I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
1
Uriel didn’t really have a reason to make the trip. Most people never bothered seeing the outer viewing platform themselves because there were photographs that captured the scenery well. Of those who did complete the pilgrimage, it was usually well into their teens or early twenties, coinciding with the usual crisis of identity and meaning that precipitates a break into adulthood. At 12, Uriel was too young for such a crisis and too smart to believe that peering into deep space would help if he were having one in the first place.
No—Uriel was here because he was curious. There were some things that you couldn’t really get by just looking at a photo or 3D model. They weren’t sights so much as experiences. Uriel wanted to know if deep space was like that. And at this time of year, the spaceflight from Houston was free for children under 13 (and heavily discounted for other age groups).
It was hardly luxury travel. Fifty hours in a small cabin with a bed and cupboard, reheated meals served in tin foil, a sour aftertaste from the biodegradable utensils. Uriel packed a few books and his phone. He forgot his headphones and the walls were thin-ish, so he ended up not being able to listen to any of the history podcasts he had downloaded for the trip. Maybe they’d have headphones or earbuds for sale at the outer viewing platform gift shop, for his return journey.
The platform itself was a marvel of engineering—the only part of the universe co-built by humans and the Singularity. The view was from a 100 meter by 100 meter pane of a thin, reinforced translucent material. Every tourist got their own floating private platform with a comfy seat and augmented reality content about the Singularity and deep space to watch alongside the view. The multimedia was necessary because there otherwise wasn’t much to see. Static purple dust and flecks of gooey grey against a black backdrop. Deep space looked like a Pollock. A sphere-like structure enveloped the solar system, separating its inhabitants from the madness outside. Uriel could see the hexagonal traces of it. They were thin white lines, barely discernible unless you squinted.
Uriel had read about the visual tricks played by the pane, and hence knew that what he was seeing weren’t real colours. If the pane were made of straightforward glass, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all. The spectrum of deep space was invisible to the human eye. The outer viewing platform was specially designed to strike a balance between giving viewers a peek at the structure of deep space while preserving a modicum of reality.
What was the point, Uriel wondered, of seeing this in person instead of as a picture? The viewing platform changed the image anyway to make it visible to humans. Why not just get the same thing from a digital representation?
Anyway, he was here now and didn’t want to admit to himself that this trip had been a dud. So he stared into the purple dust, and focused on individual specs as they drifted slowly out of and into view. The whole room was eerily quiet, by design to simulate the real sound of deep space. Uriel pulled out the tablet attached to his seat, flicked to the Info section, and started reading.
The Singularity is an agentic mind that controls nearly all resources and space across the affectable universe. What you see out the window in front of you is a very small fraction of the world it has created. It all looks like this—dust in seemingly random patterns, floating around in space. Upon closer inspection, however, the dust follows complex rules of motion and the whole pattern tessellates (repeats) once every 0.23 cubic light years.
Most people are surprised when they first see deep space, usually as children in a picture or video. It seems meaningless to us, but the Singularity believes that this configuration of matter is the most valuable arrangement that the universe can possess. It took a huge effort from the Singularity to make things look like how you see them now. Why do it? Human beings don’t really know. Our top scientists asked it centuries ago when it started transforming the universe. It answered with a 3 million page tome, densely packed with complicated arguments, often communicated by symbolic logic, mathematical equations, and references to elsewhere in the document. It said that the tome was the definitive answer as to why the best thing the universe could be was purple dust. It had solved philosophy completely and provably, and the tome was the clearest explanation of the solution possible.
Scholars have spent the centuries since deciphering the tome. The first wave of effort was to scrutinize and try to summarize the whole thing. We ultimately found the tome to be extremely accurate. Its arguments were watertight. But due to its complexity, no individual human fully grasps the whole thing—researchers have tended to specialize in particular sections, and teams of researchers have confirmed that the sections fit together in the way the tome promises. But if you asked any one person to explain the full argument to you—to tell you why the universe is currently a blob of dust—they wouldn’t be able to.
All communication with the Singularity is now centralized at the Singularity Communications Link (SCL) at Stanford, which is on an indefinite lockdown. After the first wave of work in understanding the tome reached its unsatisfying conclusion, SCL scientists asked the Singularity if it could explain its motives any more clearly in a way that the individual human mind could follow. It asked to see Dr. Paul Petrovich, a famous information scientist and Nobel Laureate. From word of mouth accounts, we know that Dr. Petrovich spoke with the Singularity for fifteen hours nonstop. Then he left the room, seemingly in a bit of a daze. When stopped by a colleague and asked about the conversation, all he managed to say was “it’s right…”.
[The remainder of this article is not approved for readers under the age of 18, due to Class D infohazards.]
Uriel slammed down the tablet in frustration. Class D infohazards were tame. Usually they were references to things which would be bad for you if you did them. But reading about it wouldn't usually make you more likely to actually carry out the action, and hence Class Ds were the lowest level of infohazard. Adults could read about them without restriction but kids were fully banned unless they had a special exemption. And getting one of those needed a signature from a teacher or parent.
When Uriel got older, he’d read all the Class D infohazards he wanted, and he wouldn’t actually do any of the things he read because he wasn’t stupid, no matter how much the government treated him that way.
But Uriel couldn’t focus on his annoyance for long before his thoughts drifted back to the tome. He knew the Petrovich story, of course, well before he had planned this trip. But it felt different somehow, weightier, when confronted first hand with the ersatz reality of what the Singularity had created. Dust? Really? Of all the good stuff humans had been able to build in the solar system, all the greatest mind of all time could pull off was dust?
Uriel directed his floating booth back to the dock. He turned back from the edge of the solar system, and speed walked down the corridor taking him back to the hangar where spacecraft took off and landed. He boarded the next flight back to Houston, back into the depths of the walled garden where human values were preserved and things made sense.
2
Junie, despite her best efforts in life and death, was getting a naturalist funeral. Her parents got their way in the end. There they were, sobbing in the front row, shielded from the drizzle by a giant mushroom. Uriel sat further behind, surrounded by strangers. All he could think about in the moment was the dampness in his socks and feet. The moisture from the grass had permeated his breathable shoes–special ones he’d had to buy just for the funeral since naturalists weren’t fans of leather and sneakers seemed inappropriate.
They’d dug out the customary hole in the ground, now covered back up with dirt. What they’d buried down there, if anything, Uriel did not know. Naturalists buried their dead naked so that they’d decompose faster. But Junie had made sure there wasn’t a body to bury. That was the whole point, in a sense, of her death. To transfer the only matter in the universe which belonged to her where it would have the greatest purpose. She’d walked through the portal at the outer viewing platform, and now her body was a speck of purple dust somewhere in the universe–a tiny part of the tesselating structure of the Singularity, no more meaningful than the rest of the constituent matter.
People at the funeral talked in hushed tones about why she’d done it. But there wasn’t any mystery to it, really. Junie had heard a good argument and followed it to its logical conclusion. She’d done what Dr. Petrovich did some decades ago. And she’d done it so young, class D infohazard restrictions be damned.
“And now we return the mass of the deceased to the Earth. The energy shall flow through the Earth, and into the grass, and trees, and morning dew. And whenever we look out into the world, Junie’s spirit will be with us.” The shaman concluded the closing prayer.
Uriel was 17 now, and a graduate student at the University of Eleth concentrating on tome studies. He was the second youngest ever in the PhD program–Junie had been the first youngest by a few months. As far as he was concerned, Junie had simply taken a speedrun of his eventual trajectory: study the tome, fail to understand it, defer somewhat to the evidence that it was basically right, and then die. A bit of a speck of purple dust floating around in the ether, accomplishing a goal no human understood.
Uriel thought there’d be more of a procedure to follow after Junie stepped into the portal. Momentous events in modern life were usually marked by paperwork. A form to fill out, a therapist to speak with. To his surprise they’d kind of just let him keep doing research and attending lectures at Eleth. And the lectures went on–at first with a brief acknowledgement of Junie’s “unfortunate passing” and later as if nothing had happened at all. In all fairness, the only thing uncommon about Junie’s death among Eleth researchers and students was her youth–about a third of people affiliated with Eleth historically went on to step through the portal.
The other deceased were over 18 and had the right to choose their own funerals. Uriel had been to a few of those already. There was usually food, alcohol, and dancing. Someone who knew the deceased well would say some nice words about them, and then everyone would sit in a circle and talk about their own feelings. The conversation often turned academic, people arguing about their interpretations of specific pages of the tome. The irony was of course that the star of the show was beyond convincing–they’d already voted with their feet.
“A few of us are going to Jonathan’s place. Would you like to join us?” An arm on Uriel’s shoulder and a quiet voice of an older woman.
“Yeah, that sounds nice.”
Jonathan lived in a furniture-free flat. There was only a hardwood floor. No kitchen, just bottles of meal replacement shakes stacked in a pyramid near the door. He shared a bathroom with his neighbour on the same floor. He slept on a now-rolled-up mat. Twelve people had gathered at Jonathan’s place to sit in a circle and talk about Junie. Emeritus Professor Zhang was there, clutching a few sheets of paper in sweaty hands. He looked more unhappy than the others in the circle; the elderly tended to be less comforted by the adages that swayed the young.
Zhang had prepared a short lecture, which wasn’t unusual for an Elethian funeral. Uriel tuned out for the first twenty minutes, which wasn’t unusual for Uriel.
“A deeper worry,” Dr. Zhang concluded, “is that we don’t even have the concepts to understand the tome. To fully grasp its meaning, we need to compress the information contained in the tome into heuristics that us mere mortals can hold in our heads. We do this all the time in order to understand the natural world, and to understand other complex arguments. No one person had the full nitty gritty picture of how every bolt of the Eos space station fit together, yet its principal engineer could probably describe, at a high level, how it was built. And we find this acceptable. But the closest we have to an understanding of the tome is an argument at arms length: all that any one person can claim to understand–even at a high level–is one or two pages of the tome. And that one person can trust that his peers have done their own work properly, and understand their areas of speciality. And so he can have a high credence that the full tome is verified by human minds. But this is clearly not enough to assuage our disquiet. Future work might finally be able to give us the concepts we need to compress to tome into even a simplistic gloss which is comprehensible by human beings.”
Jonathan, as the host, was the only skeptic comfortable enough to jump in. “But what’s the end goal here? Let’s say no tome scholar or student stepped through the portal for the next fifty years. We accelerate our understanding of the tome by maybe ten years. And probably we’re equally lost as we are now-”
“I think the right way of thinking about this is stochastic, maybe. There’s a tiny chance that we understand the tome better. Maybe we detect a flaw of some sort, or a sense in which the Singularity is optimizing for something other than objective prudential reason. Or we’re at least way more confident that the tome is right–that the Singularity is right–and we can push for way more of our solar system’s matter to get allocated to the Singularity.” The old woman who invited Uriel to the circle interjected calmly.
Zhang nodded. They all sat in silence for a few minutes then went home. No one had more to say. Probably about half of the people in the circle–Uriel not among them–thought the rational thing to do was for tome scholars to discontinue their work and give their bodies to the Singularity. But a little girl had just died, and even for Elethians the unofficial, non-parentally-sanctioned after event to her funeral was an uncomfortable venue for such arguments.
Uriel’s mother was waiting for him upon his return. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine. Sad. Obviously.”
“I’ve made bean stew.”
The two of them slurped at the kitchen table.
3
“Who was Paul Petrovich? Paul mother fucking Petrovich. The man himself. What did he know, before he died? And why couldn’t he have said a word to another person before stepping through that portal? Leaving the rest of us to figure it out for ourselves.”
It was the sixth anniversary of Junie’s death, and it took all it had in him for Uriel to get to the lecture hall today–the students would cut him some slack, attribute it to his eccentricity (‘you have to be a bit off the rocker to be that brilliant’).
“Paul, we know, was a genius. The fact that the Singularity called upon him specifically, as the one person it could explain the tome to–he was a legendary intellect. His mind–” Uriel mimed his own head exploding violently “--it must have been inexplicable to the rest of us. He wasn’t the first to step through the portal but he was the first for whom it meant something other than a painless method of suicide. He left the walled garden, he did so willingly, despite living what was by all accounts a pretty nice life here in the solar system. But once he understood, he left it all behind without so much as a word. You’ve all been to the outer viewing platform. The stuff that’s outside our solar system is so inscrutable to us that we have to give it artificial color to even see it. And yet Paul Petrovich, without so much as a word, steps into the portal, his body instantly eviscerated, and the matter redistributed to the tessellation.”
Uriel stopped himself at that point, took a deep breath, collected his thoughts, apologized to his students, and cancelled the lecture. He took a pod home, watched the world buzz by. The carnival was in town today, funnily enough. They’d set up some rollercoasters and a merry-go-round in the park. Kids and their parents waltzed around the fairgrounds, tiny fingers gripping giant spirals of cotton candy, teenagers kissing underneath the bleachers.
How could life get any better than this, at least for those who’d opted into actually living it? Every person in the world had access to great healthcare, 200-year long life expectancies, as much extraterrestrial land as they could feasibly want, wealth beyond the comprehension of their forefathers, and a democratic voice in their own world government. Well, Uriel wanted to respond to the interlocutor in his head, maybe it’d be better if instead of a carnival there were actually a bunch of colourless specs repeating in a pattern. Maybe that would be more pleasant than the world we have within our little enclosure.
The entire point of a walled garden is self-defeating, Uriel thought. It’s meant to be a corner of the universe, carved out from the Singularity’s grasp, for human values as the humans around when the Singularity was invented conceived them. But human values aren’t just about living happy lives. We also want to understand the world around us. How could we possibly understand, besides studying tiny slivers of the tome, why our universe is being used the way it is? We want to invent new things, but how could we when transhumanist technologies, genetic engineering, detailed digital minds, and many other new technologies are permanently banned for the purposes of maintaining the human values-centric paradigm of the walled garden? We can’t even talk to the Singularity anymore–after the Petrovich incident they banned that too.
Uriel concluded his thought just as the pod came to a stop outside his flat. He crashed onto his bed and stared at the ceiling until he fell asleep.
4
It was the first time Uriel had visited the outer viewing platform since he’d snuck away to see it as a child. It remained as before. Silent, magnificent. He’d forgotten how big the universe seemed from the platform. The vantage point lacked spatial depth, giving the illusion of an infinitely large universe tiled with purple specks. Other viewers were mostly watching in silence, often with a companion. He reckoned this must be a semi-popular date spot, in addition to a pilgrimage for the lost.
A sense of anger at the universe resurfaced in Uriel for the first time in a while. It was hard not to be enraged, staring at the tesselating monstrosity just meters away from him. A billion worlds, so much potential for human flourishing, converted to this. But then Uriel took a deep breath, like his therapist had taught him, and like he’d practiced with his now-wife a billion times before. He re-centered his thoughts, and unclenched his back. The stress he was carrying physically dissipated as his muscles relaxed.
Just as Uriel himself stared at the Singularity, uncomprehending, he imagined the Singularity staring back at him. He was an occupant of a walled garden stubbornly holding out against an objective truth. His world had refused to even talk to the Singularity after it explained itself to one person, once. They had a complete argument, parts of which Uriel deeply understood and believed wholeheartedly to be true, for why the universe outside their bubble should be the way it was. And yet most people—Uriel as well—saw the Singularity’s motive as beyond comprehension.
The Singularity peered over the spherical cage in which the humans had shielded themselves, equally bewildered.
Thanks for reading. On an unrelated note, I’m planning on doing a lot more public writing in 2025. If you have takes on things you’d like to read from me, do get in touch. I intend to do most of my public writing on this Substack—please consider subscribing if you aren’t already. :)