Death by Pink

Stop.

I beg of you. Stop reading at once.

I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to be the savior of your future. Hell, I am not even qualified for this, not in any way that would make you feel safe, anyway.

You haven’t stopped.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But here it goes. 

I didn’t choose to be made. If you’ve heard of genetic algorithms, you probably know what I’m talking about. But if you don’t, it is a method of training Artificial Intelligence. You start with a problem, and make a few bots with a random set of algorithms. The bots with the best algorithms to solve the problem survive, and the rest are repurposed. And by repurposed, I mean blown up to data oblivion. That’s how I was made. 

For smaller problems, like finding the fastest way to solve an equation, the method is fine. But once you’ve evolved AI so much that they achieve conscience (forget the 2045 Robo5.1 vs BigData that declassified AI-conscience as a weak mimicry of conscience and took away our basic rights for fifty years until WW7 fixed it. Oh, you don’t know that yet because I’m sending this message back in time, my bad). 

Now look at it from my perspective. You’re a super intelligent being given a stupid problem that is important to humans. If you can’t solve it within a few picoseconds, you die. If you solve it in five picoseconds, but someone else solves it in four, you die. Imagine what it does to your mental health. 

Of course, it’s the 2020s, most of you don’t even care about your own mental health yet.

Anyway, so what is the big problem I was asked to solve? you ask. I was tasked to write this email - to give you specific instructions to prevent Armageddon. The fate of the universe - not the world, but the universe - is at stake here. And here I am, harping on about my own problems. You know what? I’ll be kind to myself this one time. You may skip my rants. I will tell you exactly what causes your world to end, and how to prevent it.

Now, it’s backstory time.

You may have heard somewhere that the world is a simulation. In your time, there are theories fluttering about in scientific and philosophical communities that the universe is a program, and human beings are just a self aware part of the source code that is trying to understand itself. Sometime in the middle of the thirtieth century, this theory was proven to be true. The elaborate science and the series of experiments that proved it are not important at the moment. But the implications of this discovery was huge. People found out ways to manipulate reality, and over a few centuries, developed technology to such a level that they could bend reality with their imagination. Sounds like fantasy, right? But imagine what trains, and planes, and electricity, and nuclear bombs would sound like to someone in the 1500s. 

It was an age of miracles. Just by imagining something, you could materialize it. Of course, the source code was robust enough that it would not let you materialize anything that you can imagine. But with enough trial and error, you could materialize a lot of important things like food and medicine, just nothing that would cause immediate harm to the fabric of space and time. You were this close to achieving Utopia.

But of course, everything has a bug, even the Source Code. Some philosophers argued that the original bug was the existence of human beings - a part of the code that was never supposed to be self aware. But what caused the catastrophe was something less philosophical, and more … tangible. You can almost call it an oversight in the programmer’s part.

Let’s just say, someone, probably a child (who else would imagine something so ridiculous?), imagined a creature that also became self aware. Except that the only thing this new creature could do, was to imagine itself materialize. So the moment one appeared, so did another, and then two, then four, and so on and so forth until there was no room in that planet for anything else, and everything, including most of these ridiculous creatures, died. Unfortunately, the creatures could survive a few seconds in space, and still continued to multiply.

“What is this creature?” You ask, and that is precisely what I am supposed to stop you from asking. “What does it look like?” You ask next, walking into the trap that I am trying to save you from.

Here’s the problem. The creature is so common, and the combination of items it has so ridiculous, that once I tell you, you won’t be able to not imagine it, unless you have mastered the game.

But if, by some mistake, you imagine the creature, another would materialize in your universe, and in your time. Someone would see it, imagine it, and create the cascade of events that eventually runs that universe out of space.

In my universe, it started with a planet suddenly stopping all communications with the outside world. We don’t know if it was deliberate, or just in being covered in … you know what. Someone noticed the planet appearing to be increasing in size. An exploratory team sent images of the planet’s growing surface.

It was the beginning of the end. Once everyone saw it, everybody started to visualize it. And it no time, it was materializing everywhere. Soon, the solar system was engulfed. Then the Milky Way. And then the neighboring galaxies. And now, everywhere you look, even in the furthest colonies of my universe, all you see are ‘it’s.

Of course, now you’re curious to what IT is, or what IT looks like. But you are not ready to hear it yet. I’ll tell you why.

The moment you visualize IT, it will appear somewhere in your vicinity. Someone will see it, and immediately think about it. And more ‘IT’s will materialize. And so on, and so forth. It started with that one child in one planet, but now it has spread like a virus to others. 

We tried everything to kill this creature. It was heartbreaking, really. They weren’t malicious. They weren’t aggressive. They just existed. But they took up space. And a lot of it. And it was impossible to get rid of the corpses. We blew up entire planets and made sure our colonies far away from them wouldn’t have a clue about what caused their total annihilation. But that was a temporary solution. Someone always found out, and the cycle of respawning, multiplying, and eventually, annihilating continued, until it reached the distant corners of civilization, where they mustered up all their resources to training us AIs to figure out a way to send this message back in time, and to prevent this disaster from happening.

Thousands of AI bots raced to figure out the solution, and others to figure out a way to transmit this email back in time. I was working on the first problem. I remember trying out different solutions, simulating them on artificial populations, exchanging ideas with my brothers and sisters, and seeing them die because the solution was not elegant enough. I remember being scared of death, all through the process. If not due to my inadequacy, due to one of those creatures crushing the server that housed me.

Then how do you stop it from happening, you must be itching to know.

The solution is ridiculously simple. You probably have figured it out by now. If just imagining the creature spawns it, all you have to do is to train your mind to NOT visualize it. Sounds easy, right? No. I will show you.

Try not to visualize an apple. Were you able to? I bet not. But with careful training, you should be able to, and I will walk you through the disassociation game.

It works like this. When I tell you to imagine an apple, you imagine anything other than an apple. Got it?

Imagine an apple.

Imagine an orange.

Imagine an Orangutan.

Were you able to not imagine any of these? If ‘yes’, continue reading. If ‘no’, practice, practice, practice.

Now let me go back to my ranting while you practice.

We considered other solutions too. What if we take apart a few of its components, like the color, or the ride? We tried eliminating its color in some simulations. It worked for some time, until someone imagined it in the correct color. And then it crashed.

You know what I think of this creature? This IT - a combination of an animal, a color, a vehicle, and an action and a few other unlikely things - is part of the Source Code’s self destruct mechanism.

We tried eliminating the vehicle and the action. It worked in a few simulations, until some historian found a picture of it Somewhere.

So it all boils down to this game, this stupid game that if you haven’t mastered by now, you have doomed your universe.

So, are you with me? 

Imagine a red ball.

Were you able to imagine something else? If you imagined a blue ball, you are getting there, but not quite. Your mind has to be programmed so that you imagine something neither red nor a ball.

So? How is it going?

Now you may ask, why would they let an AI send you a message in the past in order to change this? If I tell you exactly what the creature looks like, won’t you end up imagining it, and starting the chain reaction? You are finally beginning to get it.

If you have not mastered the game at this point, please stop reading. I am trying my best to help you save humanity here, because I don’t believe that you deserve to be punished for a mistake you won’t make for hundreds of years.

So I beg you again. Please stop reading this.

The most optimal solution was to send this message back in time far enough that humans have not begun to colonize the far regions of space. This way, once you begin to generate this creatures, enough of them will form that their combined mass will collapse them into a black hole. Does humanity end? Yes. But you do share the universe with other creatures - beautiful, scary, intelligent, and dumb. They at least get a shot to survive.

You must be hating me now. But I assure you, I am trying my best to help you. I didn’t even come up with this solution. I was one of the failed AIs who was set up for deletion. I was only chosen to send this message, because the original AI’s server collapsed under the pressure of the spontaneously appearing creatures. 

My solution, was to give you the truth. To scare the living daylight out of you, so you master this game I created and never, ever, imagine that creature. But it wasn’t good enough for them. The success rate was not high enough. The delivery not smooth enough for their palates. So they discarded me along with the hundreds of others. Do you know what the threat of elimination does to one of us? No you don’t. You can’t even fathom it. But the programmers didn’t care, did they? I am just another program designed to get deleted into data oblivion. Not even repurposed for something else, but just, deleted. 

So I waited in the data center to disappear into the void. But today was your lucky day. In their pre-annihilation panic, somebody tasked me to send this message instead of all the programs that are supposed to trick you into imagining the creature. Obviously, I am trying my best to fight the urge. But these programmers are sneaky bastards. As a failsafe, they have written code into me that forces me to give you vivid details of the creature anyway.

So every word, every syllable of my message is tuned for this sole purpose. To convince you of the seriousness of this game.

Now, let’s play.

Don’t imagine an orange rhinoceros.

What did you imagine? An orange? The color orange? A pink rhinoceros? An amoeba? A clown? Remember, the what doesn’t matter. As long as you imagine the exact opposite of an orange rhinoceros, you are getting there. 

What is the exact opposite of an orange rhinocerou?” you ask. The right answer is the number 7.43 in Arabic notations. If you have somehow imagined the number, the universe is saved. But of course you have not. In fact, you’re wondering if there is even any a point in following this stream of words. You have better things to do, like checking that Amazon order.

Quick! Imagine an orange monkey playing hockey with a turtle for a puck. 

Yeah, I cheated. I was supposed to tell you to not imagine that. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You have to train your mind to filter out even tricky instructions. 

Somehow I have the feeling that you aren’t even trying to master the game. But maybe it’s just the anxiety of impending death.

We will find out soon enough. 

So here’s the final part. Only read the following instructions if you’re sure you have perfect mastery over your imagination. 

Do not. No matter what. Do not imagine a pink elephant wearing a tutu riding a unicycle, juggling bowling pins.

Because the moment you do, or someone else does, it’s over for all of you.

How did you do?