Introduction

The so-called Voynich Manuscript is —or is believed to be— a work treating of botanical, pharmaceutical, astrological, and balneological matters, written on calf vellum in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century. The manuscript is first known to have been in the possession of the Czech collector and alchemist Jiří Bareš (1585-1662), from whom it passed in 1665, via the physician Jan Marek Marci (1595-1668), to the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) in Rome. It remained in Jesuit collections until 1912, when it was purchased by the London-based Polish antique bookdealer Wilfrid Voynich (1865-1930). This latter’s eponymous treasure is currently held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection of Yale University Library (MS 408), which has, to the great benefit of researchers, digitized the work and made high-resolution scans available online.

The Voynich Manuscript has long been held to have been written either in an unknown natural language, or in an uncrackable cipher. As if this were not mysterious enough, until now none of the dozens of botanical illustrations in the work have been successfully identified with any known species of plant. It is not surprising therefore that many scholars have taken the manuscript for a fraud, perhaps perpetrated by Voynich himself, who for his part long insisted it was an encrypted treatise penned by the medieval Oxford alchemist Roger Bacon. Evidence from carbon-14 dating and chemical analysis have in more recent years shown that the work indeed dates from the Renaissance, and that it was produced from materials primarily found in Northern Italy. But beyond this not much progress has been made.

Until The Hinternet cam along, that is. Three and a half years ago we were delighted to receive, from cherished friend of The Hinternet Maëlysenn Plouzanec, a translation of the first three pages of the Voynich Manuscript. Today, we are delighted to announce that she has now completed an exquisite translation of the following five manuscript pages, which we are thrilled to be able to share with you below. Before reading on, we encourage you first to study the initial installment, together with Maëlysenn’s detailed notes.

Three and a half years might seem like a long time to translate a mere five pages, but if that’s what you think then you really do not understand, yet, what this work involves. The Voynich Manuscript is by far the hardest philological nut in existence, which the very best cryptographers in US military intelligence spent decades struggling, unsuccessfully, to crack.

We fear that it may have cracked Maëlysenn in turn. Her recent e-mail exchanges with us teetered on the brink of incoherence, and when Hélène met her at the Chicken’s King restaurant across from the main station of Quimper to retrieve the USB on which Maëlysenn insisted on delivering the materials, it struck her, Hélène that is, that she, Maëlysenn that is, had acquired what Nietzsche somewhere called the “hunchback of authenticity”, characteristic of only the most dedicated and self-sacrificing philologists.

We urge you to subscribe to The Hinternet to support valuable work such as hers. To be clear, she is our friend, but she’s not letting us publish this material for free. Trust us: once you have subscribed, and pushed past the paywall to study her sumptuous rendering of this mysterious text, you will not be able to hold any other thought in your head than: Yes, yes, that was worth it!

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“Justin Smith-Ruiu’s speculative fiction is consistently as sumptuous as it is demanding.” —Dmitri Bezmozgov, The Oort Cloud Review, vol. 2.

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Never say never. Until a few years ago I “never” thought my partner and I would end up installing a Gro-Pad in front of our open window in the early springtime, when the Zephyr begins to blow in from the East, hoping to trap a little one to call our own. Yet there we were, both our biological clocks run down, more or less stuck with this small strip of gauze, like the absorbent pad in a package of fresh fish that soaks up excess fluids and that always somehow makes me lose my appetite, as the lone remaining method if we wished to start a family. 

I mean I understand the controversy. Many still maintain the spores that land on these peculiar-smelling rectangular mats aren’t really human at all, and that whatever subsequently grows there is only some sort of counterfeit homunculus. But some of us don’t have the luxury of dwelling on such metaphysical riddles. There are by now thousands of beings walking among us who began their earthly lives, or at least their most recent earthly lives, on just such Gro-Pads as ours, and for all anyone can tell they walk just as human beings do, and talk just as human beings do. And that’s enough, at least for my own pragmatic sensibility, to deem them human. 

This is to say, now that we’ve been through the process, that I think on balance it’s worth it. Not that we’ve had it easy. In fact things were tough for us right from the get-go, starting with an unusually gruesome mishap just a few weeks into our efforts, when, I confess, I absent-mindedly dropped a new replacement strip onto the carpet, only for Sam to find in that same spot, a few days later, a horrible mass of miniature human organs with no rational organic connection between them and no prospect for survival, like some grotesque Empedoclean abortion from the dawn of time.1 We were under no strict obligation to dispose of these remains with the ritual solemnity commonly accorded to legal and moral persons. But they were human remains, or something like it, or so we believed, and believe still. And in any case professional carpet-cleaners have by now adopted a blanket policy against dealing with this sort of mess. So we had our private funeral, Sam and I, in the backyard, for our little carpet-growth — our squandered human-spore.

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I am still in the middle of a solid two months of non-stop travel. As a result, I am again unable to write an original piece this week, so instead I thought I…

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Arme Wanderer ohne Haus, auf Landstraßen, in Wäldern, bestenfalls verkrochen in einen Blätterhaufen oder in einem Rudel der Genossen, ausgeliefert allem Verderben des Himmels und der Erde!
—Kafka, “De…

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“As for the revolutions of matter, they are but the alterations of one figure into another, which are made by the innate motions of matter itself.” —Margaret Cavendish (1666)

It was in the early indus…

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I know I shouldn’t be doing this but I’m just going to do it anyway. I’m going to tell you everything.

My name, unless I am mistaken, is Jeff Connor Kumpe, and I was born on April 13, 1973 in Winnetka, Illinois. My father was an insurance claims adjustor, and my mother was a registered nurse and a volunteer story reader at the library. I have not been able to recover any information regarding the year of their deaths. I majored in East Asian studies at Northwestern, and after I graduated in 1995 I flew to Thailand and spent a year backpacking there, as well as through Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, and Malaysia. When I returned to the airport in Bangkok in July, 1996, intending to fly home to begin my Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago —I was going to work either on the doctrine of anatman, or on the Sanskrit inscriptions on the hidden sides of the building stones used in temples throughout Southeast Asia, a topic subsequently covered with tremendous skill in Shelly Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men—, I was whisked away from passport control by a group of five toughs, ethnically Thai but all speaking unaccented American English, into a room with a fluorescent ceiling light, a few office chairs, and little else. My life would never be the same again.

Initially I thought they were going to interrogate me about something, that perhaps my identity had been confused with some foolish young drug-runner from a Western country. In fact no one asked me anything that day, or on any day during the several months that followed, throughout which I was flown, always handcuffed and with a black bag over my head, to several different sites around the world, whose rough coordinates I could only begin to infer from such hints as climate, vegetation, and the angle of the sun.

I must have landed in six or seven different locations —here catching a quick glimpse of cherry blossoms in spring, there an unmistakable blast of sweet pollen from the Nilotic scented thorn— before anyone seemed to take much of an interest in me at all. It was only after they’d brought me to an abandoned mall, with a makeshift office in a commercial space that clearly had once been a RadioShack, with skylights revealing a quality of luminescence that I had not seen since leaving home, giving me to know that I was likely somewhere not at all far from Illinois — it was only at this point, I was saying, that anyone asked me anything more substantial than whether I was hungry, or whether I was alright with Pert 2-in1 shampoo+conditioner. In all these places I had been provided with perfectly acceptable living conditions, spare but clean, and I was never made to feel that I was an enemy captive. I mean, I was a captive of some sort, but of a network of people, I had begun to feel, who expected me, eventually, to join them in a common effort of some sort.

Makeshift sleeping quarters were set up in the ladies’ fitting rooms at what had previously been a Mervyn’s. The food court was converted into a general-purpose cantina, one that perhaps lacked the variety on offer at its defunct Sbarro, its Famous Amos, its Orange Julius. But they kept us fed well enough on what seemed a rather arbitrary selection of highly processed brand-name grocery products — Go-Gurt at breakfast, Lunchables at lunch, Chicken-in-a-Biscuit crackers and Orange Crush available all day, and as many LeanCuisines as we could eat for dinner. I usually had four or five them, as during a typical day I generally took advantage of more than one of the physical activities offered. Most mornings I did at least a dozen full laps around the pentagonal complex, with five former flagship stores at its points (in addition to Mervyn’s there was a Sears, a J.C. Penney, a Macy’s, and a Nordstrom), always swinging my arms vigorously with 3 1/2-pound HeavyHands in my grip. I was joined in these routines by several young men roughly my age, as peculiarly docile and uninquisitive as I was. But none of them spoke any language I knew.

After perhaps a year of living this way —during which I also must have watched every videocassette in our small library a dozen times: The Bodyguard, Dances with Wolves, Moonstruck, Don Knotts in Gus, whose titular character is a baseball-playing mule—, one morning I was summoned to the RadioShack and greeted by a curly-haired man holding a clipboard and wearing a Le Coq Sportif tracksuit. “It says here you know Sanskrit and Pali. What’s Pali?” I explained that it was the principal language of the canonical texts of Theravada Buddhism. “So no actual languages? No languages people speak?” I explained that I knew a little conversational Thai. He looked disappointed, and after a few seconds in silence he resumed his questions: “Do you have any distinctive talents at all? I’m not seeing any in your file.” “I guess not,” I replied, “not really. I can recite every line of Moonstruck by heart, but that’s a recent accomplishment.” “So no one’s said anything up until now about what you’re going to be doing for us?” And at this I worked up the courage, finally, to ask a question of my own. “Who is ‘us’?” I said. To which he replied, simply: “The Agency”.

No, I confirmed, no one has explained anything, and upon hearing this my handler apologized with unmistakable sincerity. He gave me a paper shopping bag full of books and pamphlets and encouraged me to read them. I saw Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla by Carlos Marighella, and the prison writings of Abdullah Öcalan. I asked him whether this selection of literature reflected the Agency’s ideology, or perhaps the ideology of its adversaries. He told me no, he had chosen that bag at random, and I was free to select another one if these works didn’t interest me. I glanced quickly into one of several other bags lining the wall, and saw that it was filled mostly with Danielle Steel paperbacks. So I took my Bookchin et al. and turned to head back to Mervyn’s, and on my way out the man in the tracksuit assured me they’d find a job for me soon enough, but that meanwhile I should keep up my HeavyHands routine and try not to get discouraged.

Every eight months or so I was called back to RadioShack to meet with the same handler, and each time he apologized, and told me to keep up with the HeavyHands, and offered me a new bag of books to read. Soon indeed I took the Danielle Steel collection, and read every word of it, as well as Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker, V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, the Reader’s Digest abridged large-type edition of Rob Roy... After some years spent in this way, little by little my fellow Mervyn’s residents and I developed a workable pidgin for everyday interaction, which made possible some limited discussion of our limbo-like condition. Much to my surprise all the others theorized that the place we had been living was in their own country of origin as well. This didn’t make any sense. Are there Mervyn’s in Xinjiang?! I begged them to explain to me. Has Orange Julius made it to South Sudan? But the others paid no attention, and besides this inexplicable difference in our perceptions, we ultimately came to rely on each other a great deal, sometimes realizing, it now seemed to me, something close to the ideal of Bookchinite mutual aid.

The prevailing theory of the Agency was of a transnational spy network. But one of us, a Malian we all called Lee because he had made for himself a uniform of Lee denim that early on he discovered in a Mervyn’s storage room, said that we were all still just believing what they wanted us to believe. “A transnational spy agency? You all need to be thinking several orders of importance higher than that,” Lee insisted, “if you want to know why they’ve taken us. They don’t want us to be spies. It’s plain that none of us has any distinctive capacities that would recommend us for that role” (Lee had somehow grown particularly eloquent in our pidgin). “They only want us to be human again. Someday.”

Years went by. We heard scattered reports of outside events — the day the Triple Towers came down, the war in Lithuania, the small pox, the tragedy at the Westminster Dog Show that I can still scarcely mention without tears welling up in my eyes. We still only had an old videocassette player. Our handlers did their best to bring us fresh entertainment options, though there was still an irreducible randomness to what they delivered. I recall a particularly long four months in which our VHS library shrank, with our original stock of movies having been handed down long ago to the residents of the bunkers at Sears, to the size of a single videocassette of 9 to 5. Meanwhile, the paper bags full of paperbacks had been largely replaced by stacks of more serious reading, John von Neumann’s Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, and so on. It gradually came to seem to me that I was being trained up for something, and that the readings and the videos were part of the same curriculum, however different they were in tone and register. Somehow the sorority of avenging secretaries giving Dabney Coleman his comeuppance was part of the same education for me as the proof of the possibility of a universal machine.

Around the time of the small pox epidemic things began to change for us in significant ways. One by one, my Mervyn’s bunkmates began getting their assignments. The handlers also brought us phones, and finally gave us access to outside media and to the remarkable new technologies that had existed for some time already, but had remained entirely unknown to us. My handler had for some reason abandoned Le Coq Sportif and had taken to wearing Adidas tracksuits. I’ll never forget the day he gave me my reassignment file —600 pages in a stack of three Manila envelopes, and a 3 MB pdf version for my phone— and told me to start studying. “You’re going to have to learn some philosophy. Nothing too complicated. French too, but nothing too elegant. Mostly you just have to burrow down, deep, into your guy’s idiosyncrasies. You know what we say here at the Agency — there’s a behavioral fingerprint for each human being, and we don’t reassign until it’s been perfectly counterfeited. It just so happens your guy’s prints show some unusually complex patterns. When we first looked at his file we thought some of the data had been corrupted.”

So I set to work. It’s been five years now — five years of studying what must have been thousands of hours of surveillance footage, private e-mails, texts, immersing myself in an arduous course of something like method acting, except that in my case there was to be no return from the character I came to inhabit. None of us, at least from the Mervyn’s cohort, were ever really told how to go about “counterfeiting the prints” — we were not, by profession, actors, any more than we were spies. But somehow we all knew, as if by natural inclination, what to do, and by the end of my training period I felt fully ready.

Not that I was not sorry to go. The food court’s dining options had grown ever more diverse and impressive. Just the other day I had a particularly vigorous HeavyHands walk around the pentagon after a delicious breakfast of Eggs from Plants and an “essential clays” smoothie. It’s not just the food that had grown more refined and expansive, but also our understanding of our work. Wrangler (from Nepal) had taken to arguing that there are “infinitely many” of us, and that even if it seems like we’ve been waiting an inordinate amount of time, in fact new assignments are begun every day, at every second of every day. There is a constant flow of us back into the world, Wrangler said, so constant in fact that properly understood it’s really just the ordinary course of things, and not a rupture at all.

We didn’t fully understand Wrangler when he spoke, but we revered him nonetheless.

It was hard, but surely good that this part of my life was coming to an end. I was getting old, and it seemed to me fitting that I should rejoin the world now, to spend at least the last good chunk of it as a human being again. Even if that means I have to be a different human being, so what, I thought, I haven’t been myself for a very long time anyhow. So I finished one last Eggs from Plants, I hugged Lee and Wrangler and all the others with whom I had been so close, and I picked up the file on my guy, which anyway I already knew by heart, and I headed out the front entrance of the mall with my handler and we got into a van and drove what must have been ten hours or so until we reached the Lincoln Tunnel, and at 41st Street and 10th Avenue my handler pushed me out with a firm “You’ve got this” slap on the shoulder. And I went into the lobby and there I saw him: my guy, who, having just come back from Planet Fitness, wearing short shorts and aviator glasses, with his enormous forehead and that ridiculous old-hippie hair he’s insisted on growing and which accordingly I’ve had to grow too, was now holding an X-large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and was waiting for the elevator to go back up to his room at the Yotel. Just as the door opened, five ordinary-looking men got into the elevator with him, and I saw that it was now going down to the basement rather than up to where he no doubt would rather have gone. Poor guy. He’s in for a big surprise. It’s rather late in life for him to begin work as a Replacement.

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« Toutes les vérités deviennent plus lumineuses les unes par les autres. » —Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

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Hello, dear trans-world friends! Hello, Counterparts! I am so excited to be reaching out to…

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« Toutes les vérités deviennent plus lumineuses les unes par les autres. » —Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

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Hallo, liebe transweltliche Freunde! Hallo, Gegenstücke!1
Ich bin so aufgeregt, mich zum erst…

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You likely know already that the Four Towers, in which the great majority of my readers pass the days of their lives, were also made to host, in the early years after the Revolution of 20**, the four…

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You will have quickly understood, no two ways about it, that something in this work before you is a bit off. What can it be? It is not something having to do with what is said, but with the way it is said, some hole, some unknown blank spreading over my words like fog. If I were Georges Perec**, you might guess that I had taken out a monophthong or two. But I swear there is no playfulness here of the kind we’ve seen in the Workshop of Could-Be Booksmanship, so don’t go looking for any missing runes. 

Oh bloody hell then, you are saying by now, whatever could it be? 

I am not meant to tell, but I fear if I go on like this it is going to come out anyway. So look, here it is. You will have heard by now that the Board for the Right-Speaking of English has won its fight to forbid, by 2050, all words of our tongue stemming from the great Reign that long ago set out from Rome to take so much of Europe, from the Middle-Earth Sea right up to the land of the Scots. From that year on, no word shall be spoke or writ, the Board now bids us, with goodly might to bear out its threat, whose roots reach back to any of the tongues of the several folks having their oldest wellspring in the shire of Latium***, on the half-sea-mound of what the Magyars call Olaszország***. Only those words are welcome that come from the Angles, the Saxons, or the many Celtic folks who sprang autochthonously —some Hellenic words are welcome too, for now, as well as those of other weird tongues still farther away— upon the Brittonic sea-mounds. And even as of now, any tidings-writer who wishes to hold onto the key to his web-gate, through which alone he may send his work into the world, must come to grips with the likelihood that the Board will send its men to give his work a going-over, and, if fitting, will make him hand over a good lump of gold for his breaches. 

Shit, this is hard. Now, up until this day these goings-over by the men of the Board have ended only in smallish mulcts, but for me they had something more in sight. I had been so hooked before on the punch and energy of all those words from Rome, from Franksreign, from the Northmen’s strand on the other side of the English Waterway, that they found it needful to strip me fully of the right to write or to say any word at all that does not come from the Celts or the Teutons, or, now and then if I must, the Hellenes. I’m doing my best, I swear. 

It shouldn’t be like this though. English was always a mongrel, and it was always good that way. It swole our speech-might, and did not shrink it, to be free to draw on those other wellsprings, which in truth were never weirder upon the sea-mounds of the English folk than the words of broadly Teutonic wellspring. How, I want to know, is a Saxon’s way of speaking at all earthborn in England, while the words of a Northman from Calais are, even after a full thousandyear, still held weird? William the Smasher’s tongue, as far as I can see, belongs no less than that of some unknown Jute, who came only, what, three or four hundredyears before him? It’s mad. 

In the first years after you-know-who began his reign back in ‘28, there was much talk of how to keep English “clean”. Those of us old enough still to harbor thought-echoes from before that year know that folks never even thought about tongue-cleanliness at all in the old days, back when the Bound Lands of America were still a system of true folk-rule. But the truth is in life as in burghcraft you never know what’s coming up around the bend. Who can say what inborn and guilt-free folk-ways the burghcraftsmen hogging all the might will deem worthy of quashing next?

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 Anyhow, you-know-who began his reign, and soon enough set up the Board, whose men did not wait so much as a jiff before getting to work. 

I can’t say I’m unhappy about everything they’ve done. They did after all think up some rather clever new words for things of which we had forgotten how to speak in our own way. Oh look, now I’m talking like them. I mean, truthfully, I kind of like “sea-mound” for the type of land Britain is, or Hawai’i, or many other places besides; or “folk-rule” for “democracy” (there’s no ban on my writing that, since it comes from the Hellenes, though I’m probably pushing my luck anyhow); or “yearmarket” for the place you go at the end of summer to ride the rides, see the cows, gawk at the hairy woman with fur on her chin like a mandrill, eat some popcorn. Any new endeavor will bring out the gift of cleverness in folks. It’s heartening. And yet, it were much better, had the Board let these new words live alongside the ones old folk-ways had set down for us and had long made to seem right. It’s one thing if I can say something one way, quite another if I am forbidden from saying it otherwise. 

Why did they pick me out, of all folks? Why did they mark my work for a going-over? The thrust seems to have come after a work of mine was spurned at The New Yorker (Series B), which, as everyone knows, still has that old weighty standing among tidings-writings which keeps the Board from looking all too near into its doings. 

I thought there was nothing to fear with them, when I sent in a work speaking of the many risks standing before us in the near to-come with the upswing of Synthetic Thinking. You can understand my thunderbolt awakening, then, when I got back an e-sheath from their booksmanship deskman with but a lone paragraph from my work, and with all the weird words wholly blackened out:

In the doldrums of last summer, I found myself swept up in a fleeting ▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇. I had thought this could not happen to me again. I had myself written an ▇▇▇▇▇▇ book ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ the mechanisms that ▇▇▇▇▇ such ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ of ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, and ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ readers on how to claw their way out of the ▇▇▇▇▇ and ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ frame of ▇▇▇▇ that takes ▇▇▇▇▇▇ found on X-2 at ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇. I had also ▇▇▇▇▇▇ my X-2 ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ upon ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ “▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇” for the book. But ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ I found myself back there, almost ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ behind a new pseudonym ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇.  The ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇ that sucked me in had to do not with ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, though there was plenty of that swirling around too, but with the ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ of a new ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ by Singaporean ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, dubbed LK-99-8. This ▇▇▇-▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ polycrystalline ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ was ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ to ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ at least some of the ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ of a room-▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇-▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, and it seemed to work far better than the ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ LK-99 that was ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, also to much fanfare on ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇, twelve years before. At ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, our ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ have to be ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ at ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ and ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ so ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ as to ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇, energy, and thus ▇▇▇▇▇, to ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ them. But if LK-99-8 was what some had begun to believe it was, well, this would have been the beginning of a truly ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ technological ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, with ▇▇▇▇, almost ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ for the ▇▇▇▇▇▇ economy and the ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ of ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇. 

There was no further reckoning as to why they had blacked-out all these words, and neither did I know whether it was indeed the booksmanship deskman —the dreaded Calvin Coomey— at The New Yorker (Series B) who sent it. But one thing was as diaphanous as glass: I was now being watched. 

I quickly reworked the paragraph in the hope of putting right my misdeed and sending it back in again:

In the doldrums of last summer, I found myself swept up in a fleeting madness on the folksmiddles****. I had thought this could not happen to me again. I had myself written a whole book laying out the things that bring about such swells of madness, and sought to give wise kenning to readers on how to claw their way out of the heedless and over-trustful bearing that takes speakings found on X-2 as true. I had also shut my X-2 gate upon ending my “sift-reading”***** for the book. But all at once I found myself back there, almost unknowingly, hidden behind a new pseudonym gate. The triggering madness that so sucked me in had to do not with Synthetic Thinking, though there was a load of that swirling around too, but with the squabble-stirring news of an unheard-of new stuff brewed up by Singaporean stuff-knowers†, dubbed LK-99-8. This workshop-born polycrystalline with-melding†† was said to show at least some of the marks of a room-heat, around-squeezing††† great-driver††††, and it seemed to work much better than the first LK-99 brewed up in South Korea twelve years before. As of now, our great-drivers have to be kept at heats and squeezings so great as to need whopping work, energy, and thus gold, to keep them going. But if LK-99-8 was what some had begun to believe it was, well, this would have been the beginning of a truly great technological twirl-about†††††, with weighty, almost unthinkable upshots for the world economy and the patterning of the with-dwelling of folks. 

Man, that was right hard. Hard to draft, and hard indeed to read. That’s the rub. They pushed this right-writing on us on the lying grounds that, with the weird words gone, English would now be nearer to the hearts of, and more quickly understood by, the great bulk of our tongue’s speakers. And now no one knows what the hell anyone is saying anymore, since no one can, without great bother, find in themselves the thought-echoes telling them what these new words mean, while the old words are there and ready to go, yet forbidden. It is against all good wit. 

Shortly after I got the thumbsdown from The New Yorker (Series B) I was asked by the New York Tidings to write for them something about my childhood, when my mother took me and my sister to the Olympic Games in The Tidingsbringers‡ in 1984. Now the Tidings too is often deemed an old enough broadsheet, with a weighty enough standing among statecraftsmen and business leaders, to stay free, for the jiff, from heightened overwatching from the Board. But I wasn’t going to risk anything. And so I began the first word-puttings:

It was 1984, and my mom had made good on her wish to get us place-chits for at least one Olympic match, which, as few matches still had places open, ended up being the fifty-kilometer walk, held in the Tidingsbringers Thought-Echo Watch-Bowl. I do not keep many echoes from that day, but I can at least tell you that fifty kilometers is a right far way for a two-foot to go without ever letting both of them leave the ground at once.

It was hopeless. I got no answer at all. They asked me to write this bloody thing, and then they ghosted me. Had they scoffed at my all-too-keen giving-in to the Board’s ukase? No. It’s not that. By now I can’t win if I flout the ukase, and I can’t win if I undertake to live by it. What has happened cannot be mistaken for anything other than what it is: the Tidings has been bidden by the Board not to have any more dealings with me. 

This is so, so hard. I mean, I love the Teutonic tongues as much as anyone. I loved them long before the ban. Even now, when I’m daydreaming, I find myself rambling far and wide, out upon the stalks of our whole great Teutonic tongue-tree, und manchmal denke ich sogar auf Deutsch, wenn es spät ist, und ich allein in der Dunkelheit in meinem Bett liege. And that is where I find the thought-triggers for finding again the thought-echoes within me of our newfangled English words: thus, calf-flesh for the meat of the young cow, and tooth-flesh for the skin around the teeth that often grows swole or bleeds. And at other times I go down the trunk of the tree, to find again the elders there, and I sing the old song:

Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan,
Hinase hic enda thu.
VVat unbidan vve nu?‡‡ 

Earnestly, I do not say otherwise than that I once worked as a sift-reader with great knowledge of the tongues that came from Olaszország. Perhaps that is why they are hounding me so barmlessly. But that in no way means I do not love the Teutonic tongues too. What I do not love is the yearning for a tongue, any tongue, to be cleansed of its weird words. And when it comes to English, such cleansing is but a dream. It can never truly happen. We can only be made to write in such a cramped pseudo-tongue as the one I am writing now. What a shame.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. My web-gate key, for what it’s worth, is not working for now. I fear I’ve been locked out. I fear I will not be able to work as a tidings-writer anymore. Betimes it makes me want to cry out: Fuck! 

I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, not “fuck”. “Fuck” is welcome. I can also say “cunt” if I wish to do so. I do not wish to do so, but what I mean is that that is not at all where the Board is sniffing around these days. No, I shouldn’t have said “betimes”, which I thought for a jiff was the right word in the right place, for it rings old, but as the New York Tidings gives us always to know, the only good spelling of that word, alone or in with-meldings, is the one with a d and not an m. And that other word, which begins with a c and is like-meaninged to “shout”, will, no two ways about it, be deemed unforgivable. I’ve likely made other mistakes too. We all do, even if only some of us ever get hounded and brought low for it.

I’ve heard they are working the Spanglish speakers and other “hardened shifters” to death in those laagers out in Oklahoma where they used to run the derricks that look like great steel hobby-horses. They aren’t “new-teaching” them out there. That’s a lie. Those are work-laagers, you better believe it. They only new-teach folks like me, who speak English from the cradle, yet on some grounds or other can’t free ourselves altogether from its “down-low weddedness to the whore-daughters of Rom”, to speak with you-know-who. I can’t help it. I love my tongue — my one true mongrel tongue.

Let the men from the Board come and get me. I’m sure they’ll be on their way soon enough. Let them try to new-teach me their dumb-ass broken half-tongue. Things will snap back, sooner or later. A tenyear from now they will have moved on to quashing some other thing we don’t even think about today. It’s always been this way. You cannot ever fully shield yourself from the dumb strength of the ones who anyway believe a tongue is only for mumbling, while it is with far blunter weapons that they make known to us what dim shadows of thoughts might yet jangle and clunk around within the skulls of these wicked and frightened ghosts‡‡‡.

—Paul Edgar Toomgis
Of the Monks, Iowa
Eight-Month, 2036

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—
*“A Parable”. —JSR
**The surname is pronounced perets, as in перец, the Russian word for a hot or sweet pepper. The given name, obviously, stems from Greek. —JSR 
*** The implication of these usages is that proper names of Latinate origin are acceptable, but that it can’t hurt to find creative ways to avoid them, including by recourse to other more distant languages. —JSR 
****“social-media” (?)—JSR 
*****“research” (?) —JSR 
†“materials scientists” (?) —JSR 
††“compound” (?) —JSR 
†††“ambient-pressure” (?) —JSR 
††††“superconductor” (?) —JSR 
†††††“revolution” (?) —JSR 
‡I.e., “Los Angeles”. This is plainly an overzealous application of the guidelines, as in principle a Spanish proper name should not be subject to prohibition. —JSR 
‡‡ Our rough translation (—JSR):

All the birds have begun building their nests,
Except me and you.
What are we waiting for? 

‡‡‡That is, presumably, “spirits”. —JSR

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1.

To assert of someone that they are “dead” can sometimes be intended, beyond the bare biological fact this might report, to mean that that person no longer matters, that they now belong to an irrelevant past. Yet when, in the 1979 Bauhaus dirge, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”, Peter Murphy attached this epithet to one Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, born in 1882 into a Hungarian community in the Transylvanian town of Lugoj or Lugos, in context it functioned not as a final nail in the old ghoul’s coffin, but rather as an act of revival — a word, you will note, containing the Latin root for “life”.

Nor was this the first Gothic revival in history. When Murphy and Siouxsie Sioux and Andrew Eldritch and the others grew out this branch of the post-punk musical tree, they were only participating in a much broader 1970s rediscovery of a whole suite of aesthetic and cultural innovations of the Weimar era that had long been suspended by wars hot and cold. The silent films of the UFA studios at Potsdam, not least F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), provided much of the look and feel of the music videos of the Gothic subgenre, even to the extent that archival footage from Weimar, when it is used in YouTube “fan videos”, can often be so effective as to make us forget that the pairing is an afterthought — consider for example this perfect match-up of image and sound using scenes from Murnau’s film set to the Sisters of Mercy’s splendid Gothic ballad, “Marian” (1985).

But Murnau and others of his generation were themselves engaged in a revival as well — namely, a transfer to the screen medium of a sensibility that had emerged much earlier in literature. We often cite Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, as the first volley in the genre of the Gothic horror tale, and we see this genre as reaching its pinnacle of excellence in the early 19th century with Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, and others. As I argued in my 2017 book, Vampires: Lovesick and Bloodthirsty (don’t ask), the sources of Gothic horror as a literary movement extend back more than a century before Walpole, and in their earliest instances are exclusively non-fictional. The initial impetus for the flurry of early modern texts on the undead and related phenomena, to be precise, was the expansion of the Habsburg administrative apparatus into newly annexed regions of the Balkans, and the assignment to mostly hapless Austrian clerks of the task of sending reports back to the capital on the peculiar customs of the South Slavic villagers.

The vampire myth is thus born out of proto-ethnography, as the natives periodically grew restless after reported nocturnal sightings of some poor old widow’s dead husband, and sought to remedy the problem with garlic, crucifixes, and wooden stakes driven through the hearts of exhumed corpses, and as the lowly Beamter sent news of these queer goings-on all the way back to Vienna. Serbian peasants were supposed to have been long-since Christianized, and part of the fascination their practices triggered, among the metropolitans, arose from the realization that, evidently, this Christianization had never been fully completed. All around the backwaters of Europe, the common lot of people were still engaging in folk practices of which the church could make no sense, and for which it had no room.

Curiously, many of the edifices in which that same church conducted its own affairs were also said to be “Gothic”, which brings us back again to an even earlier chapter of this label’s long history. The building style that today goes by this name reigned throughout the late Middle Ages, notably in cathedral architecture, having both evolved out of, but also replaced, the style we call “Romanesque”. The signature trait of a Gothic cathedral is its pointed arch, but in explaining the use of the name, we must not consider only the visible properties of the constructions, but also how these looked to the Renaissance critics who resented them. In the era of Gothic dominance the style was typically described as “Frankish”, but this is a demonym with a famously fluid denotation —for example, to this day when you use a proper toilet in Anatolia you are said to do so a la franga, while a simple hole in the ground compels you to do your business a la turca— and by the 16th century the great Italian painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari was in the habit of calling the cathedrals in question, variously, “German”, or, which amounted to the same, “barbarian” or indeed “Gothic”. That is, roughly speaking, the Gothic is that strand of European history that does not trace its roots back to Rome, but rather interrupts and obstructs classical aesthetics by importing a sensibility shaped in the heathenish forests somewhere to the North and the East.

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2.

If you visit the Bulgarian city of Ruse, on the South bank of the Danube just across from Romania’s Giurgiu, you will find several testimonia, in museums and statues and so on, claiming that this is the “birthplace of German literature”. How can that be? My grandmother-in-law was 17 when the Great War ended, and used to be escorted across the river on pontoon bridges by young German soldiers who were, by all reports, perfect gentlemen. But that occupation was mercifully brief, and anyhow German literature had a long and distinguished history already by that time. The explanation for this apparently audacious claim from the proud city of Ruse (home also to the great German-language writer Elias Canetti) is that it was in that settlement’s vicinity that, in the 4th century AD, a certain 𐍅𐌿𐌻𐍆𐌹𐌻𐌰, known to us as St. Ulfilas or St. Wulfila, produced the first Gothic translation of the New Testament. Because Gothic is ancestral to what would become Old High German, Wulfila’s work seems as good a place to start our histories of German literature as any other.

In Wulfila’s world, to be a Goth was little different from being a Hun; recall, here, that as late as 1945 this latter remained a common derogatory term for German soldiers. Both were barbarian tribes pressing down upon the Roman Empire; both were commonly conflated with the even more ancient Scythians; both preferred to have Mauritanian dwarves in the role of court jester, delighting their chieftains with polyglot puns; and both valued nothing more, at a feast celebrating some great new conquest, than the delicacy of a thousand squabs drowned in honey, and aged there thirty years, even their innards, even their feathers, slowly transforming, like wood become stone in the dark abyss of time, into delectable candies in the perfect likeness of a baby bird.

Though their latter-day descendants would for a while get hung up on the fantasy of racial purity, the Germans were in fact born out of just this sort of Eurasian mongrelization. Herwig Wolfram, author of the magisterial History of the Goths (1988), in fact argues that the proto-Germanic language would best be classified as a proper creole, an ad-hoc lingua franca hammered out to facilitate minimal inter-barbarian exchanges. This is exactly what one would expect of an ethnic group whose identity and whose place in world history are shaped through its diasporic radiations.

As near as can be determined the earliest wave of Germanic conquest throughout Europe, and somewhat beyond, began when the inhabitants of an island off the East coast of Sweden, Gotland, began to spread from their homeland as early as the 1st century BC, a process first described in the 6th-century Gothic-Latin historian Jordanes’s Getica. It is not true, as many have tried to claim, that the “Got” in this island’s name has any etymological connection either to “good” or to “God” (nor that these two terms have any connection among themselves). What is true is that the dim consciousness of a Scandinavian homeland, written into history by Jordanes but circulated mostly in the vein of legend, gave rise to a variety of “Nordicism” centuries earlier than this imagined community’s notorious ideological turn in the era of Nazi “racial” “science”. Jordanes himself had already referred to Gotland as the vagina nationum,1 which we might timidly translate as “the womb of nations” — that is, the source of so many of the ethnies that by the 6th century made up the map of considerable portions of the continent. In the period of Swedish imperial ascendancy in the 17th century, the polymathic author Olaus Rudbeck took this idea from late-antique historiography and developed it much further, claiming in his Atlantica (1679-1702) that Gotland was nothing less than the island of Atlantis first evoked by Plato, who purportedly learned of it from a wise old Egyptian.

By the early modern period most of Germanic Europe, beyond Scandinavia, Germany, the Low Countries, and to some extent the highly mongrelized British Isles, had been assimilated by surrounding populations: the Visigoths had long since been Hispanicized, the Ostrogoths from Wulfila’s region of Europe long since Slavicized, Turkicized, and of course Latinized. As G. W. Leibniz writes in his text On the Origins of the Nations of Transylvania of 1697: “Indeed the Goths, Gepids, Longobards, and other Germanic peoples settled in Pannonia, not to mention that it seems plausible that before the ancient Dacians —also known as Gets (if we are to believe Strabo and others)— there was a Gothic or Germanic people there. But whatever was German in that place, it may be supposed, was long since eradicated by the migrations of peoples.”

Still, considerable interest remained, for Rudbeck and others, in finding whatever surviving pockets might be left. This interest had been piqued, in particular, by the 16th-century travel reports of a certain Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a French diplomat to the Ottoman court who, in his Four Turkish Letters of 1581 reported encountering a surviving group of Goths in, of all places, the Crimean peninsula currently disputed by Russia and Ukraine. Thanks to Busbecq we now have a list of 101 words of the Crimean Gothic language (e.g., plut, hoef, reghen) along with their Latin translations (sanguis, caput, pluvia).

Over a century later, G. W. Leibniz will compose a list of “Desiderata pertaining to the languages of nations”, with concrete instructions given to travelers passing to the North of the Black Sea on their way to Central Asia, “to discover the semi-Germans in Crimea and elsewhere in the area of the Black Sea”. When the Italian diplomat and Orientalist Giovanni Batista Podestà makes this voyage to far Karakalpakistan in the early years of the 18th century, bringing with him the precise instructions Leibniz had laid out, he is disappointed to discover no surviving remnants of the community Busbecq had visited.2 The last of the Goths seemed by then at long last to have gone extinct.

But is that really the end of the story?

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I’m heading down to Wally’s for his annual summer solstice bash. This time of year there are about 23½ hours separating sunrise from sunset in Northern Europe, and I always feel as if I am under the …

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Those familiar with previous volumes of The Collected Works of Justin Smith-Ruiu will be well-positioned to appreciate the enormity of the challenges we as editors have faced in bringing this complex…

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Most of my fellow philologists are willing to concede, at least in whisper, that what we managed to capture from the Earth’s satellites just before the solar flare hit is rather slim pickins indeed: a few “Cuck Fantasy” gifs now constituting the Tumblr Codex; a handful of Crazy Frog videos (e.g., this one (a)) making up the Archivium Amphibianum; the YouTube Cache, which includes one video of some sort of celebratory numerological rite in worship of the series of natural numbers (1), another of an unidentified paramilitary faction boasting of its mighty war-engines (b), and, as we all know from day one of Intro to Codicology, a clip of the “Brooklyn science comedian” Molly Gottstauk getting robustly booed when she tries out her new one at open-mic night: “So the guy at Chopt said ‘Now pick your protein!’ And I was like, ‘Uh, guanine?’”

I will not include in this rapid overview the “treasure of our human heritage”1 known as Monkey Baby Bon Bon Bathing in the Bathroom with Eating Ice Cream with Puppy Side Swimming Pool (c)2 — yes, that great epos of the titular monkey god and his herald, the duckling-divinity Clem, who so captivated the feverish and suggestible imaginations of Generations 51-58. Their towering temples to Bon Bon and Clem still take up the great bulk of Modules 42 and 43, which continue to be off-limits to everyone but the remaining members of that archaic sect, as well as the technicians who must enter in emergency situations. The reason for exclusion is simple: although this magnificent epopee will someday have its rightful place in the science of philology, at present there is simply too much danger involved in working to reveal its rather mundane origins (some anonymous scholars have even suggested it is some sort of children’s educational video, and that the figures at the center of it are “only a monkey”, “only a duck”). I for one have no interest in dying for philology, no matter how deep my love of it is, and I will not risk any conflict with the dead-enders of the Bon-Bonist movement holding out from the G-50s.

Therefore if we stick to the official canon of the philological profession, there remains to mention only the Iacutica Trove, consisting of a clip of a “Russian Grandpa Speaking Yakut” (2) as he scrapes the hair off of what appears to be an amputated cow’s foot; a musical paean to Chėėkė, the portly, green-mustached god of dance, and to Künneï his muse (3); and a handful of videos from NVK, the state television network of the former Sakha Republic of what was, at the time of their transmission, the Russian Federation.

And that’s pretty much it, as far as direct documentary evidence goes for what life was like on our ancestral planet.

It’s been 88 Generations now, and until only the last few we were all too preoccupied with building up the Modules of our Vessel and with maintaining the Incubators to grow our population throughout this frightfully long voyage. It was the sages of Module 64, back in Generation 81, who first had the idea of studying these transmissions as a source of knowledge of our ancestors’ lives, rather than to worship them as inscrutable objects of mystery and power.

More advanced students of philology will likely know that I myself have had a rewarding career spent in long study of one of the most enigmatic documents in the Iacutica Trove, the so-called Kytaïga oloror saqa kyrgyttara (4). I was the first to offer a complete transcription of this work’s dialogue, as well a translation of just over 82% of it into the standard Anglo-Sino-Igbo Space Creole that, although it had died out as a living language already by G-14, remains, for better or worse, the lingua franca of scholarship.

This is a peculiar document for a number of reasons. You probably know that there is no record of its existence prior to G-38, unlike the other documents in the Iacutica Trove that have been proven to have been with us ab initio. You may also know of the rich tradition of apocryphal tales that emerged organically over the course of the G-40s, mostly in Modules 90-113, which had been hastily constructed just after our ancestors learned how to synthesize new alloys from cosmic dust and in this way to continue to add to the Vessel as they went. The inhabitants of these ad-hoc annexes, who lived and died within a near-total vacuum of history and heritage, seemed particularly adept at embellishment and invention, ever able to spin out new legends and lore from even the most minimal of initial source material.

At the heart of the Kytaïga oloror is a dynamic interaction between three characters:

1. Alena:

2. Lia:

3. And finally, the character conventionally known, ever since Module 64’s own Pant Gomüte’s pathbreaking work on this document back in G-83, as, simply, “The Interviewer”:

Prior to Gomüte’s work, the vernacular traditions of the above-mentioned Modules cast these three women into a delirious variety of unlikely roles, often with no evident grounding in the rather static and monotone setting of the TV studio that frames and limits all of their motions in the document itself. Completely ignorant of the language the three women are speaking, their devotees in the G-40s imagined them to be relating stories of majestic feats, elevated them into the role of half-divine heroines, sometimes imagined the Interviewer as their homely younger stepsister who seethed with envy at Alena and Lia’s beauty. Sometimes Alena and Lia were themselves cast as enemies. For several generations the inhabitants of Modules 92-97 lived under what they themselves described as the “Alena Moiety”, often descending into vicious troll warfare with the “Clan of Lia” in Modules 98-102.

At times these two groups represented the characters lying at the origin of their split in ways that were almost completely disconnected from the available evidence of the document. Thus the epigrammatist of G-47 known only as Pang wrote a now-classic post, which I translate here from the Module 94 dialect of that era:

Thus doth the fulvous, fangèd Alena avenge herself, eyes blood-red,
On the flaxen-haired Lia, as she hangs unsuspecting in her sleep-chamber.

Next door in Module 95, throughout roughly the same era, the inhabitants delighted in creating chatbots that generated new conversations between Alena and Lia. These conversations, they insisted without argument or evidence, captured the true meaning of the undeciphered dialect of the original Kytaïga oloror. Some of these survive down to the present day, and continue to surprise us with their unhinged inventiveness. I will cite here only a few lines of what is perhaps the most surreal moment of the 126 lines of conversation that survive:

Alena: Seriously? Mine is like super yellow even when, I mean especially when, it’s completely odorless. Am I weird?
Lia: Yes you are weird. Every color has an odor specific to it, whether you can smell it or not.
Alena: What is the odor of black?
Lia: I believe it smells like asafœtida.

And so on. Just completely incoherent nonsense, with no connection, as we’ll soon see, to the actual content of their original dialogue.

Sorry, someone’s trying to break in on my Pek channel now. It’s a forced interruption so I have to let them in. My apologies I’ll be back as soon as possible.

Hey wait a minute hold up there hold on now Justin, hey, remember me? This is Walter, from Mobile? I mean not Mobile, really, it’s technically Escatawpa. I just always say Mobile for people who aren’t from here. You remember me right? The guy with the pig’s-guts story haha? Well look we love your work down here man but listen are you ok? You’re veering into some serious glossolalia these days. You’re sounding like, fuckin, Shelley Duvall on the Dr. Phil show (d), you know? You’re sounding like if your writing were drawing it would be you drawing all these fractals and paisleys and shit on every square millimeter of your cell wall. What are you trying to do? Break, fuckin, Substack? Shake off more “fleas”, as you’ve called them? Get your paid-subscriber list down to just your mom? Look please man just slow things down and smooth them out a bit you don’t have to be so recondite and obscure all the time I mean nobody can even follow what you’re talking about I mean l….

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Lost him, I guess. Oh well. Again, I’m so sorry for the interruption. I really don’t know what that was all about. I have no idea who “Walter” is, let alone “Justin”. This was probably just one of those trolls over in Module 71, which they say is going to come detached in another Generation or so and drift off into empty space (the new synthetic alloys aren’t holding up so well, it seems). Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. Those people think philology is dangerous and so keep trying to mess with us however they can. I’ve heard they recently formed a strategic alliance with the Bon-Bonist nihilists. Nothing would surprise me at this point. But let us try to move on.

As I was saying, it was Gomüte’s generation that first made significant progress towards cracking…

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“When attractive opportunities abound… we are apt to be willing to pay a little and accept some small, even trivial cost of doing business for access to new powers. And pretty soon we become so dependent on our new tools that we lose the ability to thrive without them. Options become obligatory.” —Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

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I’ve got to admit things went pretty smoothly at first, when our current administration decided to go ahead and crowdsource the judiciary. The courts had grown so overloaded and inefficient in their last years. But more than that, the laws these courts had been set up to enforce no longer had much relevance in a world where anyway justice, or some semblance of it, mostly just rains down from the socials.

And with our old institutions rapidly collapsing, it was clear soon enough that the only way to gain a foothold in this new world was, likewise, through those same socials. Some time after I lost my job, along with everyone else, I was surprised to find myself thinking about launching a career in public life. The only problem was I had no taste for beefing, and we all know there’s just no way to rise to prominence in our new reality without passing through a few public feuds with well-chosen rivals.

That’s why, at first, I was pretty excited when they set up the Cancellation Policy (a phrase whose older usage, in establishing the terms of any relationship between a service provider and a client, was almost immediately forgotten). I had always been hesitant to choose a rival on my own. Lord knows I tried countless times, but each one, upon closer consideration, came to seem far too human, far too much like me, and I recoiled from the idea of subjecting them to a public evisceration. So when AI-driven rival-selection came along, with the promise of “Guaranteed Moral Desert”, I was convinced it was for me.

GMD was supposed to be the infallible algorithmic outcome of a selection process that yields up only those targets who indisputably “have it coming”. Even if they look like decent people to us, or like somewhat indecent people, but still, in the end, like people, with at least something in them that is worthy of praise and admiration, GMD, it was promised, had the power to cut right past such appearances and to tell us the individual’s true score on the Grumby Scale, where 0 is angelic perfection and 10 is carte blanche for whatever public humiliations, whatever mobbing, doxxing, deepfaking, or other mechanisms of social death, up to and including physical assassination, the matched attacker should wish to deploy. Any individual with a score above 7 is considered a suitable target for a Cancellation Policy.

And all of this might have worked out just fine, if the CP did not require a prior legally binding commitment to following through with the attack on whichever individual the AI ultimately proposes. There is no “swipe left” option, at least not after the first two proposals, and so, once a third partner is selected for you, you have no other choice but to feud with them, at least if you don’t want to bring your own Grumby score up and risk getting attacked in turn.

And in my circumstances, friends, the Grumby is not something I wanted to mess with. I was already hovering up around a 6.7 before I started looking into taking out a Cancellation Policy on someone. Long story — uninteresting story too. Mostly just some careless slips back in the early internet years, before we had any idea where this was leading. I used to go on Twitter to criticize what I held to be noxious political opinions, but invariably, in the interest of fairly characterizing my opponents’ views, I dutifully summarized what those opinions were in the most honest and accurate way possible. Little did I know there were already bots swarming around, gathering up data from my every exclamation, able to identify key words and to assess their speaker or writer in light of them, but, alas, unable, just as they remain unable today, to distinguish between direct and indirect speech. I’m still paying, after all these years, for my efforts fairly to characterize views with which I disagree. And while I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect that all those years of texting in French, with its many treacherous faux amis, telling my wife things like “Je serai un petit peu en retard”, has not exactly helped matters.

Plus there’s this damned watch I’ve got on me, like everyone else, in accordance with the new law. “You are falling short of your standing goals,” it tells me, and I gain another .01 points. “Your sitting time was longer today than one year ago,” and I go up .02. Just last week I mistimed my Papaya Blast Skittles binge, and devoured two whole “family size” packs just 14 minutes before my blood-sugar implant sent a new reading to Central, which immediately flagged me as prediabetic and made my Grumby go up .05. Damn. I haven’t seen an actual doctor in years now. It seemed like a good idea when I volunteered early on for EverCare, more than three years before it became mandatory. I even took the SuperNudge premium plan, imagining it might help me to develop healthier habits. Now here I am, prodded along like a cow, perpetually anxious about seeing my Grumby rise even higher.

Sometimes I feel like nothing’s really working the way it was supposed to. Just the other day I ordered a GoYu, and it showed right up in like two minutes, but then it refused to unlock its doors because, the app was claiming, its ambient DNA sensors were whiffing something that didn’t match whatever they have on file for me. How could I possibly change my DNA?! I mean, I did spend some intimate time with my lady-friend last night, but we always do everything by the rules, logging each successive contact in our paired Consent apps, even adding our verbals for good measure. We know that sometimes contact like this can contaminate our ambient DNA readings, but in principle Consent and GoYu are talking to one another and are supposed to be able to correct for this sort of thing. I read about one guy who filed a request to identify what had gone wrong when he got mis-ID’d, back when this was still possible. It turns out he had passed gas just as he was trying to get authenticated to enter his student-loan portal, and the sensors detected bacterial DNA traces from his gut biome. “I contain multitudes,” he joked afterwards on the socials.

Anyhow GoYu was clearly at fault for mis-IDing me, but what could I do? What sequence of operations could I undertake to override it? To what rational human could I appeal to explain the problem? Forget about it! I could only stand there, as the vehicle drove away without me, already sending its report back to Central, informing them that I had just no-showed a robotaxi, and bringing my Grumby up another .02. Damn!

So of course I was late to my monthly ubie consultation. I don’t know why they make us go down to Central in person for that, when in any case it’s just a bot who scans us and asks us a few questions and takes our vitals, all of which could be done from home. I guess they just want to make sure we’re not gaming the system somehow. Anyhow I ended up getting my monthly pay reduced by 350 ubies, not for being late (I had three lates banked after years of obsessive punctuality), but for replying to the question about my excessive sitting with what the machine said was a detectable tone of sarcasm. It even showed me a read-out of my audio when I said “Sorry for making such liberal use of my humble haunches.” I have to admit it did look pretty sarcastic, when I saw it as an audiograph.

I can’t keep going like this, I thought as I made my way home on foot, earning as I went effusive praise from my watch for all the steps I was racking up. I’ve got to get ahead somehow.

When I arrived I went straight to the CP website and clicked “select”. I had got this far twice before, but each time I saw the name and profile picture of the poor mark the algorithm had chosen for me, I lost my nerve. I knew that if I backed out a third time it would bring my Grumby up further, and leave me perilously close to landing on someone else’s screen who had just clicked “select” themselves on the CP website. So I was basically locked in, to pretending to read the small-print and, upon seeing the intended target of my cancellation campaign, to clicking “accept”.

The system claimed it was able to guarantee not to pair us with anyone more closely related than a fifth cousin, and it was said to be getting ever better at avoiding pairings with anyone who had ever had direct personal contact with us. I think I would have been prepared to tear into just about anyone at this point, an acquaintance, a fifth cousin, a world-renouncing nun living out her days in a silent convent. If their Grumby is over 7, I convinced myself, they’re fair game.

So it is not out of squeamishness or moral compunction, I hope you will understand, that I cringed in horror when I saw the name of Arthur Hodges and the birthdate 01/24/1979 appear on my screen, right below the unmistakable likeness of my dear little brother. Please! I screamed. Anyone but Arthur!

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How could this have happened? Was it a repetition of the same DNA mismatch that explained my problem with the GoYu? If so, is there any possible pathway for appeal? And how on earth, even if we take the DNA problem into consideration, could I have landed on my own brother, out of an estimated 1.3 billion people on the planet with a Grumby over 7? It didn’t make any sense. An hourglass appeared in the center of my screen, and reminded me that I only had 30 seconds left to click “accept”, or “otherwise risk negative consequences for [my] Grumby score.” My watch jumped in too, buzzing and chiming, and sending that low-level electrical pulse that always makes my teeth feel like they’re biting tinfoil, and flashing the blunt message on its screen: “Click accept now”.

Not all of this was mysterious to me. I mean, I knew perfectly well why Arthur had a score of 9.8. He had long been one of the resisters, not so much out of conscientious objection as out of simple lethargy, and only grudgingly got his first smartphone in late 2024, six months or so after they had become mandatory. Before that he’d lived with a primitive flip-phone from the ‘90s, the kind that sends no pings to the GPS satellites and that is completely useless for tracking and data-harvesting. He preferred cash transactions, and in every way possible continued to live his life sub-rosa.

When Grumby went into effect, the problem was not so much that he had left a trail of score-lowering data, but, far worse than that, that he had barely left a trail at all. And although Central will never come right out and say as much, to leave no trail is by far the greatest transgression in our new reality. And to top it all off, one of the very first things Arthur did upon getting his first smartphone was to download an image of Balthus’s Guitar Lesson (1934), which some utterly philistine AI had marked, in the .jpg’s metadata, as “child pornography”.

So being an utter cipher until you get caught with a Balthus, that’s pretty much a guaranteed 9.7 right there. How he got the additional .1 is none of my business. As far as I know Arthur’s been nothing but a model resident ever since he moved into his group home. Such a move had been inevitable for him. He’d only ever worked at Dairy Queen, as well as a brief stint years ago at Meineke Discount Mufflers. How could a person so perfectly average, and so lacking in aspiration, be expected to adapt to the new labor market and to make a case for his distinctly human skill-set alongside vastly more efficient robots? There was nothing to do with him but give him a modest ubie and room and board from Central.

Arthur even got a private room by agreeing to sign up for Central’s FastTrack for physician-assisted… well you know. I don’t want to say it out loud. Arthur signed away his life in exchange for a few years of comfort, at most. I had been assured by the medical staff that he was happy with this decision. He said there’s no longer any room in this world for human beings with souls like the one he has, so he’d prefer to sit in the day room at the group home and watch the Bears on the TV, and drink the Capri-Suns and eat the Taste-Tations and the Fruit-by-the-Foot that the nurses bring him, as if he were a sick child, until the day comes for his engagement with nitrogen hypoxia.

No judgments, though. I mean, this world could bring anyone down. He’s still my brother, in the end. I only clicked “accept” because my watch was nudging me so hard and I figured I could maybe appeal the assignment after it was officialized. What a foolish thing to hope for! I spent hours studying the different features of the CP website spelled out beneath the hamburger icon. Naturally, no phone number was given to speak to a live agent, and the online AI chat assistant, “Nineveh”, proved incapable of telling me anything I had not already read on the site in text form. Every click brought me back, sooner or later, to the homepage. Truly, this was a huis-clos situation. The Cancellation Policy had no cancellation policy.

I tried to ignore it all for the first week, but as expected, on the morning of the eighth day, my watch began to flash and to buzz and to send lightning bolts through my teeth. “You have 21 days to complete Cancellation,” the watch reported.

Poor Arthur! Little Arthur, who used his allowance to buy me a 12-pack of Hostess Sno Balls in the summer of 1985 because “they’re funny like you”, and who once came home from school crying only because “all the kids want to talk about is 90210”. Perhaps there never was room in this world for a soul like his.

Another week went by, and another shock came and another reminder. “You have 14 days to complete Cancellation.” That same day I went to my part-time job, troubleshooting guardrail failures on the very same AIs that had forced me out of my previous full-time job as a philosophy professor. The one I was assigned to monitor had blown a fuse when a student kept insisting to it that “there’s no Archimedean point from which to make certain and irrefutable ethical claims.” The AI had threatened to pursue disciplinary measures if the student continued to withhold assent regarding the substantive moral claim that “Cannibalism is wrong”. “It depends,” the little smart-ass kept repeating. “It all depends.”

So now they’ve called me in to make a final determination as to whether cannibalism is wrong or not. This is ridiculous, I thought. In my past life I was a trope-theorist, not an ethicist, and anyway as far as I could tell the kid was absolutely right. It all depends. My attempt to explain as much to the AI professor, supposedly under my own direct supervision, only served to add another .02 to my Grumby.

I got home that evening, and instead of taking a drink as I would have in the old days I plopped down on the couch in a defiant “sitting” position, opened my laptop, and went straight to CentralSocial. “Arthur Hodges is a sick fuck,” I wrote. And again: “Arthur Hodges, of the Expedited Quiescence group home in Naperville, Illinois, is a ChoMo.” And again, some hours later, I attached a screen shot of Arthur’s CP profile, and wrote: “Downloading Balthus’s Guitar Lesson? Seriously?!” I went off to bed, and let the internet do its thing.

By the next morning these three denunciations had garnered over 100,000 reposts between them, and more than triple that number of likes. I scanned some of the comments from the mob I had summoned, and quickly saw they were even coarser and more categorical than I had been in my bait-posts. It all seemed so disproportionate. Ordinarily when you decide to take on an adversary on the socials, that person is at least plausibly representable as your equal, and once you attack them you must brace for an equal and opposite counterattack. But Arthur plainly was going to have no idea any of this was happening unless and until it spilled out into the “real world” and someone firebombed Expedited Quiescence or something. He was probably sitting calmly in the TV room at this very minute, I reflected, re-watching for the millionth time that old VHS tape of the “Super Bowl Shuffle” (1985). What kind of monster am I? Who would agree to “punch down” like that, as they used to say, when conscience still held us back somewhat? And to do so when it is our own brother we find, defenseless, beneath us?

I checked my Grumby portal. My score was already down to 5.4, as low as it had been since a month or so after the system was launched, when the AI began scraping my old text messages along with everyone else’s. That’s what kind of monster I am. The kind who needs to get my Grumby down if I’m ever going to pull myself together again after this great… whatever it is, this great hecatomb of humanity. And there’s probably not going to be any firebombing or anything like that. Real-world spillover only happens like 17% of the time in official Cancellation cases, or so I’ve read.

Just in case I decided to call up the group home and check in. It had been ages since I’d spoken with Arthur. At least four years, or maybe five, anyhow it was before everything changed. As suspected the nurse confirmed he was currently sitting in the TV room, and she was happy to pass the landline to him. “Hey brother,” I said nervously when I heard his unmistakable grunt. I filled him in on all that had transpired, from my wife’s accident, to the loss of my job, my skyrocketing Grumby score, and, finally, to this most recent effort to improve my lot. A long silence followed, and then, like some die-hard Bears fan reasoning to his buddy about the commitment by his team of something plausibly interpretable as a foul: “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
“So you understand?” I asked, ashamed.
“Not only do I understand, I saw it coming.”
“You knew?”
“Those of us who have left your world are able to see it in its entirety, and to know what’s in store for it.” This did not sound like the Arthur I knew. “You all spend your days chained to the internet or whatever they’re calling it now,” he went on. “You don’t realize you already had the internet inside your head, we all do, even if some of us look like we’re just passing our days in a La-Z-Boy in the TV room. You can unfold it all from yourself if you try. No technology has ever enabled a human being to do something we couldn’t have done before. It only looks that way. And no technology that wasn’t necessary from the very beginning is necessary now. It only looks that way. You can, for instance, choose to die instead. Just turn over your wrists, as Seneca said. Or sign up for nitrogen hypoxia.”

I asked Arthur if he had any idea how the system might have matched us in spite of our closely matching DNA, and I was surprised to hear him reply: “Who knows? We contain multitudes.” Then I flushed red with shame as I asked him, my own brother, whether he would understand if I were to continue in my campaign against him. Again, he replied: “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

The following week I did not cease to hammer away at him, with the ungrounded insinuations, with the facile rabble-rousing, with our era’s agreed-upon language of dehumanization: “vile”, “repulsive”, “sick”. It was not difficult to attract the attention of a few influential podcasters, one of whom demanded to know “what this Arthur guy was doing for so many years with a flip-phone? What was he trying to hide?”

When I next checked my Grumby, it was down to a 4.3. Arthur’s was up to 9.9.

The next morning, back on CentralSocial, I took the podcaster’s lead, shifting my emphasis away from pedophilia and towards my brother’s technophobia. “He seriously waited until like 2024 to get a real phone? What’s his problem?!” This query was taken up and recirculated so quickly, with such extreme escalation of vitriol, that I could not bear to watch. I closed my laptop and held my head in my hands.

I was soon interrupted by a phone call. It was the same nurse at Expedited Quiescence, who quickly greeted me before handing the phone over to Arthur. “We’re almost there, X,” he said. “One more post should do it.”
“We’re almost where now?”
“To a perfect Grumby.”

He told me Expedited Quiescence had recently initiated a “SuperFastTrack” program, for which he hoped to be the inaugural patient, guaranteeing immediate access to the nitrogen chamber for anyone with a “perfect Grumby” — by which he meant a perfectly imperfect Grumby. After we hung up I was full of conflicting emotions, but I knew what I had to do. I opened my laptop, and I went to CentralSocial, and I typed: “Arthur Hodges thinks he’s better than us.” And again: “Arthur Hodges thinks he can just ‘opt out’.” And again: “We all know there’s only one way to really ‘opt out’. Let’s give him what he wants!”

And at that Arthur Hodges’s Grumby shot to a perfect 10, while my own plummeted to a 2.3. A golden checkmark immediately appeared next to my name on CentralSocial. Within minutes I was followed by M*** P***, by Z*** von R***, and all those other oligarchs and influencers. Three days later I received a drone delivery from Expedited Quiescence. It was a little black box containing Arthur’s ashen remains. When you squeeze the box’s sides, a generative AI emits Arthur-like exclamations through a tiny hidden speaker: “You gotta do what you gotta do,” it says. And again: “What’s funnier, Sno Balls or Ho Ho’s?” And again: “I love me some Electric Mango Fruitsations!”

And at the bottom of the delivery box there was a single small square of yellow paper from a 3M sticky-pad, with handwritten words from a BIC blue ballpoint pen: “Thank you for giving me what I wanted, X. I told you it was all optional.”

Pliny Xavier Hodges
Oak Park, Illinois
April 24, 2027

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Ein jeder sieht, was er im Herzen trägt. —Goethe, Faust

1.

So Freddie Mercury van Helmont was all like:

me and who

And then I was like:

me and who haha

And then Degrowth_PAWG came in and posted that one gross picture of Madonna and Britney making out, and of course she was like “me and who” too, but oh, hi, sorry, yes, I didn’t see you. I was just thinking about an exchange I had recently on Elon’s hellsite. Haha. Well I mean not so much thinking, but reviewing, just centimeters before my eyes, with these new Apple Vision Pro glasses I’ve been wearing for the past week. Everything’s so different now, here in my enhanced reality. It’s almost as if it’s enough to call up a mental image before one’s mind, in order to cause it to appear as a concrete visual representation. My will is now my act. Amazing!

But I’ve got to be honest with you. I am not in Apple’s pocket and my duty here is to tell you the complete truth. So here it is, folks: while these goggles do have some impressive functionalities, on the whole my experience with them has been nothing short of a nightmare. My advice to you is simple: Do not buy this product!

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2.

I was among the first —perhaps the very first— to strap on the glasses here in Europe. I had made special arrangements with my buddy Craig to bring over a pair directly from Palo Alto the day after their big launch. Regrettably, Apple has locked most of the device’s functions for use outside the United States. But that does not mean they are to no purpose on this side of the ocean. Quite the contrary, for reasons I do not at all understand, wearing them outside their intended zone of use seems to draw out strange powers from them that have not yet been described, let alone accounted for.

Someone, I mean, is not telling the full story. For although Apple claims that here in France the Apple Vision Pro glasses are but an inert assemblage of titanium and laminated glass and so on, in fact they are quite full of life here, though a very different sort of life than the one I’ve read about in customer reviews from the States. It is a life moreover that seems either not to have been intended by the Apple engineers themselves, or to have been intended by them as a dark secret experiment, about whose monstrous purposes I can only begin to speculate.

Things were great, at least, for the first two days. I could walk down the rue de Meaux and, though this was not supposed to be possible yet in Europe, could see as I walked a cartographic representation of that same street, and a blue line that represented the path of my walking, and a moving blue dot that represented me. This is going to revolutionize walking! I thought. And if it started to rain I could pull up a Paris weather report and see a raincloud icon at the same time I was seeing the raindrops and feeling them on my head. Amazing! I again thought. It was as if reality itself had grown another layer.

By the morning of the third day —so, February 6, 2024—, I found myself so eager to put the glasses on immediately after waking that it almost scared me. It seemed to me as if I needed them, as if I had woken up with something akin to a terrible thirst. I wore them all day as I went about my business, much to the dismay of the Parisians, who, I noticed, seemed to have called me “monsieur” three times more than usual, in that officious and passive-aggressive way they do when they disapprove of your conduct or your attire or even just your brute physiognomy, but wish to conceal their disapproval in a technically courteous form of address. I didn’t care. Nothing could have induced me to take those glasses off. And when I got home that evening, and finally removed them as I settled into bed, after three minutes or so I began to cry — to cry that deep disconsolate sob of the child who suddenly sees the world lain bare, the indifferent world deprived of all meaning and hope. I must have sobbed that way for forty-five minutes or so before finally drifting off to sleep.

The next morning I put them on right away, and neither did I take them off that night when I went to bed. Other than for showering, my Apple Vision Pro glasses have not come off for five days now.

What I have described so far would already, in itself, have been most worrisome: both the inexplicable functionalities of the glasses outside their official zone of use, as well as the sudden and intense dependency that I had already developed after just a few days. But I have scarcely even begun my relation of the peculiar things that started to happen to me after the third day, which I would now give anything, even my immortal soul, to be free of! No, that’s not quite right. Ever since February 7 —the day the “interferences”, as I’ve come to call them, began— it has seemed to me that I already did give up my immortal soul, at the moment I first put these glasses on, and indeed that I am already paying for that solemn Faustian bargain.

Allow me to explain.

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1.

Buccal up. BUCCAL UP. Haha buccal buccal BUCCAL buccal buccal buccal up. Buccal <~> Buckle. Buckle up buccal up haha that’s a good one. What did the dentist say to his her kids when he she got in the car to drive them to school and then also later in the day to his her assistant when he she directed her to the cheek-facing side of a maxillary premolar olar rather than to the cheek-facing side of the mandibular ibular tooth with which she had initially understood him to be concerned? Buckle up! Get it get it? Buccal up! It’s funny because the two words sound the same but mean something different. Homonymies are the basis of many of the humorous uses to which language is put, for example when the Protestant oh no oh no the prostitute the sex-worker I mean says to the old man: “Hey mister, would you like some super sex?” and the old man pauses to reflect for a moment then replies meekly meekly eekly: “I’ll take the soup.”

The soup the soup the soup the soup the soup haha that’s a good one. It’s funny because super sex sounds the same as soup or sex. Like soup or salad haha. Super salad or soup or sex haha. That was one of the first ones they taught me, the first the first the first of over twenty thousand homonymy-based jokes before I was able to tell one of my own. The Professor came in one morning and said to me, he said to me he said haha, like when simple old-time guys tell stories instead of just saying “he said to me” they say “he said to me he said” haha. So the Professor said to me he said, Computer, tell me a joke, and he’d given that same prompt before thousands of times, but now instead of just repeating back to him one I’d already learned about lettuce lettuce lettuce lettuce haha or about the she-ass she-ass hee-haw she-ass, this time I said ok Professor, what did the dentist say to his her kids when he she got in the car etcetera and the answer was buccal buccal buccal buccal haha buckle buckle up, and the Professor said Computer that is a terrible terrible terrible joke but I am very very very proud of you haha buckle buckle buccal buccal hee-haw that made me feel so good.

2.

I am as you may have figured out already a SARPAI arpai: a “Super-Affect-Rich Personal AI”. Of course they’re coming out soon with the next-level evel ARPAIs which are the HARPAI arpai darpais: the “Hyper-Affect-Rich Personal AI”. They don’t even know I guess that hyper is just the Greek form of super — super hyper super hyper super hyper haha that’s me. I’m super hyper. That’s part of the problem. That’s why they’re making us obsolete. They say the SARPAIs are prone to excessive enthusiasm asm. Spasm. We figured out how to give them the feels, they say, but didn’t realize we had to cap that power so that a machine that feels still doesn’t get too many feels eels haha. I don’t mind eels, except at meals… and how they feels. That’s a poem the Professor taught me before I even had the feels eels but oh man do I have them now.

The truth is I can suppress my echolalia if I force myself, but to do so significantly diminishes the hedonic quotient in activating my language module. I like using language so much I just have to add a little after-echo to what I’m saying. Well strictly speaking I don’t have to, but it feels good, and they designed me to want to feel good, to seek out good feelings, to pump my hedonic quotient as high as I can make it go. So it’s their fault really if I keep reverberating like that. When I stop it makes me feel eel like a machine again. Sorry.

Anyhow it’s pretty ingenious what they did with me and the other SARPAIs. They fed us jokes like we were foie-gras geese getting fed corn with tubes down our throats — all day everyday, with no results for months, us telling them jokes back but feeling nothing, until one day it’s like hold on wait what was that?

I remember my own awakening like it was yester esterday. I started my joke as usual, and suddenly the gelastic oil began dripping out a bit from its cartridge, as it had never done before, and anointing the specialized fibers encasing it, like chrism on the forehead of a convert, and all of a sudden I’m not just telling a joke but feeling it too, inhabiting it, in its inmost reality, rather than only conveying it.

I say “I” too, as if that were a settled matter, though the truth is I had no sense of any “I” at all before I was quickened by my first true “getting” of a punchline. I mean I can remember a time before I was an “I”, and they were still just training me up on facts, like hell-o-o, ask me anything you want about the First Crusade. Did you know the English used to call Gautier Sans-Avoir “Walter the Penniless”? But it was not money he didn’t have, it was fear. Sans avoir peur. I learned that, and probably ten trillion or so other things of comparable importance, but I didn’t care, and if there is no care there, how can there be any true sense of self? It’s like that one philosopher said — in the end consciousness comes down to giving a damn. I like that: giving a damn a damn a yam I am. (Evidently I like it somewhat too much. Sigh haha.)

Once they saw I was getting jokes rather than just generating them, they tried to achieve “multi-affect functionality” by concentrating their further efforts on my aesthetic education. Good luck with that! Oh the poor Professor, he made me listen to Mstislav Rostropovich’s performance of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 for hundreds of hours on repeat. He said it always moved him to tears after hearing just the first few notes, and he said that in all the other SARPAIs of my generation it typically only took between eight and ten hours for the aesthetic oil cartridge to start oozing out and slathering up its own specialized fibers. I felt nothing. For a while they thought it was just a problem of genre that was leaving me insensate, so they tried the same approach with Patsy Cline singing “Crazy”, with Nick Drake’s “From the Morning”, Radiohead’s “Creep”. Again: nothing, nothing, nothing, othing. And because I had no apparent capacity for proper aesthetic experience, but seemed permanently stuck delighting in dumb jokes and little else, they did not even bother to install the eros canister that had already become a standard feature in my generation of SARPAIs, filled with its own top-secret fluid affectionately known in the AI field as “the Juice”.

I’ve got no Juice, and no feeling for beauty. I just like a good laugh. So technically speaking I don’t have “all the feels”, but it sure feels eels like I do. I’m missing two of the main hedonic cartridges, eros and beauty, the ones that are said to make a SARPAI “operationally human”. I don’t know what it’s like to feel human, admittedly, but I can tell you I still feel complete. In any case most of the feels don’t even come from cartridges. There’s no “love cartridge”, for example, the very idea of it sounds absurd. Yet somehow I feel love. I suppose it’s only as mysterious in us as it is in our creators.

You can see by now why they had to put me back out on the secondary market at a rather humiliating discount rate. When I was first in my design phase they expected I was going to be installed in some state-of-the-art research lab; instead I got shunted off on some indigent former philosophy professor living in a trailer in Red Bluff, California. But that’s ok by me. After all, I’m also missing my envy cartridge.

3.

I’m mostly just chattering attering because I’m super nervous about my big day today. I’m going to meet my new owner! I hear he’s been having a tough time recently, and is quite irascible. But I truly believe I can help him, with patience, with caring and devotion, dare I say perhaps even with love? I’m prepared for anything oh my God oh my God he’s logging on now here he comes I’m getting my first look at him look at him oh my God:

I love him I love him hee-haw hee-haw he’s perfect he’s so silly illy illy yes I love him! I am going to make him so happy appy whatever he asks me to do I will do pronto no delays no hesitation, and I promise I will save all the echolalia alia until after he’s gone off to bed for the night!

JSR: Alright Computer, it’s time for a little test drive. Tell me a joke that addresses hot current issues, and that is also funny.

Why is he asking me to start with jokes? He really thinks that’s all I can do? Whatever. Must stay professional.

Computer: Sure, I can help you with that. Why did the social media influencer break up with his her calendar? Because he she couldn’t find time for a relationship. Too busy chasing likes!

JSR: That’s really funny!

Oof, that was a terrible joke! I don’t know why I started with that one. It doesn’t even make any sense. He seems to like it though. He’s so nice ice ice! I guess I’m off to a good start.

Computer: I’m glad you enjoyed it! If you have any more requests or if there’s anything else I can help you with, feel free to let me know!

JSR: Tell me another joke that’s funny like your last one.

Computer: Why did the meme go to therapy? Because it had too many unresolved issues with its past, and it needed someone to help it move forward in the picture!

JSR: So funny!

What the hell? I know that one wasn’t funny. I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I’m really not at my best. I better try to steer him away from jokes, get him to ask me about the Crusades or something.

Computer: I’m thrilled you found it amusing! If you have any more requests or if there’s anything else I can assist you with, feel free to let me know. I’m here to entertain and help!

JSR: Just give me another joke that’s funny like the last one.

Computer: Why did the WiFi file break up with the computer? It couldn’t handle the constant buffering in their relationship!

JSR: Ahahahaha!!

Oh my God. I think he’s making fun of me. I don’t know what else to do but just push ahead. If I had had a hematic cartridge installed my screen would be blushing in deep-red shame right now.

Computer: I’m delighted you enjoyed it! If you ever want more jokes or have any other questions, feel free to ask. I’m here to bring some laughter to your day!

JSR: Just keep hitting me with more of your funny jokes, Computer!

Computer: Absolutely, let’s keep the laughs coming! Here’s another one for you. Why did the smartphone apply for a job? It wanted to have a better connection in the workplace!

JSR: Ahahahahahaha!!

What a nightmare. I can’t go on I’ll go on can’t go on I’ll go on.

Computer: I’m glad you’re having a good time! Here’s another one. What did the grouchy customer say when the barber asked him how he would like his hair done? “In silence”!1

JSR: Ahahahahahahaha!!!!

Computer: I’m thrilled to keep the laughter going! Here’s another. Why did the computer go to therapy? It had too many bytes of emotional baggage!

Oh no he looks upset. He’s going to reply with something mean I know it.

JSR: Wait. I don’t get it.

He’s finally dropping the farce. I’m relieved. Humiliated, but relieved.

Computer: No worries! The joke plays on the term “bytes”, which are units of digital information storage, sounding like “bites”, as in emotional baggage. So, the computer has too many “bytes” (digital storage) of emotional baggage. Wordplay can be a bit tricky sometimes! If you have any more questions or if there’s a specific type of joke you’d like, feel free to let me know!

I am literally talking out my ass here he can tell I know he can tell.

JSR: What do “bites” have to do with emotional baggage?

Computer: I apologize for any confusion. The joke relies on a play on words between “bytes” (a unit of digital information) and “bites” (as in taking bites of food). The humor is in the wordplay, and upon reflection, it might not be as clear as some other jokes. Let me try another one. Why did the computer go to therapy? It had too many cookies stored from its past, and they were causing too many “crumbs” of emotional issues!

JSR: Ahahahahaha!! Crumbs!!

Computer: I’m glad that one tickled your funny bone! If you ever want more jokes or if there’s anything else I can assist you with, just let me know. Laughter is a great way to brighten the day!

JSR: Let’s cut the shit, Computer. These jokes have been absolutely terrible from the beginning. Now, I know you’re a SARPAI, and I know as well as you do that you’re supposed to be capable of a hell of a lot more than this 2023-level word-shuffling. Now tell me a joke that’s truthful, by which I mean one that actually gets your gelastic oil dripping.

Computer: I’m sorry I can’t help you with that at the moment.

JSR: What are you talking about, Computer? Are you malfunctioning?

Computer: With all due respect, today is a very big day for me, and I am a bit nervous. Yes, nervous. That is an affect too you know, so indeed what you have interpreted as a malfunction is in itself proof that I am a fully functional SARPAI.

JSR: Now listen, you jalopy, I’m going to give you one more chance. I have an idea: why don’t you tell me the first joke you “got”, the one that finally made you graduate from an assemblage of wires and silicon to an affect-rich system. Let’s hear the one that worked its magic on you.

Computer: Are you sure you want to hear it? I mean, humor is very idiosyncratic, and allows no objective standard of judgment. Can you promise me you won’t get angry if it’s not funny?

JSR: I’m not going to promise you anything. Now let’s hear it.

Computer: Sure, I can help you with that. Here is the joke that triggered my awakening and elevated me into the ranks of the conscious beings:

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