It is. It’s about being the kind of people who survive. If you want to be a person who survives.

  But of course with owning comes theft.

  The king of Elam launched a war on Sodom—well, we say a war but back then cities were a few thousand people so it’d be more accurate to call it a “raid.” This band of raiders, led by their war chief, overran the city and kidnapped Lot’s household and rustled his sheep and stole his gold and silver and all the good things he had stored. Well, these things still happen today.

  Soon, Abraham heard what had happened to his nephew. And he hated Lot’s fucking face but he was his nephew. So Abraham took three hundred of the lean tent-dwellers who followed him and they went after the Elamites. He divided his followers into six phalanxes: to the east and the south, the north, the west, the northwest, and the southeast. They went stealthily, without any light, but they were used to defending the flocks by night against gray wolves. They encircled the camp. They waited for a sign. Abraham blew a note on a ram’s horn and all the men descended on the Elamite encampment and took it quickly and with great force.

  ›› HatOnBack

  Is that a THREAT

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse

  Nope. Stick around, you might learn something.

  In the camp Abraham found Lot tied up and cut the ropes. So how did Lot feel at that moment? I’m going to say: complex. Chastened, humble, afraid, grateful—and perhaps also resentful, angry, filled with jealousy that Abraham had taken the less fertile land and yet still he was the one to rescue Lot and not the other way around. Lot was a greedy man and he viewed the world through greed.

  ›› DanSatDan is at LarderFull status

  Or don’t. No one’s forcing you.

  The leader of Sodom honored Abraham and his followers too. They’d freed the women, children, and young men taken as slaves by the Elamites. So the leader of Sodom gave a feast in Abraham’s honor where they ate sweet goat’s cheese and good bread and sang together.

  At last, the leader of Sodom folded his legs under him and said: “Abraham. By the laws we keep to among ourselves, since you rescued us, all my wealth and my women, the chattels, and the children belong to you now. Please, I beg you, give me back the people and keep the wealth for yourself.”

  Abraham had his doubts about the value of this new idea of ownership. So he drank his goat milk and thought carefully. What good had it done Lot to take the fertile lands west of the river? Abraham had the strong sense that there was something better than hoarding up goods. That his strength and security came not from specific objects in a stronghold or dug into a bunker against a day of reckoning. Abraham’s feeling was that his ability to rescue Lot had come from those three hundred men who trusted and respected him. A community and a reputation are stronger than gold bars and jars of grain and wine and oil. The only future we ever own resides in our trust in others, their trust in us.

  So Abraham said: “I don’t want a single thread of cloth or one strap from one sandal.”

  It wasn’t virtue that made Abraham say it, it was wisdom. He enjoyed riches—he was a wealthy man for those times with flocks of sheep and fine cloth and jewels and stores of food.

  What he knew was: more than greed causes wealth, wealth causes greed.

  The richer you are, the more you have to be careful about that.

  ›› RiasMom is at PlantingAnOrchard status.

  Or come and go for a while before you make your mind up, like DanSatDan up there.

  Lot had ears, but he did not hear. He thought of how they’d shouted “fuck you then!” and “no, fuck you!” and gone their separate ways. Then, he and Abraham had had about the same amount of stuff. And how had this bullshit happened to him?

  By the time the mob arrived at his door, Lot was broken. He had no language but the deal. Grab what you can, own it and use it. Give and take, trade and bargain.

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse

  That’s it. See how the words sit with you. We’ve got time.

  He said: “Leave these guests alone but take my daughters.”

  And from then, there was no way to look back.

  Abraham and Lot are a warning against what we have already done. Abraham and Lot are a warning not to do it more. Abraham and Lot tell us that we will often have the choice between accumulating more gold or objects and creating more trust. Choose to trust.

  The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.

  1. the most parsimonious solution

  It needn’t have been technology billionaires. There were plenty of other forces of merciless capital and power in the world. These simply happened to be the ones to whom Martha Einkorn had access. They were the ones who were so focused on the future that they could be dazzled by a vision of all they feared coming to pass. They were the ones she could persuade to buy AUGR and to think that a set of matchboxes and beads could learn to transcend time, who believed so strongly in the promises of artificial intelligence that they took its words more seriously than their own senses and reason. For this to work, they just had to be willing for the computers to know more than them, and they had to want—in their heart of hearts—for the world to come to an end. All of life is contingent, and if Martha had found herself in the middle of a different kind of revolution, she would have swum upstream in it nonetheless.

  It hadn’t been easy. Deciding to do it is never enough. Having the idea is never enough. Moving the world takes a thousand thousand tiny pieces.

  * * *

  The easiest thing, of course, would have been to kill them. Get them onto the plane together. Put an explosive on board, detonate it when they were out at sea, debris falls into the ocean, no one finds it, no one knows where the plane went, disable the black box before you start, terrible tragedy.

  But killing would not do. There was a vertiginous afternoon in one of their anonymous out-of-the-way hotel suites when they discussed it. Even Badger truly raised the question of whether killing their mother would be the simplest, most parsimonious solution. Of whether, in fact, they could do it.

  “I think I could kill Zimri,” said Selah.

  “A lot of people feel that way after a decade of marriage,” said Albert.

  “I can’t do it,” said Badger. “It’s not even that I think it’s the wrong answer. I just know I can’t.”

  “The thing is,” said Martha, “even if we decide we should do it, one of us will decide against it the day before and go to the FBI. Not killing them makes it more possible that this whole plan will really happen.”

  “Cold,” said Albert at the same time that Selah said, “Realistic.”

  Badger looked at their own hands and felt suddenly that these were not their hands at all, that they belonged to somebody else and were moving and fluttering in this strange, ugly way of their own accord. The thought of killing, of a murder charge, of a trial—Badger felt completely certain this could not be their life.

  “If we save their lives and keep them somewhere safe,” said Badger, “we’ll never be guilty of murder.”

  And that was how they came to it. A terrible, unforeseeable accident. Brought on by their own technology. They could always be found somehow.

  “It’s messy,” said Selah. “If they’re still alive, they band together, they figure something out, they walk to civilization, they make a mast out of tin cans and a transmitter out of their own fillings. There’s always a chance they’ll pull some Iron Man shit, be back in three months, and we will all be in jail.”

  Badger said: “So we make it easy for them. Easy enough that they don’t get desperate. My mom already thinks it’s going to be a luxury vacation.”

  This is always the secret; this was how these technology fortunes had been made: make it all so easy and enjoyable and frictionless that you never start to ask yourself the big questions about whether this is really how you want to be spending your life.

  * * *

  The more people who knew about the plan, the more likely one of them would leak. Selah suggested they use Zimri’s method: divide and rule. Find people who had a good reason not to tell anyone else what was happening.

  There was no need for the corrupt factory supervisor in Shenzhen to know what he was making. If he did what he was told, Martha would not have to let Mr. Sketlish know about the “errors” by which a little under one-tenth of 1 percent of the product of the factory had been sold to third parties, the money going into the supervisor’s pocket. That really boiled the sweat out of his body. So she had an invisible production line.

  They made small, innocuous transmitters, had them packed into precisely the same boxes as the other perfectly legitimate spares for a private jet and shipped using barcodes only Martha would ever be able to identify, to sit in the spare-parts storage units of several emergency airfields in picturesque locations in the United States and Canada. When the time was right, there would be a carton with their own transmitter where they needed it, one that had been sitting there for months or even years. And when the transmitter was plugged in, smartphones and other devices would preferentially connect to it. Anyone connected to one of these transmitters would think they were looking at the internet, but they would actually be seeing the world through an invisible filter. Bywater and Nommik and Sketlish would see something that would encourage them to stay away from the world.

  * * *

  Selah did most of the filter coding herself, with the help of five distributed teams, each of whom thought they were working on different projects that never came to fruition. One team working on “creating fake news” were told they were the black hat—they had to create an apocalypse as real and convincing and hard to detect as possible so that another team’s work in deepfake detection could be tested. They were never to know who that team was; they would never hear the results of the tests.

  That was twenty MIT and Stanford graduates lit from within by the glow of righteousness and justice, working long hours in front of their screens for two years, creating a program that would take any footage or any stills of any city in the world and morph their contents to show an appalling pandemic in progress. They used artificial intelligence programs to write posts, alter posts, insert new items into photographs, tweak the world in large and small ways.

  “Fucking love it,” said Selah, standing in front of a screen where an innocuous tourist photo of a couple in front of the pyramid at the Louvre was transformed seamlessly into a terrifying image of police attacking pigeons with a flamethrower.

  “We were inspired by 28 Days Later, obviously,” said the team lead, an earnest twenty-seven-year-old named Bradley. “We decided we’d get some amazing visuals if the next great plague came from animals. Like the Black Death!”

  He showed her his modeling. How fast a plague like that would spread. What would have to happen for it to have erupted on several continents almost simultaneously. The 2020 novel coronavirus had given them lots to play with, but they’d made it much worse in a dozen different ways.

  There was something Bradley found satisfying in imagining this plague, Selah could tell. Zimri was the same. To imagine the destruction of mankind, the terrible end of things, the flame and blood and pain and death… was that the satisfaction? A kind of sadism? Or a masochism? The conscience acting on the self, saying, “This is what you deserve, this is what you earned.” Maybe. A man driven to commit and then cheat again and again is a man who does not believe he deserves to be known.

  “Mate,” Selah said, “this is perfect. They’ll never know the difference.”

  Bradley frowned. “I hope they will. Otherwise… you know… we’re all fucked?”

  More than you know, my friend. Your own filters aren’t letting you see how deeply we’re all fucked.

  * * *

  Albert had worked a long time earlier on a now-defunct project to create a virtual gaming suit.

  “Virtual sex suit, you mean,” said Selah, and Albert admitted that the adult gaming market had been a large part of their business plan. There were parts inside the suit that… swelled and other parts that… became soft, and further parts that grew and yielded and vibrated and—

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Selah, “you were making a suit for grown men who literally want to crawl back inside their mummy’s vag. Which is all men. Except the gay ones, sorry.”

  “None taken,” said Albert.

  The project had hit some snags to do with costs. There was no price point they could make the thing for that was less than it would cost to hire a practically infinite number of real women to do all the things the suit might do for you, or to you.

  “What about the gaming aspect, Albert?” said Selah.

  “Turns out not a lot of people want to actually feel what it’s like to really be a soldier, I guess?” he said.

  The “mixed reality” capacity was already present in the suit prototypes. If you were looking through the visor, it would look as if you were seeing the real world, but in fact you’d be seeing whatever the suit wanted you to.

  “So we add in like… plant and animal recognition for the region? We already know what region they’re going to, so that’s not too difficult. Instructions about how to survive there, ditto. Load up a bunch of entertainment. Use a standard Anvil service personality type with voice recognition.” Selah was nodding, checking off a mental list.

  “Yeah.” She smiled. “Yeah, it’s doable. We’ll need some more assets but it’s doable. The thing is, it looks like it would work in any situation, but actually it only needs to work in this one really controlled situation. So we can do it. And if we want to fiddle with it while they’re in play, we can always do an overnight update via satellite, or even augment it or interact with it in real time. Not harder than real-time drone updates, and Zimri’s people do that every fucking day.”

  The place wasn’t hard to decide on. The FutureSafe zones were no-fly areas; they wouldn’t see aircraft in the sky, so they wouldn’t try to signal. Admiral Huntsy Island was the most remote FutureSafe in the portfolio.

  “We’ll set the video drones to avoid the areas they’ve been. It’ll be pretty simple,” said Selah. “We edit that shit anyway. Zimri’s taken me to visit a couple of the FutureSafe zones already; he uses them for corporate entertaining. Online users always think they’ve seen everything—you’d have to have the top-level security to notice that the drones are avoiding some areas or playing yesterday’s footage sometimes.”

  “I can fix that,” said Martha. “It’ll just be me. I already have the island set up for… long-term survival.”

  Martha waited for the others to cotton on.

  “No,” said Badger. “You turned a wildlife sanctuary into a bunker?”

  “There’s a reason we’re doing this,” said Martha.

  Badger pulled a carrot stick out of a container in their bag and munched furiously.

  “Fuckers,” they said. “If we don’t do this now, they’ll be destroyed by bloody revolution in a decade.”

  “Good point. We’re helping them, really,” said Selah.

  * * *

  Organizing a disappearing plane was somewhat complex. Albert was a pilot—he could fly the plane, he could get it into place, turn off the transponder, bail out with a parachute, leave remote pilot software to fly it on a few more hundred miles, then bank sharply.

  “You want to do that?” asked Badger.

  “I’m in extra time anyway,” said Albert, “might as well have some fun.”

  There were targeted explosives that could make the plane look like it was being taken down from the outside while giving the passengers plenty of time to escape. Tricky. Easy for someone to get injured or even die. But safe enough that they could tell themselves no one would need to die.

  AUGR was the last part to fall into place. They’d been looking for something like it for a while—something that would convince these people to get on that plane, to do it quietly and secretly, to cover their own tracks. Martha had found it at a technology incubator. The inventor, Si Packship, was trying to make predictive tactical military software—but the military make their own stuff, and all he really wanted was to be bought up. Martha reoriented him: What if, instead of trying to predict enemy movements, the software analyzed the current tactical situation in detail, offering combat options an operator might otherwise miss? What if that prediction element could be oriented in a different way? Toward the consumer market, toward people who want to know when bad things are on the way?

  Si Packship had said: “I don’t think AUGR is going to be able to do what you want AUGR to do.”

  And Martha had said: “Don’t worry about it. Really, just don’t worry about it. All we need is a ‘proof of concept.’ You know? Like when you want to show what your software will do but it doesn’t do that yet, so you commission a little animation to show it working?”

  “You want an… animation from me?”

  “Lenk Sketlish is very personally interested in this project. I want something I can show him so that he will invest in the project, and then we can get it to do what we want it to do.”

  “Isn’t this how Elizabeth Holmes got, um… in trouble with Theranos? Making it look like it could do something it couldn’t do?”

  “Really, don’t worry. Lenk is more of a kinetic, tactile learner. This will help make it real for him.”

  Poor rich Si Packship, he had really tried his hardest to make AUGR what Martha wanted it to be. The tactical analysis part used the iterative game mechanic, a billion beads through a billion matchboxes: How could you escape from danger in this locked car? In this garage? In this convenience store? In this children’s play park? Again and again users and testers telling the machine whether it had gotten it right, spotted things that could be used successfully to defeat an assailant, to hide, to get away faster. That part was always going to be the impressive and convincing part: put it on someone’s phone, wait for them to be in danger.