We’re on this ride whether we chose it or not.
Voiceover:
I.
You’re sitting at home before work eating cereal. Sunlight filters through the blinds. A fly buzzes around. You’re in a hurry, so you don’t reach for the swatter. You’ll kill it later. You just want to finish breakfast and go to talk to an LLM all day and pretend you’re a subject matter expert on the latest tech—using AI, to build AI, to train AI that trains AI.
You’re watching your phone, BREAKING news is playing.
On your screen, the headline:
“CATASTROPHE STRIKES SUMMER FAMILY FUN”
You lean in close as milk dribbles out over the table. The view pans up and pushes in on dozens of people of all ages sliding joyfully down a glass footbridge towards the camera. The faces of mothers holding babies, the elderly, teens, kids, and men turn to horror as they realize the footbridge ends right in front of them.
The impossible view of what had to be a news cameraperson suspended in the air somehow now gets wider, and suddenly you’re there among the people, past the point of scrambling back up.
It’s a fall no one saw coming, not even you. You’re on your stomach, so you turn around on your back to steel yourself.
The ocean’s below, rising to meet you as vertigo pushes your stomach up into your throat. The drop takes so long. On the way down, hundreds of people are in the water, some panicking, some treading water, parents forced to choose who to save.
Some of the kids, and elderly, will die. You’re miles from land, but the other side of the bridge is near, too high to hope to reach. The two sides haven’t been joined yet.
Who the hell planned this?
II.
You’re in a dark, dusty apartment, pastel wallpaper and cheap 70s decor surround you. You’re watching a small, CRT TV with a single dial, in vivid color. Whatever you were watching turns to BREAKING news.
The headline:
“RIVER WATER DISASTER UNFOLDS”
The fuzzy screen shows a lazy brook, deep and wide enough for 2-3 people to float down it abreast. You’re watching a recording from someone’s phone. The brook cuts through a green savanna, and it’s full of people, all ages, smiling and enjoying floating and moving gently on their tubes.
The anchorwoman explains that datacenter construction far upstream has emptied a huge underground aquifer into the brook, turning it into a “conveyor belt of death.”
Look closer.
The screen expands and fills your vision, and you’re not in the drab apartment but on an inner tube now reclining atop it in swim-trunks at high noon under a cloudless sky, feet facing downstream.
Without warning the lazy brook speeds up drastically, the water surface is calm, but it’s zooming, frictionless.
A change in altitude is coming. A drop that the softer speed would landed you onto a wet, exhilarating slide down a slippery, grassy slope—the whole point of this activity.
You hear the screams in front. The speed you’ve acquired will tear the same sounds out of you.
A man in front of you is treading water, panicking, grasping towards the bank.
Too late.
You shoot feet first into the air, losing your tube and overshooting the grassy hill.
Watch the man before you skip across the sodden grass like a rock and continue like a pebble across a pond, but downward.
Your turn.
The water feels hard and hot along your back but you know friction burns are the least of your concerns. The man’s scream gets crumpled.
Watch as the base of the plateau rises to meet you—
Nightmare fuel!
Hey, listen. You can't be doing this to me.