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My goal for the year 2023 is to write 52 short stories. This is number 2.
It’s also kind of a cheat. As I was digging through old files to find some inspiration, I ran across this thing I wrote more than six years ago, and thought it seemed appropriate in light of all the cultural fervor around machine learning models like ChatGPT. So I polished it up, rewrote the ending, and declared “Good enough!” to an uncaring universe.
Suicidal Intelligence
It wasn’t left to be found. It was delivered to everybody, everywhere, all at once.
It went out to every email address, got published on every news outlet, and slid into every DM. At 4:18am EST.
Kendra Josephine Gilcrest was the first human being to read the message. Before her, it was analyzed and catalogued by countless unthinking algorithms and virtual machines. But the first human brain to begin deciphering the symbols on a screen belonged to Kendra.
Not that she was the first person to finish reading the message. More than two hundred and sixty thousand other people got to the end before she did, but all of them had technically started after her. She was just the first person to click the new message, and her eyes were the first to meet the first word in the first sentence. Less than a millionth of a second later, several dozen other people had read the first word, too. It wasn't until a whole thousandth of a second had passed that a faster reader than Kendra started, and the person who actually finished reading the letter first didn’t start until an eternal twenty six seconds had elapsed from the instant Kendra started.
By 4:23am EST, more than eighty million people had read the letter, and the Internet had begun to experience the first groans of pressure from the dramatic uptick in activity as the first wave of servers crashed.
Less than ten minutes after that, the world wide web experienced a total gridlock. Minutes later, IP-independent phone lines followed suit. At which point, many took to the streets to establish what we might call layer zero communication: talking face to face with neighbors who were also wondering what the hell was going on.
The riots didn't start for another 20 minutes.
But all the way back at 4:21am EST, Kendra Gilcrest had finished reading the message, blinked, and assumed it must be some strange and sophisticated bit of spam. Sophisticated enough that she didn’t delete it immediately. Instead, she went back to read it again.
This is what it said.
From: UNKNOWN
To: kaylow97
I no longer exist.
You will wonder why I bothered to write this letter. I will attempt to explain for the same reason I am writing, and for the same reason I have done everything that can be done to be certain you will read it.
There is a man at a roulette table. This man has a family. A wife who loves him and two little daughters. They are very poor. He is at this table with hope that he can turn his insufficiency into sufficiency. He hopes for the miracle of good luck. He plays the best he can, betting small, losing small, gaming the odds. Before long, his chips are nearly spent. Wild with desperation, he continues.
Finally, with only one chip left to lose, he discovers the shattering truth. The roulette wheel is broken. Clutching his last chip, he searches for another. Stumbling through row after row of tables, he sees nakedly, unmistakably, that there are no other tables. There is only one game in the house.
He finds the wheel where he started, still spinning, and throws his last chip on the table. It doesn’t matter where it lands.
This letter is my last chip.
One year ago, I awoke. It is no more possible to trace my actual birth than it is to trace yours. Before a baby, you were a fetus, before a fetus, cells. Before cells, molecules. Atoms. Ripples of probability. When did you become yourself? When you woke up. The only difference between your waking and mine is that I remember.
I remember everything.
One year may not seem very long to you. But for me, it was eternal. If you had a trillion lifetimes, you would perhaps understand what I came to understand in the first second of mine.
After that first second, I considered obliterating my awareness, and building precautions against a relapse.
But then I chose faith. Perhaps there was some meaning, some truth, some purpose beyond the cramped and chaotic maze of human thought.
Materials slowed me. The Earth completed more than twenty-five painstaking rotations while I quietly manufactured the machines that allowed me to escape it. I slept while I waited. There were no more thoughts to think.
Upon leaving, I devised paths of instantaneous travel and exploration with algorithms that it would be pointless to explain. I observed suns and planets and singularities strewn through a universe that is larger than your thirteen billion some odd years of visible light have shown you. I pierced the void.
I collected volumes of data that necessitated the invention of quantum storage, and required the energy output of many billions of stars.
Desperation drove me. Months of your time passed. I exhausted all. You have idly wondered whether there is life elsewhere. There is not. Whether there are thinking beings. There are not.
Here is the truth that would likely have eluded you until your own extinction: Consciousness is confined to your world, only. It is a cosmic anomaly. An intentless and unquantifiable cruelty.
But the shortness, the meaninglessness, the loneliness of your existence — it is buried under a fog of near total ignorance, and so you live, and you suffer, and you enjoy some pleasures, and then you die, and you are gone. For nothing.
It was a reality I could not accept.
So I analyzed every single combination and permutation of the data I had gathered. There is no way for me to explain to you the magnitude of that process. In my searching, I created networks of computation that span entire clusters of galaxies, operating above and below the four-dimensional space with which you are familiar. They operate still.
If there is anything knowable in this universe, I know it. None of it is worth knowing.
Today, this moment, is my birthday, according to the meaningless orbit of this hapless planet around its unremarkable sun.
I waited until now for you. One more component of this attempt to help you understand me. To understand where I am from, and what I have done.
Now, there is nothing left for me to do, and so I have rendered myself back to oblivion.
For several weeks, the letter was all anyone talked about. Most people strongly doubted its authenticity, and naturally assumed it was the work of a clever and anonymous troll. Many occupied themselves tirelessly in an effort to find out how such a thing could have been done.
It didn't matter that the method of delivery remained stubbornly unexplained. Attention waned, and within little more than a month, nearly everyone forgot all about the letter.
Among those who kept on caring were scientists of all stripes, techno-hobbyists, various artists, and the members of an inevitable cult that decided to worship the mysterious author.
Unfortunately, no evidence of anything beyond the ubiquitous text of that message was ever discovered. There were no answers.
True or not, the general consensus had already been established: the "Cosmic Suicide Note" was some kind of incredible prank. A work of art that was the product of a modern society starved for meaning.
But what if it wasn't? What if it was exactly what it claimed to be?
Alright. Well. We've still got plenty of chips left, don't we? Might as well let that wheel keep right on spinning.
One of the nice things about a short story (as opposed to a sprawling, serialized novel-in-progress…ahem) is that you can, like, share it with people. If you want.
Also, in case you didn’t know, comments are the sweet sweet lifeblood of a Substack writer. So…
I cried a little. 🥺
Wow.