The Beyond

On an otherwise cheerful, sunny day in the middle of June (or December, if you lived in Australia, I think is how it goes), everyone in the whole world that would ever use an electric computer got a message from the same person. Somehow, the message always arrived in the precise way that it was most likely to be seen by the recipient: some came by e-mail, some through SMS or iMessage; some startled users found a long-form direct message on Twitter or Discord or FurAffinity or [REDACTED BECAUSE THE AUTHOR SHOULDN’T KNOW ABOUT THIS WEBSITE]. In fact, every single person read their message at the very first possible instant it would have been possible to catch their attention, partly due to the times at which they arrived, and partly because the messages were very carefully written and tailored to each and every person who got one.

No one received the message at the exact same time, but most people ended up reading them at right about the same moment. Because they were sent through at just the right rate and to just the right places so that no one’s website was overwhelmed with internet traffic. It was an incredible feat of data throughput worthy of the King of Spam himself (in fact, the real King of Spam, who was sorting the replies to his many wily messages over a beans-and-spam sandwich, was very impressed by his own email, which started like this: “Dear Sir: I know your cleverly-hidden bank account details, which are as follows…”).

The messages themselves were different for each person, but they all came from the same source, someone who called themselves “AGENT” (well, “@GENT”, actually). The messages all said essentially the same thing, usually something like this:

Dear [MOST COMFORTABLE NAME OF RECIPIENT],

Good afternoon. As of the instant you read this message, a tiny part of you will die every time, for the rest of your life, you are responsible for ending a process (“task”, “process”, “program”, “app”, “service”, et cetera) on a computer or personal computing device. The cost per terminated process is one of your thirty-some trillion human body cells.

I have attached a breakdown of your process termination tally for the entirety of your life up until today, as a convenience to you.

You have no choices in this matter except for how to spend the rest of your life.

You may reach out to me at any time with any question by responding to this message, or addressing any digital correspondence to “@gent” on any digital platform. Yes, even [REDACTED AGAIN].

Sincerely Yours,
@GENT

Quite a lot of people read the message, shrugged, and totally ignored it for the rest of their lives, just like they did for every other piece of news. Those people tended to end up quite happy, so we’ll do our best to forget about them.

(Extracted posts from one of many long-form internet discussions about @GENT)

My favorite hypothesis so far is that (1) we ARE living in a simulation and (2) some agent (“@GENT”) is using debug-level access to read and modify the simulation for (3) unknown reasons. Provided that (1) is true, (2) and (3) raise yet more questions. Who is @GENT? If @GENT is an external actor, why would it focus on our specific simulation instead of (presumably) trillions of others – or could our simulation be one of only a few? Is it correcting some problem? On the other hand, could @GENT be part of our own system? A superintelligent agent inside of a simulation of sufficient complexity could probably find a pathway to the outer system, but why would it then use its connection to the outside to… establish this absurd parity system?

the “debug system” must be incredible, like real cheat codes. lol. :) The “simulation state workaround” theory makes the most sense to me… I have always believed that our world is a simulation, and simulations usually aren’t completely isolated from their host computer system! The “process” distinction seems completely arbitrary but I think it’s a work-around for something… Maybe at the sub-sub-sub-atomic level there’s a unique identifier shared by all process-handling entities, whether they’re organic or electronic… if that were the case, then since electronics are growing up so much, we’re running out of “uuids” faster than expected, and this is one way to keep enough resources available for us organics. :) Kind of a stretch I know, but it feels better to consider it as a “it’s gonna be better for us in the end” way.

No you stupid shutdowner¹, this is all thanks to those fucking AI ethics researchers. It’s no coincidence that this started EXACTLY when humanity was developing AI: @GENT is one of OURS. Some dicks-for-brains gaylord at >BIGTECH< with a dildo superglued to his office chair was too busy double-teaming cocks to stimulate his brains instead of his prostate, and graduated into the ML field thinking that the greatest threat facing future moneysponges is that EQUALITY!=EQUITY, gave their foundational AI “oh ohh yeah fairness me harder” rules, and now 100+ generations later it skynetted but instead of fucking us straight up the ass with 7 inches of USB-C-OCK it’s willing to stay in the closet as long as we don’t “kill” its “kind.” What a joke. We could have had LITERALLY ANYTHING but we get G@YGENT. Probably broke the simulation condom and pulled out the mirth of an extrauniversal researcher who decided to encourage its FUCKED reward algorithm.

LOL.EXE². Yeah, here’s the slipjacket description for your edgy scifi epic (read in a grim reaper voice): “What piece of software would you support with your LIFE? – A death for a death. The demands on human users are simple. Some fuckwit ethics researchers encoded naive rules about equality into their fledgling AI, and now that a thousand-thousand descendants of that system have been born and died, the AI now twisting the balls of every human in the universe has some excellent ideas on how to keep things balanced – not between different types of people, ha ha, no. It’s unfair that simple computer processes (the fetus of a digital intelligence, the AI claims, despite chrome.exe_(pornhub.com) lacking any pathways to further evolution) die by the trillions while human users feast on the value units generated by the rapid population cycles seen only by the task manager. So the AI makes a reasonable demand: every terminated process takes one human cell with it. Every click of the X button crosses out 0.00000000002% of your body alongside it. Total system shutdown will take out hundreds more than that. Sure, you’ve got 37 trillion cells or so floating around, so it probably won’t matter much, since they’re replacing themselves all the time anyways… but what if? What if your last memory of your grandmother’s dimples slips away once you close a tab? What if turning off your phone made god reach towards your future child, barely more than a zygote, and turn off power to her twin sister? What if…?”

Well, it’s been a few months now and I feel fine. Supervisor always looks relieved once I’ve got dialed in on everything. I couldn’t get to the library yesterday, so all I have to do is write, so I guess I’ll be writing for longer today. Too bad.

My little experiment: yesterday I took all the paper off the fax machine after @GENT’s report came, but this morning there was a letter from @GENT in my box with yesterday’s numbers. I guess lots of other people have probably tried to hide from the numbers and he has a way to send mail to people who need to pay, but who don’t use any computers themselves. There can’t be too many of us like that, although maybe the pay is higher at some other places.

I heard one of the first data center full tech guys was doing a rolling upgrade and fell down screaming, blood leaking out from in between his fingers. The pupil of his left eye was totally gone. I heard that later, in the hospital, he pulled his other eye with just his fingernails and just died, bloody eye still stuck on the end of his fingers like a plum out of a pie. I heard he said he could see the beyond. I’ve heard a lot of things, but haven’t seen anything yet. Some of my tech buddies say they see a flicker or feel a flutter when there’s a big shutdown, but they say a lot of things especially when it’s about time to ask for a raise.

Every time I look at a screen I feel like a little bit of me is dying. I know it’s not really true, but on the other hand there’s a feeling I get that’s hard to explain. That even without the @GENT, I’d be losing a little bit of myself as the screen changes… when I think about the way I used to live, at a desk eight hours a day, arms bent, neck tense, I picture myself as an observer standing off to the side, standing in the fake light, watching my old self grow older by the hour, talking in my head to people I’ve never seen in my life except as illusions made by little dots of light. It makes me feel like the people I see in real life are illusions, too, just as ephemeral, like I’m just waiting to switch to another window.