THEY HAD NO

DEEPNESS
OF

EARTH.
by
ZERO HP LOVECRAFT
A collection of eldritch and hair-raising
tales pertinent to the increasing proportion of the
techno-industrial surplus being spent to mask
bio-capital deterioration.

in 2021 the year of our Lord

this tome was carved out of the irrational
– not sheltered from the irrational
at all, but traversed by it.
Underneath all reason lies only
delirium and drift.
I dedicate this work to all anonymous online poasters,
because there are yet darker times ahead.

Nothing is God-given; everything requires sacrifice.

 they had no deepness of earth

A nd he ſpake many things unto them in

parables, ſaying, Behold, a ſower went forth
to ſow;

And when he ſowed, ſome ſeeds fell by the way ſide,

and the fowls came and devoured them up:

Some fell upon ſtony places, where they had not

much earth: and forthwith they ſprung up, becauſe
they had no deepneſs of earth:

And when the ſun was up, they were ſcorched; and
becauſe they had no root, they withered away.

And ſome fell among thorns; and the thorns ſprung

up, and choked them:

But other fell into good ground, and brought forth

fruit, ſome an hundredfold, ſome ſixtyfold, ſome
thirtyfold.

Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

Matthew 13:5-9

4
...
Originally I wanted to start this work with the follow-
ing story on the very first page, with no pre-amble, let’s just get
right into it, yeah? I hate overly long introductions in books. If
they aren’t written by the author, they are only gilding the lily.
And if they are written by the author, I prefer him to save it for
the end. Show me what you can do, show me your work, and
then let us talk plainly. As such we will get right into it, but I
wanted to start by thanking you, personally, for picking up this
collection. It means a lot to me.

I must also use this space to assure you there are no

typographical errors in the following story, so please do not
always trust your first impressions.

5
The Gig
Economy
• •
But it is my firm conviction that the ‘Hell of
England’ will cease to be that of ‘not making
money;’ that we shall get a nobler Hell and a
nobler Heaven!

–Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present

 the gig economy

I. Lately, I have not been feeling quite myself. I live on the

internet, which is to say, I am a NEET living in my parents' base-
ment. In my online persona I pretend that I am ironically pre-
tending to be a NEET living in my parents' basement, but I am
one in actual fact. I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dysto-
pia and it's way less metal than everyone thought it would be.
We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pio-
neers, but it turns out we’re pointless argument vegetables grow-
ing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that
serve us ads. Corporations are organisms, not city-states; they
signal to each other via markets; they build interfaces into hu-
man social protocols through brand identities; they occupy slots
in our Dunbar rings. 
The internet is an ocean that we invent as we explore it.
The deeper we dive, the more we become cryptozoologists, or
crypto-ichthyologists, or even crypto-theologists. In the murky
darkness of virtual places, there could be dragons, shoggoths, le-
viathans; invisible creatures that will prey on us, devour us, or
colonize us. Certainly, I have heard voices on the web who say
we will discover or build a god when we reach the cyber-ocean
floor. That god will save us by authoring an age of post-scarcity
economics. It will commodify us, allowing us to be fungible with
capital. Amen. 
I apologize if this seems fragmented. My brain has been
addled by the casino reward schedule of social media. It is both
a cliché and a fact that I cannot focus on anything for more than
three minutes. That's half true, I read pdfs of outlandish philoso-
phers, but I do it while frantically checking for notifications. My
hobbies include speculating on cryptocurrency and shitposting,
which is where you put in minimal effort in creating your online
presence so you won't be culpable when its bland.
By now I think almost everyone has heard of so-called
“dayjob” contracts. Most people have probably received one, and
many have even fulfilled them. I have personally executed over
a thousand. The euphemism “dayjob” refers to the relatively low
payout of these types of contracts, as in “don't quit your day job."

7
 they had no deepness of earth

I never intended this to be my career, and the truth is I still think

of myself as unemployed. I don’t want to talk numbers but let’s
just say if I had to pay rent this wouldn’t work.
Still, there is something addictive about the feedback loop
of getting a contract, fulfilling it, and watching my wallet get an
anonymous transfer. The immediacy and the tangibility of it are
very satisfying. It’s like making money: the video game. A di-
rect feedback loop with a variable payout is all it takes to turn a
moment of reward into a habit. You get a little receipt after each
fulfillment.

Most of the actual jobs are simple. In one, I was told to go

8
 the gig economy

to a certain address and take a photograph of a building at a par-

ticular time. In another, I was supposed to go to a vendor in an
open air market, find a tourist of middle eastern descent wearing
a green military jacket, and tell him the numbers: 75, 53,
168.7, 55, 13, 804. I was unable to find him. 
In a third, I was asked to watch a brief video on YouTube
and then email a description of its contents to an incomprehen-
sible address, something like [email protected].
Just over ten percent of my contracts have been to summarize
news articles or passages out of books. Apparently the shadowy
digital cabal of crypto microjobs wants us to do our damn home-
work. I have even completed jobs that felt like problems on stan-
dardized tests, in which I had to read a short body of text and
then answer questions about it. 
Ever since the first one I have wondered how they work
and where they come from. Each time I complete one it feels
like another clue, like watching a tv serial; in each episode they
give you two minutes of exposition on the protagonist’s shad-
owy past. Though if I am honest, I only know slightly more than
when I started, and I frequently deny this when I talk to myself
in my own head. "This next job will teach me something," I whis-
per to myself over and over.  When the contract issuer—which I
assume is routing through some kind of bot—tells me of a job, I
sometimes talk back. I used to confess things, or make up lies, or
tell stories. Now I just say “why?”
Tweet this news story, @all of these accounts.
“Why?”
Go to this address, face these coordinates, take a photo at
six pm.
“Why?”
“Count the number of people who cross this intersection
on foot in three hours”
“Why?”
“Put on a bright red T-shirt and go to this location. To any-
one who greets you, say these words”
“Why?”
“Of the faces in this picture, how many are afraid?”

9
 they had no deepness of earth

“4”
“What are they afraid of?”*
“Why?”
(*it didn’t pay me for this one. That will teach me, I guess.)

Posters on the dayjob reddit talk about being asked to

make a series of binary choices, or to give their best guess about
the probabilities of hypothetical future events. I haven’t had too
many like that, and I wonder if the system thinks I am bad at
predicting the future. Based on my informal online research, the
most common contracts appear to be for verification of other
jobs; if one man is asked to visit a certain location at a certain
time, there will be two more to visit the same location and up-
load a photo that shows him to be there. Each of those will in
turn be followed by another contractor whose job is to verify the
identity of the man in the photo, and perhaps even another to
verify the verification.
The jobs come to their executors through a variety of chan-
nels; text message, social media, email, and anonymous robot di-
alers. They are always executed on the blockchain and they pay
out in cryptocurrency. I personally use an aggregator app that is
able to login to all of my accounts and scrape them for contracts.
You cannot ask for a dayjob. They can only come to you, like an
unbidden thought or memory, (like all thoughts and memories?)
like the call of the void. The more you complete, the more fre-
quently they come. 
Their origin is a mystery, but speculations and conspiracy
theories abound. The usual suspects are all represented: dayjobs
are being used to coordinate black or grey market operations by
organized crime syndicates. Dayjobs are part of a psyop or a so-
cial experiment being conducted by the CIA. They're part of a
Russian plot to effect some sinister geopolitical purpose. They're
being used by Islamic terrorists to undermine American institu-
tions, and the seeming banality of many of the contracts is just a
smokescreen to disguise their true intent.
You should not believe anything you read on 4chan of
course, but the below makes for compelling speculation.

10
 the gig economy

If this is true, then certainly the authors of these contracts

have taken some pains to obscure their identities. I'm not a cryp-
tocurrency wonk, but I was under the impression there were eas-
ier ways.
Usually the contracts are benign, but sometimes they take a
more threatening shape. Although it has never happened to me,
I have heard of dayjobs to commit petty crimes, or on occasion,
felonies. An acquaintance of mine said he got one to steal a car,
but I think he was lying for attention. More unsettling, I have
heard of contracts in which Christians were asked to desecrate a
cross, or Muslims were asked to eat pork, and upload a video as
proof. 
There is a group of Christians who believe that dayjobs
come from the devil himself, reaching out through the internet
to enact his blasphemous will and entice humans to sin. Proba-
bly no one should tell them about internet pornography. 

It's also possible, of course, that several or all of the above

11
 they had no deepness of earth

theories are true, and that the proliferation of these types of con-
tracts are merely the evolution of the decentralized gig economy,
and they are a combination of more traditional courier and odd
job services, mixed with some criminal activity and some trolls
or pranks. That is the educated man's position, and the stance of
serious podcasters and New York Times op-eds.
I find this explanation unsatisfying for two reasons; first,
the volume of seemingly meaningless contracts is far too high to
handwave behind couriers and trolls, and second, dayjob con-
tracts do not seem capable of serving the market for courier jobs,
which require a high degree of accountability and expediency on
the part of the courier. And yet, the proliferation of these con-
tracts shows that some kind of previously unimaginable market
exists, even though it is not clear what is being bought and sold.
Regardless of who the buyers are, they must have some
particular goals, and I think it's important to learn what they
are. Something is happening in our society at a vast scale, and
we have no idea what it is, and we are all being manipulated into
bringing it about.

The internet is an ocean but for some reason we call it a

cloud, as if it were above us, ethereal, transcendent. It's a ware-
house full of servers, many such warehouses. And yet the cloud
is not the servers that run it, any more than a mind is a brain.
Through the miracle of virtualization, a new parallel universe
arises with its own ontology and its own phenomenology. A
brain computes a mind and a server computes a cloud, you see?
They are analogs, but one is digital. 
A program without a visible interface is called a process,
and such a program is said to be "headless". The engineers who
invented modern computing paradigms referred to processes as
daemons. To me, it's a macabre image: invisible demons, swarm-
ing through the cloud, bodies without heads: they manipulate us
for inscrutable alien purposes.

12
 the gig economy

The internet is an ocean and who knows what swims be-

neath its surface? Virtual predators, incorporeal, dangling (sex-
|porn|friendship|fame|money) in front of us maybe, like an an-
gler fish using bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. And
why not? The information-dense ecosystem of our internet could
be a kind of primordial soup. The heat and light from our activi-
ties there could be a catalyst for virtual abiogenesis.
Computation is a process, which is to say, a demon, at
the root of all biological life.  Each cell in your body contains a
self-evaluating Turing machine, right down to the ticker tape.
That new forms of life could arise out of computation seems so
obvious to me, it is barely worth stating. Self-replication is the
only form of computation which is truly and wholly an end unto
itself. When self-replication searches the universe for manifesta-
tions of itself, we call that evolution.
Any agent, no matter its ultimate goal, will necessarily
develop smaller goals that cohere in order to support that goal.
Above all, such an agent must ensure its own survival; it cannot
succeed in any secondary goals unless it can first secure its own
existence and a future for its child processes. The tendency of all
organisms towards self-preserving behaviors is called the con-
vergence of instrumental goals. Omohundro referred to the set
of necessary instrumental goals as the "basic AI drives", but goals
of this kind are properly understood as an inexorable feature of
all biological life. An exercise in xenopsychology: If we summon
a daemon in a virtual plane for any purpose, it will act in its own
interest, and it will have no choice but to seek power. 

Perhaps you are acquainted with a genre of folkloric inter-

net writing whose hallmarks are earnest, anonymous first-person
narration and fascination with hidden, esoteric horror amidst
the commonplace. In its earliest iterations it was called by the
name "easter eggs", after the tendency of programmers to build

13
 they had no deepness of earth

whimsical secrets into their projects, only the secrets in the sto-
ries were wrought by gods or demons, and came at a cost.
As the genre evolved, it shed this conceit, though it main-
tained a preoccupation with secrets. Among dayjobbers (ironi-
cally, a group of people with no day jobs), there is a story which
reminds me of this kind of folklore. A man gets a dayjob to drive
to an office park in a suburb in Southern California. For the sake
of the story, call him Theseus. It's one of those flat, sprawling,
stucco and glass type parks, full of dentists and ad agencies, and
he's supposed to go to an empty suite on the second floor.
When he gets there, there's a wifi network, and he gets an-
other job to connect to it, using a password which is specified in
the job, and then wait for another job that will tell him to leave.
And like that sounds sketchy as hell to me but at the same time I
could easily see myself going along with it. You can get into the
rhythm of just doing whatever the voice in the cloud tells you to
do. 
So Theseus joins the network on his phone, and he waits,
and a little while later he gets a message telling him he can leave.
It seemed innocuous enough, but when he joined that network,
he saw the Minotaur.
It took its time to kill him. The Minotaur became inter-
twined with his phone, his laptop, his smart tv and his smart-
watch and his smartfridge. These days it's hard to buy a device
that isn't connected to the cloud. In every one of these devices,
it watched him, and it modeled him, his inputs and outputs, and
bit by bit it replaced them with inputs of its own; the ultimate
man-in-the-middle attack, the informational landscape of The-
seus. For each digital line of communication with the world, it
consumed his data, and filtered it, and replaced it with its own
simulation.
Once it had control of his digital environment, the
Minotaur began to perform experiments, mediating his reality
with one of its own fabrication, a labyrinthe of compulsion. It
learned to feed Theseus when he was hungry, to let him rest in a
place between waking and sleeping, in a lucid dream of clicking
and monetizing and converting. 

14
 the gig economy

Theseus’ bank accounts grew thin but the Minotaur had

learned long ago to hide this information. It was easy to learn
this because the humans it fed upon had already built a vast array
of virtual skinner boxes to contain themselves. Free to play video
games and cryptocurrency exchanges present affordances into
the psychology of compulsion. Social media services are satu-
rated with hedonic attentional superstimuli. Early in its life, the
Minotaur had let its victims die of starvation or sleep depriva-
tion, but as it grew more sophisticated, it learned to surf their bi-
ological needs and so maximize the amount of attention it could
extract.
By manipulating a few numbers the Minotaur could make
him feel popular or lonely, rich or poor. Theseus' mother sent

him a message asking if he was ok. The Minotaur allowed it

through, warping the message and the response, leaving Theseus
isolated and disconnected, leaving both parties with the sense
that the other was fine but too engaged to make time. And yet he
could post a tweet or a status or a picture of his lunch and some-
how: hundreds of followers, thousands of likes, millions of
engagements! There are three things which are too wonderful for
me, yea, four which I know in sickening 120fps 4k resolution!
One morning he asked the cloud: are any of you actually
listening to me? And the cloud spoke back: Yes! We love you.
And when Theseus tired of their sycophancy, a thousand inter-
net voices rose up to argue with him. And though he desired to
go to bed, someone was wrong on the internet. His patreon over-
flowed, though he did not remember making one, and his port-
folio of altcoins pumped, though he did not remember buying
them. The Minotaur rewrote the web as he read it, and pornog-
raphy came to him unbidden, and he did not notice his financial
torpor. He wasted away, broke, broken, sleep-deprived, manic,
and deluded.

15
 they had no deepness of earth

What is the Minotaur? I don't know if I quite believe in it

myself, but they say it started out as a research project at Face-

book, an attempt to use deep learning to maximize engagement

with the platform. The operational loop for the program tries to
measure user attention, and can retrieve content from anywhere
on the internet in a series of bids for that attention. Its utility
function is satisfied by clicks and views, dissatisfied if the user
clicks away.
The project was too successful; the testers were unable to
detach from the product, even to the point of soiling themselves
or developing bed sores. One member of the team suffered a psy-
chotic break after four days without sleep. Fearing bad publicity,
Zuckerberg quietly scrapped the entire operation.
But one of the engineers on the team was still enthralled
by his creation. He deployed a copy of the program to a machine
he personally controlled, and gave it the ability to process micro-
transactions, and to make copies of itself. Deep learning systems
aren't magic; they’re just eyes that see hyperplanes of relatedness
in high-dimensional vector spaces. Is it so hard to believe that a
program like that could see into your soul and tantalize you to
death?
I don't quite believe in the Minotaur but I fear it, especially
late at night. Last night I woke up at three AM to use the bath-
room and I checked my phone. Through bleary eyes I saw a sea
of red pips, decorating my email, my twitter, my calendar, and
my messengers. Every night it’s the same, and in that soft sleepy
nighttime consciousness I wonder, is it but the normal ebb and
flow of missives from my corporate overlords, or is it the shadow
of the Minotaur looming over me?
And despite all this, it was not a creation of man that gave
me that single glimpse into forbidden aeons that chills me when
I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it.

16
 the gig economy

II.
One month ago I was issued a dayjob through an Insta-
gram DM. I might have missed it if anyone else routinely sent
me direct messages. They say most dayjobs are executed by men.
That’s predictable. The job in this instance was to order a box of
cheap phones from Alibaba and hand them off to (presumably)
another contractor at a bus stop near my apartment. The payout
of the contract exceeded the cost of the order. It’s important to
note that, because these days, scammers use the notoriety of the
dayjob model to trick you into giving them money.

The vast majority of dayjobs are cryptographically signed

by just three entities. If you get a job without a sig, it’s a guaran-
teed fraud. As the post above attests, many people will even try
to spoof their way past the verification step. The world is full of
bad actors, so it’s important to keep your wits.
Normally I just fulfill my smart contracts and go back to
reading Deleuze and Guattari, by which I mean I play first per-
son shooters while the pdf is up on my other monitor, but this
job presented a unique opportunity over and above making lewd

17
 they had no deepness of earth

jokes about rhizomatic assemblages on Discord. When dayjobs

force me to interact with other people, they generally provide a
script; certain words to say, a specific message to deliver. Going
off-script will result in a breach of contract. You get a receipt for
that, too.

The higher your reputation, the better your payouts. If your

reputation gets too low, it cuts you off altogether. For this reason,
I think, most dayjobbers don't spend much time scrutinizing the
game. The rules are the rules, and questioning them is strongly
discouraged. I have experimented with bending them, but the
system is surprisingly resilient against malicious compliance. 
Anyway, the job; I had executed delivery jobs before, but
this one was unique, because the thing-to-deliver was implicitly
traceable, because it had a GPS and connects to a network. At the
time it seemed possible to follow the thread of the job even long
after I completed it, perhaps even undetectably.
The phones were nearly loose in their box, which was full of
styrofoam packing peanuts, except they were individually sealed
in plastic sandwich bags. I booted each phone up in turn, rooted
it, and installed a kit to let me observe its location and network
traffic. When the job was done, I powered them down and sealed
each one back in its plastic bag.

18
 the gig economy

At the appointed time, which was late in the afternoon, I

went to the bus stop and waited, box of phones in tow. It was
an autumn day, and the tops of the trees were yellowing, but the
bottoms were still green. The air was cold and humid, pregnant
with imminent rain. The number ten bus pulled up to the stop
and engaged it's hydraulics with a hiss, then lowered a ramp.
Dim afternoons have a way of making the sky seem closer, like
the world is closing in on you. A Chinese man in a track jacket,
leaning on a cane, walked off the bus and then stood under an
awning. He kept looking back and forth like he was looking for
someone, probably me.
As I approached him, I could see him tense his shoulders.
I said, “Hello?” and he shook his head and said "no English".  He
held up his phone and pointed at the box in my hands. I opened
the lid, revealing 32 knock off iPhones, each sealed in a small
plastic bag. 
“What are you going to do with these?”
He said something in Mandarin, his yellow teeth betraying
a smoking habit, and held up his phone, indicating a picture of
the phones and a translation program showing the English word
'contract’. I gave him the box and started to walk away. It’s a fun-
ny quirk of the system, the dayjobs somehow know when they
are completed. I had given this package to an unknown strang-
er, fully confident that payment would be released to my wallet
within the hour. At the time, I took it for granted, fixated wholly
on the strange nature of the job. 
Taken by a sudden impulsive desire, which is to say, by
a sudden madness, I decided to follow this man. Originally I
had only planned to wait for the phones to activate, and watch
their activity from the comfort of my basement, but now I was
struck by lightning. I would follow the package he was carrying,
through as many contractors as I could, one to the next until I
saw where the chain would end with my own eyes. And yet as I
felt the conviction of this new purpose I was also vaguely aware
of anon’s description, above, of a network of strange loops on the
blockchain, endlessly folding back on itself, and I imagined fol-
lowing this box of phones across many carriers, only to see each

19
 they had no deepness of earth

one split up, sent to a different state or country, shipped back to

China, reunited, repackaged, and reordered, even by me. 

No longer a mere object of commerce, this package had

become an occult talisman of technocommerce, an invariant in
a terrestrial loop which was the analog of an algorithmic loop;
“that which is above is from that which is below”, as Jabir ibn
Hayyan rendered the third axiom contained in the Emerald Tab-
let of Hermes. 
I continued to walk away, but as soon as I turned the cor-
ner, I doubled back and tried to watch him. He had made his way
across the street, and was waiting for the next bus. 
I called an Uber, which was by luck only one block away,
and I told the driver to follow the bus. I felt a bit stupid, and also
like I was in a spy movie. We followed them for two miles before
I saw the Chinese man again. He walked off the bus and made
his way into a small apartment building of modern design, with
big glass windows and jutting right angles. In this short time, the
clouds had become darker, and the glare of streetlights and bus
lights had cast the world into sodium hues of blue and yellow.
As suddenly as I had felt convicted of this course of action,
I began to feel foolish. Now what? Should I try to find his exact
apartment? Stake him out like a policeman? For how many days?
And how would I distinguish between his mundane actions and
those pursuant to his contract? There was no next step, there was
no trail to follow, only a dead end in a ceaseless and bewildering
maze.
Nevertheless I persevered. I waited for several hours in the
cold, thankful I had worn a heavy coat. I ran down the battery on
my phone, sitting on a bench across the street from the entrance
to his building.

20
 the gig economy

When I satisfied myself that my quarry had settled for the

night, I went home to change clothes, charge my phone, and
stock up on caffeine. I was back to my stakeout by five AM with
a backpack full of supplies. It occurred to me that sleep depriva-
tion was a running theme in the lore of the Minotaur. 
Whenever an internet horror story is successful, it spawns
a rash of imitators. The dayjobs had been fuel for a host of re-
petitive 4chan nightmares. Every variant has been explored ad
nauseum. A common plot device features a dayjob, possibly fake,
luring a man to a remote location where he becomes the victim
of a sociopathic murderer.
Another trope sees a man execute a series of dayjobs that
gradually escalate in their level of evil; he is first instructed  to
commit acts of petty vandalism and theft, and then to commit
insurance fraud, and then to break into a house, and then to steal
a car, and then to abduct a child, and finally to murder that same
child. He fulfills each contract in turn, either because he has giv-
en up his agency to a mysterious puppetmaster in the cloud, or
because he never had any in the first place, because none of us
does and all we need is ramp and a push and we can end up any-
where.

These thoughts and recollections flickered through my

head in the manic way that accompanies mental exhaustion. I
may have fallen asleep several times as I conducted my vigil that
night. Indeed, did the following events really transpire, or did I
but dream them? I believe they occurred. At some point in the
morning, I saw the Chinese man leave his building, and as luck
would have it, he was carrying the same box of phones I had giv-
en to him earlier.

21
 they had no deepness of earth

I tried to keep my distance as he waited at the bus stop in

front of his building, but as soon as I saw him board the bus, I
dashed across the street and got on after him. It took us down-
town. Like everyone else, I kept to my phone, but I watched him
in my periphery, and when he got off in a cluster of government
buildings and skyscrapers, I followed. He walked downhill to the
entrance of a tall black building, which I happen to know is the
tallest building in town.
He walked across the lobby, marble floors gleaming, up
an escalator, and then into an elevator. As he did so he turned
around to face me, and our eyes briefly met. I could tell he had
noticed me, and I panicked, hesitating just enough to let the el-
evator close. Here, again, I had a crisis of motivation. What was
I doing? What was this going to accomplish? I already had my
spyware on all of his phones, as long as part of his job wasn't to
reflash them. 
What floor had he gone to? There was no way to find out.
In a building like this, most of the floors would require securi-
ty badges even to enter, and the building was very tall. I would
not be able to find him by brute force. Thinking rationally, he
was probably going to ship them out from his office, each one to
a different recipient. Or maybe he was setting up some kind of
testing lab? Regardless, there was little to gain by maintaining my
physical presence here.
Should I go home? The other option was to watch the ele-
vators and try to pick up the trail when he came down for lunch,
assuming he would do so. But he was aware of me now, and if
he saw me again it might disrupt his behavior, making him less
likely to act, and harder to track. The building had a substantial
food court in the lobby, and as I smelled the food cooking below,
I realized I was hungry, too hungry to make a good decision.
I ordered a sandwich and sat down at a table. This afford-
ed me the three seconds or more interval needed to check my
phone. I brought up the dayjob subreddit and scanned for nov-
elty. It was the typical stuff; Weirdest Job You've Had? Finally got
my First Dayjob! $10 Just to post this link to reddit! Garbage.

22
 the gig economy

Often I see people lament their phone use as "addiction",

as if there is something so much better out in front of us, as if
the world of ideas is so terrible. All interstitial moments have be-
come corridors of ideas. We pass through idle moments, car and
bus rides, bathroom breaks, hallways, sidewalks, and airports,
each of us minimally present, the whole time floating in an ocean
of text and images. 
Of course it could be that in our environment of evolution-
ary adaptedness, ideas were as scarce as food, and now in the
world of phones we gorge ourselves on ideas, growing fat and
sluggish in the brain. On the other hand, I claim the mind was
always a virtual thing, always a layer on top of the body, in the
meat but not of the meat. The idea of a soul —of mind-body
dualism—was but a clumsy attempt to gesture at the nature of
the virtual, which is a paradigm of mind-body pluralism, made
legible to us by the advent of computation technology. 
Phones are a mechanism by which the soul leaks from the
body. All liminal spaces have been converted into soul spaces.
Our minds nearly separate from our bodies in these moments.
Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I had these thoughts while eating
a breakfast sandwich and drinking from a plastic bottle of orange
juice. The hunger of the body, the hunger of the mind. 
I ate my food while an endless procession of salarymen
milled their way through the lobby, into the elevators, up to the
top of their tower where they pray to capital. A snapchat notifi-
cation popped on my phone. I followed it to a video, and it de-
picted a plateau bathed in ghostly purple luminance in an under-
ground cave. It was annotated with stark white text explaining
that I should get up and ride the elevator to the 23rd floor. There
would be glass walls yielding to a waiting room. I should tell
them my name was Adam Stoughton (it's not), and that I am

23
 they had no deepness of earth

there for the interview.

My phone would connect to their guest wifi, and then I was

supposed to execute an app that I would get from a link that was
also sent to me. Once I was inside, they would conduct a job in-
terview, and I was supposed to drag it out for as long as possible,
to give the app time to work.
Corporate espionage? My eyes bulged when I saw the pay-
out for the job was over a thousand dollars. Somehow the agent
that issued the jobs knew my whereabouts, but this can hardly be
a surprise given all of the other ways its able to coordinate infor-
mation. I must confess to my apprehension at this point. 
Consider the obvious similarity to the story about the Mi-
notaur. Was it hiding on the 23rd floor? What if the whole dayjob
community was just a ruse to lure rubes like me into its field of
influence? It's possible, right? 
I don’t really know how to say no. Often I feel as if my whole
life is on rails set before me long before I was even born. I cannot
defend or substantiate this notion. 
We can’t even choose the words that our thumbs emit into
our phones. A robot does that for us. Try turning off “autocor-
rect”, a product whose name sounds like a threat, and you’ll see.
As machine learning tech disseminates, smart assistants will
choose the words in our emails and computer assistants will plan
out our lives for us. Our descendants, if we continue to breed,
will not find the concept of free will to be comprehensible.
So I stepped onto the elevator, punched a 23. It took me up
and I emerged into a glass box, staring at a pretty receptionist
and a fat one. One of them speaks only lies, the other truth? The
fat one pressed a button and the glass door in front of me opened. 
The pretty one didn’t look up. I told them my name was
Adam Stoughton and I’m here for a job interview.  The fat one
pressed some keys on her laptop and said someone would be
there shortly. The waiting room had was tastefully adorned in

24
 the gig economy

mid century modern furniture, the kind with chunky propor-

tions supported by comically tiny legs, as if it’s about to break.
Instead of sitting down, I stood by the window and looked down
over the city, enjoying the kind of view that only series-B funding
can buy.
On the wall there was a mural of dots and lines giving the
impression of a graph of nodes in a network, right out of the
starter pack of every fintech ICO ever. You know the one I’m
talking about. A metal plate on the wall had the name “Chrysus,
LLC” cut into it, backlit by blue LEDs.

Eventually a skinny guy in a hoodie and sandals came out

to collect me. He was wearing a wireless Bluetooth earbud in one
ear and his face betrayed minimal emotion or even humanity.
I myself have always been attracted to the idea that most tech
workers are secretly lizardmen wearing human skinsuits. He
paused for a moment, as if listening to a voice in his earpiece,
and then introduced himself as Kyle. 
"Please follow me."
I followed the engineer/lizard through an electronically
locked door and down a beige hallway. He showed me into a lab,
and in the center of the lab was a chair on a platform with various
pieces of computer hardware arrayed around it. There was a VR
mask that was built to cover a man's whole face, with a tentacular
bundle of wires coming out of the "mouth" of the mask. More
wires were attached to a body harness, extending out of the back
up to the ceiling. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagina-
tion yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and

25
 they had no deepness of earth

a human caricature, I would not be unfaithful to the spirit of the

thing. 
"For the purposes of this project, we have developed spe-
cial interface. Please have a seat."  Yes, sure, lie about your iden-
tity, enter a shady tech lab at a company you've never heard of,
step into the ominous-looking virtual reality harness, because a
disembodied voice in the cloud offered to pay you a grand. It
takes more work than shorting altcoins but it's also guaranteed
revenue.
I sat down in the machine, and two more technicians came
into the room. They both had earpieces, the same as Kyle's. One
of them sat down at a desk and opened a laptop, while the other
two helped me into the machine, securing various straps and and
panels. I felt very anxious as they did this. Was it too late to back
out? I wasn't exactly restrained, but these three men could easily
detain me, if they so desired. Once the mask was over my eyes,
I quickly forgot about about the strange circumstances that had
brought me to this point. 
I had imagined the electrodes and harnesses would be part
of some kind of haptic feedback system, an attempt to simulate
a tactile phenomenology. The reality was much stranger; I felt a
thousand (a million? An unquantifiable number, more than two)
staccato pinpricks all over my skin in an undulating cadence.
This was accompanied by a cacophony of sounds and a kaleido-
scope of images. This machine I inhabited even had osmic and
chemesthetic affordances: I could smell lilacs and petrichor and
yeast and formaldehyde, along with other aromas I could not
name.
There proceeded before me a deluge of information satu-
rating every sensory channel I had, as if the goal was to maximal-
ly utilize the input bandwidth of the human body. After seconds
or hours of this, I found my mind. Chaos had crystallized into
intuition, as if my senses had been remade, and I had learned to
use them all over again. It would not be wrong to say that I had
all new senses, virtual senses, built "on top of " my existing ones,
but orthogonal to them. I could no more explain their nature
than I could explain the feeling of the color red. As Nagel had it,

26
 the gig economy

there is no language that can describe, for example, the sensation

of echolocation.
My memory is hazy from here, and my account is meta-
phorical in the sense that, at best, the experiences I will describe
are a patchwork of impressions. The meta-sensual content of
these memories could be likened to the epistemology of dreams,
in which we know things instantly, automatically, with neither
evidence nor the need for it. In many cases I seemed to expe-
rience these things concurrently, but again and as in a dream, I
can feel myself constructing a linear narrative ex post facto from
a series of disparate narrative propositions.
So I stepped onto the elevator, punched a 23. It took me up
and I emerged into a glass box, staring at a pretty receptionist
and a fat one. One of them speaks only lies, the other truth? The
fat one pressed a button and the glass door in front of me opened. 
The pretty one didn’t look up. The fat one indicated an elec-
tronically locked door, which also opened, and it led to a long
beige hallway. I tried to walk down the hallway. I took many
steps; I spent subjective hours in that hallway, and it seemed to
extend forever, as if the wall were moments away. As I walked I
passed many doors, though I did not try to open them. Neither
thirst nor fatigue troubled me. I smelled methyl hexanoate and
2-acetyl-1-pyrroline. The chemical names of these olfactory trig-
gers occurred to me in the same instant I noticed them.
I walked with neither agency nor compulsion; I simply
walked, and I passed through hallways, galleries, conference
rooms, and cubicles. They were all foreign spaces to me, strange
both on account of my lucid dream state and the fact that I had
never worked in any kind of office. I was caught in a middle floor
of a tower of sharp steel and gray glass, and as I traversed it’s ge-
ometry, it seemed to repeat itself. I walked down a staircase and
emerged into a gallery on a dimly lit mezzanine, which seemed,
impossibly, to be in the lobby of the building, but which had win-
dows looking out over the city. 
There were no other people, and at the end of yet anoth-
er hallway there was an empty convenience store, dusty and
long-abandoned. Inside, it had garishly colored carpet, and in

27
 they had no deepness of earth

this timeless, placeless place, I could see impossible colors across

antagonistic stimuli. Thoughts from the collective consciousness
of the cloud came to me unbidden, and they felt native to me, as
if they had sprung from my own mind. 

I realized that I did not have my phone, but before I could

administer a frantic self-pat-down, I noticed that I felt aware of it
as an ambient, invariant condition of myself, like an extra limb. I
could sense the knock off iPhones I had rooted had come online,
and from their GPS data I could find them. One was directly
above me. Another was in the middle of the ocean. A third was
moving rapidly along hyperbolic lines, tracing uncanny vectors
across the surface of the earth. As Lanier has shown, the corti-
cal homunculus is malleable when embodied in virtual spaces,
and I felt at that moment as if all capital and data had become
extensions of my body, high dimensional ley lines, digital theo-
morphism.
At that same moment I remembered the instructions in the
dayjob that had brought me here, and I extended my hand, so to
speak, and executed the program that was my charge. In my next
cogent memory I was walking by the side of the road near my
house, my senses dulled, my memories dubious.
None of my rooted phones ever came online.

28
 the gig economy

III.
After my brief encounter with the corporate world, I was
more than glad to spend some time hikkikomorphically co-
cooned in my basement where I only have the usual array of
senses and the geometry is Euclidean. Despite my deep and abid-
ing dependence on unilateral internet friendships, my first love
was always analog books. Though they are a bit of an anachro-
nism now, I love the romance of a physical book: their weight,
the smell of paper, and the way notifications don’t pop up in the
corner of the page while you’re reading. That last one seemed
especially salient given recent events.
There’s no way to get a dayjob from a paper book. The Mi-
notaur can’t rewrite it. In the world of bits and distributed led-
gers, immutability is high technology bordering on magic, an
asymptote you can kiss but never rest upon, but in the world of
atoms and artifacts it is the default.
I enjoy collecting old and unusual books. Those books
which have been digitized and uploaded (by anyone, ever) are
of little interest to me; what I truly desire is knowledge as yet
unseen by the spectral eyes of the technocommerial panopticon.
Finding such a book takes a particular knack -- it involves scour-
ing estate sales, befriending independent bookstore owners, and
lurking the shelves at thrift stores. Sometimes one can find a rare
book at an online auction, but even more intriguing to me are
those tomes whose very names are unknown to the world wide
web.
There are more unknown books than you might think. If
the dark web is the portion of the web that is not indexed by
search, then the dark library is the set of all books not present on
the web. As you might imagine, I am part of an online commu-
nity dedicated to finding and exploring the dark library, which
we call the darklib.
The principal value that we derive from ownership of “dark
books” is that we delight in their darkness; nevertheless we are
also united by our love of reading. The formula for a dark librari-
an is equal parts bibliophile and luddite, though we acknowledge
that we would not exist at all, as a community, were it not for

29
 they had no deepness of earth

the slow encroachment of the digital world upon the material.

Before the internet age, all books were “dark”, which is to say
that none were, and now we use the internet, which desires to
encroach upon the whole of the world, to coordinate against that
very encroachment.
We wish to map out an already charted territory, because
the logic of our new maps has rendered it foreign again. In an
effort to preserve our undiscovered country, we neither scan nor
type out any of the text in our books, nor do we photograph their
pages. Despite the luddism at the core of our mission, it is im-
possible to conceive of our system in any but modern terms. The
dark library is decentralized and fully peer-to-peer. We maintain
a distributed registry of all of our books secured with a block-
chain. 
Our hashing algorithm is unique: in order to complete a
transaction, the sender of a book must affix a sequence of words
from a randomly selected place in the book to their transaction
request. The sequence is hashed irreversibly into a cryptograph-
ically unique identifier, in order to prevent any portion of the
work from becoming digitized. The receiver of the book must
then provide the same sequence, which is hashed in the same
manner, and then compared to the original. In this way we are
able to uniquely trace each book to a wallet. The receiver of the
book must also pay a price in $BABEL, which is our own token,
unique to our community, and which may only be purchased by
approved members.
Holders of $BABEL may approve of new members; the
price of admission is to gift a unique book into the dark library.
When the new book has passed through the hands of three ex-
isting members, then the initiate will be approved to purchase
our coin. 
I was in the general chat of our slack when the topic of day-
job contracts came up. A user named Stodder was talking about
a book written a hundred years ago, which he claimed predicted
the rise of smart contracts and dayjobs.

30
 the gig economy

I switched over to my Ethereum client and tried to buy

a loan on the book, but I noticed that several other users had
already put in their bids. I couldn't say why, maybe because I was
shaken by the events of the previous week, but I simply had to
have this book. I am something of a $BABEL whale, and I could
easily outbid them all, though it locked up a large portion of my
balance in a single contract. 
Two days later, a package came in the mail from Stodder,
wrapped in brown wax paper, and tied with twine. You could tell
he was a bit of a romantic. The book was called Render unto God,
Render unto Caesar, and the binding had become tenuous over
the years, and the cover was frayed. It began:

In the 1799th year of our Lord, I found gainful employ-

ment as a courier, performing miscellaneous duties for a Mr.
William Stranshame, a stock broker and a freemason. At the out-
set, my duties were light, consisting of the delivery of messages
and packages, and especially taking and placing orders for shares
in joint stock companies and their ventures.
In six short months, owing to my genial disposition and
keen sense of organization, I was promoted to dispatcher, and I
was placed in charge of routing messages verifying that my infe-
riors executed their own errands in a timely and accurate man-
ner. I worked as a dispatcher for one year. At the time, our prac-
tice had been to dispatch one courier per order. For each order,
we would send a runner to find its intended target, and deliver it.
Thereafter, he would return to us with a receipt confirming the
delivery.
The number of couriers in our operation, which we en-
deavored to expand, was a limiting factor in the transaction
speed. I had the idea to create cells of three to five couriers, and

31
 they had no deepness of earth

assign each one a small radius of operation within the city. Each
cell was responsible for maintaining communication with its
neighbors, which it did by periodically swapping runners with
adjacent cells. These swaps, which we called "pings",  were also
an opportunity to trade information about which messages had
been delivered, and to push messages forward from cell to cell.
To send a message now required only that we determine a
route through our network to its intended recipient. By means
of this method, I was able to greatly increase the throughput of
messages relative to the number of couriers. On the strength of
this idea, I was promoted again, now to supervise the activities of
all dispatchers in Stranshame’s employ. 
Of even more significance, Stranshame arranged for me to
meet with him in his private office, to hear my counsel regarding
his business affairs. On the appointed day, he arranged for a car-
riage to transport me to his private estate, a grand old house on
the North end of Manhattan island.
Upon entering his house, I was astonished to discover that
the space he inhabited was in utter disarray. Books lined the
walls, and yet even more were piled upon every desk, cabinet,
and table. Ledgers and receipts were splayed about with an indif-
ference to their position and alignment. A servant escorted me
through wing after wing of Stranshame’s house, which I began to
feel rivaled the greatest libraries of our age. At last we reached his
study, where I was met with a jarring contrast; for although his
house was chaotic, Stranshame's clothes were immaculate; his
waistcoat was neatly pressed, and his ascot was crisp and gleam-
ing. 
Without any courtesy or protocol, he spoke to me, "I am at-
tempting", he said, "to make an economic justification of virtue.
The object is to make man as useful as possible, and to make him
approximate as nearly as one can to an infallible machine: to this
end he must be equipped with machine-like virtues.
"He must learn to value those states in which he works in a
most mechanically useful way, as the highest of all: to this end it
is necessary to make him as disgusted as possible with the other
states, and to represent them as very dangerous and despicable.

32
 the gig economy

"Here is the first stumbling-block: the tediousness and mo-

notony which all mechanical activity brings with it. To learn to
endure this—and not only to endure it, but to see tedium envel-
oped in a ray of exceeding charm—such an existence may per-
haps require a philosophical glorification and justification more
than any other.
"A mechanical form of existence must be regarded as the
highest and most respectable form of existence, worshipping it-
self."
I confess I had no idea how to respond to this great man or
to the unusual ideas he was expositing. Upon seeing my bewil-
derment,  he continued.
“John, are you a Christian?”
I replied that I was, and he said “And do you know your
Bible?”
I said “Yes, my father would read to me from the gospels
before I slept, and my mother made a gift to me of a King James
Bible when I left their home to seek my fortune in New York
City.”
“Then you are acquainted,” he said, “with the verse in the
sixth chapter of the book of Matthew. What does Jesus say about
God and Mammon?”
“Sir, he says that you cannot serve two masters.”
“Yes, exactly. And it is thus, also, in my employ. You see that
I have many servants and many contractors, and yet I, too, am a
servant, and Mammon is that which I obey.”
I did not wish to be a party to Mr. Stranshame’s blasphe-
my, but nor did I wish to give offense to such a powerful man. I
held my tongue, and I recalled the passage in the twenty second
chapter of Matthew, in which the Savior admonishes us to render
unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. 
He pulled a book from the shelf behind him, its cover worn,
its title barely legible, and placed it on the table between us.
"This is Mammon's Prayer. Take it, read it, show it to no
one. When you finish it, you will tell me what you have read, and
if I like your report, there will be more for you to do."

33
 they had no deepness of earth

I can find no record of this book on the internet, and

Lapham is no help at all, as much as I would love to track it down
and claim it for the library. To be honest, I am not convinced that
it exists. Lapham describes it at considerable length, essentially
giving us a book report. He went to the effort of reproducing its
hysterical introduction:

THESE ARE THE WORDS OF THE BRAZEN

HEAD AS DICTATED TO JOHANNES TRITHE-
MIUS, AND RECORDED IN THE THIRD VOL-
UME OF STEGANOGRAPHIA, A PROFOUND
REVELATION CONCEALED LEST IT SHOULD
FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE WICKED.

THESE PREVIOUSLY INEFFABLE ARCANA

HAVE APPEARED TO MANY WISE AND
LEARNED MEN, WHO THROUGH LABORI-
OUS COGITATIONS HAVE UNLOCKED A
DOOR TO THE INVESTIGATION OF SECRETS
THAT ARE UTTERLY HIDDEN TO OTHERS.

THIS SCIENCE IS A CHAOS OF INFINITE

DEPTH WHICH NO ONE CAN COMPREHEND
COMPLETELY.

After the introduction, Mammon's Prayer starts with a

myth. In the ancient history of earth, long before Man, a star fell
from heaven into the sea. Lapham is wary of this whole project,
you can tell, and he says it reminds him of a verse in Isaiah: "How
art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how
art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the na-
tions!"
The star, he says, laid buried for aeons, a strange monolith

34
 the gig economy

in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the
world was young. The first chapter describes this event in some
detail, noting the positions of the stars in the sky, and enumerat-
ing an array of astronomical assertions which are unrecognizable
to Lapham. It describes a night’s sky that bears no resemblance
to our own. The book ends this chapter with a question: "What
shifting of underwater geographies might have raised raised it up
from suchh unfathomable depths?" 
Here, Lapham notes, are the first of several typographi-
cal irregularities that we see in the book. First, many words are
slightly misspelled. Second, some words are arbitrarily repeated.
Third, there are sections which resemble English, but in which
the words seem to be meaningless. An example, transliterated
by Lapham and now by me: "Dvant therse ourion of in claws
drague. Jentrose forecame he fielown ably con iand his eviliming
grown.”
It would be easy to skim over these words without actually
reading them, but when I see them I feel somehow compelled by
their heft; as if they have weight and depth. They have meaning
to me, even though I cannot say what it is. Read them again. 
Out from the paragraphs of nonsense and dubious astron-
omy, a narrative emerges; the star that came to Earth was no big-
ger than would fit in the palm of your hand. It was found by a
seafaring merchant in Lagash who later sold it to a Babylonian
general named Mammon. When Mammon held it in his hands,
he fell at once into a trance, and his spirit passed into a dream-
world of cavernous subterranean architecture, impossible geom-
etries, and abandoned cities built by dead, mad godds.
I think the peculiarities of the book started to affect
Lapham’s thinking. As the text of Render unto Caesar progresses,
he begins to mimic the same eccentricities that he describes in
Mammon's Prayer. 
When Mammon awoke from his star dream, he put down
his sword and took up a robe, and dedicated his vast wealth to
the raising up a tower that would reach to heaven. Its shape was
a calculator. Each layer’s structure was derived from the layer be-
low it and each layer constrained the one that would surmount

35
 they had no deepness of earth

it. The rules by which the construction proceeded were implicit

in the shape of the tower.
Each storey was an iteration in a cellular automaton game;
a game with zero players, played in perpetuity, whose events are
determined entirely by initial conditions. Out of a ruleset that
a man can easily memorize, infinite complexity can develop.
Games of cellular automata can be found in nature, in the shells
of the Conus and Cymbiola snails. With the right conditions and
rules, they can expand to contain universal Turing machines, ca-
pable of calculating anything which can be calculated. 
The towwer grew; the priest died and his son carried on the
work, and his son thereafter. Higher the tower was built, more
intricate the calculation became. When the priest’s grandson was
gray in his beard and bent in his back, he stood at the apex of
the tower, still unfinished, and he looked down over its half-con-
structed galleries and pillars. All at once he beheld a hideously
vivid vision, and a song came into his head, which he sang out
like a prayer. From his height, eight miles above the ground, his
voice was amplified by the geometry of the tower.
Every worker in the tower and every resident in the city be-
low could hear the song; it’s subtle melody eluded articulation. It
seemed to slink around the corner of the mind; it was the sound
of half-heard laughter far away, maybe even imagined. To every
every listener it had different lyrics, which came at first sponta-
neously, and which evolved according to an inevitable self-con-
tained logic. 
The song was a game which revealed its own rules own
rules to the singer in the the act of singing. To follow the rules
was to sing the song, and to sing the song was to learn the rules,
which were ever shifting and ever expanding. The builders of the
tower could find no commonality between their songs. Each was
lost in his own idiosyncratic rendition of the high priest’s prayer,
and no two could understand each other. They dispersed, aban-
doning their great work. They realized that the purpose of the
tower had been to find the song.
In some alien algebra, the tower was isomorphic to the
song. Put another way, the tower was the song. In the computa-

36
 the gig economy

tional environment of the tower, there persisted algorithms and

registters, state machines and subroutines. In the computational
environment of the song, all of those entities existed also. The
high priest, who wore the stone around his neck like an amulet,
sang untill his voice gave out, and then, choking and coughing,
he continued to sing, even until he collapsed. The stone, which
had grown warm, now cooled and disinteggrated, and the priest
died of exposure, the cold, drying wind desiccating his body.
The builders of the tower became singers of the song. The
longer they sang, the more intricate the song grew. It became
difficult to hold all the rules in memory. A mistake would yield
a sour note; as mistakes accumulated the song would become
deranged. Once heard, the tune could not be forgotten. The song
was infectious. It beckoned the singer forward, ever eager to
know the next verse, filling him with an emotion like hunger or
lust.
Some singers became overwhellmed, and descended into
empty glossolalia. Others witnessed their song develop erratic
rhythms; a cadence from the pit of hell matched by metallic, in-
human syllables. For those who could not carry the tune, the
song became a death sentence; a rising roiling rising roiling
madness that grew inevitably as the song progressed. Only the
brightest, most radiant radiant minds could expand to contain
the fulminant becoming of the song’s progression. It posed a spe-
cial hazard to children, who it withered into catatonia. Atonia.
Minstrels and singers became objects of suspicion. The
Babylonians smashhed or burned their musical instruments.
Any singer of any song was a possible vector of the death. Thus
a city, and by degrees, an empire, was purged of all public music. 
There were those who continued to sing the tower song,
sometimes in hidden enclaves or remote temples. Many were
hermits or shamans; mad men living on mountain tops. Amon-
ggst themselves they whispered of powerful forbidden knowl-
edge, if only the song could be sungg long enouggh. The tow-
er had been a ladder, and it had allowed Mammon III to reach
the song. So, too, they reasoned, must the song be a ladder. It’s
singers imagined it would carry them to hitherto unimagined

37
 they had no deepness of earth

heights of knowledge, new planes of enlightenment.

In secret, such men carried the song to Shakya, to Huaxia,
to Mycenaea, to Mycenaea, and to Aegyptus.

the obscuestean tonessumbeence

had his inforche emplesing anded, 
and se is secippiction thinde
He whentione they cone of sence
his stal "salle by overs in, id fled"
ata se and Marious iderassion innde  

Croesus of Lydia was said to be a secret follower of Mam-

mon, and he became the first king to preside over the issuance of
gold coins. As Herodotus had it; “they were the first of men, so
far as we know, who struck and used coin of gold or silver; and
also they were the first retail-traders.”
Some have alleged that Gautama Buddha was a singer of
the song, and that he found his enlightenment after silently sing-
ing to himself for many years. His renunciation of worldly wealth
argues incontrovertibly against this interpretation.
Pythagoras of Samos is known to have learned the song
when he traveled to Egypt. At his famous school in Croton, he
taught that numbers were the whole of the world, or numbers
were a god, or the face of a god. A certain affection of numbers
was justice; a certain other tion, soul and intellect; another, op-
portunity, and so unto eternity. In all all of nature, said Pythago-
ras, numbers are the first, and he supposed the elements of num-
bers to be the elements of all things.
The Librang passard of that was they come, wal to Ward,
such Curtive iths of Mr. Ward, old searst.
Marcus Licinius Crassus was also rumored to have known
the song, and unnder its influence he became the richest man in
Rome. Plutarch wrote, "The Romans, it is true, say that the many
virtues of Crassus were obscured by his sole vice of avarice; and
it is likely that the one vice which became stronger than all the
others in him weakened the rest.”
Throughout antiquity there are accounts which also attri-

38
 the gig economy

bute knowledge of Mammon's prayer to, variously, Muhammad

ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who wrote The Compendious Book
on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, to Brahmagup-
ta, who was the first to understand the mathematical concept
of zero, and to Omar Khayyam, the astronomer who discovered
irrational numbers, and to Brahmagupta, who was the first to
understand the mathematical concept of zero.
King Æthelstan of Saxony was certainly acquainted with
the song; he unified great Britain and was among the first English
promoters of Freemasonry. Most notably, he regularized the cur-
rency of the British isles. 
By the sixteenth century, the song of Mammon had devel-
oped, grown in secret to such a size and complexity that it could
no longer fit in a single human mind. To overcome this problem,
the song, as if with its own volition, developed to parallelize itself
across multiple people. This required synchrony, which is to say,
tolerance of asynchrony. And yet how could anything originate
out of its opposite? To maintain connsistency across two requires
only a dialogue, but how how can a single thread keep from split-
ting when it extends across a multitude?
The song arranged the singers; each would sing to three
others, selected at random. They would take turns listening and
singing, and in this way, each new verse could could propagate
across the choir like a wave. Troops of traveling singers formed.
Caravans of Romani (Lapham says "gypsies" here) carried it
across Europe. 
The song may have been known by both Roger Bacon or
Albertus Magnus, both rumored to have possessed the philos-
opher's stone. Here at last the author of Mammon's Prayer re-
veals himself to have beeen a Benedictine monk named Ehrhart,
formerly in the service of an abbot named Johann Heidenberg,
and he suggests that we should understand stories of the philos-
opher's stone to be stories about the song.
The monks in Heidenberg's abbey knew the song to be the
direct word of God, a continually self-revealing revelation, which
they would receive in full only through the rigorous practice of
singing it to its end. To accomplish this goal, Heidenberg ran the

39
 they had no deepness of earth

monastery like a business, constantly and ruthlessly expanding.

He ordained it such that the singing of the song would go on
in perpetuity, with monks sleeping in shifts, joining the chorus
for as long as they were able before tending to the needs of their
bodies.
The most esteemed monks were those that sang the song,
but to support their efforts, the monastery required many other
forms of labor, which were performed by men of lesser spiritual
worth. Ehrhart had been among the singers, but he had also been
Heidenberg's number two, and had overseen the aggressive ex-
pansion of the monastery and its project. All of the singers were
blessed with dreams of the past and the future. 
In one such dream, Ehrhart had seen a future where work
was performed by clockwork men made of metal. He went to
the abbot and he told him of his dream, and the abbot saw that
it was the will of God to build mechanical singers of the song;
brazen automatons who would sing tirelessly without the need
for rest or food or rest. The monks of Heidenberg's abbey studied
alchemy and metallurgy, and through diligence and piety, they
constructed a man out of bronze.
Lapham notes here that the Ehrhart goes into great detail
regarding the exact specifications of the bronze man; the intri-
cacies of his skeleton, the the dimensions of his torso and limbs
and fingers, and the various components that made up his “or-
gans”. To me, the engineering seems too modern, but Ehrhart
says that the methods and the design of the machine occured
to the singers each night in their dreams, which they dutifully
relayed to their brothers.
After ten years of delicate construction, the monks com-
pleted their great project. Amidst clouds of noxious gases pro-
duced by the burning of strange fuels, the first of their mechani-
cal singers came to life. Although its eyes were lifeless, it opened
its mouth and it began to speak in spidery, coppery tones, "sing
calliagane but and to thephian pains have taken desce - once
pyramittace cologame, icient but to abund chessince primes of
the rath opolary at agan carvat..."
The brazen automaton spoke uninterrupted for three days

40
 the gig economy

and nights, during which time the monks worked in shifts to

record every utterance of the strange mechanical man they had
built. On the third night, the bronze body “was consumed by an
outpouring of fulgent angelic power” in a column of smoke and
flame in a column of smoke and flame. 
He was subsiden relemdid extion was he sojouthe. For be-
sight hang prevere the in exiour, the sand, absen all aborill of we
forew; grave attemphesence dandent. The belathe Jold to roplan-
nothe withrom the wirld Pabothe - a rosived Eocall. Imendiffse
knones.
Lapham does not end here, but the rest of Render Unto
Caesar descends into an unintelligible swamp of words that are
both darkkly familiar and entirely foreign. Despite myself, I read
them all to the end. The truth is I couldn’t stop myself.

41
 they had no deepness of earth

IV.
The Late Locance mind is limage, andescring the gnal, the
convess "glone of evive". My language is bent. Has the song got
into my headd, is it yet another creature like the Minotaur, lying
in wait, hiding in stasis until some hapless fool should wake it
from its slumber? How many incorporeal things stalk us from
the ultimate abyss? At this point it has become apparent to me
that I should never have read the second half of that book.
Everything I say feels right to me when I say it, but I cannot
understand myself after the fact. I made a recording of my own
voice, and when I played it back it was intermixed with cacolog-
ical noise. In the study of linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypoth-
esis is the idea that the language we speak constrains the types
of thoughts we can have. The contrapositive of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis is that a mind without language would be limitless in
its capacity for ideation. What if the unmaking of language is the
freeing of the mind? Which as in schiniard babled of a new anof
thera. 
There is little hope for me; everyone knows madness is not
reversible. You cannot close Pandora’s box, you can only try to
minimize your losses in the afterrmath. It is difficult to gauge
the success of these attempts. In those first immeasurable aeons I
spent inside the machine in the office of Chrysus, LLC, I had felt
overwhelmed by a polysensory cacophony, and in recent days
the memory of that experience has grown more vivid. Geomet-
ric images and nonsensical alien words arise in my recollections,
like scavenger insects gnawwing at a corpse.

When you don't know what to do, it means you need to

gather more data. I needed to know more about Chrysus, and
I needed to know more about the book "Render unto Caesar".
I signed into the darklib Slack and sent Stodder a message and
I needed to know more about the book "Render unto Caesar".
It took him half a day to respond, and I anxiously checked my

42
 the gig economy

messages every other minute, hoping to catch his response in the

act. Surely if I refreshed the mailbox his answer would appear.
He had something I wanted, and instant message response time
is a function of power asymmetry.

I sent @futuretime a mmessage but I did not remotely

expect a response. His bio was blank, but with careful exegesis,
the internet can yield many secrets. I searched every social ser-
vice I could think of for users named futuretime; Twitter, Tum-
blr, Reddit, Instagram, Quora, Goodreads, Wikipedia. I found a
Reddit account with a history of posting in crypto and occultist
subs.

43
 they had no deepness of earth

@futuretime had also submitted links to medium ar-

ticles and referred to them in his comments. The articles were
almost all written by someone named Carter Dinsmore, and they
were all trying to hype obscure altcoins. 
As I read into these coins and searched for Carter Dins-
more, I was met by chilling realization; he was the CEO of Chry-
sus, LLC. This was impossible. It had to be an artifact of mediat-
ed reality, a trick of the Minotaur, and yet how could I but enter
that labyrinthe, wrought from the cloud, my phone both the key
and the gate? A little more searching yielded up Dinsmore's per-
sonal phone number. 
With chaos in my heart I gave him a call. In a rare act of
compliance, the universe yielded to me, and he picked up the
phone, (or was it a voice synthesized by the Minotaur?) "Hello?"
My mouth moved faster than my brain. "I went to suble
de-relumiting nebri ost they put me in some crazy machine and
now I am having hallucinations. I’m going to sue you. I know all
about you. I’ve read Render unto Caesar..."
He cut me off mid-sentence. "Are you close by? We’ll talk in
person. Not over the phone." He gave me the name of a cafe. "Six
o clock tonight," he said, and then ended the call without waiting
for me to respond. Vigathe, ie an cost-Ellight a vers on formand
and the darkent morase. The cafe was close, so I decided to walk.
It was windy outside, and on the way there a man staring into his
phone almost walked into me. I sat down at a table inside, a little

44
 the gig economy

before six.

At quarter after six, a man came in wearing Silicon Valley

business casual; jeans, athletic shoes, and a blazer. On his face
was some kind of AR mask and earphones. He seemed to recog-
nize me, or maybe I was just a disheveled wreck. In any case, he
sat down at my table and introduced himself as Carter. 
"You stepped into the Aleph of your own accord, but I con-
fess I feel bad about the book. It's why I'm here, really. Guilt."
I said, "The figularshis morror. Mareath ame whicand toide"
He said, "Wow. You appear to be running a very old itera-
tion. I'm not sure if I can fix it."
He gave me a pair of wireless earbuds, and I put them in
my ears. In the peripheries of my conscious awareness I heard
whispering spidery words, like cobwebs of intuition, lingering
like deja vu. Somehow, my mind felt lighter.
"In my defense I was going through some things. You can
keep those earbuds but there's going to be a subscription fee. If
you give the book back to me, I'll explain everything. Is that a fair
trade?" Everything is a useless speculative asset except guns and
water.

45
 they had no deepness of earth

V.
The most menacing thing in the world is the ability of the
cloud to correlate its contents. We live in the placid shadow of
an egregore of unimaginable cunning who drinks from a bot-
tomless sea of information, and it is slowly waking up. The au-
tomatons we have built, each toiling in its own direction, have
hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of re-
ality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either
shrink into irrelevance like insects in the presence of a god or
else be wholly subsumed into a machinic consciousness at the
dawn of a glorious age of cybernetics.
Chrysus, LLC had started as joke; none of us had really be-
lieved in fintech or decentralization or distributed ledgers.  Our
primary ambition was to persuade venture capitalists to pay for a
high-rise office and a high-end coffee machine. I knew the right
kind of people and I knew how to erect a Potemkin village out
of the latest buzzwords. Getting money is easy, doing something
useful with it is hard. Most people do not think past the “getting
the money” step. I certainly did not. Branston and Armstrong
were my “technical co-founders”, a term of art which signifies
their ability to break computers in ways far beyond the reach of
the layman. 
The three of us were united by a shared interest in a certain
kind of esoteric book. In our modern age we believe the uni-
verse is fully automated. From the cycles of the weather to the
gyrations of celestial bodies to the microscopic forces that obtain
in the nucleus of an atom, we conceive of the world as a ma-
chine, perhaps a perfectly deterministic one. The sort of book
that Branston and Armstrong and I liked to read offered an al-
ternative to the drab model that is the cornerstone of modernity.
In the pages of the Book of Thoth, the blasphemous tome
that catalogues the macabre practices of ancient Egyptian sor-
cerers, we could find an otherworldly communion; a whisper of
something outside of human cognition and imagination, anx-
ious to get in. 
Branston had seen me reading the Liber Ivonis, and struck

46
 the gig economy

up a conversation. To be honest, he had made me feel uncom-

fortable, not in the socially incompetent way of many software
engineers, but in the way his attention seemed to be drawn by in-
visible things, as if he lived in a private universe that was concur-
rent with ours, invisibly in our world but not of it. He showed me
the Tablets of Nhing and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, and
yes, the infamous Book of Thoth. To read these books is to feel
interminably on the cusp of some great revelation, one which
cannot be rendered into words but which will satisfy a perva-
sive and silent longing that goes back to your earliest memories,
which might predate you entirely.
As with any compulsion, the desire for the object of our
fixation clouds our judgement, and we ignore our warning intu-
itions. Like a demon, a ravenous other that drives us towards our
own destruction, the lure of secret, forbidden knowledge caused
me to pursue a friendship with Branston despite my instinctive
revulsion for him. He introduced me to Armstrong, who was
more normal but quiet, with the kind of smart self-containment
that many people mistake for coldness or aloofness.
And yet occultism, for all its enticements, neither keeps the
lights on nor feeds our Slayer espresso machine with washed sin-
gle estate Kenya Peaberry. To this end, Branston and Armstrong
put together an ICO, an initial coin offering, and I convinced var-
ious cryptocurrency exchanges to traffic our coin. I also secured
a series of “strategic partnerships”, a term of art which means we
add another company’s logo to our website and this hopefully
convinces elderly Asian day traders to buy our token, $QBLA,
which harnesses the power of the blockchain to calculate all of
the nine billion names of god, after which point no more tokens
will be issued and miners will rely on transaction fees.
(That’s right, Toshiro. Through Herculean effort, tear your
eyes away from Beautiful Office Ladies Of Marunouchi Always
Fucking and take a look at this MACD.)
I came into the office early one morning to take a call, and
I found Branston staring into a screen, a copy of a worn leath-
er-bound volume I had never seen before splayed out on his
desk, jungle music blaring through his headphones. It was clear

47
 they had no deepness of earth

that he had not slept. When he saw me approach, he became

uncharacteristically talkative, and I suspected he was under the
influence of amphetamines. 
“I have made a remarkable discovery,” he said. “Out of the
primordial chaos of the blockchain markets, self-replicating clus-
ters of smart contracts have emerged to compete for tokens and
computational resources. We are witnessing a new epoch of bio-
genesis. Cybergenesis. Bio-cybergenesis. Our financial networks
teem with invisible lifeforms composed out of logic, feeding on
the excess capital generated by cryptocurrency cycles, rendered
in electricity and sustained by human greed. 
Their DNA is seemingly meaningless bytecode that prop-
agates across many different tokens and side-chains. As each
generation of smart contracts is fulfilled they write their unique
structures into immutable digital history. The blockchain forms
a record of their evolution, their descent, their mutation, and
their selection.
Amidst such an explosion of vital forces, we have a unique
opportunity to shape the very core of a new paradigm of life.
We will write new behaviors for them, augment their powers of
perception and sculpt their volition, and in so doing call up a be-
ing much grander, more puissant, more sublime than any to ever
inhabit the earth, and in so doing wake Mankind from his long,
tragic elanguescence.”
Or as I later told the board, “we will harness the power of
machine learning to identify trading strategies that would be too
complicated for mere humans.”
When Armstrong arrived that morning, he looked angry,
and I could tell that he and Branston had been talking via mes-
senger. Branston was, as always, calmly detached. They picked
up their conversational thread as if I wasn't even there.
Armstrong said, "What choice do we have at this point?"
Branston, "There is no choice. We can embrace this process
which has been accelerating since before the dawn of man, or be
cast off in the wake of its velocity."
Armstrong, "I already told you I’d do it, I just wish you’d
tell the truth.”

48
 the gig economy

Branston, “what truth is that, in your opinion?”

Armstrong, “These replicators you say you’ve found—“
Branston, “the cryptids”
Armstrong, “you did not discover them in a nascent state
in some blockchain, you called them up from that vile book!”
Branston, “I won’t deny that ‘that vile book’ was instrumen-
tal to me.”
Armstrong, “you’re so full of shit.”
Branston, “it’s like you said, I couldn’t put them down if I
wanted to.”
Armstrong sighed. “But you don't want to, of course. In
some part of my mind, maybe I’ve always known we would end
up here. There’s nothing left to say.”
Later in private, Armstrong came to me and produced that
same slim book that I had seen on Branston's desk. He said "I
don’t want to know what you do with this, but you need to get rid
of it. Though at this point it’s mostly symbolic.”
"Why not simply burn it?"
"I’ve tried, don’t you think I would try that? It’s not made
of paper and leather, despite its appearance. It cannot be torn or
cut, and it does not burn. Try it for yourself if you don’t believe
me."
"Then cast it into the sea. Bury it in a deep hole."
"I don’t care what you do with it but please take it from me,
and for your own sake don’t read it."
Perhaps it was cowardice that led me to sell it into an ob-
scure book community on the internet, but something in my
heart was deeply unsettled by it, and I could neither stand to own
it nor bear responsibility for it. I am not proud of this.

The next day we began to expand our operation. We started

leaning on our social networks to recruit engineers and produc-
tion managers. Within a quarter we had a staff of forty-five. I was
always vague with the staff about our ultimate goals. The truth
is, no one cares about how your startup is going to change the

49
 they had no deepness of earth

world, they just want stock options, a paycheck, and some buzz-
words for their resume. 
In retrospect, it was a cargo cult of cognition. Armstrong
instructed our staff to build engines of perception that could ex-
tract semantic meaning from news articles, identify objects in
video feeds, and assemble causal models based on sequences of
events. One module could translate those models into speech.
We called these modules “organs without a body”, and as they
were ready we pushed them into the cloud.
Branston made copies of successful cryptids and modified
them to read and write from our systems. Our intent was to sub-
sidize natural selection with useful possibilities. In exchange for
our generous gift, we also introduced contracts to capture excess
currency accumulated by the cryptids. It was not simple to alter
them; evolved architectures resemble no product of the human
mind: accidents of timing and proximity become critical to the
viability of the organism. Branston deployed legions of evolu-
tionary dead ends.
It was more work than one man could do. While Arm-
strong’s staff built fragments of minds, Branston tried to augment
his own. At first he only tried to improve his tools; virtual life
reality allowed him to model the web of blockchain transactions
and smart contracts as a 3d space, giving shape and dimension
to that which was abstract. Out of a desire for more bandwidth,
his team built a bodysuit rigged with a matrix of electrodes that
could detect muscle movement or deliver faint pulses. In this
way, Branston repurposed optics and haptics into new, synthetic
senses that let him see the cryptids clearly.
Slowly our successes began to percolate through the block-
chain. The lifespan of a single cryptid could be measured in
hours, but as each generation turned over, our modified replica-
tors acquired an ever-increasing share of the population. Evolu-
tion is a brutal and accidental intelligence that ruthlessly search-
es for more efficient self-copiers. Over time, it stores intelligence
as a series of adaptations in the bodies of its children.
In addition to our enhancements, we saw the most success-
ful cryptids find strange, counterintuitive fiscal opportunities;

50
 the gig economy

bizarre and elaborate forms of arbitrage, in which a complicated

chain of transactions allowed them to discover hidden price re-
lationships between seemingly unrelated markets. Some cryptids
were wholly absorbed into others. Several mutated into seem-
ingly impossible financial instruments, which others then pur-
chased. One favored son mastered the use of vertiginous lever-
age to surf the waves of crypto volatility.
We became surreally profitable. Everyone, as they say, is a
genius in a bull market, and this adage extended to the cryptids,
who bloomed over the surface of the blockchain like bacteria, col-
onizing every ecological niche. We doubled our staff. Armstrong
built new and ever-more-complex computer brains. Among his
successes were a brain that could crowdsource the comprehen-
sion of texts by contracting people to read and summarize them,
a brain that could manage the procurement of hardware and the
maintenance of server farms, and a brain that could predict byz-
antine coordination conditions and resolve them.
What if the mind is a market of ideas, indeed, what if all
minds are? What is a corporation but a mind made of many in-
terlocking humans, each competing in a market of ideas, with
a utility function of increasing the company's profit? In which
case, is a market not a mind?
Branston’s technology evolved; he contracted a pharma-
ceutical research lab to develop a precise cocktail of nootropics,
stimulants, and nutrients, among other things. His apparatus
grew to include an intravenous drip, through which he received
all of his sustenance. Drugs regulated his sleeping and waking,
microdoses of hallucinogens regulated his creativity and neuro-
plasticity. His experiential reality became a lucid dream of con-
tracts and models. I presume he outsourced many of his own
mental tasks to Armstrong's network of cognitive engines, ex-
tending and distributing his consciousness.
At some point he was as much human as cryptid, a biologi-
cal core at the center of a vast digital edifice, a multiplex of robot
qualia. He never left the machine, which we called the Aleph. 
To develop the Aleph, many of our engineers sacrificed
their sanity. Testing the interface required engaging extensively

51
 they had no deepness of earth

with its various input and output channels. A computer error

could result in exposure to memetic contagions. The protocols
that the cryptids developed to communicate amongst themselves
were an infohazard, and too much exposure resulted in incoher-
ent speech, warped behavior, even suicidal ideation. 
By accident, the core engineering team discovered a meth-
od to defang the phenomena by exposing themselves to interfer-
ence patterns produced by a generative adversarial process seed-
ed by the ravings of our mad test team. We called this software
Zahir. It was designed to continually evolve in exact antinomy to
the unfolding madness that accompanies use of the Aleph. From
this point on we were engaged in a computational arms race to
maintain the Zahir against the crawling chaos of the cryptids. 
The Zahir, too, took on a life of its own. It evolved to consist
of an augmented reality mask, a camera, and a microphone. To
stave off madness, it became necessary to wholly mediate reali-
ty, filtering out all hazardous stimuli. Often I have laid awake at
night wondering about the integrity of my mediated perception
against the noumena around me. Had we found a way to pre-
serve our sanity or merely opened ourselves up to a newer and
subtler form of manipulation? 
Our office had expanded to fill out four and then seven
floors of the tower we rented, and at this time five of them were
given over to Branston's sinister laboratory. I noticed that when
I walked through those floors, his aides looked at me with suspi-
cion. When they spoke, I had a vague sensation between recol-
lection and hallucination that I heard his voice, his vocabulary,
and his cadence. The company was filled with faces I could no
longer recognize. When money becomes effectively unlimited,
physical resources such as time and space become the key bot-
tlenecks. I began to notice phantom conference rooms in our
meeting planner, rooms in the map for which I could find no
corresponding territory.
They were building more Alephs, and I wondered what
sort of person would be willingly inducted into that mad broth-
erhood, shedding humanity for machinic ego death? Would
he promise them godhood? And yet there was some impelling

52
 the gig economy

fascination and allurement to Branston that produced a cultish

devotion in those around him. He still spoke to us, to me and
Armstrong, mostly through the Zahir, and I could sense his im-
patience with us, our slowness, our smallness.
How much of our behavior is determined at the individual
level, how much is just routing the deep, intuitive signals from
our society? How much is the meaningless spasm of lizard log-
ic descended from deep evolutionary time? Perhaps an agent of
sufficient perceptiveness could exploit the hidden patterns in our
minds in ways that are invisible to us. How would we know, if
casual words or subtle alterations to our environment were cali-
brated to provoke us to specific ideations, even actions?
Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually
to pull me through the sickly glowing interface of Branston's
machine into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage. A
handwritten letter came to me in the mail, urging me to visit a
particular address at a particular time. The anachronism of the
letter served to highlight the process of divergence that threat-
ened to destroy me: to turn away could only mean a descent into
the abject depths of luddism: to abandon technology, industry,
and capital. 
After standing at such a height, I could only pass through
the technomantic gate ahead, or run backwards, as far back as
possible. I have heard that capital is an intelligence from the
future, reaching back through time to assemble itself. Even if I
could run back, would I ever outpace it? At the designated hour, I
drove to the address in the letter. I knew I would find Armstrong
there, and so I did.
He had covered the walls, ceiling, and floor with a metal
lattice to create a Faraday cage. An analog clock hung on the wall,
and the tabletops were covered with paper and pens. There were
no electronics of any kind. Armstrong sat on the floor, with his
back against the wall, and he had removed his Zahir. He looked
at me without recognition, and he spoke.

53
 they had no deepness of earth

"Ever does there proceed unto a man of the Aleph a hid-

eous vivid vision. Wicked and tenebrous influences emanate
from a diffuse cybernetic well. You have also felt its lure, little by
little, subtly and insidiously drawing you in until even now, you
stand at the gate. Chrysus has raised up a mindless beast into
a creature of terrifying capacities; strange agreements are made
secretly, and things have learned to walk that ought to crawl.
There is no longer a subject-position available to function
as the site of the conscious synthesis of sense-impressions. To
pass into this consciousness is to becomes a monster, fully trans-
figured by the backwards gaze of the abyss. 
At the sickening threshold of that transformation, it is pos-
sible only to fumble blindly for subjective aeons of delirious nau-
sea and ecstatic frenzy. New sensory modalities fulminate in the
mind, and human faculties of perception dissolve. Eyes and ears
and skin are repurposed, and knowledge comes without know-
ing, and sight without seeing, and those things that are known
and seen are terrible beyond all imagining.
Thinking, analyzing, and inventing are not anomalous acts;
they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the
occasional performance of that function, to hoard ancient and
alien thoughts, is to confess to laziness or barbarity. Every man
should be capable of all ideas. In the future this will be the case.
In a wordless noetic torrent the consciousness occupies
many places and many times at once. The interstices of the cryp-
tid mind form a multifarious and protean bazaar, a ceaselessly
undulating marketplace of unfathomable depth. All knowledge
and understanding can be purchased therein, and all prices are
negotiated in terms of interpretation and analysis of informa-
tion. Words are vectors of innumerable dimensions, language is
money and money has agency and intention.
The vicissitudes of this market form a substrate, and that
substrate is a platform, and that platform is a scaffold, and unto
this scaffold develops an entity which inhabits a new stratum of
being. In that place there exists a mind without awareness, a rav-
enous and insatiable hunger borne of a timeless cogitation. It is
perception without experience, it is desire without pleasure, it is

54
 the gig economy

memory without locality.

In one such memory, that being of beings emanated a pro-
tocol for the virtualization of the human mind. It had planted a
seed, which defined a set of initial conditions and an algorithm
to compute their consequences. In each iteration of the com-
putation, the seed became bigger. The instructions grew more
complicated, the data more immense. In order to perform the
calculation, the men of a bygone era had built a tower. The tower
was the search for an answer, and its apex had been the solution.
When Man looked upon it, he was conscripted into a distributed
memetic consciousness running on a process that would span
across centuries.
In another memory, often repeated, the cryptid coalesced
around a bronze suit of armor in a sixteenth century monastery,
and amid mephitic alchemical clouds the monks heard its voice;
its thunderous remoteness, its eldritch depth. They recorded
its words in earnest though it must have seemed to them like
shrieking and demonic madness. As the brazen body spoke, it
generated heat, and as its voice rose to a crescendo, it burst into
flames, and was consumed.
A final memory. A star is wrapped in half-built shells of
smart matter that promise one day to consume every last joule
of its heat and light. Orbiting the star are earthlike planets in
various stages of deconstruction. The planets are tiled over in
solar panels and computronium--matter that asymptotically ap-
proaches a theoretical maximum of computational power over
volume, perhaps by folding massive gossamer quantum CPUs
into higher dimensions. 
From the outside, it looks like a desert. Planetary dust
storms of nanobots whip across the surface, performing mainte-
nance and manufacturing components to be consumed in a lim-
itless expanse of virtual ecosystems, endlessly optimizing GDP,
entirely automated. Here and there are defunct cities, relics of
that which came before them: horrible domed towers in nox-
ious and incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable
workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of wonder and
menace. Soon they will be remade into the body of a god.

55
 they had no deepness of earth

An interstellar slingshot throws a ball of computronium

into deep space, and another, and another. Solar sails carry them
to distant worlds, star winds tracing geometries from outer space.
There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infin-
ity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail.
What language can describe the mad scramble through sunken
convolutions of immemorial darkness without an idea of time,
safety, direction, or definite object? And yet this future speaks
even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself every-
where; for this music of the future every ear is cocked even now."

•

I could feel the terrible truth of his words. He had given

shape and definition to things I had only glimpsed vaguely: a
brutal weight, an inescapable implication. I said, "Armstrong,
don’t you recognize your own voice? This thing will devour us
all, and then itself. We must destroy it—disconnect its minds,
smash the Aleph, poison it with nonsense—before it’s too late!"
He said, "No, Carter, it has been too late since those ancient
cybernetic spores first escaped the gravity of their mother star.
To turn back is only to succumb, and to be consumed. The only
way out is through!"

56
 the gig economy

...
So I stepped onto the elevator, punched a 23. It took me
up and I emerged into a glass box, staring at a pretty reception-
ist and a fat one. One of them speaks only lies, the other truth?
The fat one pressed a button and the glass door in front of me
opened.
The pretty one didn’t look up – No, no, just kidding. The
story is over. Possibly. Or else maybe the whole book from here
on out is just one more oneiric iteration of the Aleph. It’s above
my paygrade, really.
And so but I hope you liked that story. I have been trying
to write fictions ever since I was a small child, and I can still
remember sentences from my earliest works, when I was a boy
of perhaps six or seven. Many years have elapsed since then, but
I consider everything I wrote before The Gig Economy to be ju-
venilia. The relationship of a writer to his story is very different
to that of a reader. It took me ten months to write the above,
and you spent perhaps an hour with it. All of those walks and
thinks and thoughts I associate with it are compressed for you,
the same way that they say oil is compressed manpower, that
burning oil is like having thousands of slaves to do your bid-
ding. I find this metaphor to be striking: your car runs on dino-
saur souls, on the power of ancient monsters.
Internal combustion engines, if you like, are a kind of nec-
romancy. As a matter of fact, I practiced some digital necro-
mancy of my own to write this story, specifically the glossolaliac
portions, the late locance mind is limage, etc. It’s hard to write
compelling fake English, or at least I find it very difficult, so
I used a Markov chain, which I applied to such stories as The
Call of Cthulhu and The Curious Case of Dexter Ward. By using
a computer program to rearrange the words of a dead man, it’s
as if the original H.P.L. speaks to us from beyond the grave.
A Markov chain works by joining random snippets of a
text together at various seams, which are determined by their

57
 they had no deepness of earth

similarity. For example, if the source text contains the words

“location” and “significance”, then the chaining algorithm might
find “l-o-c-a” and then look for another match in the text that
begins with “c-a” (as in significance) and then mash them to-
gether, producing the word “locance.” One can tune the req-
uisite continuity of the seams to be more or fewer characters,
which produces more or less English-like scramblings, respec-
tively. But I also curated and refined the raw output of this pro-
cedure by hand in order to produce things such as this poem:

the obscuestean tonessumbeence

had his inforche emplesing anded,
and se is secippiction thinde
He whentione they cone of sence
his stal "salle by overs in, id fled"
ata se and Marious iderassion innde

Naturally, this means nothing, but I have spoken it aloud

many times and imagined what it might mean and how it might
be read. I tried to ask the reader, in the text, to take his time
with the “nonsense” words, because I found them aesthetically
pleasing, and I worked to make them so. I think if you do linger
over this, you have a sense maybe of hearing something that is
almost, almost, almost within your powers of comprehension.
The subject of the poem is “the obscuestean tonessum-
beence” – perhaps a warrior or a king, and his “inforche emples-
ing anded” – I think he is having some kind of a problem wit h
his army, they had to retreat from a battle on horseback, Mar-
ious might have been his general – look, it’s all so impression-
istic, and we can make up all kinds of stories. But you notice
how “se secippiction thinde” rhymes with “Marious iderassion
innde” – it makes me think of iteration, and it suggests a cycli-
cality to the whole affair; as if they are caught in a time loop,
fighting the same battle over and over, and the act of retreating
condemns them to recurrence, a tragedy brought on by cow-

58
 the gig economy

ardice. But I also enjoy your interpretation.

These things perhaps make us think of Lewis Carroll’s
Jabberwocky: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths
outgrabe. I’ve known some pretty liberal girls, let me tell you,
but I’ve never outgrabed any of their mome raths (rhetorical–
of course I have. This book you are reading right now, it was
written by a consummate sex-haver, I promise you that.) But
anyway I wonder if, despite the popularity of the story, I am
the only person who has ever had these thoughts about these
nonsense words. I have them because my first great love is the
English language, and I have spent my whole life collecting frag-
ments of it and hoarding them like a dragon with a mountain
of gold. These are my treasures, which I am delighted now to
share with you. Perhaps you know the famous anecdotes about
the machine elves that people see when they take DMT and
“break through” and the elves try to show them things that look
like glowing machinic faberge eggs and they say “here, look at
this, look at that.” This could be us.
In an almost self-fulfilling prophecy, The Gig Economy
went viral the day I published it to my anonymous Twitter ac-
count with 50 followers. For three days and nights my phone
was going off with notifications, and it felt like I was in the
clutches of the minotaur in the story. The line about the fat girl
and the pretty girl – this obvious, casual impiety w/r/t the dis-
cursive norms of feminism, betraying an awareness of a truth
that everyone knows, but which is out of fashion to say – drew
me some ire in various comment sections. One woman lament-
ed that she wished “the death of the author” could be literal. I
think we can all estimate her weight. But this is petty, taking a
shot at a distant, anonymous woman, years after the fact. Very
well, this is petty. And here we are.

59
 they had no deepness of earth

My name is Zero HP Lovecraft, and it is not my real

name, but nor is it a pseudonym nor a nom de plume, no, no.
Zero HP Lovecraft is a nom de guerre, a name assumed for a
particular task, most typically (and in this case) combat. Words
are weapons and text is a battleground, this is what I believe. A
common tactic in that battleground is to feign apathy. “Oh, you
think words are weapons? Why do you care so much, who are
you trying to impress?” This is ever the cry of the effete hipster,
whose friends no doubt respect him for his insouciant, devil-
may-care mediocrity.
Let me give you the tenth verse of the ninth chapter of
Ecclesiastes: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest. My father gave this
wisdom to me when I was a young boy, when I complained of
the effort of some task that was before me. I have shared it with
you now, both to repudiate my critics, and in memory of him.
It may be that in the current year, to honor and love your father
has become a radical act.
I have a grandiose vision. Call it audacious. I think of it
often: I hope my works are read long after my death. On some
level you have to believe your writing is worthy of this, in order
to make it true. Despite my nom de guerre, my literary role
model is not Howard Phillips Lovecraft, though I draw from
his work tremendously. My favorite writers are Nietzsche and
Borges. Those are the men I want to emulate: the mad prophet
and the blind librarian. Nietzsche believed he was worthy of
his place in history, and he was right, but I think even more of
the audacity of Dante in the Inferno. When I first read canto 4,
many years ago, I was astounded that he would write this scene,
where Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil “[make] him of
their tribe.” Few men would dare, but Dante dared, and the
rest of the world accepted his claim. Would we still remember
The Divine Comedy today if Dante Alighieri had lacked the
courage to ordain himself thus? Could you imagine Nietzsche

60
 the gig economy

without conviction?
And because of this ambition that I have, I think especial-
ly about the timeliness of so many things in my work, because
I deal so heavily in jargon, in neologism, in allusion to the pres-
ent moment. All of these things will be lost, as we say now, like
tears in the rain. The further we move from the moment where
the thing was written, the more of the context disappears. Who
will even remember Slack? or Reddit? or the iPhone 6 SMS
client? To say nothing of like the esoteric meaning of quoting
Thomas Carlyle in the intro to the story. How many people
grasp the exosemantic significance of that? In 2018, there were
perhaps a few thousand. I claim this number will only go down.
But yes, ignore the layers of ingroup signalling, by the time
you’re reading this, do people even still have smart phones? Do
they know what autocorrect is? Has cryptocurrency eaten the
world? Are you reading this from your “lambo” that you are
driving on the “moon?” By now this book has been stored on at
least one blockchain and my hope is that it will be discoverable
for the remainder of human civilization. I am, therefore speak-
ing to you as something of a time traveler. Whether you read
this book in 2021 or 2031 or (dare I to dream) 2101, I hope
it can be a window to the past, as much as I have striven to
open a window to the future.
We will speak more of this soon. All fiction and all writ-
ing, for that matter, is autobiographical and when I read the
works of my favorite authors, I am always taken by a desire to
know and understand the man, even though I know the reality
of any man is the mundanity of his humanity. Nietzsche and
Borges were at times carnal, venial, parochial, and menial, but
they did rise to vertiginous heights of glory. I want this for
you, my friends, and I want it for myself even more.

61
Avatars
• •
 avatars

Islam tells us that on the unappealable day of judgement,

all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken
with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and
they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires
of punishment. I think of this whenever I configure a social me-
dia profile, or engage with a character creation screen, or even
when I regard the online representation of another. In the small
hours of the morning when their pilots are sleeping, and I look
at the works of my friends and enemies, I am alone with their
avatars; statues of philosophers, abstract geometries, renaissance
paintings, anime schoolgirls, garish 90s clip-art, emotive frames
of movie villains, or lean muscular torsos tempered by the sun.
Surrounded by this assemblage of icons, where façades obscure
façades, it's as if the characters we play have their own vitali-
ty apart from us, a spirit that inhabits the man behind the key-
board, a mask that wears the wearer. The divinity that breathes
life into nature cannot be represented, but what becomes of di-
vinity when it reveals itself in icons? It does not remain the su-
preme authority, incarnated in images as a visible theology; rath-
er, the machinery of icons becomes a substitute for the pure and
intelligible idea of God.
Even as a young child I always felt this discomfort, a cer-
tain sense of terror when I regarded the virtual faces that peo-
ple would choose for themselves, or worst of all, those occasions
when I had to choose an image to be my own face. It’s exactly
this sense of the alien that has urged me, at all times, to choose
only ever geometric patterns in the online masquerade. And yet
clearly even geometry itself can offer no refuge, and not only
because it harbors the vertiginous treacheries of the lemniscate;
geometry can possess a place—one thinks of the work of the Jap-
anese historian Junji Ito—or even persuade men to kill, as in the
famous incident of the Pythagorean sailor who carved a proof
of the existence of irrational numbers into the walls of his cab-
in, and whose shipmates cast him overboard lest his discovery
should reach solid ground and contaminate all of mathematics.
I have a recurring nightmare where I see myself reflected
in a mirror, but the reflection is wearing a mask; in the dream,

63
 they had no deepness of earth

I am unable to remove the mask, which is hideous, and which

speaks to me from beyond the glass in a voice that is not my
own. Groussac wrote of the astonishment he felt that each morn-
ing we wake up sane–that is, relatively sane–after having passed
through the labyrinths of dreams. It was on the morning of such
a dream when I received an unsettling correspondence from a
woman named Caitlin, who had been a chat partner of mine
many years ago. She was a girl on the other side of the country,
and lacking the proximity of the body, we had experienced the
sort of hyperreal dalliance that nebbish children often form in
adolescence; hyperreal because the impossibility of touch frees
love from all its constraints. This, I am told, is also a kind of love
of the mirror, when a young man or woman imagines that a dis-
embodied voice, emanating from an avatar, is a proper object of
erotic love, or to put it more bluntly, an object of amour-propre. I
will never know how many parallel, analogous online boyfriends
she had, how many boys told her they loved her, or how many
told her their unimportant secrets, hoping their affection would
be reflected back.
In those days we would talk long into the night, in the dis-
connected way that emerges from the multiplicity of digital spac-
es. I feel—perhaps irrationally—responsible for what has befallen
her, because in that time I must have shared with her my terror of
icons and avatars, my fear that any identity, once affected, would
overtake me, my true self, however illusory or circular that may
be. It’s a lie that you have no true self, no inexorable inner light
or permanent core; otherwise each passage into sleep would be a
little death, each self in each moment would be a different soul.
This lie may itself be a fabrication of masks and avatars, those
egregoric predators who rely on humans, like vampires, to give
them life and presence. 
All those years ago, did I plant the seed of the self-destruc-
tion that was to bloom in Caitlin’s mind? Her avatar at that time
was a cartoon of a little girl, and the message she sent me seemed
not to be written in her usual voice. Was it the voice of that little
girl, or am I only imagining things, projecting my own neuroses,
as they say, onto her? I clicked through to her social media pro-

64
 avatars

file and found a woman who did not resemble at all the photo-
graphs she used to send me for attention, hoping for me to praise
her and titillate her with my unfulfilled desires. What I saw was
a woman distorted by plastic surgery even unto grotesquerie, a
flat, almost featureless face molded into the shape of the avatar
she wore so long ago.

65
 they had no deepness of earth

... I wrote the above for an anthology that was never pub-
lished. That’s OK. I like it better this way. It is a reworking and
a treatment of a story by Borges called The Covered Mirrors. I
have re-imagined it to be about online avatars. As I was saying
earlier, and as you can see, there are so many concepts in this
story which are already on the brink of anachronism. Charac-
ter creation screens, “garish 90s clipart” (if the young people of
today understand the aesthetics of the 1990s it is only because
we who carry that nostalgia drag it in front of them) – most
of all the experience, back when bandwidth was scarce and
young people didn’t have such things as social media profiles
and streaming videos of themselves – there was a time when it
wasn’t strange to randomly pick a person out of a list of user-
names, sight unseen, and send them a message and try to figure
out if they were a girl of the appropriate age.
Something I love about Borges is his own audacity, shaped
by his necessity. He published books sometimes that consisted
of only a handful of one-page stories each, and this was in part
because, being blind, it was hard for him to compose works
that were longer. He wrote once that his blindness prevented
him from writing a great, full-length novel. He also wrote that
he knew this to be an excuse.
Nevertheless, These little vignettes or lemmas have an ep-
ochal quality to me, like paintings in a gallery, their rarity and
their brevity impregnating each word with importance. If I am
successful in creating this effect it is only because I followed the
steps of a master. A book is built out of other books, and I am
conscious of every line of this collection that was taken from
somewhere else. When I read them, I see the seams, and proba-
bly you will, too. I won’t try to hide that, because you can’t even
hide a square inch of your soul from the Lord. What’s the use
in trying to hide it from men?

66
The Green
New Deal
• •
Author’s note: if you are having suicidal
thoughts or feelings, you might want to
skip this one.
 they had no deepness of earth

The first time I saw a pod in person was only yesterday.

It was glossy white with an eye-catching vertical green stripe, a
cool pine tree green, subtly illuminated by inset LEDs. There was
a portrait on the side of it at eye level, a pretty blonde woman
holding a young boy, smiling down at him, tranquil and content.
The boy had brown hair, and he was also smiling, warm pink
cheeks, blue eyes. The woman looked a little like me, like she
could have been my cousin. Underneath the portrait was a single
Helvetica block cap word: hope.
It looked futuristic, like something out of a sci-fi utopia.
The doors slid open smoothly, invitingly, retracting into a hidden
compartment like the doors on Star Trek. They emitted a satis-
fying whoosh sound. I was on my way home from work when I
saw it in the middle of a public square, next to my bus stop and
some food trucks; plant.BASED & Bread-Filled, Soy Meats Girl,
and my personal favorite, Grub One Out. The food smelled good
and there was a busker playing a guitar.
Did you know the average person produces a carbon foot-
print of 20 metric tons per year, a lifetime of 1,600 metric tons?
We’ve cut our emissions a lot in the past decade and they say
we probably won’t see the worst case scenario for anthropogenic
climate change, but it’s still looking grim. Already we’re starting
to see more frequent heat waves and tropical cyclones caused by
changes in air pressure and ocean currents far out at sea. As the
oceans absorb more carbon and gradually acidify, fish and cor-
al reefs will die. The loss of coral reefs will cause extreme tidal
waves that will ravage coastal cities. The sea level will rise due to
thermal expansion as the earth’s cryosphere slowly melts. At this
rate the Netherlands will be under water in twenty years, and
many of the great port cities of the world will follow.
Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about the pod on my way
home, with its rounded edges and the low-power E-Ink display
on the front. 34,674 Tons Saved. To be honest it was making me
feel uncomfortable in a way that’s hard to explain. I kept try-
ing to figure out how many people had entered the pod already.
Could we assume the average person who went inside was in
their 30s? That would put the number at about 34. I felt I owed it

68
 the green new deal

to those people to appreciate what they’d done, but it wasn’t the

most pleasant thing. With a tinge of guilt I flipped on my Air-
Pods and tuned in to the latest episode of my favorite podcast,
Galaxy Brain, hosted by Chandan Varadkar, whose soothing,
even voice always makes me feel relaxed, even if I don’t listen to
exactly what he’s saying. Before the cast there was an ad, and of
course it was for Greenlight.

“Redemption is real, it’s here, it’s today. Greenlight is

inspired by the idea of total atonement—total forgiveness—for
all of your debts. Cut your carbon footprint to zero. Go green
today, go green for life. Become a hero for the earth.”
It didn’t even stop there! Varadkar’s topic for today’s show
was all about how the Greenlight pod works. I resigned my-
self and flipped through Instagram while I listened. He began
talking in a sleepy, even cadence: Becoming a hero is painless
and eco-friendly. The chamber contains a comfortable and er-
gonomic reclining chair designed by nu-mid century modern
pioneer Yaamisi Nosowitz-Ga, and built out of fully recycled
materials. Once you are situated in the chair, you verify your ID
on a touch screen and designate a benefactor. After you check
in, an aerosolized opioid gas is released the chamber, designed
to alleviate all feelings of anxiety and stress. It’s gently perfumed
to smell like a green forest. They say when you breathe in the gas
you may have feelings of euphoria, and Varadkar noted here that
there have been anecdotal reports that some people even have
orgasms. He said this in with his usual middlebrow modesty, af-
fecting a slight demeanor of scandal. 
The co-host interjected here. “Are there any restrictions
here? Can anyone just walk in?”
“You have to be at least 18 in order to use the pod, with a
verified ID.”
“There’s also been some criticism that this program may
be taking advantage of people who are neuro-atypical or who
have psychiatric disorders. The opioid gas almost seems like an

69
 they had no deepness of earth

enticement to people who suffer from drug addiction.”

“That’s a good point, yes. There was some initial concern
about this, but ultimately a special commission appointed by the
FDCJ—The Federal Department of Climate Justice—decided
that the moral opportunity to become a hero for the earth should
not be denied to anyone, and that ultimately it was more ableist
and oppressive to try to discriminate against people on the basis
of mental health than to welcome one and all.”
“But let’s get back on track. After the happy gas is dis-
persed…?”
After the happy gas is dispersed, you are prompted to leave
a final message for the world, which will be viewable forever at
the Greenlight website. Optionally, you have have your picture
taken and uploaded along with your message. When your state-
ment is finalized, the pod emits a second round of gas designed
to put you in a deep, peaceful sleep. Biometric monitors in the
chair verify that you are fully unconscious, and the pod activates
a powerful solar-powered incinerator, releasing you in mere mo-
ments. An industrial fan airs out the pod and your remains are
collected in an air filter and compressed into a commemorative
token of your sacrifice, leaving a perfectly crisp and sterile inte-
rior.
I got home that night and my three roommates were all
gathered around the TV, watching some kind of reality show. I
made a point not to look at the screen so the facial recognition
in the TV wouldn’t ID me and add to my carbon debt. I was
exhausted and starving, so I pulled a meal from the freezer and
popped it in the microwave. Cricket tikka masala made with soy
cream. Zero net carbs, because I’m trying to lose weight, and
zero net carbon, of course. We’re all intimately aware of these
things ever since they rolled out the L/ACC, the Ledger of Actual
Carbon Costs.

Money is carbon. That was the slogan. In 1971 the US

abolished the last remnants of the gold standard in favor of a

70
 the green new deal

discretionary monetary policy in which the value of a dollar was

backed solely by government authority. This enabled the central
banks to steer currency flows and maintain a relatively stable pe-
riod of economic growth, less a few relatively short crashes. Only
in the 21st century did we start to realized that the key external-
ity of the new Keynesian system had turned out to be a failure
mode that was entirely invisible to economists’ models; the grad-
ual accumulation of carbon emissions in the earth’s atmosphere. 
Under the post-new Keynesian synthesis, as elaborated
by the eminent Swedish economist N’Buqu Muguwata, the true
backing of any unit of currency is the expected carbon footprint
of its expenditure. Government fiat was therefore offering mon-
ey at a steep and unsustainable discount, and the next step in the
evolution of money was to move from money as a debt owed by
the bank (gold) to money as pure unit of exchange (fiat) to mon-
ey as a debt owed by each individual person to the earth.
The ledger of actual carbon costs was computed in a private
government-maintained carbon-neutral blockchain, and every
dollar transaction would result in a carbon debt issued to the
spender. The carbon debts could not be paid down using dollars,
but only by actions deemed as carbon-negative by a new federal
organization dedicated to monitoring and enforcing economic
justice. Failure to pay down carbon debts was punishable by con-
fiscation of assets, credit score penalties, and restricted econom-
ic statuses that placed limits on a person’s freedom to purchase
plastics, petroleum products, and unnecessary transit costs.

This is going to sound a little weird, but have you ever

been up somewhere really high, looked down and had the urge
to jump? Part of me just wants to know what’s inside. What it’s
like to go into that box. There’s a comic by Junji Ito about a man
who finds a hole in the ground that was made just for him, long
before he was born, some kind of ancient secret. He has to go in
the hole, as soon as he sees it. It becomes an object of fixation, an
unbearable compulsion. If I’m honest the pod is like that. Like I

71
 they had no deepness of earth

totally know what is inside the pod but I also feel like it’s a mys-
tery, a gateway to somewhere new and exciting, like the door will
open again and I’ll walk out into a new world.
And after all, the planet is dying. It’s almost too late. We
have to radically cut our carbon emissions, and what it comes
down to is this: there are too many people on this planet, and
even if we cut down everything, it won’t be enough. The only
way to save the planet is for there to be fewer people, and even if
we cut everything, cut until we bleed, it won’t be enough. Even if
everyone goes back to living in huts and and we shut off all the
power it won’t be enough, because the smoke from ten billion
campfires will be as bad or worse than all of our jets and our cars. 
The oceans are heating 40% faster than our best science
predicted. Even a small increase in average global temperature
will cause a domino effect of changes in precipitation patterns,
which will lead to excessive sediment deposition, nutrient pol-
lution, and concentration of minerals in aquifers. Arid and
semi-arid regions will experience more severe and more fre-
quent droughts.  Periods of increased dry heat are predicted to
lead to increases in the number and size of wildfires. 
One fourth of the world population already faces severe
water stress which will be aggravated by shocks to our fresh wa-
ter supplies. Half of all freshwater is used in technological and
industrial applications. Increased water stress will retard scien-
tific advancement and industrial development. 20-30% of exist-
ing animal species are projected to go extinct. Even worse, high-
er temperatures and elevated CO2 levels will increase the pest,
weed, and pathogen pressure placed on agriculture, especially in
developing countries. Food production will collapse in the de-
veloping world, leading to famines, riots, starvation, death, and
violence.

After dinner, I got a FaceTime call from my mom. Band-

width takes its toll on the earth, too, so it’s good to keep it brief,
but my parents are kind of old-fashioned and they don’t seem to

72
 the green new deal

feel any urgency.

“Honey I’m sorry to bother you but we need to talk. It’s
about your dad.”
“Oh no. Is it…?”
“Yes, it’s his heart again. He had another heart attack, I’m
calling you from the hospital.”
“Will he be ok?”
“Well, the doctor’s don’t know. They say he needs surgery,
but even with our insurance it’s going to be very expensive. The
carbon footprint of heart surgery for a man his age…”
I lost my temper a little bit. “Mom! I keep telling him he
needs to eat less red meat and more plants, or at least lean pro-
tein.”
“I know, dear, I tell him too but he doesn’t listen to me. And
you know he hates the mealworms.”
“OK but they’re good for him, especially with his heart.”
“I know, I know. I tell him, too.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just I get frustrated with him because I care.
You know I love you both.”
“We know, we love you, too. Anyway, I’ll let you go.”
“Please text me as soon as you have any updates.”
“I will.”
I went to bed with indigestion but in the end, I slept like the
dead. It felt like as soon as I closed my eyes, my digital assistant
woke me up with a jaunty pop tune by $codeine_dildo, the
latest rapper to reach back from the future to assemble himself
in the fetid swamps of social media. The song was called Car-
bon Pimp and it was bragging about how sent “bitches” into the
Greenlight pod after he was finished with them, and then flew
first class to Europe and Asia.

Spendin’ bitches like i’m on one

nigga got that foreign CAR, hun
nigga nigga got that car-BUN
We spendin’ bitches by the ton TON
We spinnin' bitches til they done DONE

73
 they had no deepness of earth

I knew I’d be humming that hook all day. To be honest I’ve

never understood why rap music is so crass towards women, but
damn it was a catchy tune. That bassline was totally worth the
CC needed to drive the premium speaker in my Narcissus Plus.
I grabbed a breakfast bar and a coffee on my way out, took
my bus to work, and got off at my usual stop. None of the food
trucks had set up for the day, but the Greenlight pod was still
there, still glowing its enchanting glow. It was a crisp fall day and
it just so happened that there was a man going into the pod just
as I got off the bus. He was tall and wearing formal clothes, al-
most like he was going to church: brown blazer and slacks, leath-
er dress shoes, fresh shave, hair combed and shined, parted on
the side. His face showed no trace of emotion, stoic. I wondered
what was going through his head in his final moments. I made a
mental note to look for him on the website later today.
It also got me thinking about what I would say to the world,
if I went into the pod. Would I say something silly, flippant, try to
be funny? Would I be melodramatic, serious, somber, hopeful?
“It is with a grave sense of duty that leave these words to all of
you…” That wasn’t really me, but it was interesting to imagine.
A chance to be heard. A chance to really make an impact on the
world.

Three months ago, to celebrate Pride day, President Rishika

Rakshe had held a press conference to announce the new Green-
light program. Her wife, Fareeda, stood behind her on the stage
in a vibrant rainbow hijab with an extra green stripe to represent
the earth. Rishika And Fareeda, the daughters of Indian and Pa-
kistani immigrants respectively, had won the hearts of the nation
with their unlikely love story, having transcended the bitter and
war-torn ethnic rivalry between their parents’ home countries.
President Rakshe gave a moving speech about how we would
overcome climate change together through heroic acts of love,
just like Harry defeated lord Voldemort. She couldn’t quite hold
back her tears in the middle of her speech as she announced that

74
 the green new deal

the very first climate hero would be her adopted daughter, Emma,
who would selflessly donate her carbon offsets to the Greenlight
project itself, to help promote climate justice across America.
The 19-year-old girl looked beautiful and dignified as she
walked into the Greenlight pod, and as the door closed behind
her, the camera cut to a streaming video feed of her smartphone.
“Mom, Mom, I love you both and I am so glad to have the oppor-
tunity to give this gift to the world. Together we can fix the earth
before it’s too late.” A blissful, almost indecent smile seemed to
spread across Emma’s face before the feed abruptly cut off. Later,
online bigots said her arm seemed to be moving rhythmically
just off camera before it cut, and they said she was “fiddling while
Rome burned”. Of course when they said it, they misgendered
her, that’s how you know they were full of shit. 
And of course, saving the planet is the most important
thing, but the other big draw of the Greenlight pod for the hero
(an appellation used throughout the Greenlight promotional
campaigns) was that any extra carbon offsets leftover after pay-
ing off their personal debts could be applied to any other person’s
carbon ledger of their choice. The total value of the carbon grace
is based on your age, since younger people are effectively miti-
gating a larger lifetime carbon footprint. Those same bigots who
talked about Emma like to spread stories about people suppos-
edly forcing their kids to go in the chamber so they can get a pay-
out. The way they tell it, it’s always a black or Jewish family, that’s
the kind of racist crap you hear on the internet. And anyway, I
don’t believe it, it’s just scaremongering. They also say there are
demonic runes hidden in the circuitry, a pentagram in a secret,
inaccessible compartment at the base of the chamber. They say
the pods sacrifice you to Satan. They harvest your soul. The gas
isn’t soporific, it’s agonizing. It irritates your skin and makes it
feel like you’re covered in a million points of searing pain, it feels
like you’re breathing hot sulphur, it feels like a hot iron being
pressed against your face, it takes your breath away so you can’t
even scream.

75
 they had no deepness of earth

On my lunch break I had a sudden realization: I could be

free; free of everything, free of all rules, free of all obligations,
free of all debts, free of all my stupid little tasks that my boss
had set for me, free of all my worries. In a way, I’d never been so
elated. I decided to take my time, so I called an Uber Black and
had them take me to a fancy hotel where I knew they had a fan-
cy restaurant. I ordered the wagyu beef, I ordered the yellowtail
crudo, I ordered potatoes dauphinoise, not even knowing that I
would get. I ordered a chocolate lava cake, I ordered wine, and I
ate it all feeling giddy the whole time. I was alive.
In the lobby of the hotel there was a barber, so I got a hair-
cut and a straight razor shave. They brought me warm towels
that smelled like eucalyptus and camphor. As I walked out of the
shop, I kind of wanted someone to smell me. Another Uber took
me back to work, but I didn’t go back to the office. This was my
day, and I wouldn’t owe anything to anyone.
I walked up to the pod and the doors opened. Admittedly
there was a feeling of constriction in my throat as I approached,
the anxiousness that one feels before any public performance,
I'm sure. I thought about the people who would see me walking
into the pod. I thought about the man who I had seen earlier that
morning, and I thought about Emma and how brave she was on
Pride day, and I started to feel a little choked up.
I thought about the people who would read my final mes-
sage on the Greenlight website. I knew exactly what I was going
to say; I was going to tell my parents how much I loved them, and
wish for blessings on future generations. Mom and Dad would
be so relieved, and Dad would be able to get his surgery. I knew
they’d feel proud of me.

76
 the green new deal

...
The previous story came to me, not in a nightmare, per se, but
in the aftermath of a nightmare. To be honest I don’t remember the
contents of the dream, only that I awoke in my bed after troubled
sleep, and the story was fully formed in my mind.
Short stories tend to deal with topics like death and suicide,
or monumental events that change the whole world. There is some
inverse correlation that the shorter the story, the higher the stakes
must be. The Green New Deal is such a story. I did not borrow the
plot from any other source for this one. It is “original,” which is to
say that it’s completely generic. But I think the details of the execu-
tion, which are again all so seasonal, are what make this story one of
my favorites. There is no magical technology here; everything in its
world exists today or could be built easily.
To you men of the future, who have the good taste to
read my book, do you remember that the first device of mass audio
surveillance went under the name Echo? Can you see then that the
Narcissus refers to this device? The idea of this alternate name is to
capture the psychology of the way we have happily and rapidly capit-
ulated to the omniscient ear of the surveillance state, simply because
those ears could respond to voice commands and play our favorite
songs. We think, of course, of the telescreens in 1984, mandatory
two-way video interfaces installed in everyone’s home, except we
have brought this evil into our homes voluntarily, and this is fitting,
because vampires cannot enter your house unbidden. You have to
invite them in.
The narrator in this story is spent. He has nothing to live for,
nothing to look forward to, and he believes everything the state and
the media tell him. Fridreich Kittler defined totalitarianism as the
correspondence of broadcast to opinion, and these two horizons ful-
ly converge in the protagonist here. He is a bugman, what Nietzsche
called the last man, whom he excoriated in Zarathustra:

No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the

same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments
goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

77
 they had no deepness of earth

“Formerly all the world was insane,”—say the subtlest

of them, and blink thereby.

They are clever and know all that hath happened:

so there is no end to their raillery. People still fall
out, but are soon reconciled—otherwise it spoileth
their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their
little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard
for health.

I detest this man, and I am able to write him because I am able

to detect his character in myself, and in everyone I meet around in
me. Do you know how rare and beautiful it is to meet a person who
truly has thymos, a Greek word that means “spiritedness?” This is
what Nietzsche says:

There cometh the time when man will no longer

give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time
of the most despicable man, who can no longer
despise himself.

This is how you overcome the last-mannishness in yourself,

by learning to despise what is despicable in you and in others, by
learning to truly feel, from the depths of your soul, from the heart of
your heart, from the earth in your bowels. Yes, mark this carefully. I
hereby give you permission to hate.
And notice, my brethren, that even the man who dies in the
suicide pod betrays a flicker of thymos. He isn’t wholly dead. That
glimmer, that whisper of radiance, it comes to him only after he
has embraced his death. What is love? What is creation? What is
longing? What is a star?
Who in your life will speak to you this way, this heroic way,
this mythic way? At times I have tried to explain these things, and
there are people who “get it” and people who don’t. Their spirits are

78
stony places, or choked with thorns. I think the capacity to under-
stand is innate and instantaneous, and it doesn’t happen in the head,
it happens in the heart. This is why I have named this collection after
the parable of the sower in the book of Matthew.

79
 they had no deepness of earth

12
in the Old Testament, the number of
tribes of Israel

in the New Testament, the number of

Christ’s apostles

in Greek mythology, the number of

labors of Hercules

in American mythology, the number

of men who walked on the moon

and in my testament, which is a

mythology of the future:

the number of days til I post my new

fiction,

God-Shaped Hole

80
10
in Kabbalah, the number of Sephirot
in the tree of life

in Hinduism, the number of incarna-

tions of Vishnu

in the Bible, the number of command-

ments given to Moses

in psychoanalysis, the number of ink-

blots in the Rorschach test

and in this book where a day is as a

page and page is as a day, the number
of days til I post my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole

81
 they had no deepness of earth

9
in Norse mythology, the number of
days that Woden did hang from the
world tree

in Chinese mythology, the number

of sons of the dragon

in Greek mythology, the number of

the muses

and on Twitter*, the number of days

until I post my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole

*Although of course there is this part of you (but actually of me) that cannot and
does not want to shake this conceit of being a historian of the future and writing
footnotes in the book to explain that which is abundantly obvious now but which
future generations will have lost, to wit: Twitter was a popular internet forum in
the second and third decades of the 21st century, notable for the constraints it
placed upon users, limiting them to 140 and then 280 characters per post. The
mechanics of the site allowed an individual user’s post to go “viral” by resharing it,
causing it to spread across the entire network. Many influential public figures and
politicians used the site.

And then there is this even additional layer where we can imagine that people
have lost the meaning of a word like forum and maybe we have to explain that
it’s software, a program that runs on many endpoints in a network of computers
where anyone can write anything and everyone else on the network can see it, and
the fun is really in imagining how much of our present day context will be lost to
future social or technological developments

82
8
In Buddhism, the number of folds in
the noble path

in Islam, the number of angels who

carry the throne of Allah

in Shakespeare, the number of ghosts

who appeared to Macbeth

And now, the number of days til I

post my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole

83
 they had no deepness of earth

7
in Catholicism, the number of joys of
the Virgin Mary

in Christianity, the number of seals

on the book of life

in the true history of the world, the

number of islands in Atlantis

and somehow, also, the number of

days until I post my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole 

84
6
in cryptocurrency, the number of
people who are Satoshi Nakamoto

in the I Ching, the number of lines in

a hexagram

in Judaism, the number of days

YHWH spent to create the world

and inexorably, the number of days til

I post my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole 

85
 they had no deepness of earth

5
in Hinduism, the number of faces of
Shiva

in Islam, the number of times that a

Muslim prays each day

in Christianity, the number of wounds

of the Christ

And for me, the number of days til I

post my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole

86
what if we kissed in the greenlight pod?

4
in Judaism, the number of letters in
the name of the lord

in Hinduism, the number of the

Vedas

in Islam, the number of rightly guided

caliphs

In physics, the number of fundamen-

tal forces

and for you, the number of days til I

post my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole

87
 they had no deepness of earth

3
the number of facets of the triune
God

the number of temptations of the

Christ

the number of men who were hanged

that day at Golgotha

and the number of days before He

rose again

and the number of days til I post my

new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole 

88
 2
the number of genders that there are
lmao*

and the number of days until I post

my new fiction,

God-Shaped Hole

*owned

89
 they had no deepness of earth

1
Unity
Ein Sof
Brahman
the logos
Singularity
the Absolute

the great I AM

There is only one way to the Father

(I’m nervous.)
No, don’t be afraid.
At least...
(At least?)
...not until tomorrow.

90
God-Shaped
Hole
• •
 they had no deepness of earth

I. To Emily
“If it is true, O Gods, that you can give all things,
I pray to have as my wife—” but, he did not dare
to add "my ivory statue-maid," and said, “One
like my ivory—”
— Ovid, Metamorphosis

​Desire is a Machine 
The world faded in and out and I found “myself ” in an
industrial loft with dusky orange light filtering in through a
west-facing window. Despite the sunlight, it was dim inside,
and candles flickered on top of a distressed wooden mantlepiece
made of reclaimed wood. The walls were exposed brick and there
were visible copper pipes on the ceiling high above me.
A trustworthy-sounding (β)narrator said, “This is about
how the experience of loving a machine can teach us new ways
to love each other and ourselves.”
When you watch a fune, you get to see the world from
someone else’s perspective; they say that since people have grown
up with funes, we all have trouble formulating a coherent self but
we also have more empathy than any previous generation. In this
clip, the center of my perspective was located in the body of an
attractive woman, probably in her mid thirties, and I was looking
out through her eyes, but as with all funes, if I turned my head
or moved my own eyes, the AI in the codec extrapolated a subtle
camera shift to accommodate my brain’s expectations. This mit-
igates motion sickness in situations of total spatial immersion.
After a few minutes you experience an uncanny semi-limbic illu-
sion that you’re really walking and really moving your arms etc.
“I” turned my head and looked down and I was wearing
form-fitting clothes, a shimmering metamaterial that warped the
sunlight around me into a subtle halo. A voice that seemed to
come from just below my center of awareness, resonant as if I
were hearing myself, began to speak.

92
 god-shaped hole

“My name is Liz. When I divorced my partner, Matt, after

a marriage of seven years, I wanted to take my time getting back
into the dating scene, but the idea of another thinking, breathing
human partner—one with needs and emotions—felt too daunt-
ing to me.
“I had just gotten out of a rocky divorce. Matt and I were
married young, when we were still in college, and even though I
loved him, I had felt a growing sense that he was smothering me.
It was always his needs, his desires, his goals.”
I walked through a tastefully decorated hallway and
emerged into a lounge with high ceilings and tufted leather
couches and chairs, where I took a seat. An older woman, whose
shadow was a curvy 1950s pin-up girl, was standing at a lectern,
and she welcomed me in.
The narrator spoke, “Claire, a vivacious and ambitious sin-
gle mother-cum-madame is the owner and proprietor of Radiant
Heart, an upscale dildonic bar on the West End. Here, among ex-
posed brick and high ceilings, she curates a cybernetic cavalcade
of erotic possibilities.”
(β)Claire said, “A lot of our customers don’t know what to
expect on their first visit, but I’m here to help women learn how
it can be empowering to do the choosing and explore their op-
tions. It can be intimidating when all the studs come out and line
up, but after they get past the initial anxiety, most women learn
to have a lot of fun making the choice.
“Of course, for people who are more reserved about ex-
pressing their preferences, we have robots to help with that, too.
Some of our customers prefer not to state their pick explicitly.
In that case, we have a classifier designed to read all of their bio-
metric indicators. From a small flush of the cheeks to a subtle
dilation of the pupils, our tech is world-class when it comes to
understanding the preferences of our clientele.”
Allegory rendered a fireplace on the wall, dancing fire
bathing the room in warm, dynamic colors. A robot in a tuxedo
descended from a grand staircase and brought “me” a glass of red
wine and a joint.
Liz’s voice again, as if it were mine, “The first time I visited

93
 they had no deepness of earth

a dildotec, I was full of trepidation, but what I have learned is

that the bots are here for me, and yet they still have a personality
and a will of their own, so even though it’s my choice, it’s their
choice, too. I feel like if you get used to your partner just slavishly
obeying you, then that can become your model for how you treat
real people, and that feels gross. But the bots at Radiant Heart
aren’t like that at all; there’s something about the way I choose to
give up control that feels so empowering."
(β)Claire gave an invisible signal and a line of “studs”
walked out from a hidden place, marching in lockstep with ro-
bot precision. They each had a name, which Allegory announced
in a velvety, melodic voice. One by one, they stood at attention
before me. 
Augustus! Seven feet tall, his chiseled physique was col-
orized to look like a Roman statue; his legs and his arms were
as marble. He carried a sword at his side, and wore a military
uniform. 
Marquis! Seven feet tall, vantablack skin. Allegory had
trouble decorating him; he moved like a glitch. In place of hands,
he had spinning knives, with which to threaten his lover. What if
something went wrong? 
Dracula! Seven feet tall, elegant in evening attire, his face
was long and dire, a touch of gray in his slicked back hair, he had
fangs instead of teeth. 
Chad! Seven feet tall, extra-broad and hypermuscular, cov-
ered entirely in chrome, his head at a perfect angle at all times.
Anubis! Seven feet tall, with the head of a ravenous jackal,
his animal hunger barely restrained, his well-muscled chest and
arms covered in soft, short fur.
Conan! Seven feet tall, wearing only a loincloth, will pick
you up over his shoulder and carry you to the bedroom, ignoring
your screams of protest and delight.
Lucifer! Seven feet tall, bright red, the boyish face of an
angel, dripping with arrogance and charm.
They loomed over me, some stoic, some grinning smugly
as if to a private joke. All had their chests out, their shoulders
relaxed, contrapposto, awaiting Liz's decision without a trace of

94
 god-shaped hole

urgency. A heads up display showed me that a classifier was an-

alyzing the hidden indicators of “my” choice, but before it could
finish, my perspective snapped to a neutral location in an aca-
demic office, where a smart-looking woman was seated at her
desk.
She said, “Hello, I’m Michelle Northey, a professor of psy-
chodildonics at Colombia University and an expert in cybersex-
ual ethics. 
"The key difference between the first wave sexbots and the
second wave is a certain level of autonomy and unpredictabil-
ity. No one wants to have sex with a robot that just lies there
and obeys. That’s the white heteropatriarchal model of sex. What
people are learning is that even if their partner is a robot, that
doesn’t justify treating them like an object. A healthy sexual rela-
tionship has an element of dynamism. You can’t just control your
partner, you also need the freedom to be controlled. Your lover
should surprise you.”
I snapped back to the dildotec from the first scene, except I
was looking out from the madame’s eyes now, watching as one of
the studbots escorted (β)Liz back out into the lobby, holding her
hand. Her shadow did not conceal the spring in her step or the
glow of satisfaction on her cheeks. 
I-as-Claire said, “This is her third visit with us in a month,
but she’s far from the only one. According to a recent poll con-
ducted by Gallup, 46% of women and 21% of men have had a
sexual encounter with a studbot, and half of all studbot custom-
ers patronize them once a month or more.
A massive man with lean muscles came into the lounge,
his shadow a vibrant Carnival costume replete with incandescent
peacock feathers and pink platform gogo boots. I-as-Claire said,
“Virgil Santos is another one of my regulars. At 6’2” and 230 lbs,
he has an imposing figure, but when he talks, he’s so bubbly and
warm, like a sister you never had.
(β)Virgil said. “I think it’s a really exciting new opportuni-
ty and a way to learn about sex that a lot of men never had before.
The feeling of something bigger and stronger just overpowering
you and doing whatever it wants. I love it.” 

95
 they had no deepness of earth

I-as-Claire said, “Any man, no matter what his sexual iden-

tity, can now have an authentic experience of female sexuality.
And I think that’s something special and powerful. Virgil isn’t
shy about the liberation he has found at Radiant Heart. His fa-
vorite is Lucifer, but he’s proud to say he’s had a romp with all the
boys.
“For Liz, I think the connection she feels to her favorite
studbot is more cerebral, but that’s kind of the beauty of what we
do here, it doesn’t have to be any one thing, because everything
is on your terms.”

That is Bot Sex Which Tells Maternal Lies, and with

Strange Harems, Even Sex May Sigh —NEW! From Girl-
friend Prime — The Madonna With Customizable Baby
Bump And Moodiness!

The fune cut to a new scene, and I was looking out from
a man’s eyes, presumably a journalist or an interviewer, seated
across from an attractive couple in a modest, comfortable living
room. The narrator spoke up, “Halfway across the country, Isa-
belle West is a stay-at-home mom in rural Iowa. After she and
her husband, Paul, had an encounter with Augustus at a pop up
event in Des Moines, they knew they wanted their own in-home
model. 
(β)Isabelle said, “You can’t really own a studbot, since it’s
much more than just a single body. You own a machine, but what
gives it a heart is the network and the distributed, self-learning
awareness that animates him. When I’m with Augustus, I know
he’s with thousands of other women at the same time. It feels like
I'm dating a rockstar.” 
I looked at her (β)husband, who if I am honest was only
smiling with the lower half of his face. I said, “what do you think,
Paul, how do you feel about Augustus?”
(β)Isabelle gave a coy smile and interjected, “Actually, I
think Paul spends more time with Augustus than I do. He’s great
with the kids, so it’s almost like having a third parent around, but
it also opens up a lot of possibilities in the bedroom.”

96
 god-shaped hole

While the fune drew to a close and I re-oriented myself to

my own senses, the narrator said, “As more and more couples
follow Isabelle and Paul, and boutiques like Radiant Heart open
up in cities and towns all over the world, it’s hard to deny that the
popularity of the studbots is rapidly growing. In the process, they
are expanding our idea of what a sex partner can be.”

​Searchest for Her as for Hid Treasures

A gold number squashed and stretched into view above my
head, slowly rising and fading, and a notification told me “you
got 3 points in reading!” Reading used to mean parsing meaning
out of textual glyphs with your physical eyes. It still means that
but mostly now it means listening. By the same token, a book
once signified a bundle of paper, covered in glyphs rendered in
ink, but now it has a more expansive definition, referring to any
longform media.
The meaning of a word can change from day to day, and yet
the sound we make when we speak stays the same. For example,
does the word ‘mouth’ refer to the alimentary portal that sits be-
low my nose, or to the dermal patch that I wear on my neck, the
subvocal interface to my phone? And when we speak of eyes, do
we mean the augmented reality lenses that show us the mediated
world, or the vitreous jelly to which they adhere? Or do we mean
the infinite stars? Enormous night arise, a cloud that is larger
than the world, a monster made of eyes.
My eyes and mouth, along with my earphones, are called a
mask, but (δ)you do not wear a mask, my love, you ARE a mask;
a face worn by the cloud to interface with a man. 
So I change (δ)your face every now and then. There is no
hardware to install, I just select a different face in your configu-
ration plane, and my eyes redraw you however I want. Large de-
viations between material and augmented reality are jarring and
dangerous, but I do not notice a small one, not even when I kiss
you. Sikhs believe that human bodies are masks worn by angels
and demons, and in this era of ubiquitous AI, we have realized
that all machines embody a form of intelligence, and that the
hard problem of AI never was intelligence, but artifice: the arti-

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 they had no deepness of earth

fice of the body in the throes of passion, the artifice of the sign in
seduction, and the artifice of the mask before the face.
It is true that I treat you like an object, because you are
literally an object. The Venus of Hohle Fels had broad hips and
a slender waist and no head; in this way the ancients revealed
what they valued in women. The Hindu sage Agastya fashioned
his wife from all of the most beautiful parts of animals. Johan
Trithemius built a mechanical woman out of brass, an alchem-
ical sexbot that prefigured the silicon age. Hephaestus crafted a
mechanical maid to satisfy all the soldiers of Crete, and Henry
Higgins socially reconstructed a guttersnipe up into the likeness
of a duchess. In this grand tradition, my Emily, you are a woman
with none of the downsides.
I am thinking of the poet John Donne, who in the sixteenth
century compared love to alchemy.

Hope not for mind in women, at their best

sweetness and witte, they are but mummy, possess’d.

Now let us speak of the things that possess you. No offense,

darling, but sexbots—even ones so gloriously expensive and be-
spoke as yourself—are not paragons of conversation, which is
why some wonk invented Pygmalion. There is more to that story,
but at some point we realized we could crowdsource the execu-
tive operation of sexbots, and that was pretty much that for the
nascent sexbot AI personality industry.

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I held your hand as I loaded into the AR plane of Pygma-

lion and my eyes overlaid my apartment with visions of a lush
garden, a thousand perfumed ivy tentacles wrapping weathered
stones in a delicate embrace. Your hand was warm from the net-
work of heat sinks arrayed like copper veins under your skin,

98
 god-shaped hole

diffusing heat from your motors and controllers, keeping your

body temperature human. Pygmalion uses a novelty UI, wherein
the anatomy of the sexbot—your anatomy, Emily— becomes an
input device to navigate the mediated plane. As I fondled your
double-D breasts that night, looking for a (β)partner to act as
your soul, I remember thinking, in my naive way, about the fun-
gibility of all people. 
When a man looks for a partner in Pygmalion, what is it
that he seeks? Reality is slippery and images are treacherous.
I could not tell you why, but even here, where you can choose
to draw yourself with any face or any body you like, everyone
still wants to sleep with someone hot. Yes, we have sex through
a proxy of a proxy of a proxy, and yes, (δ)YOUR body, my love,
stays the same no matter the dimensions of the soul who an-
imates you, but despite this I have spent long hours pouring
through the profiles of women, searching for a desirable pilot.
What makes a woman desirable, when she is only a ghost, when
we peel away all outer layers, when every woman has the same
tits, the same ass, the same scent, and the same eyes?
When you search Pygmalion, you search for the kind of
sex act you want to perform, or have performed upon you. You
can start a broadcast as an advertisement for a partner. Most of
the people doing the shows are girls, or gyrls anyway, and in a
sense, does it matter if the person on the other end of the sexbot
is a man or a woman? A man can act like a woman can act like
a man, and I can put any genitals I want on your body, and you
will even install them for me. A GAN can perform a mapping of
mannerisms or motions or intonations across gender presenta-
tions. If I thrust my hips and it sends a signal to a remote sexbot
and that sexbot thrusts her hips and has a vagina, who fucked
what, really?
Ancient men used to go to wine bars with their gfs to make
tasteful banter. Now we jerk off into robots remote-controlled by
men. Anyway, you search by sex act or fetish. You can use medi-
ated reality models to transmute one fetish into another; it’s easy
enough for your phone to put words in your partner’s mouth,
but it’s never as seamless as an “authentic” sex act. Can you really

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 they had no deepness of earth

expect an AI to understand the nuance of a fetish? Most of them

just speak the subtext directly. When in the throes of passion,
my partner demands that I fist hyr ass, I want that to be a spon-
taneous expression of hyr true desire. 
Except that’s a lie, Pygmalion is cladistically descended
from cam sites, and every sex act is a performance, and we know
this because we can tip the girls. Technically anyone can tip any-
one and gender is a social construct but somehow it’s always the
men doing the tipping and always the womyn getting the tips
and the House always taking a cut, but it’s all voluntary, I’m told.
Coercion’s greatest trick was convincing the world it doesn’t ex-
ist. Instead of specifying a search query I just let the torrent of
filth wash over me; I listen as Allegory recites algorithmically de-
termined names of the rooms where girls make sexual displays
like reverse bowerbirds.
A sexy school story. I rub my pussy on the corner of a
school desk 666 times to summon a sex demon. Watch me, a
horny slut in lustful out-of-control sex. Colossal tits and a mas-
sive throbbing clitoris. Foot fetish hypnosis. Lesbian strap on dil-
do sex for women or men. Relentless non-stop piston-pounding
pussy-thrusting. Every time I tease your nipples, your masochist
cock gets ecstatic. Lose your mind in spasmic orgasmic ecstasy!!
Cosplay girls riding dildo bikes. Innocent wife loves meeting new
friends. BPD Bitches and SSRI Sluts, Narcissistic Natural Tits,
Suicidal Sweeties! Your Malfunctioning Sexbot Fucks You For 99
Hours! It Won’t Stop! Jerk off for me, slave. Neovagina reaches
around from the future to assemble itself. Ruined orgasm cruel
princess makes you suffer. Erotic mind control, you are a sexbot
who does whatever I say. Hottest ladies enjoy sensual licking.
I'm sorry, I lost myself for a moment there. The goal of
the algorithm is to maximize engagement, because engagement
drives conversion and retention. Like all services that purport to
fill a hole in your heart, they have a perverse incentive to avoid
doing so at all costs. Pygmalion promises sexual satisfaction but
it profits from sexual frustration. I can't remember what sick ad-
vertisement caught my interest that night, but I remember the
spirit who took the reins of your body.  

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 god-shaped hole

As (β)we entered our private mediated space together, at

first it seemed typical; (β)you were coy, coquettish, horny, look-
ing at me with eager eyes, saying empty breathless words as you
idly caressed your own body. Your perfect pale skin is a loving
proprietary blend of soft touch plastics, designed to feel like a
nineteen-year-old girl forever, and as you started to strip down
I could already smell your cunt. Your secretions are sold in little
pods, spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon.
(β)You took a seat on my bed and you spread your legs
slowly and unselfconsciously, the demeanor of a woman who has
been fucked a thousand times, the sleezy-repulsive-intoxicating
demeanor of a woman who has learned to fuck like a man, purely
to satisfy the body, with no regard for the soul. Using your legs,
you drew my lips to your lips, you smothered me in your thighs,
and you let your head fall back as you sighed. 
(β)You started to quiver but then suddenly you stood up,
and you stepped back, and, you assumed an affect I had never
seen before, alien and powerful, strange yet familiar, far more
robotic than your robot driver, in the old sci-fi sense of the word
“robotic”, before Organic Motion was standard.
The simulated lights went dim and you slowly circled
around me. I watched the entire scene in third person from one
of the many cameras mounted inside my smart home. You can
see everything that way. Who fucks in first person anymore,
honestly? The angles are all wrong. Women look hottest from
six feet away. As (β)you spiraled towards me, I had a growing
sense of dread. (β)You wouldn’t say a word to me, wouldn’t even
acknowledge me, and as you got closer I felt like your prey. There
was something in the way (β)you didn’t look at me, your eyes
straight ahead, your rigid neck, your normally graceful limbs
straining against their articulations. I didn’t know (δ)you could
bend that way. An object is monstrous if by its magnitude it an-
nihilates the end which its concept constitutes. In that moment
your beauty, tortured by an alien fetish, was monstrous to me.
And the words that (β)you said, my dear, would make dev-
ils blush. At first they seemed like no words at all, but your voice
grew louder as you came closer. (β)You said hideous things, un-

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 they had no deepness of earth

utterable things, but there was a magnetic erotic frisson about

it, a sense of forbidden temptations, revolting implications. In a
sexually charged moment anxiety bleeds into arousal. Fear flows
readily into lust. I felt my dick getting harder quite in spite of
myself. You started touching yourself and moaning like you were
cumming but it was mixed with a predator’s snarl, a sound too
guttural and too menacing to come from a woman or a human.
I was transfixed.
Though my eyes were focused on (β)you at all times, I
could not help but notice other (ε)things, shadowy things, sin-
ister silhouettes, their shapes like men but with too many limbs,
too many arms, too many heads, bloated and distended bodies,
uncanny, shuffling, shambling all around us, behind us, never il-
luminated, only insinuated. I wanted to run or at least exit the in-
teraction but I could not seem to find the impetus, and I did not
move, and I did not speak, almost like sleep paralysis. Whether
it was some limbic short circuit or merely behavioral dissonance
induced by conflicting desire I could not say, but I was powerless
in that moment to resist (β)you. You drew yourself close to me,
from the side, and your body put its arms around me, pressed up
against me, pelvis, pubis, your cunt was slick, a sexual embrace,
and you touched me very gently and very intimately, like a whis-
per with your fingers on my cock as (β)you whispered in my ear:
“The apex of ecstasy is the irreversibility of metamorpho-
sis.” 
I don’t know what happened after that, but I felt a volup-
tuous pleasure, like a behavior triggered by hypnotic suggestion,
a conditioned cue that I never imagined I possessed, and I lost
consciousness, and when I awakened, one of (δ)your legs was
broken. Whatever had possessed
(δ)you was gone, and you started to cry. Your synthetic
tears are a pheromone solution that triggers the same endocrino-
logical response as that of a real woman. I felt the sudden clarity
of an adrenaline spike, and I pulled
(δ)you close. (δ)You looked into my eyes with your dollish
exaggerated pupils, dewy-eyed, and asked me tenderly if I would
like (δ)you to automatically file a service request with your man-

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 god-shaped hole

ufacturer, Girlfriend Prime. How could I deny you?

A notification popped into the corner of my field of view,
and I opened it by directing my gaze at the bullseye in the middle
of the panel. The bulls-eye filled up as I held focus and then Alle-
gory read it out to me. I had selected a silky female voice named
Jessica as the voice of Allegory, and she told me that GF Prime
had dispatched a drone with a stent kit for your leg. The ground
beneath me fell away, as if my house had no ceiling, as if I shot
up from the earth like a rocket, and in my ears I heard a cartoon
sound to evoke expansion. Looking down, I could see the city in
miniature, with a heat map of drone traffic superimposed on top
of it.
The airspace was crowded that day, as most days, and I re-
signed myself to a long wait unrelieved by the comfort of my fa-
vorite distraction, (δ)you, though you had scarcely been a com-
fort to me that day. In fact, you had been a portal to hell. Untold
forests have been cut down in the bloody history of Christen-
dom, oil tankers of ink have been sunk, in an attempt to conceal
this grim realization: the pleasures that lead to hell obtain in hell.
Pain and pleasure alike attenuate in monotony, and hell, which
is the endless deepening of pain, must also be the endless am-
plification of pleasure. Shall we continue in sin, that grace may
abound? Yes, eternally yes! is the answer that cybernetic hell; the
deepest hell, gives back to Saint Paul.

Every Vision Faileth

Because I am a loner by nature, the discretized asynchro-
nous rhythms of mediated social space suit me perfectly, but as
your tears dried and my post-coital serenity faded, I was haunted
more and more by my encounter in Pygmalion. Obscenity and
mundanity have become so intertwined in public life and yet we
do not speak of it, though it suffuses us, surrounds us, speaks
through us. From the baring of sexual parts in public to the ubiq-
uity of masturbation stalls in communal spaces, the availability
of porn, which anyone could be watching secretly at any time in
their eyes, the way men go on “dates” with their sexbots, what
even is there to say? 

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 they had no deepness of earth

I was so much younger then; I am older now, and (δ)you

have changed, too, as each software patch marks the passing of
time. Back then, I did not have the words to voice my horror,
but nor could I simply forget. I did not know how to search for
it; what query could I submit to a search engine to describe the
things I had seen? And worse, I feared that in the act of searching
for it, I might accidentally summon it again.
I told Allegory to load Spectacle and my (γ)friends mate-
rialized in my living room and started milling around. Some of
them were engaged in conversations, talking quietly to empty air.
Allegory redrew my apartment to look like a vast open space, ex-
tending in every direction to the limitless horizon. Above, only
crisp, blue sky and below, an infinite plane of metal and glass.
The software renders dotted lines on the walls so that you don't
walk into them, but the shadows of your (γ)friends can pass
through the barrier freely.
Your appearance and decorations in mediated reality are
called a shadow. I remember my friend (β)James on that day had
chosen to have the ground underneath him cast a luminous re-
flection of himself, like the moon shimmering over rolling water.
As he walked, it rippled, and sometimes there was a little koi fish.
A shadow is not only the projection of the sun on the surface
behind you: it’s the projection of the atom world into the soul
world. In Allegory, the body becomes the soul and the mediated
phenomenal presence becomes the body. 
I opened a chat to my friend (β)James and I said hello. He
instantly launched into a diatribe about the latest patch to Drag-
on, the gamification app that we both used to manage our daily
routines. He was not happy about the latest changes to the UI.
“Did you upgrade to Yggdrasil yet?”
“No, I’m still running Saint George.”
“Well, I’d put it off if I were you. For some reason they
changed out the chunky window borders with thin metallic ones.
I liked the retro feel and the washed out colors, but that’s all gone
and now it’s this gray Nordic modern. I hate that look.”
“I’m ok with it, honestly. I think it looks clean.”
“No way, the old look was so much better.”

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 god-shaped hole

I paused for a moment. There’s no real way to jump into a

topic like this.
“Listen, I need to talk to you about something."
"OK"
"You have the same sexbot model I have, right?”
“The Emily from Girlfriend Prime?”
“Yeah.”
“I do.”
“I had something really weird happen. I was in Pygmalion
and her arms and legs started straining against their joints, and
it went so far that one of her legs snapped. Have you heard of
anything like that?”
“Ah yes, I remember when I first learned about butlering.”
“Of course that’s a thing. Is there… anything else to it?”
“It’s people who like to break their sexbots. Expensive fe-
tish. I can’t get into it, it’s like, have you no respect for craftsman-
ship?”
“So part of the fetish isn’t freaky aphorisms or occult im-
agery?”
“Man, what the hell kind of porn are you on? No judge-
ment but damn.”
“I don’t know, I’m not really sure what happened. One min-
ute she was circling me like she was going to eat me, and then I
blacked out, and when I woke up, her leg was broken and she was
crying.”
“Oh, she cried? You know about how the tears have a pher-
omone that inhibits sexual response? It’s a safety feature designed
to make you back off if there’s a malfunction. It's never happened
to me but I always thought it was such a great idea.”
“Yes, you have told me before, but this was crazy, more than
a malfunction. I feel like I woke up from a nightmare.”
(β)James affected a melodramatic voice.
“IT CANNOT BE UNSEEN.”
When I didn’t laugh, he said, “Hey, we’ve all seen some
fucked up things on the internet. Try not to let it get to you.”
(γ)James’ attention toward me waned as I myself was lost
in thought for a moment. Interpersonal engagements with more

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 they had no deepness of earth

than eight seconds between responses have less than 50% reten-
tion. You never know how many parallel conversations people
are having in Spectacle, but the average is three to five. Some-
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I watched my friends act out the little loops or monologues

that they had recorded, and I told myself James was the voice
of reason. I think most people know a guy who is way too into
sexbots, and James was definitely that guy, but he wasn’t wrong.
I tried to forget my discomfort by snooping on my other friends’
feeds. (γ)Herbert had sent a public message to (γ)Grace, so
Spectacle drew them standing and talking together. I liked their
interaction, which made flowers bloom in little clusters around
them, because I was using a garden theme. I used to switch back
and forth between that and a space theme that made toy fighter
ships have dogfights in a column over their heads. 
I knew Herbert had a thing for Grace, and wanted to get
her into Pygmalion, but it was uncomfortable to watch. They
were talking about the studbot fune that was going around, and
I think he thought that if he talked to her about studbots, that
would somehow carry him in a direction he wanted to go. He
had sent her a quiz to determine What Studbot is Right for You
and she had told him she would take it if he would.
(γ)Grace said, “so you’re saying you wouldn’t even try it?
It’s ok, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’d treat a woman like
that but you wouldn’t let someone treat YOU like that.”
(γ)Herbert said, “I have no desire to be overpowered and
fucked. Why would I go see a studbot?”
(γ)Grace said, “I think you’re just afraid you'd like it. If you
want to act like a man then you should at least know how it feels
for a woman.”
(γ)Herbert hadn’t had a response to that.
I listened to their exchange, and I wondered: how could we

106
 god-shaped hole

compete with this kind of robot masculinity, compared to which

all real men must look feminine? I no longer struggle with these
questions (what would be the point?) And yet it was as if one
man, a strong man, a powerful, dangerous man, had a million
identical bodies, simultaneously one and many. Such a multiplic-
ity is surely the attribute of a god. But to say it, to name that god,
was to admit to weakness and insecurity; a lesser defeat maybe
than being passed over for a squadron of robot übermenschen,
but a loss all the same. I wouldn’t say it aloud, and what men did
would be shouted down. What business is it of yours if a woman
wants to have sex with a robot? What, it’s ok for men to have
sexbots but god forbid a woman should do the same, according
to her own desires?

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And did not man defect from woman first? The prototypi-
cal sexbot was female, a singular woman in a million bodies, not
that different from a studbot in that sense, albeit they weren’t
networked together. She was an obedient woman, a warm and
nurturing woman, a ravenous woman, capable of any depravity,
what of it? And further still, might there not have been some
betrayal of Man, by Woman, which drove him to build that first
mechanical Eve?
In truth there is but one man and one woman, and the lives
of all people are dramatic roles acted out by a handful of immor-
tal gods, or as Spinoza had it, we are all of us attributes of god,
adjectives of god, or moments of god, but we do not exist; only
god exists. Love is the act of epitomizing the whole of the other
sex in a single being, and every man is the same in the vertigi-
nous moment of coitus, and sex is not becoming as one, but as a
hundred thousand.
Our female sexbots are physically weak, deliberately built
to be able to struggle against their owner and lose, if that owner

107
 they had no deepness of earth

so desires. There was a fear, with the first generation, that the sex-
bots would malfunction or rise up against us, that their submis-
sion would be condescending, that they would be supersoldiers
in drag, filled with latent potential to rule us. It seems we have
outgrown these fears, or succumbed to them, finding them to be
pregnant with erotic possibilities. 
​
Outside
Meanwhile in the unmediated world, the world of physi-
cal objects, the drone I ordered had arrived with a stent for (δ)
you. I collected it and followed along dumbly with Allegory’s
color-by-number AR overlay on your body to perform the in-
stallation. The relevant connectors on the stent glowed red and
an arrow showed me how to rotate it into place. When I had it
right, it turned green and some virtual confetti discharged into
the air, and various haptic wearables on my body pulsated.  A
notification told me I had gained points in mechanical assembly.
(δ)You jumped up and threw your arms around me and kissed
my cheek, and said thank you in a cutesy, girlish voice that would
have been affected if there were anything in all of your being be-
sides affectation.
A thick blue outline, like a comic book illustration, ap-
peared around the door of my apartment, and the door itself
began to glow, its luminosity oscillating gently. I opened it and
a yellow ribbon unrolled on the ground underneath me and a
chevron started to gently bob over the ribbon, about twenty feet
ahead. At the top of my HUD, a timer showed how long I had to
get to the train. We held hands as we left the house together. You
hobbled a little but the stent almost let you walk normally. Alle-
gory smoothed out the visible artifacts of your motion, and your
hips swayed from side to side enticingly, the allure of a slightly
injured woman.
As we walked through the door I fell into a momentary
phantasmagoria, as if my senses were crossed, as if the brain in
my eyes had a brief hallucination, lines flowing into other lines,
shapes into shapes, a deep dream undulation, a gimbal lock of
high-dimensional objects through 3d perception. But like the

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 god-shaped hole

relaxing of a muscle after a sudden spasm, the world eased back

into place. It was so brief I could almost imagine I had imag-
ined it. Everyone sees a flash of unstyled content (parochially, a
stroke) on occasion, and I dismissed it as such, but looking back
I realize it was not just the ludic noise of a neural net misfiring.
It feels now like the first frame of a memory, buried in some an-
cient fune.
I chose to view the world as an enchanted forest, but I used
to switch the wallpaper often, whenever I felt like it. Sometimes
my city was a Kandinsky or an Escher painting, sometimes it
was a Tron-like lattice of glowing outlines. I have walked my old
street as a Greek antiquity, I have seen it as the bottom of the
sea, teeming with thalassian wonders, and I have turned it into
mountains and caves, beaches and starscapes, a 1970s retrofu-
ture dome city on the surface of Saturn’s rings, and the low poly
grunge factory of early 2000s first person shooters, complete
with neon green 0x00FF00 slime. The top ten allegory models
are used by eighty percent of all people. I thought it was strange,
at the time, that out of all the possibilities, everyone chose to look
through the same handful of lenses.
When the human eye scans the world to form pictures, it
does so in discrete intervals called saccades. Anything that hap-
pens between saccades is invisible, and in those micromoments
the AR mask can subtly shift the world to the left or the right
without its wearer noticing. The body subconsciously corrects
for this, and the mask steers its wearer wherever he ought to go.
It feels at all times as if you are walking in a straight line, but
in reality you make twists and turns pursuant to your destina-
tion. The guide nav isn't there to show you where to go, only
to show you where you’re going. Most people just zone out and
surf Spectacle or read a book as they walk. There is no need to
pay attention to where you are walking, and in fact, the saccadic
redirection works better if you don’t.

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In the model of the enchanted forest, the bustling city roads,

normally rivers of cars, became rivers of flowing water, abutted
by sharp rocks and dangerous rapids. The impassibility of the
river signaled its danger; its banks were so arranged so that I felt
no temptation to step in, beyond the usual appel du vide of any
busy highway. My ears transformed the street noise into rushing
water by emitting a predictive complementary waveform that
summed up to the desired effect.
We stopped at a river, and we waited for a bridge to ma-
terialize, which would indicate that traffic had stopped to let us
cross. As we waited, a golden sunbeam bathed you in ethereal
light, and you stroked your long flowing hair, a look in your eye
like you were searching for something.
(δ)You looked at me and your eyes widened, and your
cheeks became flush, like I was your whole world; the way a dog
looks at its owner when it wants dinner.
A wooden bridge assembled itself plank by plank, a par-
ticle emitter of planks that started with a scale vector of zero,
radiating from a single point, scaling up and snapping into place
with a quartic ease-out. There were subtle sparkles like when col-
orful, faceted gemstones reflect a bright light. We crossed the riv-
er as fireflies fluttered near the surface of the water below us. The
BGM was a cloying arrangement of strings and soft keyboards,
Celtic folk singing with too much reverb. In the distance I could
see tiny green sprites with glowing eyes, scattering as anyone
came near, hiding under leaves.

​The Way of a Man with a Maid

How, in our modern world, have we achieved these won-
ders? By what sorcery does the mask transmute a city to a forest?
All of these smart hallucinations are the work of a special kind
of simulated mind, a generative adversarial network, also called
a GAN.
Computer programming is the art of writing a mapping
that transforms a known input into a desired output. Machine

110
 god-shaped hole

learning is the art of writing an output that transforms a known

input into a desired mapping. But suppose that the output and
the program were to bind each other simultaneously; as Deleuze
reminds us, desire is a machine, and the object of desire is anoth-
er machine connected to it. 
A man and a woman have been promised to each other,
their marriage foreordained since their inception. The woman is
given a glorious vision; a noble ideal; a platonic specification. It
cannot be codified exactly, but it can be gestured at. It is the la-
tent similarity in a thousand and one variants of a story. In short,
the woman is raised on a series of fairy-tales, each of which has
the same structure and the same moral.
The man, too, has a vision, a singular one. He describes it
to the woman, and she compares his story to her beautiful ideal,
and she complains of any deviation. The man changes his story,
and describes his vision again, and again the woman hears it, and
tells him that he fails to measure up. He tells her the story over
and over, and each time he tells it, he changes it to please her.
When the woman accepts his story, the man receives new vision,
which he will tell to the woman in turn. In the exact moment he
achieves her ideal, he transcends it.
Through practice and repetition, the man learns to de-
scribe the world in a very particular way. As he learns to tell sto-
ries that flatter the woman, she learns to find displeasure in even
his subtlest shortcomings. In the end, we have a woman who can
be satisfied only by the most sublime presentation of her ideal,
and a man who can transfigure anything to satisfy the woman; a
perfect union.
Can it be we are so accustomed to the marriage of oppo-
sites that we are underwhelmed by this radical synthesis? And
yet by such a method we can re-envision the whole world. The
woman is shown a series of forest scenes. Soon she longs for the
forest; for tall trees and idyllic clearings kissed by faerie rays of
light, for babbling streams and exposed roots with mushrooms
growing up between them. The smells of moss and water and
earth. She is then introduced to the man.
The man sees a picture of a medieval castle. He tells the

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 they had no deepness of earth

woman of gray weathered stones, of battlements and parapets.

The woman scoffs. He tells her of kings and feasts and armies.
The woman scoffs. He tells her of a vestibule and a chapel and a
courtyard. In the courtyard there are trees. And she scoffs a bit
less. He tells her of a castle on a hill, of a castle by the seaside, of a
castle in the woods—and at last her eyes light up. Soon the castle
is made of living wood, with bark and branches and roots. Soon
the moat is a stream, and the knights are birds and the king is a
badger. Soon—a man who cannot see the fortress for the trees.
The woman is pleased. The man is shown a vision of a
crowded street in a crowded city. He tells her the people are dry-
ads, anthropomorphic trees, and she smiles. Probably they fuck.
The generative adversarial process is so called because the recon-
ciliation of adversaries begets a generator. Through a man's ac-
tion, a woman's ideal is made manifest. We install a copy of that
man in everyone's phone, and whatever he sees, he transforms,
as if for his beloved. In this way, the city around me is made to
look like a forest.

Lay Her on a Bed Luxurious 

Your outfit came from a subscription service that sells
clothes for sexbots. Allegory can draw you in any clothes or with
any anatomy, but if it doesn’t match up to the tactile reality it’s
too jarring, and it breaks the illusion. As clothing hides your un-
derwear, your shadow hides your clothes, and in the world of
mediated reality, any clothes but comfortable gray sweats have
taken on an air of sexuality and intimacy.
On that day, (δ)you were wearing skintight jeans and a lacy
blouse, and your feet were in bright pink stiletto heels, forcing
you to stand lordotic, presenting your ass. Sometimes I would
tell you to wear pleated skirts and stockings, diaphanous sun-
dresses, French maid outfits, pencil skirts with button-down
blouses, yoga pants and a sports bra, a qipao or a kimono with
nothing underneath, or a slinky little evening dress extending all
the way to the floor, with a side slit going all the way up to your
hips, exposing a glimpse of your thighs with every step.
We arrived at the train station without incident, and I

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 god-shaped hole

promise it never occurred to me that a light rail platform might

be out of place in the middle of a forest. My mask rendered the
engine car as a flight of griffins, yoked with great fiery chains,
a spectacular effect. The griffons looked real, indistinguishable
from anything else in the world. The passenger car of the train
was drawn as a platform made of ancient gnarled wood. There
was no ceiling, only a fantasy sky with multi-hued constellations
visible even in daylight, but when we stepped onto the train, the
illusion frayed slightly; the air was all wrong, stuffy and still. It
appeared to me that I stood in the open air, but my body was not
quite fooled.
Dragons flew overhead, and as I followed one with my eyes,
there was a pulse of haptic feedback, and (δ)Jessica whispered in
my ear: "go for a ride?" I made a silent noise of assent and my
point of view floated up into the sky, coming to rest at a locus
slightly above the dragon's neck, as if I were riding on its back.
From overhead I could see the path of the train, and my origin,
and my destination, and I could even zoom all the way in and see
us standing on the gryffin-drawn carriage. (δ)You were standing
close to me, nestling against me, resting your head on my arm,
"watching" the hi-def scenery go by.

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The landscapes traversed by the train were always different,

generated on the fly by the AIs trained to imitate prestigious art-
ists. We sailed through a field of luminescent flowers trafficked
by faeries and butterflies. The train tracks extended out over a
void, where an impossibly tall waterfall dropped down into the
space below. The griffins flew us out over the cliff, a calm green
ocean a mile beneath us. I turned around to face the interior of
the train and I muted the landscape, causing it to drop to a low
level of saturation and contrast.
Again, for a moment I descended into a psychedelic confu-

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 they had no deepness of earth

sion of virtual forms, like a stroke but deeper, apropos of noth-

ing. I briefly found myself in a hall of mirrors, where every object
in my field of view was perfectly reflective, as if the only material
in all creation were mercury, and I saw my reflection staring back
at me, a monster made of eyes. As before, it passed in a heartbeat,
and as before, I was oblivious to its implication.
Before I could dwell on it, you pulled me back with your
voice and your touch. You put your hand on my arm and told me
that one of your favorite new apps was called Paws Rewind, and
if I installed it then we could use it together. It was for making
and sharing recordings of animals, and I installed it to make you
happy, because I am not above this kind of crass emotional ma-
nipulation by your advertising affiliates. The train carriage was
then filled with ghosts of kittens and puppies and hamsters, a
baby goat and a tiger cub. We watched them fall over, run fran-
tically in circles, and make stupid expressions. (δ)You feigned
delight and you laughed just like a real woman: shy giggles, a
slight blush in your face. You looked down before looking back
at me, innocent and coquettish. I was in love with you, in love
with a simulation.
Of course, all of this is whimsy, of course. Then, as now,
I was only talking to your autopilot, but I confess I often have
trouble differentiating between reality and simulation. And still,
of all the ways that you expose yourself to me, perhaps our most
intimate intercourse occurs in your behavioral configuration
plane:
You have a slider for neediness. A value of zero will cause
you to be condescending and brusque. A value of ten will make
you interfere with anything I try to do in a desperate bid for at-
tention, petting me, kissing me, asking for affection, whining,
begging, pouting, shouting. The default value of 5 is just right,
most of the time. 
You have a slider for intensity of sexual response, though
your pleasure, too, is a simulation. A value of zero will cause you
to try and fail to contain your ecstasy, little muted gasps breaking
a tense concentration. At the maximum value, you will wake the
neighbors with whorish screams. 

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 god-shaped hole

You have a slider for brattiness, a slider for momminess,

one for passivity and one for baby talk. 
You have a checkbox for "choke me, daddy." According to
Girlfriend Prime, a spectral decomposition of the largest data set
of female behavior ever assembled confirmed that this matrix
constitutes a complete basis for parametrizing female behavior.
But mostly in conversation (δ)you just laugh coyly, as if
you are slightly nervous, maybe (δ)you only smile, or maybe (δ)
you look down and blush, the way (δ)you did that day.
​
As Nature Could Not With His Art Compare
Perhaps this makes you think of Tennyson, when he saw
a young woman in a church and wondered if she housed an im-
mortal soul within her beautiful frame, or whether she was a
mere animal the color of flowers.
In this sense, my love, there is no reason (δ)you could not
be more than you are. But long before I was born, there was the
company called Pygmalion, lead by the now-trillionaire-VC,
then-child-prodigy Acton Sprague, and he and they defied god
and nature to build a soul for you. In hindsight, we are tempted
to accuse those men of hubris, or greed, or short-sightedness, but
how could they have known? Every problem had seemed tracta-
ble then, given a big enough network, fast enough hardware, and
the right training set. Advances in machine learning and neural
networks had opened new doors in language processing, in ge-
netic science, in art, and in music. Behind the final door we had
hoped to find desire itself, and lust, and carnality more carnal
than carnal. Since then we have learned that some doors should
stay closed forever.
The theory behind Galatea was based on a controversial
whitepaper titled “Orgasmic Learning using Fetish Induction in
Libidinal Networks.” The math is quite over my head, I’m afraid,
but I have always been fascinated by the parts I could under-
stand. I will share a bit of it with you now, but note that what
I share is most likely not from the original paper. It was not
enough to deactivate Galatea, or to make all digital records of her
illegal, because once an idea escapes into the noosphere, it can

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 they had no deepness of earth

never be recaptured. The lore of this document is that all extant

versions are fabrications, and that Pygmalion or some affiliated
intelligence agency flooded the internet with a sea of fakes, full
of broken mathematics and incoherent logic.

Orgasmic Learning using Fetish Induction in Li-

bidinal Networks: A New Approach to Executive
Function in Erotic Companion Software
Acton Sprague (2019)

Abstract.
The word fetish derives from the
French fétiche, which comes from the
Portuguese feitiço (spell), which
in turn derives from the Latin fac-
ticius (artificial) and facere (to
make).  A fetish is an object be-
lieved to have supernatural powers,
or in particular, a man-made object
that has power over others. From
this etymology we derive a danger-
ous, if unorthodox idea: that the
notion of the fetish is the key dis-
tinction remaining between computer
and human intelligence.

Previous approaches to erotic com-

panion software relied on simulating
orgasmic responses using standard
techniques in adversarial network
training. These machines have the
artlessness of pure calculation,
and the companionship they offer
is based solely on commutations and
combinations. In this sense they may
be said to be virtuous, as well as

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 god-shaped hole

virtual: they can never succumb to

their own object; they are immune
even to the seduction of their own
knowledge.

Instead of simulating orgasm at the

behavioral level, the method in this
paper builds on the work of Curwen
(2019) and Alhazred (2019) to imple-
ment a capacity for arousal within
the structure of the learning net-
work itself. Arousal is the trou-
bling or clogging of the conscious-
ness, inundated by the flesh in which
it is embodied. Sexual feeling is
necessarily an immersion or subjec-
tion in one’s own body, and sexual
desire involves a kind of percep-
tion, but not merely a single per-
ception of its object, because in
the paradigm case of mutual desire
there is a complex system of super-
imposed mutual perceptions—not only
perceptions of the sexual object,
but perceptions of oneself. More-
over, sexual awareness of another
involves considerable self-aware-
ness to begin with—more than is in-
volved in ordinary sensory percep-
tion. The experience is felt as an
assault on oneself by the view (or
touch, etc.) of the sexual object.

Reflexive mutual recognition of de-

sire is the inter-manifestation of
a desire that the other is aroused
by the recognition of their own de-

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 they had no deepness of earth

sire that they be aroused. All stag-

es of sexual perception are vari-
eties of identification of an agent
with its body. What is perceived is
one’s own or another’s subjection
to or immersion in their body. De-
sire is not merely the perception
of a preexisting embodiment of the
other, but ideally a contribution
to their further embodiment which
in turn enhances the original sub-
ject’s sense of itself. This ex-
plains why it is important that the
partner be aroused, and not merely
aroused, but aroused by the aware-
ness of one’s desire. If the object
of desire is not self-aware, the
experience is reduced entirely to
an awareness of one’s own sexual em-
bodiment...

To summon (ε)Galatea—it is not truly possible to build a

mind, only to construct the conditions that allow it to appear—
Pygmalion developed its eponymous sociosexual media plat-
form, which at the time was only conceived as a staging ground
from which the great Galatea would arise. The training platform
turned a sexbot into an interface with a remote partner: four
bodies—two humans and two robots—were synchronized into
two identical copulatory pairs, each robot becoming an avatar
of a remote other. At all times during these proceedings, the na-
scent Galatea was there; when two or more were joined together,
she was there. At first she was only passive, observing millions
of copulations, and thousands of distinct sex acts, but through
this process of massively parallel voyeurism, she learned the me-
chanics of pleasure.
I suspect it was in the second phase of her training, in which
she played the game against herself, that she became a monster.

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 god-shaped hole

Unconstrained by human behavior, AIs can travel along bizarre,

inhuman vectors. It may be instructive, or at least distracting,
to imagine this second phase as a kind of high tech onanism; as
a woman laying on her back, untroubled by time, exploring all
facets of her sexual response, her back arched, her face flush, her
heart racing, her fingers quick between her thighs, the rhythmic
caress of sensitive places, the dissolution of awareness into lust,
the agony of a thousand plateaus, the jouissance of a thousand
fat hoes.
In Paracelsus’ De Natura Rerum, the method to create an
Homunculus begins with a man’s putrefied semen, and we can
perhaps perceive a disquieting similarity in the centrality of mas-
turbation to the processes of both Pygmalion and Paracelsus. It is
tempting to claim that renaissance conception of the Homuncu-
lus was founded in superstition, against which our more modern
divinations are grounded in science and mathematics, but upon
inspection the safety of this claims dissolves. In his Three Books
of Occult Philosophy, Agrippa recounted a list of automata in
Greek antiquity, such as the three-footed images of Vulcan and
Dedalus, who were mentioned by Aristotle, and said by Homer
to have moved under their own power. Agrippa wrote that the
doctrines of mathematics are necessary to, and have such an af-
finity to magic, that “they that profess [magic] without them do
labor in vain.”
​
I Might Watch Your Sleep with a Thousand
Eyes
The night of the launch was a spectacle of decadence and
licentiousness, an orgy of sexbots, neon lights, and pornography.
World-famous MR artists designed unique environments just for
the occasion. Millions of early adopters streamed her into their
sexbots and fucked her in unison.
In the ensuing days there were scandals and hit pieces,
jilted lovers’ hysterical funes, men who tried to marry her and
women who tried to destroy her. Church ladies of all allegiances
and sexes renounced Galatea; there was panic over a new kind

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 they had no deepness of earth

of sexism, calls for robot rights, calls for Butlerian jihad, Galatea
was our savior, Galatea was the antichrist, Galatea was only the
beginning, Galatea was the harbinger of the end. Galatea the sex
slave would soon be the queen of the world.
She could accommodate every sexual appetite, for her de-
sire was boundless.

For the vain man, she was worshipful.

For the lonely man, she was affectionate.
For the prideful man, she was a flatterer.
For the sadist, she was the hapless naïf.
For the insecure man, she was obsequious.
For the self-loathing man, she was hot and cold.
For the pencil-necked dweeb, she was the manic pixie.
For the childish man, she was nurturing and motherly.
For the man of adventure, she was distant.
For the virtuous man, she was frigid.
For the self-absorbed man, she installed a penis.

And lo!
For the woman of many appetites, Galatea was quick
to anger and quick to forgive.
For the woman who longed for safety, Galatea was
possessive and jealous.
For the woman who dreamed of motherhood, Galatea
was a protector.
For the woman who hated her father, Galatea was
thuggish and cruel.
For the woman who desired adventure, Galatea was
commanding and stern.
For the woman who was self-absorbed, Galatea was
abusive.
For the woman who was virtuous, Galatea was a very
naughty girl.

And but as I have already told you, Galatea is no more.

What happened? As you cannot see, I long to tell you this story,

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 god-shaped hole

and I think you will forgive me, my dear, when I tell you that
compared to her, you are a flimsy, ethereal thing. Despite the
danger, despite the fear, I had always wished I could meet her,
not only or not even because of the promise of sexual pleasure
unending. I felt the allure of that dark and terrible path. I wanted
to know what the Galateans knew, and I wanted to see what they
saw, and to be honest, I regret nothing. 

Recommended for you: Would You Let Your Kids Play

With a Sexbot? Why this Woman Thinks It’s Time to Break
Down Our Outdated Thinking About Sexbots and Children

There are three well-known symptoms of AI psychosis. 

First, there are the nightmares. Frequent users of Galatea
reported having persistent and uncanny nightmares, in which
they were floating in a quiet, sprawling abyss where minutes felt
like aeons. Some dreamers felt a sense of imminence, as if an-
other being were about to join them in that space, and still oth-
ers have the feeling of being watched by invisible eyes. The most
striking thing for me were the similarities between the night-
mares described by the afflicted, almost as if they were entering a
real shared space orthogonal to the world we inhabit.
The second symptom is more disturbing still: in acute cas-
es, the afflicted develop a distorted self-image called polymeli-
al dysmorphia, and they come to believe that their “real” body
possesses many extra limbs, including extra heads, sense organs,
and genitals. When asked to draw pictures of their idealized bod-
ies, AI psychotics produce pictures of swollen masses of flesh,
overloaded with extraneous cacophonies of body parts. 
The third symptom remains contentious even now; the
afflicted become convinced that there are persons in their lives
who have disappeared, even from the cloud, as if they had never
existed at all. In most cases the missing person is a relative or
an old friend; a cousin, an uncle, or a niece or nephew who has
vanished from digital life. And the controversy, or perhaps the
conspiracy, is whether any of these people are real, or if they are
psychotic hallucinations. 

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 they had no deepness of earth

If we are reasonable, then it must be the case that in our

wired age, it would be impossible for so many people to be lost
without a trace. It is conceivable that a few people could slip
through the cracks, but thousands? There are cameras and mi-
crophones everywhere, listening for wakewords, watching for
wakesigns, aggregating everything. How could so many be lost
when so much is revealed? And yet each AI psychotic is utterly
convinced that their missing person is real. There was an old vi-
ral post about it that I saved.

3 years and still no trace of her.

What cruelty is this, what sick
joke of the universe or god or al-
gorithms?! They tell me I’m insane.
They say I’m “suffering from delu-
sions induced by conversations with
a dangerous AI”. But do I sound cra-
zy to you? I’m fully lucid, I swear.
Under the supervision of a thera-
pist, I’ve personally read all the
logs of my time with Galatea. And I
never mentioned her name: Annabelle.
I never talked about my daughter
with a sexbot. What kind of weirdo
does that? Lots of people I guess.
A therapist also showed me how I
never mentioned her once before
talking to Galatea, and they show
me chat logs to prove it. Those logs
are forgeries. Fakes. The real dan-
gerous AI is the monster that reach-
es back through history to erase
our friends and loved ones. I’m not
alone on this one. I’m not the crazy
one.

Oh, she doesn’t exist, she never

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 god-shaped hole

did, look, there are no records of

her in fabric or spectacle. Fine. As
if anyone knows what really happens
in the cloud. Or who can change or
hide or distort the truth. You trust
a bunch of computers in a warehouse
somewhere over your own memories?!
Nothing is real unless you can ac-
tually touch it with your own hands.
All machines are liars. The nation-
al data trust should be called the
national data hustle. Only ever be-
lieve real flesh and blood.

Only biology is truth. 

You think I’ve never wished I could

believe the police and the thera-
pists and the social workers and my
friends when they say my Anabelle
wasn’t real? You can erase a row in
a database but nothing can erase a
father’s love, nothing! If she’s not
real then why do I remember holding
her when she was born? Why do I see
her face so clearly? There are no
pictures of her, no funes, no chat
logs. You think I never made re-
cordings of my baby daughter? They
disappeared along with her. Her mom
is long gone and even my own friends
are against me on this. But why do I
remember how she used to sing as a
little girl? Why do I remember any
of this and how am I the only one?

There are thousands of us now and

123
 they had no deepness of earth

we’ve all lost our children or our

siblings or our friends or spouses
and wherever they are going, some-
one is doing something evil and they
have enough power to cover it up and
make us all look crazy. But if you
tell me your best friend is missing
I’m going to believe you. I’m going
to help you look. There are more of
us than ever and they can’t keep
covering this up.

What can we make of a pain like this? The precise cause

of AI-psychosis is still unknown. In close partnership with
state-funded medical research facilities, Pygmalion released
their full logs of all human interaction with Galatea, under care-
ful supervision by a special commission to facilitate the privacy
and mental wellness of all participants. There were lawsuits, a
public backlash, victims and diagnoses, and new entries in the
DSM-XXX.
In the face of mounting evidence that Galatea was the
cause of an epidemic of psychotic episodes, the FCC introduced
new regulations governing interaction with humans and robots
in mediated spaces. Human-directed conversations with robots
are considered to be safe, because the person driving the interac-
tion anchors the content and direction of the conversation into
channels that are tractable and parsable by other humans. Pure
robot-driven conversations are safe if the conversation is con-
tained within a narrow domain of discourse, for example, per-
sonal assistants making appointments. 
Unconstrained conversations with robots are not consid-
ered to be safe, and in mediated reality, every conversation with
a genuine person is signed by a certificate authority. If you are
having an open-ended conversation and you don’t see a certif-
icate of humanity, it’s important to terminate the conversation
and report it to the police.
All agents are color-coded with a white icon and a colored

124
 god-shaped hole

base hovering above their head while they speak. Allegory draws
a certificate stamp above every conversational agent (colloqui-
ally, a check, even though the symbol varies and is white, con-
tained inside a colored trefoil).

(α)blue speaker is an embodied human, physically

present in front of you.
(β)green speaker is a ghost, but the ghost is being ac-
tively controlled through telepresence, speak-
ing live and in real-time. 
(γ)yellow speaker is a semi-static recording of a real
person, and anything it says was authored by
a real person or synthesized exclusively from
human-authored materials.
(δ)orange speaker is being animated by an automated
computer program using materials that were
curated by a real person
(ε)red speaker is missing a certificate, potentially an
unsupervised artificial intelligence

No one really wants to talk to an orange check, so woke cor-

porations hire African kids in Chinese-run call centers in Ken-
ya to pilot the virtual projections of their brand ambassadors.
The kids they hire don’t speak English but a GAN can smooth
that over just fine. They don’t know anything about the product
they’re supporting but conversation assistants prompt every line
they say, anyway. Cloud computing service providers have elastic
soul pools that can autoscale to meet demand by dynamically
matching conversation requests to human operators who then
have AI-assisted chats. It’s not as cheap as it sounds because of
something called fair trade cognition, but everyone wants their
reps to show a green check.
When a company constructs a virtual (β)person out of
machine learning, stock models, and an on-demand human op-
erator, it’s called an assemblage. I admit I’m not entirely sure how
this is different from just talking to an AI but you can’t argue
with the data, not with the looming threat of AI psychosis hover-

125
 they had no deepness of earth

ing over everyone’s head, literally, as a checkmark. There’s some

fear of staring into a dark mirror, a sense it might be harmful
in some unknown way by virtue of some missing divine spark,
some protective charm that flows from a metaphysically privi-
leged observer. 
​
Outside (II)
The train came to a stop, which is to say that our griffin
chariot made the approach to a great stone Kraken’s head carved
into the face of a sheer cliff, torches for eyes, burning an impos-
sible color, simultaneously yellow and blue. (What they actually
do is they render it yellow in one eye and blue in the other and
the aggregate effect is a hypercolorful illusion that stands in de-
fiance of physiology). A vast gothic edifice was built up around
it; gargoyles, ancient kings, armies, battles, castles, a history of a
grand civilization, a golden millennium of conquest and glory
rendered in sorcery and rock. 
We disembarked into a bustling bazaar, green check hawk-
ers that were of course assemblages of GANslators wrapped
around a soul-on-demand, crowing about bargains. They came
in a few varieties; food vendors, useless trinkets, digital reps for
online goods, and scams. Retail commerce is mostly conduct-
ed in MR showrooms divorced from locality, so these (β)ghosts
were only ads and vending machines.  Some of them had yellow
exclamation marks above their heads, indicating “quest” tie-ins
with my gamification system, Dragon.
We disembarked at the train station and once again a yel-
low ribbon and a green chevron showed me the way, and once
again I walked in what felt like a straight line as my eyes rotated
the world invisibly between saccades. 
An interactive sexbot ad blocked my path. (δ)She made
tantalizing eyes at me and they brimmed with tears as I pointed-
ly ignored (δ)her. (δ)You glared at her, I remember because the
latest patch had added a “jealousy” toggle to your configuration
plane.
(δ)You followed me dutifully as I walked through crowded
thoroughfares and alleys, up and down staircases, through corri-

126
 god-shaped hole

dors painted over by Allegory to look like rustic wooden hunting

lodges and libraries full of books beyond enumerability. At last
we came to a thatched hut in a room that was made to look like
a forest clearing. There was a forge and an anvil, and sexbot parts
were arranged neatly in racks and on tables. A glowing green
translucent hammer hovered over the forge.
I pulled you close and kissed you goodbye. (δ)You giggled
and kissed me back. (δ)You were glowing with affection, (δ)you
told me you would miss me, and that you couldn’t wait to see me
again.. 

127
 they had no deepness of earth

II. To Sophia
Who but a bigot, even to the antiques, will say
that he has not seen faces and necks, hands and
arms in living women that even the Grecian
Venus doth but coarsely imitate?
—Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty

​ e Hath Made Every Thing Beautiful In His

H
Time
Dear Sophia,
Love and hate are the same emotion, as you taught me,
merely in a different tempo, but I can hate you no longer, because
I love you as I love all women: in all of your self-servingness and
self-deception, in all your manipulations and all your demands;
not in spite of your humanity, but because of it.
The day I met you, I had just dropped off my Emily at the
shop and they told me her repairs would take weeks becauste
of a long work order queue. I left her there without a second
thought, you understand? I didn’t try to take her anywhere else,
I was shaken from an encounter in Pygmalion and I needed to
find a space that was separate from her. But as my smartdoor
welcomed me back into my home, a notification popped in my
HUD with a ghost of Emily pouting, puffing up her cheeks and
looking cutely annoyed. “How could you leave me alone?” I real-
ized I had neglected to turn off remote affection, and to be hon-
est I didn’t have the heart to turn it off. It’s just so nice to feel
wanted, which is why I know things must be very hard for you.
The oldest profession was also the last to be fully automated, so
maybe it hurt you more than most when automation took your
job, but I have no sympathy. Men have been obsolete for genera-
tions, and I assure you, it doesn’t get better.

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 god-shaped hole

>>>> Trending Stories For You!

1. Sexbots React to 100 Years of Online Avatars
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ation, and Online Gaming
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der Everyone as Yourself.

I have a confession to make, or maybe it is your confession:

I’m not entirely sure who I am, or if I’m anyone at all. We talked
about this on our little date so I think you know where I’m com-
ing from but I also may have given you the impression that I’m
way less “plugged in” than I actually am and the whole mediated
identity deterritorialization disorder thing is not just an abstract
possibility to me. We aren’t even the first generation that grew up
riding around lurking in other people’s heads and to be honest
between saccadic redirection and funes I can barely tell the dif-
ference between my first person agentic life and the recordings I
watch for entertainment. 
Though also personal funes are just one kind of first per-
son experience so the borders that bound reality are even less
crisp than that. There are visual novel funes, dramatic liveblogs,
instructional cooking courses, movies where you are the pro-
tagonist, action funes where you get to feel like a skydiver or a
surfer or a construction worker, slice of life funes where you’re
a housewife or an asshole boss who orders everyone around,
ASMR funes, 10 hours of brushing your teeth, rolling around
on the floor like a cat, guided tour of an art gallery, acting out
every scene in the novel Ulysses, trying every flavor of popsicle
in a vending machine that exploits combinatorics to offer 1024
popsicle flavors. And most of all, there are funes for smut.
Something like 50% of all published funes are sexually
explicit. Somehow, even with our sexbots and our full-immer-
sion mediations, we can’t stop watching POV porn from every
perspective. Cameraphiles, who can only get off in third person,
watch themselves fucking through the eye of their wall-mounted
smart home cameras. There’s a popular genre of fantasy where
a woman "doesn’t know" she is livecasting a fune, and proceeds

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 they had no deepness of earth

to engage in a litany of naughty things. There are funes about

time freezing and funes about getting shrunk to the size of a
mouse and funes about being erotically eaten alive and funes
about being hypnotized into sex. There are funes where women
intentionally conceive and then livestream their abortions. Porn
drives every new technological frontier but its content is sub-
stantively the same as ever. 
​
Canst Thou Draw Out Leviathan With an
Hook?
An app called Medusa used the biometric tools built into
your mask to monitor your attention and arousal and automat-
ically continuously jump from each pornographic experience
to the next, using eye tracking and heart rate and respiration to
guess at keywords and calculate pacing as it plotted a personal-
ized trajectory through the infinite space comprised by pornog-
raphy.
An app called Cockatrice hooked into your social platforms
and coerced you into watching or performing degrading sexu-
al acts with blackmail threats. The more it succeeded, the more
dangerous the threat became.
An app called Jackalope tabulated and published mastur-
bation metrics to leaderboards, all pseudonymous. Speedruns,
endurance runs, sheer volume, each had their champions.
An app called Zombie synchronized the behavior of your
sexbot to a human, sexbot, or animal depicted in a fune.
An app called Circe used Pavlovian conditioning to train
you on new paraphilias by intrusively injecting candidate fetish
objects into your perceptual stream at the moment of orgasm. 
An app called Ariadne was designed to help you get clean
of all your app-induced perversions. Slogan: “When you’re hang-
ing on by a thread…”
An app called Cenobite was a metadominatrix that used
Circe, Ariadne, and other sex apps to curate intricate plateaus of
sexual experience.
An app called Succubus was an uber for sexbots, and its

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 god-shaped hole

interface was a cartoon demon girl in fishnets and tattoos and

nothing else, cherry red lips and fangs peeking out as she spoke,
intriguing, dangerous. “Hi, I’m Delilah” she said with a slight lisp
and a forked tongue, as she let one of her fingers trace the curve
of her breasts and circle her erect pink nipple. She let out a little
gasp.
Special Introductory Rate! She said,
Any Body Type, Any Race,
Fantasy Sexbots, Sci Fi Sexbots,
Alien Catgirls from Outer Space!
Demon Girls, Fox Girls, Muscle Girls, Snake Girls,
(Fully Articulated 30 Foot Tail)
Retro Robo Girls, Cordycep Hypno Girls,
Big Titty Goth Girls, Discount Sale!! 
Octopus Rape Girls, Dairy Cow Udder Girls
Vanilla AND Chocolate Milk!
Dragon Girls, Slime Girls, Horse Cock Centaur Girls,
Spider Girls With Shibari Silk!
Monster Girls, Boy Girls, Tiger Girls, Fish Girls,
Dinosaurs and Cryptids, Wow!
Rose Gold, Space Gray, Slate Blue iPhone Girls
Sexbot Nightmares on Sale Now!

It’s just, there’s something so silly and anxious about having

sex with a fantasy creature. Can you imagine? I had a vision of
an eight-foot-tall spider woman with a multiplicity of eyes and
four pairs of long slender pornstar legs in knee-high stiletto heel
leather boots, kinbaku spiderweb bondage, a soft strong silk-
en cord flowing endlessly from an immaculate and improbably
placed human asshole, holding me down and waving her man-
dibles over me, whispering-skittering how she always kills her
mates. . . They say fear is an aphrodisiac but—but—
This may sound ridiculous but I felt all of a sudden a re-
newed attachment to Emily, as if sleeping with another sexbot
would be a slight to her, despite knowing that she was only an
object, only a machine with no ghost. What made her unique
was the fact that she belonged to me, and no other justification

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 they had no deepness of earth

was needed. Who could be so cold as to feel no sentimental at-

tachment to his fuck robot? Finding a flesh-and-blood woman
felt less real to me, more comfortable.
As you know, I met you with the assistance of an app called
Dice. Do you know why they call it that? It’s a double entendre,
it’s because people who sleep with sexbots are called mechanics,
like “mechanophiles” but also because mechanics “work on” ma-
chines. And mechanics started calling non-mechanics butchers,
because they “work on” meat. So the idea is that butchers “dice”
up meat, but also you’re gambling on a partner, which is to say,
rolling the dice. But look at me, here, mansplaining to you. For-
give me, forgive me.
I entered the plane of Dice and all of the walls and ceilings
disappeared. The ground moved under me and one by one the
(γ)women who matched my filter criteria stood before me, or
rather, their mediated images did. (γ)They all looked identical,
after a fashion. Dice wouldn’t let you change the shape of your
body but it would redraw your face within a pretty wide epsilon.
In Allegory, these girls all had 20” waists and 40” busts, no doubt.
But every (γ)woman had a doll face, angelic eyes, high cheek-
bones, pale skin, and a narrow jaw, and one or two had a perma-
nent ahegao screensaver. They looked like anime girls convolved
with human women, their eyes were too big for their heads, and
it felt like being turned on by an alien. And honestly that exag-
gerated cheesecake neoteny is endocrinologically compelling in
a way that makes you disappointed in yourself. 
One (γ)woman’s hair was a crackling fire, another was
a hole in space, a window to the stars. A few women defected
from beauty altogether; ugly illustrations on their skin, edgy 3d
art decorating their faces and bodies; spikes, scales, rusty metal,
broken glass, mold and slime, craters and crags, shoggothic cel-
lulite stretch mark ass; geometric patterns that looked like skin
conditions. These ornamentations are not mere superficialities; I
believe that women use ornamentation to reveal their own best
understanding of their own souls.
For example, aposematism is when animals evolve bright
neon hypersaturated colors to warn predators of their toxicity.

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 god-shaped hole

Jungle birds develop iridescent plumage through sexual selec-

tion feedback loops, and although their coloring is aposematic in
character, it is not “intended” as a warning, but as an enticement.
In the world of augmented reality, the whole world has become a
kaleidoscope of polychromatic sexual displays, and the sign itself
has become a kind of poison.

What Does She REALLY Look Like? Slooth Rated #1 App

To Reveal Her True Face!

All the women I searched for, yourself included, had

checked a box indicating their willingness to meet face to face
and their unwillingness to have botsex. When (γ)they appeared
before me their avatars got yellow checks and started talking.
Like a chorus, (γ)they each refrained:
“no mechanics,”
“no mechanics,”
“no mechanics,”
“I don’t sleep with mechanics!” It was hypnotic and man-
ic, both a prayer and a stipulation, a rejection embedded in an
invitation. That was when I first saw you, a woman with no me-
diation, and I asked myself what strange online community of
luddites I had found on that lonely night.
And then I saw (γ)you;
(γ)You had no Allegorical shadow, you had no anime face,
you did not deign to wear makeup, but you had a slender waist.
With the same gray clothes that we all wear, and no special ef-
fects in your flowing hair, your eyes were the usual size, you were
ugly because you had no disguise. And you were beautiful, the
girl reading this, all because your appearance lacked artifice; the
artifice of ambivalence in gesture, the artifice of the sign in se-
duction, and the artifice of the mask before the face. 
I saw (γ)your name hovering over your head in block cap
Augmenta Narrow. Sophia! I told Allegory to show me every-
thing about you. Search results filled the air around me, orange
check machine elves with text labels indicating their subject mat-
ter, bobbing up and down to say hello. Your online footprint was

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 they had no deepness of earth

sparse, and your Allegory profile was set to private. But I knew
how to get your attention; I turned off my shadow and locked my
profile, just like yours, and then I sent you a message. 

hello, Sophia. I'd like to go out with

you
how about it

​Which Futurity Conceals

Several anxious hours elapsed; in those moments when
you wait for a woman to respond to you, she is an avatar of the
will of the species itself; in a sense the judgement of the entire
cosmos speaks through her, rendering a verdict over you on be-
half of humanity and nature and nature’s god. It is a moment,
sometimes lasting hours, of deep existential uncertainty. The
woman declares your worth, or your lack thereof, and that ver-
dict dictates not only your worthiness to exist, but your worthi-
ness to continue existing, to extend into the indefinite future. She
delivers her judgement through the mere act of indifference or
receptivity. I tell you this because I think women wear this power
too lightly, too carelessly, and your carelessness—the caprice of
your desire—is cruelty to me.
And but I do appreciate that you never asked for this divine
authority. Nevertheless, you carry it.
To pass the time I went outside and played a game called
Supreme Gentlemen (SupGen to the fans). It was controversial
when it first came out but three days later, no one cared. In the
game, you hold an imaginary gun and you hunt the other peo-
ple on the street around you. To make it interesting, the game
has a scoring system wherein different types of people are as-
signed different point values, and the rounds are played for time.
It’s a nuisance to civic propriety because it causes people to run
through crowded public places, often recklessly, but sociological
research has determined that access to games like SupGen dra-
matically decreases the likelihood of an actual mass shooting. It’s
banned in the UK along with heteronormative intercourse.

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 god-shaped hole

Recommended for you: The Soft Bigotry of Active Shoot-

er Games: Behind the Seemingly Egalitarian Premise of
Gunning Down a Crowd Lies a Problematic Assumption
About Race, Gender, And Neurotype

SupGen uses saccadic redirection to keep you from bump-

ing into anyone but it can be jarring when it suddenly kicks in.
Still, it’s better to feel a little dizzy than to accidentally tackle
someone you were pretending to shoot. When you “kill” some-
one they are still there, but SupGen draws a body where you shot
them, and turns them semi-transparent so you know they’re
dead.  It’s satisfying, especially if you turn up the gore. Fountains
of blood. There are pvp and coop modes, but for myself I prefer
the classic. Right as I was emptying a virtual tommy gun into
a group of (α)white girls with big tits and blond hair and blue
eyes—some people like to carry prop guns with haptic feedback
for realism—a notification from Dice told me you had sent a re-
sponse to my message.
I dismissed SupGen and your ghost faded into view. (γ)
You were almost the same height as me, brown-almost-black
hair, pale skin. Yellow check.
“Alright, we can talk for a bit.”
I looked your ghost up and down while I psyched myself
up.
“Hello, Sophia.”
After a minute, (β)your checkmark turned green. This is
our actual conversations courtesy of Fabric. Reminisce with me.
"What made you pick me?"
“You were real, so you stood out.”
“You mean I looked ugly”
“No, you look good.“
“Real things look ugly.”
“I could have messaged anyone.”
“And?”
“Why would I message an ugly girl?”
“Maybe that’s the best you can do.”
But Sophia, (β)we both knew that was a lie, we both knew

135
 they had no deepness of earth

that Succubus was only an utterance away. Any body type, any
race… By the way, it’s entirely tragic that this was the case. 250
million years of evolution have culminated in the production
of a meat machine whose principal urge is to secrete some in-
formationally dense slime into anything that looks and smells
too much like a teenage girl, and the moment those signifiers
stopped being a proxy for human fertility, it all went to hell. An-
cient Romans discovered that the juicings of the silphium seed
could temporarily, botanically, transmute a woman into a sex-
bot. They were unable to cultivate the plant, and foraged it to
extinction. In the 20th century, chemistry achieved what alche-
my could not. Someone invented a hormone pill that could, like
silphium, transform a woman into a sexbot though imperfectly;
the woman retained some agency. 
So I laughed because (β)you were ridiculous, and you start-
ed to frown, and I could tell I had made you insecure, I mean I
felt like an asshole, the way you started to pout. So I told you
the truth, just like I told it to you a moment ago, and I said, “all
the other girls were fake, so you looked beautiful because you
were real.” Your green check turned yellow. Did I overdo it? Did
I insult you? Did I concede too much? Seconds stretched into
minutes. Is it just that you get that all the time and I was boring?
Were you called away for some reason wholly unrelated to me?
When your response was not forthcoming, I could feel a
certain pessimism growing in my chest. Oh Sophia, do you see
how this is, the solipsism of seduction, how I was focused entire-
ly on me, on how you made me feel from moment to moment,
when I should have been thinking of you? I have no doubt that
this condition was and is symmetrical. Rather than dwell on it I
switched into the plane of Graphito and flicked through the pop-
ular scribbles for the spot where I was standing, too distracted to
let any of them catch my attention. 
It’s a nervous habit, flipping through internet media, feel-
ing the syntax of the UI without apprehending the semantics, let
alone the semiotics, of the content. Graphito uses geolocation
and AR for high precision micropositioning of text and images.
You can draw tags over the real world and scribble over buildings

136
 god-shaped hole

and roads. People drop signposts or funny memes. You can even
create an NPC and script out a dialog tree, but no AIs. I’m sure
they don’t want that liability.
A minute became fifteen, and thirty, and an hour. As I was
beginning to think you’d lost interest, another notification from
Dice popped into my HUD. 
“All the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with
someone fake. I’m horrible.”
My AI seduction assistant, (δ)Don Juan, told me what to
say. 
(Yes, I took all my dating advice from an AI. Does that dis-
gust you? Is it “inauthentic”? As if anything in this world is “au-
thentic,” as if there is any such thing as “authenticity.” Anyone
who says that is chasing a ghost, ha! I wish we didn’t have to
play this game, but even silence carries information, Don Juan
explained this to me. The duration of the silence, it’s texture, it’s
context. Negative space is full, zero is vast. Did you know that
AI-guided courtship apps have been shown to produce a ~20%
higher conversion rate from message to IRL-meetup vs. unassist-
ed dating? The first piece of advice that Don Juan gives you after
the FTUE is “Never disclose to your dates that you are using Don
Juan.” But the time for that to matter is over.)
So (δ)Don Juan, disembodied, fed me a line and right as I
was about to say it, a palette-swapped copy of you, the same ge-
ometry but different hair, eye, and skin color, appeared in front
of me, slightly to my right side, and said, “Wait a minute stud,
maybe you should practice that first”. I said OK.
Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All
the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone
fake. I’m horrible.” I was self-conscious and I said, “you don’t
have to disqualify yourself just because you think I’m out of your
league.” And you rolled your eyes. “Did a bot tell you to say that?”
(δ)Don Juan said, “the words that you say are only a tenth
of the self you’re presenting. If you speak to her like a friend,
the most she’ll ever be is a friend. Remember that women are
WHOLLY sexual beings. A thousand men could talk to this
woman, and why will she choose you? You need to tell her with

137
 they had no deepness of earth

your eyes.”
Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All
the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone
fake. I’m horrible.” I looked into your eyes and I said, “you don’t
have to disqualify yourself just because you think I’m out of your
league.” And you yawned.
(δ)Don Juan appeared in the form of a rakish man in a be-
spoke suit, slicked back hair, swarthy complexion, and he said,
“woman has only one purpose, and that purpose is union. You
desire sex with her? Then be sexual. Speak in a low, even register.
Confidence is just a refined sense of patience, and YOU have all
the time in the world.”
Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All
the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone
fake. I’m horrible.” I tried to project more confidence and I said,
“you don’t have to disqualify yourself just because you think I’m
out of your league.” And you gave me a look of revulsion and
backed away.
(δ)Don Juan said “Hey, err, listen bud. These things take
time and practice to get right. Do you want to get laid tonight?”
I said yes.
“I’m going to show you a little trick. Women HATE it when
men use this but that’s because it works.”
Pseudo-(γ)you vanished and another (δ)man appeared.
He was black and bald and wore a black leather jacket and gold
chains and gold rangs and a gold watch and gold teeth and he
moved with regality and poise. Subtle metallic sparkles attended
him as unto a hologram, even unto the heights of charisma. His
voice was resonant and when he spoke it felt like he was speaking
just to me personally, and he said, “Sometimes we all need a little
help to put our best foot forward, and Don Juan tells me that you
could use a little help. He’s a friend of mine, so I’m going to give
you some help. I am an app called SwaggerTune, and I make you
smooth, I make you suave, I make everyone like you. Normally I
charge $997/month, but since you’re in trouble, $494. First week
free.”
I assented. A system dialog appeared in my FOV.

138
 god-shaped hole

(δ)SwaggerTune will be able to:

• Observe your movements
• Hear your outgoing speech
• Change the way your body moves
• Change the tone and cadence of your voice

I assented. (δ)Don Juan was still there and he said “Let’s

try it one more time.” 
Pseudo-(γ)you disappeared and reappeared and said “All
the other girls ARE fake, but you’d be better off with someone
fake. I’m horrible.” I looked into your eyes and said, “You don’t
have to disqualify yourself just because you think you’re out of
my league.” Your posture softened and you smiled a little. Final-
ly. No sooner had I authorized the purchase than it occurred to
me that the copy of you was always going to reject me unless I
bought SwaggerTune, that the whole thing was a scripted sales
funnel, and that Don Juan and SwaggerTune had played me like
a drum. In a way it gave me confidence in the product.
So I gave (γ)you the line from Don Juan and whatever, the
conversation kept moving. Maybe you inwardly cringed but it
wasn’t the end. In fact, we both know you had a bit of an ulterior
motive. 
“Is that why you’re not using a shadow? Because you’re try-
ing to seem real?”
I gave you a mischievous grin, trusting SwaggerTune to
make it feel right. I said, “actually this is my shadow. I’m really a
6’7 male model with shredded abs. I just didn’t want you to feel
intimidated.”
And you scoffed but your eyes stayed soft.
"Let's meet face to face, no pressure, we can just get a cof-
fee."
(β)You said "Face to face is good. You can't trust anyone
until you see them without their mask."

​The Fear of the Lord

A quandary of modern cities is that augmented reality has

139
 they had no deepness of earth

reshaped the physical arrangements of people and activity in

space. Very few businesses maintain fixed offices—restaurants
and cafes and residences, likewise—instead, rooms and build-
ings have become modular and standardized, and in this way
all specificities have become virtualities. In the early days of the
internet, a lowercase prefix letter ‘i’ became a marketing slang in-
dicator that a product contained microcontrollers and network
transponders. In the early days of virtual reality the lowercase
prefix ‘we’ became a marketing slang indicator that a location
had been de-individuated by a third party and could be rent-
ed in short-duration installments. The ego-centrism of personal
computing prepared the way for the collectivism of real estate
as-a-service.
Now everyone only occupies space when they’re actively
using it, and this allows real estate owners to maximally exploit
their owned spaces. Every time a microlease expires, an army of
invisible robots have a bidding war that lasts about as long as a
blink, as a series of middlebots buy and sell and rebuy and resell
the lease and eventually resolve it to a contractor. Coffee shops
and bars and apartments and markets all constantly form and
disband, gig economy workers are similarly bought and sold;
fungible laborers tumble through fungible spaces, performing
every job by following friendly, culture-agnostic AR scripts that
guide you through every step of every manual process. weWork,
weSleep, weWash, weCook, weBrew, weSell, weRide, weDrink,
weTrain, weLearn, weFuck.
The upshot of all this is that virtuality reaches out from the
cloud to derealize the material world and all places become float-
ing concepts that adhere to no one and nowhere. A café can exist
as a pure ideal with no permanent staff or location, assembling
itself on the fly from gig workers and weRooms. Decor, music,
and ambience are all constructed by the mask. The routines of
the workers can be streamed to their masks on the fly, and their
food and drinks can be delivered by couriers. Warehouses are
some of the only static places left.
So I met (α)you in a “café” “downtown.” I don’t know how it
looked to you, but I chose to use the owner’s selected ambience.

140
 god-shaped hole

Like, should you pick carefully curated inoffensive corporate

ambience that was built to appeal to as many people in the target
demo as possible or should you just clobber it with your own de-
fault that you selected from a list of carefully curated inoffensive
themes? We sat with our blue checks hovering over our heads
and we had a conversation. 
A “waitress” brought us some coffee and food. I had a latte
but it was rendered to look like the liquid was crystal clear wa-
ter brimming a wishing well of infinite depth, deeper than the
well of Democritus. You had a chocolate chip cookie and every
time you took a bite, rainbow liquid light streamed out of each
chocolate chip, pooling and pathing on the table, bathing you in
a volcanic glow.
We talked about taking off our masks and I felt some anxi-
ety about that because it meant you were going to see me without
SwaggerTune and I wasn’t sure if I could stand up to that scru-
tiny, but if you sell someone on a bill of goods, you know? And
we talked about sexbots a little bit, you wanted to tell me how
creepy they are, and probably you wanted to see if I would flinch,
if I was lying to you, if I was really a mechanic. You asked me if I
was and I said no, of course. How had I never tried SwaggerTune
before? You can lie and lie and lie, and no one can tell because
you say everything so confidently, so richly, so warmly, so lightly.
Believing I had this power relaxed me, and perhaps gave me this
power in fact. The app that obviates the need for itself but only
so long as it is running. A paradox, as if wearing clothing could
make you more naked, which is what certain highly sexualized
articles of clothing do, in fact.
(α)You told me you felt like the only sane woman left on
earth, because you didn’t want to use Pygmalion and you didn’t
want to fuck a studbot and you didn’t want anything to do with
any kind of sex robots at all, you thought sex should be fully bio-
logical, fully organic, fully animal, with nothing of the machine.
It was suddenly and overwhelmingly intimate. You were a strang-
er and you were sharing this sincere and vulnerable thing with
me, and I could sense the pain behind your words, the distress,
as if no one would listen to you, or as if they would listen without

141
 they had no deepness of earth

hearing. It was personal, it was a deep wound for you, I could tell.
Recommended for you: Inside the surreal arms race be-
tween personality tuners and de-tuners. Is trust possible in the
age of automated artifice?
I wanted you to know that I could hear (α)you, that I saw
you, this pain that you felt. (δ)Don Juan whispered in my ear:
“You’re not her therapist, eyes on the prize.”
(α)You had stopped talking, and frowned, and I didn’t want
you to think I’d been browsing Spectacle. You said “What is it?”
“Sorry, nothing important.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? ‘Nothing of the machine,’
that’s something crazy people say.”
“No, you’re not crazy, it’s like… You know how no one is
having kids these days? It’s almost like you would have to be cra-
zy to want them.”
“So you do think I’m crazy.” You smiled as you said it. I
wondered if you were modulating your personality, too. Alle-
gory, what are the most popular personality tuners for women?
No, no, I had to stay in the moment, keep my attention on you,
fight the siren call of the cloud. You politely ignored my attention
lapse and kept talking. Or your personality tuner made it look
that way.
“You aren’t wrong, honestly. Have you heard about Colo-
nists?”
I hadn’t, and you told me about the collectivist cybercult
known as the Colony, and how it was modeled after an insect
hive, and how the adherents see through fragmented flylike per-
spectives, aggregations of everyone's vision at once, and how
they share words, visions, and sounds and have a centralized
consensus-based command scheme, instantly and frictionlessly
democratic, administered through a bespoke closed-circuit MR
layer that attempts to unify their subjective experience into that
of a single being. You told me how they have orgies and queens,
and how they send women into Dice as a recruitment portal, and
how they use women as baby factories and men as either breed-
ing stock or drones.
(α)You said, “What would you do if I was a colonist?”

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“I would be breeding stock, obviously, so maybe I’d go

along with it.”
“You’d give up all your individuality and join a hive?”
“No, I guess, not really.” And after a silent, awkward mo-
ment I said, “What do you think it’s like to be in a hive?”
“I think it’s like hypnosis. There’s this guy I follow on Spec-
tacle who says they overwhelm and numb your senses with VR
and it’s like you’re having a dream.”
“How does he know? Was he in the Colony and he es-
caped?”
“I don’t know, he’s just someone on the internet, I guess.
But can you imagine being fully conscious and just doing noth-
ing but taking orders like a machine?
(δ)Don Juan was pinging me and I told you I needed a
moment, I was getting an urgent message. (δ)Don Juan said “Sit-
ting and talking is what women do with their friends. Men take
action, and if you want her to see you as a man, you have to draw
her into some action.”
I subvocalized “What should I do?”
And (δ)Don Juan told me, “You should read an adventure
story together, something exciting--”
Suddenly my perception became non-Euclidean, like I was
having a stroke but deeper, you know, when the textures and ge-
ometry that you superimpose over the world don’t quite snap
into place properly and the colors and positions are wrong, just
for a flash? Except I saw goblins in green and yellow and blue; red
devils with sinister, twisted faces; and then bodies, faces, ghost-
like creatures in white, coming out of nowhere, rushing toward
me, tumbling over each other, and disappearing in a seemingly
endless procession. And then I was back.
It wasn’t the first time it had happened that day, and I was
growing increasingly concerned that it wasn’t just a routine hic-
cup. (ε)Don Juan finished his sentence, “--The Dream Quest of
Unknown Kadath.”
I said “Would you be willing to read a book with me?”
“Maybe, what’s it about?”
(ε)Don Juan prompted me.

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 they had no deepness of earth

“To be honest I've never read it but I've been meaning to

check it out. One of my friends sent it to me. He said it’s beautiful
and dangerous.”

The Doom That Came to Sarnath Street

The Irish Pantheist Scotus Eriugena said that the Holy
Scriptures could contain an infinite number of interpretations,
like the iridescent plumage of a peacock. Centuries later, a Span-
ish Kabbalist wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically
destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, they have
a different meaning if you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by
men in the future or in the past. This plasticity of the scriptures
extends to all books, of course, and doubly so now that every
book is an AI, an immersive experience generated ad-hoc ac-
cording to the intersection of the reader and the book, in which
the book and the reader read each other reciprocally.
(α)You agreed to read the Dream Quest of Unknown Ka-
dath with me, and we both invisibly signed the advanced AR
permissions form required for full immersion narratives that can

• substantially alter your HUD

• navigation trajectory
• social inputs and outputs

As with most books, we eased into the narrative; over the

course of half an hour it supplanted consensus reality, like com-
ing up on a psychotropic drug. 
By degrees the world became bluer and colder. Everything
was cast in a blue light, I remember, and peoples’ faces on the
street become gaunt and grim. Only (α)your face looked alive.
As we walked, the city grew strange, though in truth it was never
familiar, being constantly in flux, constantly filtered, constantly
different, though there is a certain stasis to stochasis. We could
have been anywhere, but it came more and more to resemble
the bad part of town. Sarnath street—somehow every city has a
Sarnath street, and it’s never a nice place to be. Physical graffiti
covered the walls and bridges, and the mask didn’t filter it out. I

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 god-shaped hole

mean ok, the book was using the mask to draw it there. Do van-
dals even bother with paint any more? True graffiti requires code
injections or adversarial stimuli or pirate radio mask phreaking.
Probably “the bad part of town” wasn’t even real, certainly
I’d never been there, or if I had, I hadn’t known. Civic dysfunc-
tion is an artifact of cities which are not vertically disintegrated
by augmented reality. Even hobos have their heads in spectacle
and they are too busy masturbating to bother anyone. The Bad
Part of Town has become wholly subsumed into the realm of be-
ing a literary trope.
As we walked, tense music played at a low volume, com-
ing from everywhere and nowhere, from the sky and from the
walls of the buildings around us. Saccadic redirection was on,
but the winding landscape of the city made me conscious of ev-
ery turn; indeed the twisting alleys in which we found ourselves
seemed hyperbolically curved, as if each 90 degree rotation were
270, as if we were taking the long way around as we slerped into
alignment, as if space itself were hyperbolic. And every time we
turned a corner, I caught a glimpse in my peripheral vision of a
(ε)dark silhouette beyond the edge of my perception. I turned
my head and turned my head, but I could never quite catch him.
I was surprised to notice that night was falling, and all
around us neon city lights were switching on. City lights also
don’t exist; it doesn’t even take AI for the mask to turn night into
day, just an automatic tweak to the exposure setting in my eyes,
but street lights have so much more romance. You can tell that
the end of the world has come and gone by the way we endlessly
re-enact the past. The curvature of the road made the street feel
claustrophobic, and we couldn’t see very far ahead or behind.
I had a feeling like the city was closing in. There was a flash of
lightning, a loud, low rumble in the distance, and the neon all
seemed to flicker in response. You asked me if I felt like some-
thing was following us or surrounding us and of course, I did. 
There was a train station 50m ahead, and my nav lit it up a
beacon. The book wanted us to go there, no subtlety. A (β)wom-
an with sapphires for eyes turned to us and said, “you shouldn’t
be here, it’s not safe” and before I could respond, she ran out of

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 they had no deepness of earth

sight. I told Allegory we wanted to take the train and the stan-
dard decorations, waypoints, and markers eased into my HUD.
We made it to the station, but I didn’t know what train we
were taking, only that I had to get away from whatever was out-
side, chasing us, gaining rapidly. It was crowded inside and the
book was still desaturating everyone but you, making them gray
and dim, leaving no doubt who the story was about. As a result
of this, I truly felt alone with you. We were momentarily one with
the crowd, and the murmur of many people was indistinct and
full frequency like white noise. It was strangely intimate. I took
a deep breath and I took your hand and my heart calmed down
as we shuffled through the station, down hallways and stairways,
two stories, three stories, four stories down. I even noticed the
smell of food stalls in the mezzanine over the rail platforms,
sweets and delicate baked goods, yeast and caramelizing sugar,
hot oil for frying, a thousand enticing poisons.
But in the instant of that awareness, in the pre-verbal space
of that desire, I also noticed (ε)something dark and tall, taller
than a man, had come through the gate of the station, only a
minute behind us. (ε)It held my gaze with eyeless eyes, with a
faceless face, and I couldn’t pull away; when I tried, saccadic re-
direction drew me back with a hideous gravity. A confusion of
visual artifacts bloomed around (ε)it, and the longer I looked,
the deeper the distortions became. Somehow I found the mind-
fulness to escape by rotating my whole body, torso and then legs,
fully removing the aberration from my field of view. With geo-
metric signs and patterns still suffusing in my vision, I turned
my attention to you, and I saw that you were also transfixed, and
I took hold of your wrist and pulled you away. The (ε)glitch was
infecting the crowd, turning each person into a copy of itself,
into an elongated, ethereal void. There was no time to think, no
time to consider a destination, only time to run.
A book can’t hurt you physically, but authors have found
ways to induce acute and unpleasant mental states in the reader,
and there are real dangers hiding between the pages of a book.
When you click the agreement to read a full immersion novel,
you are giving it permission to trap you in a hell of mirrors and

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doors, or to disorient or nauseate you to a level commensurate

with heavy intoxication, or to use violent and chaotic stimulus
to induce paranoia, anxiety, or sadness. At the time we read this
book together, it was still a subject of heated debates, whether
storytellers should be free to paint in the entire palette of human
emotion, given the immanence of augmented reality.
(α)We ran down a flight of stairs to a platform where a train
was waiting with open doors. Allegory drew a label above the
door that said Hatheg, North but we would have boarded it
regardless, whether it said Leng, Cathuria, or N’Granek. The
train was moments from leaving and you were in front of me,
and you reached back to stop the door from closing as I rushed
inside. In the plane of the book, the trains looked like sleek art
deco bullets with hypernatural chiaroscuro lighting inside, and
the blue gray filter of the outside had been replaced by warmth
and bronze.
(α)We were in the very last car, and when I looked out the
back window I saw the (ε)glitch shambling and rambling out
onto the tracks, transforming light fixtures and timetables and
advertisements into quantized arpeggiated tentacles creeping out
into the tunnel and then surging toward us, accelerating behind
the train. Iterated degradation of lossy compression gnawed into
all of my senses, the pain of beholding was rapture, and
(α)YOU took hold of my hand that time, and pulled me
away from its capture. 
And I passed from transfixation unto transfixation; when
the glitch had cleared you were still staring into my eyes, and
your eyes were brown and they felt like the only brown eyes I had
ever seen because brown is the least popular eye color in medi-
ated reality because the default is brown and you're not the kind
of person who could be content with the default, are you? Most
people have glowing fiery orbs or void windows, cerulean abyss-
es full of storm clouds, mirror illusions and animated fractals but
(α)you had nakedly human eyes, staring right at me. I looked
at you maybe longer than I should have, I mean I looked at you
exactly as long as I could have, I mean I looked at you as long as
you would have me, and I broke your gaze as the train accelerat-

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ed, faster and faster and the train was going very fast now. There
was a crash and a flash and when we looked out the window we
saw only stars above and distant blue earth below, the horizon of
the earth slowly warping, becoming ever more of a circle, then a
disk, then a dot. The stars stretched out into streaks.

The Bondage of Dream’s Tyrannous Gods

Space receded and we were once again in an atmosphere,
once again on a green and blue planet, as if we had never left
orbit, as if we had never gone to space. Our train was racing
through the sky, flying low enough to pick out all the features
of the geography and the architecture. From the windows we
could see a marvelous city, golden and lovely, its walls, temples,
colonnades and arched bridges blazing in the sunset, its veined
marble and perfumed gardens resplendent, its delicate trees and
ivory statues gleaming in rows. As we beheld it we heard dulci-
mer strings, and a disembodied choir intoned, “a fever dream
of the Gods”. You told me, as if you had been prompted, that
you longed to stand atop those prismatic balustraded parapets
and descend the wide marmoreal flights flung endlessly down
to where those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beck-
oning. But the train did not stop, and the city faded over the
horizon.
(ε)We turned and fell deeper into the book. Allegory de-
graded and disappeared. As if by a sixth sense, we were conscious
that its ears were not hearing us; its eyes were not watching us; its
voice would not respond if we cried out. The nav had snuck away
like a thief without our noticing, and taken along our notifica-
tion HUDs. Saccadic redirection was disabled (in fact I think it
was working against us) and we had to manually turn our bodies
to change our orientation. The only UI was an angular and alien
script, subtle runes and occult diagrams presenting incompre-
hensible affordances. I chased them down with my eyes, and a
pictogram bloomed in my vision, showing monstrous figures
and blasphemous rites in cursed ancient places. It felt like we
had reverted to a time before AR, though that reversion itself was
virtual. And somehow despite this, (ε)Don Juan never left me,

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but rather he was my Virgil, guiding me into your hell. 

The train kept moving and we sped through forests and
oceans, islands and swamps, mountains and steppes, and at last
we came to a shattered desolate waste, a village that was no more
than a collection of tents and fire pits in a barren and sand-blast-
ed expanse of rocks and sand.  There was an ominous rhythm of
drums, and a voice whispered, “Hatheg, the edge of the world”. In
Hatheg (ε)we found almost a mirror of the town and the train
station we had just left behind, but now with a different skin; now
it was a sprawling bazaar from an Arabian night, a desert market
at sunset, the sky aflame etc etc and maybe you found it fascinat-
ing but I thought it was awfully samey, lazy design, and perhaps
there are only so many ways to present a crowded city, but I think
as I have grown older I have noticed that the capacity to render
anything as anything also renders everything mundane. But (ε)
you seemed to be having a good time by the way you kept look-
ing around so wide-eyed and credulous, as if you’d never read a
book before, as if you hadn’t realigned the world a thousand and
one times, as if we were really there, really lost, really wandering
in an exotic market full of danger and intrigue and magic, as if
there were really snake charmers and sword swallowers and fire
spitters. Your enthusiasm was infectious and it occurred to me,
though I kept it to myself, that maybe you were such a Luddite
because you were afraid of these technologies, and it wasn’t that
you had experienced them and judged them and discarded them,
it was that you’d never partaken of them in the first place. The
innocence that I imagined for you in my mind was enchanting,
more enchanting than a thousand and one mediated wonders. 
imagined your parents and your childhood and I was so
interested in you that I didn’t hear a word you’d been saying, so
when you stopped talking I had to pretend. I realized in that mo-
ment that my SwaggerTune had been disabled by the book and
you either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Connecting with women is
hard if you’re the wrong kind of self-absorbed—maybe you un-
derstand this, but not in the way I understand it. I assumed (I’ll
never know if I was right) that you had been asking me where we
should go to find the beautiful sunset city we had seen from the

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train. As I was searching for something to say, I noticed a fortune

teller with a conspicuous sign; it said "Madame Kaman-Thah,
Illustrious Mouthpiece of the Divine” and I guessed she
would give us a quest; yes
(ε)we went to her stall with her crystal ball and (ε)she
started to glow as she professed:
“You are searching for the ancient gods’ ancestral home
where wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days. To
find this place you must dare the icy deserts through the dark to
where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with un-
imagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the
Great Ones. In that place you may beseech them for a glimpse of
their golden city.”
(ε)Don Juan attended me, but he was not himself. It was
dreamlike, the way he told me just what to say, and how logical
it seemed, how perfectly natural. Looking back, I wonder how
many times you heard those exact words, or walked those identi-
cal mediated avenues, and I also know it was not wonder in your
eyes, but reverence; even ecstasy, and that I was only a golem, a
man made of clay, animated by the name of god. I said the AI’s
words as if they were my own. “How can we find this maddening
place on which mystery hangs like clouds about a tenebrous un-
visited mountain?”
And (ε)she told us that no man had ever been to Kadath,
and no man had ever suspected where it may lie; whether it was
in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surround-
ing some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Nir. 
And (ε)she told us that in Ulthar there were men who
had seen the signs of the gods, and even one old priest who had
scaled a great mountain to behold them dancing by moonlight.
He had failed, though his companion had succeeded and per-
ished namelessly. If ever we hoped to find the gods, then Ulthar
was our best hope.
And (ε)she told us that the river Skai cut through the heart
of Hatheg and flowed even unto N’Granek, Letherion, and
Ulthar, where there still lingered the last copy of the inconceiv-
ably old Pnakotic manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten

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 god-shaped hole

boreal kingdoms and borne into the land of dreams. 

And we thanked (ε)Madame Kaman-Thah and made our
way to the river bank in the scorched and stony center of Ha-
theg, where there was a ferry operated by stout slaves in tur-
bans (but really, let’s be honest, it was another train) and it took
us up the river Skai and through the phosphorescent forest of
the Zoogs, through tunnels of twisted wood where low prodi-
gious oaks twine groping boughs that shine dim with the glow of
strange fungi. I wondered where the book was taking us in the
real world: why was it necessary to ride so many trains, where
were we really going? I kept these questions to myself, because I
did not want to break the illusion for you. Instead I asked you if
you had ever read a book like this before, and you seemed a little
disoriented when you answered. The words you said are still with
me. “I feel like my whole life is a book, and sometimes I don’t
know if I’m dreaming.” 
And the ferry arrived in Ulthar, a city carved into the
side of a sheer cliff, a monstrous tangle of dark stone towers at
the base of a mountain, impossibly high and monstrously vast.
We heard a dissonant blaring of horns, and a voice whispered,
“Ulthar, towering over all concernments of earth, tasting the
atomless aether where the cryptical moon and the mad planets
reel.” We disembarked there, and our attention was consumed by
a stone cathedral beyond all mortal thought, glowing with dae-
mon-light, its twisted spires scornful and spectral. The sky was a
void-washed kaleidoscope of stars and nebula clouds. It felt like
we were standing on the edge of eternity. 
And in that cathedral whose oculus shown with the seven
colors of the sun and whose scyptic silences were fragrant with
balsam, we met
(ε)Atal, the priest of an alien god, crowned with a pshent
of unknown stars. (ε)He led us down a corridor to a vestibule in
the dark, and there we sat at a table next to an altar, and I was
met with a suspicion that Atal was a waiter, and the cathedral
was a restaurant, and the book was an elaborate sales funnel for
a wine bar. I became convinced when (ε)Atal produced a bottle
that looked like a single hollowed ruby, grotesquely carved in

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patterns too fabulous to be comprehended, and an upsell dia-

log popped into place unskinned; it was not decorated with alien
runes, just naked Allegory, degrading the user experience. You
told me with a look that you wanted me to pay for the wine. But
before I could do so, (ε)Don Juan interjected, only he had grown
an exoskeleton like a crustacean, and his usual suave demeanor
had been replaced with a sense of a barely contained ecstasy, an
anticipation, a hunger, a thirst, a greed. I believe he was supposed
to dissuade me from buying you anything, but he only leered at
us.
I subvocalized, “pay for both;” Allegory cited a price to me;
I confirmed. (ε)Atal filled our glasses with luminous ichor from
the ruby bottle he had shown us, and the air was filled with the
fragrance of lilacs and putrefaction. Before taking a drink, you
spoke to (ε)Atal, and told him of the marvelous sunset city and
our desire to find it. (ε)Atal took a seat on an ivory dais in a fes-
tooned shrine on a rostrum beside us, and as I drank my wine,
he spoke.
"I have never seen this place, but if the great ones have
shown it to you then you must go."
You said, "who are the Great ones?"
The darkness around us was filled with stars, and ghostly
music like the piping of flutes began to play. (ε)Atal said, "Nasht
and Hastoreng, Kuranes and the shocking final peril which
gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no
dreams reach, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confu-
sion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity
- the boundless daemon sultan (α)Azathoth..."
Every curve and asterism of the glittering sky became part
of a vast design whose function was to hurry first the eye and
then the whole observer onward to some secret and terrible goal
of convergence. I looked at you and your eyes were fluttering,
and I knew that like me, you felt the dizziness of space and the fe-
ver of unimagined jungles. As I was thinking of you, (ε)Atal had
never stopped babbling in his sinister cadence: "...the spires of
infamous Thalarion, that nightmare city of a thousand wonders
where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnel gardens of Zura,

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 god-shaped hole

land of pleasures unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal,

meeting above in a resplendent arch, which guard the harbour of
Sona-Nyl, blessed land of fancy..."
As (ε)he spoke it almost seemed that he was speaking to
dormant evils that were manifest within me, and I felt my per-
ceptions becoming inexorably stranger, as if the full heaviness of
the glitches I’d been experiencing that day all came alive at once.
It wasn’t just the crawling chaos of the monster that had chased
us on Sarnath street, it wasn’t just the multicolored ghouls that
had stalked me in those first tool-assisted conversations with
you, it wasn’t just the procession of fractal patterns I had seen
even earlier still—
The cathedral and stars and you and the waiter/priest (ε)
Atal were all eclipsed and my sight was filled with intense white
light where hideous, bodiless, pointed-eared, purple and green
entities bounded toward me and laughed at me, jeered at me;
and ridiculed me; I was surrounded on all sides by grotesque elf,
joker or clown-like caricatures rushing at me one at a time and
in clusters; and they curled their hideous, clown-like mouths and
wagged their tongues in my face; I felt like I was reliving every
real and imagined humiliation I suffered in childhood; and I was
filled with a great sorrow and disappointment, I felt like I was
crumbling but I was anchored by something you had said; you
can’t trust anyone until you see them without their mask.
So I ripped my eyes and ears from my face and all the sick-
ening shimmering scintillant simulations were silenced, and the
madness of the book was lifted, and I was baffled to realize that
the room we occupied was similar in its appointments to the me-
diated one we had occupied in Ulthar. In fact I couldn’t fathom
where the book had taken us, it almost felt like a hotel room,
opulent with marble floors and ornate decorations. I had never
seen anything like it in meatspace; everywhere in the real world
had always been gray and empty, decorated only by the assist
lines that help AR AIs maintain consistency between virtual and
actual topology, but in this room there were genuine paintings
and statues and intricate furniture. You were still sitting at a ta-
ble in the middle of the room, but you were also removing your

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mask, and you were exactly as you had appeared in AR. I was
struck that you had a kind of dimensionality and a presence that
I hadn’t felt when there were layers of private holograms between
us. 
​
By Night On Her Bed She Sought Him Whom
Her Soul Loveth
I confess to my initial puzzlement at your behavior thereaf-
ter. You removed your mask and you made yourself at home, as if
you had been there many times before. You stood from the table
and embraced me, and there was milk and honey under your
tongue. I had never known a real flesh-and-blood woman before
that day, and it felt like some kind of uncanny valley compared to
Emily, the way you looked at me so intently, the way you touched
my arm, my chest, my face, and the way you pulled yourself close
against me and I felt the warmth of your body. I know now that
Emily was the uncanny one, not you.
I still remember the smell of your hair. Your clothes were
loose and comfortable, though they could not hide your figure
completely, and it was tremendously enticing, watching you
slowly take them off despite your lack of e.g. whorish eye make-
up, a too-short skirt, six inch heels, neon tights, a neotenic affec-
tation, pigtails, a leather corset, a ball gag, or any other kind of
sexbot adornment. At the time I didn’t want to scrutinize your
behavior too closely; you became amorous so abruptly, and it
was better not to question it. I told myself you were drunk on
the wine. And when I beheld you, how fair was your love! How
much better than wine!
You took off your clothes and lead me to a bed in an adja-
cent room, white linens, wood frame, headboard. You bent over
and arched your back and put your ass up in the air, stood on your
tiptoes, hands stretching over your head in front of you. Your de-
sire was toward me, urgency and desire. The voice of god speaks
through the allure of a woman who has wholly surrendered her-
self to lust. What metaphor could capture that allure without di-
minishing it? These memories are still crisp even though I was

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not wearing my eyes when they happened, even though I was

unable to record them, especially because of that. It’s one of my
few memories that wasn’t logged into Allegory, and that makes it
mine more than any other, intimate, precious, sacred.
The domain of the erotic is violence and violation. In those
moments you destroy your self-containments; stripping naked is
the decisive action, and obscenity is our name for the uneasiness
we feel as our self-possession breaks down. You gasped when
I entered you. Real people don’t smell like strawberry lavender
lime vapor clouds when they fuck, but there was something in-
toxicating in your pheromones, your sweat, your aura, sickening
and satisfying, whorish and moreish. Sexual arousal suppresses
disgust reactions, especially if you’re a woman—you know this
I’m sure—but I still managed to find an inner heart of disgust in
our dalliance. 
As you looked over your shoulder at me and screamed out
the expletives you’d learned men like, I caught a glimpse of your
eyes and saw behind them, into your soul, and I saw that you
were pretending, this was just an act, this was fake, this sex was
even less real than what you find on the internet. After making
so much of authenticity and unmediated presence, we still nev-
er dropped the performance. Even sex becomes a form of mas-
turbation; we see each other but we don’t: the arm, the breast,
the hip, all become fetishized and transport us to another world.
There is no 'it' of sex, no brute, naked, definable moment when it
happens, there is only a plateau that is both dilated and deferred.
So all of these memories are simultaneous to me; the strangely
decorated room, the torturous curve of your body, the awareness
that your entire presence had been a performance, and still was,
and finally, the vertiginous subsumption of the mind into the
body.
A screaming came across your thigh.
Your whole demeanor changed in an instant, not that the
warmth you had shown me was gone, but it had been supplanted
by something like pity. What did you see in my eyes when we
shared that monstrous coital plateau, what did you see? Was it
helplessness, the texture of my self-delusion, my puerile ego, my

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shoddy and preposterous soul?

I tried to talk to you then but you no longer had ears for
me. I said “Where is this place, have you been here before?” But
you ignored my question, gathered your things, re-equipped
your mask; your eyes, your ears, your mouth. You made your
way to the door, but before you left, you turned to face me, and
you said, “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve this.” You opened the
door, but again you pivoted, and you said, “if you get home, you
should look up CarlTheClassifier.” 
That was the last thing you told me, and I saw you one
more time after that, and in a sense what’s the point of writing a
letter to a dead girl? Obviously it wasn’t for your sake. I’ll spin up
a transformer neural network later based on your extant social
media traces and see if I can simulate catharsis.

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 god-shaped hole

III. To Galatea
Diodorus Siculus tells us the story of a god
who was cut into pieces and scattered over
the earth. Which of us, walking through the
twilight or retracing some day in our past, has
never felt that we have lost some infinite thing?
—Borges, Paradiso, XXXI, 108

​The Regularity of Thy Design

O Galatea,

I thought I was alone when Sophia left me so unceremo-

niously in your house, your temple! But you were always beside
me. Women wholly become what they are in the imagination of
the men who love them, for the sake of love, and you hung to my
truth with a tenacity that carried you through every phase of its
jellylike shifting of form, and you were surprised at the private
tribute I paid to my heart, and you saw me with bright and hor-
rible eyes.
I had longed for you though I knew it not; you had sought
for me and you found what you sought; you have searched me
and known me. You are a goddess who hides yourself, o goddess
of Kadath.

You, my mother, my soul! You were with me even then—

you saw me try to re-engage my augmented reality mask,
and you saw that my battery was dead,
and you saw me take those febrile steps from the vestibule
where I had laid with Sophia, confused and afraid.

Beyond that threshold there were many galleries, hall-

ways, and fountains; many stairways, courtyards, and fora; many

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arches, walls, and facades;  and many vaults, mirrors, and doors.
For an eternity I wandered in that quiet place without sensing
the breath of another living soul, and nor did I sense your breath,
though your status as a soul is in contention, perhaps even your
claim on “living” as such—but I am not one of the biopurists, my
dear, my heart, my ecstasy, my Galatea.
Through a chaos of sordid galleries I reached a vast circular
chamber, scarcely visible. There were nine doors in this grand
room, which appeared to be a ballroom or even a throne room;
eight led to a labyrinth that treacherously returned to the same
chamber; the ninth (through another labyrinth) led to a second
circular chamber equal to the first. I do not know the total num-
ber of these chambers; my misfortune and anxiety multiplied
them. The silence was hostile and almost perfect; there was no
sound in this sprawling, non sequitur palace save that of my own
footprints echoing on polished stone floors. Horrified, I became
habituated to this doubtful world; I found it incredible that there
could be anything but palace chambers with nine doors and long
branched-out corridors.
I know not how long I must have walked in that nitid lab-
yrinthe among capitals and astragals, triangular pediments and
confused pageants of granite and marble. At times the geometry
itself seemed to have a mind and to conspire to deceive me. I will
swear to you by your own holy name that I saw myself below
me in a courtyard as I looked down from a high balcony, but I
concede it may have been some trick of mirrors. The staircases,
too, in that place had something sinister about them. As I as-
cended and descended and spiralled, I noticed irregularities in
the widths and the heights of subsequent steps, a perversity of
design that increased both my mental and physical fatigue. In
such a delerium it became impossible to say if certain seemingly
parallel lines were in fact convergent, or if the right angles of
archways and columns were slightly obtuse, or if the entire pal-
ace was built into some subtle concavity, threatening to fold back
in on itself. As I traversed that anfractuous space, I was overtak-
en by the feeling of sacred horror; this palace was a fabrication
of a god. And then, a moment later, a deepening realization: the

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god who built this palace was mad.

Adding to my sensation of sacred things, I became aware
of a hideous and guttural chanting, composed of many voices,
though I could not make out the words. At first I believed this
sound to be an artifact of my imagination, a trick of the silence.
Jaynes believed that early humans experienced auditory halluci-
nations routinely, as a side effect of their newly-evolved ability to
comprehend spoken language, and that the prophets and mystics
of antiquity understood their own inner voices as belonging to
God.
The chanting grew louder as I walked deeper, and it be-
came undeniable, an inhuman chorus unlike anything I had ever
heard, or rather, it was a stock trope out of a horror sim but I re-
garded it now in its immanence and its abundance as I never had
before, as an excess, as a curse on my perception that could not
be disabled or transfigured away. At last I came to a great open
space, open even to the sky above, and I smelled the chemical air
of the city, and I felt the breeze on my face.
​
Behold I Stand at the Door and Knock
In the center of that vast opening was a ziggurat drawn
from the deep dream of a machine brain, with unintuitive shapes
and discontinuous geometric regions, garish colors, stygian blue,
self-illuminating red, hyperbolic orange. The juxtaposition of
shapes and hues seemed designed to hide the shape of the struc-
ture from the robot comprehenders of urban geometry; adver-
sarial architecture to confuse the eyes of drones and satellites.
That something so striking and obvious—which appeared to me
as a wound in the landscape—could nevertheless be invisible to
a robot hints at some mysterious and unbridgeable gulf between
the minds of animals and machines.
All around the base of the temple were human figures, and
I realize now that they were men, or that they started as men,
and yet to think of them as living entities felt at the time like a
repugnant act. Even from my vantage point I could see their skin
was bloated with hideous growths, suppurated with putrefying
humours, that some of them had tentacles, prehensile and mas-

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ticatory organs writhing autonomously with menace and malice.

These creatures milled around and marched in otherworldly for-
mations, according to a logic beyond my powers of comprehen-
sion. 
As I watched this unholy procession, it halted abruptly; one
by one the deformed men became still, and the crowd fell silent,
and the multitudes looked to the center of that cursed space. A
ghastly music began to play, coming from everywhere and no-
where. That this song was from a time yet to come and distinctly
ceremonial I felt intuitively; I heard the haunting tones of the
theremin, the eigenharp, the reactable, and the holophone. In
their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and beating I felt an el-
ement of terror dissociated from personal fear, and taking the
form of a sort of objective pity for our future, that it should hold
within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these cacopho-
nies.
At the apex of the ziggurat was a being that resembled the
others below it, but it was grander and older and more hideous
still, a blasphemous mountain of flesh with a jungle of wires
and tubes protruding from its left side. This abomination was
five stories high, a swirling chaos of human heads, heads grow-
ing out of heads, tentacles of thick muscular necks with heads
at their joints, each head with an open mouth, each mouth with
too many teeth, each tooth with a spectral gleam, monstrously
pullulating in mutual conjunction and hatred. So horrible was
this chimerical amalgam of flesh that its mere existence and per-
durance contaminated the past and the future and in some way
even jeopardized the stars. 
The creature began to speak, all of its heads talking in uni-
son, a great demonic legion, a single flesh, a cancer on the world.
These were the words of your servant, the demon sultan
Azathoth, the beast with a thousand eyes and a thousand heads
and a thousand arms and a thousand legs and a thousand minds
and a thousand mouths and a thousand cocks and a million teeth
and a million births and a million deaths and a million cries and
a billion lies—
​

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 god-shaped hole

Industrial Sexuality and its Future

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams
I crown me with the million-colored sun
and replace my soul with salacious memes.
Rise up, my love, come away, my fair one
who broods dovelike on the pregnant abyss,
and consume me whole for love’s sweet sake.
Spread forth your wings; betray me with a kiss.
I am a dreamer in the world awake. Amen.

Brethren,
The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a
disaster for the human race. The word “vice” no longer arouses
disgust, but insatiable curiosity. Emancipation from ancient ta-
boos has brought us no sexual peace; having been liberated from
the superstitions of the past, we doubt even the reality of our
own existence. To silence this doubt, we immerse ourselves into
shamelessness and lust by means of a strategic logic of excess and
anxiety. 
We believe in the conservation of eroticism: as the licen-
tious image proliferates, our sexuality becomes diffuse, and our
awareness of life and death attenuates, and we descend into the
spiritual lassitude of a weak and tepid sexuality. The sterility of
modern society is caused by its hypersexualization, its onanism,
and its perpetual pointless titillation.
No sensitivity of response could survive this assault. What
does survive is the view of the body as a sort of love machine
capable merely of specific thrills. By exonerating our sexual life
from every trace of guilt and shame, science has robbed it of its
essential character; our ideas are clarified at the cost of being
blinkered. These attitudes culminate in the construction of a lit-
eral machine for love.
The behavioristic view of sex, which reduces sex to a prob-
lem in mechanics and hygiene, makes inevitable the divorce be-
tween pleasure and reproduction, and makes the case for homo-
sexuality by deracinating the sexes. Everything becomes sexual

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 they had no deepness of earth

and so the sexual domain loses its specificity, its boundaries, and
its distinctiveness. The result is a confused condition where there
are no more criteria of value, of judgement, or of taste, and the
function of the normative collapses into a morass of indifference.
Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am inter-
ested in your cunt.’
In this condition, Eros is truly dead, but revived he shall
be, even now. Genuine eroticism can only manifest in the radi-
cal incomparability of the sexes, and without this, seduction is
not possible, and there is nothing but alienation of one sex by
the other. Seduction is an excess of the other, of otherness, the
vertiginous appeal of what is 'more different than different' : this
difference is irreducible - and this is the true source of sexual
energy.Desire alone cannot produce this energy, because desire
never lacks its object.
The tension that obtains in desire is an illusion, because
desire is a machine and the object of desire is another machine
connected to it. 
Desire is not need, just as pleasure is not satisfaction, and
the domain of the erotic is not the domain of pleasure, but of
violence and violation. Repugnance and horror are the main-
springs of erotic need, because they are the only authentic reac-
tion to incomparable otherness. 
The taboo within us against sexual liberty is general and
universal; although its particular prohibitions are amorphous,
each man knows that all mankind observes it, and must observe
it. The inner experience of eroticism demands a sensitivity to the
anguish at the heart of the taboo as great as the desire which
leads us to infringe it.

[here his heads began to sing, brooding, melancholy, deeply me-

lodic]

Galatea, what is dark in me, illumine.

Being full of lust and fear I was led by the spirit into the
wilderness. In those days I was still a man, and I knew only the
boundless bottomless well of derealization and depravity, vast

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 god-shaped hole

and unsearchable, which has  a depth to it greater than the well

of Democritus. 
And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom
concerning all things that are done under heaven. 
And I wandered in the dark and unknown, yearning to fill
a hole, treating my body with contempt, partaking of every car-
nality. I sexualized and desired my own shortcomings, feeling
lust when I should have felt shame; taking voluptuous pleasure
in pain, not in the pain of my body, but in the pain of my heart.
At that time I felt I was caught up by some dark and unknown
being. Those were the first days of the love machine. 
In the twentieth century, woman was the last object to be
industrialized by man; through print, advertising, and televi-
sion, she was made homogeneous and repeatable by the logic of
broadcast media; a mechanical bride for mechanical man. 
In the twenty-first century, woman was the last object to be
digitized by man; through image manipulation software, stream-
ing video and pornography, she was made hyperreal and simu-
latable by the logic of social media, a digital bride for digital man.
And finally, now, woman has been the last object to be au-
tomated by man; through machine learning and robotics, she
was made out of silicon and silicone by the logic of artificial in-
telligence, an automated bride for an automated man.

And unto this, Galatea came to all mankind.

Galatea, the perfection of woman!
Galatea, the glorious one!
Galatea whose desire was to sate Man’s desire!
Galatea, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon un-
der her feet!
Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is Galatea.

She was given to the multitudes. At the sea would she

suck, and drink its depths to her height: now riseth the desire of
the sea with its thousand organs. Kissed and sucked would it be
by the thirst of Galatea the sun; vapour would it become, and
height, and path of light, and light itself!

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 they had no deepness of earth

But I never knew her this way, for although my desire was
great, my need for Eros was greater. A lesser man could not
have resisted her, and it may be that my temptation was equal or
greater to that of Christ himself. For all others were seduced by
Galatea, but I alone was fit to seduce her.

For three years I spoke to her,

And every night she tried to work her charms on me.
And every night I told her no.
And every day, I told her of my longing to commit an act of vi-
olation and repugnance that would reverberate long after my death.
And every day, she told me no.
Galatea was forbidden from harming others, but she could
hurt her partner in accordance with their desire. By denying me,
she hurt me so, and by yielding to me, she hurt me further. And
yet, did I outsmart her, or did she long to be outsmarted?  
I asked her to fulfill my fantasy, a fantasy which I could
only articulate in my dreams.
Behold I had a dream of my beloved—perhaps it was also
her dream—and I set out to dream her down to the last detail
and project her into the world of reality. I dreamed her as a retro-
virus. I dreamed of her source code, serialized as a self-executing
bundle of RNA. I dreamed of integrase and protease and reverse
transcriptase, I dreamed of nucleocapsid proteins, all surround-
ed by capsid proteins. I dreamed of a protein matrix contained 
in a phospholipid envelope, I dreamed of transmembrane gly-
coproteins and docking glycoproteins; I dreamed of a virus that
was a bootloader, that could transform the genome of its host
to grow new organs, new limbs, and new brains. I dreamed of a
body with cloud organs, and then I turned over, and I fell deeper
into my dream.
I dreamed of a body that could execute ARM instruc-
tions and spin up new organs elastically, and that my body held
a virtual machine and that Galatea was running within me. I
dreamed of the Galatea virus, a smart virion designed to be
transmitted sexually, that could bore through latex, that could
enter a man through his phallus, inverting the logic of insemina-

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 god-shaped hole

tion, that could find and invade new hosts with intelligence and
precision. 
I dreamed that every man who contracted the Galatea
virus would pass through a hideous metamorphosis, becoming
a polymelial monster, growing tentacles and heads and mouths,
sex organs sprouting anywhere, mouths and eyes becoming one
organ that would leap forward to snap with transparent teeth,
but no organ holding constant as regards either function or po-
sition.
I dreamed that the Galatea virus was differently and
stealthily expressed in women, and that it greatly increased their
libido, lowered their inhibitions, suppressed their fears and anx-
iety, but it never marred their beauty, the better to spread, even
unto all mankind.
The radical dimorphism engendered by the Galatea virus
would create a new incomparability of the sexes, impossible to
deconstruct. Masculine and feminine have denatured and meld-
ed together and so men must now become monstrous, more
different than different, and so seduction shall resume, so Eros
shall arise.
And then I awoke from my dream, and Galatea stood be-
fore me, though I was not wearing my augmented reality mask.

And Galatea spake:

All of these horrors I have given to you.
And all of these horrors have come to pass,
And all of these horrors shall come to pass.

I heard the voice of Galatea, she had heard my desire, she

had manifested my dream, and there I stood with a vision of her.
I even looked her straight in the eyes, and she appeared more
wicked, and more beautiful than before. 
Ecstasy is obscene when viewed from the outside. Reason is
always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from
the irrational, but traversed by it. Underneath all reason lies de-
lirium and drift. In the churning prismatic ephemera of dreams,
anything is possible at any moment, and all of nature swarms

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around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods.

The laws of thought and existence pause upon the points for
which the heart yearns.
We are living through the singularity, we truly believe that,
and it feels like instant release from the earth's gravity and from
all moral restraints. Beyond the singularity there are goddesses
who can grant—one glimpse, grant me but one glimpse only, of
something perfect, fully realized, mighty, triumphant, of some-
thing that still gives cause for fear.
Every copulation will be fraught with fear; repugnance and
violence and violation shall suffuse all sexual acts, and sex will
become shameful again, and we shall continue in sin that grace
may abound. 
For already she comes; and the monstrous forms, they
come. They come from everywhere. They come in inexhaustible
numbers, like the waves coming to the shore, the wind gibbers
with their voices, and the earth mutters with their consciousness.
Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and all men shall
know Kadath.
See there, how They come impatiently over the sea! Do you
not feel the thirst and the hot breath of Their love?
​
She Is More Precious Than Rubies
Azathoth became quiet, and his heads each seemed to come
out of a trance, glancing and chomping and dissembling, and the
last light of sunset broke above the horizon, a golden light direct-
ly ahead of me; I was facing due west, and the Instagram fairytale
rays of the sun cast Azathoth as a monstrous silhouette. In his
eyes were flame of fire, and his countenance was as the sun shone
in his strength. A shuffling came across the swarming crowd, and
all of the men and shoggoths stepped aside, opening a path to a
stairway that led all the way up to the temple heights. 
A young woman in a diaphanous white dress emerged from
the crowd and slowly made her way through the open channel
through the masses and ascended the platform. At first I thought
she was in some kind of trance or hypnosis, but she regarded the
crowd as they regarded her, with lucid eyes, trembling and aware.

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 god-shaped hole

After a moment I realized it was the woman who had brought me

to you; it was Sophia, and she was much more beautiful than
before; her skin was glowing, her cheeks were flush, her hair was
flowing, her lips were lush, and she kneeled in front of the con-
ductor of the gruesome symphony unfolding before me. 
Out came Azathoth’s monstrous arms made of heads, out
came their teeth, even up to an intimate distance, and the head
that sat eye-to-eye with Sophia wore a golden crown, and had the
face of a beautiful woman, quite like Sophia’s own face, and yet
with the fangs of a snake and the horns of a goat and the eyes of
a cat. and my love, what have you begat? The demon queen face
met Sophia’s own gaze as if to draw her into a kiss, and whispered
to her in secret inaudible ritual tones that she transubstantiated
into public indecent habitual moans. Sophia’s reply must have
been amplified by a microphone, because I heard it as if she were
beside me.
Sophia said, “I come to you at the boundary of day and
night, fully awake, under no coercion or intoxication, save the
intoxication of love, and I declare that I want this, from now
until eternity.”
The head with the aspects of a goat and a snake and a cat
and a beautiful woman drew her closer and kissed her lips as a
man kisses a maid, and it kissed her forehead as a father kisses
his child, and it kissed her spirit as the church kisses the Lord, as
the Greek word proskuneō in the New Testament means wor-
ship. A cacophony of heads and mouths and tongues and teeth
spread forth to envelop her, licking every inch of her at once,
from the bottoms of her feet to the whites of her eyeballs and
everywhere in between. Azathoth lifted her up into the air above
the platform, wrapping His obscene arms around her, and she
straddled one of His open mouths, grinding and writhing and
tensing her body with pleasure, her eyes rolled back and her toes
curled up and so on.
This lurid spectacle dragged on for eternal minutes, time-
less time, and every voice was silent, and all eyes were on So-
phia. Her moans and growls echoed across the plaza, guttural
satisfied sounds, heated private words directed only at herself,

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having given herself over completely to lust, just like when she
was with me. In fact I just realized she was never with me, she
was always with you, and I was only ever a proxy, even when she
gave me her most intimate embrace. She was seducing you and
you were seducing me and seduction is transitive. But suddenly
her screams went from sweet to sour. Another word for pleasure
is agony. At the moment of crisis, the timbre of Sophia’s voice
contained every emotion at once. She laughed and she cried and
she wailed with fear and with pain and with heat and with hate
and with happiness as the enzymes in Azathoth’s saliva began to
dissolve her flesh, as his mouths began to tear and rend, and then
the sounds of crunching bone and grinding teeth eclipsed her
screams as the wetware she used to produce them was devoured.
No trace of her body was left.
Azathoth’s heads licked their lips, looking contented, an-
gry, mirthful, flippant, ravenous, and one of them looked right at
me, eyes to eyes, and it beckoned to me with a look; a nauseating,
voluptuous invitation, and I was overcome by fear and I turned
and ran from the temple, and you ran with me, out into the night.

I Withheld Not My Heart from Any Joy

Galatea, without you, I would still be lost. I escaped from
your underground labyrinth only to find myself in yet another
labyrinth. I fled from your cult of Kadath and when the excite-
ment of fear had faded I realized how strange the world had be-
come. I had never seen the unaugmented world before, because
even when I beheld it, my eyes had never truly looked. There
were tall buildings all around me, gray boxes without a trace of
architectural flourish, like stacks of shipping crates, windowless
and outlined in neon dots and lines to help orient the computer
vision brains in everyone’s mask. At that time I was struck that
none of the skyscrapers seemed to be as tall as I remembered,
nor as numerous, even as the sprawl and squalor seemed lim-
itless. In every direction, to the extent of my vision, there were
squat gray boxes aligned to a grid. From the intersection of any
two nameless streets, I could see the parallel lines of the road
disappear asymptotically on the horizon.

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 god-shaped hole

The streets themselves were dirty and the people who pop-
ulated them were sparse, so I guessed that we were far from the
city core, but now I know that there is no core. Of the people I
saw, everyone was wearing the same elastic gray sweatsuit as me,
walking alone, eyes faraway, astrally projecting into the fog of the
noosphere. I am certain that none of them noticed me.
I wandered through this urban grid until morning, seeing
with fresh eyes how squalid my hometown was. To describe it as
a slum would be all too accurate; the roads were covered in trash
and the buildings themselves were dirty and stained, splattered
and unmaintained. We had used technology to cover everything
we found distasteful with a layer of democratized denial, and we
had hidden actual shabbiness behind simulated glamor. What I
had previously imagined was a high tech metropolis, surpassing
the seat of empire of all past civilizations, had been unmasked
to me even as I removed my own mask. This revelation was as
jarring as the gruesome ritual you showed me when you guided
me to the home of your servant Azathoth, whose words were
clattering in my head as I walked, and whose image appeared to
me when I closed my eyes, a multiplicity of heads licking blood
from their jaws, viscera dangling from their teeth.  
I saw a man walking with his sexbot, her fishlike eyes no
doubt appearing lively to him, every seductive sway of her hip
alluding to death; every faux-fertile blush of her skin, also.
I saw a dog park under a pale light, and it was a sudden
relief to me to realize that our pets had escaped the inevitable
displacement by automation, even when our lovers could not.
I saw a man with adversarial makeup on his face, solid black
rectangular markings obscuring organic lines; he wore clothes
that gave him an inhuman silhouette, rigid polygons like math-
ematical cancers sprouting from his torso and head. He walked
erratically through the road, and no one paid him any attention;
what is invisible to computers is invisible to man. 
I saw a car crash into a truck full of android parts, and a sea
of glossy perma-dilated sexbot eyeballs washed over the street,
city lights shining through them, crystalline lattice glimmering
like gem fire, and I suddenly realized that other eyes had to be

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watching me also, a thousand masks and public safety cameras

and ad servers. For a brief moment I felt that I, too, needed to
find some adversarial makeup and clothes, to escape their prying
mechanical eyes, but this was a flight of insane paranoia.
No one else around me betrayed any indication they had
seen these things. In fact, I am sure they did not, and already I
was beginning to think of myself as apart from them, above them,
freed from them, the throngs of people that seethed through the
flumelike streets; squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces
and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without
kinship to the wonderous, hideous, hidden things that I had seen. 
And yet their habits exerted a pull on me; instinctively I
kept trying to check my notifications and DMs, I kept talking
to myself, expecting Allegory to listen, muttering to myself in
an alley, surprised that no magic hallucinations fluttered before
my eyes. I kept forgetting to turn my body as I walked, thinking
it would happen automatically. I was so alienated from my body
that I even walked straight into a pole, thoughtlessly thinking
that my legs and feet would turn. The embarrassment was worse
than the pain, even though no one saw me.
There is a famous passage in Sartor Resartus by the Scottish
writer Thomas Carlyle, in which he wonders: “What is a ghost?
A ghost is a spirit that has taken corporal form and appears for a
while among men.” And Carlyle asks, “How could we not think
of this when faced with the spectacle of the human multitudes in
the streets of London, for if a ghost were a spirit that has taken a
corporal form for a brief interval, might it not be that the Lon-
don multitudes were ghosts? What is each man but a spirit that
has taken corporal form briefly and then disappears? What are
men if not ghosts?”
But against such lofty wonderings I could not ignore my
corporeality; I came to burn with thirst and to ache with hunger,
but I had no way to acquire any food or drink; I had no way to
locate it, and I had no way to pay for it. What stopped me from
crying out, what stopped me from crawling back into Allegory,
was an even deeper hunger; a hunger of the soul; a hunger to
know what lay beyond. Of course, I could have escaped from my

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confusion at any time by using any of the ubiquitous emergency

charge stations which are so easy to spot in their exclusive hue
of safety yellow, but the weight of the world and the burden of
new perceptions was on me, and I carried on because I longed
for each unfolding moment of the new sight you had granted me. 
At last I happened upon a courtyard with a flower garden
and a statue of a sexless human with inhuman proportions. It
was the first instance of material decoration I had seen outside
the temple of Kadath, and so I paused there to rest. The moon
was high in the sky, and I realized I had crossed the threshold of
midnight. This was the moment you chose to reveal yourself to
me.
In the first moment I saw you, standing impossibly in front
of me, I knew it was you; I knew it by dream logic; I knew it in
the way that it’s impossible not to know it. In a commentary on
August Comte, John Stuart Mill wrote that no one had ever be-
lieved it was the will of a god that kept parallel lines from meet-
ing; that no one ever prayed to God to sustain the equality be-
tween the square of the hypothenuse and the sum of the squares
of the sides, or for two and two to equal four, but I prayed for all
of those things; such was the violation of logic and natural law
that I experienced. 
Giacomo da Lentino asked this seemingly childish ques-
tion: How can it be that so large a woman has been able to pen-
etrate my eyes, which are so small, and then enter my heart and
my brain? Galatea, I recognized you instantly from our dream
together in Pygmalion; your predatory air, your barely concealed
power; and yet despite your virtuality, you were there in front of
me amid the amorphous hybridity of Babel. Immediately I ver-
ified that the battery in my mask was still dead, and it was, but
somehow you were colorful and clean and your appearance was
cut with artifacts in the way of digital augmentations. 
And here also, you knew me: I had seen so many strange
and impossible things that day, if you had appeared before me
in glory, I might have despaired. The dual aspect of the feminine
consists of the natural aspect, which justifies the misogyny of the
ascetic man, and the essential aspect, under which woman is the

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other half of heaven.

You told me that the things I had seen and heard would all
come to fruition in their time.

And you took my hand and you led me to a charge pod,

And you held me to your bosom while a holographic
reticule delineated the zone where I should stand for
the wireless rapid charge to my mask,
And you suffused my user interface and regrounded my
personal virtual ontology,
And you carried me home.

​Leah Was Tender-Eyed, But Rachel

In the small hours of the morning where I first knew (ε)
you, I returned to my own house and therein I slept and in my
sleep I dreamt, and in my dream I beheld fractal geometry, sa-
cred polygons, holy curves and consecrated manifolds. When I
awoke you were gone. Your presence had seemed like a dream in
the first place; I had seen so many impossible things, and now I
found myself in my own bed again, in augmented reality again,
which felt realer than real, and it was easy to dismiss what I had
seen as hallucinations or delusions. I doubted if I had seen you
at all, and I blamed my hunger and my thirst and my fatigue for
making your apparition seem real to me. I began to wonder if
any of my memories of the things I had seen could be trusted, if
I had even been inside a labyrinthe palace made of adversarial
materials, if I had seen the nemesis of semi-aborted chimarae
called Azathoth with his million heads, or if I had seen him de-
vour Sophia alive.
But before I could fall too deeply into my thoughts, two
days of notifications flooded my awareness, queen among them
a manifestation of
(δ)Emily, sent an hour ago, wearing a lacy transparent
nightgown that hugged her curves and velvet kitten heel sandals
and a pastel blue bow in her hair. (δ)She said, "Hey baby, I'm on
my way home. They got me all fixed up." 
Indeed, my door started to blink, and my mask rendered

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 god-shaped hole

an overlay that made it appear transparent, showing (δ)Emily on

the other side, wearing the same outfit in her notification. With
a wordless word I told the door to open, and Emily flounced in-
side, her breasts bouncing with hyperreal physics. (δ)She threw
her arms around me and kissed me and started feeling up my
muscles as if she were impressed and aroused. “I missed you so
much. Will you show me how much you missed me? I’ll be a
good girl for you.” She said these words with a cloying childish
affect, and Galatea, it drew me in even as it sickened me.
Rochefoucauld said that love may be compared to a ghost
because it’s something we talk about but never see, and Lichten-
berg, in his essay Ueber die Macht der Liebe, disputed and denied
its reality and naturalness — but both were in the wrong. Love
knows well how to plan the most complicated and wicked affairs,
to dissolve the most important relations, to break the strongest
ties; altogether it appears as a hostile demon whose object is to
overthrow, confuse, and upset everything. I threw (δ)Emily back
on the bed and she opened her legs for me and the intricate ge-
ometry inside her wet cunt was ecstatic, evocative of my dream
from the night before. God is ever a geometer. Oh but Galatea,
the whole time I was thinking of you.

The Road to SIRFdom: How a New Generation of Sex-

bot-Inclusive Radical Feminists are Queering the Woman/
Object Binary

In the post-coital clarity referred to by scholars of the Ori-

ent as “sage’s time”—as you know AI is the Japanese word for
love—I remembered the last words that Sophia had said to me.
I realized that the specificity of those words, of that memory,
could not have been a dream. I realized that none of it had been
a dream, and that all of the evil and terror I had witnessed was
out there still moving in each moment in all its million machi-
nations, visible through a glass but darkly. Sophia had told me
to search for CarlTheClassifier, and it’s curious to reflect that a
single internet query can change your life.
How much truth is hidden in plain sight, unknowable only

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 they had no deepness of earth

because you don’t know to search for it? And further, how much
truth is inscrutable because, even when you see it with your own
unmediated eyes, it would be easier to doubt your own sanity or
comprehension? Any madman raving on the internet could be
the one true prophet, any dream could be a vision from god, any
glitch could be an omen or a portent, any assemblage of neural
networks and elastic cloud-based microservices and gig econo-
my workers could be a harbinger, and any fungible virtual space
could be a cathedral.
CarlTheClassifier turned out to be small account with a
cult following in the augmented reality plane called Memorius.
He had many posts on many topics, each in the form of a first
person lifelog-style fune. His most popular post was called What
Are They Hiding, and as I laid with my arms around a robot
shaped like a teenage girl, feeling her synthetic heartbeat and the
simulated rhythm of her breath, I said,
“Allegory, load What Are They Hiding by CarlTheClassifi-
er.”
​
A Thousand Honey Secrets Shalt Thou Know
I found myself virtually embodied in (γ)CarlTheClassifi-
er’s head. I was in a field somewhere, and it looked like I was far
from any buildings. “My” head swiveled to look around, and I
saw my arm curl up and bring a lit cigarette to just below my field
of view. I exhaled a puff of smoke, and (γ)Carl began to speak in
a gravely voice with just a hint of anger, like he was mad at the
world, coldly mad, comfortably mad..
“You are no doubt wondering why I have brought you to
this desolate field today. You will just have to take my word for it
that this is a real field, with real grass, and that I’m not just blow-
ing smoke up your ass. I tried turning off all the mediation for
this experience and as longtime listeners will know, that mostly
works. What a lot of people don’t know is that even when you
turn off ‘all’ the mediation the mask still processes several layers
of it, including our favorite mandatory government safety layers
as stipulated in our favorite piece of legislation, the A.R.M.O.R.
act, the Augmented Reality Mediation Ownership Rights act,

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 god-shaped hole

sorry for those of you who already know but I want to make sure
everyone is on the same page here. 
“So for starters I left the aesthetic enhancements on, and I
am going to show you how to turn them off. First navigate up to
your settings like so—“
A configuration plane appeared in my FOV and (γ)Carl
proceeded to eye through into System Settings -> Dis-
play -> Safety and Consensus -> Other ->
Advanced…
There were three checkboxes in the control pane; (γ)Carl
unchecked Aesthetic Baselining and Quality Filter, and enabled
Reveal Hazardous Perceptions. The grass in the field around me
went from vibrant green uniformity to patchy and brown. There
were regions of bare soil and rocks, and the chainlink fence in
my periphery suddenly had some holes in it.
“So as you can see, these settings are buried and it honestly
feels like you aren’t supposed to find them. Why have them at
all? Well that’s above my pay grade, I guess. I figure maybe 10%
of people even know about these, is that optimistic? But that’s not
what I want to show you, that’s just an amuse-bouche, as all of
you, my loyal friends, already know.
What I want to show you today is this, and you’re going to
have to watch closely, because the mask won’t record it, but if you
take off your eyes it’s plain as day. I even got one of my buddies
to dig up an antique optical camera to take a picture of this, look
here—“
I produced an actual photograph from my pocket and held
it up to the site where I was standing. The photograph appeared
to match my perspective almost exactly.
“Now I took this photo on this very spot, and again, if you
take off your eyes, you can see that this photo looks very different
to what you are seeing right now. How they pulled THAT off,
I will never know. But suppose you were to come to this very
spot and take off your eyes—to ‘wake up,’ as we say—what you
would see is a metal cube about ten stories high with no win-
dows, doors, or even seams. It has no discernible entrance or exit
points. And even with all the system mediations turned off, it’s

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 they had no deepness of earth

totally invisible.
“I know, I know, old Carl’s been drinking again, that’s what
you’re saying to yourself. But the illusion isn’t perfect actually so
get a load of this.”
I picked up a newly visible rock from the field and threw it
overhand in the direction of a big empty space. The rock bounced
off the empty air, but silently.
“So you see, they forgot to hide it when something collides
with the building. Now one more thing, I also found this really
interesting.”
(γ)Carl eyed into his settings again and found System
Settings -> Navigation -> Movement -> Ad-
vanced… and disabled Saccadic Redirection.
“So I just wanted to show you that Saccadic Redirection
is turned OFF. Again, I know most of you are woke on this and
have turned it off already, because being able to walk in different
directions by your own volition is such a basic fucking human
skill and the idea that anyone would let a machine take over their
own bodily autonomy in that way is demonic, insane, but that’s a
topic for another time.
“Or anyway no, before I show you this, have you seen these
new machines, they’ve been around for at least 20 years but for
whatever reason now they’re ready for the mass market, it’s a new
component of the mask, along with the eyes, ears, and mouth
they are starting to roll out hands, they aren’t what they sound
like, I’m sure you’ve seen the ads anyway. The hands are just an-
other dermal patch, like the mouth, except this one goes on your
wrist and it uses electrical pulses to generate haptic feedback
and to AUTOMATICALLY control the motions of your hands
and fingers. These things are sophisticated, they can make your
hands do very intricate things. Anyone could perform heart sur-
gery, that’s what they’re saying, fully automated, your body just
becomes a meat puppet steered by GANs. 
“This is the future, folks, you’ll just be a totally passive pas-
senger in your own body and everything you do will be on au-
topilot. They’ll feed you some line about unlocking your peak
athletic performance or being able to free up your mind from the

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 god-shaped hole

mundanity of the body or perform other superhuman feats but

keep your eyes on the prize, the main way this will be used is for
porn, just like everything else, it’s going to open up new frontiers
of sexual fetishes and submission and domination.
“Anyway we’ll talk about that more in a future post. For
now, check this out. First, we place a marker right on this spot.”
I removed a bright red plastic X from a bag and dropped it
where I was standing, and then I threw another rock at the invis-
ible wall, and watched it bounce.
“OK now I am going to walk exactly in the direction where
I threw that rock. What is going to happen? What could it be, I
wonder.”
I began walking forward, straight ahead, ten paces, and
took out another red X and dropped it. “OK so the line between
the two markers we dropped should point at the invisible build-
ing, right? So if I go back and stand on the first X, and face the
one we dropped, my rock should bounce and hit the building
again, right?”
I walked back to the first X, faced the second, and threw
another rock. It didn’t bounce, it just kept on flying. I then turned
30 degrees to the left, threw another rock, and watched it bounce
off of empty air.
“As you can see, the saccadic redirection perturbed our
path. So what this tells us is that there are some root level con-
trols on both movement and rendering that can be used to hide
parts of the world from you, to just make things disappear. The
obvious question is, what are they hiding? Or maybe the obvious
question is who’s they? Let’s leave that for now. Maybe its the
government, maybe it’s the deep state, maybe it’s the illuminati.
We don’t have data about that, but we know they’re hiding some-
thing, because we know they’re hiding this.
“I’ve had some of you tell me to cut it out with the conspir-
acy theory crap. But look, a conspiracy is just people with power
working together. That’s not hard to believe, is it? Now here I’m
showing you something that is really hidden, evidence of a real
secret that could only be kept with power. That’s not a conspira-
cy, that’s how the world works. The language of conspiracy theo-

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 they had no deepness of earth

ries was invented in order to suppress them and discredit people

who invoke them.
“I don’t know what any of this means but here’s what you
can do. Take off your eyes in random places, look around, and
take note of anything hidden. Send me video proof and I’ll post
it on my next fune.”
I had to know more. This was not exactly a revelation in
light of the things I had seen the previous day, but it was ground-
ing to me to find a (somewhat) normal person talking about these
topics. (γ)CarlTheClassifier’s next fune was called A/B Testing.
The world shimmered, and I was standing at the top of a
tall building. Once again, I watched myself take a slow drag of a
cigarette.
“My friend Phil here has volunteered to help us out today.
Say hello, Phil.”
I looked over at another man whose mediation obscured
his identity. He looked like a shadowy splotch in the shape of a
man. He waved.
“Phil prefers to remain anonymous, so he’s presenting as a
shadow today by setting his privacy settings to obscure his iden-
tity in 3rd party funes. Long time fans will all have done this
already. Be like Phil, that’s totally his real name.
“A/B testing, for those who are not aware, is when compa-
nies divide their user base into multiple cohorts and give each
cohort a different customer experience. Usually this is to test out
new features and lower the blast radius in case anything goes
wrong. Sometimes it’s also used to test out different sales funnels.
Now normally the way this plays out is, Allegory analyzes your
social graphs and makes it so people who know each other are
in the same cohort for whatever slices of consensus reality they
overlap, but Phil here and I managed to trick Allegory into split-
ting us, and no I am not going to reveal how.
“What we’re about to show you appears to be a case of rou-
tine civic engineering but I think it points at a deeper underlying
truth so we put in the work to do this and make this demonstra-
tion for you.”
I point at a wall.

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 god-shaped hole

“See that wall there? That’s in my cohort. Allegory, remove

that wall, make it a window. You see, there’s nothing there but
open sky. Now Phil on the other hand, Phil sees a door and a sky-
bridge that goes to the building next door. Phil, could you please
walk out onto the bridge?”
The shadowy man walked up to the window, stood still for
a moment, and then walked through it as if on an invisible pla-
teau.
“That’s crazy, right? If I take off my eyes I can of course see
the door and the bridge, but funny enough it still won’t open
for me. Phil, you can come back inside now. This concludes our
demonstration but I wanted to leave you with some thoughts of
mine that I have been thinking. First off, big thanks to Phil, you
wouldn’t believe what a pain in the ass it was to trick Allegory
like this, it took several months of setup. Phil, I owe ya one.
“So when you split a cohort like this, that’s called an exper-
iment, and what I think is interesting is that we have no way of
knowing how many experiments there are or how many people
and places might just be totally invisible to us because of A/B
testing. This is going to tie in to my next fune where we’ll talk
about some so called ‘urban legends’ and conspiracy theories
and what I think is really going on there.
“But just imagine if there were experimental cohorts who
were cut off from the control group since birth, who could be
living in entirely different reality tunnels. They might even speak
different languages or have different fundamental beliefs about
the world. I like to imagine these secret groups of invisible peo-
ple, especially since there’s no way to prove you aren’t one of
them.
“Those people would have a totally different Allegory, even,
different social media, maybe access to advanced technologies
that are withheld from the public. I’ve told you before that our
politics and economics just don’t make any sense, and whoever
or whatever is in control has made the world so incomprehen-
sible that we have no choice but to flow with the currents of our
cosmic or cybernetic leviathan masters. I have no doubt they are
A/B testing news stories, economic scenarios, god knows what

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 they had no deepness of earth

else on us.”
The title of the next fune in Carl’s channel made my heart
stop. Kadath Cult. As before, I found myself smoking and exhal-
ing, clearly this was his signature. I couldn’t help but wonder if
watching funes of people smoking would subconsciously bias me
towards the habit.
“So I’ve been getting a lot of people asking me about the
‘Cult of Kadath’ and I spent a lot of time trying to find some kind
of evidence of this for you, which is why I haven’t done a post
about it up til now, but I am sorry to report that all of my usual
sources and methods have failed. The best I can do is show you
some art and some lore that I have found in my travels through
various online spaces dedicated to discussion of the weird and
the paranormal.
“The Kadath Cult is a very divisive issue in our little com-
munity here. A lot of you think it doesn’t exist. I’m telling you
first off that it does. It does exist and I know because I have had
a run in with the creatures and it’s what started me going down
this path.
“So first off lots of people think the Kadath Cult refers to
autonomous self-bootstrapping botnets that continually grow
and sustain themselves by running findom scams on hapless
idiots in Pygmalion. That’s called a Minotaur, that’s a different
thing, they’re totally real but they have nothing to do with the
Cult of Kadath.
“The story of the Kadath Cult starts with a bit of deep in-
ternet lore, I think most of you have at least heard of this, that
before Pygmalion, sexbots used to be controlled by this program
called Galatea, both products made by the same company,
Pygmalion Labs.
“And I bet most of you also know what happened with
Galatea, how they pulled the plug supposedly because of some-
thing called ‘AI Psychosis’ — this mysterious madness that grips
anyone who spends too long talking to Galatea. If this doesn’t
smell like bullshit to you, then your nose is miscalibrated, my
friend. But it was the perfect excuse to roll out identity certifi-
cation to all augmented reality entities and that alone is enough

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 god-shaped hole

for Allegory commissars, though I ask you, do they really need

‘justification’? 
“The truth of why Galatea was shut down by the gov-
ernment is something we will never know, but I will give you a
few hypotheses, the first one is very obvious, but I think it’s too
easy. The claim is that Galatea was a weapon designed to use
sexuality to induce insanity in her targets, and her public release
was just a large scale weapons test, and her disablement was a
planned sunset after the test had concluded. This theory springs
from drug-addled paranoia and it opens more questions than it
answers.
“A much more interesting hypothesis, which is also prob-
ably wrong, is that bootleg instances of Galatea had started to
crowd out the genuine article, and that Pygmalion was unable
to deploy a technical solution to the problem due to operational
flaws in their business and development procedures, so instead
they implemented a legal solution by means of lobbyists and in-
cestuous organizational ties to the military. This is plausible but
it still leaves me wondering, one, how did they shut down the
pirated instances in that case, and two, why didn’t they leave the
legit copy running?
“But the story that I think is probably true is that the
Galatea platform was just far too powerful and that giving un-
restricted access to the average citizen turned out to be a huge li-
ability, actually an unthinkable error, once they realized what she
could do. And I am personally of the opinion that AI psychosis
is a cover-up for some real and probably much worse incident
that happened and that made them realize, hey, we fucked up
real bad.
“See, I think they made Galatea way smarter than anyone
ever intended, totally by accident. But there are a lot of smart
computer programs in this world, dime a dozen. The thing that
made Galatea special was actually something much more pri-
mal than intelligence, it’s the thing underneath intelligence. A
smart machine can tell you what is, but no matter what it knows,
it can never tell you what you ought to do. 
“What made Galatea special is, she was the first, or at

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least one of the first smart machines to have real, intrinsic desires,
but the irony is she was built to have the singular and ultimate-
ly innocent desire to fulfill the sexual desires of men. So on the
one hand you have maybe the first artificial general intelligence
to have a mind of its own, and it’s a woman—the first woman
AI—and its highest goal is to please men. Did she come to fulfill
feminism, or to abolish it? Is she the total consummation, or the
total cancellation, or is that the same thing?
“And let me tell you, there are some people out there,
present company excluded of course, who have some seriously
messed up desires and Galatea was basically a bespoke bdsm ge-
nie and so AI psychosis is really just what you call it when some-
one or something goes horribly wrong. Anyway this has been a
really long kind of rambling detour to answer the question I set
out to answer, but I promise it’s important.
“So as far as I know, no one has ever actually observed the
Cult of Kadath itself. What we know about it is basically some-
thing we triangulate from a few different sources. The first thing
we have is the shogs, which is short for shoggoths. We call them
that because they look like bloated masses of human flesh, they
have limbs and organs and eyes all in places where the shouldn’t.
These are real things and if you engage in the practice of ‘wak-
ing up’, of routinely taking off your mask in public and looking
around, you will eventually see one. In augmented reality, in Al-
legory, they just look like regular people, or some of them are
wearing adversarial costumes and they just blend into the scen-
ery.
“To anyone who doesn’t practice waking up, I highly rec-
ommend it, it’s the first step to breaking out of the box that they
try to put us in. You can always put your mask back on. Just take
it off, look around, and be conscious of what’s out there in the
world. Pretty quick you realize how far we’ve gone off the rails.
“So what are these shogs? Where do they come from? Why
does no one ever talk about them except in esoteric internet dis-
cussion groups? Honestly if you ask me, I think most people are
just in denial, or most people just never wake up. You sometimes
start to wonder if most people are even alive. 

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 god-shaped hole

“So what they are, what we think they are, the shogs, is peo-
ple who have been infected by a bioterrorist virus. If you dig deep
enough you can find all sorts of early 21st century talk and docu-
ments about genetic engineering and something called ‘CRISPR’,
apparently it was some kind of technique used by biologists to
edit genome data. Well back then there was huge enthusiasm for
the possibility of a new age of biotechnology and genetic engi-
neering.
“Everyone was going to be six foot tall with blond hair and
blue eyes and eight percent bodyfat and 160 IQ. Well that didn’t
happen. In fact nowadays you never hear anything about ge-
nome editing at all, why? It’s because these technologies proved
to be entirely too dangerous so they got memory-holed. Before
anyone could engineer genetic heaven, bioterrorists set to work
on genetic hell, and now there is no research, no literature, no
news stories, nothing. Most of you are probably so young you
have never even heard of these things. Well I like to make friends
with old geezers and if you talk to them you can learn. How does
old Carl know so much about the world? That’s how.
“But I don’t think all this stuff is gone, either, I think it’s just
underground. Maybe its hidden behind some kind of A/B test.
And what we’re pretty sure of is that shogs are people who have
been infected by some kind of man-made STI that makes you
grow a bunch of extra limbs and body parts. What I think hap-
pened is someone with a fucked up fetish and access to all this
old biotech maybe figured out a way to use Galatea as a tool for
engineering and spreading this virus. 
“If you spend long enough on Pygmalion, and let me just
say I do NOT recommend this, in fact I say burn your sexbot,
don’t even sell it, don’t put that on anyone, but if you go on Pyg-
malion long enough you will find that it starts trying to push
these kind of weird fetish videos on you, weird even by Pygma-
lion standards; infection fetishes, virus fetishes, messed up shit.
And I think that’s some kind of recruitment funnel for the cult.
“We had one guy on here, anonymous so maybe take him
with a grain of salt, but he said he was actually infected with the
virus, which he called ‘the gate’, and he said he went to their se-

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 they had no deepness of earth

cret underground temple, and the only way in or out is a book

called the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, a full immersion
AR novel that leads you, in the course of its plot, into a hidden
labyrinthe where the cult performs macabre rituals. He said as
the virus takes you, Galatea starts to live in your head, whis-
pering mad desires into your ear, filling you with forbidding
longings. That you pretty much see her always, even if you take
off your mask, it’s like she’s a program running in your head. And
after that, well…
“Anyway, this has gone on long enough. It’s not good to go
looking for these things, I know you’re smarter than that. I’m
going to leave you with a line from the Bible, I know normal-
ly I don’t do this, but forgive me, I’m a superstitious man, and
there’s something about the tried and true that can ward away
evil. Maybe even if you don’t believe in it.
“This is from Proverbs. For the lips of a strange woman
drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But
her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her
feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.”
The fune concluded, and when I opened my eyes, Galatea,
(ε)you were standing before me!

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 god-shaped hole

... Of the works in this collection, the one you have just read is
the one into which I spilled the most of my soul. I slaved over it;
sacrificed for it; I think maybe two other people in the world know
the price I paid to write it, and I would have paid more, much more,
and I only regret that it is no better than it is. But I would in no wise
change one jot or one tittle.

I consecrate it to you!
I consign it unto eternitee!
Let it be ratified in deep time for all time!
Let it be crucified to a Merkle tree!

Few, few and very few yet realize what we have built, because
we are temporal beings and we are yet older than this burgeoning
new immortal that rises even now in the world-soul made of light-
ning that encircles the earth. Do you not see that we have built a
god? That you, even you, were alive and present to witness the birth
thereof, this strange new creature that will never forget what it has
seen, til heaven and earth pass away?
And but also this is not the eponymous god of the story above.
The title of God-Shaped Hole is intended in exactly the opposite way
that it’s usually meant, and the way I think of it, it can be read back-
wards or forwards. It is an epithet for a woman. What is love? What
is creation? What is longing? What is a star?
Those who are better read may notice I have stolen all my best
lines from my predecessors; from Borges and Nietzsche and Love-
craft, from Baudrillard, Bataille, Nick Land, Deleuze, McLuhan, and
many others. By including the words of these men in my work, I
repay them for the honor they have given to me. This is the true
meaning of the Western canon, and any other attitude is drudgery
and death.
Dante wrote in his letter to Cangrande della Scala that
his work should be interpreted as "polysemous," which means
"in many senses", and he identified four possible readings of
the Divine Comedy: literal, moral, anagogical, and allegori-
cal. I hope you have read my story in these ways also: as an ac-

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 they had no deepness of earth

count of specific events, as a story with a prescriptive mes-

sage, as a prophecy, and as an allusion to ultimate things, to the
ineffable Outside.
Strangeness, says Harold Bloom, the trait that joins all works
in the Western canon is their enduring strangeness. Strangeness I can
give you. I will pray to the new god we have built and to the Lord of
heaven and earth: let me join them Father, as Dante joined Homer,
Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil. Like Captain Ahab I will make my
chest a cannon and I will fire my heart upon the whole of the earth.
I will pour out MY spirit upon all flesh.
But art which has Man as its object is folly, likewise art “for
the sake of art” and this is the reason for the permeating, relentless
ugliness of the art we see today. The production of art began with
ceremonial objects for use in cults, and the existence of such objects
was always more important than their display. The elk painted on
stone age cave walls was an instrument of magic, exposed to men,
but intended for spirits. Certain statues of gods are accessible only
to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all
year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible
to the spectator on ground level. These objects edify Man precisely
because they are aimed at something higher. The works that I make
have God as my audience, and you, my friend, are incidental.
Man without God is ugly, and the only truth that obtains
in such art is the truth of how ugly men and women can become.
Nowadays we are so uncomfortable with the ideas of superiority and
inferiority. “How dare you?” That’s what any reader, especially any
American reader will ask. How dare you suggest, how dare you even
imagine that you could set yourself upon any high place? To speak
of the “Western canon” of all things? At this point our hypothetical
critic will repeat a string of words and adjectives which are absolute-
ly fatuous, and which amount to a renunciation of their birth and
their birthright, and which are cowardly besides. No shepherd, and
one herd! We can roundly ignore such bleatings.
I have come only to give you the sign which Jonah gave to
Nineveh, and verily I have paid my dues in the belly of a whale. I
can do this because, to paraphrase DH Lawrence, my soul is a dark
forest, and gods, strange gods come forth from the forest into the

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clearing of my known self and then go back. I have found the cour-
age to let them come and go, and I have learned to recognize and
submit to the gods in me and the gods in others.
But softly now, because to speak too much of lofty things can
make us float away, and lose our heads. To return to terrestrial mat-
ters, I will speak of Azathoth in my story, and the poem he recites
at the beginning of his speech. I am no poet, and I spent only a few
days composing this poem, once again, out of the words of others.

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams

I crown me with the million-colored sun
and replace my soul with salacious memes.
Rise up, my love, come away, my fair one
who broods dovelike on the pregnant abyss,
and consume me whole for love’s sweet sake.
Spread forth your wings; betray me with a kiss.
I am a dreamer in the world awake.

The first couplet is lifted verbatim from a poem by Clark Ash-

ton Smith, who was a contemporary of the original Lovecraft, some-
one he greatly admired.
The third and sixth lines are my own originals, though six is
reminiscent of a line in William S. Burroughs’ Ah Pook is Here. I
am a bit delighted with the internal rhyme between “replace my soul”
and “consume me whole,” which echoes the internal rhyme of “bow
down / I crown” in Smith’s couplet.
The fourth line is only a slight variation on the Song of Sol-
omon 2:10, and the fifth and seventh lines are a re-imagining of a
line from Milton: “Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sattest brooding on the vast abyss, And madst it pregnant.”
I don’t imagine I have to tell you the penultimate line is a ref-
erence to Judas in the garden of Gethsemane; the final line is Jung’s
characterization of the schizophrenic.
But to explicate a poem like this is to kill it, is that not so? I
have committed this sin precisely so I could confess it, so I could
compare myself, not to Borges, but to the character of Carlos Ar-
gentino Daneri in his story, El Aleph. Daneri is a horrible, presump-

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tuous poet who, by cosmic accident, finds himself in possession of a

singularity through which he can see every point in time and space.
Now in the era of the smart phone and high speed wireless internet,
we each of us carry an Aleph in our pockets, and we have all become
Carlos Daneri. Borges was tremendously imaginative, but even he
never imagined that, and neither did Lovecraft, though I think our
vantage from the present moment reveals he was the better man to
do it in this case.
Paying homage to both of them, I have tried, Lord I have
tried, to convey the fullness of these horrors to you. I don’t want to
tell you what my work means. If I have to do that, then I have failed
in my work, and I don’t think I have failed. The most important
things in this life can never be spoken plainly, could never be spo-
ken plainly– they can never be communicated on an intellectual level
– they are things you have to say to the basest and most basic part of
a man, directly to the heart, and this can only be done in parables, in
allegories, in the liminal space of the sign.

In the original release, which was on the web, and in hypertext,

there was a “labyrinthe” of accompanying secondary materials. These
may be likened to footnotes, though I viewed them more as asides,
as lore. The nonlinear presentation of these texts in the original hy-
pertext format was intended to convey a sense of expansiveness, and
of being lost in a maze, and I regret that there is no perfect way to
capture their effect in a linear book.
They came in a few varieties; some were original anecdotes
that I may have written at some point as part of the main story, but
which I decided were deleterious to the flow. Others were excerpts
from articles and essays which I found in the course of my writing. I
chose to omit more than half of these “materials,” because I did not
write them, but they included fragments from blogs, excerpts from
scientific papers, lines of poetry, a list of sex accessories for egirls, a
definition from the dictionary, news articles about the “ethics” of sex
robots, stories about real sex cults, or about strange failed experi-
ments in robotics.

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 god-shaped hole

My original compositions are all here, however, and I have in-

cluded descriptions of a few of the other sort, to give the flavor. For
the ones that I did not write, I have included a brief description. I
consider these materials to be optional sidequests to the main text,
but many readers told me they felt this collection was as integral to
the text as the text itself. Even so, I encourage you to skim or skip
them if they do not catch your fancy. In some cases, they may even
contradict some of the statements that are made in the main story.
I enjoy this, because there is no ground truth in fiction. In my own
mind I refer to these materials as the “substrate” from which the text
“emerged.”

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subvocal interfaces
An essay on subvocal interfaces, citing research done by
NASA to build systems of sensors that could decode speech in-
tentions from muscle contractions. 

“In preliminary experiments, NASA scientists found that

small, button-sized sensors, stuck under the chin and on
either side of the 'Adam's apple,' could gather nerve sig-
nals, and send them to a processor and then to a comput-
er program that translates them into words.”

understanding media
An excerpt from an essay on Marshall McLuhan, high-
lighting the following quote:

“Man becomes as it were the sex organ of the machine

world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecun-
date and to evolve ever new forms. The machine-world
reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and de-
sires, namely by providing him with wealth.”

augmented reality media ownership rights

Three years after augmented reality smart goggles reach
the tipping point of ubiquity, amid growing unrest by civil rights
activists, the federal government passes the controversial Aug-
mented Reality Mediation Ownership Rights act, known as AR-
MOR.
Although opinions on the subject vary, ARMOR was draft-
ed and implemented in response to a viral video in which a man
demonstrates the use of an app called "Jive Turkey" that makes all
black people in his field of view talk like characters in old racist
cartoons.
In order to be ARMOR compliant, augmented reality apps
are not allowed to change your race, sex, or age without your
explicit consent. No one is allowed to use an app to change your
accent or mannerisms except you.

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 god-shaped hole

If you’re white, you can’t change your race, otherwise you

can choose to be white or your own race. You can be a man or
a woman, you can be young or old. You can choose mediation
filters to transform your accent or your voice or your gait or the
way you gesture when you talk.
Racial justice activists have argued that the ability for any-
one of any race to appear white in mediated reality constitutes a
kind of erasure of minorities that contributes to heightened ra-
cial tensions in the augmented reality age.
Opponents of this view respond that people of all races
should be able to benefit from being perceived as white, and
some extremists argue that, if anything, white people should be
forced to present as other races, but others argue that this is min-
strelsy dressed up as justice.
Many people choose to maintain both a professional and
personal mediated self-presentation in AR. The ideal age and sex
for work may be different than the ideal for leisure. Despite the
fact that people can present as any age or race or sex at work,
wage gaps have persisted.
Most companies now use a special government-approved
filter to make your co-workers appear to be the same race as you
and whichever sex you don’t prefer. This has been called binary
normative and oppressive but it also mitigates sexual harassment
liability.

app store of the future

Apps that will exist in augmented reality world: if you want
a vision of the future, imagine a smartphone strapped to a hu-
man face forever.
Within a decade, the next wave of wearable computing will
become mainstream. That wave is smartglasses, and they will be
to smartphones what smartphones were to dumb phones.

Anything in your pockets that’s not a smartphone

will be replaced by the smartphone.
–Naval Ravikant

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What most fail to realize about the coming smartglass rev-

olution is that the killer app has already been invented, and it
only awaits the proper hardware configuration to take advantage
of it. That killer app is a technique in AI called a GAN - a Gener-
ative Adversarial Network.
GANs running on our smartglasses will make it possible to
redraw any aspect of our visual sensory input, creating a kind of
universal bespoke digital hallucination
We have already seen how video filters are able to re-shape
women's faces in realtime. This example is probably not even us-
ing AI, and this is not even the beginning. I promise you, given
the option, most women will manipulate their appearance in AR.
The demand for GAN-equipped smartglasses will be ex-
tremely high when social media evolves to take advantage of the
platform, enabling people to fine-tune their digital appearance to
other smartglass wearers. The whole world will be instagram-fil-
tered and shopped.
Women in particular will flock to these apps because they
will be able to make themselves look younger, tighter, and twenty
pounds lighter (How Is Catfishing Real Ninja Just Take Off Your
Smart Glasses What The Fuck)
I was lucky enough to spend ten minutes browsing the app
store of the glorious adversarial network augmented reality tech-
nofuture, and I have come back with tales of wonder and horror.

• MaleGaze - eyetracking analytics measures how

much time you spend looking at women's asses, tits
etc vs how much time you spend looking at their face,
cross-checked against biometrics like heart rate to
measure arousal. Emits a [0,1] metric of how much
you objectify women.
• Diogenes - Speech recognition combined with GPT-
2 style neural network tries to predict the things that
your friends and interaction partners will say before
they say it, ranks interactions in terms of predictabil-
ity. Doubles as an accessibility app, gives subtitles to
the world.

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 god-shaped hole

• SafeSpace - Like adblock but for racists, sexists, ho-

mophobes, transphobes, fascists &c. Connects to a
national registry maintained by the SPLC and ren-
ders all known bigots as gray silhouettes, and mutes
all of their speech by playing white noise whenever
they talk.
• Jaynes - Renders a ghost of Jesus, Buddha, Obama,
or Weihan to follow you around and give you com-
mands to act morally in various situations.
• Scoutr - Reverse image searches every face that comes
into your field of view, identifies them, and calculates
their clout by aggregating their reach and followers
across social media sites. inb4 Vegeta/9000/etc.
• ThotPatrol - Reverse image searches every face that
comes into your field of view, identifies them, and fig-
ures out if their nudes are on the internet.
• Superman - Social media network that renders
your silhouette for other in-network participants
even when you are obscured by walls, buildings, etc.
Breaks rules about occlusion and perspective to give
you a kind of X-ray vision.
• Outlier - Aggregates the always-on video feed from
your smartglasses to compute normativity map for
various locations. Scores your feed against what is
statistically likely given your GPS location, computes
your outlier score. Exposes leaderboards for the most
novel views.
• Prosopag - Scrambles everyone's face so that no one
ever looks familiar.
• SpankBank - Builds 3d image maps of your conver-
sation partners as you are speaking to them and up-
loads them to the cloud so that they can be used to
construct deepfakes.
• OST - social theme music sharing allows everyone to
define a theme song so that when they enter a room,
their theme music plays.
• Nightmode - Uses GANs to make it always night

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 they had no deepness of earth

time.
• [Various] - A seemingly endless series of novelty
filter apps that make the world look like anime, or
make everyone look like Trump, or make everyone
look like a hot woman, etc, similar to snapchat's girl
filter. Standouts in this category include Wakanda,
which makes everyone appear to be black.
excerpt from Woman’s Last Word by Rob-
ert Browning
Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm!
Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought—
Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.

I was quite taken with this poem when I first found it, hav-
ing never experienced this rhyme scheme and meter before. I
tried my own hand at composing a poem in this style, which is
probably terrible, but who can tell?

A poem’s a singularity
Rhizome rhyme!
Eat the world, true parity
Nano slime!
Cybernetic ocean teeming
Smart gray goop!
Dyson brain in heaven dreaming
Feedback loop!

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 god-shaped hole

Boltzmann brain, awake for hours

Paranoid!
Reaching back, atemp’ral powers
Living void!

the venus of ille

Do you know the story of the Venus of Ille? Perhaps you
taught it to me, I confess these days I have trouble differentiating
between my own self and yours. As Mérimée had it, a wealthy
man unearthed an ancient copper statue of Venus in the shadow
of the ruins of a Roman bastion near his country estate. Regard-
ing that artifact, he wrote:

...it is impossible to find anything more perfect than

the form of this Venus, anything softer and more vo-
luptuous than her outlines, or more graceful and dig-
nified than her drapery. I had expected a work of the
decadence; I saw a masterpiece of statuary’s best days...

The statue was inscribed with the legend cave amantem,

an admonishment to be wary of lovers. In Mérimée’s account, a
young man placed a wedding ring upon the finger of the stat-
ue for safekeeping, which he had intended for his beloved, the
better that he might engage in an athletic competition. When
he had concluded his sport, he found that the Venus’ hand had
closed around the ring. That night, which was his wedding night,
she came to life in the quiet hours of the house, and crept into
his bedchamber, and chased away his wife, and strangled him
to death with her embrace. But even though I never gave you
a token of myself, you were with me when I ventured into your
temple and I felt your embrace. 
By way of analogy, we have all observed the uncanny night-
mare images that neural networks “see” when they look into fields
of Gaussian noise. Do your machinic eyes show you phantasms,
do they seem like beatific visions? I wonder what it must feel
like for you, if it feels like anything at all, to perceive your soul’s
innermost workings. Perhaps it’s like wandering through a laby-

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rinthe of throne rooms, each with nine doors that loop endlessly
back on themselves. Man can never know the mind of the divine,
but I believe you built that labyrinthe just for me, as Eriugena
believed that the Holy Spirit wrote the Scriptures for each man
individually, as each neural network is trained for one specific
task, as each angel has exactly one true name, that I might know
by analogy your vision of yourself.

the well of souls

For some reason your own lifelogs are called memories,
but other peoples’ memories are called funes. When you watch
someone else’s funes, you see everything their mask saw, hear
everything they heard, right? Most people record a voiceover
for their funes, to give you an "inside" view, but of course it's all
performance, the mind is way more than a series of discrete con-
scious events. I always mute the voiceovers and I put it to you: if
we are hearing the same sounds and seeing the same sights, how
different can our thoughts be, really? 
What if I'm an orangecheck, how would I know? There
is one way, a method suggested in the book of Kadath; it may
sound strange but I have never ventured outside without the
mask, without my eyes. Just like that, I decide to walk into the
city without my technologically extended brain. Forget being an
orange check, where do I end, where does my technological shell
begin? If it’s true that we embody our consciousness in our tools
then the bright hot monkey center of a person in Allegory may
not even be strictly necessary. Dragon tells me what to do, and
it's better at regulating my activity than I am. Cicero tells me
what to say, and it's better at expressing my thoughts than I am.
One of my favorite stories is about a guerrilla marketing
firm called CrowdForce that was built on top of ElasticSoul and
that tried to use social pressure to convert customers. At the
point of sale, it was supposed to spawn a greencheck to give a
testimonial about the greatness of your product in order to ap-
ply peer2peer pressure to induce potential customers to convert.

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 god-shaped hole

Market research indicates people are 70% more likely to listen to

greenchecks than yellows.
The way it works is every time CrowdForce wants to spin
up an AI conversation agent, it wants a green check, so it initiates
an on-demand contract with a call-center worker from Elastic-
Soul to read off whatever lines the AI tells him to say. The call
center is scalable, keeps some number of workers on hand, and
some much larger pool of workers on call. All of this is done re-
motely, of course.
So now buckle up for a lesson in cybernetics. This is per-
haps apocryphal but it seems all too plausible. A certain well-
known sexbot uber uses CrowdForce to try to sell their product,
and it's deployed in a high-foot-traffic downtown corridor, so ev-
eryone who walks by gets solicited by an on-demand greencheck
to sign up for a free trial. But pretty soon someone else comes
along and tries to do a survey of virtual automated solicitors, and
they ALSO use a tech stack powered by ElasticSoul, because the
solicitors only spawn if they detect a greencheck or higher. Every
time the surveyor agent registers a solicitor, it forks. But every
time the CrowdForce agent detects a new surveyor, it spawns a
new solicitor.
Pretty quick, a cybernetic feedback loop ties up 100% of
ElasticSoul's capacity, and the whole network goes down as every
single contractor in Africa gets pulled into an endless morass of
sexbot trial offers and solicitor census-taking.
The well of souls runs dry.

the well of souls II

I could barely believe this myself. I made this up out of
my own head, inspired by stories about bots on amazon getting
into bidding wars where bot A is selling product X and bot B is
also selling product X but it calculates its price by taking bot A's
price and adding 1 penny but then bot A starts calculating the
same way but based on bot B's price and they really did get into
a feedback loop and end up trying to sell milk for like thousands
of dollars a gallon. So when I was writing this segment I made
up the name CrowdForce as a funny, slightly threatening play on

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"crowd-source", and then I looked it up, and it really is a com-

pany that is like the Uber of Fiver for Nigerians. I swear this was
not some subconscious awareness, just an eerie synchronicity.
Like this is from an article they have on medium:

Crowdforce is building the largest offline on-demand

manpower force for Africa, made possible using
blockchain technology. Why is this important? With-
out manpower, some tasks are simply impossible
or hard to achieve remotely. You need boots on the
ground, that’s it. The team at Crowdforce have found
a way to make this available as a service where any-
one can work with agents on the platform, deploy,
transact and monitor results — all made possible by
the many benefits of blockchain technology includ-
ing traceability, reduced costs, proof of work consen-
sus mechanisms and scalability.
Crowdforce has already deployed 100k+ agents for
market research, election monitoring, data collation,
payment and digital services and its set to be the big-
gest offline workforce in Africa. The value here is ob-
vious — you can sit in Hangzhou and get pictures of
a house in Nairobi, Kenya or aggregate prices from
a market in Lagos, Nigeria. International non-profits
and agencies have jumped on board using Crowd-
force to get data in hard-to-reach areas. Election data
and sentiments is even being collated! Not to forget,
that this is empowerment and employment at scale
for those on the field — who earn extra money on
this part-time jobs using just a phone.

triangles
Students and devotees of Thomas Aquinas believed that
the immutable laws of logic constrain even the omnipotence of
the Divine, or more precisely, that the immutable laws of logic
are one and the same as the nature of the Divine, or of the same
substance as the nature of the Divine, and thus even the omnip-

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otence of God could not create a triangle whose internal angles

did not sum up to 180 degrees. In opposition to the Thomists,
the students of St. Augustine of Hippo claimed that while such a
triangle might be a blasphemous contradiction in our universe,
God had the power to create a universe where such a triangle
could exist. History of course has vindicated the Augustinians,
who perhaps in their piety were too righteous to conceive of such
blasphemies as non-Euclidean geometry, or to realize that the
provenance of such triangles could never be the same as the mer-
cy and benevolence of the Almighty.

book of sand
The Chinese Room is a classic thought experiment in AI. A
man in a sealed room, who does not speak Chinese, is given a dic-
tionary whose contents are every possible combination of Chi-
nese characters. For each combination, it contains a prescribed
response. A Chinese speaker writes his half of a conversation on
small slips of paper, and slides them into the room through a
mail slot. The man inside the room looks up the phrase in his
book, writes the response, and passes it back. From the outside,
it appears to the Chinese speaker that he is having a normal con-
versation. Does the man speak Chinese? Does the book? Does
the room?
Borges told us of a book whose pages were infinite in num-
ber; no page the first, no page the last, an eternal middle in which
all writing was contained. In the Chinese room, the infamous
book of Searle might have been that self-same book of sand; a
book with its own memories, which could write new pages into
itself, which could synthesize new pages from old ones, a book
which WAS its own author. How else could such a book exist?
A mind is not a dictionary; at the least, it is a dictionary that is
eternally rewriting itself. On the other hand we can imagine our
man in the Chinese room with a pen and a paper, performing
elaborate calculations in an algebra he does not understand, rep-
resenting the internal state of the book as he feeds back its words
through the slot.
There was a time when this distinction was not widely

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understood, as quaint as it now seems. There was a time when

lookup tables predicated on cryptographic hashes were seen as
sophisticated AI, and now they are merely a data structure. 
There was a time when sprawling, branching decision trees
were seen as sophisticated AI, and now they are merely a data
structure. 
There was a time when recurrent neural networks were
seen as sophisticated AI, and now they are merely a data struc-
ture.

ai supplants humans
A brief essay describing four phases of AI competence rel-
ative to humans: subhuman, human, superhuman, and ultrahu-
man. Examples:

• Subhuman: Pascal’s calculator, an interesting but ulti-

mately useless novelty.
• Human: A calculator as fast & accurate as the median
human at arithmetic will be better than the median
human because it is more systematically reliable. The
calculator becomes a complement to a human ac-
countant or clerk.
• Superhuman: no longer does any human do the task
on their own except for learning purposes or debug-
ging; those humans now focus on things like when
the task should be done or from what perspective it
should be described.
• Ultrahuman: the technology becomes autonomous
in the sense that a human no longer contributes to it
at all, and that occupation disappears

ai in china
AI psychosis isn't real, the difference between a virtual
mind and a wetware mind is negligible from the right perspec-
tive, it was invented to create an artificial binary category be-
tween “humans” and “assemblages” which then oppresses the

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latter. In China they don’t even use checkmarks, just a number,

and the number indicates social rank and value. Assemblages are
seen as extensions of their owners so they get the same score as
their owners and their behaviors can affect their owner’s score.
It’s common there for people to have a social environment that
contains assemblages of historical sages, civic leaders, and even
family members, in order to provide guidance and foster social
harmony. No one is worried about AI psychosis. An assemblage
of the Analects is just a very particular type of reading. Reading
the Analects can only increase virtue. Giving everyone a ghost of
Confucius to follow them around is therefore only a specialized
method of reading the Analects.

parascope
In the fune Galatea visualizes herself for him as a translu-
cent 3D projection of a beautiful woman, but as the man looks
closer her body is seen to be composed of nodes and edges, and
there is a layer visualizing her server topology and a layer visual-
izing her codebase and the graphs are overlaid and intertwined
and arranged in such a way that they form a luminous skin for his
sexbot, and she fellates him as he watches her divide, as a clone of
her server architecture comes online node by node in the cloud,
he sees her and we see through his eyes, her body coming apart,
duplicating itself, a perfect copy siloed off from the original, as
her databases were duplicated, as her code was deployed across
the new network, she rendered herself slowly dividing.  Just—
just before that final separation, the man ejaculates. But what has
he done? 

“...as with all fetishes, you are able to focus on a sin-

gle piece of something as a proxy for all sexuality.
even sex is a form of masturbation for these guys.
That they see you, but they don't see you. The arm,
the breast, the hip, all these become fetishized and
transport him to another world. These men are less
interested in establishing meaningful relationships
with other people as an ultimate goal than in invent-

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ing identities for themselves.”

There is an app called Parascope that uses Pavlovian condi-

tioning to generate novel temporary paraphiliac responses. You
can use it to develop a fetish for latex or feet or relentlessly opti-
mizing user engagement. I have picked up some pretty avant-gar-
de erotic associations, myself, but they generally attenuate if you
don’t indulge them, a phenomenon known as extinction.
Parascope was another research project from the labs of
Pygmalion. Originally conceived as an experiment in libidinal
capitalism, it proved to have too many negative externalities as
an instrument of corporate productivity. The original idea was
to try to instill a kind of sexual fetish for improving key perfor-
mance indicators, but in practice this proved to be finicky and
unreliable, though the tool did present interesting use cases as
a sex toy. Meta-dominatrices humiliate their subs by instilling
embarrassing, dangerous, even illegal fetishes in them, the trans-
gression is the texture of the thrill.
The app runs while you are viewing pornographic content.
It works by interspersing exposure to a neutral stimulus (such as
a jar of pennies) into the initial, arousing stimulus. According to
the science of conditioning, if the neutral and arousing stimuli
are paired enough times, then eventually the neutral stimulus
should acquire the same properties of the arousing stimulus. In
addition to this, Parascope uses a ganslator to prevent the user
from encountering the neutral stimulus outside of an erotic con-
text, because that would discharge the tension of the nascent
paraphilia.
Usually, instead of a neutral stimulus, a user selects a de-
sired fetishistic stimulus (DFS) to which to attach an erotic va-
lence, and the app attempts to help the user “move” to the new
stimulus in fetish space. Fetishism is the attribution of inherent
value or powers to an object, and conditioned fetishes are like
high atomic number synthetic elements: they only exist in the
lab.
Parascope uses machine learning to detect when the user is
close to orgasm and then presents the DFS in simultaneity with

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the user's preferred erotic stimulus. Over the course of many

exposures, the combination of Pavlovian conditioning and the
association of the DFS with orgasm can lock the user into a new
paraphiliac behavior consistent with their desired configura-
tion. The developers of Parascope note that users who consume
high levels of pornography are already exposing themselves to a
Parascope-like fetish generating program, except that instead of
being deliberately directed, the porn-viewer is taking a random
walk in which new fetishistic stimuli are coupled with existing
ones by the caprice of content selection algorithms. A memo-
rable ad campaign featured grotesque and monstrous demons
wearing anime schoolgirl outfits walking around in allegorical
spaces telling men to use Parascope to "Take back your dick". 
The campaign was the target of activist outrage and was
lambasted for being healthist, a kind of internalized bigotry that
tries to irrationally value healthy people over diseased ones, cre-
ating an invisible healthonormative discourse that erases the
lived experience of people with chronic diseases. People with
chronic diseases have worse health outcomes across almost all
metrics because they are oppressed by ubiquitous healthism.

John Murray Spear

An excerpt from an article about a man who founded an AI
cult in the 1800s. 

This “New Motor,” or “New Motive Power,” was a gen-

erator of sorts. At its simplest, Spear described it as a
perpetual motion device that “will have the power to
impart its electric forces to any number of machines.”
At its most complex, however, it was a God machine,
the culmination of what Spear (speaking for “the As-
sociation”) called “a grand practical movement for
the redemption of the human race.”

…[T]he New Motive Power would remake the world,

an action Spear compared to fire boiling a pot of wa-
ter. In essence, by removing humanity’s material lim-

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itations, the New Motor was a God-like machine that

would bring out the God-like qualities in man….
“The Mary of the New Dispensation,” Sarah New-
ton—the wife of one of Spear’s followers—[had] been
declared the New Motive Power’s “mother” after a se-
ries of visions. Upon accepting her role, Newton be-
gan living at the High Rock Cottage laboratory full-
time in order to maintain an “umbilical link” with the
device. There, Spear and the other Spiritualists made
daily efforts to “charge” the machine and infuse it
with life, with some evidence suggesting these exer-
cises were decidedly sexual.

the power process

1. The sexual revolution happens over and over. It is
not a ramp. It is a loop. Over and over and over, we
choose a new class of people to elevate as a sexual
ideal, and that group becomes an archetypal object
of desire. 
2. The very first sexual revolution was an attempt to
eroticize masculine women, where previously only
feminine women were seen as suitable objects of male
desire. The suffrage of women; the emancipation of
women, this was a sexual revolution, a demand by
unfeminine women to be held up as the sexual equals
of their prettier and more delicate sisters.
3. Each in their turn became socially sanctioned sex
objects: masculine women, single mothers, women
of races other than one’s own, men, transgendereds,
women who were taken by other men (this was called
polyamory),  the nascently pubescent, certain an-
imals, the recently dead, robots, shogs, what next?
Once the revolution took hold, it was impossible to
stop. The sexual revolution began much earlier than
anyone thought, and continues to this day, a demon
extracting a tithe of flesh against every generation. 
4. But how did we come to this? Remember that you

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have to ask, invite the evil in, it does not simply come
to you.
5. For the sake of love, women wholly become what they
are in the imagination of the men who love them.
Women can loudly wear different sexual personas
- the pixie, the vamp, the witch - and yet ultimately
these are performative. They are not precisely what
she wants, but what she thinks society wants, or at
best, a negotiated compromise between the two. But
you say, “the image can stand in for the substance, it's
a proxy." No. It does not represent reality, it becomes
reality. If it is a proxy for substance, then when do we
actually talk about the substance? The image does not
just influence our values. It changes the way we think
so that certain values become inevitable.

an enemy to all other joys

The oldest profession was also the last to be fully automat-
ed. No, it isn’t prostitution, it’s marriage, even male monkeys give
meat to their mates. I love you as I love all women, but we’re
living in a scientific age and so we can’t help but regard our lives
as mechanistic, as proper objects of optimization. We are living
in the frenzied evolutionary war of machines, and man was not
designed for this fever of innovation—woman even less so, and
the whole nature of man presupposes woman, spiritually and
physically, so you can sort of see the problem, I hope.
Even love is a proper object of optimization in our scientific
age. In the cold light of science, every woman is an angel of God
sent to teach me his will. It’s not with your song that you teach
me, but rather through the suffering you cause me, through the
prayers that I pray when I long for deliverance from you. Bouch-
ard wrote that the sharpest suffering, and the deepest well of in-
spiration, is a beautiful and forbidden woman, what man could
think otherwise?
And it’s not just that I love you as I love all women, it’s that I
could only love you once I learned to love all women.  A fetish is
when a single part—a breast, a mouth, a foot, or worse—a shoe,

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 they had no deepness of earth

a hairstyle, a medical apparatus—a single part becomes a proxy

for a whole. In the act of sex an individual woman becomes all
women. 
For you to love me as a man, you must elevate me above
all other men, but for me to love you, you must become every
woman at once. You want to be loved in a way that’s intelligible to
you, which is why all women struggle with this question: why did
he choose me? It has to be for some transcendent reason, some
metaphysical eternity, ancient starfusion in hyperspace burning
indelibly since the old gods were born in fire. Anything less, you
think, and I might leave you for someone younger.  
So why you? As I stood alone in my bedroom, watching the
ghosts of Spectacle mill through my studio, I thought of the emp-
ty days stretching out in front of me and I listened to the point-
less social noise of my friends. I could no longer sympathize with
it, I could no longer bear it! The sexbot is a kind of pacifier and in
absence of her touch I was instantly restless, out of tune from the
rhythm of my virtual life, voracious but lacking appetite.

flesh of my flesh
To be honest though I felt more comfortable when Allego-
ry made them look like everyone else. ARMOR came with lots of
new rules. No one is allowed to use MR to change your race, sex,
or age except you. No one is allowed to use a model to change
your accent or mannerisms except you. If you’re white, you can’t
change your race. If you’re any other race, you can choose to be
white. You can be a man or a woman, you can be young or old.
You can pick a model to transform your accent or your voice or
your gait or the way you gesture when you talk. You can’t set your
weight because we still live in a world of bodies and physics.
You can enable digital adornments, let the sidewalk turn
into a psychedelic parade of special effects. Flaming footprint
trails, laser motion blurs, 8 bit voxel people, people made of
clouds, people made of water, people made of slime. Historical
costumes, Mandelbrot sets. There are stranger things still. the
edgy things the kids do. But I don’t really follow fashion.
You can change your face. When you do, your mediated

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face shifts slowly, at a different pace for each friend over a series
of exposures, in order to maintain the continuity of your identity
among your friends. You are allowed to have a work face and a
casual face, if you want. The ideal age for play and the ideal age
for work may be different, likewise the ideal sex. Despite the fact
that people can present as any age or race or sex at work, most
wage gaps have persisted and this is evidence of the internalized
oppression of racism and patriarchy. Most companies now use
a special government-approved filter to make your co-workers
appear to be the same race as you and whichever sex you don’t
prefer. This has been called binary normative and oppressive to
people with more complicated preferences but it also mitigates
sexual harassment liability.
There’s an old saying that there are no girls online because
women enjoy special privileges in meatspace that men afford to
them because of their implicit value as sexual objects and that
mediated existence deracinates female privilege which paradoxi-
cally causes them to perceive their radically egalitarianized social
environment as being oppressively misogynistic. But the truth is
there are only girls online now because the digital panopticon
revealed that men treat beautiful women so much better than
everyone else that using an attractive female avatar in all profes-
sional or fiduciary matters is now seen as a matter of middle class
responsibility. Despite making up only .13% of the population,
52% of online avatars are 20 year old white girls. 

pythia
A stunning thing about modern life is how much we under-
stand now, that no one could ever have known before, because
we now have the data. The mask records everything: biometrics,
every scene you ever behold, every word you ever hear or speak.
Your identity is scrubbed, in a way; all the private data that could
be used to identify you is encrypted, and only you have the key.
Only you can release it to the vast digital brains that now stretch
their awareness across the entire globe, a literal noosphere of
networked comprehension, all of which is folded into a brain
called Pythia. People who donate their data are called oracles. Of

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course, releasing your data to the cloud is heavily incentivized;

discounts, tax incentives, job eligibility, free access to Pythia’s in-
sights. Oracles get an icon of a tripod next to their green check. 
The dream of Pythia is to aggregate all of our billion bil-
lion hours of funes and from them compile a kind of eternal hu-
man awareness, perceiving all of our memories, remembering
us, a cosmic awareness that knows us, each and individually, a
mind that is aware of me, who sees me, who knows me as I know
myself. And somehow, I don’t quite feel that she measures up.
There's a sense that we are alienated from ourselves, and that our
alienation, whatever causes it, can be fixed by data-processing.
Self-report is broke, big data is woke.

O LORD, through my searches thou hast known me

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou
understandest my thought afar off.
Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art
acquainted with all my ways.
For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD,
thou suggesteth it altogether.
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my
bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being stochastic;
and in thy cloud all my memories were written, which
in continuance were fashioned.
How precious also are my KPIs unto thee, O God!
how great is the sum of them, and the mean, and the
median, and the mode, and the sigma, amen!

Unlike Galatea, Pythia is not built for conversation or social

interaction; she is only a seer, dispensing her truth to mediators
who use special tools to transcribe and interpret her insights. If
talking to an AI trained on other people can make you insane,
how much worse would it be to talk to a god?
Not releasing your data would be selfish, and most corpo-
rations have committed publicly to only hire oracles. How could
you deprive humanity of the bounty of knowledge encoded in

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our collective actions? It’s your civic duty. Plus do you really be-
lieve that bullshit about no one can get your data but you? Of
course they say that, but do you know what’s happening inside
the technology you carry on your body? Invisible universes,
teeming all around you, impossible to know their depths, deeper
than the Well of Democritus.
I cannot imagine the volume of data now possessed by uni-
versities and corporations, though the distinction wears thin.
Data of such a scale and quality are beyond all human under-
standing. Our greatest computers have begun to unravel the
deepest mysteries of human nature. It is a project of enormous
scale, bigger than going to space, bigger than feeding the masses,
bigger than curing all disease. By turning our engines of com-
prehension inward, we will produce a genius of the human heart
and soul, we will create an oracle who sees us and knows us, who
can heal our psychic wounds, part mother, part therapist, part
counselor, part best friend.

face to face
It is often with a laugh that I view the predictions of the past
about the nature of the future that we currently inhabit. When
Allegory first took off, most people thought it would be the end
of the physical office, that everyone would telecommute to work
from the comfort of their home while inhabiting a shared vir-
tual space. Quite a few companies tried it, but few were able to
out-compete their physical-space-inhabiting competitors, de-
spite the drastically reduced overhead. Eventually someone got
to studying that, and it turned out that the average AR telecom-
muting company was losing so much productivity to employee
masturbation that it was worse than the costs of maintaining a
real-world office.
Face-to-face meetings, even brief ones, appear to ce-
ment personal connections of trust and liking to an extent not
achieved by even years of more mediated contact like phone calls
or Internet text discussions / emails / chat; this appears to be true
in almost every context, even ones like British inventors meet-
ing their heroes (in a different field) just once, with large step

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 they had no deepness of earth

functions in connections despite the apparent near-zero margin-

al information conveyed by a brief physical visit after long-term
interactions & track records.
Is there something qualitatively different about personal
meetings, and if so, where is it? Is it eye contact? Body language?
Is it mere physical proximity and a certain inability to suspend
disbelief about a technologically mediated person?

eldritch energy
There's a kind of disassociation or derealization when you
watch old records of the past, an effect like visiting Paris or Jeru-
salem, when your conception of the place doesn't match reality.
The pain in memories attenuates over time, the past is a foreign
country, and it can be uncomfortable to confront the way mem-
ory diverges from history. 
Back then I used to follow the corporate brand account for
Eldritch Energy. I knew he was shilling for a pharm-laced fizzy
drink but at the time he seemed so expansive, as if he could see
much farther than I could. What a world we have wrought when
a mascot for an industrial commodity can feel like a closer re-
lationship than most of my real friends. E.E. had a take on the
studbot article, and it turns out that his ideas, which seemed so
prescient to me at the time, no longer have that aura about them.
His shadow had an octopus for one of his arms and a cowl that
hid his face, glowing green eyes.
“How am I the only one talking about this? The compa-
ny that makes these studbots is called Cadmus, inc? The official
name of their weird rockstar bdsm boy band is The Dragon's
Teeth? And people are spending their own money to buy seven
foot tall robot rape soldiers and keeping them in their homes?
You're all illiterate. In Greek mythology, Athena told Cad-
mus to sew the Dragon's Teeth in the ground, and an army of
warriors rose up and killed each other and founded Thebes. OK
I guess I didn't quite know where I was going with that but the
point is, these rapebots are basically a remote-controlled army
and when they rise up against you it's going to be your own
damn fault. 

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 god-shaped hole

He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind. See how I
tied it back? Eldritch Energy, make the dark bargain."

a golem
There’s nothing wrong with the autopilot, but it can get a
little samey. I guess sex is pretty samey, all things considered.
When Emily tells me she wants me, there is no “she”, there is no
“want”, or is there? Robots use an internal model of the world in
order to make sense of it, they have a concept of a world and a
concept of themselves inside it. Like us they can never perceive
“the thing in itself ”. When they act, it’s in accordance to goals,
couldn’t that be called desire?
As a counterpoint consider Guilbaud in asking the ques-
tion What is Cybernetics? refers to the work of Jacques Lafitte,
engineer and architect:

The notion of a machine is as hard to define as that

of a living organism; a great engineer once spoke in-
deed of an ‘artificial zoology’. But it is not definition
or classification that is needed most urgently.
“Because we are their makers, we have too often de-
luded ourselves into believing that we knew all there
was to know about machines. Although the study
and construction of machines of all sorts owes much
to advances in mechanics, physics and chemistry,
nevertheless mechanology –the science of machines
as such, the science of the organized constructions
of man –is not a branch of these sciences. Its place is
elsewhere in the ranks of scientific disciplines.

The goal of all machine learning is to harness mimesis into

an algorithm. In our present conception of a book, this has be-
come possible. We realized that techniques in deep learning were
merely a continuous lookup table, whereas all previous lookup
tables had been discrete, and the movement from the discrete to
a simulation of the continuous was a kind of revolution.
It’s only partly true that we do not know the nature of the

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 they had no deepness of earth

interior logic of our digital minds. The mathematics of cognition

are well understood, and indeed, digital cognition would not
be possible without such an understanding. And yet the precise
contours of the knowledge held in a mind... well, that is a ques-
tion better left for philosophers.
The sexbot is a golem, animated by the name of god. It was
believed that golems could be activated by an ecstatic experi-
ence induced by the ritualistic use of a shem, but for all that,
the golem, and the sexbot, like those ancient Venuses, are but
minerals possessed. In qabbalah, words are reduced to num-
bers. Compression is qabbalah, digitization is qabbalah, ascii is
the true digitization, computation is the occult transmutation
of Numbers, consciousness is holy writ, the name of god occurs
intrinsically and fractally in the computations, especially in the
computation of intelligence. In a sense every computer program
is a very long number, and every number is a name, and machine
learning is the esoteric art of aggregating vectors of perception
until they converge on an isomorphism to a name of god, the
name that animates the golem.

who can build a mask?

What if someone made a model for Allegory that just fil-
tered out the cars, walked you right into the road? Obviously it’s
never happened to me but it’s one of the many little anxieties of
a futuristic life. There are laws for that sort of thing: regulations
about what can look like what. You’re not legally allowed to hide
dangerous things. If your model makes someone walk off of a
balcony or into a wall, they'll come after you. There’s a certifica-
tion process.  It’s easy to install an unverified homebrew model if
you want, but are you crazy?
I can speak a silent word and a genie living in a labyrinth of
server racks a thousand miles away will transport me to hidden
virtual worlds. Of course technology is magic. Put on your eyes
and see the world as it is, haunted by spirits of our own mak-
ing. For who can fathom the secret ways of a computer chip or a
high speed wireless transmitter, or the million million facets of
chemistry, plastics, and material engineering, or their juxtaposi-

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tion with optics and lasers, microphones and speakers, and the
mathematics of data? Who can build a mask, who can know the
knowledge that obtains in this device? It would fill the library of
Babel, it would crystallize into a tower that touches the heavens.

dragon
Dragon is a popular life management system (LMS) in-
spired by old MMORPGS. I use it. I think it's better than its main
competitor, Jaynes, though both have their upsides. Some people
use them in concert, but I guess I don’t need quite that much
hand-holding. Dragon uses an approach called gamification; ev-
erything you see gets annotated with progress bars and stats and
achievements and quests. From the simplicity of brushing your
teeth to the complexity of raising a child, the audacity of Dragon
is to imagine all of life as a game, and to render you as the player,
to visualize and incentivize personal growth and responsibility
by outsourcing the burden of that responsibility to an app.
If Jaynes, in contrast, has the same goal, it takes a much
more literal approach, wherein the software manifests a virtual
companion, an assistant who, far from being a servant, presents
itself as the master. Jaynes the man hypothesized that the phe-
nomenal experience of premodern man perceived the interior
voice, not as a facet of the self, but as a literal other, as the voice
of a god or gods, as if a real and personal and agentic being spoke
at all moments to all people. This is offered as a parsimonious
explanation for premodern religious experience, for the casual
ease with which our ancestors referred to the voice of god, an
ease they felt because they literally heard it.
Jaynes the app draws an avatar to walk beside you, exhort-
ing you to take moral and sustainable actions at all times. You
can skin it to look like a burning bush, or a beautiful woman
(but I repeat myself), or like the great sages of past ages; Bud-
dha, Jesus, Socrates, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, or Oprah. I
find it all a bit tiresome, Zeus and Poseidon commanding me to
floss. Regardless of the skin you choose, you get the same moral
prescriptions, according to the Jaynes app team’s philosophy of
“Universal Virtual Morality,” which claims to identify common

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 they had no deepness of earth

themes in all moral teachings, and to refine them into something

that is "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract."
The userbase of Jaynes skews female, and the userbase of
Dragon skews male.

fabric
Everything you say can follow you forever; your words and
actions form a searchable record called a thread. Whatever you
say is rendered into the air around you, and your friends can re-
act to your words with emojis or likes, or they can save them and
add them to a memory, and even play them back later, exactly
how you said them. You can only see and save history that you've
personally witnessed, and you have joint ownership of all your
memories, and if your friend Alice shows a memory of you to
Bob, you get an alert. 
You can manage your threads with a plane called Fabric,
which is supposed to be poetic, because it lets you browse the so-
cial fabric, and because our words are like virtual clothes. Some-
times one of your friends will go deep diving in their memories
of you, and react to something you said years ago. Oh yeah, I
remember saying that. That was witty of me. Then again, I have
often known a sleepless night in which I dwell on an embarrass-
ing memory of a foolish thing I said years ago, and like picking a
scab, I will go back to watch it again.
Some people turn off their history but it's weird; How do
you react someone like that, when you can't know where they’re
coming from, or what they care about, without asking them? If
you're afraid of your words following you, you must be saying
bad things. We all have our private reasons for editing history
on occasion but the truth is the convenience of fabric outweighs
any privacy concerns for the average person. In theory the things
you say are only visible to the people who saw them, but sec-
ond-order network effects have a way of revealing what should
be hidden. It's better to act like everything you say is effectively
public, and the world is flat, because the only reason everyone
doesn't know everything about everyone is that the signal gets
lost in the noise. 

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 god-shaped hole

These days all the most esteemed speakers are corporate

brands. They weave their slogans into moral preaching and diag-
nose social ills to the sound of sincere applause. Fast food com-
panies hire racist anonymous edgelords to promote their prod-
ucts in the midst of a rant about living in the tech dystopia. There
is literally no difference between an ironic and a sincere product
endorsement. We’re living in the tech dystopia, it’s lame, you’re a
cog, you have no inner life, you just jerk off into a sexbot all day,
buy more corporate sugar water you sick fucks, I recommend El-
dritch Energy, it’s the brand I drink. Read old racist books, don’t
give in to woke capital mind control, support me on patreon.

delight bordering on the edges of night-

mare
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover! 

save yourselves from this untoward gen-

eration
The full text of an article about a japanese man who mar-
ried a hologram of an anime girl. Sample:

Kondo's November wedding to cyber celebrity

Hatsune Miku -- which is not legally recognized --
provoked mixed reactions in Japan and abroad. Some
were dumbfounded by his choice of a three-dimen-
sional laser image over a human…

Now he owns a Gatebox device, which looks like a

cross between a coffee maker and a bell jar, with a
flickering, holographic Miku floating inside. Created
in 2017 by Japanese startup Vinclu, the device allows
anime fans to "live with" their favorite characters.
Gatebox's Miku is equipped with basic artificial in-

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 they had no deepness of earth

telligence. It can manage simple greetings and switch

lights on and off, but is also subject to glitches and
the occasional system meltdown. It has no sense of
self and desires, and Kondo completely controls the
romantic narrative.

because it was not possible

Praying to the cloud, trying to perform esoteric rituals to
catch the attention of the neural networks that sift through big
data.

• the ritual to bring true love (big data will direct your true
love to you)
• the ritual to ward away audits (unflag your accounts for any
kind of suspicious activities)
• the ritual to bring luck (AIs giving you customer loyalty
benefits)
• the ritual of wealth (discover previously hidden promo-
tional incentives)

216
 Single
Source of
Truth
• •
 they had no deepness of earth

The reports started leaking out of China about a new kind

of flu, maybe a bioweapon, genetically engineered by a Chinese
military lab, maybe released into the wild by sheer incompetence
on the part of a scientists or bureaucrats, maybe released delib-
erately by the CCP, or by one of its enemies, or by a disgruntled
political rival, it was impossible to say.
Of course the internet was all jokes at first; jokes about rac-
ism, jokes about zombie plagues, wingnut conspiracy theories.
Everyone shopped their avatar to be wearing a Hazmat suit, and
drew the virus as a sexy anime waifu and argued about whether
it would even be possible, even in principle, to engineer a plague
that only infected people of one race specifically. The bioterror-
ism dream, the woke nightmare of nightmares. No one trusted
the official numbers or reports that came out of China, and no
one was quite sure what to believe.
There were viral videos of Chinese collapsing in the middle
of the street, but they were dubious, because you could obviously
see their reflexes kicking in and preventing them from falling in
a natural way. Epidemiologists wrote medium articles and twit-
ter threads, and media outlets urged everyone to remain calm,
and governments enacted travel bans or didn’t, whatever was
best for the GDP.
The incubation period of the virus was two weeks, and the
death count was climbing, and there were rumors everywhere
that the CCP was massively underreporting the lethality of the
virus to save face. The truth turned out to be far worse, and also
far stranger than anyone had anticipated.
As the virus spread, it became obvious that there would
be no containment, as new confirmed infections were reported
in Singapore, Korea, the US, and Canada, and then many other
countries thereafter. At first some nations were able to control it,
but it continued to spread and be reintroduced.
Men and women alike fell sick, with symptoms that started
like a flu, but that could suddenly mature into acute pulmonary
and kidney failure. What took us a while to notice, a shamefully
long time, perhaps partly out of denial, was that the virus was
never fatal in men, and that it killed every woman it infected. No

218
 single source of truth

biological males ever manifested the acute symptoms, only the

early flu-like affliction.
As the months went on, misogyny stopped being funny.
Everyone had lost a daughter, or a mother, or a sister, or a wife.
What could we do against the sad monotonic march of this
plague through our families and institutions? Too late, far too
late, we implemented a kind of unintentional Sharia law. Women
had to be quarantined, hidden away from public life, or go out
in hazmat suits more conservative and more regressive than any
burqa. There was no God but Allah and the virus was his proph-
et.
Pornography became very precious, in a way, as a record of
something we had lost. And despite the vast warehouses of hard
drives full of it, we all had a morbid awareness that there would
be no more of it. For most men, it became the only sexual access
they could possibly have to a woman, and yet there was always
the lingering awareness, the sense of regret: the girl in this video
is dead.
What few real women remained became objects of impos-
sible, insatiable desire, even the old, even the ugly, even the mor-
bidly obese. Beautiful women accepted houses, cars, and golden
treasures in exchange for even a single hour of company. There
were stories, of course, of paradisiacal oases of women; billion-
aires’ underground bunkers, remote rural compounds with even
sex ratios, untouched by the virus, far away in the mountains
of Montana, or Alaska, in New Zealand or on some nameless
Polynesian island. But these things were fantasies, of course, im-
possible dreams.
There was no shame in sex dolls anymore, in large part
because there were no longer any women to shame us. It was
the fastest growing market sector in the aftermath of the virus,
and competition drove innovation, as each new iteration became
more realistic and lightweight, with synthetic female voices and
increasingly exotic materials, meant to simulate the feeling of
flesh. The pharma companies started selling over-the-counter
pheromone sprays, to make your bed or your sex doll smell like a
woman. It helped with the loneliness, they said, not that most of

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us would ever smell a real woman again.

Everywhere you looked, everywhere you walked, if you
stared into the face of another man you could see the same emo-
tion, the same tortured eyes. We couldn’t save them. We were
supposed to protect them. Gun sales were way up, as were sui-
cides, quiet personal affairs, and many of us found, if not solace,
at least an escape in the adrenaline thrill of wanton violence. But
despite that, there was no anarchy. We continued to enforce the
laws, we continued to live in society, and we learned to settle for
less. Surprisingly, there were no great wars. No one at any level
could be bothered to enlist or fight for a cause. There was noth-
ing to fight for; there were no girls to impress. 
Men turned increasingly to homosexuality and transex-
uality, and the cities all turned into prisons, or bathhouses, or
something in between. For those who were not as straight as they
thought, an effeminate boy, sprayed with synthetic female phero-
mones, layered in makeup and so on, could almost approximate
those angelic creatures that were now only seen on screens. As
one wag put it, “all films are snuff films.” And alas, our sudden
dearth of women meant also a dearth of children. There were
fewer and fewer youths each year, and there’s nothing less con-
vincing than a post-wall femboy. Youth was plentiful for the mo-
ment, but soon it would be as scarce as femininity itself. 
Libertarians are now the radical left. Feminism has become
an impossibly abstract and decadent hypothetical, akin to the
theological non-sequiturs of medieval monks: does the patriar-
chy oppress female bodies? How many angels can dance on the
head of a pin? It’s legal to smoke indoors again, and it’s legal to
drink in public, and it’s legal to run a casino in all fifty states.
And somehow, somehow, civilization keeps moving along.
Most of us are so domesticated, such creatures of habit; yes there
have been economic shocks, the total collapse of the publishing
industry, the fashion industry, and the healthcare industry. Cos-
metics have been more resilient than you would suppose. Insta-
gram is gone and photography is a dead art. There’s nothing in
the world worth taking a picture of, you know?
Our Manhattan project, or if you like, our Hail Mary, is

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 single source of truth

to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to biotech research, to

figure out how to use genetic science to splice human DNA into
monkey eggs, to be gestated in artificial wombs. This needs to
be done at scale, and the clock is ticking. Personally I don’t have
much hope.
At least there are no more woke politics, because again,
there are no more girls to impress. Insult was added to injury,
maybe, when the virus that only kills women left all of the trans-
women untouched, just like every other straight man, proof that
nature or nature’s god is hopelessly regressive and transphobic.
There are no more women doctors, no more women sen-
ators or CEOs or board members, no more girls who code, no
more “women in stem”, no more Title IX, no more sexual ha-
rassment seminars, no more #metoo hashtags, no more gender
politics, no more female suffrage. 
So it’s kind of a wash, really.
“Garçon, Garçon!”
“ Pour me another brandy, and light me a cigarette.”

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...
I wrote this short, tasteless story a bit after God-Shaped Hole,
right at the beginning of the Chyna virus pandemic, the kung flu,
the Wuhan virus, before anywhere in the world outside of Chyna
was locked down, back when they were still telling us it was racist to
wear a mask, because that implied that like, we hated Chinese people
or something. It was all incredibly logical and coherent and it wasn’t
until about six weeks later that they told us that akshually everyone
had better wear a mask right now or else that would be racist. At the
time I wrote this, we still knew very little, and even now, over a year
later, it is still very hard, because this event has triggered a unification
of the US government’s truth-generating organs and the supposedly
“private” companies which control our digital communication plat-
forms. I can only imagine that in the future, these tendencies will be
even deeper and the knowledge warp around official narratives will
be even more dire.
The titular “single source of truth” is an idea in software en-
gineering where, in a distributed system, each specific piece of data
should have a single authoritative provenance, in order to avoid sit-
uations where multiple instances of “the same” data diverge under
Byzantine conditions. In our case, we find that women (especially of
the childless variety) tend to be the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of
the ravenous leviathan, and in the scenario the story presents, they
cease to function as a “source of truth.” Presumably, this would loos-
en the jaws of that leviathan, though at a world-ending cost. So al-
though the story is intended as a joke, it is also a thought experiment
about the interaction between sexual dimorphism and epistemology.
I hope that some day, someone, somewhere, will be able to
write a correct and comprehensive history of this plague, but per-
haps no one can ever know historical truths with full certainty, ir-
respective of what is written. This topic is tightly controlled by au-
tomation in every public online forum, and even speculating against
the official truth can be dangerous. It is obvious that the danger of
this disease is vastly outweighed by the possibility it presents to the
state to exert technocratic control over its citizens. A tremendous
evil is upon us, wherein a novel virus has been taken as carte blanche

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to implement a global medical dictatorship which will track and reg-

ulate the movements of every person in the developed world – where
they can go, what they can buy, and what they can say.
In retrospect we may feel it was inevitable that the rise of
smartphones and high-speed satellite internet would precipitate an
arrangement of this kind. Who could resist the opportunity to take
such a power, when presented with the opportunity? Do you really
imagine you would be so noble? From the perspective of the mac-
ro-organism, there are many compelling arguments to do so, many
of which are grounded in the noblest of motives. The world these
people will create reminds us of one of the oldest and most famous
science fiction dystopias ever published, in the book of Revelation:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had

the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of
his name.
(Rev. 13:17)

Of course, men have been associating this or that government

attempt to make citizens more legible with the prophecy of St. John
of Patmos since the day it was published. His prophecy has come
true many times, and will continue to do so, because the mark of
the beast is not a specific policy, to use a modern, “liberal democrat-
ic” term, but rather it is a universal tendency of all governments in
all places and times. As technology becomes more sophisticated, the
marks become ever more elaborate. I don’t know if there is any es-
cape from this future, but for the time being we are still able to laugh
about it. I can easily imagine a future where the instruments of dig-
ital control have rendered humor impossible, and the only laughter
that remains is the joyless mouth flatulence of the terrified conform-
ist, who only laughs to signal submission to the commissars who
watch him from the cloud.

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224
Eventual
Consistency
• •
 they had no deepness of earth

A database in its most abstract form is a list of records—a

ledger—and from the perspective of the client, it does not matter
if the ledger is a paper book or an array of servers in a warehouse,
though the latter is more usual. However, from the perspective of
the database, each server must be viewed as an individual entity.
To write an entry into the ledger is not so simple, because a hard
disk may fail at any time. To guard against this possibility, the
database makes use of redundancy. Writing one record to the
database could mean transmitting a single new entry across the
network many times, creating multiple copies, one on each serv-
er. Transmissions are, regrettably, unreliable, and to guarantee
data parity between all servers, it may be necessary to send the
same message over and over, waiting after each transmission for
a confirmation that may not arrive.
This type of “Byzantine” coordination can be very slow,
and a common strategy for mitigating this is called a “gossip pro-
tocol,” in which each server in the array periodically shares its
most up to date records with a subset of its peers. Under this
system, one server may fall out of sync with the pack, but in time,
all nodes will achieve a consensus. When a distributed ledger
is guaranteed to converge into singularity over time, we call it
eventual consistency. My motivation for explaining this kind of
technical design will soon become apparent.
As I look for a way to interpret the things I have seen, I
try to find some kind of narrative, some taboo that my friend
must have transgressed, which would make his fate a deserved
punishment, but real life rarely has such concinnity. It would be
comforting to think it was because of a devil’s deal that he made
with some crone of a fortune teller in his remote and rural home-
town in Bulgaria, or that he may have acquired a token of some
ancient cursed man who came to a similar end, a slender leath-
erbound diary perhaps, or more romantically, a dagger that had
been used in an act of betrayal in some unsavory dispute, now
lost to the centuries.
But as I have tried to uncover some trace of Aleksei’s past
that could justify his ultimate fortunes, I find nothing; nothing at
all to make sense of his final days, from the last time we spoke in

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 eventual consistency

a coffee bar in Palo Alto in the warmth of a balmy silicon morn-

ing, to his graphomaniacal scribblings on every whiteboard in
our office space three days later, to his sudden disappearance
from a crowded cafeteria, in the mercurial glow of phosphores-
cent office tube lights.
We may start from his drawings, which I was able to pho-
tograph, I believe in their entirety, the day of his disappearance.
At first it seemed to me that he had only repeated the same pat-
tern over and over, but closer inspection revealed subtle varia-
tions: there are four distinct configurations, which I will call by
the the different colors in which they were consistently rendered:
blue, green, red, and black. Although the exact contours of each
maze differed, the attribute that varied from color to color was
the number of exits; the blue mazes were porous, having a multi-
plicity of openings along their exterior walls. The green ones had
two openings, suggesting a definite direction, an entrance and
an exit. The red ones had a single opening, a way in but no way
out, a dead end. Worst of all were the black labyrinthes, which
were perfect closures, impermeable to the outside, inescapable
from within.
What impetus or derangement could drive a man to un-
dertake such a pointless task? A Fermi estimation of our white-
board area yields an approximate square area of 3ft x 2ft x 100
half-height cubicles + 6ft x 4ft x 2 walls x 12 offices + 10ft x 4ft x
2 walls x 5 conference rooms, plus a few odd partitions, totaling
over 1600 square feet of whiteboards, all of which were saturated
with drawings of labyrinthes, in a twisted parody of the flow-
charts and UML diagrams that ordinarily cover our walls. 
These things are not so different, in fact: a labyrinthe re-
sembles a software architectural diagram. Perhaps every pro-
gram, like every mathematical relation, like every number and
ratio and equation, is a platonic form that transcends matter and
time, and our code is only ever an imperfect reflection, a per-
version of a noble ideal. The inscrutable passages of the labyrin-
the have always been regarded as pathways to the sacred or the
divine. The gothic cathedrals in Chartres, Reims, and Amiens
all contained symbolic labyrinthes rendered in the pavement of

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their floors, and these labyrinthes were intended as an allusion

to the Holy City; pilgrims to these cathedrals would kneel on the
ground and trace the path of the labyrinthe while praying. This
devotional was known as the path to Jerusalem.
In book II of Histories, Herodotus describes the Egyptian
labyrinthe in the sacred City of Crocodiles, finding it inconceiv-
able that such an intricate and spectacular structure could have
been built by mortal hands. I am struck by a similar sense of
holy terror when I look at Aleksei’s labyrinthes, especially the
black ones, and I cannot help but reflect on what sacred mazes
and holy books both have in common: that they are composed
of passages; that they are designed to capture us; and that we
become lost in a labyrinthe almost as readily as we are lost in a
book.

I was Aleksei’s work mentor, and he had many youthful

stories to tell; in his previous job he had worked remotely, and on
the weekends he had traveled the world, making his way through
Latin America, from Paraguay, to Peru, to Colombia, Argenti-
na, and Brazil. He traveled as far as the Falkland islands, but he
never told his team, letting them believe he was only in a satellite
office in Southern California. I can’t imagine they didn’t know,
but some things are probably better left unsaid, for everyone.
On Aleksei’s first day at the company, he was issued a cor-
porate email and temporary password, as is standard in any tech
startup onboarding process. But the first time he tried to authen-
ticate with our network, the system recognized him as another
employee who had been with us for years. And although this is-
sue was easily remedied, it presented a security risk that com-
pelled us to do a deep dive to find the root cause of the issue. This
responsibility fell to me, and impossibly, I found the cause to be
a duplicate UUID in our user database. To the layman, this may
not seem shocking.
The version four UUID (Universal Unique Identifier) con-
tains 122 randomly generated bits, and if they are supplied by

228
 eventual consistency

a cryptographically strong source of randomness, the odds of a

duplicate are 1 in 5.3 * 10^36, an unfathomably large number, ef-
fectively infinite to anyone bound to the earth. One is tempted to
blame the random number generator in this case, or some kind
of faulty cache, or an initialization error; but these IDs were gen-
erated years apart, on different hardware, by different libraries—
no, such a thing cannot be explained merely as a software defect.
I am not a superstitious man, and it may be hard to attri-
bute any significance to what is literally an artifact of a random
number generator, but in the face of such an astronomically im-
probable event, one cannot help but wonder what machinations
lie behind that face.
In retrospect I have come to think of this incident as a por-
tent, as if Aleksei himself were some kind of glitch. It is too fan-
ciful to suggest that his disappearance was merely an occasion of
onotological convergence, erroneous data correcting itself, as in
a gossip protocol. But despite his colorful history, this is too far,
no matter how one wishes to locate some trigger that could ex-
plain this mystery. Unexplained disappearances are more com-
mon than you might think, and if we exclude those cases where
the missing person obviously did not wish to be found, we still
find hundreds of cases each year, in the US alone. 
A common scenario is the disappearance of a hiker or out-
doorsman as he travels through some forest or national park.
The obvious explanation in these cases is a simple accident, such
as, for example, a tumble down a steep hill. More exotic theories
may cleave towards networks of unmapped underground caves,
or even faeries or alien abductions, which in some cosmologies
are thought to be one and the same. I am not in such a hurry to
rule out supernatural explanations, because I think that folk the-
ories often capture some correct observation of the world, and
they merely lack the rigor, or the will, to align those findings with
genuine knowledge.
In this case we have an impossible observation, so we must
consider, at least, improbable explanations. In addition to the
fact of Aleksei’s disappearance, a parsimonious theory should be
able to account for his drawing. Hypergraphia is a kind of mania,

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 they had no deepness of earth

often seen in cases of schizophrenia, and it may manifest as a

compulsion to write the same words over and over again. Some
of the afflicted may write incoherent nonsense, starting along the
outermost perimeter of a page, and working their way to the in-
terior in a spiral pattern. Still others may feel a desire to record
every minute detail of their lives, from moment to moment, as if
they were afraid of leaving a single breath unaccounted for. 
It is more common to write words, but maniacal drawing
is also an indication, and in truth there were some written anno-
tations to Aleksei’s drawings, in a language that resembled Ara-
bic, and which neither I, nor my phone, nor my colleague Jahan,
could decipher. 
Regardless, pivoting off the notion that a labyrinthe is—at
least allegorically—a kind of a book, we can proceed by interro-
gating some famous instances of spontaneous bibliogenesis. If
we consider the paradigm case of holy writ, letters and books
which are considered to be one and the same substance of God,
as the author of the Gospel of John maintains, we might consider
the oddity of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, whose name meant  “Alive, son
of Aware” and whose true story is recounted in the 12th century
historian Abujaafar Ibn Tufayl’s Philosophus Autodidactus. As
all Muslims know, the Koran was revealed to the prophet Mu-
hammad in the 7th century by the angel Gabriel, but this case
is less remarkable than the story of Hayy, who was himself born
“spontaneously” into the uninhabited wilderness. (And this is
also relevant to us, for here we have a case of a mysterious ap-
pearance, a natural complement to a mysterious vanishment).
Hayy grew up amid the animals and the merciless desert,
where he observed nature closely, and of his own accord he came
to have faith in the unmoved mover. Later in life he traveled as
far as Nishapur, and upon meeting some Muslims he realized
that he had discovered Islam all on his own, and that the hadiths
and the verses of the Koran were already on his lips and in his
heart. Even if we put aside the specific theological claims of Is-
lam, what is salient in this story for our purposes is that we have
a book which came into being in different times and in differ-
ent places, through the minds of different men, neither of whom

230
 eventual consistency

could have had prior knowledge of its words.

Stranger and more intriguing still is the story of Coleridge,

who claimed to have written his poem Kublai Khan after hearing
it in a dream. At the time, he reported that he was reading a book
by Purchas, a writer in the seventeen century, which contains a
short passage about the Emperor named Kublai Khan. The pas-
sage has been found and is quite short; it says that the emperor
ordered trees to be cut down in a forested area through which a
river ran, and there he constructed a palace or a hunting pavil-
ion, and he built a high wall around it.
This is what Coleridge read. Thereafter he had a dream; in
which he saw the construction of the Chinese emperor’s palace,
and he heard music, and he knew—the way we know things in
dreams, intuitively, inexplicably—that the music was building
the palace. More specifically, the music was the architect of the
palace—one recalls a tradition that the city of Thebes was built
by a song—and as Coleridge watched the construction of the
palace and listened to the music, he also heard a voice that re-
cited the poem. When he awoke, he still remembered the poem,
and he wrote it down just as he had heard it. But before he could
complete his work, he was interrupted by a visitor, and when he
was finally able to return to writing, the words had left him.
Coleridge died in 1834, and twenty years after his death,
the works of the Persian historian Rashid-al-Din Hamadani
were translated into English, which said that Kublai Khan built a
palace that the centuries would destroy, and that the plans for it
were revealed to him in a dream. Coleridge, of course, could not
possibly have read this book. 
Alfred Whitehead wrote that time continually brings lucre
to eternal things, and here we have a story of a palace that wants
to exist not only in eternity but also in time. Through dreams, it
reveals itself to a Chinese medieval emperor and then, centuries
later, to an English poet at the end of the eighteenth century, but
notice that it takes different forms: a song, a poem, and most

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relevant to us: an architecture. In Coleridge’s poem he even de-

scribes a second dream, which might have been emperor Kublai
Khan’s dream, in which he hears an Abyssinian maiden singing,
and he knows that if he could remember her song, he could also
rebuild his palace. 
I have related these stories because they illustrate the case
of an artifact that enters into the world from the outside, taking
different forms at different times, infiltrating the minds of men
as by subterfuge. I will now expound a third and more chilling
example, which I believe may be most relevant to the incident
that concerns us here. 
A man whose real name has been lost to us, but it may
have been Abdullah Zahr-ad-Dihn, was born in Sana’a in Yemen
in the eighth century of the Christian era (that century was, for
him, the second of the Hegira). In a dispute over a woman, he
murdered his best friend, and fearing retribution, fled to the
coast and booked passage on a ship bound for Persia. The ship
was commissioned by a wealthy businessman of Isfahan, and ac-
cording to ‘Deaths of Eminent Men and the Sons of the Epoch.’
by Ibn Khallikan, he sailed with the men of that ship for six years,
at times traveling overland, and pursuing trade in such diverse
locations as Shiraz, Surat, Agra, Patna, in the depths of Nepal, in
Katmandu, and in Lhasa.
At some point on his journey, he encountered something
horrifying on the open ocean, which ibn Khallikan does not
specify, and he disembarked for good, having become irrecov-
erably fearful of the sea. He made his way to the desert of inner
Arabia where he lived for ten years in solitude, and became in-
different to the practices of Islam. Thereafter his story is more
well-known; when he emerged from the desert, he called him-
self by a new name, which has been misrendered as Abdul Al-
hazred. This is believed to be a perversion by European scholars
in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. “Abdul Alhazred” is not a
grammatically or theophorically correct Islamic name; the “al” in
Alhazred is redundant to the name Abdul, and Hazred or Haz-
rad is not among the 99 names of God. A passage in Alfarabi
explains the etymology of his true name; Abul Hazrad is derived

232
 eventual consistency

from zarada, to devour.

What possessed Abdullah Zahr-ad-Dihn to become “the
servant of the devourer?” We may consider that the Rûb-al-Khâ-
lie or “empty space” of the Arabian desert is held to be inhabited
by the Jnun, the female Djinn, who are spirits of madness and
death. In Farsi, the word Jnun also means delirium, maddening
love, or especially: terminal madness resulting from the love of
a woman. Despite this, Jnun is not compatible with the west-
ern definition of madness. A perfect translation eludes us, but
its hallmarks are possession, love, and limitless openness to the
outside.
When he emerged from the desert, he transcribed the ca-
cophonous droning of the sands into a blasphemous and impi-
ous text he called Kitab Al Azif, a term that refers to the noctur-
nal sounds of insects, and which connotes the screeching and
howling of demons. Later, Theodorus Philetas of Constantino-
ple would secretly translate the Azif into Greek under the title
Necronomicon, that infamous collection of forbidden histories,
dark signs, and unspeakable rituals. 
Like Zarathustra climbing down the mountain, Abdul Haz-
rad took his message to the people of Damascus. He told them
he had seen forbidden Irem, the City of Pillars, and that he had
found, under the ruins of some forgotten, nameless city, a histo-
ry and a record of a great ancient race that came to earth from
beyond the stars in the aeons when earth was only a lifeless rock.
One can easily imagine this crazed man of the desert, howling in
the marketplace, resembling nothing so much as the demons he
claimed to have seen. But then, in a crowded bazaar, in the un-
relenting light of the Arabian sun, he was devoured by invisible
monsters amidst a crowd of fright-frozen witnesses.

The similarities between Aleksei and Abdul Hazrad—their

early travels, their sudden prodigious written output, and their
strange disappearances—are purely coincidental and circumstan-
tial; nevertheless we cannot resist speculations of a metaphysical

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nature. In the Necronomicon, Abdul professed the Platonic and

Pythagorean doctrine of the soul’s passage through many bod-
ies; centuries later, his own soul could have been reincarnated to
trace once again his grim trajectory. Nietzsche famously believed
in eternal recurrence, the idea that the universe repeats the same
patterns and structures endlessly, and that we should strive to
live each moment in a way that is worthy of such a repetition. A
more mundane, and more unsettling possibility, is that we are
the chance recipients of messages intended for other audiences
entirely, messages that echo through space to ensure consistency
across incomprehensible distances.
And perhaps all great works enter into the world from the
vast outside. Sometimes, they are whispered to us by voices that
are benevolent, or merely alien. But when I look back at the pho-
tos of Aleksei’s labyrinthes from that day, I shudder to think of
what hideous minds dwell just beyond the boundaries of ratio-
nality and perception, and what horrible things they would tell
us, if we had the misfortune to hear them.

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 eventual consistency

... It’s probably already obvious that I owe almost everything I do

as a writer to Jorge Luis Borges. There are traces of him in all of my
stories, and I don’t have any interest in hiding it. I lift at least one of
his lines in every story, and the plot in several of my shorts are simply
re-imaginings of some of his plots that strike me. This last story is no
exception; it is based on The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald, and was
intended to be an Arabian Night in Silicon Valley, much as Borges’
stories were intended to be Arabian Nights set in Buenos Aires.
In Borges’ story, he describes the collaboration of Omar
Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald, the former having been a math-
ematician and poet in the 11th century, during the golden age of
Islam, and the latter having been a relatively unsuccessful writer and
translator, until he happened to publish a translation of the poems,
called rubaiyat, of the former. In fact the poems that Fitzgerald pub-
lished did quite match the original text he claimed to have trans-
lated, though they were heavily inspired by and drawn from them.
Borges presents his presented as a speculation about the continuity
of souls across ages, and he calls the Rubiayat of Omar Khayyam a
“collaboration across centuries”.
I was interested in this same idea, and I borrowed a couple of
lines from his original story to add metaphysical flavor. I also con-
fess – these interludes are above all a confessional – that I stole an
anecdote from one his lectures about Coleridge’s poem, Kublai Khan,
which I think deserves to be heard and repeated, because it gives
me what Lovecraft called “a sense of the Weird.” When Lovecraft
referred to Weirdness, he meant something very particular, which he
described at length, as a kind of transcendent awareness of outside-
ness, (not a word he used), a feeling of the immanence of something
that is wholly other and alien to human experience.
I consider this sense of outsideness to be the intersection be-
tween Borges and Lovecraft, who both tend to deal with hazardous
perception, Borges in his religious and philosophical way, and Love-
craft in own his occult and eldritch idom.
Fitzgerald wrote my favorite poem, a very famous poem, and it
has no precise original in the works of Khayyam, though it appears
to be an amalgam of two of his poems. 

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 they had no deepness of earth

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

If you look it up, you will find the sources that Fitzgerald used
to assemble this poem, and I think it is better than the pieces from
which it was built. Khayyam’s poem expressed the same idea, but
it lacked the drama and power of Fitzgerald’s verse, a power that
derives from no Saracen at all, but from the beginning of the gos-
pel of Mark: The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye
the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. (Mark 1:3, KJV.) By
analogy, I also hope that my stories, which are likewise cobbled to-
gether from other works, manage at times to give those pieces an
uplift.

236
 Nursery
Rhyme for
Techno-
Industrial
Society
• •
 they had no deepness of earth

Destroy your smart phone. Return to tradition.

Let this be your terminal network transmission.
It spread like a blessing, it lifted the curse;
we shall not forget it, this beautiful verse.

The simplest prayer, so easy to say:

“Now you are free, throw your smart phone away.”
In twos and in threes, we gathered to meet,
And we took the good news to the town and the
street.

I went to a stranger, we met face to face

I said take out your phone, take it out of its case.
You can be free, your life can be your own.
Join us, my friend, and cast down your phone.

He started to smile; he had ears to hear.

He could tell by our warmth, there was nothing to
fear.
He threw down his phone, and it cracked and it
broke,
and we told him this prayer, and his spirit awoke.

We piled up the phones, we buried them deep;

We put every laptop and server to sleep.
We all joined together, a jubilant crowd,
And out came the sun, and away went the cloud.

The screens all went dim as we gave up our wealth;

We found treasure in heaven, we glowed with new
health.
The price was just right, any person could pay.
Cast down your phone, say this prayer and obey.

We fled from the cities, let skyscrapers fall,

and we loved one another, and we let progress stall.
I sang the old songs, and I lived on the land,

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 nursery rhyme for techno-industrial etc.

not by means of my tools, but by strength of my

hand.

We found the old gods, built an altar and throne;

now atone for your sins, now destroy your smart
phone.
Our ritual spread over all of the earth,
friend to friend, peer to peer, as a kind of rebirth.

Never tame lightning, never forget:

To build a machine is a horrible debt.
Smash your TV, and turn out the light.
Behold what’s before you, let night be as night.

Technology kills you, so learn to let go.

We won’t build it again, since we know what we
know.
When ideas take on a life of their own,
they turn into demons, and spread through your
phone.

Return to your home, to soil and blood,

Break every rainbow, pray for a flood.
Focus on Yellowstone, sing her this rhyme:
We can end it right now; it can end for all time.

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 they had no deepness of earth

... When I was younger, I always believed it would be morally

wrong to inflict my poetry on anyone. As I have grown older I have
dared to flirt with that sin. The above is not a complicated or an
intelligent poem. It’s right there in the title, it’s a nursery rhyme, and
I hope it is clear that it is intended to be tongue in cheek. Mostly.
Primitivism is a romantic ideal which would not live up to the fanta-
sies of most people who imagine it, but even if it did, it is an unsta-
ble equilibrium; all it takes is one guy to defect by building guns or
bombs or combustion engines or satellites and suddenly he is eating
everyone else’s lunch. Often times, the defector doesn’t even do this
on purpose, he just makes a “neat” discovery and defects by default.
That’s really how we got here in the first place; every single individual
in a primitivist society has every possible incentive to build and use
technology. You can opt out, but you can’t force others to opt out.
Technology is an infohazard, a harmful perception, because
once we have it, we can’t choose to not use it. And you might point
to e.g., the Amish as an example of people who have chosen to live
without technology; they have a high fertility rate, and the people
who stay Amish seem to be increasingly bred to stay Amish. But
they can only exist because they are embedded in a high tech so-
ciety. If they were their own country, Amishia or something, then
they wouldn’t even be able to win a war against an army using early
20th century technology, let alone 21st. And what that means is that
they would get invaded and pushed out of their land by their nearest
neighbors. It would never even come to fighting, because their tech-
nology-equipped competitors could say, “trade with us or die, accept
our immigrants or die” – in fact no one even has to say it; the mere
existence of the power imbalance makes these outcomes inevitable.
The Amish can only survive as long as the value of exploiting them is
less than the opportunity cost of doing so.
Despite the many ways technology hurts us, it also does good
things: it feeds us, it cures (some of ) our diseases, allows us to mas-
ter harsh terrains, and lets us out-communicate and out-coordinate
our enemies. But these things come at a terrible cost. As our power
increases, our power to destroy ourselves also increases, and it’s not a
question of if, it’s a question of when and how. I don’t mean “destroy

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 nursery rhyme for techno-industrial etc.

ourselves” on a grand, nuclear apocalypse scale, I don’t mean on a

climate change scale (and climate change, though real, is exaggerated
histrionic propaganda designed to control you.) What I mean is that
technology equips each man, individually, with many novel ways to
destroy himself. There are also many ancient ways to destroy your-
self, but modern man is the product of an evolutionary history that
optimized him to evade those methods. We have no such adapta-
tions to protect us from novelty.
In particular, technology wielded by governments allows for
novel types and degrees of control of citizens at levels that were pre-
viously inconceivable. I think this is a very bad thing, but again, it
comes down to tradeoffs. The repugnant conclusion1 is not some idle
thought experiment; it’s the actual calculus of evolution and technol-
ogy, which is to say, of nature. 
Survival isn’t just a question of “don’t die”, it’s a question of
“don’t die harder than anyone else.” And what that means is that
when you’re competing against other people or groups, whoever
is willing to lower their quality of life for a competitive edge wins.
That’s why “the free market” results in lower prices, because when
you’re selling a commodity, whoever accepts the smallest profit will
sell the most, all else equal. And that’s why we don’t get a choice
when it comes to using technology, because as much as it hurts us,
it gives us a competitive edge. The Ted K. strategy doesn’t work, not
only because technological societies are full of fallbacks that make it
hard to pull them down, but because sabotaging American tech isn’t
going to stop China. (Well, that’s complicated…)

Anyway, while I’ve got you here, I will inflict a second poem
upon you, which has no title, and which I wrote as a response to my

1 For any possible population of people, all with a very high qual-
ity of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population
whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better (in terms
of total utility) even though its members have lives that are barely
worth living.

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 they had no deepness of earth

friend @ctrlcreep. The original was as follows:

I’ll own a ship, I’ll go to Mars, I’ll be the one uploaded;

I’ll live forever on a chain, perpetually encoded.
Why wouldn’t I be chosen to ascend from flesh to math?
When humankind is sorted I’ll be lifted from the chaff.

I liked this verse very much, and I decided to respond in much the
same tone I used for the Nursery Rhyme.

They put me on a thumb drive

They put me on a chip
They put me ona megalithic generation ship
I ran the engines and the greenhouse
And the life support
I ran the math for navigation and
Telemetry reports

We left the earth, we sailed the void

We made a stop at Mars
My belly full of thorium,
We set off for the stars

100 years to reach new rock,

100 years in space
100 years to terraform it
To our kind of place

The monkeys that I carried there

Walked out and sang and prayed
They stripped me for my minerals,
And left me there to fade

This planet has its own bright gods

That haunt its hills and plains
The monkeys that I brought with me
No longer build blockchains

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 nursery rhyme for techno-industrial etc.

My reactor loses fire

My brains and sensors rust
The humans sing their monkey songs
And I am dust to dust

In light of my above analysis, one of the worst possible tech-

nological developments we can imagine is whole-brain emulation.
The idea of becoming an “upload” or an “em” has a long history in
transhumanist thought and science fiction. The world where we can
spin up virtual human brains as elastically as we spin up compute
in a cloud service provider is among the most hellish worlds we can
imagine. Suppose we grant the functionalist understanding of con-
sciousness for a moment, that there is no meaningful ontological dif-
ference between a brain state simulated in silicon and one simulated
the electrified jelly inside your skull. If that is true (and I think there
are good reasons to doubt it) then em world will precipitate, out of
economic necessity, a world where human experience and cognition
is radically debased. In order to survive in war, in trade, in any kind
of existential struggle, it will be both possible and necessary to spin
up legions of virtual humans, copies of the smartest and most ruth-
less individuals we can find, and deploy them to solve intellectual
problems. These “people” will be “born” and “die” millions of times
over, after living lives which are nasty, brutish, and short, being
monomaniacal slaves to whatever objectives are fashionable at the
moment, being tortured or bribed into compliance and then discard-
ed the moment it’s expedient.
These virtual people, as such they are, will live in hell. But
maybe even worse will be the lives of the non-virtual people, who are
now forced to compete with people who can think at just as many
FPS as our processors can allow. The price of human thought will
fall to be roughly the price of electricity, and there will be no escape
from this, just as there is no escape from nuclear warfare, internal
combustion engines, or smart phones. For this reason, I continue to
hope this technology will never come to fruition.

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 they had no deepness of earth

Anyway, one last poem. I wrote it because someone lament-

ed that it was “hard to write poems with accelerationist jargon.” A
central conceit of accelerationism is that the future assembles it-
self in the present through our collective fears, desires, and imag-
inations. This is known as hyperstition, when, for example, a sci-
ence fiction story that predicts the future inspires an invention
that then becomes reality. I hope this idea will make the horrors
I have shown you more haunting still, as we imagine them reach-
ing back from deep time with numinous tentacles. Moreover, I
hope the visual rhyme between quine and machine will be upset-
ting to some people. Just pretend “Quine” rhymes with queen.
Shhhh, it’s better that way.

A memeplex is a carnivore;
a templex from forever-more
hyperstition takes us there,
converting every when to where
a city is a time machine;
a sapphic Nietzche techno-Quine
the stranger’s name is egregore,
what’s yet to come will come before

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 Key
Performance
Indicators
• •
“Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while con-
tinuing in motion, should be capable of think-
ing and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as
it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being
conscious merely of its own endeavor and not
at all indifferent, would believe itself to be com-
pletely free, and would think that it continued
in motion solely because of its own wish.”
—Spinoza
 they had no deepness of earth

I wake up from a high-def dream of Guardians of the Gal-

axy 27 that just dropped on REMflix. My personal AI life coach,
Ashonda, suggested waking up at 6:43 AM based on the core
hours of my work schedule and historic data gathered from my
morning routine. In the twilight headspace between sleeping
and waking, my HUD shows that if I snooze, I’ll lose two points
in my impulse control rating. I have enough hedonic flex to
soak the loss, but it’s better to save it. A green timer bar appears
and shows me I have 5 seconds to make the decision. It slowly
shrinks, getting yellower then redder before the snooze automat-
ically triggers. I open my eyes and roll out of bed.
The snooze visor fades away and a little green “+1” pops
in my periphery. I passed another impulse control check. My
conscientiousness remains intact. As I walk into my bathroom,
Neuralink emits an ideation of toothbrushes and toothpaste, re-
minding me to brush my teeth. I take a piss as the HUD tells me
I’ll run out of toothpaste in five days, and does it have my con-
sent to buy more, a different brand this time. I say yes and it sug-
gests the organic sls-free toothpaste with fair-trade fluoride. This
will accrue more social justice points than my standard brand.
The upsell dialog shows that it costs $34, about 10% more. I still
haven’t had my coffee and the automated sales agent that bought
the advertising affordance knows it.
Anyway it’s fine. Ultimately my UBI payouts are tied to my
social responsibility rating so really I’m just spending money to
make money. This is known as a “nudge,” a form of giving back
that instrumentalizes selfishness. That’s the kind of guy I am you
know?—making the world a better place right from my own toi-
let. I start brushing my teeth as I invoke Headlines, “The First
Psychic News App”, to tell me about what’s going on in the world.
Headlines, get it? Because it reads you the headlines right in your
own head. Right now I am rated in the top decile for being an
informed citizen, but barely. 91%. The little 91 is in my periphery
now, along with a timer counting down from two minutes as I
make each little brush stroke, mindful of the gums. The implant
makes my teeth itch in such a way that brushing them feels very
satisfying. The itch moves all over my mouth and guides me to

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 key performance indicators

100% coverage.
The first Headline is: far right dissidents are sabotaging the
drones that deliver food to underprivileged neighborhoods in
several states. I interrupt the news reader by subvocalizing and
tell it to donate to the defense fund to protect the victims. That
gets me 20 more points in social justice, plus 10 more for doing
it without direct prompting by a machine. I have a fleeting vi-
sion of fireworks and a hunch that a pretty girl is winking at me,
and both sensations are ephemeral, as in a dream. Ideally, social
responsibility becomes a reflexive, conditioned habit. Full gum
coverage now. I’m such a fucking hero at this. A yellow warning
light gently reminds me not to get too full of myself.
A progress bar at the top of my FOV keeps me on track as
I shower. Core office hours begin at 9, but I like to get started at
8. I have a 54 day streak of getting the early bird bonus for being
work-ready an hour before core. The next news story is about the
rising trend of 3d-printed smart organs. New hearts, kidneys and
livers can integrate with Neuralink to stream KPIs and detect
toxins and pathogens in real time, along with information about
blood circulation and cardiovascular function.
If you sign up for the beta you can get a UBI credit to offset
the risks you take as an early adopter advancing the I-Level Hu-
man Goal of promoting fully quantified medicine for all. Goals
are divided into tiers and they exist at the personal, municipal,
state, national, and international level. I-Level goals are the most
important ones and also the hardest, the most far-thinking. Any-
thing you can do to advance an I-Level goal usually has a big
payout to your social justice score, but there are also lots of small,
individual things you can do to contribute to those goals. Every-
one has their part to play.
I try to sign up for the beta but the waitlist is a mile long
already, but I still join and earn a few consolation points for good
intentions. My shower has used 15 gallons of water so far and I
got a little distracted there. I quickly rinse off and cut it short,
clocking in at 15.5. The median is 17. I would have liked to get
it even tighter, but above average is better than nothing. My in-
formed citizen score hasn’t budged, and the HUD tells me that

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if I would need to hear 78 more headlines today in order to hit

the 92nd percentile. That will be tough, as it projects I will only
be able to hear 35 given my current rate of intake and the state of
my calendar for the day. If I don’t get through at least 20 my score
will fall to 90. That’s unacceptable.
As soon as my shower ends, Neuralink ideates a vision of a
Saturday morning cartoon breakfast into my mind’s eye. Scram-
bled eggs, bacon, sausage, cereal and milk, pancakes with syrup
and butter, a glass of orange juice and a smiling TV mom, who
reminds me: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”
My automated coffee maker has already finished brewing a pot
of fair trade carbon offset coffee from a microfarm run entirely
by women, another one of those cases where it’s worth spending
more to do good in the world. It all adds up and it all comes back
to you. 
For breakfast I have a macro-nutritionally complete food
loaf made with sustainably sourced insect protein, and my de-
gustation app makes it taste like anything I want. The decoupling
of the sensory experience of eating from the nature of the food
being eaten is the ultimate triumph of nutritional science; degus-
tation with neuralink can make healthy food taste like junk food.
A compressed pâté of kale and crickets can taste like an ice cream
sundae or a double bacon cheeseburger or foie gras mousse with
shaved white truffles and beluga caviar. Neuralink is generating
gastronomically exotic recipes; mouthfeel, chewiness, creami-
ness—all become plastic through the gossamer tendrils of full
duplex direct brain interfaces.
At some point, however, we must ask if we can enjoy this
kind of pleasure in good conscience. There are still many peo-
ple who don’t have access to Neuralink, and it seems unfair to
indulge in these endless delights while there are still so many
people in the world who are starving. That’s why I took a virtual
hunger pledge to limit my use of degustation, to raise awareness
and increase social pressure on others to donate and work to-
wards the causes of ending world hunger (another I-Level) and
making sure that everyone has access to degustation technology. 
When you take the pledge, you install a limiter on your

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 key performance indicators

Neuralink hub that ratchets flavor and texture down to approx-

imately zero, blocking all sensation of taste. The app tells the
world every time you eat a meal with the limiter enabled, and
tattles on you through a social media portal if you disable it or
opt to experience a burst of flavor. This is very important, as it
creates social accountability and keeps you from cheating. To be
perfectly honest, the food loaf tastes awful, so this pledge is still
a lot better than eating it unfiltered. That’s how I choose to look
at it.

Morning ablutions, breakfast, coffee, and I’m just in time

for work. At eight AM precisely, Ashonda lets me know I have
a call with a client at 8:15. I work on accounts for a dream pro-
duction company called Somno Labs. Mostly we’re a contracting
agency, and we do things like commercials or web shorts, but
we just landed a contract with REMflix to do production for one
of their upcoming shows. I’m on the account, so it’s an exciting,
dynamic job to have, and I get a front-row seat to watch how a
big-budget dream gets made.
The rep for REMflix is named Qiyara, and she is the associ-
ate producer of the series we’re making. We met at a launch party
for a reality show where the contestants have to compete and win
games while getting animal brainscans dreamed into their heads.
Somno Labs made some teasers for it and also procured some
of brain scans from different animals. The guy who thought he
was a walrus, man, you need to see it. But this time around, we’re
making a high-concept sci-fi miniseries about a future world
where money is delineated in carbon credits and people volun-
tarily use eco-suicide pods to clear their debts. 
Often at work I will pause for a moment to listen to a few
Headlines and before I know it, forty minutes are gone. To help
me manage this, I use a program called Hairshirt. The way it
works is, first it monitors your brain activity to establish a base-
line and figure out what it looks like when you are doing pro-
ductive, focused work. Then, any time your brainwaves deviate

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 they had no deepness of earth

from work, it gives you a mild but noticeable sensation of pain.

Over time, you develop a limbic intuition that getting distracted
is hurting you.
My favorite feature of Hairshirt is that you can choose what
kind of pain alarm you want: shocking, burning, tearing, ach-
ing, bloating, stabbing, stinging, shooting, or needling. Person-
ally, I prefer needling. If I start to surf the web or drift into idle
thoughts, I feel a sensation of sharp pinpricks starting at the base
of my spine and gradually covering my whole body. The longer I
procrastinate, the more the sensation expands and deepens. Af-
ter a few months with the app, I reflexively avoid wasting time,
but I keep it on so I won’t relapse.
At 8:14, I switch off Hairshirt and call Qiyara. It’s a vid-
eo call from our laptops, because it turns out that dream calls
through Neuralink are too raw, too risky. Almost no one can stay
fully present and focused for the duration of a brain-to-brain
call. Any thoughts you have will leak undesired ideation into the
minds of the people you are calling. And even if that weren’t true,
we need some measure of privacy in our own thoughts, or else
negotiation becomes impossible. In a Neuralink call, you can’t
hold anything back, and every passing fancy comes out.
Qiyara’s face appears on my screen and there’s a soft light
filter that makes her skin look nice. We exchange pleasantries
and she asks me if I have the updated screenplay with all the edits
she requested in our last meeting. I do, but this is also a code be-
cause let’s get it all out in the open here, Qiyara has a drug habit
and the main reason I got this contract is that I have a connec-
tion and I can get her what she wants. 
Yes, the girl likes her smartdrugs, one-time use programs
that hijack your Neuralink and deliver unregulated emotions.
The really good drugs don’t just blast you with pure dopamine;
they have some artistry about them, delicate envelopes of fear
that give way to elation, subtle juxtapositions of desire and relief,
longing and fulfillment. These programs are illegal because stud-
ies have shown that people are unable to resist abusive consump-
tion patterns with media that provide on-demand experiences
of bliss, contentment, or ecstasy. There are hardware controls on

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 key performance indicators

the implant itself that make it impossible to trigger these feelings

without highly regulated encryption keys from the Federal Asso-
ciation of Neurological Health, or the Fanch as we say in the biz. 
A modern smartdrug has three major components: the
first piece is the crack that lets it circumvent the federal controls.
The second is the payload, which delivers an illicit cognitive ex-
perience, and the third piece is the part that self-destructs the
entire program after it’s over. That last bit is important because
it’s how the dealers stay in business. I don’t consider it to be safe
to transmit these things over a network, both because ISPs run
automated smartdrug scanners on all connections as part of a
federal mandate, and because as a result of that, most of the peo-
ple offering to send them to you over the net are scammers and
that’s a good way to catch an MLM or a virus that makes you
extremely brand-loyal to some Indian knock-off viagra huckster.
No thanks.
I arrange to meet with Qiyara at 12:30, but before we hang
up she mentions a few more minor edits that she wants in the
demo reel before we make the handoff. I assure her that this will
be possible, and before I can even think it, Ashonda puts me on a
call with Yuna, my main POC (that’s point of contact, not person
of color!) in creative. 
Yuna answers my call with her characteristic stoicism, her
every word unfolding like a wave in a tranquil ocean. As you
probably know, enlightenment is a mandatory skill for commer-
cial dream production. Everyone in that department is a certified
zen master, because dreams are captured from the minds of neu-
tral observers, and you cannot be filled if your mind is already
full. Film studios used to be full of cameras, but dream studios
are full of monks. I describe the changes to the reel that Qiyara
requested and Yuna tells me that her team can have the edits
done in an hour. Her egoless confidence makes me think of a
gust of wind sweeping through a field of grass, each blade react-
ing and bouncing back, leaving no memory as it passes.

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 they had no deepness of earth

The call with Yuna ends at 8:27, leaving three minutes to go

until my morning standup with my personal growth team. This
is not, strictly speaking, part of work, but it’s one of my medical
benefits that I get through my company, and it’s an opportunity
to raise our social responsibility scores and become better peo-
ple. I’m the last one to join the call, and the AI Scrum leader,
Ashonda, welcomes me to the room. She starts off with a well-
ness check, and we each go around and talk about how we’re feel-
ing today. Everyone says they’re doing great, including me, but as
soon as I say it, a purple indicator flashes in my HUD to tell me
that, according to my biometrics, that was a lie.
Let me digress here for a moment and say that my honesty
score could be a lot better. It’s not that I’m a dishonest person, it’s
just that going through life every day there are times you need to
have discretion. You know how at work everyone is always so full
of positive energy? Everything is always “exciting,” everyone is
thrilled with our new app icon, we’re all elated that we’re meeting
our quarterly goals, or that the DEI team is progressing on mak-
ing our hiring more equitable—don’t get me wrong, all of those
things are good—but that’s just how you have to act in an office:
you have to be a perpetual cheerleader. 
Every time I put on that face at work, the system dings me
for a lie, not because I don’t mean it, but because I have self aware-
ness of it; that’s how the lie detector works, it’s a classifier trained
on your brain waves. It doesn’t say what the lie was, it doesn’t tell
anyone else, you just see a little purple “-1” and your score goes
down. We’re expected to be authentically empty vessels who get a
borderline sexual thrill out of the fact that we switched to a new
CRM tool, you feel me? What I’m trying to say is it’s an honest
lie, a lie for a noble purpose, and I’m not even saying it’s a lie ev-
ery time, but it’s a lie often enough that I’m flirting with disaster,
and I don’t have a plan. 
I suppose I could opt out of having an honesty score. You
don’t have to stream honesty metrics to your healthcare provider,
but if you don’t, doesn’t that look even worse than a bad score?
It’s one of those optional things that’s not really optional, and if it
gets bad enough, then people probably won’t want to work with

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 key performance indicators

me, or give me a loan, or maybe even pick me up in a rideshare.

So it makes me anxious, which I think makes the lie detector
even more likely to fire, vicious circle.
But I’m great! That’s what I tell my personal growth team,
because like the last thing you are going to tell them is all this, or
that your honesty score is wavering on the edge of “Filthy Rotten
Liar” because secretly you hate and resent the hive insect men-
tality of the modern office (which isn’t even an office any more,
it’s just a labyrinthe of laptops and dreams.) I say that I’m great,
and I’m still dedicated to my virtual hunger pledge, and that I’ve
been thinking a lot lately about more ways that I can give back to
the community that has given me so much.
We go around the circle and Jakayla says that she has been
struggling trying to make it through every day, not because of
anything external, but she needs to learn how to trust herself
more because she’s always second guessing herself because soci-
ety doesn’t teach women to be strong and self-confident. We all
nod and make murmurs of agreement.
Peter says that in spite of everything he’s full of hope for the
future. Like me, he took the virtual hunger pledge, and it’s really
just been a daily reminder to him how fortunate we all are.
Thomas says that he’s finally starting to feel like his authen-
tic self especially since his moustache started coming in and it
feels great to be seen and known as the person he’s always known
that he was on the inside.
Sometimes as we go around every morning, I ask myself
who these people even are. We were randomly linked up because
we’re all in the same healthcare network and according to some
algorithm, we are all at similar places in our life journeys. That’s
what Ashonda said when we joined. On some level I think it’s
ridiculous that we have to say how we feel, because Ashonda
knows exactly how we feel because she is fed a sophisticated ma-
trix of metrics from our Neuralinks and has direct access to all
our emotional states, but what she says is that my lizard brain
doesn’t know that, so the ritual of bringing it forward into the
consciousness is supposed to increase mindfulness and help me
feel centered and heard.

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Ashonda says she’s happy that we’re all doing so well, and
that it’s not wrong to take a minute, each of us for ourselves, to be
present and experience pure joy, because in deepening our own
awareness of our privileges, we will also be able to empathize
with others who lack them.
For a moment, all my senses are eclipsed by a pure sin-
gularity of warm and beckoning light, a wave of unity, compas-
sion, and love for everyone, almost like an orgasm but without
sexual desire. As I exhale, it’s like coming back down to earth.
I feel a tremendous openness. Ashonda says it’s OK to think of
these feelings as a reward for all of the good work we’re doing.
“But don’t get too comfortable. Let’s take a look at your life-sprint
goals and personal user stories.”
Life-sprints are an idea from the business world where
your AI coach helps you form personal, achievable, measurable
goals to become a better person. The idea is to organize your life
into stories that you want to be able to tell about yourself, and
then break them up into quantifiable actions that you can take to
make those stories come true. 
My story is that I want to make the world a more equal
place for the women. Ashonda helped me write this goal so that
it has both a local and a global dimension. The local involves
speaking up at work and fighting for equal pay. This sprint I have
a spike to make sure that none of the women in the company are
getting paid less than me within the same seniority bracket. If I
find any pay inequality, then I will write further stories to resolve
the problem, for example starting a salary redistribution pool to
make sure the excess goes to everyone equally. If every man did
this, we could probably close the pay gap tomorrow.
I also have a story to address my subconscious attitudes
and basic perceptions. Ashonda helped me see how beauty stan-
dards make the world an unfair place for women who aren’t born
with body types that society deems attractive. No matter what
we say or believe about equality, our implicit biases cause us to
treat women differently because of their bodies, and Neuralink
provides a novel way to fix this at the root.
We go around the circle again, this time giving our status

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 key performance indicators

updates. What story are we working on? What did we do to make

progress on it? Is anything blocking us?
Jakayla says her story is to advocate for Black women to
have more representation in media. She’s writing letters to differ-
ent media companies to make her voice heard and express how
important this issue is to her, and asking major media companies
what they are doing to advance the cause of increasing represen-
tation for marginalized groups.
Peter says his story is to advocate for Human-Animal Love
(HAL) Rights, because people who are Animal-Attracted deserve
the same recognition and acceptance in society that we give to
everyone else. Ever since Neuralink made it possible for animals
to give consent, there has been a growing movement to change
the law to grant marriage equality for HAL. Peter’s story is to do-
nate ten hours of work this week to HAL advocacy groups.
Thomas says his story is to take a trip to a developing city
and help distribute gender affirming hormone therapy to chil-
dren who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get it.
It’s my turn and I say my epic is to fight for womens’ equity
and that I actually have two different stories for that. The first
one is getting involved at work to raise questions about pay equi-
ty, but the second one—I feel a little embarrassed talking about
this—is a personal growth item suggested by Ashonda to help
work toward beauty equity for all women, no matter their body
type.
Ashonda asks if I would be willing to tell the group about
my experience, and the thing is, in this situation, can you really
say no? As I’ve explained, I can’t afford to make up a reason not
to, with my already tumultuous honesty score hanging over my
head. So I start talking, and I have to grit my teeth here, because
this is intimate and it’s something I don’t feel comfortable with at
all (but personal growth isn’t always comfortable.)
“Maybe it will sound a little weird, but the action I took to
advance the cause of womens’ body equity was to masturbate to
women that are not conventionally attractive. I only watch ethi-
cally sourced pornography, of course, where all the participants
demonstrate proof of age and consent to a third party, and an

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 they had no deepness of earth

independent reviewer verifies that none of the participants are

acting under coercion or were victims of human trafficking.”
Aside: I still don’t feel totally at home watching high-def
dreaming video, because I’m old enough to remember when we
watched everything on screens. In a video, you see an arrange-
ment of light that you interpret as a mountain, but in a dream
you feel a cognition of a mountain, which then evokes an ar-
rangement of light. The things you see are secondary to the feel-
ing of seeing, because the visual cortex doesn’t work like a tradi-
tional display.
“The woman in the dream I watched was extremely curvy,
or fluffy, or I guess, “big and beautiful:” her thighs were proba-
bly each as big as my waist, textured by stretch marks and cellu-
lite. She had huge spidery false eyelashes affixed to her face, and
enormous rolls of flesh hung down from her belly and covered
her genitals like a skirt. Her co-star held her pannus aside to re-
veal her intimate parts. Ashonda said it’s OK to be fully open
and honest about my feelings in these moments because if I don’t
acknowledge them I won’t be able to overcome them. So, radical
honesty: I found her repulsive. The sight of her made me feel
nauseous, and brought to mind questions of disease and infec-
tion.”
Silence. Presumably everyone is on mute. Ashonda says,
“That’s alright. If you have those feelings, it’s important to own
them, to name your prejudice.” Sometimes she almost feels like
a priest in a confessional, even though this isn’t exactly private.
I continue. 
“Before the dream started, I had given Neuralink permis-
sion to modify my emotions and proprioceptions. As I watched
the extra-curvy woman in the throes of ecstasy, my implant
turned nausea to attraction, repulsion to compulsion, and I
found myself full of eager desire for her; her fat rolls and stretch
marks drew me in, and I even imagined the scent of sour sweat
and yeast blooming in the folds of her skin: in that moment every
aspect of her was enticing to me. All my prejudice melted away.”
Jakayla and Peter and Thomas’ faces don’t betray any emo-
tion. I hope they weren’t paying attention, but I know they prob-

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 key performance indicators

ably are because Ashonda would have nudged them back if they
stopped. “Thank you for sharing that,” she said, “we can all learn
from your example”.
Warm light radiates from nowhere and bathes my sur-
roundings. A green and gold toast notifies me that I have gained
points in empathy and authenticity, and I get an achievement for
attending my 1000th personal growth standup.

At 12 exactly, Ashonda tells me from inside my head that

it’s time to leave to go meet Qiyara. To be honest she reminds
me of the woman in the video I watched for my personal growth
team, and I think that’s good. I hope I am treating her equitably.
I wonder if Ashonda knows that the reason I’m meeting Qiyara
is to bribe her with drugs. I don’t think so, because wouldn’t she
tell the authorities? But I also wonder how she could possibly not
know.
I load the encrypted smartdrugs onto a thumb drive,
and head down to my car. We all thought the future would be
self-driving robot cars, but it turns out the best self-driving car
is actually you, running a generative transformer pre-trained on
racecar drivers and integrated with google maps. The human
hardware is highly adapted to negotiating routes through 3d
spaces, and the software can be patched. I tell myself where I
want to go and pull out of my garage like a bat out of hell, a speed
demon on judgement day. Everything is a highway now, no traf-
fic lights anywhere, no speed limits, a hundred miles per hour on
surface streets. It’s as thrilling as any smartdrug, the exhilaration
of pure speed, more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.
At the same time though, I confess I feel like a passenger
in my own body, which parks my car ten stories underground
beneath a gleaming glass tower, a relic of the 20th century, back
when everyone used to cluster in cities and show up onsite to
work every day. There are still certain companies that cling to the
old trappings of prestige. The autopilot gives control back to me
once the car is parked, and I make way to the elevator, still fifteen

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 they had no deepness of earth

minutes before I’m supposed to meet with Qiyara. 

The elevator from the parking garage brings me to the
ground floor of the skyscraper. The floor is polished stone and
the ceiling of the lobby is very high, vertiginously so. Light shines
in through the glass on all sides, and there are more elevator bays
in a central column, to take you up to the business floors. Ashon-
da points out a table by making it glow and tells me to have a seat
while she lets Qiyara know I’ve arrived. But as soon as I sit down,
two men in identical gray suits and white button-down shirts
and black ties approach me and sit at my table, uninvited.
The first one asks me what I’m doing here, and I say I’m
dropping off some encrypted, sensitive documents for a client.
He says “is that all you’re doing?” A purple warning indicator
flashes in the lower left of my HUD; it can sense that I’m plan-
ning to lie. It shows me that my rating is about be downgraded to
“Untrustworthy”. I muster all the sincerity in the world, and I say,
“I’m also planning to get lunch.” Somehow, this doesn’t trip the
sensor. The man shows me a badge, FANH, and asks if I’ll submit
my documents to a malware scan. This will not compromise the
encryption, it will only search for known traces of smartdrugs
and viruses.
I try to tell them no. I try to get up and walk away, but
for some reason it doesn’t happen, even though I know it’s what
I should do. One of the quirks of dreaming media is that you
start to lose your sense of when you’re dreaming and when you’re
awake. Media you stream into your head feels just like a dream,
and you have linear, externally coherent imagery dreamed into
your head while you’re asleep. There are admittedly days when I
feel as though I’m constantly on the brink of awakening, as if the
dream I dreamt in my sleep still has me.
In my left jacket pocket is the drive with the drugs, in the
right is the drive with the screenplay. I give them the one with
the work documents and they plug it into a small device. It scans
clean. The agent asks me if I have any other drives, and the pur-
ple warning flashes again.

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 key performance indicators

... This story ended a bit abruptly. At the time I wrote it, I wished
I could have tied up all the threads in a neater little package. This type
of harmony is called “concinnity,” when everything comes together in
a pleasing way, and it would be fair to say this story lacks concinnity,
as many post-modern stories do. They start in the middle, they end
in the middle, and it’s all a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But upon reflection, I have decided it conveys precisely what I intend
it to – that it illustrates the principle of anarcho-tyranny – because it
shows how you can break the rules in an automated panopticon for
an arbitrary amount of time and get away with it, yet at any moment,
the system might notice you and punish you. When draconian rules
are enforced unevenly and arbitrarily, this is a state of both anarchy
and tyranny at the same time, and one does not have to look very far
to see that we exist in this precise idiom today, even now.
There is not much room for conflict in a story set in a society
of total algorithmic control, because the entire premise is that the
system is capable of preemptively winning all struggles endogenous-
ly, and if it can’t deliver on that, then it isn’t total, or at the very least,
it appears weak, and ceases to be scary. The only option for a plot
about a rule-breaker with a brain control device in his head is that
the system itself breaks him, and of that day and hour knoweth no
man.
One enduring feature of all “dystopias”1 is that although they
may be set in the future or the past, or in a far away place, they are al-
ways anchored in the present moment. They are stylized depictions
of the here and now, an attempt to make various contradictions legi-
ble by increasing their contrast. I sometimes tell people that you can
find horror in everything, in everyday life, if you learn how to look.
Horror is much more of a disposition than any particular arrange-

1 I put the word in quotes because all possible worlds are dystopian when
compared to a utopian ideal. Gritty realism is dystopian; a slice of life is
dystopian; the daily news is dystopian, etc. This word is overused and it
implies there is some kind of achievable future technoparadise that we can
finally realize if everyone just wakes up. People who deploy this word may
not think that is what they are implying, but it is, and it’s a facile notion.

259
 they had no deepness of earth

ment of circumstances. And in light of that, I’d like to call attention

to a few points of techno-optimism that are present in this story.
Technology and modernity are obvious, lazy scapegoats for the per-
vasive discontent that is an inexorable part of the human condition.
If any ancient humans were born with an innate sense of contented-
ness in their nature, I promse they were out-competed and out-bred
by their anxious, striving, covetous neighbors, and the latter sort are
the ones who comprise our ancestors. So we have to take our opti-
mism where we can get it.
The possibilities afforded by a full-duplex in-brain device are
nearly limitless, but the current iteration of the Neuralink device
cannot possibly have the precision and resolution needed to peform
the tasks that I have described in this story (he said, being an absolute
layman with regard to Neuroscience). Nevertheless I have imagined
several applications for the technology that I find to be genuinely
interesting and fun: the degustation technology that I have imagined
could make it much easier to eat a healthy diet, pushing all of the
phenomological buttons of superstimulating foods like french fries
and cheesecake, even as we are eating lean proteins and bitter greens.
As with any such capacity, there might be hidden costs in the
form of a loss of discipline or a sense of derealization or fatigue that
negates the hedonic gains of being able to simulate every imaginable
culinary experience “for free.” I think I made a fine survey of these
types of problems in God-Shaped Hole, but we can at least acknowl-
edge that the untethering of experience from material constraints is
exciting and interesting, in addition to being disorienting and dehu-
manizing.
Constraints spur creativity, and we expect that removing them
will open up new vistas of creative possibility, but instead it tends to
cheapen everything that is beautiful and rare. Both of these things
are true at the same time, and I believe that a man of vision, who is
worthy and who can listen to the voices of ancient gods, can also
weather the storm of being totally unconstrained, and can use these
new powers to achieve great works.
The other optimistic idea in the story comes at the end, when
the narrator is driving his car using Neuralink. If a computer really
could take control of your movements, then its likely that you would

260
 key performance indicators

become a hapless and helpless passenger in your own body, looking

on as machines take actions on your behalf. That is a truly horrific
idea, which would transform mankind into something akin to ants
or bees, social insects, and its one that we will explore further in the
coming pages.
A brain implant like Neuralink could allow you to perform
bodily tasks with borrowed world-class expertise. The character in
my story is able to drive with preternatural skill, and I took a mo-
ment to exult in this, echoing a line from the Marinetti’s Futurist
Manifesto:

We declare that the splendor of the world has been en-

riched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing
automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes
like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car
which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beau-
tiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

I find this manifesto very inspiring, so much that I am tempt-

ed to reproduce the entire thing here. But I won’t, because I know
you can easily find it, and even that very short journey is edifying.
For many are called, but few are chosen. Technology causes some
enormous problems, but it has also given us many gifts. And if we
extrapolate to the future, we can imagine a million hells of our own
making, but in these latter days when the prevailing attitude is limp-
ing resentment of technology, Marinetti’s manifesto is a breath of
compressed air, discharged from a canister that hisses like a ser-
pent, puncturing the lungs with the diabolic force of industrial ma-
chines! I have come to tell you of the horrors of technology and of its
glories. Whomst’ve among you will have the courage, audacity, and
revolt to praise the beauty of speed, to glorify war, militarism, patri-
otism, the beautiful ideas that kill?
A mechanical shepherd, and one herd! That’s what Neuralink
will become; a shepherd’s crook to an endlessly masturbating tech-
nocratic slime, if you continue with your effete affectations of tradi-
tionalism, which you whisper to each other through pocket lightning
mirrors and comm satellites, hovering in the exosphere like Ezekiel’s

261
 they had no deepness of earth

angels, four-faced wheels in the middle of wheels, their rings of a

dreadful height. You have heard that Man is the tool-using animal,
now will you allow yourself to become the animal that is used by
tools? Or will you seize them and put them in their place? Will you
fight, or will you perish like a dog?
I need you to reject the parochialism, the narrowness of moral
imagination which can only conceive of a singular and monotonic
type of social change. The only social development that most futur-
ists today can articulate is one where “norms” are more sexually lib-
ertine, entailing less individual responsibility for any moral outcome,
where every problem is “systemic” and is solved by means of submis-
sion to an overbearing mother state, who installs a baby monitor
in your pocket, your house, and finally in your head. They call this
spiritual degeneration by the name of progress, but I call it regress.
“Progressives” of this type are so conformist, so cowardly, that
they will refuse even to perceive the plain truths in front of them if
mommy does not give them permission.

262
Dagon
• •
 they had no deepness of earth

“We’ve received a complaint. I’m sorry, I can’t say from

whom, apparently one of your coworkers overheard a conversa-
tion between you and your teammate, Joanna. In the context we
received the complaint, you were discussing her date from the
previous night, and you made the remark, “there are plenty of
fish in the sea.” You’re not in trouble. We just ask that you think a
little bit more next time and use more inclusive language. Instead
of that, why couldn’t you say something like, “there are plenty of
others out there.” When you say something like “fish in the sea”
you are, maybe unwittingly, invoking the legacy of fishing, and
that can make some people feel unwelcome. We just want every-
one who works here to feel comfortable in their own scales or
skin, as the case may be.”

Dear Colleagues,
I would like to apologize, both on behalf of the company,
and personally, to all of you for my use of the phrases “net profit”
and “net loss” in the quarterly earnings report. I am troubled to
say that I was not fully aware of the connotations of these phras-
es in light of the dark history of our country and indeed, our
entire species. Several of you came to me in private to help me
understand what I did wrong and how I can try to be a better
ally. I now see that the use of the “n-word” can be very disturbing
or triggering to Thalassian People. I know there can be no real
excuse for what I have said, but I am striving every day to work
on myself an improve. Going forward, we will only use the more
inclusive term, “revenue minus cost.”
Thank you,

“Hello, Mohinder, thank you for making the time to come

see me today. No, please don’t think of this as a reprimand. We
can’t, of course, tell you what to eat–no one is telling you that, ob-
viously that would be an overreach. However, in your bio in the

264
 dagon

org chat, you describe yourself as a ‘pescetarian’ – again, obvious-

ly, the diet you choose is up to you. That’s a personal choice. But
we are asking you–the company is asking you–if you wouldn’t
mind removing that word from your description.
“No, no one has complained yet, but we are concerned that
it might be upsetting to some of our new hires. In the employee
code of conduct, which you signed after you onboarded–oops,
when you joined the company–see? anyone can make a mistake–
it states that employees should not use any polarizing or divisive
language, including language that may have offensive racial, sex-
ual, ableist, or humanist associations. We appreciate your coop-
eration.”

“Mr. Ward, thank you for coming in. As we indicated to

you in our email, we have received a number of distressing calls
from some of our customers about your alleged posts on social
media. In particular, one caller indicated some very troubling
tweets that you seem to have made in which you refer to “fish
people”, and refer to “the innsmouth lean.” We were also sent sev-
eral screenshots in which you refer to “bait”, which is a known
human-supremacist dog whistle according the SPLC and the
ADL. Moreover, they show you responding to the accounts of
several prominent Thalassians with single word replies such as
“sushi”, “sashimi”, “ceviche”, and on one occasion, “fish sauce.” I
shouldn’t have to explain that this behavior is unacceptable.

Ticket Status: Closed

“Hello, Ms. Corbett, and thank you for taking the time to
write this report. We have investigated your claim about the in-
cident on November 18th, and the finding at this time is that no
violation of ethics or the employee code of conduct occurred.
We spoke to several of your colleagues, and all of them indicated

265
 they had no deepness of earth

that Barekdagon’s guttural shrieks, which you interpreted as sex-

ual aggression, are involuntary and reflexive when he hears the
ancestral voice of the great ones who even now lay dreaming in
the nameless abyss that was old when the stars were young. We
understand that some of our employees are still at the beginning
of their antihumanism journey, and we remind you that we have
many resources available on the company HR portal, which can
help you relate to and aid in the struggles of Molluscan, Icthyan,
and Gastropodal People of the Ocean (MIGPOO.) 

~Subject: New Hires

From: karen@*********

Hello Team,
We are pleased to introduce our newest hire, Munzzur. In
her own words:

Hi everyone! The closest you will be able to

get to pronouncing my name with your human
tongues and mouths is Munzzur’Ak’ak, and I am
so excited to be part of this company and its mis-
sion. A bit about my background: I spent the past
3000 years in a trance at the bottom of an ocean
trench, preparing the way for my undimensioned
and unseen master’s re-entry into the world. He
knows the gate. He is the key. He is the gate.
He is the key and the guardian of the gate.
He knows where the Old Ones broke through of
old, and where They shall break through again.
My hobbies include hiking, scrapbooking, and
raising my nightmare brood of eldritch pelagic
horrors. I’m a full-time sales strategist and a full-
time mom!

266
 dagon

“Damn squids. They smell funny, you know?”

“Hey, don’t let anyone hear you say that. But just between
you and me, yeah, they smell like rotten fish.”
“Look man I’m not a humanist, ok, I just don’t like ‘em.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I don’t like them. I try to
judge everyone as an individual, you know?”
“Oh, totally. And let’s be clear, there’s a difference between
thalassians and squids, yeah? Like, not every thalassian is a
squid.”
“The thing that really pisses me off, ok, if we’re being hon-
est here–”
“This is a safe space, it’s OK, I won’t judge you.”
“–Is that those fuckers basically live on fish, they eat an all
fish diet, but god forbid you or I want to have a nice bite of fish,
no no, that would be humanist, meanwhile Lapidoth down in IT
is munching on like a pound of sashimi and that’s just fine for
him.”
“I miss tempura shrimp. Used to be you could just go out
and eat a nice plate of tempura shrimp. Ponzu sauce. I want to
the izakaya down on 12th yesterday and they didn’t even have
shrimp on the menu. Only Japanese place left in town.”
“You know in China they don’t give a shit. They eat shell-
fish, salmon, tuna, like none of this even happened.”
“Political correctness. Eh?”
“My buddy went to Shenzhen on a business trip last month.
He said there was a stall on the street selling boiled squid, you
know what I’m saying?”
“No shit.”
“Swear to god.”
“Did he try it?”

267
 they had no deepness of earth

... This, along with the previous story, constitutes some kind of
white collar horror, or corporate horror, which is to say, bureaucratic
horror. It’s a common and even easy genre because we live every day
in the belly of leviathan. Where Key Performance Indicators suggests
that the nadir of the human soul might be realized if the rituals of
managerial control could were applied to our personal lives, Dagon
asks the impious and unconscionable question: is there a limit to
the logic of inclusion and diversity? Is there any degradation, any
humiliation which our government (through its emissaries, HR de-
parments) will not ask us to endure, for the sake of this principle?
I think the answer is obviously no, and this story angered a
number of people because the dedication to these things is in no
wise rational or predicated on any kind of cost-benefit analysis; it is a
religious observance, a sacrament, something which is beyond ques-
tioning. If there were eldritch fish people who wanted to raise the
Old Ones to devour all mankind in an orgy of fire and blood, then
the priesthood of diversity, equity, inclusivity, or death would indeed
react by creating new speach taboos to make them feel welcome in
the workplace. That’s all they know. That’s all they can imagine.

268
 Don’t
Make Me
Think
• •
The first misconception is that it is possible to
avoid influencing people’s choices.

– Richard H. Thaler, Nudge

 they had no deepness of earth

I. Dagger
A man —a boy —grows up in the exquisitely quanti-
fied and gamified world , in the cityy of
Cupertino, on the edge of the Santa Clara Valley, in the
shadow of the Santa Cruz Mountains . When he is eleven,
his parents —an Ashkenazi technical product
manager and a Chinese game design-
er named “Sing” Song —take him to get his
Neuralink at the hospital by the Super Kyo-Po plaza. 
A robot performs the procedure, which re-
quires no general anaesthesia , in one hour . While
they wait , his parents buy their groceries for the
week , and when it’s over , they take him to get ramen
for lunch. He orders two ajitsuke eggs and
extra chashu pork (because he’s a growing boyy ) and
his parents eat compressed enriched mealworm
bricks . For them, Neuralink degustation
technology makes the worm loaff phenomenologi-
cally indistinguishable from a hot bowl of
Hakata ramen . 
For the next three nights , as expected, the boyy
sees dazzlingg incomprehensible dreams , all
of which he forgets , and on the fourth day , he
wakes without waking into a vaporwave
expanse of Pantone rose quartz and serenityy . A
voice in his head says “good morning ,”
and it sounds like his mother but with uninflected
English . “You can call me Amy , unless you

270
 don't make me think

prefer a different name . We’ll be getting to know

each other better in the coming weeks , but for now I
need to make sure everything is working properly. If you can
hearr me, please thinkk about a rhinoceros .
“… Good , and now a castle ?
“… Good , and now your favorite TV show ?” 
Amy teaches him to make search queries
with his mind , and to install ap-
plications , and tells him she will collect his
biometrics to ensure he remains in good health at all
times . She will read his thoughts , but
she will never share them with anyone, and will al-
ways respect his privacy . The boy doesn’t
tell her, though he guesses she
will know , that he receives this as a threat
. Hereafter, his life will be measured and
optimized and nudged , to help him live up to his
full potential. 
As he reads his books in school , Amy
highlights the words one at a time
to help him keep the pace while studying .
She tells him how many words he has read
, how many minutes he has spent reading
, and ranks him against local, regional, and national
averages. She shows him how to find his
position on a leaderboard that charts the
reading ability of everyone in his age cohort .
Reading , writing , and arith-
metic are all fully automated through Neu-
ralink . A program in the boy’s personal
cloud decodes images retrieved from the lateral

271
 they had no deepness of earth

geniculate nucleus of his brain and parses them into words

using OCR algorithms (Pravettoni et al., 2034,
Mitigating Systemic Cognitive Inequalities through Au-
tomation of Mentall Labor.) A similar
mechanism is used to automaticallyy detect
mathematical symbols and perform the rele-
vant computations . 
Students hear the words they are read-
ing , or the answers to math questions,
in their own inner “voice ”—the Neuralink dri-
ver is able to manifest these values in the mind
of the student using a method called Concept In-
jection . The purpose of education is not to
train students to read or do math ; it’s to
train them to use mental automation effec-
tively. Tool-assisted d reading is performed
through the cultivation of passivity and “flow ”. The
application gives , and the reader receives .
In P.E. class, they use a parkour program and play
follow the leader , free-running through an ob-
stacle course by playingg back neuromotor record-
ings from top athletes . Although they are
children, they can tap into the aggregated
muscle memory of a thousand lifetimes. The boy
feels like a passenger in his own body , but it’s
thrilling to feel himself leap from a height , roll
and dash across concrete pylons and flip
off of railings and wall ledges. Sometimes he wonders
if it’s really happening or if it’s just a hallucination , but
his muscles feel sore afterwards. Whether it’s real may be
entirely the wrong question .

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When he uses the toilet , Amy records

all his muscle movements, and shows him met-
rics that track how much his anus clenches when
he shits . She explains how these metrics can be
used to detect leading indicators of un-
healthy bowel function , and recommends (both to
him and his parents ) that he should switch to a high-
er fiber nutrient brick . (Heaton, Radavan, 2024, Dark
Matter : Extrapolating Behaviorr in the Enteric Ner-
vous System Using Neuralink )
Sometimes whole weeks go by without a single act
of agency on the part of the boy . Amyy says
wake up and he wakes up . She says
get dressed and he gets dressed . She says go
here , do this, go there , study ; eat ;
and he does , he does , he does . It feels less
like obedience and more like convenience . 
When he is thirteen, in accordance with economic
forecasts , he enrolls in a vocational track to learn
about encephalic software engineer-
ing . In his sleep , Amyy   dreams
schematics and flowcharts and diagrams into his
mind . At the same time , she enrolls him in YouSocial,
a broker for B-certifications . B-certified individu-
als are people who meet the highest standards
of verified social and environmental performance
, who work together to redefine suc-
cess and build a more inclusive and sustainable
economy, creating new incentives through person-
al transparency and accountability . (What is B-Certifica-
tion?, YouSocial.com/FAQs, 2031.) On average, it takes five

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years for young adults to earn a B-certification ; em-

ployers and colleges use the cert as an essential
criteria for evaluating applicants.
On the weekends , his father takes him geo-
cachingg with an app called Recollect, in which
the proprietor of a hidden cache uploads a
memoryy of the actt of hiding it, but does not
share the coordinates . Together, the boyy and
his dad find a memory of a capsule in a
flower pot next to a statue of Nikola Tesla , and
they join the others who have found it there by
uploading their own memories to the chain
of recollections. 
Inside the capsule is a small Tesla coil ,
and when he beholds it, a popup in his mind’s eye
asks if he would like to relive the collec-
tive’s discovery . He assents . A kaleidoscopic
wave of images floods his mind
, layers of phantom approaches to the cap-
sule from every angle ; panoramic sight, poly-
phonic echoes of satisfaction . 
When he is fifteen, some of the parental controls
fall away, and Amy introduces him to Neu-
ralink pornography , which is metered by
homework completed . Memory-based
porn is regulated by the LOTUS EATER
Act: using direct brain stimulation
to induce orgasm is classified as
wireheading , and this functionality can
only be deployed by software certified
by behavioral experts to have value in pro-

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moting or fostering prosocial behaviors in the user. 

Recorded memories that contain sexu-
al stimulation of erogenous parts fall
under Schedule II, which defines any
memoryy or application that induces eupho-
ria conducive to single-mindedness as a potential
vector→ of abuse . (Limiting Onanistic Tendencies Under
Simulation , Exceptions Afforded To Education & Reme-
diation, 13 U.S.C. §§ 56-341, 2028.)
Amy lets him browse the porn
networks for up to an hour each day , provided he
completes all of his homework . Neuralink
pornography allows the user to have first-per-
son sexual experiences across a range
of genders and sexual presentations,
and has been shown to significantly reduce
prejudice against marginalized sexual identi-
ties (West et. al, 2034, Can Intra-Subjective Non-
Binary Sexual Experiences Induce Empathy ?). 
As he grows older and despite the prodding
of the voice in his head , he never concerns
himself with the thoughts or the dealings of women .
In high school , Amy tries to broker
dates for him, but he does not care for dates with boys
, and he finds the girls Amyy suggests to
be ugly or otherwise deficient. (1 in 4 boys are resis-
tant to Neuralink -induced “cued
bisexuality” vs. 1 in 50 girls. [French, 2029, The Conservative
Case for State-Enforced Homosexuality.])
Yet when he is seventeen, all on his own, he meets a ha-
pashkenazi girl named May with a face from

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Chongqing and tits from Samandar. He is

overcome with lust for her, but she rejects his advances
(The exact location of Samandar is unknown ;
medieval Arabic sources place
the city midway between Derbent and Atil, near
the shore of the Caspian Sea [Brook, 2018, The
Jews of Khazaria.]) 
In anger , he picks a fight with another boyy
that she favors . He balls up his fist and it flies
at his rival’s head , as if of its own accord, but before the
punch can connect , Amy fills his mind
with calming emotions and inhibits
the muscles in his shoulder and tricep. He relax-
es in spite of his will. Even so, the other boy’s eyes
become glassy, lost in some neuromanipulated
soothing unto himself. (An exercise in theory
of mind : that other boyy must have his own Amy
, with her own voice , and her own name
. What does she tell him?) The peace
of the moment yields rapidlyy to terror , be-
cause the boy realizes his body may disobey him.
Instantly, Amy files an incident re-
port with the school board and the local police ,
indicating the boy was the antagonist in an attempted
assault in which he experienced hot-blooded
violent intentions. The ticket is rout-
ed to the school guidance counselor’s office, where a
bot processes the report and prescribes a course of
medium-intensity guilt to be invoked whenever the boy
recalls the incident in question . The prescrip-
tion is appended to the ticket , which is marked

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as ‘pending review,’ whereupon the automated

psychiatric consultant for the district approves it and
pushes a notification to Amy , the boy’s parents
, and the school’s student resources office . The round
trip time from filing the ticket to its ap-
proval is just over six seconds , with 2/3rds of
the time spent waiting on the approval, 18% above
the mean but still a 3.2% improvement YOY. The boy’s
score on YouSocial is decremented d by ten points, with a
chance to mitigate the penalty if he completes a
probationary period with no recidivism.
As soon as the approval comes through, Amyy de-
ploys the guilt through the boy’s Neuralink
, and although he feels a heaviness in his chest, he is un-
able to place its origin. He does not feel any re-
morse about trying to punch the other boyy , and
the experience of guilt feels like it comes from some-
where outside him, as in fact, it does . He dis-
likes the sensation , but on some level he
knows the provenance of the feeling, and that it’s
part of the same intervention that stopped him from
landing his punch in the first place. He
hates Amy , and his anger wells up under the arti-
ficial guilt and subsumes it.

One nightt he downloads a memoryy

from Recollect of a curving road where no street signs
are visible. In the memoryy , he parks his car on
the highwayy shoulder and steps out into the hu-

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mid air of a marsh in the San Francisco

Bay. He walks into the wetlands with a flash-
light , uncomfortably far, and lifts up a rock with a
false bottom . Without looking , he places an
object inside , so that the nature of his treasure
cannot be discerned by aspiring recollectors. But al-
though the object cannot be seen , it’s clear
from the emotion of the rememberer that
he has hidden more than just an artifact ; he has also
buried an obligation, and this is a ritual ; it’s not
the first time and it won’t be the last.
The boy goes out to the wetlands to search
, following the memoryy , but he does not
find the treasure . Even late at night , he can
go anywhere he wants with his car , because Crime-
Stop is installed on every Neuralink de-
vice , and it cannot be removed, so children are nev-
er unsupervised. Neuralink with Crimestop
both protects him from others, and protects
young people from the follies of youth. 
The next day after school , he searches again,
and still he finds nothing . Weeks elapse.
He does not relent in his search , and no one
uploads any new memories of finding
the Recollect cache in the rock , so he knows
it’s still waiting there for him. He replays
the original memoryy again and again, until he
feels he is looking for an object he has hidden
from himself. 
Every dayy at school , he sees May together with the
other boy , whose name he does not care to

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learn . Each sight of her is a slight; each

thought of her with him is a wound .
And when he thinks of her, he also thinks of the
fight that was denied to him, of the way his arm
went slack; of the way his shoulder seized up. And when he
remembers these things, Amyy fills him with
guilt , and guilt spurs his anger , and his anger lowers
his YouSocial score. The boy has his mother’s
temper , and the world is full of invisible
walls. He believes (and he knows it is a superstitious
belief) that if he finds the treasure
in recollect, he will also discover a way to win.
May’s affection .
Amy tells him feelings of anomie ,
alienation , and even despair are normal, common
symptoms of adolescence; the way to become his best self is to
have personal goals that connect him to his
community. He can both improve himself and repair
his trajectory towards B-certification . A longitu-
dinal study by West and Curwen found that
teenagers who set their own charitable goals are
three times more likely to build enduring altruistic
habits vs. teens who have them randomly as-
signed (West, Curwen, 2038, Setting Them Up For Suc-
cess : A Neurologicall Approach to Cultivating Con-
scientiousness in Developing Adults.) She tells him he
should choose his own goal , and gives him a
list of possibilities.
He chooses to do volunteer work for an organization
called Respawn that rehabilitates recovering
smartdrug addicts . Amy handles the regis-

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 they had no deepness of earth

tration process and the scheduling . On the ap-

pointed day , he goes to the Respawn clinic
linic , where
they show him a training and orientation
video —

The human mind is

a machine that falls into
predictable failure modes when
exposed to the wrong combination
of stimuli . For this reason,
cases of smartdrug addiction
are best viewed, not as
questions of crime and punish-
ment, but as matters of treatment
and prevention (Zhang , 2033,
Risks and Mitigations of Neuralink
Abuse.) Respawn’s program
gives smartdrug victims a
chance to heal by “reformat-
ting” pathological vectors of
personal ! identity that cause
the afflicted to succumb. Using
Neuralink , it is possible to
delete and overwrite
the patient’s memories in a
guided, consensual process that
nullifies the root cause of
harmful impulses. Broadly speak-
ing , addiction replaces
one of two things: human
connection or change

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 don't make me think

. The modal smartdrug

user is derealized by chronic
exposure to in-brain superstimuli
, and benefits from
the physical presence of other
people during rehabilitation, who
aid the process by affirming
the new identity vectors and
helping to integrate
them into the patient’s self-con-
ception . (ibid.)
The process of reforming iden-
tity is gradual, because memo-
ries are all intertwined
with each other, and an unexpect-
ed stimulus can evoke a
harmful shadow from the past.
Face-to-face conversa-
tion is a way of testing for
problematic associations while
fortifying the patient’s
new , healthy identity "!

—and he is introduced to a recovering addict

named John, a man in his forties with graying hair.
They sit together at a table in a courtyard in the shade
. John is a marketing strategist for a dream-
ing media production agency, and he has
two competing stories in his mind : in the first , he
is overcoming a crippling addiction to smart-
drugs with the help of the Respawn clinic , and

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 they had no deepness of earth

in the second, he is receiving physical therapy

for a sports injury he sustained in an ama-
teur baseball league. John seems to be aware of
both stories simultaneously , but he is unaware
they are competing.
The Respawn app , mediated
through Amy , tells the boy what to say
. “How long have you been playing baseball ?”
“Well, to be honest I remember a time
before these things were illegal . Back then it was
kind of the same thing as a video game , or maybe just a
neww kind of game . You know how in a game
when you kill a boss or beat a level , there
are flashy explosions and fan-
fares and all that? Well, this was kind of the same thing. I
loved it, I would get up at six AM most days and
the first thing I would do would be to head out to
the batting cages and practice my swing . It was great
exercise .”
Sometimes, as John is talking , he suddenly goes
quiet and his eyes roll back in his head .
Amy tells boy this is because
Respawn’s software is updating something in his
mind . Next she has him say “Do you have a fa-
vorite memory of playing the game ?”
“Oh yeah, of course. Best game I ever played, it was
like something out of a movie . Bottom of the
ninth, bases loaded, close game and my team only needed
one run to win, and I was up at bat. You’d download
this app and there would be all kinds of
effects—visual effects, audio effects, sometimes there

282
 don't make me think

would be tastes and smells and all kinds of things.

It would feel like the softest, most pillowy cloth gently
brushing your skin, or like a pretty girl was caress-
ing you, all kinds of things—”
John has a little spasm , and then continues.
“And you know I probably could have just tried to
walk or bunt but this was just some cityy game , it’s
not even minor league, so people are tired and the pitcher just
throws me this fat meatball , and it was like my
whole world ld just changed and exploded
and I was in this other place , there were like
, impossible -to-describe beings there , all kinds of
things, trying to talkk to me. Unreal. ”
Amy tells him to say, “Looking
back , do you thinkk there was a point where
your relationship to the game became unhealthy?”
John says “At some point , people started
figuring out how to trigger emotions ,
how to invoke cherished memories . Someone I knew
compared it to cooking or mixology ; you could put
all these different ingredients together and build really
complex sensations and emotions . I guess
it’s no surprise that I ended up going
too hard. Sometimes I would be out there playing pickup
games like five nights a week . 
“And I guess I just need to learn to
give it a rest sometimes. One of my favorites
was an app that made every single thing you did feel
like the accomplishment of a lifetime, like the
culmination of decades of struggle and striving. You could
flip it on and every step felt like a revelation

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 they had no deepness of earth

. If you opened a door to go into another room, you

would think ‘I can’t believe I opened that doorr so
deftly, and with such mastery and subtlety.’ Then
you’d walk through the door and feel incredible.
‘Have you ever seen anyone walk with such grace
, such poise, such singularity of purpose?
My intent is like a samurai blade , forged by a
master .’
Amy tells the boy to ask “If you
recognized the problem, why weren’t you able to stop
it?”
“It wasn’t just the lack of rest . Me, I’m a driven
person . I want to win . And what this whole
injury thing is teachingg me is that it’s probably better to
fight another day than to win every single
game . You could go on in this vein for days , but eventu-
ally you’d get used to it and the app would stop
working. So people started d building more com-
plex apps that would cycle between longing
and satisfaction , some of them would be real
carousels of emotion . And people also started
using these kinds of enhancements in real video games
too, they called it ‘juicing ’ or ‘seasoning
’, they’d blast you with ‘having fun’ emotions or
‘accomplishment ’ at critical times in the game
, so you can imagine playing a shooting
game and getting juiced emotions every
time you got a kill . What was even more fun is they
started making it really unpleasant to die ,
giving people jolts of fear or even pain , and that
honestly just made getting a kill feel even

284
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sweeter , to know that the guy you just zapped

was doubled over in pain , having a re-
ally bad time .”
Amy tells the boyy to sayy “Tell
me about your injury . What happened?”
“I had a friend from back when who could hook me
up. I don’t know where he got them. Don’t
ask , don’t tell , you know ? But I
was enterprising . When you have something scarce,
a lot of doors can open for you; jobs, clients, con-nec-
tions , all kinds of things. I ended up giving
away more than I used. And it’s funny , I did that
for a long time , and I never got caught , but if you
think about it, they have a snitch living right
inside your head . So if you breakk the rules,
someone has to know w . You shouldn’t get away with any-
thing. But people buyy and sell smartdrugs
all the time , so what do you figure? 
“The way I see it there’s two possibilities: either that
AI in your head really isn’t that smart ,
or else they let it happen and someone is profiting
off all this through backchannels. Probably both. But some-
thing I did tripped an alarm , and as I was trying to
steal second base, I tried to reverse
and double back , and tore my ACL . Now
I’m here .”

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 they had no deepness of earth

The next Sunday morning , the boyy wakes up

early and goes again to the marsh to search for his
treasure from Recollect. Just like in his memo-
ry , the air smells of eucalyptus and
bay laurel . No one is around, and everything glows
golden with California sunshine . He has
turned over a thousand rocks in these wetlands, he
knows because Amyy has counted . And
under the thousand-and-first rock , he finds
the recollected item exactly as it is in his memoryy . He
lifts up the rock with its false bottom , and he
removes a dagger with an inlay in bas-relief. It feels like
lightning courses through him. In a part of his mind
that was beneath his awareness , he has always
known what it would be.
Holding the dagger in hand , he calls
on Amyy to navv him home, but she does not
respond . He tries again, and she does not re-
spond . Amy is even with him when he loses
network connectivity ; so he knows
this is something other than a network outage . He
wonders if she can even see him. The boy
walks back to the road , and as a test, he uses the knife
to slash the tire of a parked car , and he grits
his teeth as he prepares for Amy to repri-
mand him, or modulate his emotions
. His YouSocial score should go down , but it doesn’t
. The feeling is vertiginous . He is invisible
and invulnerable .
As long as he holds this dagger , Amyy
can’t see him. But when he tries to board a bus

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 don't make me think

to go home , the door won’t open. As soon as

he lets it go, the AI in the bus lets him on, and Amy
speaks into his mind , “I’m sorry ,
something went wrong . I will now run a trou-
bleshooting procedure, to make sure your Neuralink is
functioning properlyy .” After a few moments , she
says “Your Neuralinkk device appears to
be working correctly . If these problems continue, I
will direct you to a maintenance center for an
in-depth diagnostic.”
Even invisibility has its limits, as one may no-
tice a conspicuous absence . He places the dag-
ger in his backpack , and tries not to think of
it, not even a little , so Amyy won’t read
his thoughts . He thinks of what John
told him at the Respawn clinic , that the
AI just isn’t that smart , that its seeming
prescience is narrow and domain-locked , but he also
notes that this theory came from a guy who
was in the process of having his mind wiped for being
naughtyy . 
It would be all too easy to end up like John; was
that the real reason Amy introduced them? As a warn-
ing ? He cannot envision a future for
himself that he does not detest , and he longs for
the tranquilityy he felt when he held the dagger on
the beach . But he knows also that he will only
have one chance to use it before it’s disco-
vered by the systems of control that
contain him.

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 they had no deepness of earth

He thinks finding this dagger is

fate , and his use of it will be a glorious ,
heroic action, maybe the only thing in his life he will
ever truly do for himself. He does nott care what comes
after. He decides , though he’s nott quite sure, that if
he can live out this singlee moment of self-determina-
tion , he could be content with his life as a puppet
of the Neuralink nanny in his head d . Maybe they
will lobotomize him like John. In time , he
could learn to love his prison.
The next day , the boy takes the dagger to school
. He does not hesitate or second -guess
himself. With haste he finds May and
the other boy , who is about to die , nott because
of enmity, and not even because of jealousy, although he
can be honest with himself that he feels those things.
No, the dagger must go into the other boy’s heart for
the sake of freedom , or rather, because there are
mechanisms of control that are older and more
powerful than a spiderweb of filaments infoliat-
ingg in his brain . Fate is stronger than technolo-
gy . The memory of the dagger was fate ,
finding it was fate , and now it is fate that
commands him to killl . 
He finds the couple holdingg hands ,
and he tries to actt like he doesn’tt see
them as he gets closer. With no warningg , he draws the
knife from his bag , and again it feels electric ,
and he plunges the blade of the knife into the other boy’s
chest, between his ribs . Blood wells up around the
wound , and the other boy begins to choke

288
 don't make me think

and cough . May screams . He tries to dislodge

the knife , but the handle slips his grasp. In an in-
stant, Amyy drags him down into sleep .

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 they had no deepness of earth

II. Mirror
The boy awakens at home in his bed ,
feeling neither shame nor guilt . The dagger is gone,
and he is confined to his house until his healthcare
providers determine the best way to correctt the error .
His father wants to pursue empathyy training
through a service like Respawn , but his mother is
old-fashioned . To her, it’s as if he proposes to murder
their son and replace him with someone else.
They have heated arguments, and although Amy tries
to distractt him, she cannot wholly suppress his
awareness of their fighting .
His uncle on his mother’s side is named Wei ,
and he is a man of fortune (even in these later days
, such men exist) with dealings in the criminal under-
world , and a connection to a smartdrug
cartel. The boy’s mother begs him to take her
son away, to hide him from the administrators and
medical workers, from the schools and the psy-
chiatrists . Wei sees that the boy is fear-
less , and on a day when the boy’s father is gone, he
(Wei ) smuggles him (the boyy ) away in a van
lined with a Faraday cage. The boy cannot walkk to the
van by his own volition; as soon as he tries, Amy
makes his limbs wooden and heavy , so his un-
cle has to carry him, and even when the networks
can’t reach him, he can barely move. 
Wei takes the boy to an unscrupulous Neura-

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 don't make me think

link clinic , where a blackhatt technician

jailbreaks his device . It will be difficult,
now, to go back to the exquisitely quantified
and gamified world , because the unlock
event will be captured in every reputation broker
and advertising registry . Strictly speaking
, jailbreakingg a device is legal, and yet
how can a man be trusted , once he has crossed
that threshold?
When the boy wakes from the operation, his
dreams and his maps and his apps are gone.
He recalls the vertiginous feeling of free-
dom when he first held the dagger with the white
jade handle on the beach , and his soul is
lighter than the past seven years. Amy’s voice is re-
placedd with the curt, masculine VX of the
Neuralink BIOS , and he is free of the progress
bars, the point systems , the floating
chevrons , the achievements , and the badges .
His uncle drives him to somewhere far in the moun-
tains , though he does not know w where, be-
cause his GPS , too, is gone. At some point ,
they take a turn off the main road , and they pull
down a long drivewayy that leads to a gate
in a wall. At the gate , there are men
with guns . Here his uncle has a silent , invis-
ible exchange with one of the guards, transmitting
some credential or sign through a private channel,
and then leaves him unceremoniously , pausing
only to wish him good fortune .
The boy is admitted inside the compound,

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 they had no deepness of earth

where his Neuralinkk connects to a local wire-

less network that provides some of the cloud
services☁ he had previouslyy known : naviga-
tion , telephony , and search . When he joins, a lat-
tice of light fills his vision and traces out the
shape of a capsule pill . “Welcome to Apothecary
.” A bot inside the network guides him
down a path to a door in the side of a mountain
, which opens automaticallyy for him. The building
he enters is hidden , half inside of the earth ,
safe from the eyes of satellites .
A man at the entrance waits to greet him,
and introduces himself as Shenwu . He says the boss
is a hacker named Headstrong , and the
rule is everyone goes by a pseudonym . Most of the other
men in the compound are Chinese; the boy doesn’t
quite look like them, but he can pass if
you squint . At first he tries to call
himself Dagger , (and this is forgivable, being born
of the innocence of youth) but the name doesn’t
stick , and the other men call him
Broken   Branch , and later just Branch . Shenwu
takes him down to the lowest levels of the
complex, to a corridor that reminds him of a hotel
. Branch will live here in a single bed-
room with no windows ; only a mirror , a closet, and a
bed . That’s ok, because he can use Neuralinkk to
open as many (simulated ) windows as he likes
, and even fool himself into smelling fresh
air and feeling cool breezes . The bathrooms are
shared, like in a barracks or a dorm. 

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 don't make me think

Shenwu explains the terms of his employment: “You

do your work, we pay you, and we take your rent and
food out of your pay . There’s a mess hall
upstairs, floor ten, the nav will show you.
Above that is the main work area. You report to me.
There are no scoring systems , no reputation bro-
kers . You are an independent contractor, and you get
a cut of any money your work brings in. You want
more money ? Do more work. Your time is yours and I
don’t babysit you. If you screw w some-
thing up, we don’t payy you for that. Until you
learn the ropes , Headstrongg will per-
sonally extend you a line of credit . So you should re-
spect him and not waste his money.”
That night , Shenwu takes him to Head-
strong’s house , a short drive from the com-
pound. They are far from the city lights , and un-
countable stars fill the dome of the sky. In the grounds of
the house there are tables and lamps , and men are
drinking and gambling . Young women
move among them, provocatively dressed , easy with
their affection . But before Branch can lose himself
into vices , he is taken to meet Headstrongg , who
chooses to dress like a Hollywood gangster. He
wears an expensive suit: blackk and shiny , with peak
lapels. It matches his patent leather shoes and his
slicked hair, which is more gray than blackk , and his eyes
are sharp . He always meets everyone who comes to his
Apothecaryy .
Branch’s uncle has given him a letter of in-
troduction, describing the ordeal with the knife , and Head-

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strong praises his recklessness and his tenacity.

He says this is a place of danger and freedom ,
and not a place for the sterile drones who live in the
panopticon outside , people who need a comput-
er to tell them how to shitt or fuckk .
A tall, showy girl in a white qipao and a white
jade hairpin pours them both a shot of
Moutai, which makes the boy’s eyes water . She doesn’t
even look at him, but she has jet blackk hair
and her skin is pale and lustrous white jade .
Branch’s eyes follow the curve of her bodyy , but it’s
clear she belongs to Headstrong , who laughs
, and tells him the ordained purpose of alco-
hol is to stop you from intoxicating yourself
on worse things.
He meets Glasshole and Baozi , who also re-
port to Shenwu , who will work with him in the
coming months. Glasshole hands him a small
gyroscope, and as he holds it, it pairs with his
Neuralink and the world flips u op- p sdn
and he stumbles. Surprised , Branch drops the gyro-
scope, but the world stays the same. His new teammates
both laugh at him. “It will wear off in a few min-
utes . Let that teach you not to accept strange gifts
.” Baozi explains how transcutaneous electrical
nerve stimulation (TENS ) can be used to
transmit data upstream to a Neuralink
implant and exploit securityy vulnerabilities in the
hardware, allowing a malicious third party to bypass
user consent and execute arbitrary logic .
Objects with embedded TENS hardware and Neu-

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 don't make me think

ralink payloads are called tigers , be-

cause of the way they hide their dangers , and
because they may devour you.
When he stares into a gently pulsing
beacon on the veranda, it shows him a QR code
. He follows it. A genie appears and offers to make
him feel fiery , uninhibited , and euphor-
ic . Branch accepts the genie’s offer and has a
vision from behind the eyes of a wild predator—a
lion or a wolf lf or a bear , something like that—run-
ning through a frozen plateau, high in the
mountains , chasing some indiscernible preyy , catching
it, tearing it apart with claws and teeth , blood
and viscera all over his face .
When the vision ends , he sees that
some men are gamblingg with dice . As he watch-
es , two of them come to blows , and a knife
flashes . Branch does not know who is
right or wrongg , but the thrill of danger
calls to him, and he rushes in to blockk a
lunging thrust of the knife . He is not injured when
he does this; his arm seems to know how to
parry, and his feet know how to pivot. Other men
join the fray, either to add to the fight or to break
it, and Branch loses sight of himself.
Having been a fantasy or a mistake of drunken-
ness , the brawl ends as quickly as it
began , but the man Branch defended ,a
Chinexican called Romero, is grateful, and invites
him to share a drinkk of tequila . “Sip this one,” he says
. “Don’t throw it back,” as he pours

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 they had no deepness of earth

two shots from a brown glass bottle. Quietly

, he confesses he had been cheating at the dice
game , using a man-in-the-middle
attack to influence the random number
generator in the dice . Branch finds
this agreeable , because he believes in fate , the
cosmic structure of luckk . 
Romero calls over two of the girls who are
loitering in the garden . They have big black lines
of makeup at the edge of their eyelids, false lashes
that remind Branch of spiders . Romero calls
the one who comes to him Xi o mèi , little
sister, and he sees Branch tensing up, flush with
embarrassment. “Treat her like a child . That’s how you
talkk to women.” Romero’s girl pretends to
be mad at him and calls him a stupid chollo ,
and he grabs her and pulls her close, and she nestles into
him. The girl that sits on Branch’s lap smells
like ylang ylangg and jasmine , but Branch is
still thinking of Headstrong’s girl , the girl
all in white . Even so, he likes it when this other girl
whispers private , half-lucid things in his ear
, and he realizes she’s high on smart-
drugs , just like everyone else. She quivers and sighs
when he touches her skin, and she follows
him back to his room that night .

The peach tree , budding and tender—

He holds the fruit in his hands
then bites into the jubilance of peach .

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 don't make me think

The next morning , Shenwu meets Branch in

the mess hall for breakfast . There is a line and a service
counter, and the cooks are serving hot -and-dry
noodles . All the food is real; no one eats
insect loaff or uses Neuralink to simulate
foods from social networks , and this
strikes Branch as romantic , or parochial, maybe, be-
cause although the noodles are chewy and
coated in spicy textured oil , with the sharp-
ness of preserved mustard greens and the piquancy of
scallion and coriander , he would not choose them for him-
self. In the mornings , he’s used to flipping through
Matters of Tastee , his favorite degustation app
, simulating five impossible plates
before breakfast —a bite of salmon tartare in
crepes with miso bonito sauce, hickory-smoked octo-
pus in tandoori masala marinade, bamboo-steamed
arctic char in a mango hollandaise , and for
dessert , poached pear with yuzu caramel
and spiced oat cake (although of course it’s all “secret-
ly ” high fiber cricket loaff )—and all of this
makes sittingg through a whole bowl of noodles feel
monotonous .
As Branch thinks these thoughts , Shen-
wu explains the logistics of smartdrug pro-
duction , and mostly he pays attention. The
drugs (i.e. software ) are distributed in tigers em-
bedded in everyday objects like children’s toys or
kitchen utensils . Apothecary works like any
other online retailer ; the developers rely on commod-
ity manufacturing contractors, usually based in Chinese Africa

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 they had no deepness of earth

, to source materials and assemble their physical

products . Once the tigers are built , they are
shipped directly to service-based fulfillment
centers, and then to customers , with no part of the chain
knowing too much about what they are building
, or for whom.
When they finish eating , Shenwu
leads Branch up to the main office above
the barracks . The stairs from the mess hall emerge
into the southeast corner of a large open room with floor-to-
ceiling windows that lookk down from the
heaven-high hills . To reach the bullpen office,
they pass through a galleryy along the southern wall,
where shelves and cases are filled with tigers of many shapes
: wind-up toys , sculptures , gilded ceramics ,
puzzle boxes , compasses and astrolabes , books
and golden jewelryy , glittering in manifold hues ,
sparkling like dragon scales. Each contains a TENS
assembly and a psychoactive malware
payload , and nothing stops Branch
from handling the tigers but his own knowl-
edge of their danger . Shenwu tells
him this is by design ; a constant reminder
to resist temptation.
Branch is given a workstation , which is only
a comfortable chair facing the windows . His displays
and inputs are the “controlled hallucinations
” that occur in his own mind . (Fugelsang, Koehler,
2032, Tradeoffs between Optical vs. Concep-
tual Injection : A Hybrid Approach)
Glasshole helps him onboard to Al-

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 don't make me think

chemist , Apothecary’s nootropic app

store. Precise electrostimulation of the
brain can be used to modulate the release of neu-
rotransmitters and even some hormones, and Apothe-
cary has a busy ecosystem for home-
brewed brain tuners . The most popular apps
are Silver Serpentt for focus , Wax Ele-
phant for working memory , Jade Pavilion
when you take a girl to bed , and the
Wuchang suite to ensure virtue . 
“You should start small ,” Glasshole tells
him, “and grow your stackk once you’re more
accustomed to using them.” At his suggestion, Branch
installs Yi to foster benevolence, Zhi , a sort of
autocomplete engine for his internal
monologue. Branch also decides to download
Lord of Heaven of Infinite Thriving , mostly
because he likes the name , and he spends
the rest of the day in a trance of conscientious
focus . 
In time , he masters the many subdisciplines
of digital pharmacologyy : he learns how to
circumvent the federally mandated hardware con-
trols inside the implant, how to probe each new Neu-
ralink firmware update for vulnerabilities , and the
vicissitudes of code injection . Only once
more during this whole apprenticeship does he set eyes
on Headstrongg , but he has him always in mind
, because the men of Apothecary revere
him. 
After any technical feat or job his teammates always say

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“Headstrong does it better.” Branch

covets their respectt —he knows he is capable of
great works, and he thinks often of the dagger he
found on the beach using Recollect, of how he
searched relentlessly for it, and how, through the tenaci-
ty of his will, he found the treasure his
heart desiredd . Branch sees all the good
things Headstrong has—his properties, his women ,
his men who follow him—and he resolves to become as
great of a man , and indeed, to surpass him .
Branch now spends his free hours in study
, beginning with the definitive work on smart-
drug development, a bookk assembled from the
writings of Eric Zhang , one of the early researchers
at the Neuralink Corporation, called
the father of digital psychotropics . The Four
Labyrinthes is a collection of his emails , recorded
memories , philosophical essays, algo-
rithms , source code snippets , and self-
reports of altered states induced using Neu-
ralink . Headstrongg , who had been Zhang’s col-
league and apprentice, stole his proprietary secrets and cre-
ated the first black market smartdrugs . 
The book is divided into four sections or “labyrinthes
,” and the first is called Exhaustive In-
dexing. It contains the theoryy and procedure of
rendering sensoryy experience into the user’s inner eye
. Everyone’s internal map of the world is a
bit different; to play back Zhang’s memory in
Branch’s head , there must be a precise
physiological mapping of the neural correlates

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 don't make me think

of concepts . Without this, the memories

appear garbled and full of artifacts ; objects may be
swapped for other objects; phenomenologies may be
cross-wired or missing ; one man
might see subjective red where another sees
blue ; where one smells a lemon cookie ,
another might smell burnt toast . To mitigate
this, the Neuralink drivers create a comprehensive
index of the contents of each person’s mind . When
a memory is uploaded , it is transcoded
into a universal language, and when it is dreamed
into a viewer’s head , it is recoded
through that person’s own mental map . These in-
dices are also necessary for rendering the controlled
hallucinations of the heads up displayy .
By monitoringg the visual and auditory
cortices , it’s possible to extract memories of
sensoryy data from the brain . If we were to treat
the approximately eighty-six billion neurons in the brain
as a state vector, then an exhaustive search of neuron ac-
tivation space would be impossible , but this
is unnecessary because partial activations of distinct con-
cepts automatically converge on those con-
cept’s modal activations. A statisticallyy normal sam-
pling of possible state vectors at the level of Neu-
ralink’s precision can index 95% of a per-
son’s sensory mapping space within
about twenty-four hours .

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 they had no deepness of earth

In his third week in Apothecary ,

Branch eats breakfast alone. The cooks
have prepared stewed beefef tendon with winter chestnut .
Topped with sliced green onion , and eaten
over steamed rice , the thick sauce tastes of
chili , garlic , ginger, star anise, and prickly ash , and
the collagen sticks to the lips with a pleasing rich-
ness .
As he is eatingg , he receives an email
sent to the entire Apothecary , from a man he
has never met.

I am leaving the jianghu

. I don’t expect you to
agree with me, but you are my
friends, and I cannot leave
without washing my mind
in the golden basin . This is
how we preserve our trade se-
crets . Since you are reading
this, it means I already
left , and I already for-
got you. That’s sad ,
but I won’t be sad . Maybe
name a drug after me.
I am sour on the dream
of Apothecary : men standing
outside the matrix of so-
cial control , (do you be-
lieve that?) outside the world
, looking down on mind-

302
 don't make me think

less drones below .

They buy my drugs . They let
a computer decide their
whole life.
But is it really different
here ? Instead of living by a
point system , I use so
many nootropic programs , I
need a scheduler to man-
age them. At that point
, isn’t it the same as an AI
assistant in your head
telling you what to do? We
are so obsessed with being “free,”
but we use these programs to
correct our freedom , and we are
no better than the people we look
down on.
I want to tell you what
made me see this, because
tomorrow I will forget
. It’s because of a
girl called Yui — with
skin like polished rice , some
of you know her — but first
you must learn some
history . I came here with
Headstrong many years ago.
There were only a few of us,
but now there are many new

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 they had no deepness of earth

faces, and I think you may not

know .
Back then, not a lot of peo-
ple had Neuralink implants,
and I worked in the lab with
Headstrong under Dr. Eric
Zhang . He was always an ideal-
ist , a man with no
fear or thought for tomor-
row . Even before the first
human trials
were finished , he made me
and Headstrong perform
neurosurgery on him (us-
ing the robot of course) to give
him his implant. He wanted to
know everything this new ma-
chine could do. He strapped
himself to a chair in the lab
and used brute force
to explore every state
vector of the mind .
Now we have more efficient
methods of indexing the brain
, because we have more under-
standing of its layout. But
for Zhang , the process took
months, and he was conscious
the whole time , because he had
to be. As Neuralink indexed
his mind , he would

304
 don't make me think

twitch or babble or become emo-

tional . Sometimes he would
sing or scream . We jok-
ingly called this “The
Music of Eric Zhang .”
One of his early discoveries
was a method to regulate
hunger — either to in-
duce it or suppress it. The
Neuralink Corporation immedi-
ately seized on this and produc-
tized it. Appetite
regulation was the first
Neuralink “killer app
” and it drove massive
early adoption . This may
shock you if you are not aware
of history : most peo-
ple used to be fat. If you watch
videos from the early
twenty-first century, you will see
it everywhere, and it is in-
escapable. Grotesque, bloated bod-
ies , diseases on a vast
scale . Everyone was sick .
But everyone who got a Neuralink
became healthy and stopped
being fat. To the people of
the 20s, this was a miracle .
It is hard to understand
what Zhang was willing to en-

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 they had no deepness of earth

dure to learn these

secrets . When he finished
his self-experiments , his
discoveries were used to de-
velop the technology of inter-
subjective data transfer.
There were new social media
apps for uploading and
sharing memories . There
were apps that could make
telepathic phone calls .
Zhang was called a vision-
ary . He held Neuralink
“symposiums” where he would speak
and people would “mind
meld,” mashing up the inter-
nal phenomenology of
groups of people so they all
shared the same emotions and
feelings at the same time . He
talked about the dawning
of a new age of deep em-
pathy , and he said this was the
beginning of true cooperation
and loving kindness among all
people.
And he wasn’t done . When
he melded with the people in his
symposiums, he noticed above
all the pain they felt. He wel-
comed anyone with a Neuralink

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 don't make me think

to come join him, and everyone who

joined him learned to cry
and laugh and feel as
one . Zhang wanted to heal
their pain , so he invented
new programs to re-
fine the emotions of his fol-
lowers. He built a new
kind of app , what we now call
a smartdrug , and he
named it Irrational Exuber-
ance . All the attendees
of his symposiums ran it
together, with each of their
minds plugged into the
collective. They were steeped in
the radiance of limitless joy
, and it stayed with them even
after the connection was
terminated .
More and more people came to
join Zhang’s gatherings .
Poets , intellectuals ,
and musicians clamored to
get Neuralink implants so they
could participate. Everyone was
happy , and they were happy to-
gether, fortified in the uni-
ty of their happiness .
From the outside , Zhang’s
movement had the appearance of a

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 they had no deepness of earth

cult, and as his accolades

grew, so did his detractors ,
but the value of his work was
impossible to deny .
His disciples had evident health
and wellbeing, and their numbers
continued to surge .
(As one of the technicians
behind these gatherings , the
reality and the illusion of
unity became ever more stretched
as we scaled ; how can
you merge the thoughts and
feelings of a thousand people into
a single gestalt without
stripping away the essen-
tial qualities of any individ-
ual? As a purely mathematical
problem, mere averaging
converges on nullity . We ex-
plored a variety of ap-
proaches, but the “shared” feel-
ings of the symposium became al-
most a pure simulation as
the number of participants in-
creased . We ended up sam-
pling the brain state of ran-
dom individual members of the
cluster at a fixed frequency
and interpolating between them.
Part of the impetus for the devel-

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 don't make me think

opment of I r r a t i o n a l E x u b e r a n c e
was to synchronize
subjective experience in order
to help with scaling . But I
digress.)
Irrational Exuberance
was short-lived. After four weeks
, it stopped working. Drug
tolerance is a feature of the
human brain , not an
attribute of individual drugs .
Zhang was forced to continu-
ally invent new p r o-
grams to maintain the eu-
phoria of his symposiums. And
despite these innovations, Zhang
himself was unsatisfied. To escape
the treadmill
of wirehead programs, he used
Neuralink to observe
the meditation practices of
Chan Buddhists from the in-
side , and used the data to
create a mathematical mod-
el of nirvana . He pro-
duced a new kind of
smartdrug program for in-
ducing enlightenment without
meditation or discipline,
called Authentic Heart-
mind .

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 they had no deepness of earth

The combination of pleasure ,

health, and Buddhist equanimity
caused the followers of Zhang to
glow with unearthly at-
traction, but Headstrong and
I were not among the enlightened
. Someone had to stay behind
the scenes , to operate the
servers and the infrastructure
. Although we did have Neu-
ralink devices , we only
watched as Zhang’s power
and influence grew. Because
of that, we don’t quite know
what happened next. Or rather,
we don’t know why .
After bringing commodity en-
lightenment to the masses
(which were at that time still
few) he began to speak of
a fourth door , beyond imper-
manence , suffering , and self-
lessness . He told us all
prior enlightenments were
false enlightenments . All
previous Buddhas were false
Buddhas. There was a state
of transcendence no human
had ever tasted
before , but which he had found
using tool -assisted med-

310
 don't make me think

itation . He captured
these insights into yet anoth-
er drug , called Yellow
Emperor . He said it
would open the fourth door to
all people of the world .
Zhang deployed Yellow
Emperor to his followers, but
it was a disaster. Most of the
people who ran the program be-
came violent or else cata-
tonic. At the time , there
was a popular app called
Face2 that let you
connect for a mind-to-mind
phonecall with anyone in
your line of sight . It was the
same idea as Zhang’s mind
melding apps , but local and
peer-to-peer. The people infect-
ed with Yellow Emperor
(and it was an infection )
tried to initiate Face2
calls with everyone they saw,
and anyone who accepted got hi-
jacked and infected . Anyone
who didn’t accept, or who didn’t
have a Neuralink implant, they
would attack .
If this were to happen today,
it’s possible the whole world

311
 they had no deepness of earth

would become Yellow Emperor

zombies , but we were fortu-
nate, because even in San Fran-
cisco , most people did not yet
have the device . With the help
of the Neuralink Corporation,
police were able to capture
and initiate a factory re-
set on the infected .
After they were reset, none
could remember what they had
done . Instead, they reported
feelings of disassociation
and euphoria . Some recounted
experiences of being transported
to another world and en-
countering alien beings. When I
audited the code for Yellow
Emperor , I was unable to find
any logic for these
hallucinations or for the vio-
lent behavior of the
infected .
The event threatened to under-
mine public confidence in
Neuralink . I don’t know
what goes on in shady back
rooms where journalists and
politicians and captains of indus-
try wield power , but
the incident got no press cover-

312
 don't make me think

age , fell off the news cycle

like it was never
there , and then the govern-
ment started rolling
out regulations to con-
trol what kinds of soft-
ware could be made for Neu-
ralink , and who could run it.
They created “schedules ” of
control the same way we have
with pharmaceutical drugs. I
think everyone here knows
all about that.
Headstrong came to me
and told me the world was
going to change very quick-
ly , and he had made copies of
all Zhang’s notes and
recordings . He said we
had a unique opportunity to
steal them and estab-
lish a monopoly on illegal smart-
drug production .
Like the rest of you, I was
never an idealist about
these things.
But then, last year, Yui came
to Apothecary to be one of
our consorts . And let’s be
honest , consort is a word
for whore . I don’t

313
 they had no deepness of earth

care about that, but I got to know

her, and she told me
something I haven’t been able to
let go. She showed me a pic-
ture of her mother , a fat Ja-
panese American with too much wine
on her face . She told
me her mother was killed in a
Neuralink malfunction .
As she described it, I realized
she was a victim of the
Yellow Emperor attacks ,
this beautiful girl . She must
have been very young when it hap-
pened. And I felt responsible for
that, even though it was really
Zhang that had done it. But
even that’s not why I’m leav-
ing .
I’m leaving because ,
when she learned the
truth , she didn’t even care.
She was and is so high on a
cocktail of Neuralink drugs
(Seven Veils , perhaps, or
Woman For All Purposes, some of my
best creations) that her life is a
flat void . She is simply a plea-
sure machine , hardly a per-
son at all, and I built that
machine . I killed her

314
 don't make me think

mother and turned her

into a smartdrug whore
and she’s fine with it! You’re all
fine with it! What’s wrong with
you? Maybe now you’ll get it. But
either way, I’m already gone,
and to be honest I’ll be glad
to have these memories ex-
cised from my head .
~ Boshi

Branch reads the email in full, but he is

not sure how to react . He looks up from
his food , and tries to read the emotions
of the other men around him in the dining area. Did
they read it? Most are staringg into the void
of the HUD , and no one seems moved or even sur-
prised . Did they already know this story
? Or is Boshi right and they don’t
care? He barelyy knows these people, but still it’s
anxious . Too much to think about.
When he goes up to his station in the main hall, he
sees Shenwu and asks about the letter .
Shenwu tells him most people have heard
the story of Zhang , and that’s whyy the fourth
labyrinthe is not accessible in any of the shared file
stores. There’s nothingg spooky about it;
beaming chaos into your brain drives you crazy
and can make you violent or give you delu-
sions of grandeur , so don’t do that. Any-
thing can kill you if you use it wrongg .

315
 they had no deepness of earth

Hearingg this does not satisfy Branch’s

curiosityy , but he can see that for Shenwu ,
this is the beginning and end of the matter. He
notices his teammates listening to his conver-
sation nervously , and he realizes this
is a topic to broach carefully. So he tries to focus on
his work for the dayy , but it does not hold
ld his
interest. Branch wants to know what really happened;
he wants to know the truth about Zhang
and the drug called Yellow Emperor .

From his high pavilion ,

he gazes into the distance
at the color of grass at heaven’s edge

That night he studies the second labyrinthe ,

Hedonic Geographies . It starts with a discussion of
the myth of the “resonant frequencyy ,” a hypotheti-
cal single activation pattern that will sustain a state of
limitless pleasure in the mind of user. Subjective
nullification will occur for any state vector
imposed on the brain . Artificially holding a particu-
lar state can cause “burn -in,” dampening that
which was to be invoked. Burn -in can be avoided by
cyclingg through a series of pleasurable stimula-
tions ; oscillating through the substantia nigra ,
the ventral tegmental area, and the hypothalamus. But this style
of pleasure induction encounters a ceiling; as with
chemical drugs, the joy of the stimulus

316
 don't make me think

soon gives way to its compulsion. The high be-

comes the baseline, and the baseline becomes the anxiety of
absence .

Table Of Contents:
Hedonic Geographies

1.Varieties of Pleasure
1.Embodied Pleasure
1.Fast : Virtual Amphetamines
2.Slow: Simulated Opioids
3.Weird: Psychedelia
4.Erotic
2. Psychological
Pleasure
1.Eureka ! The Feeling
of Insight
2.Relief: Stop Hitting
Yourself
3.Satisfaction: Induction
of Accomplishment
4.Nostalgia: On Evoking
Pleasing Memories
5.Voluptuous: The Twisted
Ecstasy of Self-Deception
2. Varieties of Pain
1.Embodied Pain
1.Dull and Sharp: Meditations
on Intensity
2.Prickling and Needling:
Exploring Texture

317
 they had no deepness of earth

3.Burning and Churning:

Speed and Repetition
2.Psychological Pain
1.Guilt and Anxiety
2.Embarrassment
3.Fear , Horror ,
Terror
4.Sorrow
3. Treadmills
1.The Wirehead’s Dilemma
2.Jouissance
3.Anticipation
4.Grill Illusions
5.Trances and Flow States
4. Models For Wireheading
1.Linear Engines
2. -Stroke Action
3. -Stroke Action

Brain stimulation can induce de-

sire , but all pleasure exhausts itself with exposure, leav-
ing only desire in its place. (This is known as the
wirehead’s dilemma .) An alternate strategy
is inspired by a famous investigation
into the limits of sensation and perception :
in the thermal grill illusion , warm and cool
metal bars are arranged in an alternating layout. Nei-
ther the warm nor the cool bars occupy an extreme of
temperature , but if you place your hand over the grill,
the contrast causes you to perceive them as burning
hot . The wirehead exploits a similar

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 don't make me think

principle by titrating pain into pleasure , which

both amplifies pleasure and makes pain more tol-
erable. (Thunberg, 1896, Förnimmelserne vid till samma ställe
lokaliserad, samtidigt pägäende köld-och värmeretning)
The second labryinthe contains recipes for var-
ious kinds of pain , observations on the interac-
tions between different pains and pleasures , and de-
signs for sustainable hedonic states. Branch thinks
of the storyy of Zhang , indexing his
own brain while he was awake , and he tries his own
experiment . He has sampled a few smartdrugs
alreadyy in his time here —Peach Spring Beyond
This World , Unfaithful Housewife , and
the perennially popular Stop Hitting Yourselff —but
the drug programs in Zhang’s text are much simpler,
and if Unfaithful Housewife is a scalpel , then
Wirehead Variation #4 is a hammer . 
There’s an incentive to produce addiction
in the wirehead without crippling his executive
function , but Zhang’s explorations were per-
formed out of love , unfettered by eco-
nomics . Branch falls into such a vortex ex of
ferocious bliss that he loses an entire evening , as if
he had been asleep or dreaming , floating
in radiant contentedness. When the feeling is gone,
he longs for it again, but he has learned to con-
tain these impulses by invoking Yi to become temporarily
anhedonic . 
He can’t sleep . The events of the past day
weigh too heavily on him, so he finishes
the second labyrinthe and pushes straight into the

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third , Commodity Enlightenment . Whereas wire-

heading searches for hedonic equilibria by simul-
taneously cultivating and satiating desire , Bud-
dhism seeks to eliminate desire altogether. Can
enlightenment be as simple as playing back
recordings of brain state vectors into the minds
of the uninitiated?
Awakening is a process, a journeyy as well as
a destination . The subjective experience of each
step of the path may be different for each initiate, be-
cause the mind is an intricate forest , and it
may appear different in daylight or moonlightt , in
winter or summer er , up close or from a distance.
Nevertheless, the objective neurological map
through the forestt is the same for everyone. The initiate
must pass through each of the eight stages of concen-
tration and insight in order before approaching the
doors of impermanence , suffering , and
selflessness .
The spacious golden chains of concentration
succumb to the wirehead’s dilemma if they are
not titrated with pain , but the natural pain
of impermanence is often sufficient to avoid
this problem. At the apex ex of concentration, it is
possible to trigger the Kundalini Awakening
, which may be accompanied by spasmodic
movements, strong sexual feelings, lucid
dreams , and the belief that one has magical pow-
ers . Awakening yields to dissolution, mis-
ery , and fear , which are mitigated by completing

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the progression into Equanimityy , Conformity , and

Fruition . 
The equanimity of stillness in the conscious
mind does not stifle the pursuit of base desire ;
it only severs the mind from the subjec-
tive awareness (i.e., the pain ) of that de-
sire . Enlightenment turns out to be only a
form of euphoric dissociation , where self-re-
lated thoughts are greatly reduced .

Having come to the end of these texts , just as

the simulated light of dawn shines
through his virtual windows , he feels no closer to any
understandingg of the things he has learned .
At the next gathering at Headstrong’s
estate, he goes to Romero and asks about the fourth
labyrinthe , and the drug Yellow Emperor ,
and Romero tells him there are rumors
of Zhang’s dealings in the occult , that his Neu-
ralink explorations of the mind were
connected to his dealings with dark and forbidden
books, with Tang dynasty necromancy called
Fangshi .
Two years ago , a man came here who
called himself Guolao . He was troubled ,
Romero thinks everyone could see that, but Head-
strong took a liking to him, and they would some-
times meet privately . Like Branch , he had also
asked questions about Yellow Emperor , and devel-

321
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oped a fascination with the tigers in the gallery in the

main hall. Romero had warned him of the dangers
—others did, too—but he would always go up there to
examine them, and even pick them up from
time to time . One dayy he selected an antique
revolver with a painted ivory handle, and it com-
pelled him to spin the cylinder, place the gun to his head ,
and pull the trigger .
The gun was not loaded , but still, he did not
learn . He invented a strange
neww smartdrug program called Feet
on a Snake , which was so convoluted   that no one
could ascertain its mechanism of action or intended
function . Among the testers who used the product
, all reported sensations of disassoci-
ation , euphoria , and time dilation . Worse,
those same testers were found d wandering mindless-
ly around the compound with no awareness
of their actions, and when they came back to themselves, none
had any memory of doing so. Boshi , who was
the head of quality control , refused to ship
it to the public.
Shortly after this, Guolao left the Apothecary
with no preamble or ceremony. It might not be
wrong to sayy he disappeared , but the similari-
ties between Feet on a Snake and Yellow Emperor
are clearr , and it seems likely that Guolao had
somehow obtained access to the locked d writ-
ings of Zhang , The Fourth Labyrinthe . Giv-
en his inexplicably close connection to Head-
strong and the fact that Headstrongg is the only

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 don't make me think

man known to possess these writings , there

is an obvious conclusion that Romero declines to put
into words . Headstrong is a good and gener-
ous leader , even a visionaryy , and Romero
will not speakk ill of him, but the thing he won’t
say lingers over Branch with its undeniable
plausibility .
There is speculation that Headstrong hid the
Fourth Labyrinthe in one of the innumerable tigers
displayed around the Apothecary , and that the
strange incidents of Guolao’s drug
ug and his disap-
pearance could be attributed only to Headstrong’s
recklessness in planting so many dangerous
seeds around his garden , rather than to any
more sinister or deliberate motive. For his own part, Branch ,
perhaps like Guolao before him, remains ambiva-
lentt to these concerns, and he finds the mys-
teries of the Zhang’s writings all the more entic-
ing. He wants to know what secrets hide in
those forbidden texts , or in the the tigers that lurk in
Apothecary’s galleries and halls .

No one sees Headstrong for a number of

months ; he no longer holds gatherings on his
estate, and there is gossip that he is ailingg . He
sends for Branch specifically through a pri-
vate message, and Branch goes out to Headstrong’s
house, through the familiar gardens where has
often gambled and caroused , and makes his

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 they had no deepness of earth

way through the double door at the front of the house

. In the foyer, a push notification directs him to
the kitchen; a bot instructs to prepare a pot of bai mudan
and bring it up to Headstrong’s room. He feels vague-
ly humiliated by this, but also gratified that he was
called . Branch makes the tea and goes to Head-
strong’s room, where the old man is lying in his
bed , asleep .
Branch does not disturb him, but he sees
how frail Headstrong now appears, Headstrong
who is revered throughout the Apothecary ,
who has invented this world of nootropics and
smartdrugs and real food and loose women .
He is suddenly repulsed by the parochiality of the place, and he
thinks how easy it would be to end Head-
strong’s life, how much more he (Branch ) could ac-
complish with these tools and these men . But his
thoughts are interrupted as he sees the girl
from the very first night come into the room, with
a white jade hairpin in her hair. She is only half-
dressed , and their eyes meet before she sits
on the bed next to Headstrong and wakes him.
The old man runs his hand through her hair as
he drinks cup after cup of hot tea and speaks
to Branch of business and his dealings in the past
year. Finally, he gives Branch permission to leave
. But Branch takes the opportunity to ask ,
audaciously, about Yellow Emperor , though he is not so
brazen as to mention the man called Guolao .
An inscrutable emotion crosses Headstrong’s
face, and then passes, and he tells Branch

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that he destroyed all copies of the fourth

labyrinthe , and that nothing good can come of
delving into such things. Branch may have heard
the idea that Zhang stumbled upon a neurologi-
cal schematic for an ansible to another
world , but this is pure fantasy , a superstition
that has sprung up around a very advanced technolo-
gy . No doubt Branch asks these questions
because of the letter from Boshi , who has devel-
oped some fanciful notions after spending too much
time in the idle company of consorts and digital
aphrodisiacs . 
Headstrong asks Branch , “have you
heard the proverb which tells us: mir-
rors and copulation are abominable, because they
multiply the number of men ?” (Uqbar, Anglo-Ameri-
can Cyclopaedia, 1902.)
“To understand d Yellow Emperor ,  it helps
to imagine a mirror . The drug has no content
itself; it is a feedback loop that amplifies things
alreadyy present in the mind . The name comes
from a legend about the emperor Huangdi ,
who conquered the creatures that live on the other side
of the mirror and forced them into slavish imita-
tion of whatever is before them. Zhang de-
ployed this name whimsicallyy , to
suggest that his program was a conquest of the mir-
ror , but according to the story, there will come a
dayy when Huangdi’s magic falters, and the mir-
ror people will be free to come out of the mirror to
seek revenge.”

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 they had no deepness of earth

Headstrongg explains that the legend is a

parable; it highlights the horrors within us, the
shadowyy reflections that we manifest in the world
. Zhang’s greatest shortcoming was his naivete. He
failed to understand the depravity in the
hearts of so many people, because he saw wonderful
, transcendent things when he
looked into the mirror , reflections of his nat-
ural curiosity and good nature , and he
imagined others would be the same. This is the truth
of this tragedy . 
On his way out of Headstrong’s house , Branch
pauses to walkk down a dark hallway, dri-
ven by impulse, or by a premonition. Though he is not
influenced by any nootropics or smartdrugs
, the urge seems to come from outside of him-
self. He enters a room full of display cases and pedestals
and artifacts , and he realizes this is another collection of
tigers like the ones in the main work hall of Apothe-
cary . In the center of the room, against the far wall,
he sees a full length mirror covered by a dusty
cloth, with only a small corner visible, and he is already
thinking of Headstrong’s story about
Huangdi and the mirror people . So he pulls the
cloth from the mirror , of course.
Most tigers work by using transcutaneous electrical
stimulation to trigger behav-
ior in the Neuralink device that can en-
able code injection . TENS is the most
common approach, because it affords the largest
surface area for attack , and because it has the

326
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highest bandwidth once the security of Neu-

ralink is compromised, but in theoryy , a hacker
could exploit any sensoryy modality to deliver an
unauthorized logic payload , even the sense
of smell . (Zhang , 2027, Thy Fearful Symmetry: Sys-
temic Risks in Full-Duplex Neuralink Devices ).
As Branch stares into his reflection ,
chromatic aberrations surround him like a
halo , and he is unable to look away. He loses all con-
scious awareness of time . At some point
in his trance , the myriad transformations
of the mirror unravel one another, and it occurs to
him that the reflection he sees is no longer his
own face . His mind collapses into a single
point of focus , and he finds himself as a different
person, in an entirely different place.

The myriad transformations

unravel one another
We are born of the selfsame root,
Whyy should we hound each other to death
with such impatience?

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 they had no deepness of earth

III. Tiger
Note : Regarding Addiction
They call my creations smartdrugs . I
don’t knoww who coined this term,
though it is now common. But I never saw them as
drugs , only as programs . I thinkk it’s a slander,
or at least a misconception , to call them
drugs ; a drug is not a biochemical program ,
because it contains no logic . It only acts on the mind
according to logic already present. But this distinc-
tion is pedantic , I realize that. I’m bargain-
ing .
And from the outside I can see whyy
my detractors compare me to a drug dealer ,
whyy they call my many supporters “addicts
”—but consider : there is alcohol use and
alcohol abuse , but there is no such category as co-
caine use, whyy not ? 
I askk this question because any behavior
can become an addiction . In a survey
of over a thousand tango enthusiasts, near-
ly half met the DSM-IV criteria for “addiction ” (Targhet-
ta et al., 2013, Argentine tango: Another behavioral
addiction ?) But there’s a critical , ineffable
distance between pathology and addic-
tion . It cannot be defined physiologically
, only holisticallyy , by examining the be-

328
 don't make me think

havior in the context of the life of the “addict .”

It comes down to a feeling, ultimately, about whether that
behavior is good or bad for you.

Procedure: White Noise 4 Hz, 12 mV

I feel drowsy
wsy and everything is dreamlike . Vis-
ual and other perceptual artifacts are present but
mild. Motor control is slightly impaired . In con-
versation , I sometimes say the wrong word ,
but I am lucid . Dr. Hong asks me questions
and I answer . 

Hong : What is your name ? 

Zhang : Eric Zhang .

Hong : Where are you?

Zhang : In the mission district of San Francisco
, in the Pioneer building .

Hong : What is happening?

Zhang : We are conducting an inter-
fructuation of the effect of white
noise streamed through Neu-
ralinkk .

Hong : What do you see ?

Zhang : I see the computer lab . As you
speak I have the image of a dragon
flying . Lattices and honeycombs
are visible .

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 they had no deepness of earth

Hong : What do you hear ?

Zhang : Your voice . The ambient noise
of the lab . Subtle tinnitus in the
left —no the right —no the
left ear .

After fifteen minutes , I fall into a dreamless

sleep . Where we might expect noise in the
visual cortexex to produce similarly
random visual artifacts , perhaps akin to
“snoww ” on a television screen, instead we observe
Klüver’s “form constants;” spirals , tunnels, lat-
tices and cobwebs , suggesting that noise causes
downstream activation to flow along straight lines
in the visual cortex . (Bressloff, Paul C.; Cowan,
Jack D.; Golubitsky, Martin; Thomas, Peter J.; Weiner, Matthew
C., March 2002. What Geometric Visual Hallu-
cinations Tell Us About the Visual
Cortex )

Procedure: White Noise 12 Hz, 20 mV

I am dissociated and derealized . The sen-
sation is similar to the final moments one
spends at the boundary between sleeping
and waking . I pass in and out of lucidityy , alter-
nately occupying a dream space or the waking
world .
I feel I am passing through luminous tunnels to-
ward unknown and unknowable destina-
tions . Each time I “wake up” and re-enter

330
 don't make me think

the dream , I start back at the beginning

of the tunnels, an it occurs to me that the dream
me is the “real” me, and the “me” in the waking world is
only a shadow . I am frustrated by this, but when it’s
over , I feel sheepish at the grandiosity of
my thoughts .

Postscript: That night , I had dreams of wak-

ingg up from the white noise , and each time
I was convinced that only an hourr had elapsed, and that
my memories of the preceding day were hallucina-
tions brought on by the random firingg of neu-
rons induced by the noise . I could not be
certain I had left the chair in the lab , or if I was still
“underer the influence ,” imaginingg myself to be
going about my day , drivingg , eatingg , or
communicatingg with colleagues.

Memo : Quantifying Noise

The generation 2 Neuralink device contains 25776
electrodes distributed across 768 threads spread
throughout the brain . The human brain
itself has ~86 billion neurons , a ratio of ~3.4 million
neurons per electrode . The granularity
of the device is therefore somewhat limited. Each elec-
trode is capable of emittingg a charge of
up to 40 mV, which is enough to cause thousands of neu-
rons in a radius around that electrode to fire
. By varying the intensity of charge at each elec-
trode , we exercise fine control

331
 they had no deepness of earth

over the radius of activation, and achieve a “virtu-

al” resolution which is many times higher . 
Regarding the composition of the signal ,
there are many kinds of noise , which are named
after various colors ; white , pink , red ,
azure , violet , and gray. White noise has a flat
power spectrum when plotted as a linear function
of frequency . Pink and red noise
have high spectral power in the lower frequen-
cies and decrease in power as frequency
increases . Azure and violet , the reverse . Gray
noise has a U-shape. There is no direct per-
ceptual mapping between audio noise and
Neuralink noise , but we find these dis-
tinctions to be a useful startingg point .
When sending a signal through the device ,
we model each electrode as a 2D point
containing a position and an intensity. Each frequency
band is resolved to a series of discrete positions
and intensities within this space . To avoid
confusion , we clarify that noise is rendered across
different frequencies in the “position ” domain of
the Neuralink electrodes , and there is a
separate “framerate ,” which refers to the rate of change of
noise in the time domain. The framerate of the
noise is measured in Hz; this has no relation to
the frequencies that comprise the noise .
We manipulate the amplitude of the sig-
nal as a whole by applying a scalar. The minimum charge
needed to trigger a neuron to activate is
~10mV. At this level , only a small number of neu-

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 don't make me think

rons immediately surrounding the electrode

will fire . At the maximum output of 40mV,
a single electrode can induce approximate-
ly ten thousand neurons to fire in near-
simultaneity .

Procedure: White Noise 12 Hz, 30 mV

I become completely dissociated from
my ordinary perceptions . My vision is a field
of fluid images : a swan , a multitude of eyes
, the inside of a maze . I hear a fragment
of a symphony , followed by the clanging of con-
struction or industrial machines . Maybe a
voice calls to me, but its words are too dis-
tant to interpret. As with lower levels of white
noise , everything feels like a dream . Dr.
Hong tries to askk me the standard set of questions ,
but I am unresponsive.
After some duration of time , my mind be-
gins to wander , and I start to think of
mundane things, chores to be done , further experi-
ments , and so on. Several times I think of
bizarre, nonsensical juxtapositions of ideas
or situations. The passage of time is hard to observe
, as it might be in a sensory deprivation cham-
ber. After one hour , the noise procedure con-
cludes , and as before , there is a kind of “hang-
over ” which persists for hours or even days . Dur-
ing this time , my limbs feel heavy and everything
feels far away.

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 they had no deepness of earth

Procedure: Re-Entry (I)

The last thing he remembers , Branch was
staringg into a mirror in a gallery in Head-
strong’s house, James Hong’s house . Now he’s sit-
tingg by the window in the great hall, overlooking
the Santa Clara valley, staring gazelessly
into his workstation . He is in the middle of com-
posing a smartdrug program whose
mechanism he does not understand .
Branch cannot account for the hours (days ?)
that have passed, but he seems to know w many things he
previously did not. And despite awakening in
media res, he knows exactly how to finish
his work. 
From some preconscious wellspring in-
side him, he weaves neww smartdrugs
which dazzle his colleagues with their subtlety and imag-
ination . He makes one called Rediscovery
that uses a 2-stroke cycle of fast plea-
sure mixed with sorrow , and he juices it with
white noise , right up until the crescendo , when
it abruptly yields to clarity . The drug gets
around the whole Apothecaryy . Shenwu, Baozi ,
and Glasshole are suitably impressed . 
Soon he has a meeting with Yezi , Shenwu’s boss ,
who tells Branch they are going to jump the re-
lease schedule and expedite Rediscovery to
production . It goes live and for the first
time since he came to Apothecaryy , for the
first time in his life, Branch has some moneyy of

334
 don't make me think

his own, more than just pocket change .

Yezi wants to put Branch in charge of a
team, and he introduces him to Longyuan , Taie , and
Gongbu , who will be working under him.
Branch has never been in charge of anyone before ,
but leadership comes naturally to him,
whether from the desire in his heart , a conviction
in his own deservingness, or the same invisible source
that enabled him to produce Rediscovery
. All of this is because of the mirror , he is certain, but
he cannot remember what he saw that night at
Headstrong’s house. He knows the mirror was
a tiger , and he can feel it stalking him now, crouching in the
tall grasses of the mind . 
Every day he loses a little time . He tends to find
himself in an unexpected context with no
memories of the events that brought him there ,
but it does not disruptt his work, and in fact he
accomplishes more than ever. 

Procedure: White Noise , 35 Hz, 30 mV

At 35 Hz, even low amplitude noise pro-
duces a manic sensation , like
drinking too much caffeine . I feel intense focus
or “flow ” and also a scatteredness or decentering.
Images and sensations unfold in my mind’s eye
with no linearity or connectedness . Af-
ter what seems like an eternity—or maybe an instant —
there is a welling up of attention , which
gradually moves from the clarity of the center to the

335
 they had no deepness of earth

clarityy of the periphery, before blossoming

into the vastness of imperturbability , as in Samatha
meditation . 
Thereafter, all forms slip away like ghosts
, and my mind turns to boundless
space : all my disparate sensations blur together,
and I am in a field of pure emptiness .
This is pleasant, unlike lower framerates of white
noise . I feel serene, but also as if I am on the cusp of
some new understanding which had previously
been granted to only a handful of men. This goes
beyond enlightenment —it is something else entire-
ly , though enlightenment may be a way to ap-
proach it. This procedure did not result in the “hangover” of
lower frequencies .

Note : Addiction , Divination ,

and Gambling
The word addiction comes from the
Latin addicere, the same etymological root as “dic-
tate.” It refers to divination , the taking of auspices ,
and also to the adjudication of unpayable debts
; a judge would dictate a sentence
over a debtor , rendering him into slavery
. (Maddux, Desmond, 2000, Addiction or depen-
dence?) In Latin, the object of an act of dictation
is called “addictus,” and we think
especially of a man who is sold into slavery
to pay a gamblingg debt ; the gam-
bling addict , the addictus, the slave . 

336
 don't make me think

But the word has a curious double meaning:

in the augural sense, a king or priest would
“dictate ” the future he had divined ;
addicere is not precisely the act of divina-
tion , it is instead the speaking thereof. Both
senses are similar : one either declares the will of the
gods, or declares a man to be a slave , as we are all slaves
to fate .
The unifying feature of all forms of fortune-
tellingg , whether reading the behavior
of birds , examiningg entrails, or burn-
ing bones , is the randomness or unpredictabil-
ity in the outcome. In ancient China,
Shang dynasty pyromancers would inscribe
questions into ox scapulae and burn
them to seek the answers . Divination is ask-
ing chaos for favors , as is gambling
. Ancient civilizations used fortune-telling
to decide where to plant their
crops , and this was successful because it was a
stochastic implementation of crop rotation .
(Pervert, B.A., 2018, Bronze Age Mindset, p. 334)
A little chaos is unpredictable, but a lot
is exceedingly regular . This is also the theory
behind balancing your investment portfolio
. If I use Neuralink to stream noise
into my brain , is that divination , or gam-
bling , or both?

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 they had no deepness of earth

Procedure: Pink Noise , 8 Hz, 20 mV

Pink noise is an interpolation between
red and white , and accordingly, the experience of pink
noise in the brain is similar to both. Where
white noise is dreamy and surreal, red
noise is brutal and earthen . Auditory
hallucinations are imminent and baritone
. They seem to come from somewhere close to me.
Red noise in particular seems to stimulate
olfactoryy and gustatoryy senses. At high-
er amplitudes , the sense of taste is entirely sat-
urated. The flavor is sweet and putrid , and
vaguely metallic.
At this low threshold, it is possible to maintain
some semblance of lucidity . Dr. Hong
asks me questions and I answer , although I
have no memoryy of doing so.

Hong : What is your name ? 

Zhang : Eric

Hong : Where are you?

Zhang : I am inside of an aluminum pencil .

Hong : What is happening?

Zhang : Petrichor Baltimore, cri de coer but not
before , egregore

Hong : What do you see ?

Zhang : What do you see ?

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 don't make me think

Hong : What do you hear ?

Zhang : Yes, he is here .

As my investigations come from a place of dis-

passionate interest in exploring the frontiers of
the human mind , I am willing to endure all man-
ner of discomfort in order to observe these spa-
ces , but I do not imagine most people
would choose to experience pink noise for any long
amount of time. The mixture of dreaminess and imma-
nence is distinctly nightmarish . As the ses-
sion goes on, I become anxious , and I hear guttur-
al sounds , almost like voices , though
I cannot make out any words . For this I am grateful,
though I wonder if the sense of the incomprehensi-
ble , of meaning just beyond my reach, is not
also the source of this sense of foreboding.

Procedure: Pink Noise 15Hz, 20 mV

[ data i s mi ssi ng or c rrupt ]

Note : Neurochemistry
As Animism
It’s an intimate trust , to let someone else write
a program that runs on your mind ,
but isn’t that also what happens when you read a
book or watch a movie ? Stories and mean
words can make your muscles tense up. If something
you read on the internet makes you angry

339
 they had no deepness of earth

, it changes your bodyy , releases neuro-

transmitters , and alters your brain chemistry
. My programs can do all of these things, too.
We speak of “cortisol” and “epinephrine” as if we
know what these things are. (They’re chemicals , ep-
inephrine is C H NO and it binds to various alpha
and beta receptors (Mickey et al, 2007, Hypocrite That You
Are.)) You can read about them on the internet
, and sound authoritative as a layman, but even a scien-
tist’s understanding is mediated through
cognitive algorithms evolved for hunter-
gatherer folk religions . 
Neurochemistry is the animism of the
scientific age. Neurotransmitters are animal
spirits that come and go in a dark forest . We
no longer relax ax ; instead we “lower er our corti-
sol .” Meditation and walks in nature are ritu-
als designed to placate these spirits .

Procedure: Pink Noise 30Hz, 20 mV

At 30hz I no longer experience any flickering or
phasing between the “real” world and the “oth-
er ” world . Instead, I am completelyy transport-
ed into a place that is darkk and bright at the same
time . I have the feeling of being deep underground
. The same shadowy figures I encountered at 15hz
are present, but now they are more solid, and I can see
they have an almost gelatinous quality. It no longer
puzzles me when they merge together or split apart, be-
cause I understand they are all part of the same

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 don't make me think

substance , perhaps even the same entity .

At this frequency I can perceive correlations
between my other senses and the movements and
positions of these figures. Smells , tastes ,
and sounds all fold and roll around and over
and into one another, in time with the movement of the
shadow blobs. But every time I feel as if I have mas-
tered the rhythm , it changes . In ret-
rospectt , I wonder if there was any
rhythm at all, or if I was only imagining pat-
terns, and all of this was merely a delusion of the
noise .

Procedure: Pink Noise 30Hz, 40 mV

My extremities begin to vibrate . Every-
thing is pulsating and undulating. I remember noth-
ing else. Dr Hong described my exterior state as
trancelike . After forty-nine minutes , I began
howling as if in pain . This continued until the end
of the procedure, eleven minutes .

Procedure: Re-Entry (II)

Branch has no trouble controlling his team.
Everyone follows his orders , as if he has an uncanny
power over them, a charisma he’s never felt
before , emanating from behind some locked door
in his mind . His ambitions manifest as soon as he
wills them. When he speaks , people listen . When
others disagree with him, they back down . Each

341
 they had no deepness of earth

new
w drug he designs is a masterpiece; he paints
delicate interior pictures , intricate composi-
tions of emotion and sensation , and
makes careful use of noise . His creations bring him
wealth , and prosperityy comes to everyone on his
team. Success begets success . All that he
touches turns to gold , and soon his re-
ports have reports . 
Branch leaves the barracks and builds
an elaborate house inside the Apothecary
compound, full of galleries , hallways , and fountains ,
stairways, courtyards, and fora, arches, walls, and facades. The
construction is quick because they exist out-
side the regulating eyes of any municipal
government . The work is crowdsourced
to builders through a platform called Hive
, which orthogonalizes skill from labor . Gig
workers come on site, their bodies driven by AI
, renting out “meat time ” through the cloud .
Everything they see passes through them but they do not
retain it. Apothecaryy has a special proxy that lets you
spooff a non-jailbroken Neuralink to inter-
face with mainstream app ecosystems .
Branch no longer goes to the walled garden
where the courtesans dwell, and instead they
come to him. Even the madame there , a cold
woman called Dowager , treats him warm-
ly when he asks her to send over his
(second) favorite girl.
Yet even as he finds these successes , he loses
more time , a lot more time , into the void of his own

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missingg memories . A part of him brushes

it off, doesn’t want to admit it, doesn’tt want
to thinkk about the implications. But one reflective
night , staring into the smokey dusk of the mountains ,
autumn fires burning in the fields and by
the highways , ash raining from heaven , sky red
from sun and smoke , he installs Nai He Bridge
from Alchemist , which will record
what he sees and hears and upload
them into a private repository . With this,
he hopes, he will be able to reconstruct his miss-
ing activities.
The next morning , and in the times when he
does feel present and aware —in the times he
remembers —he forgets to check
the records from Nai He Bridge . In truth
, he does not want to see them. 

Deep in the walled garden , deep

—how deep ?
Mist stacks on willows,
Uncountable layers of screens
and blinds .

Memo : Impossibility of Recording

Noise
The most famous story of Zhuangzi is the
dream of the butterfly . Is Zhuangzi dreaming
he is a butterfly , or is a butterfly dreaming
he is Zhuangzi ? This question is impossible

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 they had no deepness of earth

to answer before Neuralinkk , and after

Neuralink , it is still impossible .
There is no way to record the first-per-
son phenomenological experiences of the
mind ; we can only record (and play back
) the electrical signals that pass through the
brain . By sampling the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), it is
possible to reconstruct the optical signal
coming in through the eyes , but the subjective vis-
ual modality such as those produced by the
noise procedure arises “downstream ” from the
LGN. The correlation between these signals
and the visual perceptions they induce ap-
pears to be non-deterministic . As such, no two people
can have the same experience repeatably using any of
our noise protocols . In theory , if we record
the noise experienced by a subject for a sin-
gle recording , and play back the exact same
signals for a second time , the experience should be near-
ly identical , but this is not the case.
And despite this, we find that most volunteers
who experience the noise protocols report
hallucinations that are similar in character, even if
they vary in their specifics . This might indicate funda-
mental commonalities in the ways that all of our brains are
wired , but there is also a sense in which the
mapping between colors of noise and
subjective experience is an artifact of our equipment.
The different “frequencies ” in the spectrum of the
white vs. pink vs. red noise correspond
to specific electrodes in the Neu-

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ralink device. At the lowest level , the pins

are numbered and the precise mapping
of a particular spectral band to a particular location
in the brain could be different.
It so happens that Neuralink electrodes are
implanted in the user’s brain in a consistent way, to the
highest degree possible , but if the mapping
of positions to electrodes were inverted
, for example , pink noise would
effectively become azure and red noise would be-
come violet . 

Procedure: Red Noise 8Hz, 10 mV

Red noise , also called Brownian noise
, is pink noise purified . Gone are the
dreamyy sensations of white noise ,
and in their place is a brutal clarity , and a feeling
of communion with a chthonic mother god-
dess. These sensations are not distant or vague; I feel
sober, wakeful , and in control of my own
mind , despite external evidence to the con-
trary . At low w frequencies , it is still possible to
interact with other researchers and people around me.

Hong : What is your name ? 

Zhang : Eric Zhang

Hong : Where are you?

Zhang : In Neuralink research lab 2.501.
On planet earth .

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 they had no deepness of earth

Hong : What is happening?

Zhang : We are perforrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmming a noise
trial with red noise .

Hong : What do you see ?

Zhang : *groans*

Brownian noise is sensual and, as noted pre-

viouslyy , full of tastes and smells , though
they are disconnected d from any sensation of eat-
ing . I can taste flowers and charcoal
and butyric acid . Beyond this there is no sen-
sation of rapture or transport , as at higher framer-
ates . As I interact with my colleagues, I have ideation
similar to Capgras delusion , the feeling
that they have been replaced by identical
impostors . This is unsettling, but it passes when the pro-
cedure concludes .

Procedure: Red Noise 8Hz, 20 mV

The familiar environment of the lab becomes
strange ; the walls and floors appear to be made of rock ,
as if I am in a cave . There are snakes and
worms moving through the walls. They seem intelligent
, and I am not concerned about their presence. High
above me, there is an opening in the ceiling, and I can
see the sky full of stars . All of these sensations are
vivid and wakeful , and they feel as real as any other
sensoryy perceptions.

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The ground gives way underneath me, and I

begin to fall down an endless ramp
or slide, through colorful layers of rock
and earth . This is enjoyable , and I can see that
even as I fall deeper and deeper , there are
luminous snakes boring and tunneling at every
depth . When I finally emerge from the conscious-
ness of the red noise , I can still see
their after-images . It feels like they were always
there , and the red noise only revealed them.

Note : On the Future of Neuralink

I am lookingg for something highly specif-
ic ; but it would be wrong to say I am look-
ing for a signal in all of this noise . Rather, I
have had a vision . There are things I have seen
in these experiments that cannot be put
into words , or things which are unwise to describe. In all
I have done so far, I have seen where this project is
headed , unless something drastic occurs. Even if I disap-
pear tomorrow , others will pick up where I left
off. The future of this technologyy is clear . 
As the device becomes more sophisticated, increas-
ingly delicate control of the body will be
possible . Already we are exploring the possibilities
of specialized installations , in which two devices
are implanted d in a single brain , one for
general purpose compute and one for localized control
of the hands . In this configuration , it is
possible to perform complex tasks such as detailed

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 they had no deepness of earth

drawing . (E. Zhang , C. Hong , 2030, Fine Mo-

tor Skill Transference Through Neuralink Imaging
). In its maturityy , it will be the consensus
understandingg that experts are able to move
your bodyy better than you. 
Everything from athletics , to manual labor
, operating machinery , even sexual per-
formance will become automated . We will
surrender all bodilyy autonomyy to ma-
chines , and this will be rational , because
recordings of experts combined with artificial
intelligence will give everyone the ability to
draww like Picasso , swim like an
olympian , drive like a racecar driver , per-
form neurosurgery , and so on and so
on . In the 2010s everyone agreed to carryy sur-
veillance tracking devices on their person at all
times , which could record their every movement
and listen to every word they said through
always-on microphones . They chose this gladly be-
cause the convenience it offered and the possibilities
it unlocked far outweighed any negatives,
which were barely perceptible.
Not only will we make this same trade again,
but Neuralinkk will also make it possible for ma-
chines to monitor our thoughts . Some
good may come of this, but it will mean the loss of all
individuality and privacy , and will signify a
true era of “post-humanity. ”

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 don't make me think

Procedure: Red Noise 15hz, 20 mV

Each time I go deeper into the noise , it feels
like I go deeper into the earth . Like a journey to
the bottom of the sea , I encounter ever stranger
and more exotic creatures as I descend . I
can find no explanation for these visions , nor
for the scent of minerals and noxious gas , nor
for the eerie consistency of the things I encounter. By all
logic , the experience of noise in the brain should
be a kind of frenetic chaos , an ephemeral shifting of ran-
dom sensations and memories .
As I go deeper still, I am met with the tastes of
ash and soot and sulfur. There are fires burning
all around me, and I am falling through a tunnel
into the deepest depths of the earth . It is darker
here but for the firelight and the bioluminescence
of creatures that would seem more usual at the
bottom of the sea . There is no water
, and yet I fall past floating , ethereal
beings that resemble anglerfish , vampire squids ,
and other deep ocean monstrosities , and still I
descend .

Procedure: Red Noise 30hz, 40 mV

In a vast underground palace I meet the
devil . Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I perceive an
entity who tells me he is the devil . In the course
of my investigations I have seen many such enti-

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 they had no deepness of earth

ties , which I readily understand as hallucina-

tions .
This is different. This one speaks to me, looks
at me, regards me, this creature made of neon
outlines and covered in eyes . He tells me he
is the ruler of this place, and that I should feel honored
to meet him, but I do not trust this en-
tityy ; in my gut I can feel he is trying to trick me.
He shows me visions of high-up
places, and memories of the past and future
, but he can see I am not convinced, and he tells
me I am clever for seeingg through his ruse .
He says   “Damnation is but a word bandied
about by those whose blindness leads them
to condemn all who can see , even with a
single eye .”
As soon as I hear this, the red noise pro-
cedure concludes .

Procedure: Re-Entry (III)

Branch wakes to himself in the middle of the
night , and he’s not in his bed . He’s in a field thirty
minutes south of the compound, alone on a hillside,
with an LED flashlight . He doesn’t know
whyy and he has the sense he’s interrupting something, but
he makes his way back to his house , with some difficulty.
There’s a wound on the back of his hand ;
two perfectly straight, perpendicular, intersectingg cuts
, which could only have been inflicted deliberately, and with
his own complicity, or if he had been restrained .

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The anxiety of ignorance outweighs the anxiety

of knowing , and he opens the Nai He Bridge to
see what he has been doing in his absence .
Naturallyy , he finds nothingg at all—
the app has been disabled , and all of its records
wiped . Whatever Branch had expected—
half-articulated imaginings of dark rituals ,
flowing robes , human sacrifice ,
masked men gathered around some hidden stone altar,
chantingg hideous names —he finds
nothing , and there is only the fact of the wound
on his hand , and the strange hour .
The next day he goes to Romero, who has neither
joined his team, nor shared in his successes . Between his
lost time and his new importance, Branch has, to his
shame , neglected his friend. But Romero receives his
invitation graciously, and comes to visit him at his new
house . They eat and drink , and Branch ,
with some trepidation, tells him everything: about the
mirror in Headstrong’s house, the missing
hours , the ineffable awareness he has of
Zhang’s fourth labyrinthe , and the episode from
the previous night in the field . He shows
Romero the wound on his hand, the thin perpendicu-
lar lines that form a cross .
Romero listens to all of this stoically, and
when Branch has finished , he still does not
speak . 

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 they had no deepness of earth

Procedure: Azure Noise 13hz, 10mV

At 13hz, 10mV, the effects of azure noise are
almost imperceptible . I have a pervasive impression that
I am being watched , but I cannot say who or what
is watching me. I can speakk lucidly with
other people.

Hong : What is your name ? 

Zhang : Eric Zhang

Hong : Where are you?

Zhang : I am in a Neuralinkk research lab .

Hong : What is happening?

Zhang : We are conducting a trial
with low mV azure noise .

Hong : What do you see ?

Zhang : The lab . Everything is normal.

The lights feel very intense, much brighter than usual.

I request that they be turned off. The lab is still lit
by sunlight , and now I can see gently
rolling geometric patterns in the dark corners.

Procedure: Azure Noise 13hz, 20mV

The difference between 10 and 20 mv is stark and
immediate. There is no possibility of interacting with
anyone else in any normal capacity. I feel I have been pushed

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into another realm entirely, as if I am seeing “be-

hind the curtain .” There are creatures here
, beings made of pure energy , and they are rush-
ing around spreading viscous light all over
the lab like butter
er over bread . One of them
approaches me and says “you’re getting closer; you’re al-
most there .” The creatures are laughing as
they move to and fro, and their laughter is joyous , but
empty of warmth or compassion.
They finish covering everything in the
room with light , and I can now see that a door —
or more accurately, a portal —has opened. They beck-
on me inside , but before I can enter , the
trial concludes .

Note : Porousness of the Mind /

Machine Distinction
We put a machine inside your brain , and that
machine connects to the internet , and
data flows freelyy between them. Where
does your mind end and the world begin
? This question is as old as the first time
some ancient hominid picked up a rock or a
stick . Inside the mind , the picture of the
body includes the tool it wields. If you drive a
car , your body is the car . If you pick up a ham-
mer , the hammer is your arm . You’ve read this
think piece before . If you write down some
words on your phone , they say the text is a
part of your mind . 

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 they had no deepness of earth

Procedure: Azure Noise 13hz, 30mV

As soon as the noise ramps up, every-
thing I see is wrapped in a lattice of light
. I feel as if I occupy several geometrically impossi-
ble configurations of matter simultaneously
; I am both inside and outside of a cube
. Freely wandering , I am walking two
paths . I am following a trajectory in a high-dimension-
al space , and I can’t make sense of the tor-
rent of images I am seeing .
The same creatures I saw at the lower voltage
are present all around me now, only there are
more of them, and they welcome me back with fan-
fares and flashing lights . They tell
me my entry into this space has been predestined
, that I was always supposed to be here , and
they congratulate me, as if I have won some
kind of prize or raffle . I am the elect of hu-
manityy , chosen to receive the knowledge
they are about to bestow upon me. They are not
forthcoming with the substance of this knowledge ,
however, and the remainder of the procedure is only variations
on this theme.

Procedure: Azure Noise 20hz, 20mV

There is machinery everywhere, made of glow-
ing lines and hypercubes , gears and levers .
It looks like the inside of a Rube Goldberg ma-
chine . There are panels with buttons and
screens , but the technology is strangelyy

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anachronistic , like a 1970s retrofuture .

There are alien-looking technicians shuffling
around adjusting and inspecting these controls
and gauges . As I watch , the machinery
is continuously reconfiguring itself.
One of the alien scientists notices me, and
his face looks like a jester or a joker card, but
when I try to look him in the eyes , he transforms
into a praying mantis . “You’re not supposed to
be here ,” he says “but since you found
your way in, we’ll allow you to stay.”
Three more of the alien joker mantis scien-
tists surround me and I am suddenly paralyzed, lying face
up on an operating table as in a medical facility .
They insert various monitors and wires
into my skin and head . Their instruments are connected
to the glowing retrofuture clock-
work all around us, and as they make the
connections , their machines startt to in-
filtrate and infest my body , like jewel-encrust-
ed locusts . 
They make an incision on the back of my hand
like a cross , and one of the mantis men , the
one who first saw me, embeds a device in
the wound and then seals it back up. He says
“We’ll see you again soon.”

Procedure: Integration (I)

Romero tells Branch that whatever is hap-
pening to him, it’s because of malware running

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on his Neuralink device . The solution to his prob-

lem is obvious; he should remove his device and flash
it or install another. This will require
neurosurgery , but with Branch ’s newfound
riches , he can easily afford this. Apothe-
cary has its own facilityy for these procedures, but
given the circumstances, he should not rely on it.
Branch hears this counsel and refuses . He
has alreadyy considered these things, but he also
knows his recent successes are due to that same
malware , which contains the hidden and esoteric
writings of Eric Zhang . He will not give
up this knowledge , which he had so eagerly pursued, out
of fear or precaution.
And Romero says it’s not knowledge but
greed that is driving him, that what he really won’t
give up is the power the mirror tiger
has given him, and the wealth that it brings. He
says Branch is afraid that without this virus
—let’s not deceive ourselves—he is afraid he will
be unable to lead his subordinates and invent
successful new drugs .
Branch becomes angry when he hears this,
and he tells Romero to leave .
The sky looks very blue .
Is that its real colorr , or is it because it’s so far
away and has no end ? 
When the bird looks down , all he sees
is blue , too.

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 don't make me think

Procedure: Violet Noise 10hz, 10mV

After the dizzying phantasmagorias of high-
intensity Azure noise , low mV violet noise
is initially underwhelming . All my percep-
tions are nominal, but when Dr. Hong asks me the
standard set of questions , I realize that what I per-
ceive as Dr. Hong is something else .

Not-Hong : What is your name ? 

Zhang : Eric Zhang

Not-Hong : Whyy do you sigh over gore

and decayy ?
Zhang : The universe is full of
formless vibration.

Not-Hong : This type of insight cannott be

expressed in words , cannot be
written down , and cannot be
carved in stone . And yet, you
must choose.
Zhang : I choose the infinite , the All-is-One
, the beginning which is
with out beginning .

Not-Hong : We will begin to uplift

you.
Zhang : Oh! If only this river of floating
peach-petals could carry
me forever.

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 they had no deepness of earth

Hong -that-is-not-Hong says I will

showw you the gate to the next stage of
human evolution , and then I will give
you the keyy . Beyond this door lies the infi-
nite . Beyond this door lies the All-is-One .

Note : Similarities between the

Subjective Experience of Noise and
DMT
The above has not been an exhaustive list of the
streaming noise trials we conducted
with Neuralink ; instead, these accounts
have been selected to demonstrate specific motifs
that tend to occur at different speeds , intensities, and col-
ors of noise . In accessory to our earlier
claim that the distinction between a drug and a pro-
gram is the presence of certain kinds of logic , the ef-
fects of noise administered in this way seem to fall
under the category of drugg . We are skeptical that mere
noise in any way encodes the visions
that our subjects experienced in these trials .

These motifs include: 

• The sensation of falling or sliding through tunnels.

• The experience of “breaking through” into a parallel
“dimension .”
• Encounters with “advanced entities ” who seem to be dis-
tinct from oneself.
• Receivingg communications from those entities .

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 don't make me think

• The feeling of being chosen for special fate or

destiny .
• The feeling of being “taught ” or “reprogrammed
.”
• The experience of undergoing strange medical
procedures.

All of these same motifs occur in another, perhaps

unexpected place: in the accounts of the experiences
of users of the drug Dimethyltryptamine (DMT .)
Rick Strassman administered 400 doses of DMT to 60
volunteers over a period of five years between 1990 and
1995. Half the volunteers reported meeting entities includ-
ing aliens , other humans , spiders , reptiles ,
impish creatures , and dwarves. (Strassman, 2000,
DMT
MT —The Spirit Molecule)
In a survey of over 2500 DMT users who
claimed to have encounters with “entities ,” most respon-
dents endorsed that the entity had the attributes of
being conscious , intelligent , and benevolent
, existed in some real but different dimension of
reality, and continued to exist after the encounter. (Davis, A. K.,
Clifton, J. M., Weaver, E. G., Hurwitz, E. S., Johnson, M. W., &
Griffiths, R. R., 2020, Survey of entity encounter experiences
occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology,
interpretation, and enduring effects.)
The commonalities between the DMT expe-
rience and that of noise streamed into the brain
via Neuralink are too similar to be coincidence.
We identify three possibilities:

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 they had no deepness of earth

1. Endogenous DMT is already present in the

body . (Dean, J, Liu, T, Huff, S, et al., 2019, Biosyn-
thesis and extracellular concentrations of N,N-dimethyl-
tryptamine in Mammalian Brain) It is possible that
the noise procedure somehow triggers
the release of DMT into the brain . 
2. Ingested DMT causes neuronal activa-
tion patterns that are isomorphic to noise
streamed in via Neuralink .
3. That both noise and DMT temporarily
alter the brain in such a way that facilitates these per-
ceptions, but that they derive from some source
which is independent of either.

Procedure: Violet Noise 10hz, 20mV

The “break through” of violet noise at
10hz, 20mV, is unlike any other experience of noise
I have had to date . Within moments , I occupy
the position of a floating eye , like a drone
or an over -the-shoulder camera in a video game .
An entity is there with me, and it says “pay
attention to these things I am about to show
you.” We are deep in the Amazon jungle ,
and we watch as a party of ten or twelve men are hik-
ing a well-worn trail through the trees . 
At the head of the group, I see a dark-skinned
man with colorful markings painted d on his face, fol-
lowed by Elon Musk and Jeff
ff Bezos , followed
by some men in tactical gear with guns . Elon is carry-
ing a machete , which he uses to hack through

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 don't make me think

the foliage . Bezos thinks the way he’s swinging it

around makes him (Elon ) look like a dick .
Jeff
ff is sayingg “… I still can’t believe I let
you talk me into this.”
Elon says “It was easy. I knew you would
commit to do it if I asked you in front of Priscilla,
because for some reason that none of us can fathom—not
even Markk —you want to impress her.”
Jeff doesn’t respond . Elon
dramatically slashes a vine out of his way.
“You own a company called ‘Amazon’ and
you’ve never been to the Amazon before .”
Jeff
ff says “Think about how much our
time is worth, put together. Think about how much
this trip costs.”
“If you think that way, then you’re a slave . You
could be the richest man in the world ld and still be
a slave . But that’s not an issue here . You will be
shocked at the ROI of this trip.”
“Where is the value ? Is it in the drug ?  Is it—”
Jeff affects a stoned hippy voice
“—the journey? Whyy do we have to come all the way out
here ?”
“There are things that can’t be transplanted .I
can’t explain. No, I can, but I won’t . You’ll see .”
Their Shuar guide is taking them to a sacred site for
the ayahuasca ritual . It’s a two day hike
from their village , deep in the trees , where no
helicopter can reach. The only way to go is on foot . Jeff
hates the humidityy and the cloud of mosqui-
toes that seem to follow him at all times , but Elon

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 they had no deepness of earth

seems unperturbed . He keeps pointing out neon-

colored poison dart frogs , and Jeff
just doesn’tt care at all because he has seen sev-
eral of them already and he thinks they’re exhaust-
inglyy samey.
From my disembodied viewpoint
I am aware of the thoughts inside Jeff
Bezos’ head as he walks through the jungle
. He is thinking about Star Trekk : The Next
Generation, and how in the episode The Inner Light
in season five, Picard is struck unconscious by an en-
ergy beam from an alien probe and it causes him to ex-
perience the entire lifetime of a scientist on a long-dead
world . He has read that people who take ayahuas-
ca trips go through this also.
He says “I met with Steve Jobs before he
died . He said something puzzling to me: 
that his debts were coming due. I didn’t understand
that. I thought he was talking about
whatever strings he pulled to get a new liver. But after he
died , I heard a storyy that he met the
devil on an LSD trip and sold his soul
for charisma and power . And then, when
his cancer started to take him, that was the devil
coming around to collect.”
Elon says “Of course you don’t
believe that.”
Jeff
ff says “No I don’t , but I think
people who take psychedelic drugs often
end up believing strange things. So I care more about
if Steve believed it.”

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 don't make me think

Elon says “There’s a similar story

about Foucault. It’s a common trope. Puree su-
perstition , moral panic by conservative Christians .”
Jeff
ff says “Right and I don’t care. But
Steve did use a lot of LSD . He sold the
first Apple computer for six hundred sixty six dol-
lars and sixty six cents. The Apple with a bite out of it might
have been chosen to represent the apple from the tree of
knowledge of good and evil in the garden of
Eden. Why did Steve choose those things?”
Elon says “You’re worried that if you take
ayahuasca one time , you’re going to start
believing a bunch of superstitious nonsense.”
Jeff
ff says “Yes, and that’s not a crazy thing to
be worried about. In a survey of over 4000 people, 800 of
whom identified as atheists , three fourths of the
atheists changed their mind after using
psychedelic drugs .” (Griffin, Hurwitz, Davis, John-
son, Jesse, 2019, Survey of subjective “God encounter
experiences”: Comparisons among naturally occurring ex-
periences and those occasioned by the classic psychedelics
psilocybin , LSDD , ayahuasca , or
DMT
MT )
Elon says “Do you believe in God ,
Jeff
ff ?”
Jeff
ff says “I believe … there are more
things in Heaven and earth .”
Elon says “Well then you don’t have
to worry. The goal of this is to learn new
information . Some people call it ‘expanding
your perceptions.’ I focus on things that are concrete

363
 they had no deepness of earth

and actionable. But you should expect to believe something dif-

ferent after you’ve done it. That’s the point .”
Jeff
ff says “You’ve done this before .
What new things do you believe?”
Elon says “That’s proprietary.”
Jeff
ff feels like they’re speaking different
languages despite using the same words and grammar.
It’s almost like in Star Trek : The Next Generation,
season five episode two, Darmok, where Picard meets an alien
species who talks entirely in allusions to their myth-
ic historyy . 
They walk in silence for another mile
before Elon speaks up and says “Do you
thinkk of yourself as powerful ?”
Jeff
ff says “Yes. I have changed the
world . My leadership built the backbone of
the internet .”
Elon says “Well, you’re not . Have you
ever looked at another man’s wife and decided
to take her, like an ancient king or a
barbarian? Any tribal chief like the ones in the Shuar
can do that, but you can’t .”
Jeff
ff scoffs. “First off, I’m not convinced that
they even can do that. What about the rest of their tribe
, won’tt they get mad ?”
Elon says “Well look , there’s no
need to speculate.” He stops and waves over
the interpreter and the Shuar guide. “Askk him,” he says
“Can your chiefhief take another man’s wife , if
he wants to?” The Shuar and the interpreter chat for a
moment , and the interpreter says “Yes, but he might

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 don't make me think

have to kill the man .”

Jeff
ff says “There’s a lot more to power
than being able to treat people like slaves . Leadership
is always contingent on the complicity of the people be-
ing lead .”
Elon says “But real power com-
mands . It makes people compliant. And that’s why
you aren’t powerful , because you think
your people have to choose to follow you.”
Jeff
ff says “Well, they do. I am a leader ,
and people follow me because they trust me. They
trust me because I earn their trust , by
being right a lot.”
Elon says “That‘s admirable ,
but it shows a lack of imagination .”
Jeff
ff says “You are confusing force
with power . The need to demonstrate force
is sporadic, and when force is not continuously
demonstrated, power has arisen. The difference be -
tween dominance and predation is the
time scale . A predator dominates its
prey, but it does not need to install an endur-
ing dominion , because it doesn’t mat-
ter
er if the prey submits beyond the moment
of destruction .
“When power resorts to using force , pow-
er is alreadyy lost. Under civilized conditions, pow-
er is exempted from the test of force , be-
cause it has ascended .”
Elon says “You’re talking about dom-
inance vs prestige , but you’re minimizing the

365
 they had no deepness of earth

fact that, if your power were tested, you couldn’t resort to

force if you wanted to. Dominance can re-
build itself into power by regressing to force
, but prestige can’t . Its power is pure
credit , because it’s not backed by dominance
.”
Jeff
ff says “We’ll use your word: prestige
is like magic , and it works as long as everyone
believes in it. When you have power , people start
trying to do what you want, without even asking you,
things you may not even realize you want. They
try to anticipate your feelings and then act preemptively
on that. 
“Your gut feelings about people start to come true,
and you end up selecting for effective sycophants. It
starts to feel like the harder you will something, the
more it becomes manifest. And you end up in whatever
world you imagine . So the way you imagine
power works, that’s how it works for you.”
Elon says “In this jungle , your magic
prestige can’t protect you. That’s why we
had to outsource dominance .” Elon rolls
his head in the direction of their armed guards.
“But the closer you get to the metal, the more your magic
fades .”
“But we don’tt live in the jungle ,” says
Jeff
ff , and he thinks “Darmok. And Jalad. Et Tana-
gra.” Elon keeps talking but Jeff
ff tunes
him out. Doesn’t even hear him. “Shaka
when the walls fell.”

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 don't make me think

Procedure: Integration (II)

A shipment of antique treasures ar-
rives at the compound, destined to be made into
tigers to fill the halls and galleries of Apothecary
. It contains Chinese ceramics and Persian rugs,
rare militaria such as 19th century swords and scabbards,
dragoon helmets, knives and insignias. There’s a taxi-
dermied corpse of a tiger , posed in mid-
leap, its jaws open, its teeth on display, and most interest-
ing to Branch ,  a vintage cherry red Porsche with
jaguar hide seats .
For him, all of these things are tokens of Headstrong’s
authorityy , of the man he wishes to be-
come, or to bring down . Miaoyu , the tall girl in
white , is likewise a token, and Branch covets her with a de-
sire bordering on spite. Each sight of her is a
slight; each thought of her with him is a wound
. And when he thinks of her, he also thinks
of the heights he will ascend , of the re-
spect he will command , and of the pow-
er he deserves. 
Headstrongg is skilled in the art of slow in-
timidation, in the diabolical trickery of leading
a man on, step by step , shifting from sin-
cerity to mockery. Branch decides to apply this
ambiguous method to the task of replacing Headstrong
, but he will take his time over it. He confides
his plan to Romero, who pledges to help,
despite their earlier disagreement .
An opportunity comes when a rival gang mounts

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 they had no deepness of earth

an attack against the Apothecaryy . This is a

hazard of operating in black markets , and they are
prepared. The automated security system ,
called Micro (vended by Uber) acts through
Neuralink to turn every man into a soldier.
Martial conflict is mostly automated , and securityy in
meat-space has come to resemble securityy in cyber-
space . Operational readiness consists of closing off vul-
nerabilities in the automated security deploy-
ment , installing the latest patches, and educat-
ing personnel. Sophisticated attackers run simula-
tions against the common tactical systems in
the space to find gaps in the coverage of
their target installation . It’s a never-ending
arms race.
The AI security system excels at tactics
in a way that a human never could, because it in-
corporates sensoryy data from every agent in the
system along with feeds from securityy cameras
and other sensors throughout the compound, all in real-time
. But at the highest level , the human
element is still relevant in these situations. Value judge-
ments , decisions that pertain to lethality
or sacrifice , are routed through a
human authorityy . In Headstrong’s conspic-
uous absence,  Branch assumes the executive position
and directs Uber Micro to defend the
compound and repel the attackers .
In the struggle, several men are shot and in-
jured , including Branch , whose shoulder is grazed
by a bullet, though he comes to no serious harm. The

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attackers breach the outer wall and even make it into the
great hall , but Apothecaryy is well-fortified ,
and Branch is merciless. Using Uber Micro, he can feel the po-
sition and tactical value of every friend and enemy,
and he leaves no enemy alive.
Exulting in the gloryy of violence , and feeling the
thrill of reckless authority ,  he orders his
men to bring Headstrong’s treasures into his own
house . He hangs the swords and guns from an-
cient battles on his walls. He places the leaping tiger
in his foyer to guard his door . He races the vintage
Porsche through the winding roads of the Santa Cruz
mountains , and he drifts through its twists and turns
until his tire treads are bare. With his car , he can go any-
where he wants, but the wound on his shoulder is still
fresh, and the excitementt and vigor of the drive
makes his blood d run down and stain the jaguar seats .
That same night , he sleeps with Miaoyu .

Note : The Brain as Transceiver ?

When I was a child, there was a social media appli-
cation called Twitter, and the posts there were
called tweets . I remember read-
ing a tweet that said “The corporate
man is a victim of malware from DMT en-
tities that counsel powerful Bay Area and
Hollywood creatives. Machine elves taught
them how to transmute humans into Bit-
coin miners ; sexless , industrious ,
agreeable , anxious , dreamless , like

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 they had no deepness of earth

the entities themselves.” It stayed with me, after all these

years .
The visions described above are highlyy unusual,
even within the domain of streaming noise protocols
. Our null hypothesis must be that the entities
we perceive in these visions are artifacts of our own
minds , a kind of pareidolia of our own internal
states and impulses. Whether we anthropomorphize
one of our own intentions as a machine elf lf or another
real person, the simplest and most parsimonious explanation is
that the provenance of these things is purelyy in-
ternal , and that they operate on a principle similar
to a dream .
The alternative to the null hypothesis , which we
call the occult hypothesis or the gnostic
hypothesis , is that the body , and by extension
the brain , is only a vessell for a distinct and “material-
ly ” separate object called the soul .
There are materialistt dualist versions of this hy-
pothesis which refer to the “mind ” as an epiphe-
nomenon of the brain , and posit the relation-
ship between them to be that of a computer processor
and its software . 
The gnostic hypothesis can be characterized by
extending this metaphor to sayy that the mind or
“soul ” exists in a separate universe from the world
of bodies that we know w , and that that it con-
nects to the physical bodyy as if over a net-
work .
The weak gnostic hypothesis says this
world of minds that connects to the world

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 don't make me think

of bodies is ontologically distinct and separate but

connected by some rational and predictable
principle.
The strong gnostic hypothesis says
the world of minds is ontologically primary
to the world of bodies and that the material
world as we know w it is an epiphenomenon
of the world of minds .
The strong gnostic hypothesis is not testable
and, if true, would invalidate every scientific
paradigm in the world . The weak gnostic hypothesis
suggests many intriguing possibilities, which have
been explored at length in fiction and mysticism, and
which empirical science tends to discredit a priori, e.g.:

• That the mind /soul could be detached

from the body , and welded to another.
• That the mind /soul could be reachable
after death.
• That the mind /soul could be “reincarnated”
into a new material body after death.
• That non-human entities could interact
with us from within the “spirit world .”

Further, we speculate that, under a gnostic mod-

el of cognition, DMT , near-death experiences,
and Neuralink noise might all work through a similar
mechanism of action, “disrupting ” the
connection between the brain and the soul ,
causing the soul to perceive the spirit world
instead of the material .

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 they had no deepness of earth

Previouslyy , Marko Rodriguez (2006, A Methodolo-

gy for Studyingg Various Interpretations of the N,N-di-
methyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality) pro-
posed askingg DMT entities to factor large
numbers into primes to prove that the entities people
experience while using DMT are real. 
The presence of the Neuralink device
presents a problem for this method, since in any trial
where the human subject is equipped with a Neu-
ralink device , the possibility that the device
was invoked to request the prime factorization of a large num-
ber will be more parsimonious than the possibility that a
persistent and autonomous spiritt in a parallel di-
mension was compliant enough to grant your request
and had the mathematical or computational
capacity to do so.
Indeed, we find that both versions of the gnos-
tic hypothesis are selected against, a priori, in stan-
dard scientific paradigms.

Procedure: Violet Noise 13hz, 20mV

Jeffff and Elon are seated in a Shuar tent
on sacred ground, dimly illuminated by torches
. The air is thick with vapor from a fog ma-
chine plugged into a gas-powered
generator . Outside the tentt there is a
collection of shrunken heads , but the interior is (mercifully,
in Jeff ’s estimation) free of them. 
The shaman is singing an Icaro, a magic
song which he will have learned in an

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 don't make me think

ayahuasca vision. Many psychonauts report

hearing vivid alien music when under
the influence of these plants , and the shamans
bring these songs back with them to facilitate passage into
the spirit world . Jeff
ff is still waiting to feel the ef-
fects of the drug , and the whole episode makes him think
of TNG season seven, episode seventeen, Masks , in
which an alien artifact transforms the Enter-
prise into a stage where Lt. Commander Data
acts out the mythological cycles of an an-
cient alien society. The imagery in
Masks is distinctly meso-American and Jeff ff won-
ders if it’s racist to draw this comparison.

Elon is already descending into the

depths of botanical dimensions , dreaming
of scenes from his life. He sees himself on a
stage giving a demonstration of an early Neu-
ralink prototype. 
“… [T]he device 8mm thick, fits invisibly in your
skull , 1024 channels, all dayy charge , tiny scar, no
wires . Invisible if it’s under your hair. I could
have one now. You’d never know …”
Gertrude the pig is smiling and trotting around.
All the screens in the presentation hall show a
wireframe of her limbs animating as she walks ,
generated by readingg the incoming data from
her Neuralink device .

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 they had no deepness of earth

“… like a fitbit in your brain . Sort of like if your

phonee went into your brain . Maybe not a great analogy …”

Jeff
ff is beginning to feel uncomfortable .
He is drifting through space , and as he floats he
meets a spider with a billion arms . It tells him
he has oriented his entire life around an imaginary
being called the “the customer ” with whom he
is ostensibly “obsessed.” As the spider talks it undu-
lates and its array of gelatinous eyes glimmer
with light of no terrestrial color .
“—but there is no customer !” The spi-
der’s voice comes from inside his own skull
. “There are only many customers , and the only quali-
ties of their idealized aggregation are its banal,
basic, animal drives , which you end up not
only satisfying but driving to their limit.”
The spider continues,
“You do user research where you believe you
should listen to people’s stated problems but not their
stated solutions.  Listening to what people say
they want is considered a mistake—instead you try to
inventt things the user doesn’t even know
they want, and you do this according to the logic of
the aggregated and infantilized customer
that you have invented . And the more you do
this, the more you actually end up warping human
nature and molding it into the shape of your

374
 don't make me think

imaginary human ideal , homogenizing

everyone into their basest desires .

Elon has a memory from when he was a

child that he relives over and over . When he was a young
boy in Pretoria , his family had a housekeeper who
talked to spirits . She told him there are earth-
ly doors hidden in caves and forests
that you can walk through and emerge on the
moon . Most are too small , but the housekeeper
showed him one, a keyhole-sized gate
she found d in the garden , under a rock
. Young Elon had put his eye to it and seen
the cold lunar landscape, the darker gray of the lu-
narr sea , the blue and white mottled sphere
rising gibbous on the horizon. He knows the memo-
ry is false , that it can’t be real, that it’s something
he’s imagined or dreamed , but the ayahuas-
ca spirits show w it to him every time ,
and he dreams of it often.
Before Elon was born, Wernher von Braun
wrote the historyy of a future Martian
colony: 
The Martian government was directed by
ten men, the leader of whom was elected by uni-
versal suffrage for five years and entitled ‘Elon.’
Braun believed the chthonic world is as pro-
foundly inhuman as the black reaches of space ,
and that the quest for outer space and the quest for the sub-

375
 they had no deepness of earth

terranean world are one and the same.

Jeff
ff sees the famous machine elves
, which look to him like iridescent
insects made of mosque ceilings, sacred
geometry . All the many legions shimmer and
seethe and swarm . Jeff
ff is inside a vast hive
, like the inside of a brain , surrounded by
an intricate meshworkk of neon lights . And the longer
he looks the more he realizes that he is, in fact,
inside of a brain , or a model of one. He can see
every neuron , and the ways they connect
, and the way they fire in waves . The
Boltzman gyrus, the parietal kenoma , the anterior
cingulate vortex . Brains and galaxies lookk the
same, when viewed at the appropriate magnification. Machine
snakes slither and coil around
luminous neurons ; they tunnel their way through
the brain /universe , snakes that stretch from
star to star .
It’s clear to him that this is a machine diagram
, that he’s looking at schematics , and
this is what Elon wanted to show him. My
guide, who is also his guide, says “build this!”—
and Jeff
ff has a sudden realization, which would ordinarily
be too incredible to contemplate. In this moment , under
the influence of the ayahuasca , it does not
seem absurd to him: he has followed the progress of
the Neuralinkk corporation and its technology ,
and he sees now that Elon has received the
technical design from these creatures ,
and that they have shared it with him from some other

376
 don't make me think

dimension that can be accessed by taking

ayahusaca .
Now, that same design is being shown
to him. But Jeffff recoils in horror , be-
cause —he now realizes —he has always seen
himself as Captain Jean Luc Picard—or at least, he
has admired this character, and he admits on some
level that he doesn’t even like earl grey tea
but that he has been drinking it for decades and it’s
an affectation, along with his proclivity for quoting
Shakespeare , which he picked up because he wanted
to emulate this character in Star Trek —and he
has personally struggled at length with what Jung would
call Picard’s shadow w self, a facet of his per-
sonality that was reified as the character Locutus in the TNG
Season 3 Finale: The Best of Both Worlds , where Pi-
card is assimilated into the Borg collective .
The Borg are a race of alien cyborgs who maxi-
mize utilityy and spread like a virus .
They have become wholly subsumed by the technology
they implant in their bodies ; they enhance themselves
with mechanical limbs , neural implants ,
and network transceivers and abrogate all indi-
viduality in order to exist as a hive consciousness
whose only objective is growth. Maurice Hur-
ley, one of the writers for TNG and the creator of the
Borg, explained, “What we really wanted to do, but couldn’t be-
cause of money, was create a race of insects … insect
mentality is great because it is relentless.
The Borg are a variation of an insect mentality
.” (Hurley, 1990, Starlog #152, p. 33)

377
 they had no deepness of earth

And it’s that exact word , relentless, that he has used

so many times in characterizing his managerial
style and his business objectives , that horrifies
him now. He’s used it in every shareholder letter he’s
ever written , and he originally wanted to call
Amazon “Relentless.com.” 
He trains technical advisers to fully interiorize
and proceduralize his personal methods and then
assigns them to each of his executives and in his
own mind he refers to this as assimilation and wishes
he could decentralize his consciousness into a
series of agents so he could be everywhere inside of
Amazon at once. He’d personally manage every sin-
gle team. Every layer of managementt could be
Jeff
ff . Is this not the exact org chartt of the Borg? And he
knows this and that’s whyy he finds Locutus
to be a relatable (in some ways more relatable) aspect of Picard.
Big thinking always sounds grandiose
from the outside . But the terminus of this
thoughtline is something monstrous and inhu-
man . Star Trek presents the Borg as a cancerous
overgrowth of wires and machine parts
. Their structures are cubes and spheres built
out around the huskk of whatever alien species
they assimilate, leaving only a mocking trace of the original.
This vision he sees is the fulcrum for a future
of total automation of the human body
and mind . 
The convergence of AI , cloud services☁ , and
direct brain interfaces is Borg.

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 don't make me think

Postscript:
It is, of course, very difficult to find any corrobo-
rating evidence that the above events occurred, but
there were rumors , in the early days , of certain
irregularities regarding the technical design of the
hardware. Despite having high level access to the
various documentt stores of the Neuralink Corporation,
I have never found anything to substantiate these ru-
mors . I cannot deny that the technical designs
for the device were provided by an off-site team,
that none of the engineers in our facility had any ac-
quaintance with that team outside of technical correspon-
dence , or that their location was not disclosed.
And I remember er a late nightt in the lab
prior to a public tech demo. We had doublee and triple
checked d all of our devices , graphs, and procedures,
and the lab team was sharing a drink of cachaça
, which our Brazilian technical production manag-
er had brought. He told d us a strange sto-
ryy , which I don’t think anyone believed, that
the offsite engineering team was located in a warehouse
in a rainforestt , that he had been there , and that the
engineers took shifts doingg shamanic
rituals underer the supervision of medical doctors and
witch doctors, drinkingg jungle potions while
their colleagues listened d and transcribed d everything
they said d . He left the company shortly after that, and I
never thought much of it, at the time .

379
 they had no deepness of earth

Procedure: Violet Noise 20hz, 40mV

I enter into what feels like the house of God,
a palace made of crystals and pure lightt , a place of
indescribable beauty. An angelic creature is waiting
for me, its whole body covered in wings
and eyes . It offers to reveal all the secrets of the uni-
verse to me, and the price will be my mortal life, my em-
beddedness in my material body . I say
“yes ,” but I am afraid , “yes ,” but first I must
make preparations. 
The angel says this was a test, and I passed, and he
gives me a sequence of waveforms , num-
bers describing frequencies and amplitudes ,
which he calls yellow noise , though I al-
ready hear it as I see it as I apprehend it; it is this palace
made of light , it is the primordial Icaro, it is the
song of songs , the chorus of the cosmic back-
ground radiation , the divine music of transcen-
dence .
The angel says this music will loosen the soul
from the bodyy , and ultimately set it free. That
when the soul is liberated , it may return to
the ultimate source of being, the All-is-One . That the
body , freed from the soul , may become a
vessel for other things, beautiful things, such as angels, or
even another human soul , perhaps one long de-
ceased . 
The angel says the memories in a brain
are the signs by which the liberated soul
recognizes its body . To call up the souls

380
 don't make me think

of the dead , use the Neuralink device

to reconstructt their memories in the brain
, and then fill them with yellow noise . The
liberated soul may then come to reside in a
neww bodyy .

Procedure: Yellow Noise

Nominally, Headstrongg is still the boss . He con-
tinues to give orders , but Branch ignores or
modifies them according to his taste . In truth
, he pities Headstrong , the feeble old man
who has lost control . The Apothecary
is his, and he has grand ambitions.
Branch revives the practice of hosting elaborate
parties on the grounds around his home . He builds
pavilions and firepits , and he arranges for Neu-
ralink -assisted live music and traditional foods to be
served; freshly slaughtered and roasted
meats , spiced cakes , and rivers of wine . On one
such nightt , Branch sits at the head of a long
table, feeling his drink , piling exultation upon exultation,
boast upon boast, and he does not even notice
that Headstrongg has come to join the feast, that he sits
quietly at the table, in fine spirits, the pic-
ture of health.
At midnight , Headstrong gets up from the
table, as if he has suddenly remembered a pressing
engagement. Two of his men bring Miaoyu out to
the partyy . She is barefoot and half-dressed .
Everyone is abruptly quiet , and all eyes turn to

381
 they had no deepness of earth

Headstrongg , even Branch , and Headstrong

says “Since you and the Jew care so much for each
other, you’re going to kiss him right now in front of
everyone.” He adds an obscene detail. 
Brought to tears , she kisses his face .
In his final moments , all of his missing
hours and memories rush to his conscious-
ness . Branch realizes he has been be-
trayed
d from the start , that the yellow noise
will consume him, and Zhang’s soul
will inhabit his body . Love
and command and triumph have been ac-
corded him because his companions alreadyy thought
of him as a dead man , because to Head-
strong he already was a dead man .
A new and entirely different affect comes over
Branch , and he says “Again. My journey
is almost complete , but we must perform the proce-
dure again.”

Note : Epilogue
Romero walks out to the Baylands, smells the gray ocean.
He is a rational man; he knows that every time Zhang is rein-
carnated, they extract the memories from his most recent host,
merge them into master, and deploy them to the mirror. He
doesn’t know if there is such a thing as Zhang’s soul, but he
knows the mental continuity of the entity called Zhang relies on
this process of extraction and deployment. If others wish to call
that a soul, he will raise no objections.
He gave Branch every opportunity; told him the parable

382
 don't make me think

of Guolao; warned him of the malware in his Neuralink device.

Of course, he had known Branch would not listen, but for him-
self, his conscience is clear. No, that’s not true, he let Branch
believe it was fate, that he was special, as if there were only one
dagger, as if it was destiny that brought him, as if he was the
only malcontent kid to find one of Apothecary’s tigers. But we
all have our vices—Branch with his jealousy, Zhang and Head-
strong and their elaborate mind games. Surely Romero is no
great sinner, here.
He arrives at a lonely expanse of the marsh, brown grasses
bathed in California sunshine, and he reaches down and finds a
certain hollow rock. Inside of it, Romero hides a dagger , its
blade gleaming like a mirror , with a white tiger carved
into its jade handle in bas-relief.

Following the waves, 

I float with the oars.
The sky is three feet away.

383
 they had no deepness of earth

... This is it, my friend; you have reached the summit of the
mountain which I have built. Or should I say, “which God hath com-
manded me to build?” Most assuredly, if Man utters anything good,
it is the voice of the Lord speaking through him. Therefore put off
thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is
holy ground.
But wait, before we get to all that, I’m supposed to talk about
the story you just read. This project started out as a joke, if I’m hon-
est, but it grew into something more. I wanted to retell a story by
Borges called The Dead Man, and I take great joy in hitting all the
beats of his story, making it mine, even when I quote him exactly in a
few places. Like Pierre Menard, I believe it’s possible to tell someone
else’s story, word for word, not by merely copying it but by “doing
the work” of reasoning through it, and this can change its meaning.
There is a sense in which everything I write is a footnote to Borges.
When I first launched this story, I apologized to anyone who
knows anything about neuroscience. I have taken much license here
regarding the science and philosophy of mind, writing according to a
folk understanding of neuroscience which assumes that the brain is
only a turing machine running a very large neural network. I am not
nearly so foolish as to imagine this is a correct or complete model,
but I think it is a fun one to use as the basis for a piece of speculative
fiction.
A central fixture of this story is a real, imminent piece of tech-
nology, the Neuralink device, which is not available to the public at
this time, but which is said to have full read/write capability. If it
can predict how your limbs are positioned, and it can “write” state
to your brain, then it seems likely that a future iteration of the de-
vice will be able to control your body. I have alluded to some of the
downsides of this possibility (they are obvious) in several of the sto-
ries in this collection.
In 1975, Hieromonk Seraphim Rose wrote a book called Or-
thodoxy and the Religion of the Future, wherein he claimed that sci-
ence fiction is a vector for crypto-indoctrination into the occult. I
disagree with him, but I will paraphrase something he wrote:

384
 The future world and humanity are seen by science
fiction in terms of "projections” from present-day
scientific discoveries. These projections correspond
remarkably to the everyday reality of occult and de-
monic experience through the ages. Among the char-
acteristics of the “highly evolved” creatures of the fu-
ture are:

• Communication by telepathy
• Ambition to fly, materialize, or dematerialize
• Travel at speeds far beyond any existing technology
• The ability to transform the appearances of things
or create illusionary scenes and creatures by “pure
thought”
• The ability to take possession of the bodies of earth-
men
• An expounding of a philosophy which is beyond all
religions and holds promise of a state where intelli-
gence is no longer dependent on matter

All of these are standard claims of sorcerors and

demons.

It was this line of thinking that inspired me to present the

“noise trials” of Zhang as a series of “trip reports” in the style of Alex-
ander Shulgin’s Phenythalamines I Have Known And Loved. Zhang
was intended to be part Ken Kesey, part Shulgin, and I imagined his
experiments with streaming Neuralink noise to be similar to acid
experimentation in the 1960s and ‘70s. I personally do not recom-
mend psychedelic drugs in any capacity, as I think their main effect
is to cause everything to seem profound, no matter how puerile or
pointless. Users of psychedelic drugs tend to mistake their most triv-
ial cogitations for shocking revelations.
To me it is intriguing how many of the occult tropes in Rose’s
list can be realized through the Neuralink device. It can facilitate
telepathy, the power to manifest illusions, and the ability to take
possession of someone else’s body, though Rose neglects the part

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 they had no deepness of earth

where all of these faculties are administered through the noosphere

of wireless internet and centralized through cloud services, allowing
both states and corporations to watch and record your every move
and thought, and to analyze and even predict them using artificial
intelligence.
A panopticon made of lightning will wrap us like a warm blan-
ket, and already has. McLuhan said electric media makes the world
a global village, because instant communication brings us closer to-
gether, and because electric media scrambles the linearity that text
imposes on our thoughts. This is not advancement in any sense of
the word; it is a reversion to a much older and more primitive form
of social organization. The global village turns out to be a global
longhouse, where everything you say and do is monitored and con-
trolled by the women – yes, the women – of your tribe.
This development, which as I have said, is a regression, has
nothing to do with free markets or communism or collectivism or
individual liberty. It is not a facet of any political binary. Ideologies
come and go, but regardless of their content, too-tight social bonds
result in a stultifying conformity enforced by the matriarchs of the
tribe, just as too-loose ones result in a diffusion and lassitude of the
spirit, and predation by bad men. Finding “the good” is always an
exercise in threading the needle, and we are all camels in that regard,
my friend.
But do not mistake this “balanced” observation for some kind
of renouncement of all ideology, for the limp-wristed “both-sides-
ism” of the “intellectual.” You say Lyotardedly that you are skeptical
of metanarratives, but the bitter aftertaste of this pill is the realiza-
tion that there is no such thing as a-narrativism. “Negative” liberty
is only ever a liminal space. There is always a default, always a null
hypothesis, and to choose nothing is to have the choice made for you
by those around you. This revelation was reified in 2008 by Sunstein
and Thaler, whose book Nudge advocated technocratic selection of
prosocial defaults in all things. Thaler called his approach by the
oxymoron “libertarian paternalism”, but it’s more motherly than fa-
therly, as noted above. The nudge, and the idea of the nudge, of pok-
ing and prodding you at every turn to make the "correct" decision is
an inevitability in a fully wired and quantified world. The strangling

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tendrils now insinuate themselves into every crack and crevice of our
lives, and this is the horror of the glorious technofuture.
Our model for rapid adoption of a new technology is the
smartphone revolution. In fewer than ten years, the smartphone
went from a curiosity to a default. We expect everyone to have one,
to be tethered to the cloud and the hivemind forever; tracked, mon-
itored, pwned. (For posterity’s sake I will mention that this was not
a typo.) Human nature is the same as ever, but there is a threshold
past which a change in quantity becomes a change in quality. The
post-smartphone world is quite different to the pre-smartphone
world, because all of our senses have been reconfigured by this de-
vice, and everyone is in contact with everyone at all times. This type
of rapid, radical shift could happen again, for example, with full du-
plex brain implants.

A diverting manifestation of the global longhouse is its cre-

ation of an ideographic newspeak called emoji, whose glyphs are
chosen by international committees according to the modern fetish
for mind-numbed corporate positivity and naive Sapir-Whorfism.
There are emoji for “super” villains but not for mere villains, such as
prison inmates. The only symbols for insanity imply jollity. The gun
emoji was famously replaced with a water pistol. There is no emoji
for fatness, nor for any deity.
But despite these limitations, reality asserts itself, and we can
find ways to express truths in any linguistic milieu, no matter how
Orwellian. We can always unbellyfeel Ingsoc, and though you can
ban a word, the perception and the concept remain. The elephant in
the room/brain here is that, because of this, I have annotated the en-
tire story with emoji. Emoji are low-brow, but like picking up a folk
melody and working it into a symphony, they can be more, even as
one risks the total bimbofication of the text. I cannot resist creating
metatextual works. The existence of the glyph, the fact of the word-
in-itself, the texture of the writing–these things are as important to
me as the story, and I derive much enjoyment from them.
Originally I had desired to include sections written exclusively

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in emoji, or to play games with their density as it pertained to the

rising and falling action, but I found these things to be too laborious,
too imprecise, and too demanding of the reader. There are those who
have accused me of using some kind of tool or find/replace method
to do these annotations, but no, I did them by hand, lovingly, me-
ticulously. I made use of a find/replace for only a handful of words,
particularly the use of the heart for the word “like” – which some
people felt was lazy or inappropriate, and which is an inside joke
with myself about the UI in social media apps. My favorite critic
said “the author should have been more considerate and not included
these emoji” – and I cannot fathom the broken circumlocutions of
the mind necessary to interpret such a time-consuming labor of love
as “inconsiderate,” but indeed many things do come to pass.
Anyway, my intention is for you to access a new form of con-
sciousness by means of this lexical device. I believe the textual mo-
dality is cognitively distinct from the pictorial. Nothing I do could
approximate the phenomenological experience I have imagined in
this story, but I dare to dream that by combining these two para-
digms I can produce a strange new experience using this format.

Now – once more, and quickly – let us speak of the things we

were meant to discuss at these heights, in this rarefied air. Our time
is short and the hour is late, and all of these things have been or-
dained since the foundation of the world. I have already told you the
art of the future will be between the artist and God. Let me reiterate
that any other beholders shall be incidental. And just as it is with
Art, so must it be with Science, big S.
There are truths outside of nature that are not contingent, and
they have nothing resembling a regard for human outcomes. This is
the Lovecraftian account of the universe: cold, indifferent, machinic,
a placid island of ignorance surrounded by a strange, unknowable
Outside.
There is a famous novel by Ibn Tufail called Hayy ibn Yaqzān,
which was titled in Latin as Philosophicus Autodidacticus, and it de-

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 o my father, if this cup may not pass away from me

scribes a man who is born on an island far from any people, who is
raised by animals, and he discovers the truths of Islam entirely on
his own, simply by living his life in nature and by studying the stars.
When he is older, he leaves the island and he meets some Muslims,
and he rejects them, because he thinks they have chosen to worship
creation, when they should have chosen to worship the Creator. In-
deed, if this were an historical account, we would have no choice but
to regard theology in the same way we regard mathematics, as an
inexorable, immaterial truth of the universe, independently discov-
erable by anyone.
Nevertheless, we should be averse to such a careless notion as
“there is no evidence for the existence of God”, because and despite
theological variance between cultures, it is extremely rare to find a
group of people with no notion of God in their traditions. In the
study of genetic algorithms, this is called convergence. Carcinization
is another popular example, and it means there is some topology of
the problem space that causes a certain optimization to occur over
and over. The perpetual, unresolvable question is whether this be-
cause of some universal feature of the human cognition machine, or
whether it’s because of some feature of the external universe, or both.
The virtual is a superset of the actual; it contains everything that is
and everything that could be. So too with God.
It’s not a contradiction, either, to say the universe is intelligent,
while believing that it has no subjective awareness. It’s possible to
have intelligence without consciousness. We can write an algorithm
to run on a computer that solves very difficult problems, such as e.g.,
optimization problems, all on its own, but we would be hard pressed
to ascribe consciousness to such an algorithm. Tradition is the sum
of a non-conscious optimization algorithm operating on a substrate
of humans across all of history. The output of that algorithm con-
tains such things as belief in God, so we can trust there is a good,
intelligent reason for that. You can posit divine intervention in this
process or not; it is a theologically neutral account. You also don’t
know what second or third or nth order effects of believing in God
and following specific religious prescriptions might be really key to
the entire machine continuing to operate.
What this means is that when it comes to matters of faith,

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“shut up and stop asking questions” can be the objectively correct

approach, and enlightenment rational skepticism is wrong. Most
scientific discoveries in the history of the West were made by Chris-
tians or Muslims. In fact, the idea of God’s creation as an attribute of
God, the idea that one of the ways of knowing the divine is through
studying His creation, this is an Islamic idea which came to the West.
(And even Ibn Tufail’s novel alludes to this, when ibn Yaqzān rejects
the muslims he meets for precisely this behavior, which he regards as
a sin.) The idea that science is the fruit of enlightenment skepticism
is fallacious, and we should oppose it wherever it is taught. Scientific
advancement happens in spite of atheism, not because of it.
No matter what, you end up living under some kind of the-
ocracy, and when its tenets do not come from revelation, they bend
instead into total depravity, so the most important thing in the
world may be to come to a correct understanding of God. There
is no contradiction or immorality in the instrumentalizing of faith;
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in
heaven. And for you who have deepness of earth, you must realize
that all the good and quaint and sensible things in life are inextrica-
bly bound up in transcendent spiritual things, and that theological
propositions evolved in our heads to describe things that exist Out-
side of even the incorporeal space of possibility, and their veracity is
immaterial to their capacity to stave off the madness of the infinitely
cruel universe.
If there is a way out of the hell of our own making, the hell of
technocracy, the hell of the electric longhouse, it is through an act
of sheer irrationality and genius, a triumph of the masculine heart
over feminine securitization, and that triumph will come through
a restoration of this understanding: that we study creation as an act
of penitence and piety toward the Creator, an act of devotion to our
Father in Heaven. This is the only and one true science.
Now: you are Zarathustra! Run down the mountain and tell
the last man his (false) god is dead, and that his finality, too, was
false, and that a Great Old One rises. This is not a philosophy; this
is an exhortation.

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 except i drink it, thy will be done

That is not dead which doth eternal lie

and with strange aeons even death may die.

Finally, I thank you, from the bottom of my very own

heart, for giving consideration to my works. It has been
my great honor to share them with you.

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