Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I have to do this. 9/11 inspired a lot people, not just me and Madison. According to the Sacrifice Game Engine that we were now running on LEON, the Lab’s main AI engine, there are at least sixty aspiring doomsters out there who have a good shot at killing ten million or more people. I can practically see them, beavering away in their basements on homebrew viruses, packing the remains of tossed smoke detectors into dirty bombs, refining hundreds of pounds of ricin, and on and on. Madison was unusually talented but not unique. So if I don’t do this well, somebody else will do it, badly, in very short order. Any one of these losers could, and will, unleash his garbage at any moment. And from what I’ve had time to track with the Game, the scenarios aren’t encouraging. The odds are good that the next few decades, and more, are going to be characterized by wars, famines, depressions, government repression, torturous deaths, wasting diseases, parents eating children and vice versa, and on and on. Things are definitely going to get bad, and bad is worse than people realize.
Like I say, the Game lets you read ahead and work out exactly what to program. By read I mean, in the sense of a great Go player reading a hundred moves ahead. But with the Sacrifice Game I was reading hundreds of thousands of moves ahead, in hundreds of thousands of much more complicated “games” all over the world, tracing a single chain through the latticework of contingency that would lead to-well, let’s just say it leads to what I think is definitely the best available way to do it. Definitive, painless, and, once begun, inexorable. Now, that’s progress. Eleven years, one month, and twenty days later, it took only one tap on a touch screen to trigger an event that, if there were anyone around to witness it, would make the World Trade Center event seem quaint. Now, that’s progress.
Actually, there will be one near-witness: me. 4.564 hours-from the post time, the release time above, plus, say, four minutes for your reading up to this point-as I count down the quarter-seconds on the atomic clock, there’ll be a moment when, as I’m wondering whether I could have made a mistake in calculation and the whole thing will be a nonevent, for, I think a little less time than one of those quarter-seconds, more like, say, 700,000 microseconds-about two p’ip’ilob- two blinks, as we say in Mayan-I’ll see and feel things change around me, I’ll notice that something huge and strange is happening, and for about another quarter second, just before I cease to be, I’ll know that I hadn’t made a mistake, that I’d gotten it all exactly right.
So, that’s my whole story. And there’s nothing left to do but wait for the bigger nothing.
Probably you still don’t agree. But you would if-hmm, I almost said “if you were honest with yourself.” Well, what with everything else I don’t also want to put you down, but it’s true. Just look around a little, check out the world a bit, and it seems as obvious as a = a. The average person just wants to Huh. Serendipity. Just while I was typing this bit, about the average person, I noticed a headline on my news screen:
Bridge Demolition Provokes Soul-Searching in Akron
AKRON, Ohio-Its official name, the one on maps and signs, is the All-America Bridge. But so many people have jumped off since it was built 32 years ago that it sometimes goes by a less-welcome nickname: the Suicide Bridge.
Now the City of Akron has decided to do something about it, and plans to use more than fifteen million dollars of federal aid to destroy the bridge.
Since the bridge was built in 1997, 468 people have died leaping from the bridge to their deaths in the Little Cuyahoga River Valley below. Police are called to the bridge to save would-be jumpers roughly twice a week. Neighbors below say bodies have damaged roofs. Four years ago, the city spent over a million dollars to build a safety fence, but this was circumvented by over sixty further jumpers. Mental health officials say the All-America Bridge has become a “magnet bridge”: one with a reputation for suicides, therefore drawing more troubled people to try to jump off it.
In approving the measure, the city has prompted a sometimes emotional conversation about suicide and mental illness, government spending, and Akron’s image and future as it continues to remake itself and adjust to a new economy without the thousands of tire manufacturing jobs that once led people to call this the Rubber Capital of the World.
You could Google the rest, but you get the idea. And, really, who could be more representative of the general run than someone, anyone, from Akron, Ohio? Although I admit that four hundred and sixty-eight people is a hard-to-believe statistic. I mean, you’d think they’d have that many every couple of days. You’d think that by now the entire population of Akron, along with a large percentage of citizens from the neighboring communities of Cottage Grove, Barberton, and Cuyahoga Falls, would have taken the opportunity to jump. I mean, just typing the word Akron a few times has depressed me so much that I’m close to hanging myself right now with my mouse cord and not waiting around for the twenty-first. So why pull the thing down? If anything, you’d think the town fathers would just build a designated suicide platform up there, and put up bleachers and concession stands and sell tickets so that at least they could reduce the deficit. Or, if they absolutely insist on keeping their taxpayers alive, why not just work on making Akron less depressing? Although I guess that would probably cost more than a million dollars. A trillion? Infinity? Who knows?
So anyway, basically, they want it even if they can’t ask for it. And I accepted the responsibility to give it to them. I didn’t want to be the villain (But y’are, Jed. Y’are!), but without villains nothing happens.
And that’s the whole reason. I’m not doing this because I’m frustrated or enraged at my co-workers or any of those postal things, although I suppose I’m as angry as the next gink. It’s not because people are no damn good, although I’ve always had a deep faith in their awfulness, even before watching that toddler-in-the-microwave clip on Rotten Video. It’s not because I think the real world is just some collective hallucination or alien holographic projection or veil of Maya or whatever. If only. Nope. The reason, the only reason, is that I spoke to the babies. That is, I met the unborn. All of them. I listened. And they don’t want to be here. And I’m the person who’s in a position to do something about it.
So, I have reason and opportunity. Do I also have the right?
I don’t know. But I do tend to think that’s a meaningless question. The only point is, like I say, I’m in a position to do it, and so I have the duty to do it. I didn’t want to be the villain. Nobody does. But some are called PING. Ah. My imaginary internal alarm’s telling me it’s time to check in on that second domino.
Hmm. I’m almost afraid to look.
Okay. Not almost. I’m terrified.
Maybe if I don’t look it won’t have happened. Maybe it’s all just a fantasy… maybe it can’t happen, things like that don’t happen, things stay the same, there’ll still be things, there’ll still be coffee and Japan and mornings, another season of Battlestar Galactica, there’ll be parrot fish, crimson sea slugs, Fluffernutter sandwiches, snow Jed. You’re getting maudlin. Stop. Get a grip.
I called up the price feed and scrolled down… slowing… there it is…
Chix, chix, chix. Xkimik, xkimik. Ay, dios. Oh God, oh God. It’s not true, it’s not true…