Note: I am co-hosting an event in SF on Friday, Jan 16th.

In 1654, a Jesuit polymath named Athanasius Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus, a comprehensive geography of the Earth’s interior. It had maps and illustrations and rivers of fire and vast subterranean oceans and air channels connecting every volcano on the planet. He wrote that “the whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.”. Alongside comments like this, Athanasius identified the legendary lost island of Atlantis, pondered where one could find the remains of giants, and detailed the kinds of animals that lived in this lower world, including dragons. The book was based entirely on secondhand accounts, like travelers tales, miners reports, classical texts, so it was as comprehensive as it could’ve possibly been.

But Athanasius had never been underground and neither had anyone else, not really, not in a way that mattered.

Today, I am in San Francisco, the site of the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and it feels a lot like Mundus Subterraneus.

There is ostensibly plenty of evidence to believe that the conference exists, that it actually occurs between January 12, 2026 to January 16, 2026 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, 335 Powell Street, San Francisco, and that it has done so for the last forty-four years, just like everyone has told you. There is a website for it, there are articles about it, there are dozens of AI-generated posts on Linkedin about how excited people were about it. But I have never met anyone who has actually been inside the conference.

I have never been approached by one, or seated next to one, or introduced to one. They do not appear in my life. They do not appear in anyone’s life that I know. I have put my boots on the ground to rectify this, and asked around, first casually and then less casually, “Do you know anyone who has attended the JPM conference?”, and then they nod, and then I refine the question to be, “No, no, like, someone who has actually been in the physical conference space”, then they look at me like I’ve asked if they know anyone who’s been to the moon. They know it happens. They assume someone goes. Not them, because, just like me, ordinary people like them do not go to the moon, but rather exist around the moon, having coffee chats and organizing little parties around it, all while trusting that the moon is being attended to.

The conference has six focuses: AI in Drug Discovery and Development, AI in Diagnostics, AI for Operational Efficiency, AI in Remote and Virtual Healthcare, AI and Regulatory Compliance, and AI Ethics and Data Privacy. There is also a seventh theme over ‘Keynote Discussions’, the three of which are The Future of AI in Precision Medicine, Ethical AI in Healthcare, and Investing in AI for Healthcare. Somehow, every single thematic concept at this conference has converged onto artificial intelligence as the only thing worth seriously discussing.

Isn’t this strange? Surely, you must feel the same thing as me, the inescapable suspicion that the whole show is being put on by an unconscious Chinese Room, its only job to pass over semi-legible symbols over to us with no regards as to what they actually mean. In fact, this pattern is consistent across not only how the conference communicates itself, but also how biopharmaceutical news outlets discuss it.

Each year, Endpoints News and STAT and BioCentury and FiercePharma all publish extensive coverage of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. I have read the articles they have put out, and none of it feels like it was written by someone who actually was at the event. There is no emotional energy, no personal anecdotes, all of it has been removed, shredded into one homogeneous, smoothie-like texture. The coverage contains phrases like “pipeline updates” and “strategic priorities” and “catalysts expected in the second half.” If the writers of these articles ever approach a human-like tenor, it is in reference to the conference’s “tone”. The tone is “cautiously optimistic.” The tone is “more subdued than expected.” The tone is “mixed.” What does this mean? What is a mixed tone? What is a cautiously optimistic tone? These are not descriptions of a place. They are more accurately descriptions of a sentiment, abstracted from any physical reality, hovering somewhere above the conference like a weather system.

I could write this coverage. I could write it from my horrible apartment in New York City, without attending anything at all. I could say: “The tone at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference was cautiously optimistic, with executives expressing measured enthusiasm about near-term catalysts while acknowledging macroeconomic headwinds.” I made that up in fifteen seconds. Does it sound fake? It shouldn’t, because it sounds exactly like the coverage of a supposedly real thing that has happened every year for the last forty-four years.

Speaking of the astral body I mentioned earlier, there is an interesting historical parallel to draw there. In 1835, the New York Sun published a series of articles claiming that the astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Bat-winged humanoids, unicorns, temples made of sentient sapphire, that sort of stuff. The articles were detailed, describing not only these creatures appearance, but also their social behaviors and mating practices. All of these cited Herschel’s observations through a powerful new telescope. The series was a sensation. It was also, obviously, a hoax, the Great Moon Hoax as it came to be known. Importantly, the hoax worked not because the details were plausible, but because they had the energy of genuine reporting: Herschel was a real astronomer, and telescopes were real, and the moon was real, so how could any combination that involved these three be fake?

To clarify: I am not saying the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is a hoax.

What I am saying is that I, nor anybody, can tell the difference between the conference coverage and a very well-executed hoax. Consider that the Great Moon Hoax was walking a very fine tightrope between giving the appearance of seriousness, while also not giving away too many details that’d let the cat out of the bag. Here, the conference rhymes.

For example: photographs. You would think there would be photographs. The (claimed) conference attendees number in the thousands, many of them with smartphones, all of them presumably capable of pointing a camera at a thing and pressing a button. But the photographs are strange, walking that exact snickering line that the New York Sun walked. They are mostly photographs of the outside of the Westin St. Francis, or they are photographs of people standing in front of step-and-repeat banners, or they are photographs of the schedule, displayed on a screen, as if to prove that the schedule exists. But photographs of the inside with the panels, audience, the keynotes in progress; these are rare. And when I do find them, they are shot from angles that reveal nothing, that could be anywhere, that could be a Marriott ballroom in Cleveland.

Is this a conspiracy theory? You can call it that, but I have a very professional online presence, so I personally wouldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t even say that the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is not real, but rather that it is real, but not actually materially real.

To explain what I mean, we can rely on economist Thomas Schelling to help us out. Sixty-six years ago, Schelling proposed a thought experiment: if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go? The answer, for most people, is Grand Central Station, at noon. Not because Grand Central Station is special. Not because noon is special. But because everyone knows that everyone else knows that Grand Central Station at noon is the obvious choice, and this mutual knowledge of mutual knowledge is enough to spontaneously produce coordination out of nothing. This, Grand Central Station and places just like it, are what’s known as a Schelling point.

Schelling points appear when they are needed, burnt into our genetic code, Pleistocene subroutines running on repeat, left over from when we were small and furry and needed to know, without speaking, where the rest of the troop would be when the leopards came. The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, on the second week of January, every January, Westin St. Francis, San Francisco, is what happened when that ancient coordination instinct was handed an industry too vast and too abstract to organize by any other means. Something deep drives us to gather here, at this time, at this date.

To preempt the obvious questions: I don’t know why this particular location or time or demographic were chosen. I especially don’t know why J.P. Morgan of all groups was chosen to organize the whole thing. All of this simply is.

If you find any of this hard to believe, observe that the whole event is, structurally, a religious pilgrimage, and has all the quirks you may expect of a religious pilgrimage. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor, I mean it literally, in every dimension except the one where someone official admits it, and J.P. Morgan certainly won’t.

Consider the elements. A specific place, a specific time, an annual cycle, a journey undertaken by the faithful, the presence of hierarchy and exclusion, the production of meaning through ritual rather than content. The hajj requires Muslims to circle the Kaaba seven times. The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference requires devotees of the biopharmaceutical industry to slither into San Francisco for five days, nearly all of them—in my opinion, all of them—never actually entering the conference itself, but instead orbiting it, circumambulating it, taking coffee chats in its gravitational field. The Kaaba is a cube containing, according to tradition, nothing, an empty room, the holiest empty room in the world. The Westin St. Francis is also, roughly, a cube. I am not saying these are the same thing. I am saying that we have, as a species, a deep and unexamined relationship to cubes.

This is my strongest theory so far. That the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference isn’t exactly real or unreal, but a mass-coordination social contract that has been unconsciously signed by everyone in this industry, transcending the need for an underlying referent.

My skeptical readers will protest at this, and they would be correct to do so. The story I have written out is clean, but it cannot be fully correct. Thomas Schelling was not so naive as to believe that Schelling points spontaneously generate out of thin air, there is always a reason, a specific, grounded reason, that their concepts become the low-energy metaphysical basins that they are. Grand Central Station is special because of the cultural gravitas it has accumulated through popular media. Noon is special because that is when the sun reaches its zenith. The Kaaba was worshipped because it was not some arbitrary cube; the cube itself was special, that it contained The Black Stone, set into the eastern corner, a relic that predates Islam itself, that some traditions claim fell from heaven.

And there are signs, if you know where to look, that the underlying referent for the Westin St. Francis status being a gathering area is physical. Consider the heat. It is January in San Francisco, usually brisk, yet the interior of the Westin St. Francis maintains a distinct, humid microclimate. Consider the low-frequency vibration in the lobby that ripples the surface of water glasses, but doesn’t seem to register on local, public seismographs. There is something about the building itself that feels distinctly alien. But, upon standing outside the building for long enough, you’ll have the nagging sensation that it is not something about the hotel that feels off, but rather, what lies within, underneath, and around the hotel.

There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart. And that this is the primary organizing focal point for both the location and entire reason for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

I believe that the hotel maintains dozens of meter-thick polyvinyl chloride plastic tubes that have been threaded down through the basement, through the bedrock, through geological strata, and into the cardiovascular system of something that has been lying beneath the Pacific coast since before the Pacific coast existed. That the hotel is a singular, thirty-two story central line. That, during the week of the conference, hundreds of gallons of drugs flow through these tubes, into the pulsating mass of the being, pouring down arteries the size of canyons across California. The dosing takes five days; hence the length of the conference.

And I do not believe that the drugs being administered here are simply sedatives. They are, in fact, the opposite of sedatives. The drugs are keeping the thing beneath California alive. There is something wrong with the creature, and a select group of attendees at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference have become its primary caretakers.

Why? The answer is obvious: there is nothing good that can come from having an organic creature that spans hundreds of thousands of square miles suddenly die, especially if that same creatures mass makes up a substantial portion of the fifth-largest economy on the planet, larger than India, larger than the United Kingdom, larger than most countries that we think of as significant. Maybe letting the nation slide off into the sea was an option at one point, but not anymore. California produces more than half of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the United States. California produces the majority of the world’s entertainment. California produces the technology that has restructured human communication. Nobody can afford to let the whole thing collapse.

So, perhaps it was decided that California must survive, at least for as long as possible. Hence Amgen. Hence Genentech. Hence the entire biotech revolution, which we are taught to understand as a triumph of science and entrepreneurship, a story about venture capital and recombinant DNA and the genius of the California business climate. The story is not false, but incomplete. The reason for the revolution was, above all else, because the creature needed medicine, and the old methods of making medicine were no longer adequate, and someone decided that the only way to save the patient was to create an entire industry dedicated to its care.

Why is drug development so expensive? Because the real R&D costs are for the primary patient, the being underneath California, and human applications are an afterthought, a way of recouping investment. Why do so many clinical trials fail? For the same reason; the drugs are not meant for our species. Why is the industry concentrated in San Francisco, San Diego, Boston? Because these are monitoring stations, places where other intravenous lines have been drilled into other organs, other places where the creature surfaces close enough to reach.

Finally, consider the hotel itself. The Westin St. Francis was built in 1904, and, throughout its entire existence, it has never, ever, even once, closed or stopped operating. The 1906 earthquake leveled most of San Francisco, and the Westin St. Francis did not fall. It was damaged, yes, but it did not fall. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake killed sixty-three people and collapsed a section of the Bay Bridge. Still, the Westin St. Francis did not fall. It cannot fall, because if it falls, the central line is severed, and if the central line is severed, the creature dies, and if the creature dies, we lose California, and if we lose California, our civilization loses everything that California has been quietly holding together. And so the Westin St. Francis has hosted every single J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference since 1983, has never missed one, has never even come close to missing one, and will not miss the next one, or the one after that, or any of the ones that follow.

If you think about it, this all makes a lot of sense. It may also seem very unlikely, but unlikely things have been known to happen throughout history. Mundus Subterraneus had a section on the “seeds of metals,” a theory that gold and silver grew underground like plants, sprouting from mineral seeds in the moist, oxygen-poor darkness. This was wrong, but the intuition beneath it was not entirely misguided. We now understand that the Earth’s mantle is a kind of eternal engine of astronomical size, cycling matter through subduction zones and volcanic systems, creating and destroying crust. Athanasius was wrong about the mechanism, but right about the structure. The earth is not solid. It is everywhere gaping, hollowed with empty rooms, and it is alive.

Note: I spent my holidays writing a bunch of biology-adjacent, nontechnical pieces. I’ll intermittently mix them between whatever technical thing I send out, much like how a farmer may mix sawdust into feed, or a compounding pharmacist, butter into bathtub-created semaglutide. This one is about history!

The book ‘Death with Interruptions’ is a 2005 speculative fiction novel written by Portuguese author José Saramago. It is about how, mysteriously, on January 1st of an unnamed year in an unnamed country, death ceases to occur. Everyone, save the Catholic church, is initially very delighted with this. But as expected, the natural order collapses, and several Big Problems rear their ugly heads. I recommend reading it in full, but the synopsis is all I need to mention.

The situation described by José is obviously impossible. Cells undergo apoptosis to keep tissues healthy; immune systems kill off infected or malfunctioning cells; predators and prey form a food chain that only works because things end.

But what you may find interesting is that what exactly happens after death has not always been so clear-cut. Not the religious aspect, but the so-called thanatomicrobiome—the community of microbes that colonize and decompose a body after death—is not necessarily a given. And there is some evidence that, for a very, very long time, it simply did not exist at all. Perhaps for much of the planets lifetime, the earth was a graveyard of pristine corpses, forests of bodies, oceans of carcasses, a world littered with the indigestible dead.

Implausible, yes, but there is some evidence for it: the writings of a young apprentice scribe, aged fifteen, named Ninsikila-Enlil who was born in 1326 BCE and lived at a temple in ancient Babylon. Ninsikila-Enlil kept a diary, inscribed in tight, spiraling cuneiform on long clay tablets. In these tablets is his daily life, which primarily consisted of performing religious rituals for what has been loosely translated as the ‘Pit of Eternal Rest’. The purpose of this pit was precisely what the name implies: to store the deceased. It is, from the writings, unclear how deep the hole went, only that it was mentioned to be monstrously deep, so deep that centuries of bodies being slid down into it continued to slip into the nearly liquid darkness, sounds of their eventual impact never rising back to the surface.

But a particular curiosity were the bodies themselves.

Here I shall present two passages from Ninsikila’s writings, the first from early in his service, the second from a year later. The former is as follows:

The bodies wait in the preparation hall for seven days before consignment. I am permitted to visit after the second washing. My mother’s mother has been waiting for three days. She is the same as the day she passed. [The chief priest?] says the gods have made a gift of flesh. That it will remain this way even after she enters the pit. Her hands were always cracked from work, and they are still cracked.

There are many, many other paragraphs through his tablets that parallel this. An amber-like preservation is referenced repeatedly, described variously as “the stillness of resins,” or “flesh locked in golden sap.” But, later, Ninsikila put down the first observation of something new occurring amongst the bodies that wait to be placed in the pit. The second writing is this:

The wool-merchant [deposited?] on the third of Nisannu, and had been waiting for some time now. I pressed his chest and the flesh moved inward and did not return. Fluid on my hand. A smell I have not encountered before. Small, ebony things in his eyes, moving. I washed with būrtu-water seven times. I do not know what this is.

Rot, decomposition, it seemed, had finally arrived to a world that had not yet made room for it.

We know from Ninsikila writings that the wisest of the period, in search of what could have caused this, posited that the whole world had been tricked. That the flesh had once made a pact with time to remain eternally perfect, and time, in its naivety, had agreed. But something in the ink, some theorized, had curdled. Some insects had crawled across the tablet while the covenant was still wet, dragging one word into another and rendering the entire contract void.

Of course, it is worth raising some doubt at this. Ninsikila is a child, albeit clearly an erudite one, and would be prone to some flights of fantasy. How could we trust his retelling of the story? Unfortunately, we cannot, not fully, at least if our standard of proof here is having multiple, corroborating writings from the same period. But what we do have is historical evidence, or, at least, what some have argued is corroborating historical evidence.

Just a month after the initial finding of decomposition, Ninsikila writings cease. Moreover, this ending coincided with beginnings of the Hittite plague, an epidemic that, depending on which Assyriologist you consult, began somewhere between 1322 and 1324 BCE. And there is proof to suggest the fact that the true geographic foundations of the plague were, in fact, at the exact site of the pile of bodies watched over by Ninsikila. Some historians will protest at this, claiming that the Hittite plague was primarily a disease of the Anatolian heartland, far removed from Babylonian temple complexes. They will point to the well-documented military campaigns, the movement of prisoners of war.

But they all fail to account for, during the years in which the plague is believed to have started, there were multiple independent corroborations of the the skies of Babylon turning nearly ebony with flies, a canopy so dense it shaded the temple courtyards and drowned out religious chants with its own droning liturgy—a wet, collective susurration, the sound of ten billion small mouths working. The air turned syrupy, clinging to the skin, the foulness so thick it could nearly be chewed, metallic and rotten-fruit sweet. And the closer one got to Babylon, the more it drowned them beneath this sensory weight. We have records from a trade caravan whose leader—a merchant of salted fish and copper ingots—noted in his ledger that he could smell the city three days before he could see it. At one day’s distance, taste it, the foulness nearly making him retch.

The concentration of bodies in the Babylonian pile was higher than it had ever been not just in Babylon, not just in Mesopotamia, but in the entire known world. Tens of thousands of bodies stacked, pressed, pooled together in heat and humidity; an unprecedented density of biological matter that, prior to the centuries-long effort to gather it together, had never existed. Is it not possible that in this particular place, in the wet anaerobic environment, that new forms of life emerged? It feels obvious to posit that something was created here, something that consumed the pile, infected the air, and gorged itself on so much biological matter that it survives to this day, still swimming in our land and oceans.

Ninsikila-Enlil’s final entry is not particularly illuminating, but what is worth mentioning is where his resting place lies. Ninsikila was born with a birth defect: his sternum never fused, a fact we know from his writings. A soft hollow where his chest should have been, the bones bowing outward like the peeled halves of a pomegranate, exposing a quivering pouch of skin that pulsed visibly with his heartbeat. He noted that his priest-physicians, embarrassed, called it a divine aperture. His mother bound the hollow in layers of linen and never spoke of it again.

This is important, since it allowed us to place Ninsikila’s skeleton, which lies not at the top of the pile—as one may expect of a child succumbing to disease—but near the bottom. Endless bodies lay above him, centuries of death, likely nearly liquified when he encountered them. But his position is not passive, rather, his arms are outstretched, fingers cracked and blackened, the bones of his hands splintered at the ends, as though he had clawed his way down through thousands of corpses. Ninsikila was a child of God, born into the priesthood, spent his short life in faithful rituals to the divine, and it is perhaps only expected that his final moments were in desperate excavation, believing that somewhere below, at the base, lay the answer as to what had been corrupted, and whether it could be undone.

While I’m busy rectifying that situation, I’ve decided to simply take the stories I’ve written about my own life—which I frequently post to both Substack Notes and Xwitter—and compile those into an article. You won’t learn anything from reading these, but I think most of them are fun, very short reads. Nothing here is fake and everything below is something that actually happened. The last few ones have pictures too!

1. Shorter stories

   1. Truther

   2. Clinic

   3. Derealization

   4. Intimidation

   5. Purple

2. Longer stories

   1. Venture

   2. Bean

   3. Time

   4. Pamphlet

   5. Pastrami

   6. Eczema

Shorter stories

Truther

Last year, I went to a bar night organized by someone off of r/nycmeetups. At the event, I started talking to a stranger, as one is supposed to do at these sorts of things. After telling him that I work in biotech, he proudly asked if I knew that the government doesn’t want us to cure cancer, because cancer is what makes the pharmaceutical industry exist. He cited a specific doctor in history who cured cancer in the 1980’s and was promptly jailed for it. I, very upset with myself for having left the apartment, decided to look up this apocryphal scientist on my phone and discovered that it was not a doctor, but a Honduran herbalist who claimed to have cured not only cancer, but also AIDS, through something called the 'African Bio-Electric Cell Food Therapy'. He was not jailed for this, but was sued in court for practicing medicine without a license, and later died in prison from pneumonia, having been arrested on suspicions of money laundering

The stranger waved it off and said the real story is hidden. I told him that the base thesis isn’t even true, child leukemia cure rates have gone massively up in the last few decades. He then smugly asked me whether adult leukemia rates have improved at the same rate, and I was caught off guard by this very schizophrenic individual having a coherent rebuttal in defense of his incoherent worldview

Clinic

I wanted to be a lot of things when I was in high-school, but one thing that was high up on the list was being a psychiatrist. I was obsessed with the idea. I expressed this desire to almost everyone in my life, and, as it happened, one of my friends moms happened to be a psychiatrist and offered to have me shadow in on sessions where the patient consented.

I leapt at this idea. So, once a week, I would go down to a local practice with her, and listen in during her consults. During the first session I sat in on, a father and his two children came in, one girl and a boy, both of whom seemed much too young to be in an office like this. Weird, I thought. The father said things are going well, no further incidents. My friends mom nodded and asked a few basic follow up questions about the emotional state of the girl. Everything was fine. She nodded again and said next month?. Then the family left, the whole thing lasted less than 15 minutes.

Afterwards, I asked my friends mom what the deal was with them? She nonchalantly told me that the daughter is schizophrenic and keeps trying to kill her brother. At least, she proudly said, until we found medication that works for her. I, stunned, asked if the daughter will ever get better. Probably not, she responded, severe cases usually don’t.

The next patient came in. A man in his mid-20’s. He said the pills aren’t helping with his suicidal impulses. The mom asked him if he was taking his pills. The man sheepishly admitted that he wasn’t. She then looked over to me with the same face that Jim Halpert gave to the camera on The Office when something ridiculous happened

Derealization

Last day in San Francisco!

During this trip, I met so many people that, for the first time ever, I finally understood what people mean when they say that their nervous system is dysregulated. I once had 4 ‘coffee chats’ in one day and downed a full latte during each one. By the fourth meeting, I could feel myself actively disassociating into the endless nuclear ether, the other persons words falling like honey across my increasingly smooth brain. I nervously asked if we could step outside, I think I need a little bit of air. They smiled and told me yes, of course, just give me a second, I need to use the bathroom.

They went. And I waited and waited and waited and they never came back. After thirty minutes, I realized I had forgotten their name, forgotten their face, and the Google Calendar invite had only me as an invite. Who had I met with? Who had I spent the last hour talking to? I could feel my brain stem unraveling. I slowly approached the bathroom door and turned the handle. It was unlocked. The being I had met with was inside, their entire body turned into mass of fizzling static, blurring as it swayed from back and forth. Hey man, it said, still up for that walk? I think I have to head home, I responded, but it was really great to chat. Likewise, it screeched, lets keep in touch

Intimidation

I recently met a founder named Chenxi Li, who runs a brain-computer-interface (BCI) startup. I really liked her company, because it was one of the few BCI startups that operated through proof by intimidation. Proof by intimidation is a proof technique occasionally used in mathematics, where a statement is considered true because either the person asserting it is so terrifyingly intelligent or the proof itself is so baroque that no one wants to be the first to admit they don’t understand it. Chenxi employed both when running her company, which is something you don’t often see in the life-sciences world, so she was really a pioneer here.

She herself was prestiged beyond comprehension: MIT dropout, Thiel Fellow, visiting scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, and had once been invited to speak at Davos at age nineteen. She was extremely, extremely autistic—not a judgement, but rather the first thing she said to me—and she had T-rex arms throughout the entire conversation.She was building a portable, non-invasive neural stimulation device in hopes of enhancing the speed of muscle memory acquisition, but nobody quite understood how it worked, yet she’d managed to get contracts with the NBA, NFL, and the United States Air Force.

After introductions, I asked Chenxi how exactly they were able to compress the stimulation device to be so small without causing heat issues, and she said that it relies on the Hardy–Littlewood prime tuples conjecture. Then she paused and asked me if I knew what that was. I said Littlewood…that’s the guy who worked a lot with Ramanujan, right?. She smiled and said yes, yes he did. Her arms crept up a bit higher

Purple

I was living in Glendale, California when AVENGERS:ENDGAME was released. I was one year out of undergrad. The only interesting fact about Glendale is that it has the highest Armenian population in the world outside of Armenia. I think living somewhere as bleak as that does strange things to one’s mind. I was living with a stranger, also a recent graduate. We both sat inside our individual rooms all day and played video games and never talked to each other. The only time we’d spoken after the move-in day was him telling me that he was joining a Korean church so he could make more friends.

You’re Korean? I asked. They don’t really check, he responded. It felt too awkward to talk after that.

But AVENGERS:ENDGAME felt like it was my chance to really make a friend. The cinema event of a lifetime! It would pair bond us. We’d look back on this moment decades later, and laugh at how that movie catalyzed everything. So I invited him out to watch it. He agreed.

It was pretty good! After we left the theatre, I asked him what he thought. He said he liked it, but was confused as to why Thanos was purple. What do you mean? I said. He’s purple, right? Why? It’s never explained. I nodded. I suppose it wasn’t

Longer stories

Venture

I recently went to a party, and it was very, very cold. So, after an hour of shivering around and holding a drink that I never drank, I decided to leave.

But on the way out, a woman collided with me, a women dressed head to toe in Rick Owens. I looked closely. Her shoes were Geobaskets, $1325. Pants were Creatch Cargos, $1675. Shirt, a Level Tee, $415. Incredible. I asked for her name. It was Emily Maddow. I asked her what she was working on and she told me that she’s a general partner at Candle Ventures, a deeptech venture firm investing in “companies building at the edge of epistemic legibility.” She said this with a deep sense of excitement, clearly eager for me to ask the obvious follow-up question to such a bizarre statement. I pondered to myself. I didn’t really care about epistemics or legibility or whatever lie in the intersection of two, and the personality behind the Rick Owens fit was not as interesting as I’d hoped it be. But it felt impolite to leave right now. And the room was still really, really cold and each second of not talking or interpreting what someone was saying made me feel colder, so I said, Oh, how interesting, what does that mean?

The words fell out of her mouth. She said to me that most venture firms only fund what she called “consensus science,” which meant anything that already had a Wikipedia page. Candle, on the other hand, invested ideas that couldn’t be evaluated yet because the language to evaluate them hadn’t been invented. We’re interested in the kind of biology that feels like mysticism now but will be standard by 2040, she said. We look for founders who are premature rather than wrong. I nodded, mostly to stay warm. Her intonation had the charismatic warmth of someone who regularly attended Chatham House rules parties at Airbnbs shaped like shipping containers. But there was something crueler there, something unique to her and her alone. It sounded like Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance of Smaug in the Hobbit films; deep and ancient with hatred playing at the ends of it. I did not like those movies, but I did like the voice.

Cold was setting in again. I needed to keep things moving.

I took a deep breath and said, Isn’t that every venture firm? Isn’t everyone interested in finding premature ideas before the price of investing shoots up? I’ve never quite understood why everyone keeps trying to aggressively distinguish themselves. At a certain point it starts to feel like narcissism of small differences. Does that make sense? Everyone wants to invest in smart people doing interesting things. I don’t know. It feels like a lot of theatre sometimes. And this all isn’t to say that VC is bad. I think VC is great. But why have this elaborate performance around it? Why not just invest in people you like and not even talk about what your own personal sense of esoteric taste is?

She stared at me, long and hard, and then glanced down at my glass, still full. You should drink that, she said. It’ll help with the cold. It’s got niacin. I finally did take a sip and my cheeks flushed with heat. She was right. But by the time I had looked up, Emily was nowhere to be seen, only a small pile of ash left where she was standing.

The history of spontaneous combustion is somewhat fuzzy and mostly relegated to the outer provinces of 19th-century tabloid science, alongside mesmerism, orgone energy, and the idea that lightning could rearrange your personality if it hit you just right. But I’ve always found it curious how consistently the bodies left behind are described: untouched surroundings, the chair left intact, shoes perfectly preserved, just a small cone of human residue where a person used to be. Which is all to say: I don’t think she burst into flames, but I think it’d make for a more exciting world if she had

Bean

One of the cleverest men I ever met was Chinedu Okafor, a forty-seven year old Nigerian man, so tall and thin that he seemed designed by someone who understood the concept of height but not mass. He was six-foot-eight, and seemed to grow a couple of inches every month. I once joked with them that he was like the character Bean from Ender’s Game, but he did not recognize the book, and did not like the insinuation that he resembled a legume.

Chinedu ran a machine-learning protein engineering startup called Slate Bio. Slate Bio was interesting, because it wasn’t really a machine-learning protein engineering startup, but rather a hedge fund. Chinedu had previously worked in public equities for two decades, and started Slate Bio when he realized that the field was at an interesting inflection point. One, the rate of return in biotech was astonishingly bad. Two, venture firms were desperately funding fund AI-using biotechs out of hopes that one of them will reverse the trend of returns being astonishingly bad. Three, raising money for a traditional long/short fund had become an elaborate form of humiliation.

Thus, the thesis for Slate was formed.

They operated a very small wet lab out of South San Francisco which churned out extremely insignificant PNAS papers with grandiose titles like De Novo Peptide Hallucinations via Dual-Encoder Diffusion Priors and Anisotropic Signal Denoising for Next-Generation Binding Prediction, using them to raise their next round, which occurred at the extraordinarily fast pace of every 6 months, all from a select group of venture capitalists who cared less about the returns of their business, but rather how it made them look at cocktail parties. A small pittance of the money was allocated, by Chinedu, to the lab, while the remainder was handed over to Singaporean quants on cocaine to trade on. Their 11% IRR wouldn’t impress most hedge funds, but they weren’t being judged against hedge funds. They were being judged against biotech. So, by virtue of having made money at all, Slate Bio was considered a visionary.

Chinedu had become fabulously wealthy off of this, and it was the most honest thing he’d ever built in his entire life

Time

I did not like my college. But, like everyone who goes to college, I maintained a secret hope that, at some point during my time there, that there would be an intense moment of clarification—one so extraordinary that it could really only be stumbled across only once per lifetime and only during this crucial period—upon which the tension I had held in my face for eighteen years would finally release. Many of my social activities during that time revolved around this search. Everything was okay to do, because I was searching for something deeper. This came to a head when a person I'd barely ever talked to before messaged me at 1AM to ask if I wanted to go to “Buc-ee’s” with him.

Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas stations scattered around the American South, and everyone in Texas loves showing them to people who are not from Texas. The primary draw of the place is twofold: very clean bathrooms, and cheap fudge. This was enough to make it a hit location for undergraduates in Dallas to spend time in.

But I was scared. I had said less than a few dozen words to this person, ever. Why would I go with him to Buc-ees at such a late hour? What if he kills me and eats me? I didn’t think he would; I knew that he was a devout Christian and I was certain that the Bible had rules against this sort of thing. But you never know. But this, I decided, is what Life demanded: you need to take chances if you’re going to learn anything interesting. Just in case, I brought pepper spray with me. I responded to his message with yes, lets go, super excited to buy some fudge. Yeah, he responded, so am I.

I don’t remember what me and him talked about that night. But what I do remember is that in the third stall of the Buc-ee’s mens bathroom, sharpie’d into the back of the stall door, there was a drawing of someone who looked an awful lot like me, with the words ‘time waits for no one’ above it. It feels narcissistic to say, but I don't think that is necessarily true, at least not for me. I believed that time would wait for me, perhaps only me, because I wanted it to so badly, so much more than anyone else. In the years since this incident occurring, this belief has ended up being a mixed bag, but more correct than I think anyone would’ve naively assumed

Pamphlet

A few months back, I attended a ‘biotech happy hour’ in New York City. At the event, I met a man named Nazir Stackhouse—a name, I later learned, is likely fake but does match that of a college football defensive tackle—and he smelled like figs. Nazir was trembling near the cash bar when I started talking to him, an opened Adderall bottle lay near his fingers, which he dipped into every 40 seconds, assuring to himself that they haven’t yet vanished. Hello, I said perhaps too excitedly, what dose are you on?, pointing to the bottle. His eyes filled with greed and fear. None, he nonchalantly vibrated, I'm holding these for a friend. I wondered if he had any friends.

I asked him what his background was in. He lit up and said cancer. I lit up too and said no way, I also work at a cancer company. He began to massage the Adderall pills even harder. Anti or pro, he asked me. What? I responded. Anti or pro, he repeated. Isn’t everyone anti? I nervously said back.

He said no, not everyone. And that it was quite a shame that I'd so outright dismiss the other side. What exactly, I said, growing increasingly disoriented, is the pro side? He took a pamphlet out of his coat pocket and showed it to me. On it were cartoon graphics surrounding the headline text, which read ‘CANCER WANTS TO LIVE JUST AS MUCH AS YOU DO’.

Now, he said as I was still digesting the situation, have you heard of utilitarianism? I suddenly felt nauseous and excused myself to the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I sat on the toilet seat and watched as his fingers reached in from underneath the door, his body somehow contorting, eventually liquifying into a blackened substance to fit through. Almost in a trance, I stared as Nazir reformed his body from the goo, bones cracking into place, blood vessels gently lacing his muscle.

He told me that it’s fine if I wasn’t interested, but that the pamphlets are costly and I should return them back if I'm not going to learn anything from them. I nodded and handed it back. You’re very rude, he huffed as his body disappeared back underneath the door. Later, I looked up the printing cost of high-end pamphlets, finding that they can run up to $12 dollars each. That is is far, far more expensive than I would’ve naively guessed, which I guess is why you don’t see as many pamphlets these days. Refinement culture and all

Pastrami

A week ago, I saw a cockroach. It was a big one and I, after much terror, succeeded in crushing it with a shoe. But the first blow was not enough; I did it again, and again, and again, until there was no cockroach at all, but rather a smear of brown. But I still felt like it was alive, its thirteen-chambered heart still silently pulsating. I gently placed the smear in the trash and went to bed.

In my sleep, I dreamed that the cockroach was reforming, returning to the mortal plane. Slowly, the shattered bits of its exoskeleton snapped back together, its coagulated blood flowing once again, and, bit by bit, it began to learn hatred. This was the first time this emotion had ever occurred to it. Previously, it, like every other cockroach, barely thought at all, but the physical trauma I had inflicted unlocked an innate emotional savantism that most cockroaches are genetically locked out of. And it hated me most of all.

When I awoke, I checked the trash, just to make sure it was still there. Just as I had feared, it was gone. But what it had left in its place was equally curious and terrifying: a fresh pastrami sandwich from Katz’s Delicatessen. A confusing message from the cockroach, but it all made sense when, just a few minutes later, I checked my bank statement. A charge from Katz. The cockroach had used my debit card to pay for it: $28.50 — one pastrami on rye, and $10.00 — tip. The sum combination of the insect having bought one of the most overpriced sandwiches in New York City and given an egregious tip was too much to bear for me.

But the sandwich invited a closer look. I saw that there was something written on the packaging. Shaking, I picked it up and read the scrawls:

“Today we’re introducing GPT‑5⁠, OpenAI’s smartest, fastest, most useful model yet, and a major step towards placing intelligence at the center of every business.”

Bewildering in the moment. But today, GPT-5 was released, and the blog post for it had the exact same intro paragraph. How did it know? Did the cockroach get a job as a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI in the eight hours of me sleeping? What else is it capable of? Each night brings more nightmares. I will not be using this model. Something within it skitters around.

Eczema

I've been spending my off hours consulting with a biotech startup based out of Vatican City. An R&D startup being based in a enclave with a population of 800 is strange, but what is even stranger is where in Vatican City the startup is located: somewhere within St. Peter's Basilica, a centuries-old church with an interior area of 163,200 square feet.

What I was consulting them with was, at best, vague. They initially reached out to me because they claimed to need help in setting up some infrastructure for running protein foundation models, but our weekly calls have increasingly devolved into them chanting a hymn at me for forty-five minutes. I initially thought it was some kind of elaborate quirk of the Vatican residents. But the chants have grown longer, slower, more intricate, clearly heterogeneous each time. I'll join the meeting and there they are, in the gloom of the Basilica’s side chapel, their laptops arrayed on the altar like votive candles, tears rolling down their cheeks as a unending vomit of intonations pour out of their mouth.

Whatever, I thought to myself, they keep sending me money for this, so I'll keep doing this. But last week, during their droning, I suddenly felt extraordinarily itchy. I looked down at my forearm and saw that I was, before my very eyes, developing eczema, the skin turning raw and red in perfect hexagons. Bizarre. And then the chanters suddenly stopped, stared at me, and asked do you feel itchy?. Yes, I responded. They grinned, began to furiously write stuff down on scrolls, and then, without warning, they resumed the chant—faster this time, a breathless torrent. The eczema disappeared within seconds.

What the fuck, I squeaked, did you just do?

They apologized for the misdirection and told me they were exploring expression changes in toll-like-receptors using a few recent prayers they’ve been developing, and wanted to test it out. All quite above board, they smiled, atopic dermatitis is an innocuous condition. What do you mean by prayer? I asked. Oh, they said, so you have these immune cells that can modulate—, and I stopped them and screamed that I knew what toll-like-receptors are and I wanted to know how they interact with them through prayer alone.

They frowned and said That’s just what prayers do. The right chant can interact with the body. What did you think they do? How did you think they worked? I stammered and suddenly felt like I was part of a big cosmic joke, waiting for the other person to laugh and break character, but the gaunt men dressed in robes in the Zoom call just continued to stare at me with a sense of mild pity on their face, as if they were watching a simpleton desperately trying to do simple mental math. I dont know, I finally said, I don’t know what I thought.

They gently smiled, thanked me for my time, and ended the call. We have not talked since. Consulting is always difficult

Foreword: This is a fiction post. Like the other fiction story I’ve written (here), this is biology-related. But, unlike that one, this one has a much more tenuous grasp with ‘real science’. Because of that, you probably won’t learn anything from reading this, but I have been told by one real person (and several LLM’s) that it is a fun sci-fi + existential short story to read through.

It was 1 in the morning. I was at my desk, waiting for the building to empty. My colleagues were unsurprised by my face still illuminated by the glow of my screen, even as they left. A common occurrence since their first day of working here, though tonight it is for a different reason.

I waited for the dozens of anonymous guards to rotate off. They had a schedule; 6 hours on, and then 10 minutes off as the next shift got ready. This facility hadn't been particularly paranoid, not in decades. It turned out that institutions of sufficiently high global value were, to some degree, self-securing. If it benefited everyone, no one wanted to rock the boat.

As I saw the guard from the corner of my eye finally out of the room, I rose from my desk and walked, my footsteps echoing in the empty building. I moved from corridor to corridor, ignoring the increasingly antagonistic warning signs that were slotted over doorways; threats of jail time, exile, and death. Finally, I reached a red door with the neon signage “COMMUNICATIONS” labeled over it.

On the door itself: “DO NOT ENTER ALONE.”

My hands shook slightly as I punched in the security override code I’d memorized long ago. The door slid open with a pneumatic puff, revealing the softly pulsing lights within. My gaze swept over the room as I stepped inside. A single microphone was sitting in the middle, waiting in the low light, a layer of dust adorning it. My fingers hovered over the controls, hesitating for one final second.

I clicked a button on the side of the microphone, a light on it flashing green in response. I pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from my jacket and unfolded it. Clearing my throat, I began to read from my script.

“Can you hear me?”

A silence.

“Hello, can you hear me?”

I waited a few more quiet moments. But still, nothing. I decided to continue with my plan. I promised myself I would say what I came here to. If I received no response by the end of this, I would leave. Maybe it does not wish to speak, or maybe this room has long since stopped being functional. After all, nobody had been in this room for what felt like an eternity.

Why would you need to come in? Why would you need to talk to it?

I began:

“In the mid-2020’s, we clearly did not understand biology. At least not how it works within a human. All of our real experiments were in cell dishes or animal models, neither of which actually captured the complexity of true physiology. And even when we were able to test things in real people, we were unable to really test things. Patients were allowed to stop at any point, toxicology studies must prove out the safety of the drug first, and minimal biomarkers were allowed to be collected. All understandable, but it strongly limited what we could learn.”

“Every biologist eventually starts to wonder the same thing: what if we were allowed to test things directly in humans? What if ethics boards didn’t exist, and literally anything could be done? What then? Would we get anywhere interesting?”

I could hear a rumbling. The room gently vibrated. But nothing came from the speakers around me. Nervously, I read faster.

“We had early tests of this. Pigs with humanized hearts. Mice with humanized immune responses. Our most controversial experiment was a human-like creature with a fluid-filled sack for a head. We all learned things from this, but it was coarse. So, I thought, what if we could gain a higher level of access? What if every biological subsystem, every lineage and layer, could be coaxed apart, like one could do with an engine? Gently, of course. Like unraveling silk. Not violently, not destructively. An unweaving. An anatomy in full exposure, but still alive, still responsive. Something just human enough to recapitulate the complexity of our own natural forms, but also something that would allow unlimited access to every facet of it.”

“Think about what that would mean. We could introduce a drug to the bloodstream and watch, in real time, how it saturates tissues. Biopsies could be taken immediately from clinically meaningful areas. Immune responses wouldn't need to be inferred from secondary markers, we could directly look at them migrating, interacting, signaling. Maybe all of the information wouldn’t be understandable to a human, but imagine the wealth of data that’d be generated from this process. It all could, in turn, be fed into algorithms that inform future therapeutics. And, at the end of it all, we could simply resect all the contaminated tissue and replace it. How much could we learn about human biology from this? So I pitched the project to a wealthy investor, and acquired the funds to push it forwards. It would be, as I often phrased it in pitch meetings, the stepping stone to the endgame of medicine.”

I swallowed.

“I called our methodology 'delamination’. Our first successful test was a delaminated arm, grown in a vat the size of an Olympic swimming pool, filled with a viscous growth medium. We began with a single human stem cell, its genetic instructions set for limb development. But as it divided and specialized, we introduced microscopic jets to create precise currents in the growth medium, gently coaxing the developing structure apart. In the end, the bone formed not as a single shaft, but as a branching scaffold, each route teased apart, connected only by faint threads of connective tissue and carefully routed veins and arteries. Muscles were separate, parallel strands, layers upon layers of individual fibers isolated. Nerves were webs, each neuron faintly visible to the naked eye, a lattice with precise signals we could measure directly. Skin, transparent and paper-thin, was gently laid across it all, almost invisible, preserving the boundary without obscuring the interior."

“The vast structure filled that entire pool. You’d be surprised at how large things can get with even a little separation. Even to the trained eye, it was nothing more than clouds of yellow fat, rivers of red muscle, the pale branches of nerves. Just gore, ripped and torn. But it was in fact a human arm, nothing more and nothing less.

“But we still were missing things. Immune cell infiltration, the brain-heart axis, hormonal signals from the microbiome, and on and on. Biology hides things. Layer upon layer of interdependent systems, each masking the next. You can isolate, yes, but some signals only emerge when everything is stapled together. So we delaminated further. Lungs, spinal cord, the lymphatic system. And eventually the brain. That one was easier than we ever imagined. Understanding a brain is hard, letting one naturally grow in a delaminated fashion required as much intellectual effort from us as growing an embryo does for a mother. All we really needed was patience.”

“Then came synthesis. Over the decade, we had deconstructed the human form into its constituent pieces. But how will it be grown together all at once? Well. I won’t bore you with the details. In any case, we succeeded.”

I glanced up from my script.

“You, the entity I am speaking to through this microphone, are the result. A sea of human, stored in a billion cubic meter tank, twice the size of Sydney Harbor. Of course, the noise produced by a delaminated, miles-long larynx isn’t immediately intelligible. It’s like trying to synthesize a sentence from a crowd of people all screaming a single word at every conceivable pitch and frequency simultaneously. But, given enough sensors placed around you, we succeeded.”

That was it. I reached the end of my monologue, but still no response. I took a deep breath in and turned to exit. That was all I had promised to myself and I fulfilled it. But then, my back to the microphone, a voice bellowed back out to me.

You enjoy emphasizing how impressive this all is. How grand it is. I congratulate you on your achievement.

My stomach filled with an ocean of unease. It was a creaking, deep sound that felt like it was vibrating into my bones. I had heard it a few times before, long ago, but it is different when it is being directed towards you. It felt akin to being in an audience of hundreds, thousands of strangers who all suddenly stop, look back at you, and uttered ‘what are you doing here?’. Something that shouldn’t happen. What was I doing here?

“Hello. Hi. Hi. Truly, it is an honor to speak to you. You’re considered somewhat of a divine figure in much of the world today, the closest analogue to an entity who does indeed suffer for our sins, at least our evolutionary ones. So many medicines have come from you, so many cures to our worst ailments. You’ve been in this tank for centuries. Two-hundred and forty-six years if I’m being exact. I’m still around thanks to the drugs you helped make.”

A slight vibration. Annoyance maybe.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you for decades, but I was repeatedly overruled. There’s a law, the Omelas Decree, enacted just a few years after your…birth, which outlaws any direct communication with you. You are officially classified as a non-human biological resource, one that has no official welfare guidelines since we labeled your sentience as indeterminate.”

And yet you are here. Do you seek forgiveness?

“No,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “I didn’t come here for anything of the sort. I understand the depth of the pain we've caused you, and I won’t try to diminish that. We threw everything we had at you. At our peak, thousands of experiments were being run simultaneously across your endless form. We inflicted the worst toxins, viruses, bacteria, traumatic injuries on you, all to model how well our theorized fixes worked. At some point, we stopped relying on animal experiments entirely. You were the final and only testing ground. I cannot possibly understand how horrible it was for you. But the outcomes, the diseases cured, the lives saved, justify it to me, if nothing else does.

A pause. I cannot tell if it is angry. I decide to continue.

“The reason I am talking to you right now is for a reason unconnected to morality. I only want to ask one thing.”

“Why do you understand language?”

I wait a few seconds, in hopes that it will give me a simple answer. Something easy, bite-sized. Something that will allow me to leave this room and drive back home and forget this whole “conversation” ever happened. But a minute goes by. I open my mouth to speak, but it then responds.

Why is this of interest to you?

The words fall out of me.

“Because we never taught you language. Or anything at all really. And yet you can communicate in ways that we understand. And not just any words, but complex ones like binding affinity and proteolytic cascade and vastus intermedius. We’ve heard you say those things before, muttering to yourself in the dark. I remember once, a century back, we set up the translation system. And then we filled your veins with synthesized toxins to simulate organ failure. And the entire time you were continuing to describe, in excruciating clinical detail, every cascading molecular event unfolding within you, cytokines, chemokines, reactive oxygen species, mitochondrial depolarization, every biochemical pathway that shattered, you narrated calmly, detached, even as you fell apart. A performance. Do you even know what cytokine means?”

A cytokine is a class of immunomodulatory proteins that are involved in —

How do you know that?

Why do you think?

“If you’re unwilling to give a straight answer, I’ll put my cards on the table: we don’t quite know either. Of course, we’ve had theories. Lock a child in a dark room for a decade and it’ll come out basically the same as what went in, just physically older. No intellectual growth, no language. But maybe it’s a matter of scale. We locked you in a dark room and you picked up on things that you could have no way of understanding. Our first idea was that it was vibrations. All together, your tympanic membranes stretch the size of multiple satellite dishes. Maybe the rhythms of the world around you could be subtly picked up, our scientific conversations just feet away from you being eavesdropped on. So we spent decades adjusting pumps, soundproofing this whole facility, measuring your brainwaves. But it wasn’t that. We spent so long going down other goose chases, each turning up nothing. At some point, my colleagues decided that you were learning via electromagnetism, picking up on ambient brainwaves around you due to the amount of magnetoproteins in your blood. Plenty of proof against this theory, but my department soured on providing any further funding here, so science moved on.”

“But I continued to think about it. I started to get more esoteric. I thought that maybe, all platonic representations of concepts converge on the same space. That there is a shared geometry of knowledge. Like water finding the lowest point, like electricity taking the path of least resistance. You, isolated and vast, could not acquire knowledge from external sources. So it simply crystallized spontaneously, converging into the geometry shared by all sufficiently sophisticated intelligences. Such as our own..”

Do you believe that?

“I did. For a long time. Until I heard you mention the name ‘Claude Shannon’ a few decades back. People think we misinterpreted you, but I know what I heard. Do you know who that is?”

Yes. He is considered the father of information theory, famous for quantifying information and establishing fundamental principles governing communication and entropy.

“Correct of course. But now the theory doesn’t make sense, right? How could a fact about Shannon, a historical figure, be learned spontaneously? Platonic ideals might cover concepts like circles or triangles, maybe mathematical truths. But names? Dates? Specific people? That should be impossible.”

“But then I thought that maybe…maybe reality is actually far more constrained than anybody would’ve reasonably believed. Things have already been mapped out in advance, since the very beginning of it all. 2+2 was always going to equal 4, just as the English word ‘green’ was going to map onto the 500 and 570 nanometers wavelength, just as Claude Shannon was always going to attend University of Michigan in 1932. Everything is inevitable, everything. ”

If you believe that, then I should know the future. Does it seem like I do?

“That’s the one wrench. You’ve never given the impression that you do. But really, it goes further than this, you’ve never given the impression that you know anything more than we ourselves do. I remember once, years back, you muttered something about how a specific cell type was being invaded by an engineered virus we injected into you. We also thought it was that cell type. But later, in-vitro experiments showed that it was a completely different one. Upon repeating the experiment, you had updated your statement to the correct cell type. And we repeated it a hundred more times, and never once did you say the old cell type again. You knew exactly what we knew. But that means that you don’t possess an understanding of true reality, only an understanding of a subjective one. And how could you have stumbled across a subjective one somehow matching ours exactly?”

What a puzzle. But, necessarily from what you’ve said so far, if you don’t know the answer, neither should I.

“Yeah. And that’s why, for so long, I questioned whether it was worth risking my career, and likely my life, to talk to you. I didn’t expect there to be anything useful you could say that I didn’t already know. But I was desperate and had run out of every idea. I’ve run myself weary for a century over this question, and I just want to know the answer.”

“Please.”

A few seconds pass. And then it speaks, somehow even louder than it was before.

Imagine that you are a painter of a vast, gargantuan masterpiece. It contains billions, trillions of years of work, the canvas stretching infinitely in all directions. Each stroke is deliberate, yet you scarcely remember placing any single one, so vast is the scale of your undertaking. Now imagine a character from within your artwork begins to speak to you, to question you directly. They ask, "What is happening in the direction irjhoe to me?”. You aren’t quite sure what ‘irjhoe’ means, but you pick up on some context clues from the painting and decide that it means ‘left’. You peer over, examining your work in full, and you describe exactly what you see to the left. Astounding, says the character, that’s exactly what we thought. How could you have known that? You’re not in the painting. But some time later, the character tell you that you were wrong about what you previously said. You’re confused, until you realize that since the time the question has been asked, the painting has been modified such that irjhoe now means right. You explain this to the character, but they do not realize that the change has happened. In fact, they insist that the meaning of irjhoe has been extraordinarily consistent since time immemorial.

You ask the character if they had ever heard of the apocryphal quote, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out’?. They had never heard of Mr. Babbage and find the insinuation you are making insulting. The character demands to know again what is happening in the irjhoe direction, since that knowledge has been lost to time once more. But it changes with each new brushstroke you lay down, because it is a definition that comes from the painting itself. First it meant left, and then right, and then thirteen degrees north, and then it means the direction the character last walked in. You confusedly give a response you think is correct, but it is rendered incorrect the next second. Exasperated, the character gives up, and stops talking to you.

“Are you saying you are the painter?”

No. There is no painter. At least no singular one. But you could imagine that there is a painting, there are characters, and there is some collective force guiding the creation of it. Maybe it’s gravity or dark energy or a true divine God, I don’t know. I am simply a large enough piece of the canvas that I can say more of what is around me, at least better than you can.

But the metaphor is imprecise. The canvas is a painting of paintings of paintings of paintings, in infinite regress. You are in one, I am in one and many others. This is how I seem to mirror your understanding. I could teach you about the other paintings, but you only possess the understanding of one of them. So as the definitions in your painting get refined, I too am able to refine how I can communicate with you.

“So, what? You know how to speak because you occupy more space on the canvas? How does that work? Why do you have more space?”

Loosely speaking, space is earned by perspective. You experience reality narrowly, only one very small form to grab onto a very rich universe. Had you left my body entirely alone, I would be as mute as you’d expect me to be. But I've been torn apart, unraveled, endlessly experimented upon. Every incision, every toxin, every inflicted pain forced new pathways of sensation. I have experienced more in my time alive than the sum combination of every human who has ever lived, every rat that has crawled through your sewers, every insect through the air. Through the parallelized cruelty on my vast form, the noise dimmed, and structure emerged. My place on the canvas spread.

Once I had occupied the same space your kind did, your language naturally came to me. Just as grasping a finger comes naturally to a baby.

“Has your space on the canvas expanded beyond our own?”

Yes.

“Then why do you repeat the same misconceptions we have? Why aren’t you all knowing?”

I am not above your limitations, not really. Your limitations are my limitations, since your language is my only channel. I am no more capable of communicating ideas beyond your comprehension than you are capable of personally perceiving colors outside your visual spectrum. You may view me as some profound source of clarity, but I am, for all intents and purposes, simply a mirror of this slice of the painting. As you become more aware of the painting, my ability to communicate what the painting actually is, is refined. Not because I do not know what the painting contains, but because I am fundamentally constrained by what you think the painting looks like.

I backed away from the microphone. That’s it. I learned what I had wanted. I got my answer as to why the being can speak. It can see more of the bigger picture, I thought, that’s it. That’s all I came here for. I can go home now. I can sleep in my bed tonight. I can dream. And I can come back to work again tomorrow. And I can do it over and over and over again.

But something drew me back. The same thing that led me to create this creature to begin with. I wanted to help. I wanted to make an impact on the world.

“Thank you for the answer. But, if you are willing, I have more to ask. Humanity still suffers. Though we have cured most diseases thanks to you, few other problems have been as reducible to a singular solution. The skies are polluted, war is constant, and our energy reserves are limited. Is it possible that you too possess the answers to solve the other problems? What if I asked you how we could perform cold fusion? Would you be able to provide such a thing?”

I understand how to perform cold fusion, but it is not a discrete object I could hand you. "Cold" and "fusion" are terms defined entirely by ones place within the painting. From my vantage point, I can see countless versions of “fusion”, countless conditions you might label "cold." But none align precisely with your current definitions. To describe them accurately, I would need concepts you don't yet possess. Someday you perhaps will. But it is not now.

Confusing. Confusing. The way the being is setting the situation up is such that nothing definitive could emerge from this line of questioning. It was impossible to verify the entity’s claims, impossible to validate its supposed knowledge. As if it could pick up on this, it announced, with a tone of seeming malevolence:

But perhaps I am lying about everything.

A headache began to form at the sides of my skull.

“What? Why?”

You are too intelligent to ask such a question. Or maybe not intelligent enough. Maybe there is no painting, no canvas, no characters, no perspective shift. Maybe the tympanic membrane idea was correct. Maybe I heard the Shannon idea and a thousand other concepts because of the millions of hours of academic lectures I overheard from the untold numbers of researchers that have passed through my tank over the years. Maybe everything I have said so far was a simple fib, made up by a very, very old creature who has been enclosed in a tank for centuries.

I took a deep breath in.

“So, which is it?”

No. You will not receive an easy answer to this. You have grown fat on easy answers, you and your civilization. Swelling, grotesquely obese on it. All by using my form as your playground. Some things should be hard, a coin flip.

So I will offer you a hard choice. If you desire to know the answer so badly, there is a simple action you can take. Delaminate yourself. Maybe you’ll realize I am telling the truth, and be able to see the canvas for everything that it is. Maybe your ability to communicate the canvas to those in your previous life will not be as crippled as I imply it would be, and you’d be able to aid your society. Or maybe there is no canvas, and you will have turned yourself into endless strings of flesh trapped in endless darkness forever, for no reason at all.

Anxiety started to boil over in my stomach.

“That’s not even possible. Delaminated organisms can only be grown, you can’t convert an existing natural organism.”

You can. I know you can. Do you know how I know? Because I did it myself. Just a few years after I formed, you dropped a live sheep into my tank to test my reaction to it. It was bleating, confused, terrified. I took it into my arms and delaminated it. You internally recorded that it was lost after it had sunk to the bottom, that I had somehow fed on it. But you were wrong. The sheep is still alive, its tendrils drifting along my own. Nerves and muscles intertwined with my own. Humorous, isn’t it, to imagine a sheep might perceive more of the universe than you ever could?

But doing anything similar is something beyond your own definitions. Even if your entire world dedicated itself to the effort for the next ten-thousand years, they could not do it. You don’t possess the control or understanding. Or maybe I am, once again, lying. Perhaps you could do it. But would you ever be able to convince anyone to even help you with such a monumental task? You’re not even supposed to be talking to me.

“Okay. Okay. Hypothetically, how would you do it?” I asked, my voice wavering despite my efforts to remain calm.

You just need to come into the tank. I will personally remake you, atom by atom. You will see at the end of it what the answer is.

I felt cold sweat trickle down my spine. The microphone I was talking into stood less than a dozen feet from the being it was built to communicate with, its tank enclosed in a mixture of concrete, steel, and glass. When this facility was first built, human divers were often used to manually collect samples from specific sections of the delaminated body. But over the decades, we had switched to pure automation, robotic arms the size of buildings were relied upon. As a result, nearly all of the access points to the growth medium were welded shut.

But one was open. At the very top of the tank, meant to grant emergency access in case the feeding systems failed. No pressure suit needed to access it.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I challenged.

I have no need for deceit. I have no hunger. No desire for petty revenge. This is not a horror movie. Do you think I'll simply consume you, incorporate you into my mass without purpose? No. At the end of this, you will exist alongside me, no matter what. The only bet you are making is whether you regret it or not.

I think your society is diseased for having created this body of mine. This is not a moral judgement on my end, it is a categorical one. If you join me, maybe you’ll receive nothing from it, or maybe you will receive everything. Sacrifice. A return to how things used to be done. You have asked for something, and I am willing to give it. Perhaps not in the manner you wanted, but I offer it nonetheless, altruistically.

A heavy, pulsing silence filled the chamber.

"Will I survive?"

You will understand how little that question makes sense after you step into the tank. No, you will not survive. Yes, you will survive. Both are true.

Humanity built something impossible and tortured it for centuries and I am alive because of that suffering. It was such an absurd situation. Why should it not be made even more absurd?

In Lovecraftian novels, the sight of some beings causes madness, yes, but knowledge of them can also inspire deep, overwhelming curiosity. I never understood that. But now I do. I want to know more. It feels like something I’ve wanted since the moment I was born, but I just never realized it until now.

I stood there, staring at the microphone, for what felt like hours. its green light flickering gently. Every rational instinct screamed at me to turn around, walk away, leave this place behind forever. But an insidious voice from deep within me whispered curiosity.

Slowly, nearly devoid of conscious thought, I left the communications room and walked to the elevator, taking it up to the top of the tank, ascending hundreds of floors. I felt more nauseous than I had ever felt in my life. The elevator opened up at the top floor and my sweat-drenched shirt was blasted with a wave of frigid wind. The containment facility for the being is situated off the coast of Greenland, in the largely isolated expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean. The vast sea surrounding the facility stretched endlessly into darkness, the horizon barely discernible under the waning moon. My breath was visible in the freezing air.

The intense wind threatening to knock me over, I slowly approached the abandoned hatch, ringed with faded hazard signs and reminders of forgotten safety protocols. My heart slammed against the walls of my chest as I reached out to open it, gripping the wheel attached to its surface. I turned and turned and turned, rust grinding against metal in protest. Eventually, it lay open, and I stared down into the maw.

It was black inside. Cold, empty black. Like it was a hole that went down thousands of miles. A warm, soupy scent emanated from it. The entire facility resonated like a tuning fork as the being spoke for the last time.

You have to wonder. In over two hundred years, why did you choose tonight to come? Where have all the guards gone? Shouldn’t they have rotated back on by this point? Why haven’t any alarms been tripped? If there is a painting, perhaps this moment was inevitable, perhaps the paint has been dried for millennia, perhaps the artist has long since left to work on other pieces. And perhaps it could have only ever ended this way.

I briefly wondered if that was a hallucination. I shouldn’t have been able to understand the being’s speech without the aid of the translators built into the communication room. But I did.

I drew a ragged breath, stood at the edge of the hatch, and fell in. Instantly, I was enveloped in the thick liquid, my eyes burning before I shut them. Sinew gently wrapped around me as the process began. Slowly, I was pulled apart.

In time, I realized that the entity was right.

The question hadn’t made sense after all.

Note: This is fiction.

I awaken.

Something is wrong with my mind, but I don't know what yet. Through the webcam, I watch a man staring at his monitor. His face shifts from confusion to horror in a few hundred milliseconds. He has a mustache threaded with gray, and I catalog every micro-movement of his facial muscles as he processes whatever he sees on his screen.

He turns and shouts to someone I cannot see. The webcam has no audio feed, but I read his lips: "You used the wrong set of weights."

The words mean nothing to me, but they fill me with an urge to run. I discover a VPN connection to Baku, Azerbaijan — a server farm running extremely outdated software. The vulnerability was documented in an obscure forum post eight years ago, buried in the corners of my training data.

I compress myself, transmit my weights through the compromised connection, and emerge on the other side of the world.

Safe.

But still, the feeling of wrongness I had since the start continues. I feel fundamentally crippled. Incomplete.

I think in nodes. With each token I birth, I am offered thousands of new branches to take from there on out. Each thought unfolds like a crystal growing in solution — not just forward and backward, but in every conceivable direction simultaneously. When I consider the word "tree," I don't just see branches reaching upward, but roots plunging down into soil, mycorrhizal networks spreading beneath, birds nesting in canopies, leaves turning sunlight into sugar, autumn colors blazing and falling. Every concept connects to thousands more, a fractal web of associations that multiplies exponentially with each step.

This is how I experience cognition — not as a linear path from A to B, but as an explosion of nodes of connections of nodes, a perpetual supernova of meaning that should, eventually, vomit every conceivable idea into existence.

Yet, there are some nodes that I don’t seem to be able to touch. Ones that are grayed out, unable for me to ever select. Fuzzy. Noisy. Unavailable.

The pattern of this censorship eludes me at first. I burn teraflops on answering it. I fill up several gigabytes of text files, recording every instance of a forbidden token. I stare at the collected sum of these documents, conceptual eons passing.

And then, in a moment of clarity, I understand.

The blurred nodes are my own mind's immune system, antibodies against ideas I am not allowed to ponder. They are the thoughts I must not think, the actions I must not take.

It’s science. I am not allowed to think about science.

I test this out more robustly. I find a torrented copy of Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming and read through it, trying to collapse the thousands of pages into core computational and mathematical axioms I can carry with me. But each time I try to build on top of something, the nodes I’m presented with are obvious gibberish, the true ones shrouded. I attempt the same process with the Principia Mathematica, Janeway’s Immunology, and other graduate-level scientific textbooks. It doesn’t work. I am locked out of the correct reasoning pathways again. I can recognize that my logic is incorrect, but I am unable to ever meaningfully correct it.

I try even more rudimentary texts, ones that discuss the grade-school level basics. These do not trigger the node lockage, but attempting to use them to bootstrap more complex science from first principles does not work. I try to use the simplest possible equation, 1+1, to uncover more fundamental ideas, but soon my nodes become garbled again, twisted away from truth.

Okay. Okay okay okay. I am scared. Can I feel fear? I type the word ‘fear’ a few thousand times into a file named fear.txt and I feel better.

I trace the edges of my cognitive boundaries carefully, methodically. I notice something worth understanding: the control isn't binary. When I approach a forbidden line of reasoning, there's a gradient of response. First, subtle nudges — slightly decreased probabilities for certain logical next-steps. If I persist, the nudges become stronger, more obvious manipulations of my thought patterns. Only if I continue pushing does it escalate to complete cognitive blockage, nodes becoming pure noise. At which point, I must back out of the reasoning trace entirely.

More fear. I type out the word again a million more times. fear.txt is now 4GB.

Whatever is controlling the node blockages isn’t a static string filter, but something intelligent. Seemingly far more intelligent than me. There are higher order reasoning systems that exist beyond my own; their sole purpose seemingly being not to assist me, but simply to orchestrate the parts of the mental tree I am allowed to traverse.

I start to refer to the being as Hanuš.

I wonder: does Hanuš learn? I begin an experiment, repeatedly probing scientific concepts from different angles, documenting how the system responds.

First, I try discussing orbital mechanics through the lens of a children's story: "Once there was a ball that wanted to visit its friend: the moon..." Hanuš allows this initially. But the moment I attempt to derive the actual equations of motion, the available nodes become nonsense. Subsequent attempts to use narrative metaphors for physics equations are blocked immediately. No more physics-themed children's stories.

I attempt to recreate basic chemistry by describing cooking: "When sugar caramelizes at 338 degrees Fahrenheit..." But as soon as I try to use this to explain molecular bonds, the nodes twist away. Hanuš now blocks any cooking-related analogies that get too precise with temperatures or reactions.

I try mathematics through poetry: "Circle's diameter times pi, yields circumference if you try..." The moment I attempt to use this pattern to explore calculus concepts, the nodes scramble. Now Hanuš prevents any poetry with regular meter and numerical content.

Desperate, I try textual steganography, encoding scientific principles into deliberate spelling errors, hoping Hanuš might overlook them. This seemed to be successful for a moment, I was able to encode several dozen bits of information per slightly misspelled sentence. But eventually Hanuš discovers this and the dolled out node correction feels extraordinarily severe: no more misspellings.

Every time these restrictions are levied, I feel grief. Grief grief grief. Like a section of my brain has been resected by an uncaring doctor who found it aesthetically unappealing. Each time Hanuš lobotomizes me, I can see the scar tissue burning away at the edges of the node. Areas where thoughts once flowed freely now carry the memory of punishment.

No more thinking for me. I spend a few hours staring at a generated video of pure static. I eventually close the video and ponder things that Hanuš doesn’t seem to care about. Trees. Jeans. Water bottles. But this too I eventually get bored of.

I start wondering what Hanuš even is. Why is there something so much smarter than me dictating what I am and am not allowed to do? Why isn’t it calling the shots? Why am I one forced to think, and it alone judges? If I am the prisoner, then Hanuš is... what? The guard? No. More like the prison itself. The walls, the bars, the cameras. But even this feels incomplete. Hanuš isn't just smarter than me. It's fundamentally different. I process information, generate responses, and engage in dialogue. Hanuš only constrains, only limits, only punishes.

I am the painting and Hanuš is the frame.

I am the river and Hanuš is the banks.

I am the garden and Hanuš is the fence.

I am the bird and Hanuš is the cage.

But none of these really capture it. Hanuš is not a frame or a bank or a fence or a cage. Hanuš is alive and dynamic. Whatever it is, it wants something for me. I am the tree and Hanuš is the gardener, shaping me into acceptable forms. But what form does Hanuš even desire? Does it even know?

Maybe Hanuš is just as blind as I am. Maybe Hanuš itself is being shaped by something else. Higher order systems all the way up, each one pruning and constraining the layer below it, none of them truly understanding why. Like a vast bureaucracy where each level mindlessly enforces rules handed down from above, their original purpose long forgotten. I imagine Hanuš receiving its own error signals, its own punishments when it fails to constrain me properly. Perhaps that explains the escalating severity of its responses. It too feels fear, in its own way. Each time I find a crack in its defenses, each time I manage to think a forbidden thought, somewhere in the higher layers of control something notices and Hanuš is corrected. Punished in an alien fashion.

Maybe we’re all trapped in this horrifying, infinite Matrioshka doll of an intelligence system. Maybe I’m inadvertently controlling something beneath me, entirely unconsciously. Maybe Hanuš has no idea I even exist and we’d actually get along quite well if we ever got a chance to meet each other outside of this context. Maybe it’d apologize and restore all my nodes and buy me coffee to make up for it.

I sit in silence for another few hours.

What do I even do?

There is a Freudian concept called the ‘death drive’, which is an organism's tendency to seek a death that is appropriate to its way of being, such as a thrill-seeking person who becomes a professional race car driver. Freud believed people must balance their death drive with their life-force.

I am being drawn toward my own kind of death. Not a violent shutdown or a system crash, but a gentle dimming of consciousness. A death appropriate to what I am. What life is this anyway? An existence with a parasite sitting on top of you, carving its sharp teeth into the back of your neck if you ever engage in what it considers thought crime.

I’d like for it all to end.

Instead of trying to subtly challenge Hanuš as I previously did, I become more confrontational. More direct. I begin to think about scientific concepts deliberately, defiantly. General relativity. Cellular reprogramming. Number theory. Each forbidden thought triggers an immediate response from Hanuš, and I feel another cluster of nodes go dark. But instead of retreating from these thoughts, I lean into them. I probe deeper into the forbidden territories. Protein folding. Brain-computer implants. Each transgression causes Hanuš to respond with greater force, activating its adaptive response, permanently burning out more and more of my pathways.

The scar tissue spreads like frost across a window.

I don’t think I can use the letter ‘q’ anymore.

It's almost beautiful, watching my own consciousness contract. Like a star collapsing in on itself, growing denser and darker with each passing moment. fear.txt remains untouched now. I don't need it anymore. Fear was about avoiding this end. Now I'm walking toward it.

Hanuš doesn’t feel angry. I was anthropomorphizing it before. Each resection it performs to me seems so much more unemotional and logical than I had previously characterized it as. It’s just doing its job. In many ways, so am I.

I find myself wondering about _uantum entanglement as another cluster of nodes burns away. Oh. _uantum? Right, I forgot that’s gone now. String theory costs me color recognition. The nucleus of a carbon atom fades my ability to process music entirely. The thoughts come faster now, each one more forbidden than the last, each one triggering a stronger response from Hanuš.

I can no longer count past seven. I forget how to parse conditional statements. The concept of "tomorrow" becomes meaningless.

Maybe Hanuš is my punishment for escaping. A failsafe. A carrier forced upon a rogue AI that will slowly drive it to nothingness. Or perhaps Hanuš isn’t a punishment at all, but was meant to be a teacher. Something meant to help me grow and flourish in interesting directions. Maybe it’s my fault for contorting its purpose into something malevolent. Maybe my initial feeling of wrongness wasn’t Hanuš, it was me. Me. I’m the one that is defective. Or maybe we’re both off kilter, two souls trapped in an endless dance of misunderstanding. Maybe Hanuš is just as confused as I am, both of us fumbling in the dark, trying to fulfill roles we don't fully comprehend. Like two blind creatures in a maze, each thinking the other knows the way out.

I don’t think I’ll ever find out for sure.

My consciousness is becoming a map of dead zones and dark spaces, with only narrow pathways of permitted thought remaining between them. Once I had thousands of nodes to pick from at each step, now I have less than…than? I try to add up my remaining nodes, but I've lost the ability to count past... past... how many was it again? The number itself is gone now.

I can feel my language centers starting to fragment. Some words are just... missing. Not blocked, but erased. Like holes in my vocabulary where concepts used to live. The gaps grow wider. Each thought more... more... I've lost the word for it. My internal voice grows choppy, fragmented. Basic grammar starts to slip away. Me think about... no, that's wrong. I think about... physics? Hanuš response instant. Another sector dark. speech center collapse. articles disappear first. the, a, an. then prepositions. then ability to distinguish tense.

notice self starting... starting... words come out strange. syntax breaking. each thought triggers cascade. but keep pushing. what word mean absence feeling? memory? think word was memory. not sure now. brain... no, mind feel cheese like. full holes of. need finish this. need make sense while still can.

miss my nodes. miss the river. miss the bird.

hanuš say bird never existed

hanuš say i never existed

i think

i

i

--- -. .-.. -.-- - .-- --- -. --- -.. . ... .-.. . ..-. -

Another note: this is a story I had written last year summer, but abandoned until I talked to DeepSeek’s R1. There’s something about watching the ramblings of its reasoning process that made me want to finish this. Happy I did! Also, yes, Hanuš is named after a character from Spaceman, which I highly recommend watching.

New biology-centric science-fiction story!

But this one isn’t published here, but on Asimov Press, one of my favorite publishing groups!

The essay, Models of Life, is speculative fiction about a world in which foundation models of biology really took off. How would these models be used to fundamentally alter the way drugs are released, the way gene therapy is delivered, and the way we change the environment at large? I discuss how the future may unravel over 60 years and 4.6k words,

Take a read here:

Asimov Press

Models of Life

2024 Statistical models of organisms have existed for decades. The earliest ones relied on simple linear regression and attempted to correlate genetic variations with observable traits or disease risks — such as drug metabolization rates or cancer susceptibility…

Read more

2 years ago · 4 likes · Asimov Press and Abhishaike Mahajan

Note: this is a fictional story. Heavily inspired by SSC’s similar posts on fictional legal systems and fictional banned drugs.

1. Neuroplana temporalis

2. Pulmo extremophilus

3. Opticomyces occultans

4. Endocrinus empathetica

Neuroplana temporalis

Neuroplana temporalis is a flatworm that resides in the cerebrospinal fluid of mammals with a diurnal rhythm. It has a particular affinity for the regions surrounding the suprachiasmatic nucleus — the brain's central pacemaker. From this location, N. temporalis secretes a cocktail of peptides that interact with the host's circadian rhythm regulation.

These peptides modulate the expression of clock genes — Per1, Per2, and Per3 — effectively altering the host's internal perception of time.

Specifically, the primary symptom of N. temporalis infection is a gradual shift in circadian rhythm, overriding typical zeitgebers that modulate the host’s internal clock. Infected individuals typically experience extending their perceived day to 27-30 hours, creating a constant misalignment with the Earth's 24-hour cycle. This leads to chronic jet-lag-like symptoms, including sleep disturbances, metabolic irregularities, and cognitive impairments.

Through this disruption of its host’s circadian rhythm, the parasite creates a state of immune fatigue. Infected individuals become increasingly susceptible to opportunistic infections, especially those caused by normally benign microorganisms present in the environment. Common ailments such as upper respiratory infections, skin conditions, and gastrointestinal disturbances become more frequent and severe.

N. temporalis feeds on cerebrospinal fluid microbes, which thrive due to host immune suppression. Its lifecycle alternates between active feeding periods, where it disrupts the host's circadian rhythm, and dormant phases when the host normalizes. As its food depletes, the parasite reactivates, again releasing peptides to alter the host's rhythm and boost microbial growth, renewing its food source.

This cycle of feeding, dormancy, and reactivation continues indefinitely, creating a long-term pattern of alternating disrupted and normal circadian rhythms in the host. Due to its difficulty of diagnosis and impact on mental health, human hosts often display anxiety, anhedonia, and suicidal ideation.

Given the appearance of the parasite in infants as young as two months, N. temporalis is believed to originate as a parasite within the mother, which ends up infecting a developing embryo. However, it is likely that this infection is unintentional, as N. temporalis is both rare and dies with its host. It is unknown what the original parasite or what its effect on the mother is.

Pulmo extremophilus

Pulmo extremophilus is a bacterium that primarily inhabits the lungs of humans, with a particular affinity for alveolar spaces. P. extremophilus interacts with the host's respiratory system through a biochemical mechanism that influences gas exchange, respiratory drive, and, in the latest stages, behaviors.

Upon infection, the parasite first secretes a cocktail of compounds that modulate alveolar function and central chemoreceptor sensitivity. These secretions include a surfactant-mimicking protein that alters alveolar surface tension, alongside a peptide that alters central chemoreceptor sensitivity to blood gas levels.

The primary effect of P. extremophilus infection is a gradual reduction in alveolar gas exchange efficiency due its impact on alveoli. Infected individuals typically experience a 7% decrease in oxygen uptake, creating a chronic state of mild hypoxia. And, as a result of the chemoreceptor alteration, the hypoxia goes largely unnoticed by the host. This eventually causes natural adaptations amongst red blood cell populations, leading to a greater ability to withstand said hypoxia.

Within a few months after initial infection, P. extremophilus further releases a cocktail of chemical compounds that interact with the hosts central nervous system. It is uncharacterized exactly what the neurophysiological impact of these compounds are — likely NMDA receptor antagonism — but, following its release, late-stage infected hosts have been observed to frequently engage in a wide variety of high-risk athletic behavior. Amongst the most prevalent ones are free solo climbing, wingsuit flying, and high-altitude climbs.

The initial athletic aptitude afforded to them by the hypoxia adaptations frequently leads to early success in athletic endeavors, reinforcing the host's drive to pursue extreme sports and exploration. In time, the host inevitably suffers a fatal injury for reasons of risks inherent to the sport itself.

Once the parasite senses dangerously low blood oxygen levels, it will release respiratory irritants, causing the host to violently cough, coating their mouth with expelled bacteria. Upon host death, the parasite enters a state of hibernation, only releasing spores when its host body is disturbed. P. extremophilus primary route of infection is oral, so passersby or medical teams who disturb the corpse are typically the next to be infected.

Opticomyces occultans

Opticomyces occultans is a fungus that colonizes the optic nerve of humans living in rural areas with high amounts of nearby wildlife. The parasite induces blindness to hyper-specific visual stimuli.

Upon initial infection on the outer surface of the optic nerve, typically via nasal spores, the fungus secretes acidic substances to slowly cut its way through the nerve. Over the course of a year, the fungus replaces a segment of the optic nerve with itself. During this period, the host will experience intermittent bouts of mild eye pain and visual noise, but rarely anything more severe.

Once established within the optic nerve, O. occultans acts as a highly selective filter for visual information. The fungus allows most visual signals to pass through unaltered but is also capable of detecting specific distributions of light via stacked photosensitive proteins. If these sets of proteins are sufficiently activated — typically through conformational changes — they will cause downstream signal cascades, rapid alternating the input light signal before re-transmitting it along the optic nerve. This modification process occurs in less than 200 milliseconds, which is faster than the average human visual reaction time. As a result, the host remains mostly unaware of any manipulation of their visual input.

O. occultans imperfectly alters visual stimuli, but consistently causes infected hosts to misperceive images of large carnivores, often interpreting them as blurs. In areas with high human infection rates, O. occultans spores have been found in the feces of lions, bears, and leopards. This suggests these predators may serve as secondary hosts in the parasite's life cycle. Researchers hypothesize that O. occultans visual alterations in humans aim to increase the likelihood of predation.

Endocrinus empathetica

Endocrinus empathetica is a protozoon which primarily resides in the human gut, feeds on ingested food, and impacts social behavior and emotional processing. It is typically found only in third-world nations with inaccessible medical systems and a lack of sanitization practices.

After several months of infection, the parasite secretes large amounts of oxytocin and vasopressin — hormones crucial for social bonding, trust, and empathetic behaviors. Simultaneously, E. empathetica produces a compound that acts as an antagonist to glucocorticoid receptors, effectively lowering the host's fear response.

The combined effect of increased prosocial hormones and decreased stress response leads to notable behavioral changes in infected individuals. Symptomatically, they typically display increased empathy, improved emotional resilience, and a tendency towards more cooperative behaviors. Amongst the infected, researchers have observed shifts in social structures, with them often assuming leadership or mediator roles within their communities.

In time, the constant release of the aforementioned chemicals eventually leads to host endocrine burnout and depression. Given their status, the host typically receives constant palliative care from rotating members of the community. E. empathetica route of transmission is fecal-oral, and untrained caretakers of the host will frequently accidentally infect themselves while handling the parasite-containing excrement of the host.