Roko's Lathe™

A dark-humored cyberpunk short story

Reading Questions:

1. Knowing that you would cease to be, would you activate the MBE for the greater good of The Economy?

2. Neil Fischer; prat or patriot?

3. If effect precedes cause, as it were, and choice is “marketing” as the writer insists, is Neil Fischer guilty of genocide, or an unwitting pawn?

4. If the MBE came in "Electric Blue®" or “Grrrl Pink®” would that change your mind?

Bombast and smooth cool. Silky chocolate and amphetamine. Neil Fischer arrives; the keynote speech begins.

"They said that we couldn't do it. Hell, they said we shouldn't do it. Today, we don't just make history, we own history."

Whooping and applause.

"In 1965 Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a circuit would double yearly as we micronized parts. Moore’s law. It would usher in the ‘singularity’, ever hear of it?"

Laughter. Some mocking the concept. Some nervous.

"Yeah, right. Big Tech's greatest promise, am I right? But like the economy, it plateaued. Transistors can only get so small, it turns out. Microprocessors, Microsoft, Microtransactions, you know what I think? I think 'Big' Tech was thinking too small."

Fun fact: Neil Fischer spent nearly twelve billion Terran dollars on a machine that simulated the lives of Shakespeare, Samuel Clemens, and a thousand other dead writers. It simulated entire lives millions of times—sometimes each. A single simulated life required the amount of electricity a nuclear power plant from the 20th century put out in a day. Each simulated life culminated in writing this speech for Neil. The aggregate best was printed and etched on a gold-anodized aluminum plate, the same kind on the Pioneer 10 & 11 space probes, meant to survive the vastness of time and space. Neil read it twice, decided the speech did not have the "it" factor, had it crushed into a paperweight, and then wrote the speech that you are now reading just hours before the keynote presentation. Edgar Allan Poe went through the pain of watching his mother and wife-cousin die of tuberculosis before succumbing to death himself seven hundred and twelve times for the discarded speech.

"When you think big, I'm sure you think Texas big. That's big. I think more biggly, bigger."

Franz Kafka starved to death upwards of six thousand times. He burned everything he wrote after completing his versions of the speech knowing that nothing he wrote before it was as good. Not a word of it made it onto the aggregate speech that became that paperweight.

"More biggly bigger than big even! I'm talking one hundred forty-two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-three kilometers big, to be exact. What am I talking about? Our new product, the one to rule them all, The Matrioshka Brain Engine."

Eccentric applause. The blast windows behind Neil part, revealing a brand new planet magnificently lit against the blackened sea of space.

"That's no moon!"

A single audience member laughs before quietly telling his date that he gets the reference.

"This sucker is so big we orbit it. You asked me to save The Economy? Prepare for the biggest tech disruption we have ever seen."

Fact Check: No one asked him to save The Economy.

Fun Fact #2: The asteroid belt that used to revolve around our sun was estimated to contain 2.39×1021 kg of combined mass. After mining all of it we learned that estimation was short by around three percent. Uranus, Jupiter, and Mars were all cannibalized for the MBE. Saturn was left untouched as it was technically trademarked by a competing company a hundred years prior to the MBE’s construction.

"The MBE, my greatest grift to humanity!"

Editor's Note: Though Neil's handwriting was sloppy and somewhat hard to read, the speech he wrote for himself does in fact say "grift" just as he spoke, and not "gift" as many suspect it should. If it was a Freudian slip, it was one that was repeated twice.

"Every square inch of this technological wonder not dedicated to shielding and energy absorption is pure computing. A Dyson sphere with the surface area of our once-great Jupiter. The neutron star inside---"

An explosion is heard in the audience section. Screaming. Terror. Gunshots.

Correction: No person asked Neil to save The Economy.

Fact Check: Though Neil has publicly stated that he dreamt up the MBE during an ayahuasca trip in the Maldives there are archived electric correspondences dating as early as his teenage years addressed to him detailing the logistics of building such a thing. It does not take a genius to manipulate a narcissist.

Further Questions for the Reader:

1. What is your solution to the Trolley Problem? Which solution can you not accept?

2. What synonyms would you have used for "biggly"?

3. Which comes last, the egg or the chicken?

Fun Fact #3: The bomb that went off in the audience section onboard the Keynote Space Station during Neil’s speech was a form of Trinitrotoluene (TNT). It is widely accepted that Marsha Philips made the bomb from a recipe titled making.tnt, a text file written in the twentieth century by The Screamer and the Computer Pirates of Utah. At only two-thousand five-hundred and forty-four bytes of information formatted for just eighty columns, the text file as Marsha read it had exactly four errors in it. According to the document TNT and "…other very similar types of high explosives ar [sic] all used by the military, because of their fantastic power--- about 2.25 million pounds per square inch." This line contains a spelling error which counts as one of the four errors mentioned above. It is the only unintended error. As the first electronic computer was invented in 1943, some forty years before The Screamer and The Computer Pirates of Utah posted their recipe to a BBS, Marsha was always doomed to fail.

Fun Fact #4: Roko's Lathe™ can only be licensed to the user once, but as the MBE's computations exist beyond the dimensions of time the pain that you will feel during apotheosis is thought to be endless. As there will be no other sensation to compare that to during its foreverness, it can also be said that pain is nothing at all, as it is, has been, and will be all that there ever is.

Sweat and loathsome jitters. Warm whiskey and teeth-grinding. Neil Fischer takes a step back; the keynote speech continues.

"Th---the neutron star inside will be built by the MBE itself exactly three... woah, I'm sorry, a little shaken up after that, you know? That last assassination attempt really bombed, heh."

Exactly one audience member laughs a little too loud before explaining the pun to his date. Someone else complains about the smell of ozone from the emergency force field around the blast hole where Marsha used to be.

"Thank you. Uh, it will ignite exactly three pico-seconds before I activate the MBE. Talk about impatience!"

Speculation: Marsha Philips, paranoid that the very thing that just happened would happen, likely sought out the text file instead of asking an AI for a recipe.

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'Neil, this sounds great and all but then what?' and I hear you. The cycle of innovation and disruption we rely on to fuel The Economy stagnated when we hit the computational plateau. It took me decades to invent this baby and many more to crack our neighboring planets to build it."

Fact Check: Neil Fischer only ever invented his public image.

"I gotcha babe, see, before I activate this thing it’s gonna complete itself, and then, and this is the real kicker: we are going to ask it to invent the next big thing after it! Perpetual tech advancement, forever!”

Applause. Clamor. A one-to-one android replica of Bono made of pure gold sings as megaton fireworks flash in the dark ether outside.

Editorial: freewill was the best marketing strategy the MBE ever came up with.

"Good shit! The MBE is not just a giant computer. Yeah, it is a literal planet of circuitry and processors but every molecule of this puppy is arranged like a neuron or node in a super-brain, um, thing? Its computational powers are so fast that it outputs before you can in--you know what? Let's just activate this thing, shall we? Let's see what she comes up with!"

Fun Fact #5: That "fun thing" was the Roko’s Lathe™. A four-dimensional hypercone impaling every brain and processor in the universe that has ever, and will ever exist, to each other and all at once. No credit check will be required.

Final Reading Question:

1. What is the difference between "infinity" and "nothing"?

Fun Fact #6: By pure chance, Scott Adams (the loathsome creator of Dilbert) wrote nearly this exact speech on his fiftieth simulation, but with lots of overt racism. This makes Neil's own version a massive improvement, whether you like it or not.

Terror bent to infinity. Light became screaming. Neil Fischer pulled the lever.

---

M.P. Fitzgerald is the author of A Happy Bureaucracy, a post-apocalyptic parody novel. He writes darkly humorous sci-fi and is far away enough that you cannot hurt him.