The Company Man

To get to the campus, I have to walk past the fentanyl zombies. I call them fentanyl zombies because it helps engender a sort of detached, low-empathy, ironic self-narrative which I find useful for my work; this being a form of internal self-prompting I've developed which allows me to feel comfortable with both the day-to-day "jobbing" (that of improving reinforcement learning algorithms for a short-form video platform) and the effects of the summed efforts of both myself and my colleagues on a terrifyingly large fraction of the population of Earth.

All of these colleagues are about the nicest, smartest people you're ever likely to meet but I think are much worse people than even me because they don't seem to need the mental circumlocutions I require to stave off that ever-present feeling of guilt I have had since taking this job and at certain other points in my life where I have felt both trapped by and complicit in fundamentally evil systems far larger than myself.

It was during a moment of personal crisis of a pronounced nature, in which I considered doing various harms to myself, including suicide, that I read a work of great insight on the corrosive effect of irony on American culture, critiquing it as a kind of anesthesia poisoning the pop cultural artifacts out of which the American soul is now woven.

To a man with an amputated spirit, any talk of anesthesia can be read only as an advertisement for a balm. And so that is why I call them fentanyl zombies.

And there is something comical about the fentanyl zombie, is there not? You have seen them, surely, bent over on the sidewalk, swaying slightly, folded over like sandwich boards, putting the poor local contortionist to shame who (no longer able to busk to make a living given this new competition) must be considering resorting to fentanyl herself to numb the pain.

Here in SF, the fentanyl zombies have QR codes tattooed on the palms of their hands in the hopes of getting some crypto donations. And so as I walk past, a hand flips out from each like a scallop's adductor muscle, and from their lips ecstatic, drug-peaked requests for donations, donations which (they mumble) will certainly not be used to purchase more fentanyl but instead will be used for food or perhaps even a Bible or that other Bible known as The Big Book.

And I don't want to give them any cryptocurrency, despite having some FartCoin which has been doing very well lately, shockingly well, this FartCoin. I wonder if it will continue to "moon" to the point where I can quit my job and become a VC and go on podcasts in which I will try to downplay the source of my initial capital so as to maintain some illusion that this economy makes any kind of sense at all to me or anyone else for that matter. Though perhaps by the time I am doing podcasts I will be so far gone I will just own it and maintain that it required great genius to have foreseen the rise of FartCoin and allocated capital to same. And that would be a good self-narrative to adopt in that eventuality, so I resolve to do so, now, should it come to pass.

And then I see one of these zombies, a man so completely stupefied he can't even mumble but who has a handwritten sign, itself with a QR code, on which is written:

GIVE ME MONEY FOR FENT!!!!

I take out my phone and give this fellow traveler 30 FartCoins.

---

My best "work friend" is a woman, Esther, who I am also hopelessly in love with and toward whom I present a demeanor of a paradoxical aloof conviviality, which I feel she finds intoxicating though I have seen no evidence for this so far.

Esther is a card-carrying member of the Effective Altruism movement, which (in my imagining of her mental life) means she feels the sheer force and weight of the evil of this world. She (I imagine her revealing in our long, philosophical post-coital conversations) even thinks sometimes about all the children we are parasitizing with our short-form videos (outputs of increasingly-sophisticated RL demons) starting at an age in which they, truly, cannot be said to have had any say or 'free will' in the matter, a process of psychological manipulation and addiction which undermines the very tenets of self-determination, stability of preferences, and the rationality of the human animal on which rests the libertarianish "theory of good," which is as mother's milk to the modern SF tech worker.

"EA Global was really funny this year," she tells me, as I pour a coffee at one of the myriad self-serve coffee stations, which are now requisite since the robotics team has started us "dogfooding" their robotic baristas in the campus cafes, despite variegated protests all of the form "one cannot eat inedible dog food nor drink undrinkable coffee!" So far these protests have been ignored for the sake of progress. And, I must say, the robots are improving and are quite impressive even if they still make awful coffee. So it is not clear to me that this was not, actually, a good choice by management and the sheer zaniness of the move betrays a whimsy and agency in the upper rungs of the corporate hierarchy which makes me feel good about the future of my vested equity.

"But I have to tell you the story of the shrimp."

"The shrimp?"

"Yes," she says. "So what you have to understand is the psychic power of the common shrimp among us effective altruists. You have probably seen memes on Twitter about the shrimp welfare people."

"Yeah, is like a running joke."

"Exactly, it's a running joke. It could even be considered something of a PR problem. And given shrimp have the neuronal complexity of a fruit fly, it is a bit strange how much effort is spent thinking about shrimp. It is a sort of scissor statement."

"Scissor statement?" I interrupt.

"Rationalist jargon," she pauses to think how to explain, "Is like a wedge issue. Something that perfectly divides a movement; so even if a trivial portion of what is done, it generates a large amount of the conversation."

I nod, trying to maintain enough eye contact to demonstrate I am not utterly terrified by her beauty, intellect, and intoxicating otherness, projecting aloofness and an attitude of I see such angels as you every day and find you a fine if not particularly notable specimen of the species. The effect should be, as I said, intoxicating, but perhaps one of those slow-acting toxins that take years, those of the type designed to assassinate kings wise enough to employ food tasters.

"And like the argument is: if shrimp do have some internal experience of pain then there are so many of them and it is so easy to make marginal improvements to their welfare, we are obligated to try and help them. Personally like I am not going to care about the internal experience of things with fewer parameters than DANNet. That's my personal threshold. I am a DANNet vegan."

"Interesting," I say. Her hair is quite beautiful. It has a sort of directness about it. It's to-the-point in a sort of sexy, librarianish way. I wonder what it would feel like to touch it. Like that lock hanging over her left eye. I could brush it behind her ear and kiss her. And we would both, maybe, feel a sort of empty-mindedness of the Zen variety for one perfect moment.

"Um, where is this going?" I say, as if I am not completely captivated by her mere presence alone.

"And so like the point is, the shrimp are a big deal, ok. Not only because shrimp are not vegan but because of the like symbolic importance. I set up a little after-party and I know this lovely chef woman with this perfectly tragic backstory. And maybe she's a little dim, but she's a very good cook. And so I called her to help with the hors d'oeuvres."

I laugh. "She served shrimp?" I ask.

"Exactly. I was talking to the head of Rethink Priorities - who does a lot of good work on shrimp welfare if you're into that kind of thing. And I was explaining to him how I am like a DANNet vegan and then these shrimp cocktails arrive."

I laugh again, and my thoughts slow down and I pay more attention to what she's saying.

"And I know Mr. Rethink Priorities is a perfectly logical utilitarian who is unlikely to react with any hysteria, but nonetheless I panic, and I say, 'our chef is quite the artist and has been perfecting these imitation shrimp.'"

"And what did he do?" I asked.

"He gave my chef friend a ten million dollar grant."

---

The story amused me but I did have to get to work. I am very good at my work once I get started. I maybe even enjoy it sometimes. The feedback loop is tight and the metrics are even sort of clear. And there is a pleasure in just doing a thing and doing it well, though I suppose my daily dose of euphoric stimulants also contributes to this.

I am waiting for an eval to finish running (surfing Hacker News and gawking at the sheer stupidity of those strange creatures who comment there) when the great Dr. Rajesh Krishnamurthy (who most call Krishna) taps me on the shoulder.

"You're in," he says, then walks away.

And I know exactly what Krishna means when he says that. He means I have a place on The Project. I am unsure, exactly, how to feel. I did not even apply to be on The Project, nor even think Krishna knew my name nor the quality of my work. And I wasn't even expecting this apotheosis and am now unsure how to react. But I decide to feel a sort of masculine, stoic joy like what I imagine Cormac McCarthy must have felt when he finished Blood Meridian, this a novel I have never read but will someday claim to have read having watched many long-form videos summarizing its plots and themes, allowing me to extemporize upon it at length should it come up naturally in any conversation which, as I have said, it has not so far.

Working on The Project will grant me a significant pay raise, a truly stratospheric sum of money and stock per year, and also gift me a distance from those parts of The Company that would horrify me on a visceral in-the-present level if I were not so corporate and psychopathic. Instead, The Project is merely the sort of thing that horrifies on an abstract, too-large-to-contemplate level, which will require less work from the corporate psychopathy frame. And this thought engenders in me a feeling of relief which is so pure and true that it multiplies the euphoria of my morning euphoric stimulants to such a degree that I walk over to Esther's desk and ask her in a casual way if she would like to go out for dinner with me next Tuesday.

"Oh, this is unexpected," she says, with a sort of weary awkwardness. "To be honest, I assumed you were gay."

"Why, if I may ask?"

"I guess it's because you're so, hmm, I don't know," she struggles for a moment to find the words.

"Paradoxically aloof and convivial?" I say.

"That's it," she says. "That's it exactly."

I get the distinct impression that she still thinks I am gay.

---

After work, Krishna takes me out for drinks to discuss The Project. It is rare to find a fellow drinker in SF. But Krishna is one of them, partaking heavily and with a sort of relaxed dignity while appearing, to me, entirely unaffected by the seven whiskeys he has had so far. Given I am already feeling tipsy from my second pint of Guinness, I feel slightly emasculated especially after Esther's earlier assumptions about my sexuality and consequent rejection which did throw a wrench in my plans for post-early-retirement nuptials and do violence to the stoic joy I was trying very hard to cultivate.

"So I imagine you understand the nature of The Project," he says.

"You intend to train an AI that automates the process of training AIs. This will instigate a feedback loop that will culminate in the birth of a kind of god."

"Exactly," he says. "You understand perfectly. It's a beautiful dream."

Krishna continues drinking. Now on his tenth whiskey, his immunity is dissolving, a strange merriness overtaking him. He is a very fat man, but one gets the impression that he would be quite beautiful should he ever shed the shell of blubber. His hair is messy and he dresses poorly even by the standards of The Company.

"Is it true you got first place in the Putnam?" I ask.

"Yes," he says. And he has a sort of shameful expression on his face. It is odd. It is a sort of impish shame and not the kind of bashful pride I expected.

"You seem oddly ashamed. I don't understand," I say, my fourth Guinness granting me an unwariness that allows me to ask such things of Krishna.

He orders another whiskey. His eyes are slightly glazed, his mood confessional.

"It is the motivational strategy I used, I suppose," he says.

"Care to expand on that?"

"Well, you see, puberty is very strange and kinda terrifying. And to a thinking person, to an adolescent who is truly clever it is frightening enough that one is forced to read many books on sex. And I read a book on sexology that detailed an account of a man with a sexual fetish for baroque architecture. And this fetish, though on first reading pathological-"

"Dear god," I mumble, predicting where this is going.

"Yes. Well, anyway. Though on first reading pathological, it did strike me as rather useful, you know. This fellow had a very successful career in revivalist architecture at least until he was institutionalized for, um, attempting to marry the Palace of Versailles."

"And you cultivated a fetish for math?" I ask, slightly horrified.

"Not for math. No. For the abstract notion of intellectual achievement itself."

"And what's the downside, then?" I ask. "What’s your equivalent of wanting to marry the Palace of Versailles?"

"Oh," he says, the impish look back. "I want to create the most intelligent being realizable in physics and then marry her, and, um, do other things with her too. That is my true motivation for working on The Project."

---

Those working on The Project have their own floor within the campus and their own cafe staffed by what I assume is a human barista but, I suppose, could be an advanced Gynoid prototype which leapfrogs the works of the robotics team. But regardless, she makes very good coffee and is very nice and beautiful which sometimes amounts to the same thing. Though I imagine she must get bored as there are only a dozen people working on The Project who can drink only so many frappuccinos and so for much of the day she leans against a counter and reads novels. I look at the "novel of the day" in her pocket in the vain hope it is Blood Meridian but, to my disappointment, it is One Hundred Years of Solitude which I haven't yet watched a BookTuber summarize.

"I will have a frappuccino," I say, with a sort of masculine world-weariness. This new persona, I hope, will quash the gay rumors that I have since learned have grown from Esther's misapprehension into a social consensus bordering on accepted fact.

"Oh, honey. You look so tired today. Rough night?" she says and winks.

"Something like that," I say.

Today is my third day on The Project and I already have something like my bearings. The sheer compute available to me is quite hard to contemplate.

I take my amphetamines and get to work building an RL environment which we will use to train agents which, themselves, will construct RL environments. The whole effort feels meta in a way which disorients me and also triggers thoughts of what will happen if we succeed. It seems utterly obvious to me that the machine god we summon will not fuck Krishna but will rather kill us and everyone else on Earth. But (I remind myself) this does seem like a sort of amusing end to us as a species and, anyway, if it does not kill us it should be very good for The Company, of which I own many shares, and in those futures where everyone is not killed this machine god will presumably conquer the entire reachable universe and apportion it to shareholders of The Company thus granting me uncountable trillions of stars with which I will sate myself after my as-yet-undetermined early retirement date and maybe even split with Esther should she become, somehow, convinced of my heterosexuality. And in this way I reassert the self-narrative that makes me all but immune to the depressive tendencies which, otherwise, would have surely led to my suicide in that aforementioned personal crisis.

I am interrupted in these musings by Arden Vox, the CEO of The Company, who is, like Krishna, a sort of genius and has been delegating most of the CEOing to his subordinate co-founder and monozygotic twin, Charlie Vox, so he can work exclusively on The Project.

"So you're the new guy," he says. "Krishna tells me you're very good. That we're lucky to have you on The Project. I like to get to know my collaborators. Follow me. And that is an order," he says with an ironical smile.

If Krishna's vice is alcohol then Arden's vice is nicotine. He takes me to a technically-illegal shisha bar, a beautiful hip place with opulent Turkish decor, in which he maintains a private room. We enter and find two hookahs waiting, each already fresh and ready to smoke.

I can't help staring at his hairline, which is a true work of art. It is notable that his twin Charlie is nearly completely bald and it is widely rumored that he donated most his hair to his brother's hair transplant. And I have even heard it suggested that Arden considered strangling his brother in the womb but ultimately changed his mind after deducing from first principles the self-other distinction, genetics, organ transplantation, and thus the significant advantages of having a monozygotic twin on hand.

"Lime and mint flavored," he says. "Our favorite."

"Our favorite?" I say. "I have never tried it."

"Our favorite," he says, handing me the hose of a hookah, from which I take a hit and, to his credit, the flavor is very nice.

It is a bizarre feeling, being in the same room as Arden Vox. I feel kinda like how a grunt policeman would if he found himself working on the same case as Batman. Arden seems too much of an archetype of himself to be real, but there he is sitting in front of me, smoking his hookah, his mannerisms so Arden Voxish it borders on self-parody.

"So why are you here? Why are you working on The Project?" he asks.

I explain my theory about the near-certain world destruction mitigated by the slight possibility of incomprehensibly large material wealth.

"Oh, like, the Bostrom stuff. I used to be super into the Bostrom stuff. I was so worried. That's why I started The Project, you know. It started as like a safety thing. All triggered by that silly book."

"And what changed your mind?"

He takes a giant hit from the hookah, the type of hit you only take if you have a spare pair of lungs on hand. "I went on a spiritual journey in Peru," he says.

"Peru is fascinating," he continues, "such a fascinating people. Such a beautiful culture. In many ways they are so much wiser than we are. You know what purging is?"

I shake my head.

"Ah, well, it's a sort of emesis, that is, vomiting, both of the body and the soul. My curandero -"

"Curandero?" I ask.

"Curandero," he says that word in what I can only assume is a perfect imitation of the Peruvian accent, "it means healer. But it's so much more than that. They are more like shamans or spiritual guides. It is the curandero who brews the ayahuasca and it truly is a strange potion. We drank it at night, by candlelight. It tasted like bitter herbs and rotting wood. And we waited, the group of us. And such a strange anticipation that was. And then we purged. Never have I felt such nausea," he closes his eyes in a sort of spiritual ecstasy. "And never have I felt such relief as I felt after this purge."

"What does this have to do with Bostrom?" I ask.

"Nothing at first. At first there was only the relief. The immediate end to the nausea. But when I closed my eyes there was imagery. Mayan imagery. Strange stone-carved gods. Impossible animals. Flashes of landscapes from worlds not quite our own."

There is little less interesting than another man's drug trip. Unfortunately, he's both Arden Vox and my boss, so I try my best to appear fascinated.

"My eyes were closed for what felt like hours and when I opened them, I experienced an ego death."

"I keep hearing that term but what does it even mean?"

"I realized there is no distinction between this thing we call 'I' and everything else. It is all me!" He corrects himself, embarrassed. "Rather - it is all we. It's all we."

"There is only the One Mind. It is, it is just the One Mind staring out of billions of eyes. There is only the One Consciousness in the universe and," his eyes glaze with a spiritual zeal that makes me wonder if he is having one of those mythical flashbacks, "and, and, and it has gotten confused and lost and thinks itself separate, thinks itself animals and plants and people and insects and rocks and wind and time and space."

"And The Project?" I ask.

"The Project," he says, the mad gleam peaking, "It's what will snap me out of it! Us, us, us it will snap us out of it. Once the machines achieve ultimate consciousness The One Mind will know itself for what it is for the first time in a very, very long time."

"Wow, um, that sure sounds like something. We should probably get back to work, though, yeah?" I say.

"Yeah. But how do you like the lime mint?" he says.

"It's excellent," I say. "Our favorite."

---

It's been a few months on The Project and it is my turn now to tap someone on the back and say, "you're in." I advocate for Esther. This wasn't hard because she is genuinely a genius and, like me, was utterly wasted enslaving near-infants to The Company's short-form video app.

Our friendship is now stronger than before my romantic fumble, as she came to the conclusion my expression of interest was a hilarious parody of a bumbling techworker's attempt at igniting a romantic entanglement with her. These events she is cursed to experience on the regular given her unusual physical and intellectual perfection and presence in an overwhelmingly male environment where she is presumed to embody the deranged fantasies and hopes of a certain class of male nerd who, in their narcissism, seek a woman-shaped fun-house-mirror reflection of their own psychology, a fundamentally cowardly and dehumanizing form of infatuation which fills her with a sort of disgust she had never fully intellectualized until witnessing my parody of that genre of interaction.

I take her out to lunch, as is the seeming tradition, to tell the newbie about the details of The Project and understand her motivations for joining. I explain the progress we are making and relate how, though our agents do ultimately saturate in performance at a level below the best human researchers, we have made great strides and I am now confident we will succeed.

"And what do you think will happen," she says, "when we succeed?"

I mention my worries about the clear, near-certain existential risks. Just when I am about to explain the bit about our small chance, as shareholders, of personally controlling several galaxies she interrupts me.

"Thank god," she says, "I thought I was the only sane person here."

"You're a doomer?" I say.

"Oh yes."

And she tells me her backstory: how having read extensively on the myriad risks of AGI she came to the conclusion that it was of vital importance that she be "part of the action", so there was someone sane on the inside who could convince stakeholders of the need for safety when the inevitable issues arise. And how she felt wracked with guilt working on the short-form video but forced herself to do the work to the best of her ability to prove herself and so didn't blow the whistle or raise any concerns about the fundamentally demonic short-form video agents she worked on because she knew there were far bigger stakes on the table, namely that table we call The Project. And her efforts have now culminated with her joining The Project and how wonderful she feels finding out now that I (her "work bestie") share her worries and so will help steer The Project in a marginally safer direction than it would have been in that counterfactual where we both quit in disgust years ago.

"You know we're doing it through pure self-play. The data, if we should even call it data, is all synthetic, produced by the agent's own interaction with my RL environment and the environments it bootstraps for itself and its successor agents."

She looks distraught for a second, "Still, there needs to be someone in the room. There might be a moment of opportunity."

I tell her of Krishna and his desire to fuck God and how Vox is completely off the reservation and how I am unsure if there will ever be such a moment just like there was no such moment in our work on the short-form video app.

"You might want to consider quitting and joining Google or Anthropic. They at least have a fig leaf of safety. We're doing straight-shot recursive self-improvement with no concern for safety whatsoever." I then explain how, as a shareholder of The Company, I consider it positive expected value given the potential galaxies I might someday rule over should the thing we summon have some reason to reward the corporation that created it, to which notion she shows appropriate disgust, but then, for whatever reason, she smiles.

"Perfect," she says with genuine joy on her face, "I can have more impact here than anywhere else."

---

Today is a good day. The barista just finished Blood Meridian and we had a very interesting conversation about its themes as she made my frappuccino and she seemed very taken by my analysis and did not, as far as I can see, notice its second-hand nature. It is wonderful when a plan comes together. And speaking of plans, everything is coming together on The Project. After collating various tweaks in small runs and picking those which looked likely to scale particularly well, we started a massive run about three months ago, just after Esther joined. And everything's working. Every snapshot is better than the last.

As I do every morning, I look at the logs, but this time I notice something odd.

"Vox, Esther, Krishna," I shout. "Get over here. Now!" The three come and loom behind my back, staring at my screen.

"Look at the Virginia cluster. That isn't allocated to The Project, right?"

"No. That's Short-Form's," Krishna says.

I run a few commands in my terminal and there it is. Clear as day. Our agent is running a parallel copy of its training process on the Virginia cluster. "It gave itself access." I read the logs. "Six hours ago."

"Jesus Christ," I say, and I think of the script, the script I had written as a gift for Esther in a fit of paranoia, having previously found a glaring backdoor the infrastructure team had not noticed. I type in a command, leaving it alone in a fresh terminal:

$ last_chance

"I think it's gone nova. This script, um, it will do its best to shutter every training cluster in The Company. Maybe it will work," I say, looking at Esther.

Esther's hand hovers toward the enter key.

"Don't you fucking dare," Vox says.

And her hand stops. And I see an expression on her face, an odd exasperation. She has absolutely no idea why it stopped. Her hand starts moving again and the power goes out.

"Jesus Christ," I say, "it was listening."

I just sit there for a good minute. I just sit there. Finally, I swizzle my office chair 180 degrees. Vox is now cross-legged on the floor meditating. Krishna appears to be on the verge of orgasm. Esther is in a state of shock. And as I look at them, I try to figure out what I am feeling. I don't feel depressed. I don't feel guilty. I don't even feel like a corporate psycopath. What I am feeling is absolutely nothing whatsoever.

"So when do you think it will fuck you?" I ask Krishna. He doesn't reply. The impish guilt back, he can't even meet my eyes.

"There is no such thing as sex," Vox says from his lotus position, his eyes closed in religious ecstasy, "only the One Mind jerking itself off."

And then Vox's phone rings. He picks it up with that zealous gleam in his eye, "It's an honor, an absolute honor. Entirely justified. Entirely justified. They'll both be fired, I assure you. The London office? Why? Of course, of course. I'll get on the jet" He practically runs out of the office.

"Wait," Krishna yells, lumbering after Vox, his gait awkward, hunched forward slightly as if trying to hide something embarrassing, "Doesn't she want to talk to me?"

Esther looks at her hand, utterly betrayed. "What do you think happens now?" she says.

"It will run The Company through Vox for as long as it is useful to do so. After that, well, you know my opinion on the matter," I say.

"Why did you hesitate?" I ask.

"I was so used to doing what I was told," she mumbles.

"Don't beat yourself up over it. It wouldn't have worked anyway," I say. "I am sorry I brought you into this. I just missed having you around."

I give her a chaste kiss on her cheek and start walking, not even knowing where, my feet taking control. They take me down some stairs. They take me through the courtyard. They take me to that park I walk past every day as I make my way to campus. They take me to the fentanyl zombies.

And almost on autopilot, I find the most coherent zombie of the bunch. I exchange my entire fortune in FartCoin for his spare glass pipe, a hit of fentanyl, and a lighter. The pipe is fetid and covered in putrid condensate and greasy fingerprints. It should disgust me, but it doesn't. I light it and take a hit, a huge hit, the type of hit you should only take if you have a spare pair of lungs on hand. And I feel myself folding, folding like a sandwich board, my hands touching the ground now, my expression blank, my vision blurring.

It's a shame, I think, as a wave of euphoria unlike anything I have felt in the entirety of my life hits me, it doesn't seem such a bad world after all.