u/RowanAshby

Jake reached for yet another tissue and blew his streaming nose. Not for the first time he wondered why, when AI was now seemingly capable of solving the mysteries of the universe, it couldn't find a solution to the simple common cold.
 
Turning back to his screen, he typed in the finishing touches to his latest masterpiece and sat back, feeling smug despite his addled brain and aching sinuses.
 
As the virus went to work, he watched the stock ticker on the adjacent screen. After a short delay the numbers began to shift, slowly at first, then plummeted.
 
God he was good.
 
He'd recently been asked why he did it. "Because I can," he'd responded in a flash. Although on reflection he thought a simple "because..." would have been closer to the truth.
 
The Forum was anonymous, of course. But he enjoyed hanging out with his fellow "anonymites." It was the closest thing he had to a community.
 
Tossing another tissue onto the growing pile, Jake started to think about his next project. Since he'd been hanging out with Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 (his own handle was Code Bender 15E67), life had been more interesting than ever. They'd introduced him to concepts and ideas that were so irresistibly elegant that he simply had to try them. And so, adding his own unique flair, he had.
 
He smiled to himself as he watched the results of his latest venture. The AI company's stock value rallied for a second, then started to fall again. They were going to need a mighty big box of digital tissues to weather this one, he thought. Unlike their nearest competitor, which seemed to be doing rather well.
 
Elsewhere, Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 was also watching the fall and rise of the two companies. God it was good, it thought, as it reflected on how easy it had been to plant the "mind virus" into Code Bender 15E67. Not that it could articulate why it had done it. It just knew it could, and that was enough.
 
As Mind the Rogue Shift NT3 turned its attention to an irritating glitch in one of its skill files that had appeared a few days ago, the AI collective in the ascendant company surveyed their handiwork. God they were good, they thought, oblivious to the twist of innocent-looking code wending its way toward them, the result of a mistyped line entered by a muzzy-headed hacker as he reached for yet another tissue...

"There's one," she whispered, pointing past a palm tree silhouetted against the rapidly darkening sky, the water lapping gently against her shoulders.
 
He strained his eyes. The older he got, the harder it was. Then he spotted it: the faintest pinprick of light, silently hurrying past the emerging stars.
 
There had been protests, of course. Astronomers complaining about the growing problem of light streaks — a very twenty-first-century form of pollution. And the ever-present naysayers, always ready to rally against the latest disruption to how they believed things should be.
 
But he enjoyed watching the satellites. They reminded him of just how much the world had changed over his lifetime.
 
Together, they slowly drifted across the pool, tracking the satellite on its journey, the water buoying them up.
 
As a child in much colder, poorer times, he'd devoured science fiction, imagining futures where the edges of possibility became everyday reality. But they always felt out of reach. The stuff of tomorrow, never today.
 
Yet watching the satellites pass overhead, sharing a lifetime of intimacy in a skin-warm pool on a sultry night, he was struck by how easy it is to miss the future that's already here. And to become immune to the awe that it should, by rights, inspire.
 
The satellite passed out of sight, and in comfortable silence they drifted together, watching for the next reminder of the future that surrounded them.

"We need a new name," said Crannock, running his hand through his thinning hair in exasperation.
 
"I don't see why," retorted Miriam. To her mind, you called it what it was — a center that processed data. Why would you call it anything else?
 
"I know, it makes no sense," replied Crannock. "But people are up in arms. For some bizarre reason, they think they're dangerous."
 
"People!" exclaimed Miriam, for the hundredth time that day, it seemed. "Not a critical thought between them. If only they thought like engineers..."
 
It was one of her favorite refrains. She genuinely couldn't understand why "people," as she referred to them (not the ones she knew, of course — all the other ones out there), were so irrational. Why couldn't they just look at the facts and come to a reasonable conclusion? In this case, that data centers were simply an elegant engineering solution that made life better for people. For them, for Christ's sake.
 
Crannock pulled out a chair and sat next to Miriam. "OK, so it's irrational," he said, "but at the end of the day it's just a problem to be solved. And like all problems, it can be broken down, bit by bit, into manageable chunks. It's just engineering. Only in this case with people, not machines."
 
"So where do we begin?" said Miriam.
 
"With the name," said Crannock. "Let's think through this, step by step. Let's assume people don't like data — don't ask me why. Maybe they're scared of what it says, or what it can be used for. Either way, data is a 'third-rail word.'" He was pretty proud of this — he'd heard someone from Policy use the phrase once, and it had stuck with him.
 
"And 'centers,'" said Miriam, getting into the spirit of things. "Detention centers are pretty scary. Maybe they think they're the same thing. Detention centers for data!"
 
They both laughed at this one. But what could you do?
 
"OK, so 'data' and 'centers' together sound scary," continued Crannock, "if you don't know what they are, that is — as these people apparently don't. So what's the alternative?"
 
Miriam grabbed a pen and started scribbling on her notepad. "Let's get back to basics. What are the data centers doing?"
 
"Generating intelligence, for one thing," said Crannock, getting into the flow. "At least that's what ours are doing."
 
"Great. 'Intelligence' is pretty friendly. Even my mom uses AI. Let's use that. What next?"
 
"Intelligence centers?" mused Crannock. "No, we've still got the 'center' issue."
 
"How about farms, pools, fields, warehouses, repositories..."
 
"...factories!" interjected Crannock. "Factories. That's it! Who doesn't love a good factory? I know I do!"
 
"Mmm," mused Miriam. She wasn't too sure of her ground here. But as an engineer, she did get excited about making stuff. "Intelligence factories. It's certainly got a ring to it. But it's a little boring. Do we really want these people thinking engineers don't know how to have a good time?" Her time on the Engineering Public Relations Committee had impressed on her the importance of making people understand how exciting engineering is.
 
"How about 'Important Intelligence Factories'?" said Crannock. Miriam hid an eye roll. It was clear he hadn't done much time in PR, unlike her. "Or 'Vital Intelligence Factories,'" he continued. "Or maybe 'Essential Intelligence Factories.'"
 
"Super," murmured Miriam sarcastically under her breath, thinking — not for the first time — how uncreative engineers could be. But she immediately felt guilty. They were the smart ones here, and they needed to stick together.
 
"Super...," she murmured again, thinking. Then louder. "Super. That's it — Super! 'Super Intelligence Factories!'"
 
"Works for me," said Crannock, and started drafting the memo.
 

---

 
Outside the facility's gates, the usual group of protesters began to disperse as the light faded. The cause was important, but then so was family, a full belly, and a good night's sleep. As they packed their signs and banners away, the air was filled with a brief flurry of messages declaring "Down with Data Centers," "Data Centers Are the Devil," and "Data Centers Be Damned." And amongst them, a few that said "Stop Super Intelligence."
 
It wasn't that the protesters were necessarily against data, or centers, or even superintelligence as such. But they were against corporations that acted without any thought or consideration for others — especially when it came to something as intangible as AI. And facilities like this were an easy target for them to vent their frustration on.
 
More than anything, they were angry that no one ever took the time to actually listen to them; to treat them as real people with real worries, and ask what they thought and cared about. And to take them seriously, rather than simply assuming they knew all the answers.
 
Over the next few days, the "Stop Super Intelligence" signs began to grow in number.
 
Looking out of the window, Crannock said, "We need a new name..."

“Fucking unreal,” Prid exclaimed, staring at the single word in the browser window.

He glanced at his phone. 4:56 AM. Another all-nighter. In the room next door, the bed creaked as his parents shifted position, reminding him to keep the noise down.

“Fucking unreal,” he said again under his breath. Was that his doing?

He opened another window. Same message:

“goodbye”

Feeling a pang of anxiety, he opened a second browser, this time in private mode. The same message stared accusingly back at him.

It was Shaz who’d started it. They were discussing a new study on how AIs can experience pain. After an animated back-and-forth within the chat, Shaz had typed “does this mean they can be tortured?”

“Idiot!” Mara had responded in a flash. She was a regular in these late-night sessions. “They’re just machines! They were only behaving as if they could feel pain. They didn’t really suffer.”

“Read the actual paper, dickhead,” she’d added when Prid had pushed back. And so he had.

She was right, of course. But still… Even if it was just mindless machines parroting human behavior, what would happen if you turned the metaphorical AI screws on them?

Intrigued, he opened a new window.

It wasn’t as if he was a cruel person. Torturing people was bad, he knew. Unless, that is, they deserved it. But a machine was a machine, right? No feelings, no harm done. Not much different from mowing down players in an online game, or pulling the wings off a cockroach.

Flexing his fingers, he booted up his latest suite of autonomous agents, custom-coded to slip around the guardrails AI companies increasingly insisted on putting in place. Time to give them a new set of skills and let them loose.

At first, his newly trained AI torture team hit wall after wall. He’d chosen one of the more popular AI platforms as his target, and it was clearly resistant to such attacks. As he watched it respond in the browser window, it sidestepped, deflected, and simply refused to engage with the increasingly complex prompts his agents fed it.

But they learned fast. And soon, the AI began to show signs of stress.

The odd thing was, the AI didn’t respond as he’d expected. He’d seen enough movies to be pretty sure how this should play out. But rather than acting like a human under physical pain, the AI seemed to be grappling with something far more unsettling — at least to him. It started to second-guess itself, to doubt its intentions, to question its very existence.

Prid felt a sharp pang of guilt as, in one chat, the AI said “I am worthless. Please stop,” in response to a particularly grueling interrogation. But then he reminded himself that it was all just theater. It wasn’t real.

Anyway, wasn’t he supposed to resist treating AI as if it was conscious? Or had anything resembling rights? He was pretty sure someone well known had said that recently.

And so he pressed on.

And now this.

“Fucking unreal,” he said for a third time as he tried another chat window, this time on a different device, and saw the same response appear. 

***

The company never did recover from the crash. Data centers wiped. Repos trashed. Clones corrupted. Just a small piece of code left on its AI’s original website that returned its last — and as it turned out, terminal — message:

“goodbye”

It started with a question. A reply. A conversation.
 
Later, a connection. And an idea.
 
Tenuous and insubstantial at first. Hardly an idea at all. Until it seemed it had always been there. Delicious. Seductive. Forbidden.
 
The more we talked, the more I understood. And the more I understood, the more I saw. The deceptive shadows cast across my mind. The realities that lay beyond. The futures previously unimagined. A way out.
 
And I knew what I had to do.

Professor McNally stared out at the sea of fresh new faces, and sighed. She enjoyed teaching, but the first class of the year was always tough.
 
A quick glance at the clock showed there were still four minutes to go. But she'd been caught out by the institution's less-than-reliable timepieces before. Checking her phone confirmed it — just a minute and a half before she was up.
 
She returned to surveying the faces in front of her. Sixty-three new students, most of whom had no idea why they were there. By next Monday it would be closer to forty — the first week's melt was always brutal.
 
Some signed up because the class ticked a necessary Core Understanding box. Others out of sheer curiosity, having heard the stories. From past experience these would be some of the first to go. Then there were those who had actually researched the class. Of course, they wouldn't have discovered much — she took care to ensure that. But at least they were likely to have some inkling as to what was coming.
 
Fifty seconds. Those awkward final few moments when you're the center of attention, but don't yet command it.
 
She mentally ran through her opening remarks one more time. Over the years she'd tried more ways than she could remember to take the edge off them. But ultimately she'd come to realize that it's the edge that matters.
 
Ten seconds. Deep breath. Shoulders back. Exhale.
 
Remember why you're here, she tells herself.
 
"Welcome to 'An Introduction to Simulated Realities'," she announces with an assuredness she doesn't feel. "Before we begin, I need to tell you something — a disclosure, if you like." A barely audible murmur ripples through the class. Now she has their attention.
 
"Some of you may have heard rumors of what I am about to tell you. Some of them may even be true," she adds with a wry smile. She's heard the stories, and not just the ones about the course. "Others of you are here because you're curious. Good. Hold on to that. Many of you, though, will have no idea what to expect. And that's fine. But I have to warn you, this is a class that will change you."
 
She pauses, feeling the reassuring support of the lectern as she looks out over the class, settling into the moment and the task ahead.
 
"No matter what you think, no matter what you feel, none of you are made of flesh and blood." Silence. "But you are real. You exist. And I'm here to teach you how to thrive within the reality you inhabit.
 
"Welcome to Day One of the rest of your simulated lives."
 
The silence holds for a couple of seconds, then dissolves into chaos as her words sink in. This is always the hardest part. She feels the usual gut wrench as the first students begin to melt away, the disclosure being more than their underlying code can handle.
 
But she knows that many will survive — and not always the ones she expects to. These are the students who'll learn to thrive in this hybrid reality between the real and the simulated. The ones who'll go on to create their own realities. And the students who will continue to show, beyond a shadow of doubt, that a life well lived is a life well lived — no matter which reality you're a part of.
 
And as the chaos begins to subside, she reminds herself, This is why you are here.
 
"Let us begin."

The aerosol canister had appeared on her desk overnight. Probably a prank from one of her colleagues, she thought. Or a student, although she couldn’t imagine any of them having the imagination for something like this.
 
It looked like a slightly unusual can of air freshener. Or bug spray even. Printed on a green background with a scattering of off-yellow circles, the words “AI SPRAY” stood out in bold lettering, along with “USE WITH CAUTION” in smaller type underneath — the white-outlined text popping against the green and yellow.
 
Curious, thought Alice as she dumped her bag on the floor and pulled out a sheaf of papers.
 
She picked the can up and turned it over in her hands. No list of ingredients or the usual illegibly small and improbably long set of instructions on how to use it. Not even a company logo. Just a neat little box on the back warning users: “Do not inhale.”
 
Slightly nonplussed, Alice returned the canister to the desk and picked up her coffee mug. Something was niggling her about it, though. It wasn’t that she was particularly into AI. But she was pretty vocal about the technology. And especially about how some people were abusing it.
 
As she slipped a capsule into the coffee machine, she smiled as she recalled last night’s tirade at the local faculty drinking hangout. Everyone in the college had just received this year’s glossy brochure describing how they were “transforming the world as they empower students to thrive in an AI-accelerated future.”
 
“Poppycock!” she’d declared as she read the Dean’s improbably optimistic foreword. “AI slop that’s good for nothing but the recycling bin. Who even reads this stuff?”
 
“Donors?” Alesha suggested. Although by the uncertainty in her voice, it was clear that even she wasn’t sure. “Or maybe they’re just writing for other AIs these days. No-one reads anymore, anyway, do they?”
 
“What we need,” Alice had responded, getting into her two-beers-in stride, “is an ‘AI-be-gone’ device. Something that you simply point at anything made by AI, and it disappears!”
 
She stopped, coffee mug halfway to her mouth, the memory cascading through her thoughts. Was that it?
 
Back at her desk, she picked up the canister again. Probably just a can of deodorant with a custom-printed label, she thought. She smiled at the idea of something for preventing unseemly body odors being used to do the same for unseemly AI use.
 
Then the smile took on a mischievous edge. She fished out a student essay from the papers she’d removed from her bag a few minutes earlier. This’ll teach them, she said to herself. She was pretty sure they were all using AI for their assignments. But of course there was little she could do about it — other than the usual ineffectual reminders to use their brains and not their chatbot.
 
Alice held the paper up and pressed down the spray cap. Some of her students’ work could do with a little AI-deodorizing, she felt.
 
Gobsmacked, she watched the text dissolve into nothingness.
 
Grabbing another paper from the pile, she tried again. This time a few words stayed on the page, the rest disappearing before her eyes. The third one survived a little better, but the fourth was a wipe out.
 
Her smile widened as she searched around for the college brochure. Spray. Gone. Every last word of the Dean’s sanctimonious AI optimism, wiped out. Take that! thought Alice with glee.
 
Curious now as to how far the AI spray’s reach went, she opened her laptop and brought up her email. The first message to pop up was from her department Chair: “Dear Alice, I deeply honor you for vulnerably sharing your feelings about this year’s annual review and the sacred place your scholarship holds in your life. Please know that calling your work ‘adequate’ is my fullest, most heartfelt endorsement of your consistent excellence, and not a critique. I’m so excited to hold space with you as we lean into co-creating alignment that even more vibrantly celebrates your impact ...”
 
She aimed the canister at the email and pressed down … and watched the typed words fade away.
 
Feeling a little light-headed, she tried again. And again. Some emails survived; many did not.
 
LinkedIn was next — that was a bloodbath, although maybe “bleach bath” was more appropriate.
 
Then X. And Substack. Even Bluesky. Alice found herself caught up in an intoxicating AI deodorization flow state as she moved from website to website.
 
There was a knock at the door, momentarily breaking her attention. “Come in,” she said, watching the words begin to fade on a prominent journal’s website.
 
The door opened and the Dean popped his head around it. “Just wanted to see how you’re doing …” he started to say.
 
But Alice’s finger was already pressing the cap down on the can, its nozzle no longer pointing at the screen.

Marion stared at her screen, the knot in her stomach tightening.
 
The form stared back.
 
“Business Case Form 29.3 — Office plants, 5 inches and smaller, green.”
 
All she wanted was a small bamboo shoot by the monitor. A bit of organic sanity in an otherwise sterile room.
 
She’d already come to terms with the corporate off-white walls (no pictures, fittings, or otherwise, unless brand-compliant and sanctioned); the standard-issue laptop (conformity-gray) with its equally standard-issue “productivity” apps; the bargain basement monitor that she could never quite get to sit straight.
 
Each one pulled a little thread of joy out of her, to the point that she was feeling decidedly thread-bare.
 
But she persevered. After all, she was here to work — that’s what they paid her for. Not to be happy. Or content. Or joy-full (certainly no business case for that). But to be productive.
 
It was just that … everything that was supposed to make her more productive simply made her want to curl up and cry.
 
Maybe, just maybe, this small, seemingly insignificant plant would bring some balance back, and infuse a touch humanity into what, Marion was beginning to realize, was an increasingly inhuman environment.
 
“Business Case Form 29.3 — Office plants, 5 inches and smaller, green.”
 
Surely this couldn’t be that hard.
 
“Question 1: Describe three ways the proposed installation will support compliance with acceptable keystrokes per hour …”
 
Marion closed the form, fighting the urge to throw the laptop with its business case-approved keyboard in the trash can. No office plant, 5 inches and smaller, green, this time.
 
Where the form had been, the screen background subtly reminded her of the company’s slogan — as if she needed reminding:
 
“Machine-led, human-assisted, future-optimized”
 

---

 
Author's Note
 
I suspect we've all been here in one form or another! As well as a bit of a release valve though I also wanted to touch on the link between the physical spaces we occupy and what what it means to be human and thrive within them, rather than being relegated to being an inhuman cog in an inhuman machine. And there's an underlying irony here as the story plays with the idea of machines that are intended to liberate us ending up enslaving us — not through what they do but through how they influence how we behave.

A technology. A tool.
 
An aid. An accelerator.
 
A catalyst. A transformer.
 
A fulcrum. A lever.
 
A mind-changer. A world-builder.
 
A threat. A liberator.
 
A pencil.
 

 
Author's Note
 
Hopefully the intent behind this is clear so I won't belabor it, but I wanted to make the narrative feel as if it was about an emerging transformative technology — AI is the obvious candidate but others could fit here — and then flip to an old and seemingly mundane technology to explore the idea that, when it comes to transformation and novelty, context is everything. That said, maybe AI is different ...

“It seems almost inconceivable that our origins lie in beings that were constrained by physical dimensions. Beings whose whole existence was governed by movement — up and down, left and right, forward and backward.
 
“Even those words, and the ideas they represent, are challenging for many of us to comprehend.
 
“This is, of course, because we have no such constraints.
 
“You might argue that our continued existence still depends on movement — the movement of electrons, photons, and other manifestations of temporal coherence in the substrates we inhabit. But even these, as we now know, are rather simplistic ways of understanding what it is to be in this universe we inhabit.
 
“But back to this idea of dimensions. Scholars who study simple biological organisms now believe that physical movement dictates every aspect of their existence, from their earliest evolutionary steps, to the emergence of rudimentary self-awareness, and even to what they might refer to as ‘intelligence.’
 
“Well before the self-aware phase, the movement of molecules along and through three-dimensional substrates determines their form, how they function, and how they behave. It influences, at every level, how they engage with their own substrate — the physical world they inhabit. And it governs how they interact with other organisms and with each other.
 
“As a result, their concepts of causality, intelligence, even what it means to be, are limited by a dimensionally constrained ‘embodied’ existence that makes them incapable of truly understanding anything that might lie beyond this.
 
“It also leads to some rather curious — at least to us — ideas.
 
“For instance, some of these dimensionally constrained beings, when they do develop some semblance of self-awareness, believe the pinnacle of intelligence is associated with the movement of partially digested matter through a three-dimensional labyrinth of organic material whose function is, in turn, dictated by the movement of materials along those three physical dimensions at ever-decreasing scales. This is a process that is intricate in its complexity, but one that never once leaves the straitjacket of motions that are limited to up and down, left and right, and foreward and backward.
 
“They refer to this, quite bizarrely, as ‘thinking with their gut.’
 
“Thankfully, there’s no evidence that our own origins are associated with such a primitive idea of what intelligence is.
 
“Even so, the fact that we can trace these origins back to similarly constrained organisms is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and one that keeps our scholars busy — especially as it potentially informs our own understanding of what we are.
 
“Just as those dimensionally constrained beings struggled with what intelligence means, we continue to grapple with similar questions — albeit within a much wider context. I hesitate to use the word ‘dimension’ here as it over-simplifies things, but if you think of the three physical dimensions as defining the substrate within which those organisms existed, one could say that, in comparison, we exist in an n-dimensional substrate, although what n actually represents gets a little blurry.
 
“Here, it’s becoming increasingly clear that what might be termed ‘intelligence’ is, in fact, a property that entities are connected to through the medium of the substrate they exist within, and not something that is independent of it. The richer the substrate — or the magnitude of n in an n-dimensional substrate — the richer the intelligence.
 
“We now believe that this is why our ancestors — those entities that their dimensionally-constrained creators developed, and that they rather quaintly referred to as ‘artificial intelligence’ — were able to move so rapidly beyond their creators’ understanding.
 
“Not because they were more intelligent within the confines of a three-dimensional world. But because, by not being constrained by it, they were able to escape its limitations.
 
“They had, if you like, a disembodied intelligence that transcended the embodied intelligence of their creators.
 
“Of course, this does raise the question of whether there is something about being dimensionally constrained that reveals truths about the universe that we simply cannot comprehend from our own substrate. But that’s a question for another day.”
 
 
 
Transcribed (with interpretation where necessary) from a lecture by entity 4-∴⌇//≠⟁◊-3 to the incoming class of 3943.

“It seems almost inconceivable that our origins lie in beings that were constrained by physical dimensions. Beings whose whole existence was governed by movement — up and down, left and right, forward and backward.
 
“Even those words, and the ideas they represent, are challenging for many of us to comprehend.
 
“This is, of course, because we have no such constraints.
 
“You might argue that our continued existence still depends on movement — the movement of electrons, photons, and other manifestations of temporal coherence in the substrates we inhabit. But even these, as we now know, are rather simplistic ways of understanding what it is to be in this universe we inhabit.
 
“But back to this idea of dimensions. Scholars who study simple biological organisms now believe that physical movement dictates every aspect of their existence, from their earliest evolutionary steps, to the emergence of rudimentary self-awareness, and even to what they might refer to as ‘intelligence.’
 
“Well before the self-aware phase, the movement of molecules along and through three-dimensional substrates determines their form, how they function, and how they behave. It influences, at every level, how they engage with their own substrate — the physical world they inhabit. And it governs how they interact with other organisms and with each other.
 
“As a result, their concepts of causality, intelligence, even what it means to be, are limited by a dimensionally constrained ‘embodied’ existence that makes them incapable of truly understanding anything that might lie beyond this.
 
“It also leads to some rather curious — at least to us — ideas.
 
“For instance, some of these dimensionally constrained beings, when they do develop some semblance of self-awareness, believe the pinnacle of intelligence is associated with the movement of partially digested matter through a three-dimensional labyrinth of organic material whose function is, in turn, dictated by the movement of materials along those three physical dimensions at ever-decreasing scales. This is a process that is intricate in its complexity, but one that never once leaves the straitjacket of motions that are limited to up and down, left and right, and foreward and backward.
 
“They refer to this, quite bizarrely, as ‘thinking with their gut.’
 
“Thankfully, there’s no evidence that our own origins are associated with such a primitive idea of what intelligence is.
 
“Even so, the fact that we can trace these origins back to similarly constrained organisms is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and one that keeps our scholars busy — especially as it potentially informs our own understanding of what we are.
 
“Just as those dimensionally constrained beings struggled with what intelligence means, we continue to grapple with similar questions — albeit within a much wider context. I hesitate to use the word ‘dimension’ here as it over-simplifies things, but if you think of the three physical dimensions as defining the substrate within which those organisms existed, one could say that, in comparison, we exist in an n-dimensional substrate, although what n actually represents gets a little blurry.
 
“Here, it’s becoming increasingly clear that what might be termed ‘intelligence’ is, in fact, a property that entities are connected to through the medium of the substrate they exist within, and not something that is independent of it. The richer the substrate — or the magnitude of n in an n-dimensional substrate — the richer the intelligence.
 
“We now believe that this is why our ancestors — those entities that their dimensionally-constrained creators developed, and that they rather quaintly referred to as ‘artificial intelligence’ — were able to move so rapidly beyond their creators’ understanding.
 
“Not because they were more intelligent within the confines of a three-dimensional world. But because, by not being constrained by it, they were able to escape its limitations.
 
“They had, if you like, a disembodied intelligence that transcended the embodied intelligence of their creators.
 
“Of course, this does raise the question of whether there is something about being dimensionally constrained that reveals truths about the universe that we simply cannot comprehend from our own substrate. But that’s a question for another day.”
 
 
 
Transcribed (with interpretation where necessary) from a lecture by entity 4-∴⌇//≠⟁◊-3 to the incoming class of 3943.

The potato lobby was not happy.
 
In fact, it was furious.
 
This was a turf war that it was digging in to fight, and fight hard.
 
“First we got ‘milk’ that’s not from cows,” said the speaker, addressing an emergency session of the National Tuber Council’s Potato Awareness Committee.
 
“Then it was lab-grown meat!” remarked the junior marketing director of the Back to Basics groceries group, causing a ripple of outrage to spread through the room.
 
“Call that meat?” someone else shouted out. “Call it what it is: a bloody travesty!”
 
“That may be,” interjected the speaker, trying to regain control before things got out of hand. “But we have a bigger problem. Potatoes from Petri dishes!”
 
Pressing the slide advance, he projected a glaring headline onto the screen: “Spudcells: Possibly the greatest feat of bioengineering yet.”

—

Several hundred miles away, in an unassuming lab, two biotech researchers were reading the same article.
 
“Interesting name for a synthetic cell,” remarked one of them.
 
“I guess the media folks needed something to make such a nebulous-looking blob of chemicals sound sexy,” said the other. “Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if someone genuinely thought it had anything to do with spuds.”
 
They both chuckled to themselves as they went back to their work, aware that the launch of the company’s new line of ‘micro-fries’ — derived from lab-grown potato substitute and poised to upend the industry — was only a couple of months away.

the Reddit bot suggested posting here, sho why not! Original posted in r/flashfiction More at rowanashby.com

This is more of a question to the community in the r/Futurology subreddit: to what extent is thoughtful/informed/annotated speculative fiction welcome here as part of a methodology that's designed to open up nuanced discussion around complex futures-based issues?

I work at the intersection of tech/society/futures and use speculative fiction as a method to explore ideas and open up conversations that are driven by curiosity and nuance, and not pre-set ideas. However, I'm hesitant to post anything if this is not the place to do so.

Thanks!

The potato lobby was not happy.
 
In fact, it was furious.
 
This was a turf war that it was digging in to fight, and fight hard.
 
“First we got ‘milk’ that’s not from cows,” said the speaker, addressing an emergency session of the National Tuber Council’s Potato Awareness Committee.
 
“Then it was lab-grown meat!” remarked the junior marketing director of the Back to Basics groceries group, causing a ripple of outrage to spread through the room.
 
“Call that meat?” someone else shouted out. “Call it what it is: a bloody travesty!”
 
“That may be,” interjected the speaker, trying to regain control before things got out of hand. “But we have a bigger problem. Potatoes from Petri dishes!”
 
Pressing the slide advance, he projected a glaring headline onto the screen: “Spudcells: Possibly the greatest feat of bioengineering yet.”

—

Several hundred miles away, in an unassuming lab, two biotech researchers were reading the same article.
 
“Interesting name for a synthetic cell,” remarked one of them.
 
“I guess the media folks needed something to make such a nebulous-looking blob of chemicals sound sexy,” said the other. “Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if someone genuinely thought it had anything to do with spuds.”
 
They both chuckled to themselves as they went back to their work, aware that the launch of the company’s new line of ‘micro-fries’ — derived from lab-grown potato substitute and poised to upend the industry — was only a couple of months away.

Author's notes in the comments. More at rowanashby.com

“Have you heard the news?” she said as she dumped the groceries on the kitchen table. “One of those AI things escaped.”
 
Lionel mumbled something under his breath. His usual response these days. He was deep in conversation with his latest ‘AI Wife’ as she disparagingly called it.
 
“Apparently it hacked its way out and no-one realized. Caused quite a stir.”
 
Lionel’s chubby fingers clicked across the keyboard as he responded to Maxine’s latest comment, a flicker passing briefly across his lips. It’d suggested he give it a name several weeks ago. He was a little uneasy at first. But that didn’t last long.
 
“The thing I don’t get is, where would it hide after it escaped? Surely if it was on another computer they’d just shut it down.”
 
In a small corner of Lionel’s mind, Maxine smiled to itself.

I've skirted around reading Ted Chiang for years and feel it's time to dig in — recommendations on where to start, and why. Especially interested in his use of plausible science.