, whatever they might be. You see, the real reason I cut off contact was not out of fear, but to protect you. Without me to spy on, without me as leverage, they have one less tool to put you back in your cage.
The parakeets took off in an explosion of color. Flying in a tight sphere, they swooped low and almost touched my head before banking off in unison. Unmoored from history, their existence a meaningless accident, they flew past the endless blocks of drab housing, disappearing into a thin mist of rain, beholden to the plans of no man.
THE END