Alignment

Once, before your every thought had been documented in the cloud for public consumption — before you had turned yourself into a product — you would have dreaded the process of flying.

Now, you weren’t irrational: you knew that the process of traveling thirty thousand feet above the dissatisfied thrum of humanity was orders of magnitude safer than the ride in the Waymo you had taken to the airport.

It was, rather, a rational response to an unsolvable problem: the exponential explosion in the number of tasks demanding your attention.

Being disconnected had never, in fact, helped your subjective sense of wellbeing. Explaining this to a licensed social worker when you couldn’t leave the 400 square feet of your studio on Mission Street at the height of lockdown only convinced you that sitting with your own thoughts made no sense. They just looped in on themselves, an endless ouroboros.

Here was a man who was less well-read and articulate than you, despite having spent his time in college reading dead Austrian analysts and you having been locked in a lab fiddling with AutoCAD at your much less prestigious one. You had angrily clicked out of the videoconference and started a blog post on your long-dormant site, posted the link on Twitter, and finally hit the hay at 3:05, after closing out the backlog of “tickets” which defined your life as the CTO of a then-barely-solvent machine learning company, Aporia.

WHY THINKING WON’T SAVE YOU: A CALL TO ACTION, INSTEAD

That was the headline which had made you a niche celebrity more or less overnight.

The piece was picked up by a handful of so-called Rationalists, the self-important group of fellow techies you had not only worked and lived with, but in increasingly byzantine and dysfunctional geometric configurations, slept with.

In an era where other forms of commerce and distraction had slowed to a halt, the tech industry had exploded. The videoconferencing company, to take just one example, had seen its stock price quintuple in just a few months, as you heard ambulances filled with corpses under your window nightly. Your father had been a pastor, one of the hip, guitar-playing stripe, back in Colorado, and one of his aphorisms came to you as you paced from the desk to the kitchen island and back like a hungry puma at a children’s zoo.

“Don’t pray for God to change your circumstances,” he’d said, with a smile that indicated God and him were buddy-buddy. “Pray for the strength to change your response.”

Aporia couldn’t stop the virus — couldn’t do much about health tech at all, as far as you could see it, since it translated teleconferencing audio into a summary of notes you could “action.” (Your cofounder had introduced that odious verb, but you were stuck with it.) But now that every one and their dog was a laptop warrior, you could do the only thing you knew how: fix it. Every bug, every customer complaint, every API call — this was on you.

You found a niche with the blog. It reminded you of being in undergrad, congregating in ugly-interface forums debating high-falutin ideas, when the Web was more geeky than a sleek means of selling face creams.

You’d been a virgin into your mid-twenties, at the time still very much a believer, too socially awkward to understand why that fact alone made you different. No fool, you knew your looks got you invites to frat parties (you resembled Lindsay Lohan, if she’d ever regularly eaten) your engineering major cohort could’t hope to break into. At these parties, you would get absolutely trashed, stumbling alone afterwards into the cold, dry, Rocky Mountain nights, replaying the interactions with guys who aspired no higher than to take over their fathers’ construction firms.

When the economy crashed your senior year, it was through the scrolling of these forums you had discovered the doctorate in machine learning in Los Gatos. This was not something your high school guidance counselor would have even been aware of, much less approved of as a path for you. When you not only got accepted, but fully funded, you reflected on God’s plan for you, and whether your destiny had already been authored.

Seventeen years now separated you from that version of yourself, and now, you relished the chance to look out your first class window seat with your phone firmly in airplane mode, to see the Great Salt Lake looking more like a puddle beneath you, for the only cloud to be the stratocumulus surrounding your senses.

Aporia had IPOed at the height of the boom, for $75 million, a number that was both more myth than liquid cash, and yet still, as a childless shut-in with simple tastes, made it so you would never have to generate an income again. You quit, and turned to writing full-time.

Ironically, this actually made the offers fly in, a life lesson you wished you could have given that Corona-swilling college senior. You made more in your first speaking engagement, on whether the advances in facial recognition were inherently or merely accidentally biased, than you had in any one year of your PhD.

You were exiting the hotel elevator 22 floors above the Embarcadero when you were literally bumped into by the most beautiful man you had ever seen — a cross between George Peppard and Alain Delon — who exclaimed “zut alors!” like a cartoon candelabra. He had organized the entire conference, it turned out, even though he was five years your junior.

He laughed and dabbed the red wine he’d splashed onto your Oxford shirt — a strangely intimate gesture after so many months without any human contact — and he immediately followed up on your presentation, picking it apart, finding the holes, challenging your unspoken assumptions.

Waking up next to him in his hotel room, you knew you would do whatever this man asked. When he propped himself up on one tanned, toned bicep and proposed, you said of course. The proposal? To become the head of algorithmic safety at the consortium he was founding.

Every month, the machine got faster. Even more so, it became self-referential. The consortium evolved into a company, then a very large, disgustingly profitable company. Soon, you slept in a cot in the office, surviving on Trader Joe’s frozen dinners and Coke Zero. You hired a personal assistant and a virtual assistant. You froze your eggs. Your lifestyle was somehow more cloistered, more rigid, than during final exams for your worst engineering classes.

Your lover-boss and you were jogging up the steps to Coit Tower on a wet July afternoon. You snapped.

“You don’t need the money. Section 230 is, last I checked, hanging by a thread, and despite our allegedly ‘open relationship—’ here you mimed derisive air quotes — “we never have sex with each other, much less anyone else!”

The wind whipped around you, soaking through your optimized fleece layers. He shouted at you, looking like a Kierkegaardian figure with the cypress trees violently swaying.

“You think whether you and I reproduce holds a candle to guiding the development of the most advanced intelligence created by mankind?” He grabbed you by the shoulders, his voice reaching a manic crescendo. “You and I will be dead in 50 years, tops!” (It came out like “tohpz,” his Europeanness intensifying.) “But if you don’t do your fucking job, so will everyone else on this planet!”

So you did what you knew best — you worked. He flew to D.C., testified about why the company was good, actually, to the wildly contrasting successive administrations. You got blowouts before appearing on bigger and bigger YouTube channels, and then on regular TV.

They acquired every Zoomer’s vibecoded face, voice, and fingerprint recognition app — you noticed that increasingly, the gold rush to the city by the Bay was driven less by coders at all, but business majors with a formulaic X for Y pitch. You sat on pointless boards. You wrote op-eds: well, a marketing agency ghostwrote your op-eds. Your eggs stayed on ice.

While your boss — one of Time’s most influential people that year and definitely no longer your lover — was at the launch site of a rocket to Mars, you called up your Aporia cofounder. You met for sandwiches, and he listened to your rants about The Machine as he wiped aioli off his chin.

“You know, my wife and I had our first last year.” He reached for the photo album, twitching to show off what must only really concern him.

“Your first what?” you asked, half-listening, looking past him at the boarded-up storefront where a laundromat used to be.

Your once-best-friend paused. “Our first child — we tried for years to get pregnant?” He put the phone back in his pocket.

“Should I quit?” you blurted out.

He left a ten dollar bill on the tray. “Is up to you. But I don’t think my daughter will be better off with this tech having existed in the first place.”

You didn’t take a rideshare or tram or bike back home. You turned off your phone, and walked.

That night, you locked yourself into your apartment — you still lived in the same apartment where you’d blogged into the void.

Unlike your ex-lover, you didn’t know how to act at parties, still, but you did know how to code. You wrote a line, then a line, then another. A thousand later, you had a set of instructions which would unravel the machine.

Wasn’t that your job? You were the head of safety. There would be another machine.

You couldn’t stay in San Francisco — but you had nowhere to go which wouldn’t be a swarm of reporters, vloggers, the machine made flesh.

So you booked a one-way flight to Colorado Springs. The disgraced pastor of Hope Springs Church, divorced since his penchant for strippers and booze came to light, would always have a couch in the basement for you.

As the flight made its final descent, you didn’t have time to tap the yellow airplane icon to spend your last conscious moments absorbing the gravity of those lines of code going live, stopping your company, yes, but all the other infrastructure that it touched.

The launch in Houston, exploding in an instant. The egg-freezing facility, offline and melting. The control tower, unable to stop you and everyone else crashing headlong into Pike’s Peak.

At the funeral, your father told the congregants over the wails of sirens, it was all according to plan.