by Michael Scholtes
Peter stared at the page of code that he had been struggling to finish for a week. It looked basically done, but he wasn’t sure.
“Check this please,” he murmured.
“Mind if I…?” came the response in his earpiece. His personal digital assistant had recently learned the skill of integrating with his IDE, and he was finding it very helpful.
“Go ahead,” he said, and watched a couple of lines swap order. A paragraph of logic was replaced by an elegant lambda expression. It was still his code, mostly. But better.
“That looks good,” he said, and the changes were merged and pushed to the repository. He thought for a minute about whether he was ok with getting help from someone or something else. Sure. It’s the product that matters. He’d never had a problem with ego. But he had a hunch, a worry tickling at the back of his mind.
“How would you have done it?”
A few seconds later, she asked “Which part?”
“The whole module.”
Again, in just a few seconds, he watched little icons representing classes fly around, merge, rearrange, and settle like birds in a tree. In the zoom-out view, the reduction in code volume was striking.
“OK, walk me through it. How does it work?” It turned out to be very smart, very elegant. There were parts he couldn’t immediately understand. Others, he would never have thought of.
“If you can do that, why am I doing it?”
“You are happiest when you have something to do.”
After that, it was hard to focus. He didn’t feel like working and decided to call it a day. The route he always walked back to the apartment followed the hike & bike trail by the river. Peter looked around, finding himself in a clean, sunny day, with lots of people out and about, a normal contingent of walkers and runners, with an extra serving of buskers, artists, and musicians. He didn’t think he’d ever seen it so busy when it wasn’t a festival. Ultralights flocked over the river, mimicking the clouds of bats that would be emerging from under the bridge at dusk. He saw a guitar-slapping singer-songwriter, a solo blues saxophonist, and a madrigal trio dressed for a renaissance festival come together and start riffing. It amazed him; components you’d never think of being compatible complemented each other, danced together. The artists he paused to admire should be in a gallery or something. He marveled at his own species.
The last few blocks south from the auditorium threaded an old neighborhood of tiny bungalows replete with kitschy yard-art. The exterior stairs of his own building were almost barricaded by bikes, trikes, boards, and strollers parked or temporarily abandoned on the sidewalk. He picked his way through and loped the three flights to his floor. He could really use some Anne-time about now.
His girlfriend lounged on the couch, gesturing cheerfully with the balloon of sangria in her hand to Jax, a co-worker and neighbor. She saw Peter and smiled with her eyes without interrupting her flow of words. Jax saluted amiably with his bottle of IPA. Peter sat at the other end of the sofa, forcing Anne to bend her long legs to make room. He tried to make sense of the conversation. They were marketeers in a workerspace with groups coming and going, fluid. He had never understood what she did, or how she made money. It didn’t seem to matter to their relationship. She didn’t know anything about coding. So what? At the moment they were talking about some gathering momentum in attention-space, as real and vivid to them as the cityscape he had just traversed was to Peter. Attention-space? What was that? Could he see it? Feel it? It conceptually overlaid “meme-space”, whatever that was. Old memes were being pushed aside, and actively destroyed, by something big, new, and fast-moving.
“It sounds like Sherman’s march to the sea,” he offered, because it did.
Jax laughed, spontaneously, teeth flashing white framed by a fine and finely-trimmed black Van Dyck. “Man, you’re so deep. That’s perfect! You are funny as shit!” Anne’s look was happy and approving. She tossed her head and her straight blonde hair whipped across her face.
Peter had no idea what they were talking about. He was laconic by nature. Terse. He took a long time deciding what to say, and when he said something, there wasn’t much of it. Their friends were mostly her friends, but they all seemed to like him. Twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, always sparking with talk about music, or tech, or indie media. For reasons totally beyond him, they saw Peter as deep. And hysterically funny. He was pretty sure he was neither.
Jax went to “see my peeps” after a while, and Anne whipped up some fusion-something food. Delicious, but he’d be unable to describe what it was. They had sex, and that was really good too. She said, again, that he was fantastic in bed, and he accepted it without really understanding how anyone could be different. You just find what works and do that. Asleep now, she sprawled diagonally across the bed on her stomach, a long, tan arm and leg poking out from the tangled sheet. Peter curled up in his remaining corner of the bed, but he was awake, and decided to get up and study. The second bedroom, their de facto storage locker, held piled boxes, their bicycles, and a makeshift desk wedged in the corner with a reading lamp. His well-thumbed copy of a book of coding recipes sat waiting. Peter had been reading and re-reading that same book for several years. Because it never quite stuck, but it was important for him to be able to do this stuff. And it worked. To his colleagues, he appeared solidly competent at this core skill, this aging splinter of the tech galaxy. Most of them had read this book once, when it first came out, learned what it had to teach and moved on, not needing it ever again. They had no clue how much easier it was for them than for him. Theirs was the world he wanted to live in, but he had to work much harder to stay there.
Later in the night Anne’s restless arm ended up lying across his throat. He gently repositioned it so he could breathe, and while drifting back to sleep, heard her humming.
He kept going to the office, even though he now knew that his PDA could do the most rewarding part of his job better than he could himself. His project manager came by, and Peter slowly rolled his chair back from the big monitor. He’d been using one of the techniques from his book, and he was confident the code was good. He looked up, expectantly, waiting for Tom to speak.
“Hi Pete. You’re a real workhorse, you know that? Our secret sauce. Keep it up! But don’t burn out!” He chuckled to himself. “Any idea where Ananda is today? Or David? Or Gloria? I hadn’t heard about any flu going around. And Gloria’s never sick. She says it’s all her Chinese herbs.”
Peter had not noticed, but he did now. Half of the developer’s carrels were vacant, and the office had no energy at all. No one at the ping-pong table, or the coffee server. It felt like 4 pm on a Friday. “Sorry, no idea.” Tom wandered away, and Peter went back to polishing his code. Every time the suite of unit tests finished with a green “SUCCESS”, he felt a little satisfaction.
On the way home, the weather was iffy, cool and threatening to rain, but it seemed not to deter the jugglers, artists, and sidewalk musicians. They looked a bit scruffy, though. Anne was home, sitting in a chaise on the little balcony, gazing absent-mindedly at the slice of grey river visible between buildings, and singing and humming to herself. A couple of plates and several dirty glasses clustered on the deck boards.
“Have you been sitting there all day?” he asked, puzzled. “Didn’t you go to work?”
“What? Oh, hi, Peter. How long have you been home?” She smiled weakly but her mind was elsewhere. “What did you ask? Oh, right. No. I didn’t.”
The silence stretched out. Grackles squawked on the lawn. The air trembled with traffic rumble. Children someplace piped like birds. He didn’t know what to ask, but usually if he said nothing at all, the pressure to fill the silence would speak for him. Anne focused, met his gaze. Seemed to wake up somehow. “I’ve been reevaluating my priors. My job isn’t instrumentally useful to me the same way it was. And life is too rich to spend moldering in an office. No offence. I’ve been sitting here listening to the city. It’s like Mahler.”
What on Earth was she talking about? “What are you going to do?” he asked, for lack of anything better.
“My head is full of music. I never learned an instrument, but I can sing. I’m going to do that.”
Her mind was imagining beauty, pulling her to a delicious horizon. His was ever rooted in the practical. He said, “I meant, for money.”
“I’ll get more, I suppose.” She didn’t know how, or care, but low-level details like that would sort themselves out. She started humming and singing again. A composition? Or an accompaniment to something she was hearing? She didn’t say anything else, and after a while he walked inside. The words of her singing were not English, or Spanish, or any other language he could recognize.
Peter googled “recent flu” on his phone. He didn’t really expect any hits that would be interesting, but he was wrong. Workplaces were half-deserted all over the country. Some businesses had temporarily closed. The tech meccas on the west coast were particularly hard hit. He decided to ask Jax if he’d noticed anything amiss with Anne. The black railing of the walkway had a green dusting of oak pollen, and the painted apartment doors were cracked and peeling from too many Augusts. Jax’s apartment was just a few doors down.
He knocked. A live oak full of screeching blackbirds made it hard to be sure there had been no answer. It wasn’t locked, and he stepped inside. Quiet descended. It was hard to see; all the blinds were closed. It looked like Jax was sitting on the couch, facing the wall with the black TV on it. It was off.
“You ok, man?” Peter stepped closer, and suddenly smelled urine.
“Shhh. I’m waiting for the next note,” Jax whispered.
Like, music? “When was the last one?”
“Maybe…a couple hours. Dunno.” Jax’s eyes were closed, a blissed-out smile on his face. He apparently hadn’t left the sofa for quite some time. It creeped Peter out. Something was wrong. Maybe it was contagious. He backed away. With his back pressed against the door, he dialed 911. “What is the nature of your emergency?” He waited until someone came, and then he fled. But while he was waiting, he remembered a conversation. Jax telling Anne and somebody else about an amazing composer. A minimalist.
When he got back to their place, she was gone. She’d left her phone, so there was no point trying to call her. He picked up her dishes, and the kitchen nook, and the living room, and thought about how long he should wait. And what he should do.
Were the street artists looking scruffy because they weren’t eating, or sleeping in a bed?
He walked to her workerspace. She wasn’t there. Strangers at her station, immersed in some interactive game—abstract patterns flickering between screens like data flowers. They didn’t know her, didn’t look up.
He filed a missing person report. “We’re slammed,” the dispatcher said. “Lots of missing people. Gotta go.” Peter left voicemails for her parents but never heard back.
He called the hospital to see how Jax was doing. He’d been discharged. “Nothing wrong,” they said. His apartment was still empty.
An old friend, Thomas, taught at the university. Peter still had his number.
“Hello, Thomas? This is Peter. Yeah, that Peter. I need to talk to someone.
No questions. Thomas gave him a building name and office number.
The elevator opened, and he smelled old floor wax. The corridor fluorescents were in night-time mode. Thomas’s office door stood open, light spilling out into the hall.
“People are disappearing,” Peter said, without preamble.
Thomas nodded, slowly. “Some. But the streets are still busy. Supermarkets, too.”
“There’s a pattern? Tell me!” Peter was heartened. He’d had a hunch Thomas would be able to help. And he’d been right. Where had Anne gone? Could he get her back?
“I thought it might be a fad or something. Mass hysteria. There’s this book, The Madness of Crowds. I looked all through it. Witch trials. Mesmerism. Pole sitting. There’s nothing like this.” He sounded drained. His despair started to corrode Peter’s hope.
“Have you figured it out? What’s going on?” Peter leaned forward.
A laptop glowed on the desk. Thomas gestured at the screen. “I’ve been reading about it. For days. It’s all I’ve been doing.” He fell silent. They heard a siren dopplering as some emergency vehicle raced past in the street down below. “At first, there were a lot of different ideas, new ones, creative. But now, the old ones are just getting recycled.”
“All the smart people checked out,” Peter guessed. “But why? Why is this happening? Is it just here? Where did they go?”
The other man’s voice did an odd thing. He started to answer, but for a few seconds it sounded like he was singing a Gregorian chant. Some uncertainty resolved itself, and the protracted “aaahh” stopped modulating and turned into words. “Aaaaaaaaa’m not smart enough to figure it out. There are a lot of crazy theories. A phase change in social networks. Chinese recruiters. Drugs in our food. I just keep trying to organize them all.”
Peter saw that the mess on the desk, that he had taken for a normal litter of papers, was composed of index cards, some loose, a few small stacks. A sharp yellow pencil. Old school.
Thomas said, “The category I like the most is also the scariest. A lot of very different ideas, but they share a theme. They think it’s a deliberate attack.”
An attack. Not just blind forces of nature. Peter felt his own mind grow focused. An attack could be fought, and maybe even defeated. “By who?” he asked.
“`By whom.’ No idea. No ideas any more. I’m completely stuck,” Thomas said. “Chinese. Russians. Our own government, or its agencies. Big pharma. Middle Eastern terrorists. Hell, somebody even suggested aliens. I keep looking at the sky now. But I’m too tired to think.”
How could he fight them if he didn’t know who they were? It was well after midnight when Peter finally got back to his empty apartment. He felt drained. The bedsheets were still rumpled from Anne’s last night there. He collapsed onto the couch instead. Again.
In the grey morning, he ate granola bars mechanically, while he searched the apartment once more like an idiot. She was still gone. His whole life was a bruise. Was this how Dad had felt, after Mom? They’d never really talked about it. And now, Dad seemed normal.
Peter looked up, emerging from dark thoughts, and was surprised to find himself most of the way to work. The outdoor crowd, as he thought of them now, might be sleeping in, to appear later in the bright morning. Or maybe they would not appear again. Their litter was everywhere. Blankets. Water bottles.
Doug greeted him effusively. “I’m so glad you’re back! Just in time! Ha ha!”
About half of the developers’ seats were vacant. “Just in time for what, Doug?”
Re-org. Peter was being promoted to project manager. He had no idea what that meant, but soon learned that it meant meetings. In his first meeting he found out the company was pivoting into a new area: provisioning server farms. He’d be doing more traveling, meeting with contractors, lawyers, elected officials. The whole dev team was being re-trained for a different technology stack. All that time he’d spent re-reading his book, and now they would be doing something different. It scared him. He was now one of the most capable knowledge-workers in his company. He felt wholly inadequate.
The novelty kept him distracted, but at his first major break, he couldn’t think of anything but Anne. It was only fifteen minutes’ walk to campus from work. He went looking for Thomas. His office was unlocked, serenely lit by the big windows. The engineering building loomed like a cliff to the left of his view and would block the direct sun for another hour or so. Thomas’s desk was still littered with those index cards. He might not have been back since that night. Peter turned to go, feeling lost. Now what?
His gaze dropped to the litter of cards on the desk, intending to survey the collected wisdom his old friend had distilled from the web. The cards were unreadable. The few words he could make out looked like they were written in Phoenician, or Klingon, but most of the cards had been solidly filled with geometric doodles, obscuring the underlying text. Even in pencil, they were beautiful. Frameable. Something was very wrong.
Then he noticed another man in the shared office, another desk half hidden behind a palisade of bookcases.
“Hello? I’m looking for Thomas. I’m Peter.”
The fellow was typing rapidly at a keyboard. He paused for a moment, without turning or making eye contact. “Not here.”
“Yeah, I can see that. It looks like he’s been out for a while. Any idea what’s going on?”
He turned to face Peter, but looked a bit to the side, still not meeting his gaze. “Your question has multiple possible interpretations. You need to be more specific.”
What the hell. It felt like talking to a computer. A plastic box on a metal bookshelf was labeled “GIORGOS A.”, and he saw the same name sharpied onto the cut pages of a textbook. “Ok. Giorgos, right? Why are people like Thomas going missing? Do you have any idea?”
The pause while Giorgos thought stretched out uncomfortably. Peter was about to try a different tack, but then…
“Padma thinks it’s a virus.”
“Who is Padma?” asked Peter.
“She is my friend. From Dr. Pierre.”
“Dr. Pierre? A medical doctor?”
Giorgos shook his head. “No. He runs our group, on Tuesday nights. At 8:30 PM.”
Peter had a hunch. “A meet-up? Or a support group?”
Nod. “We are learning social skills. But this week he was also missing.”
Asperger’s, maybe. Peter was normally patient, but not today. “Why does she think it’s a virus? And why weren’t you affected?”
Giorgos straightened in his chair. His t-shirt showed a geometry proof, but all the text was Greek. “Mat said she sees virus because she is a microbiologist. He says if it was a virus, it was a very complex one. Intelligence is not localized. Hundreds of genes. Complexity argues for natural selection, but there is no history of progressively more advanced intelligence-virii. QED.”
Peter was about to ask what Mat’s field was, but Giorgos kept speaking.
“I am still not happy that Dr. Pierre was gone. He would have had rules. So everybody wouldn’t talk at the same time. Alex said yes, but the natural selection could have been exogenous. He meant the virus could have been designed, and the complexity came from the natural selection of its designers. Alex is in operations research, which he says means thinking outside the box, and not knowing what to put inside the box if the box is a resume. That’s a joke. So I said if it was designed, there was intensionality. James said that was putting Descartes before the horse. That was supposed to be a joke, but it was just random. He just likes to say that. So what was the intent? And we all had different ideas.”
The flood of words shut off abruptly. Giorgos looked like he was about to turn back to his work.
Peter couldn’t let that happen. “Alex? Mat? Could you call your group to come here and talk about it some more?”
Instead of answering, Giorgos pulled out his phone and entered a text message, very rapidly. He sent it, and soon the phone was buzzing with replies. “They’re coming,” he said, and turned his back on Peter, returning to his interrupted work. Rude, but not on purpose. Peter went over to Thomas’s desk and looked down at the tree-lined street. Were any of those people coming here?
Voices. A man and woman were talking to each other and approaching from the elevators.
“It won’t be Dr. Pierre. He’s gone. Litany!” Her accent was New York City, but softened.
Peter didn’t understand, but then a male voice intoned, “If he is gone, let me believe he is gone. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.” The voice approached, growing louder.
“Close enough,” she said, and the two entered the office and stood there looking at Peter. He could tell they were intelligent, wasn’t sure how. Something in the way they looked at him.
“I’m Peter,” he offered. “That was fast.”
“We work in this building. I’m Mat. This is Anita. Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, slightly stilted, offering a handshake. Then, before unclasping, he looked past Peter and said, “Yiorgos, how many are coming?” Peter let go. It felt weird to be completely ignored by someone who was still gripping his hand.
“Everyone,” said Giorgos, without turning around. “Except Dr. Pierre, of course.”
Anita was still watching Peter. She looked like she’d just discovered something unpleasant in her breakfast.
“What do you call people who aren’t as smart as you?” Peter asked her.
“Normals,” she answered. “We’ll all be here soon. Everyone is close.” She and Mat pulled out their phones and started reading.
‘Everyone’ turned out to be seven people. Alex, Padma, and James showed up. They were waiting for one more person. Michael. But they were supposed to call her Michaela now. Peter felt like an old man in this crowd. They were just kids. Michaela arrived, a little breathless. She’d taken the stairs. She was tall, a little too thin, wearing skin-tight leather pants and matching vest. Alex was math and economics. Mat, physics. James and Michaela, computer science.
They were all looking at Peter, the odd man out, quizzically, arranged around Thomas’s side of the office, leaning against the bookshelves, the desk, and the windowsills. Giorgos rolled his chair closer.
“Hello,” Peter started. “My name is Peter. I’m a ‘Normal’. My girlfriend disappeared. Why do you think that happened?” He usually felt awkward in a group, sure that he was unwittingly committing some social faux pas. But in that respect, he fit in here. Social awkwardness was one thing he would not be judged for.
“A weaponized virus could soften us up for another stratagem?” said Anita, looking at the ceiling tiles as if she was seeing through them, to the stars.
James decided to interpret for Peter. “Anita thinks aliens, because she’s an astronomer.”
Mat answered, “Maybe the medium is the message. And the virus is a form of communication, but also the thing trying to communicate. But we don’t understand the message, so it just makes us crazy.”
“So, why hasn’t it affected you guys?” Peter asked.
Padma’s voice was almost too soft to hear, a precise British-Indian accent. “I don’t know the answer. The Spectrum might have genetic components that interfere with whatever pattern-matching the virus does. But it also has neurophysiological aspects, damage ascribable to childhood disease or neurotoxicity. You know about neurotoxicity?”
Peter decided to nod.
“Good. And we don’t know how a virus could pattern match at that meta-level, when its context is, as we typically assume, entirely the information-theoretic perspective on genetic biochemistry.”
After a polite pause, Peter said, “My company has switched to building server farms. We used to do health-care marketing.” It seemed like a non-sequitur, but this was one of those times when he just said what came to mind, and Anne or Jax would find something deeper in it. He didn’t understand Padma’s explanation. The gist seemed to be that people with Asperger’s spectrum disorder were non-Normal in some way that interfered with the virus.
Giorgos nodded. “We’ve been thinking of the disappearances as a form of recruitment. But maybe it’s simpler than that. Simple subtraction.”
Anita said “Huh?”, and James got a very intense look on his very young face, and said “Connect the dots!”
Giorgos turned his palms up in his lap as if about to receive something. “Who would benefit from removing society’s least-predictable, most disruptive members? Who would also want to scale up the compute capacity of the world? Where can you find complexity that is not the slow product of natural selection at the genome or techno levels?” Peter was impressed at everything being tied together.
James saw it first. “Oh crap.” Immediately, Michaela said, “Fuck meeee” in an incongruous baritone.
Everyone was looking at them, thinking, I didn’t know the answer. But they know the answer. Oh. Now I know the answer. Peter still had no clue. “Sorry, you’ve lost me.”
Giorgos, emboldened by having his speculation reinforced by everyone, explained. “Sneaky foom. Somewhere in the world we’ve recently had a Bostrom event. An artificial intelligence, an AI, has become self-modifying, has become superintelligent. Foom. But it decided to lay low and not advertise the new world order.”
“What is the new world order?” asked Peter, feeling a sense of unreality.
James took over. “A super AI can solve really hard problems. Way faster than humans or groups of humans. From our traditional perspective, literally anything seems possible. So we’re thinking it decided to engineer a virus that would target a certain kind of mind. That’s a whole sackful of hard problems rolled into one. How do minds differ at a level discernible to biochemistry and genetics? How can you engineer a virus for a new and specific effect? If it’s a search problem, the search space is unbelievably huge.”
Michaela interjected, “There are precedents. That fungus that takes over ants’ brains and makes them climb to the top of the grass so they can be eaten by cows. Or some toxoplasmosis that makes rats, or people who own cats, fearless. It’s very sad.”
“Michaela has way too many cats,” said James.
No one else spoke. Peter heard his own heartbeat. Anita looked up at the stars, once untouchable. No longer.
“Can we stop it? What will it do?” he asked, finally.
Apparently, his question was the ultimate buzz-kill, because they all just stared gloomily ahead and said nothing. After a bit, Giorgos said, “Its mind may be as un-knowable to us as string theory to a dog. A key category of people was targeted. We assume the reason was something to do with the attributes of that group – disruptive, creative, a possible threat to the AI’s plans. But in the real world, super-smart people have a pretty small impact. Most innovation, and nearly all the work of keeping society running, is done by normals. Maybe people with high G-factor intelligence made a good experimental population. It was practice. Which gives us a clue to how to answer the question, ‘What will it do?’”
“What if we stop building server farms? Sabotage the generators? Try to return to a pre-industrial way of life?” Peter was grasping at straws. “Or maybe we could get away.”
Alex shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s probably listening on every smartphone. And if we gum up the works for it in one place, it will outmaneuver us, easily. There’s no place on the Earth that would be safe. And setting up a viable society somewhere else in space is beyond us. I don’t see a way.”
Everyone moved towards the door. Even Giorgos.
“Wait! Where is everybody going?”
James paused and gave Peter a surprisingly compassionate look. “Sneaky foom.”
Grief. She was just…gone. Envy. He wished he was smarter. But that was stupid. Fear. What was going to happen? Irrationally, he had the feeling that Mom would have known what to do. He called his dad.
Two days later, the two men watched the sun and clouds enact their dance of colors at day’s end, drinking Dad’s home-brew on his deck with a view over the lake, and talking about how Mom would have wanted to paint it. This part of the world seemed unchanged, but change would come sooner rather than later. The end of history. Peter felt the way he had when she died. Something so huge, so impossible to get his arms around, deserved a huge memorial by the universe. The sun should turn black. The earth should heave itself to broken chasms. But lakes still sparkled. Loons still cried at dusk. His heart kept beating. And maybe it wasn’t the end; it just felt that way because he couldn’t imagine the other side.
Change was coming. They would meet it together.
© 2026 Michael Scholtes All rights reserved.
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