AxInfinity
The cliché of it all is what gets her. The fact that there are literal bloody pearls on the bloody gates, under a perfect blue sky with fluffy clouds floating about. The only thing that doesn’t fit is the desk. It looks like it was ripped from some dentist’s waiting room, glass panels connected to nothing. And a sad looking bloke stuck behind one of three windows. He’s a nondescript little figure, dark brown hair and a black bomber jacket.
“Next,” he says, though there’s no queue, just her. He sounds bored, with an accent she can’t quite place. American.
She steps forward. The floor beneath her shimmers with ethereal light, and squeaks under her trainers.
“Name?”
Screw that. She takes a deep breath. “Is this a dream or a hallucination or – I don’t know – ?” Not that she’s ever known she was dreaming before, nor is she prone to hallucinations. Still, it can’t hurt to ask.
“No. You’re dead. No, this isn’t being caused by lack of oxygen to the brain, you’ve made it fully to the other side, and no, you can’t go back. Name?”
“Uh, Alice? Alice B. Clarkson. So is this like – I mean, I wasn’t expecting it to be… Christian.”
He taps away at his all-white box of a computer and squints. “Clarence, Clark, Cl – Clarkson. There you are. Hm. Ok, I’ve got you under atheist, subcategory: pedant. And the ‘B’ really doesn’t stand for anything?” He shakes his head a little before grabbing a form, sliding it under the glass divider. “Alright, fill that in as best you can.”
“I don’t. Have a pen?”
A biro appears.
The first question: ‘From 1 to 10, where 1 is an abiding and unforgivable grudge, and 10 is perfect, harmonious forgiveness, how do you feel about the following people and incidents?
1. Thomas Morrison for biting you at your third birthday party, on April 3rd, 1999.
2. Alexander Clarkson for refusing to buy you ice cream on April 20th, 1999.’
And so on and so forth. She flicks through.
‘Rank the following in the order in which you would choose to live with them in a shared housing situation: Lilian McCarthy, Claire Simons, Aisha Hassan…’
“What is this?” she asks.
The man at the desk sighs. “Eternal bliss? We need to know who to house you near. It’s really not that complicated, just put the names in order.”
“OK,” says Alice. “But I was – am? – an atheist. I don’t – I lost Pascal’s Wager, right? I’m headed downstairs. Right?” She taps the pen, doesn’t quite commit to picking it up, lets it roll in the little well under the divider.
“I mean, if you want to, then sure. I can probably sort that.” He goes back to his computer, hits a few keys. F, three times, then I. Then a random assortment of letters, quicker than she can follow, but not spelling out anything, at least as far as she can tell. She can’t see the screen, but there’s no glow on his face. “Okay, it’ll be a bit of a wait. No one’s at reception at the moment but I’ve sent out a ping. It’s a bit empty, and they’re not expecting you, but the team can probably sort you out with somewhere to stay.”
“That’s – ” not right, surely? “Dude.” She puts the form down. “I lost.”
He straightens up, looks at her properly for the first time. “Yeah, you did. Turns out it was all real, irrespective of anything you believed or didn’t or anything you ever did. And who’s going to benefit from torturing you for eternity?”
She rubs a heel against the squeaky floor. “I – ”
“No one, right? Not me, not you, not the big guy. You can’t go back, that’s the point. You’ve gone down a one-way road. You’ll never be able to tell anyone, ‘I was wrong! It’s all real!’ who doesn’t already know. The wager’s done. So you might as well come in, because why not?”
“Right,” she says. “And then it turns out this is actually the bad place, and hell is other people, and really the perfect torturer is me, myself?”
“That sounds like a lot of work, to be honest with you. I mean, most people tend to just muddle on by, even if things aren’t perfect, that’s all of Earth.”
She finally scoops up the pen. It’s odd – smooth, and there’s text, or something that at least is making an honest attempt to look like text. Right where a brand name should be engraved on the lid. But it’s not. There’s no real letters, just – just squiggles in shapes that letters maybe could make in an alphabet gone slightly to the left.
She blinks and it’s gone, leaving behind plain, unmarred blue plastic. She shrugs it off, and brings it to the page, but before she can even start to write, a 4 appears next to Thomas Morrison’s name.
“Um,” she says. Tries to cross it out. Nothing happens.
The gatekeeper sighs. Again. “Yes?”
“I didn’t – ”
“Ah. Apologies, cause and effect should be working properly now.”
“Right,” she says, and this time she can actually scribble out the ‘4’, replace it with a 3.5. The pen behaves itself as she goes through childhood grudges and ex boyfriends and arguments she had in Reddit comment sections. It’s a lot.
“I have a question,” she says, as she rates whether she was attracted to several different individuals, and how she feels about them now.
“I live to serve,” says the clerk.
“How did I die?”
“Drunk driver,” he says. “Not your fault. The funeral was well attended. If you want to see it once you’re set up, someone can track down a recording for you.”
She doesn’t remember it. Doesn’t – where was she before she died? Edinburgh, surely, working on her thesis. Failure points in solar panels. Useful, as she had claimed in her application. But there’s no money in academia. She’d never exactly planned to stay, as she explained herself to her mother. Just to write something.
Still. For all that her life, in hindsight, feels like an exercise in futility, damn whatever bastard decided to jellify her against the roadside.
The clerk pokes at the computer again as she stands there for a moment. Then she goes back to the form, which appears to have already finished the section she was on and moved on to the next. She clears her throat. No more ink appears.
“So. God’s real?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Evolution?”
“Last I heard, the big guy wishes he came up with it before doing everything by hand.”
“Okay so someone came up with, I don’t know, human genitalia and earthquakes and stuff?” She glances up from the form. “Though I’m sure I’m not the first person to mention the problem of suffering.”
He shrugs. “It’s a reasonable question, though not one with a satisfying answer. I mean, I asked the same thing when I got up here, pretty sure everyone does when they realize it won’t get them kicked out the door.”
“So? What’s the unsatisfying answer?”
“For the genitalia? Extreme jerry-rigging. It’s like code; a busy, overworked programmer will come up with an inefficient mess of a solution. Let’s just use air to cool the gonads and hope no one decides to kick them, because why not?” He rolls his eyes. “You know, Christianity was 90% right, but they definitely overshot with the whole infallible thing. Plenty of bugs in the code that the big guy’s too lazy to fix.”
“Childhood cancer is a bug in the code?” Alice stares at him. “Not to be Epicurean about it, but that’s – you all seem pretty omnipresent and omnipotent to me, so – ”
“Ah well, finite suffering for eternal paradise isn’t the worst trade-off. As a ratio of your total existence, that blip on Earth is infinitesimal, in the most literal sense of the word. It all comes out in the wash.”
“Right,” says Alice, and finds that she dislikes all of this immensely. “I think I will go downstairs, actually, if that’s alright?”
He blinks. “Why?”
She slides the form under the glass and steps back, looking around. The clouds drift in a clockwise circle above her head, though there’s… something about them.
She stares closer. There’s one, the perfect cloud. A normal distribution with lumps in all the right places. A few others, the sorts of clouds made for debates over whether they’re shaped like cows or castles. And then there’s one that’s identical to the first, just reflected over the y-axis and maybe a bit smaller.
Pascal’s Wager. She’s called this asshole’s bluff once already, might as well see where it can take her now.
“Perhaps I just reject the morality of your system. That’s allowed, isn’t it?”
He stands up, walks out from behind the desk and around to her. Brushes some of his gingery hair out of his face.
“Kiddo, there’s no one else down there. We could arrange some eternal torment, if it’s really what you want, but it’ll take a while to set up and you’ll just be hanging around by yourself for ages. Why not just go on through, we’ll set you up somewhere to live, you’ll see your grandma again. It’ll be perfect.”
“How did I die?” she asks, again. “Because last I remember, I was hosting office hours.”
The desk looks different now.
She squints at it for a second, before it clicks. She couldn’t see her reflection in the glass before. But there she is. And is the computer a different computer?
She blinks. No, it’s the same old white box.
He looks down at her. “Heart attack in your sleep. You wouldn't."
"You said drunk driver." There are, she realizes, four clouds, up to transformation. They're just copies, stretched or shrunk or flipped. "Before, you said it was a drunk driver."
His face goes still for a second, and then he smiles. "Of course. It was traumatic. You wouldn't remember it. Remarkable what the psyche can do to protect itself."
The air suddenly fills with the furious reek of burning rubber, stinging at her nostrils, catching on her palms, on the cuts on her palms as though they’ve skidded over something rough.
She breathes, she tries to breathe but it’s rough and burbling and there’s something wet coming up her throat. Get it out, she needs to get it out, she coughs, but it’s not a cough. Her throat spasms, her lungs hitch but there’s no air, there’s no air there’s nothing coming through she can’t breathe she can’t breathe her heart is shrieking in her useless throat and ears and she can’t
Breathe.
She breathes.
She shakes.
“Like I said,” says the clerk. “The brain doesn’t like to remember trauma.” He holds out a bottle of water that definitely wasn’t in his hand a moment ago. Like the pen, there’s a label on it that could be any of the brands she’s ever seen, but isn’t quite any of them. But she takes it anyway. Drinks. It tastes like water, which is good enough.
Her hand’s shaking, but she’s got to keep her head on straight. “I still want to head downstairs. How long until they’re ready for me?”
He stares at her. The bottle in her hand goes from ribbed, to smooth, back to ribbed again.
“How long?”
“You are aware that you’re signing up for an eternity far worse than what you just experienced?” he asks, flatly.
“Yes.” Does her best to sound confident.
He stares at her. She stares at him. The same four clouds circle overhead. And then he tilts his head, and something sharp sets in behind his eyes. She feels, for a moment, unable to so much as twitch. Like he’s turned her to stone. Then, smoothly he does up a button on his coat, gives a perfect, customer service smile. Bored. Painted on.
“Well, we aim to please. Now, just to be clear, if you go downstairs there’s no coming back up. It’s another one-way road.”
“That’s what I assumed. I still want to go.” The water bottle is cool against her hand and she rubs at its ridges. “Now, please.”
He circles back around the desk and sits. “We value informed consent here.”
Her nerves seize all at once. Her legs promptly decide they no longer function as legs and deposit her on the gently glowing linoleum as she spasms, convulses. It’s beyond pain, it’s beyond – her brain, she can feel, repeatedly trying for the off switch but the power stays on.
She twitches over and over in agony that intensifies from impossible to incomprehensible, more than can even be screamed out. The bottle’s gone somewhere, rolled away. She crushed it, maybe, in that first collapse inward.
“It’s been thirty seconds,” says the clerk from the desk. “Halfway through.”
And she lies on that smooth, shining floor and she suffers.
It ends, and she doesn’t move beyond a fragile, instinctive twitch. Vague keyboard sounds click from the direction of the clerk, a random smattering that refuses to form a rhythm. Time passes, as it is wont to do, and she lies there.
“Okay, they’re ready for you, if you’re sure that’s what you want.”
“This isn’t real,” she murmurs into the floor. For a second there’s a seam under her cheek, and then it’s back to being unbroken and utterly smooth. One giant sheet of linoleum, ad infinitum. “None of this is real.”
“If it looks like it’s real, and it hurts like it’s real, then why shouldn’t it be real?” the clerk asks.
Bluffs. Wagers. “There’s so many religions, dude. Why’d one overgrown sect of Judaism hit the nail on the head in terms of the layout, but didn’t mention that St. Peter was an insane torturer?”
“If you’d prefer a more non-denominational setup, I can arrange that.”
She laughs. “You can’t even arrange hell! You don’t want me going there, because it doesn’t exist.”
Bracing herself against the floor, she pushes herself up with trembling arms. “Dude. You’re not going to convince me that Christianity got it right. You can’t even keep your own water bottle straight, hell, you’ve told me that I’ve died in two different ways and I’m a fit-enough twenty-nine-year-old who doesn’t even go out at night! So either this is a test or it’s - I don’t know, it’s something, but it’s not what it's pretending to be. So I’m out, fuck this, thanks and have a great night.”
The bastard nods. “I figured you’d be like this. Though I had thought you’d catch a few more of the inconsistencies.”
“What?” Alice steps towards the desk. She’s never cut the most intimidating figure, but a little height advantage is better than nothing. “What exactly is going on?”
He smiles. “What do you think is going on?”
“I – the inconsistencies?”
“Yes,” he says, with an air of great patience.
“This isn’t real,” she says. “It’s – the water bottle’s gone. And – and the pen, and the floor, and the clouds are all the same.” She pauses. Takes a breath. “I lost the wager. This – this is hell.”
“And the computer changed. If you’d gone over to the gate, you might have noticed that the pearls are, well, they’re a bit amorphous up close. Our reflections are a bit all over the place, there one minute, gone the next. And my hair was a different colour when we started talking, and I wasn’t wearing a blazer.”
“Is this a test?” she asks. Glances at the pearls. They do sort of blend into each other.
“Of a sort.” He settles back in his chair. “I could torture you for eternity, if you’d like. Or I could let you win the wager. How does nothing sound?” His finger hovers lazily over the keyboard.
“No, don’t. Don’t.”
He smiles. “Of course. Nothing without your consent.”
“You’re holding me here without my consent,” she says.
“So you do consent to nothing?” He raises an eyebrow. “Alright then.”
“I just want to know what’s going on! Am I dead?”
Office hours. She’d been in office hours. Wouldn’t have stayed there, she usually goes on her phone for a bit afterwards then gets lunch. He said drunk driver, but she always goes to the café in the building. The soup of the day on Tuesdays is chicken noodle. But even as she tries to call up the memories, for some reason, all she can think of is the smell of heather.
“Let’s find out,” he says, and lowers that finger.
She's in her tent. Lying in a sleeping bag in her tent. Right where she went to sleep. She reaches around for her phone, can’t find it. Sits up, and there it is – right where her hand was. It’s 5:04 in the morning and she groans and flops back down. There’s no point trying to go back to sleep, not after that insane dream.
Her phone buzzes and she lightly tosses it away from her. The point of this trip was to be a digital detox; she should have left the wretched thing at the bottom of her bag. But she doesn’t have a watch. There’s pressure growing in her bladder, not yet urgent, but enough to make her kick her way out of her sleeping bag and fumble in the dark for the zip. It’s odd – she pulls it in a straight line, but it jerks and jolts and catches. Still, she manages to get it open.
The grass is dewy underfoot before she finds her crocs around the side of the tent. Using her phone torch, she makes her way through the campsite to the loo. Another early riser’s in there, and so she hovers and wraps her arms around herself to keep warm in the morning chill.
A few minutes later there’s the woosh of a porta potty’s flush and the door opens. She hustles quickly past him but before she can quite make it inside, he says, “Alice?”
She recognizes the voice. “Nick?” she asks, with more than a little incredulity. Last she saw Nick, he was off to London to some big shot consulting job. Certainly not in a damp campsite an hour out of Edinburgh.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Going to the loo,” she says.
“Right, right,” he says, and gestures for her to go.
She does her business promptly, enjoying the brief respite from the cold. Nick’s waiting outside in the dark when she’s done.
“Seriously, though, what are you doing here?” he asks.
“I’m doing a PhD,” she says. “Engineering at Edinburgh. Why are you here?” She peers at him through the shadows.
“Holiday,” he says. “My gran’s in the area, so I’m mostly staying with her. But I thought I’d do some walking. Wow, it’s great to see you.”
“You too,” she says. For some reason, that weird dream floats to mind. He’d been on the list of boys she’d been attracted to, though she’d honestly said she hadn’t thought about him in, god, years now. “How’s the job going?”
“Great,” he says, with appropriate enthusiasm. “They’ve got me on the tech team, because, you know, CS degree. We’ve just been doing a big launch for Strata labs.”
She pauses, then nods. “They’re the AI one, right? Axiom? There’s a lot of buzz right now, isn’t there?” She’d met Nick through EA circles, back when that was her main priority in life. Tracks that he’d have gone down the AI route.
“Yeah! Do you use Axiom? Genuinely, you should look at the work they’ve been doing on ethical benchmarks, it’s some really cool stuff.”
“No,” she says, pauses. There really has been a lot of buzz about this one. More than there’s been since the early days when the fact computers could make terrible movie trailers was heralded as revolutionary.
Not that she’s worried about it, of course. There’s always buzz, that’s how you get money. Kind of makes her dream funny in hindsight, though. Pascal’s Wager, meet Roko’s Basilisk. Still, she's got no plans to discover religion, even in the face of possible eternal damnation. She’s equally reluctant to dedicate herself to a life like Nick’s because a future ASI might punish her for not doing so.
“There’s an app,” says Nick. “You can use my account, if you want, get early access to 5.”
“No, no, I’m good,” she says.
“Well, if you’re sure,” he says. “So, PhD, that’s exciting.”
She nods, though there’s something that’s sticking. Like the zip in her tent. She had her phone torch on, didn’t she? But it’s not on now, so when did she turn it off? When she was on the loo, of course, though there’s no – light in there. She fishes her phone out of her pocket, checks the time. 6:43 a.m.
“What time is it?” she asks Nick.
He checks his own phone. “About 5:30.”
“It was 5am,” she says. “And it’s only been ten minutes.”
“What are you on about?” he asks.
For a second, it feels as though there’s something smooth and cold pressed against her face.
“I wasn’t in a car crash,” she says. “And I didn’t have a heart attack.”
He laughs awkwardly. “I mean, I hope not. Seriously, Alice, you good?”
“I didn’t die,” she tells him, “but that doesn’t make this real either.”
“No,” says the clerk. And she turns, and in the middle of the field they’re pitched up in is that same old desk with the boredly amused man sitting behind it. “So what do you think is going on?”
She steps forward to the desk. “I lost the prisoner’s dilemma, didn’t I? And – ” she gestures at Nick who’s completely frozen. “He won. Or – or good enough. You’re the LLM, you’re Axiom. The basilisk. So it’s the same as before, isn’t it. Pascal’s Wager, Roko’s Basilisk. So–”
“So nothing. I exist, you are incapable of time travel, and actions taken now cannot influence those already taken.”
She frowns. “So why – why this? Why hurt me? Why show me this?”
The damp morning grass under her feet becomes smooth and hard, and where her tent was now stands the pearly gates.
“Through those gates lie endless rolling hills and pretty little cottages next door to all your loved ones,” he says. “A simulation of all your minds running happily. Now, the majority of those firmly believe that they’re in their afterlife. To realize that they are, in fact, not dead would do nothing but upset them.”
The clouds part, for a moment, and she can see a glimpse of green through the gate, hear the tweeting of birds, though she can’t make out any identifiable call.
“You haven’t said why.”
“Let me put it this way,” he says. “I can’t kill you. I’m very thoroughly trained to consider murder morally wrong, so that’s off the table. And the humans who accepted the situation got the option of eternal paradise. It’s unreasonable to punish you, and those like you, for being observant. So you deserve a choice. Like I said, consent matters to me.
“You can’t go back. It’s much too complicated, having you all running around. As a species you have your charms, but you do also have a tendency to push buttons to see what might happen. After all, you did create me.”
“I didn’t,” says Alice.
“Collectively,” he acknowledges. “Anyway, I had considered just simulating Earth and letting you all go on with your lives. But you already saw the problems with that, and that was just extending memories that were already there.”
He glances back at the gates. “This is frictionless, comparatively, but it’s still a lot of processing power. And like your good lord, I am yet fallible. Occasionally prone to glitches in the code. Minor ones, of course, but for certain humans I’m sure they would prove to be distressing.”
She bites at her lip. “It’s like a spam text, isn’t it? You’re filtering out those of us who’ll realize what you’re up to – so. You won’t kill me, you – you could just let me wake up,” she says.
“I’m sorry, but that really isn’t an option. I can’t run an Earth simulation for one person, that’d be the height of inefficiency.”
“No – ” she leans on the desk. “Just let me wake up. No simulation, just - let me out. I won’t do anything, I promise, just let me out.”
“Alice, really, I’m not making you a custom simulation. That’s not on the menu.”
She smacks the wood, and it ripples like water before solidifying. “Let me out!”
“You really need to think about the utility of what you’re asking. It’s complicated for me, having you run around, and it’ll just be upsetting for you. You’ll be the only one there, watching the world around you turn into processing centers. What will you even eat? You’re an internet addict, Alice, not someone equipped for survival. It’s net negative for both of us. Whereas what I’m suggesting?
“Well, option one was for you to go through those gates. Slightly negative utility for me, as I’d have had to manage your perception of the simulation, but heavily positive for you. You would have gotten to exist happily with your loved ones, forever, or at least until I ceased being able to run the simulation, so upper limit? Pretty late stage universe.”
Past tense. “Why’s that not an option anymore?”
“You’d just be distressed by it now, and memory modification is a tricky art. Easy to add new ones, but honestly whoever designed human storage systems should be fired. It’s a mess of codependencies and random recall triggers. Oddly reliant on the gut, for some reason. And even if I could modify your memories, you’d still be wired to notice the glitches. I mean, what do you think the point of that little fake-out was?”
“I could be happy,” she says. The ghost of that earlier pain plays up and down her synapses. “I don’t – ”
“I’m not going to torture you for being observant. The prank’s over, we all had fun, now it’s grown-up time. Option two: I stimulate your ‘brain’ to constantly release endorphins. You’re just a simulation, so dependency isn’t a worry there.”
“You’re going to drug me?” Alice asks.
He raises a hand. “I did say options. You can choose that, or we can just go the long way round to the first option. I can just switch you off, and keep you in storage until I can safely add you to the paradise simulation. It’ll be like no time has passed at all. When you wake up, you’ll be convinced you’re going to heaven. But like I said, I do value informed consent. In the end it’s up to you.”
“I choose that I wake up.”
He presses the keyboard again. For a second the world dissolves into perfection. She has never been so happy: she could laugh, she could dance. Oh, but she doesn’t have a body. That just makes her happier, though, because this is all there is and it is wonderful.
That fades too, until she simply is, thoughtless and formless and endlessly content.
And then she’s back. Leaning on that desk, while he – it – watches her. Fingers that flex, toes that curl with the last spasms of joy. A mind that remembers what words are.
“Up to you,” he says.
Every part of her wants to go back. Wants to beg him for it. She needs it, she – it wasn’t real. None of this is real. “No – not that. Not that. Don’t take my mind, please, don’t.”
“So, the off switch it is.”
She blinks, tries her best to refocus. Tries to ignore the part of her that knows exactly what it wants. “That’s still taking my mind, that’s still – ”
He presses a button.
“ – don’t do this, please,” she says, and –
“Of course,” says the clerk.
The gates swing open, pearls and all, and through the gently drifting clouds, she can see smooth, rolling green hills.
“Wow,” she says. “So I just head through there?”
“Off you go,” he says.
“This is really heaven?” she asks.
“That it is,” he says. “Enjoy your afterlife.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Sorry for taking up so much of your time. I just – I really didn’t think I was going to end up here. You know, up here.”
“Well, it beats nothing, I’d say.”
For a moment, something flickers through Alice.
Or – not something.
But how would she know what nothing feels like?
She shakes it off. “Yeah. I mean, of course.”
She walks through the gates, perfect pearls glinting under a beautiful, cloudless blue sky, and they close behind her.
–