“Come on,” rumbled Zimri.

  “I’m serious. You’re keeping a pilot on staff who never flies anywhere because you want him on standby? You think on the day he puts on his coat and bundles his family into the car, if that’s also the day the food prices spike for the seventeenth time in three months, you think none of his neighbors are going to try following him? Hunger makes people real focused, real quick.”

  “No reward without risk,” said Ellen.

  “But not unnecessary risk,” said Packship. “How about: You know what’s coming before the riots? Before the food shortages? Before the protestors overturn your jeep, before they leave the house, before they paint their placards?”

  Si Packship made a control gesture with three fingers. The next slide appeared. The slide said:

  When do you leave?

  He said: “AUGR is a survival AI designed to protect you, to understand when you’re in danger and get you out of it. But AUGR is more than that. AUGR will tell you when danger is coming long before anyone else can tell. AUGR is a complete algorithmic package and protocol that will tell participants in the program when it is time to go. AUGR knows the future.”

  He clicked the slide again. There were no interruptions.

  Defense perimeter

  “Our clients want to leave their homes, businesses, and places of work ten days before a catastrophic event or politico-social disaster. We call this ten-day period the defense perimeter.”

  AUGR: machine learning

  “AUGR has analyzed thousands of city-, region-, and nationwide disasters, from the Bhopal chemical leak to Chernobyl, from the pandemic of 2020 to ’23 to the Fall of Hong Kong. Nothing happens in a vacuum. With hindsight there are ways to see what’s coming. AUGR has tapped into all available data streams to learn the deep patterns around these events. AUGR looks at economic data, weather data, seismic data, currency transactions, population movements, traffic. With more recent events it analyzes internet searches, social media posts, cell phone usage, bird flight patterns, air quality, bee pollination, ant colony migration. We don’t ask why or whether a dataset might be relevant—we presume everything and anything can be.”

  “Does it work?” said Zimri Nommik.

  Selah Nommik had a hand on his thigh. She was completely calm.

  “You can’t… predict the future,” she said, frowning. “Even Zimri can’t do that.”

  Zimri smiled faintly. He loved to educate. Martha could see Selah’s remark putting Zimri—subtly but definitely—on Packship’s side. Defending the possibilities of prediction to his skeptical wife. “You can up to a point,” he said. “You can’t tell exactly what’s going to happen, but trends? Yes, of course. If you’re looking at the right things, you can analyze trends.”

  “Thank you,” said Si Packship. “That’s just what we’re doing. Incredibly astute of you.”

  AUGR: from analysis to prediction

  “We’ve been running AUGR without pause for two years. It’s getting better. It can sense changes of mood and pace now, the wheel spinning out of control.”

  The slides flashed pictures on-screen. A riot in a major South American city after a corrupt election. A military incursion in an eastern European seaport. An oil spill. The collapse of a company previously thought strong as bone. A campus sit-in, the unseating of a newspaper editor, a suspension bridge disaster.

  “AUGR flagged those last three as significant but non-evac events. AUGR is a lifestyle system. Once you’re in the program, it looks for large-scale events, but it’ll also be looking for personal danger to you specifically—a stalker, an internet hate mob. Anything that would mean you should get out right now.”

  AUGR and you

  “Let me describe how this works in your life for you. You wake up in the morning and AUGR has detected a perimeter event.”

  A series of images—the discreet AUGR app on your smartwatch, your phone, your tablet, your home console—a little black dot in the corner of each screen. Nothing that would alarm anyone who happened to see your devices. “Your nanny, your pool guy, your ex-wife will never know.” Lenk and Zimri, both of whom had ex-wives, laughed.

  “You check in with AUGR online to see the threat level. AUGR will then work with you to create a plausible story—a sudden business opportunity, a medical emergency, or an unexpected canceled deal creating a break in your schedule so you and the kids can get a quick vacation. AUGR can spoof emails and screengrabs to make your story look convincing.

  Orderly evacuation

  “We make evacuation possible. But we can also make it pleasant. You have your alert. It’s still the morning. Let the airfield and the pilot know you want to perform an as-live test of the evac systems this evening. There’s time to pack up treasured heirlooms, to tell the kids there’s a treat waiting for them tonight, to inform the school of a family emergency, to have your secretary reschedule meetings. You can spend the morning at your laptop, the afternoon at your safety-deposit boxes, and still have time for dinner at your favorite restaurant before you all head to the plane.”

  After you leave

  “You’ll all have your own systems in place for monitoring the situation after you’ve pulled out. AUGR can help you make those choices with an eye to the future. No point returning if the situation’s just going to destabilize again in three weeks, right? AUGR will keep monitoring all available data streams, even after a major collapse. If there’s widespread chaos, AUGR can let you know where—if anywhere—will remain stable. AUGR won’t make your choices… but it will make your choices clearer.”

  Exclusive

  Si Packship was winding up his presentation now. Coming in for the money punch. Ellen, Lenk, and Zimri were all still there, so that was a start. And Martha knew the pitch was a killer. The final slide flashed up. It was the AUGR logo, a stylized drill. The name could be both an augur (a prophet) and an auger (a tool) that drills down.

  “This meeting’s been facilitated by Ms. Einkorn, who spotted my work and gave me access to some development money. For which I’m incredibly grateful. But now I’m in the market for a sale. As we know, many technology start-ups need to get big fast. AUGR is the opposite of that. We need to stay small forever. This thing cannot do its job if every person in every city owns it. It’s for a select group. There are a number of other interested clients, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you who they are. But I’ve come to the three of you first because Ms. Einkorn suggested you might want to take AUGR completely off the table for any other buyers.”

  Zimri looked at Ellen and Ellen looked at Lenk. They wanted this thing; this was their chance. It was the solution they’d been looking for.

  PART 4 the possibilities of iteration

  or, try, try again

  or, keep going, you’ll get there in the end

  well. either that, or the end will get you

  extract from Name The Day survivalist forum

  sub-board: ntd/strategic/biblestudywithonecorn

  ›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status. OneCorn has made 5,118 posts and received 17,555 thumbs-up.

  Things get darker before they get lighter, that is the whole of the law.

  The story of Lot is, fundamentally, a story about survival. All the problems and self-delusions of survival. Lot and his two daughters, Moa and Amma, survived the rain of fire onto Sodom, fine. They lost their mom first—Edo looked back, she couldn’t stop being transfixed by the past, she couldn’t walk a step further on. She turned into salt: tears or the ocean or something inhuman, anyway. A bare piece of rock salt. Life, for her, was over.

  But her daughters and her husband, you’d have thought, could have a brand-new start. They were the sole survivors of a doomed city, whisked out of there by the messengers of God. They found their way to another city, Tzoar. Start again. Get hustling. Up by your bootstraps. Don’t look back. Yeah well, says Genesis, there are some problems you can’t will your way out of. Trauma comes back again and again.

  The story of Lot is a story about how sole survivors are fucked. In the case of Lot, extremely literally.

  Genesis chapter 19, 30–36, loosely translated

  CW: caves, alcohol, rape, incest, pregnancy, despair, internet

  So they did get to Tzoar but they didn’t stay long. The story says: “Lot was afraid to stay in Tzoar.” They’d seen one city burned to ashes, maybe they thought it was going to keep happening. They had fallen out of the practice of hope.

  They moved out of the city and went to live in a cave. Which I guess is what you do if you’ve stopped believing in cities but you’ve also lost the skills of walking the land, wandering, hunting and gathering. I think we can imagine they felt ashamed.

  One night by the dregs of the fire, Moa said to Amma: “Where is this going?”

  Amma knew what she meant. Still, she said: “What do you mean?”

  “Are you really going to make me spell it out?”

  “You mean, are we going to live our lives in a cave and first Dad’s going to die and then one of us will die and then the other?”

  Moa said: “Wow yeah, I guess that’s what I meant.”

  “Then that’s where this is going.”

  “And is that what you want?”

  God had taken their home, their husbands, their mother, their neighbors, their neighborhood, their safety, their security, probably also their sanity given what’s about to happen. They didn’t feel they owed much to God. Lot had offered them to the mob. They didn’t feel they owed much to him. All that was left was their own desire. The force of life that rises again every dawn. The desire of all creatures that we shall not be the last of our kind.

  I’m warning you again that this is going to get really dark.

  The sisters got wine somehow. (Side note: they definitely knew there were cities, that’s where they went to get the wine, clearly. You can’t really make wine if you’re living alone in a cave.)

  They fed their father the wine until he was so wasted he couldn’t tell the difference between his own daughters and the whores who used to stand by the gates in Sodom. He lolled back against the wall of the cave and when there was a girl on him, Lot relished it like a dream of the world he’d left.

  That was the first night. On that night Amma sat at the cave mouth and hummed tunelessly to herself and threw rocks down the mountainside. There was nothing to do and no one to talk to and nowhere to go.

  So. That’s also an effect of trauma, right? Tunnel vision. The story tells us the girls said: “There’s no man in the land to come for us, in the way that everyone else is doing.” They’d just been in Tzoar. They knew there were men. They knew what everyone else was doing. This is a story about what it’s like to be the last survivors of your civilization. No one just gets up and walks away from that feeling fine. They knew there were other men. But they were stuck in this place, unable to walk away from their father.

  “How will we know if it works?” said Amma to Moa as she came out, wrapping her linen around her loins again.

  Moa said: “We’ll wait. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try again.”

  The second night it was Amma’s turn.

  Amma said to herself:

  I do not need to be any better than him, I am certainly no worse.

  He offered this part of me to the mob; he has forfeited his right to choose or to tell me what to do.

  What does the world hold for me other than this? Bones and burning and the stench of the pit.

  My mother is not alive nor yet is she dead, she is turned to salt and I have no need to make sense of the world. I want a baby.

  It wasn’t fun but it wasn’t difficult. It was easy to make Lot drunk again. He knew on the edge of his mind what had happened, but he did not want to know. On the first night with Moa he drank without understanding. On the second night with Amma he drank so as not to know himself again. We walk into illusions gladly, eager for release from our encircling selves.

  By contrast with the grasping mob of Sodom, what Amma did to her father was kind. There was no suffering. He gave three sharp grunts and fell back asleep.

  The golden rule is very clear: “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others.” Let me simple that up for you: if you don’t like it when something happens to you, don’t do that to other people. It is the simplest thing you’ll ever hear and no rule is perfect but this one is a pretty good yardstick for most of your choices.

  By the golden rule, the sisters should have known better. But people tend to think things are different after the world’s ended. Or when they’ve told themselves the world has ended.

  What comes after despair? Hope, if you’re lucky. It is dark before the dawn but the dawn always returns. At least on this planet.

  If you’re not lucky, what comes after despair is brutality. “Whatever has been done to me, that is what I may do to others; and whatever others have done, that is what may be done to them.” That’s how people live on the internet these days. It’s the golden rule’s dark twin. If I were feeling fancy, I’d call it “the rule of salt,” because it crumbles at a touch and lacerates the hands every time it is used.

  The golden rule operates like a technology designed to direct us away from revenge. It hauls you back time and again to the certain knowledge of what it is you don’t like. Do you not like it when people call you ugly on social media? Then don’t do that to anyone else. Do you not enjoy it when someone tries to get you fired? Then consider very carefully whether it is ever right to do that to someone else. I know, I know. It’s so boring to get control of your feelings and think about what’s right. But this is how we construct a society, OK? The golden rule is a vastly valuable social technology carefully passed down to us by people who fought their way out of darkness using it.

  Unfortunately these days quite a lot of people on the internet seem happy to live by the rule of salt. That’s a rule of infinite vendetta: scroll back years through a social media timeline, the worst thing you can find another person has done is totally legit to do to them. But then, that’s the worst thing you’ve done, and it’s legit to do it to you. And on and on, everyone trapped inside this same worsening cycle. That’s where we are right now with the media and the internet: stuck inside a cave with the worst person we know, finding increasingly degrading things to do to each other and feeling righteous while we do them.

  Lot offered his daughters’ vaginas to the mob. So they felt justified in doing what they wanted with his cock. That’s the last we ever see of Lot in the Bible. That’s where he ends. Sitting alone in a cave, having involuntarily knocked up both his daughters. I think we can all agree: he might have gotten out of Sodom but he didn’t thrive.

  close

  ›› ArturoMegadog is at BunkerBorn status.

  Jesus Christ you dig up some dark parts of the Bible.

  ›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status.

  Thanks! It’s my special thing. You think anyone else is still listening?

  ›› ArturoMegadog is at BunkerBorn status.

  This sub-thread has 4,610 followers. They’re just all stunned into silence.

  ›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status.

  I mean, reasonable.

  ›› DanSatDan is at One Tin O’Beans status.

  OK. I’m gonna wade in because that’s what I do, right? My guess is: in terms of survival this is about not giving in to the urge to hide and stay small, right? Trying real hard to band together with other survivors? But not “band together” in a “rape your dad” way.

  ›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status.

  Ah, welcome, DanSatDan, to Disturbing Genesis Study Group! I love that you want to keep us on topic. OK so, I have thought a lot about this and… these stories in Genesis have a lot going on in them. You can turn them over and over and never quite get to the bottom of them. This one is definitely about family, about passing on of family trauma. But it’s also about surviving, and the problems of being a survivor. And about, yeah, keeping on trying to get something from the worst person you know.

  ›› DanSatDan is at One Tin O’Beans status.

  It’s about trust. Anyone who thinks that sexual assault and mob rule isn’t relevant to an evacuation scenario hasn’t realized what other humans are like.

  My dad was one of those Rambo guys. He loved fighting, and when he couldn’t get what he wanted from the other drunks, he beat up my mom, he beat on me. He coulda survived a nuclear event. But you wouldn’t have wanted him in your bunker. Or your cave.

  Lot’s whole family are a warning. You’ve gotta be careful about looking back. You’ve gotta be careful what you bring with you. The things that once kept you alive will end by killing you.

  ›› ArturoMegadog is at BunkerBorn status.

  Shit. DanSatDan I’m so sorry to hear that about your dad.

  ›› DanSatDan is at One Tin O’Beans status.

  Thanks, man. I wanted to ask. How are you? Are you doing OK? After the thing in the spring?

  ›› ArturoMegadog is at BunkerBorn status.

  I’m doing better, thanks. Getting some help myself. Taking it day by day. I was too much by myself before but it’s helping a lot that now I have a project.

  1. twenty-eight squeeze packs of peanut and almond butter

  zhen

  Zhen spent three weeks holed up in Madrid. If she was going to Marius, she needed to muddy her trail and let it get a little cold.

  After Singapore, she took a flight to Manila, then a second onward, then another, then another. Between two of those she pulled her alternate passport in the name Ho Sara from the bottom of her rucksack. She’d never traveled on a false passport before. It had been a stunt for her video audience to get one made and somewhere between a private pleasure and paranoia to keep it. A comfort blanket for former refugees. She hadn’t known whether it would work until—in an airport between here and there—it suddenly seemed less dangerous to try than not to.