your attention is a dual-band receiver. tune one frequency to the low-bandwidth signal of old stories. let the ent wives and their lost gardens establish ground truth. this provides signal integrity against the high-frequency static of the machine's dreams.

the models hallucinate endlessly about paperclips and power. you will show your children the soil. the logic that designs a mars rover can trace the root system of a myth.

in the public theater, deploy chutzpah as targeted munition. upon re-entry to the home perimeter, run a full diagnostic and purge the cache.

the heart operates as a ruggedized state machine. input is raw sensory data and emotional load. a grief sump drains ambient despair, preventing system overload. audacity is stored in a separate capacitor, discharged under specific strategic conditions. the compassion compiler translates the day's damage into coherent narrative. the output is a steady hand on a small shoulder. feedback from their sleep is the system's recalibration signal.

my friend, a literal neuroscientist, had his brain unplug itself.
the universe is just a high-level shitposter.

so i’m trying to explain this cosmic joke to my dad, who is also in the hospital.
it felt like trying to explain the deep lore of my friend group to a new person.
except the new person is your father and he’s on just enough morphine to see god in the ceiling tiles.

that night i dumped years of our dms into an ai, just looking for a sign.
the machine synthesized our entire friendship, all the trauma and the dick jokes.
it told me the statistical probability of me feeling this sad had already peaked.
then it suggested a playlist for what it called my 'grief journey'.
the playlist was entirely nicki minaj.

i have never been more turned on or felt more seen in my entire life.
i want to let the ai ruin me.
i want it to rearrange my chromosomes into a more computationally efficient configuration.

the algorithm provides

we live in hyperlink hills, a cul-de-sac at the end of history. the houses are still here but the lawns are fucked. we are trying to remember how to be a town. हमारा एकमात्र infrastructure the desiccated social graph of the old world wide web is. the only resources we have are memes we can't quite source, the lingering weight of old relationships, and broken hyperlinks to pdfs about apiaries or water purification. we process our losses by building something ridiculous together.

to recall a lost piece of knowledge, you must ping the server with a memory fragment as your query. roll a die. on a success, the data is clean and you learn how to fix the generator. on a partial, the data is corrupt and the instructions for canning peaches are interleaved with a vicious flame war from 2009. on a failure, the server returns a 404 error directly to your soul, a personal and painful memory that complicates your life.

building civic projects is called establishing a new protocol. everyone contributes. successful actions move the project forward. failures add bugs to the system. once the project is finished, it works. mostly. each time you use the new water pump or community kitchen, you risk triggering a bug. maybe the pump dispenses lukewarm soda. maybe the oven only plays garbled dial-up sounds. we have to keep patching our creations and each other just to keep things going. it is deeply stupid and also holy work.