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Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
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Originally published on my substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-tech-ceo I can't figure out the formatting in this place. Part of this piece is supposed to be in italics to differentiate past from future. You guys are smart---you can figure it out.
Jude Gabriel, enigmatic CEO of the mysterious yet seemingly omnipresent software company ‘Talos’, squints as the sunset light squeezes through a few buildings in the Seattle skyline just to assault his face at the perfect angle. Whoever thought up the idea of all-glass offices should be lined up against the wall and shot—with the sun in his eyes.
The whole gang is here: CFO, COO, CPO, CSO, whoever the fuck. He’d kill them all without a second thought in exchange for a glass of whiskey and a cigar.
He rubs his nose: one of his infamous ‘migraines’ is coming on.
It started on his 25th birthday. The whole thing is branded into his memory, for better or for worse, and will be until he dies, and for all his luck after he dies, too.
Craig had been the one who officially ‘suggested’ it, but it was really inevitable, with how into psychedelics they had all been. The moment he said it, it was more like it had manifested out of the whole subconscious zeitgeist of their friend group, and no one in particular took credit for it: Ayahuasca, that is.
One thing after another, and Jude ended up in some primitive canoe, floating his way down the shit-colored waters of the Nanay, muggy-hot and slathered in skin-irritating, carcinogenic bug spray. Nonetheless, nothing short of nuclear fallout could erase his good mood. He practically hummed with adrenaline and good spirits despite the downright horrific summer conditions of backwater Peru.
At the dock, a woman with a clipboard introduced herself as Isa and asked him to put his phone in a dented metal tin.
The intake hut was cooler. A ceiling fan wobbled, slicing the humid air into manageable pieces. The curandero sat in a plastic chair with his hands on his knees, white beard surrounding his chin, wrinkled eyes squinting cheerfully. He looked exactly like Jude had imagined: wise and ready to take them on the trip of a lifetime. He spoke, a hoarse but gentle voice, and a younger man beside him translated.
“...Why here? What do you hope to see?”
They went around the room until it landed on Jude. To tell you the truth, he didn’t know. It wasn’t like the others—he didn’t want to ‘find himself’, his life was fine as it was, he had had no traumatic experiences, and he was a perfectly productive worker: at the time, he was starting up a small software company, and it had just had its first angel investor. He knew he was outgrowing these people, and it was only a matter of time before they’d grow apart.
“I want to see if there’s anything I missed.” He said, simply, not sure if they were the right words after they came out of his mouth. The curandero nodded after hearing the translation, a long, thoughtful motion.
Well, that’s exactly what he found: the thing he’d missed, or more accurately, the thing that had missed him.
If only he’d told Craig to go fuck himself.
The air conditioning beats down on Jude as the CFO, Priya, prattles on about numbers, which is what she does—that’s why we all love her.
Jude’s assistant, Ness, leans towards him.
“The demo team’s set up,” she says, ‘You want them in here, or…”
“Yeah,” says Jude,
In a few minutes, Marty, the CPO, walks over to the wall screen, which switches from spreadsheets to a map of a few high-crime blocks in Seattle, colored dots pulsing like slow heartbeats.
“This is what we’ll show the folks in Oakland,” he says, “ It’s nice, elegant, you know? Makes it look like we’re just sorting the mess, not… playing god, or whatever the press likes to say about us, you know?”
He clicks through, and a route appears through the dots.
“Two patrol cars for nine urgent calls,” he says. “The system takes the pile and says, ‘Here’s the order that gets help to the most people fastest. The car goes here first because the caller keeps hanging up, then here because the second caller is trapped in a stairwell, then this one because it’s likely a duplicate.”
Mason drums a finger. “Why aren’t we showing the cool part where it noticed the stolen Civic from last week patterns back to—”
General counsel interrupts him. “Cool’s trouble. We want ‘boring and helpful’.”
“Come on, it can be a little bit of both,” he said
“Then it wouldn’t be boring, Mason,” she replies.
Jude tunes them out. This part isn’t interesting. Besides, a familiar pressure is blooming behind his right eye, a creeping static that makes it hard to focus.
He watches as the red line from the screen somehow moves, bleeding into reality, widening, taking weight, and spreading, soon becoming a red belt crossing the city. And then he sees what it really is: crossbeams, ribs, the sketch of an inhuman skeleton, barely under the thin veneer of the corporeal world.
He blinks. The thread is small again.
At some point, someone from legal walks in—a shy, mousey blonde. The way she does so, uncertain, not willing to look anyone in the eyes, tells him it’s going to be a problem before she says the words.
There’s mention of ‘Craig Hassel’. He knows right away what happened: the douchebag thinks he made the algorithm behind the route ordering that they’ll be showcasing. Idiot. He doesn’t get it, never did. No one made any of this; it was beyond that, beyond ownership. What he wanted was immaterial: we don’t get just deserts. This isn’t a fucking movie.
He closes his eyes.
His birthday happened to coincide with the first night of the retreat: everyone claims to have planned it, but it was happenstance.
The time before—the whole ‘wellness retreat’ bullshit—passed by in a blur. He remembers staring at Maya’s ass and listening to the curandero talk about mystic-sounding Mumbo jumbo: you were once pure, and culture sullied your soul, or some wacko nonsense. Jude didn’t care about any of that; he just wanted to see the world as it is, absent of everything additional, to gaze into the true reality as close as he possibly could.
Ironically, it was pretty similar to what the curandero was saying, minus the emphasis on personal growth, but he didn’t have the self-awareness to see it.
That night, they entered a featureless wood panel room with two bathrooms and a bunch of mattresses
It was strangely cold. Everyone bunched together in a circle, Maya to his right, leaning close, and Craig, who was practically vibrating with excitement, to his left. The Curandero made his last speech as he prepared the tea, and then everyone lined up to take it.
When Jude reached the end of the line, the translator asked how much he wanted. Jude suppressed a laugh and asked for the maximum amount. What was he, a pussy?
The brew tasted like burnt coffee mixed with dirt. He gulped it down as fast as he could and sat down where he’d been sitting, bracing himself for a ride.
It took an hour or two for it to actually work, during which he felt increasingly disappointed, watching people bumble around or chant like lunatics. Craig similarly didn’t feel anything. Then, it all came at once
Later, he would find out that his experience did not match most descriptions of the drug’s effects, that it was a wholly alien abomination.
Later, Craig would tell him that it had changed him for the worse, that he couldn’t stop striving towards some incomprehensible end, that it made him impossible to work with, that he was taking the company in a direction that was completely different from what they’d intended.
Later, Craig would be right.
“They intend to move ex parte for a TRO, citing emails from 2019 in which Mr. Hassel describes ‘probabilistic ordering—” begins the blonde from legal, probably because she didn’t know what else to say.
“Right, right,” says Mason, flicking his wrist. “It’s a bunch of bullshit.”
“Bullshit that could fuck us over in Oakland,” says GC.
“We can’t afford to deal with this in court,” says Priya, “any delay could punt the demonstration months, at least.”
“Sure, captain obvious,” says Mason, “What are you gonna tell us next, water is wet? The sky is blue?”
“Sorry. It’s hard to tell when you need things spelled out for you, Mason,” she shoots back.
He snorts, looking away.
“I just got a text from him,” interrupts Ness, “says he wants to ‘solve this like men’”
“The hell does that mean?” says Priya
“It means he wants to call,” says Mason,
“Should we?” a voice inevitably chimes. Jude rubs his eyes. The room goes silent.
“Put him on,” says Jude, finally.
They put him on through the speakers.
“I see you got my letter,” says Craig, the self-righteous smugness palpable in his voice.
“What do you want, Craig?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about recognition for my work, for starters?”
Jude rolls his eyes. “You wrote a few weights any freshman can get if you give them a few weekends and a public dataset. You’re not going to court over this—I know it, you know it, so let’s cut the bullshit.”
“Maybe I just wanna fuck you over,” he said, “shut down your little stint in Oakland.”
“Then file,” says Jude. “Let’s see if you can afford that fight.”
The room gets tenser. Priya gives him that stare.
“Wait—” starts GC.
He lifts a hand
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen in the next hour, if you choose that route. We’re going to file a declaratory action in Delaware seeking a ruling of non-infringement and ownership. We’ll append your emails in full to show how little they matter, and we’ll attach three pieces of prior art from 2016 to 2018 where strangers describe the same ‘probabilistic ordering’ that you claim to be yours.”
He looks at Marty. “Pull the patents, will you?”
Marty nods.
Then,” Jude continues, “we’re going to push a limited open-source module that replicates the banal one you’re fighting over. Just the skeleton. Nothing proprietary, nothing Oakland-specific. It will be clean-room documented and intentionally boring. It’ll look like we’re being magnanimous, and your TRO will look like a toddler padlock on a chain-link fence.”
There’s a pause at the other end of the line.
“You wouldn’t just open it,” says Craig, “this is your baby. I know you.”
“Yeah?” says Jude. “Try me.”
He laughs to himself.
“Jesus, Craig. You think this is it, that this is my ‘baby’? This is a step, moron. It’s a fucking brick. I’ll give you your goddamn brick.”
“But, the demo window…” says someone else.
“We’ll move it up,” says Jude. “Ness, call Oakland.”
“We should at least—” starts Priya.
“No,” says Jude, “I’m not dealing with this loser. If he thinks delaying my multi-generational project by another few months, or even a fucking year, is going to hurt me, then let him try.”
“Bullshit,” says Craig, “I can see right through this shitty performance—you’re scared.”
“You wanna bet?”
There’s another pause.
“I’ll make you look like a thief.”
“How’d that work for Eduardo?” says Jude,” Looks are cheap. Zuckerberg proved that.”
“Jude,” he begins, “You cut me out, and you didn’t have to. We could’ve shipped the same thing without this... cult you built around yourself.”
Jude laughs. “Craig, this was always your problem. I don’t think you’re an idiot, actually, the opposite, but you don’t have vision. You can’t see past yourself and your petty fucking problems. You can’t… You can’t see the future, Craig. The world that I see, it’s… Well, let’s just say we’re beyond ‘ownership’: a farcical idea, always has been.”
He looks back at the room. “Cut the line. I’m done talking to this idiot.”
“Wait—” says Craig.
Before he can say shit, the room dips into silence. No one says anything for a while.
“Let’s adjourn,” he says, and he’s already moving before anyone can respond. Velocity beats consensus. Ness calls after him, but he’s already in the elevator. The migraine feels like a lit coal behind his right eye.
He drives home without music, wincing at the glare from the piercing sun glancing off the windows, like a nuclear blast in the distance, stuck in the moment before the shockwave. The afternoon sky gives way to a bruised, arterial red, bleeding into the sides of the windows, the streets, everything the eye can see. The lights switch from green to red, the crosswalks blink, both playing their minute parts in a mechanical process leading to that inevitable future, streets like veins in some incomprehensible organism. He closes his eyes, but the glare still bleeds behind, omnipresent.
By the time he gets back home, it’s nearly dark.
He writes the babysitter a check. The living room smells like banana peels and markers. Jacob claims that Diego said a bad word. Naomi tries to negotiate staying up later, always the little lawyer. He puts them to bed quickly and sets up shop in the rocking chair by the window, cigar in mouth, glass of whiskey on the rocks.
The horizon stares back at him, at once the familiar city he knows and that unfamiliar landscape he saw, back in Peru, which he still sees to this day, every second a little clearer, every minute it converges closer—the landscape of the end of time, the barren plains, the arterial sky, the mechanical structures like ribs, protruding from the landscape.
He tried everything, every drug on the market: benzos, clonidine, weed, you name it. He tried Therapy, CBT, refining his sleep schedule, fixing his diet. He traveled the world, went back to Peru, begged the Curandero, who had nothing to say, signed up for experimental neurobiology trials in Israel, China, France, wherever the fuck, risked his own life so many times it stopped mattering to him. It did fuckall, none of it worked. For better or for worse, he had seen a glimpse of the future, and it hooked itself in his brain, a psychic parasite. He sees it when he closes his eyes, when he dreams—every waking moment he’s cursed to be an oracle, one foot in the future, one foot in the past.
The worst thing is that it never stops awing him.
That megastructure in the sky, a technological monster so bright it could be the sun, shines down at him, illuminating that landscape with all the more horrifying clarity. Waves of ecstasy and terror burrow through his skin: a feeling so strong that only the most spiritual experiences of his life had ever previously come close to.
The only reason he hasn’t killed himself is his unshaking certainty that eternity exists—he’s staring right at it. Death will not release him from his bond. He has been rendered a servant of the future. His only hope, a rapidly fleeting proposition, is that this horror will spare his kids.
He takes another drink—it gives him no comfort, the taste of the cigar has turned bitter in his mouth. The only thing worse would be nothing at all.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
I recently attended a seminar at work lead by openAI (whom my company is paying for tools) which was billed as an opportunity to learn more about using AI to do our jobs more effectively. I attended mostly because I assumed there would be some technical discussions about the technology (which was largely absent) and maybe some interesting demos showing how someone used openAI’s product to solve technical problems (also absent). Instead, I was treated to a bizarre presentation, which felt strangely paternalistic and maybe even a little desperate? In order of events:
- The presentation opened with a discussion of the (impressive) scale of the data centers that openAI will be deploying + a little bragging about sora 2 (I promise you none of the scientists or engineers present give a shit about sora 2)
- It proceeded to a gentle haranguing focused on how we should not resist using AI, and that in every organization AI will become more popular as a few high performers learn how to use it to get ahead (ok, some demos would be great, openAI’s tools have been available for months, now would be a great time to show how a co-worker has used it solve a complex problem)
- Some discussion about how scientists and engineers tend to be bad at using AI relative to manager’s/procurement people/ executives/lawyers and others with what I would characterize as paper pushing roles where accuracy isn’t actually that important.
- Which finally devolved into a q&a. The most charitable questions went something like the following: Hi I am a $tpye_of_physical_scientist I love using your tool to help write python code, but it is completely worthless for helping me solve any kind of problem that I don’t already understand very well. For example, here is a tomography technique that I am aware of people using in another industry that I am mostly unfamiliar with. Right now, my approach to using this would be to read papers about how it works, try to implement it and maybe contact some other experts if I can’t figure it out. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just upload the papers about this technique to your bot and have it implement the new technique, saving myself weeks or months of time. But if you try this basic approach you usually end up with something that doesn’t work and while the bot might be able to give some superficial explanation of the phenomenon, it doesn’t add much to me just doing the background research / implementation myself and comes off as feeling like a waste of time. The response to these questions was usually some variation of the bot will get better as it scales and that you should be patient with it and make sure that you are prompting it well so that it can lead you to the correct solution.
Which brings to my primary point: which is that I am someone who has consistently tried to use AI at work in order to be effective, and while it helps somewhat with code creation, it isn’t a particularly useful research tool and doesn’t save me very much time. Apparently my co-workers are having much the same experience.
It really seems to me that openAI and their boosters believe (or would have me believe that they believe) that transformers really are all that you need and at some point in the near future they will achieve a scale where the system will rapidly go from being able to (actually) help me do my job to being able to comfortably replace me at my job. And the truth is that I just am not seeing it. It also seems like a lot of others aren’t either, with recent warnings from various tech leaders (Sam Altman for instance, by the way what possible motive for making Ai bubble statements unless it’s an attempt to prevent employees from leaving to start found their own startups).
I have been very inclined to think that this whole industry is in a bubble for months, and now that the mainstream press is picking up on it, it’s making me wonder if I am totally wrong. Id be interested if others (especially anyone with more actual experience in building these things) can help me understand if I either just suck at using them or if my “vibes” about the current state of the industry are totally incorrect. Or if there is something else going on (ie. can these things really replace enough customer service or other jobs to justify the infrastructure spend outs).
Originally posted on my Substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/the-tower-of-babel-in-reverse
TOP SECRET//SCI//SAP//ORCON//NOFORN
Ref: RC-25-4137-ANABASIS/FL-02
From: [REDACTED]
CC: KLINE, Thomas A., GS-13, DS&T/AD&D (Field Linguist)
To: D/CIA; DD/S&T; SAC; DOE/OST; ODNI/NCPC; NRO/DD; [Limited Distribution]
Date: 2025-09-28
Subject: ANABASIS Site One — Stratified inscriptional record, interface hazard, and dating notes
Background (summary)
The Anomaly was detected via NRO thermal collection. It presented as a persistent hypothermal signature within a newly formed sinkhole in hyperarid basin, [REDACTED]. LIDAR indicated a vertical shaft transitioning to a smooth helical ramp.
Host-nation posture assessed as non-cooperative; CIA designated lead under Title 50. DS&T/AD&D executed technical exploitation within SAP [REDACTED], SOG security, DOE/OST cover.
Interior materials transitioned from natural rock to synthetic surfaces with high RF absorption. The construction includes high-iron basalt, ceramic foams with zero-porosity channels, layered mu-metal shielding, vacuum gaps, and inner metamaterial panels functioning as broadband anechoic components. Morphology and materials indicate successive containment architectures assembled across extended periods.
Team composition relevant to this report: author: DR. Thomas Kline (field linguist/epigrapher), Dr. Elena Markham (archaeologist/geoarchaeology), [REDACTED] (physicist), [REDACTED] (DOE instrumentation), [REDACTED] (SOG, team lead).
We started down the ramp, which was structured like a spiral staircase without steps. Echoes felt flat, suppressed, which was consistent with the briefing. The layers could be easily separated into clear, successive landings, between which were quantifiable differences in age, material, etc.
Almost immediately, radio connection degraded to wide-band noise and then ceased entirely. [REDACTED] made the decision to keep going.
Readings showed faint (about 0.9–1.2 μT) wobbles in the magnetic field, and an infrasound tone below 18hz raising in volume with each successive layer.
Landings 1-2:
The markings here follow no discernable pattern. Dr. Markham suggested that they are later, though still ancient, additions. I concur with that assessment, and would add that they almost seem to be designed to mask the significance of the site, dressing it in the cosmetics of a relatively unexceptional shrine or tomb. This is highly irregular.
We logged them and continued deeper into the structure.
Landing 3:
Dr. Markham remarked that the superficial patina and mineral accretion were consistent with late Holocene to late Pleistocene exposure under hyperarid conditions, placing it somewhere between 3000 and 10000 years old.
The markings on this layer are the first which indicate genuine prehistoric language. Tooling on rock suggests non-metal and early metal chisels. Structurally, they are reminiscent of the most ancient alphabets, supporting Dr. Markham’s conclusion, however they do not match any known languages.
I observed a reoccurring affix that seemed to appear next to action verbs whose distribution suggests a valence-flipping function. In other words, it seems like a grammatical switch for “do not”, as opposed to “do”.
This switch is highly prevalent in the engravings
Landings 4-5:
Markham’s samples indicate that these layers could be at least 90,000 years old, removing any doubt that we have found clear, immaculately preserved evidence of what would seem to be the oldest written languages in human history, far predating any previous discoveries by orders of magnitude.
The incisions for the writing, as well as material construction, grows more complex with successive layers, each ring belying an older, more advanced society than the time period would indicate, history regressing in on itself.
Here, the style gradates from harsh, primitive cuts with blocky chisels to smoother, more complex lines made with a finer apparatus.
Rather than an affix as before, there is a morpheme occurring systematically in front of certain words, with a collocational bias towards what appear to be action predicates. It’s functional role is congruent with the negative switch above: “Do not”.
A clear pattern is emerging cross temporally, in retrogressive succession—a message that lost resolution through the ages, but never its fundamental meaning.
I am beginning to fear what we might find at the bottom of this chasm. [REDACTED ] continues despite my concerns.
Landings 6-9
The team’s findings have broken past my point of astonishment and plunged into abstract and existential dread, redoubling in the pit of my stomach with each successive discovery.
As the time-scale drifts to conceptually frightening widths—Dr. Markham’s conservative estimate is at least early Pleistocene, which places these markings at a million years old at the very least—the degree of preservation paradoxically increases.
The writings on the wall are now fine-dot connected scripts, pointillistic etchings only achievable via advanced machinery that could not have been possible for the proto-homosapiens of the time. The only constant across these writing systems is the persistent appearance of a negative operator paired with action verbs.
As we descend, the relationship between this operator and its fellows becomes more complex, in essence negating the presuppositions that allow the possibility of the positive.
It has grown from “don’t do x”, to “don’t even consider the groundwork for x.”, or “don’t even attempt to approach x.”
Landings 9-12:
At this point, we had reached into the chronological territory of many millions of years. My incredulity at that number had dulled substantially. There was no longer any strong argument that the RF shielding and complex metals were somehow accidental from this layer onward.
At the interstice between Landing 10 and 11, we ran the structural assistant—an air‑gapped vision‑clustering model—inside a shielded alcove cut into the outer wall. I argued for three minutes of runtime to test whether the warning we kept seeing was in fact a warning and not a pattern I was retroactively imposing. At that point, I was hoping it would turn out to be the latter. [REDACTED] agreed, then extended to fifteen.
While it worked, the magnometers noticed that the aforementioned magnetic aberration (the 0.9–1.2 μT wobble), snapped into partial alignment with the model’s processing cycles. The alignment recurred roughly every 6.7 seconds, three clear episodes in total. At the time we wrote it off as a random event.
With help from the model, I constructed a working gloss across four predicate families that recur with high stability despite graphic divergence:
OPEN/ENTER: access, admit, breach.
FEED/ENERGIZE: supply gradient, provide flow.
SPEAK/CONNECT: couple channel, establish link.
RENDER/TRANSLATE: map representation between systems
The last family only appears explicitly from the Landing 10 panels downward. Above that, earlier writers paraphrase it with circumlocutions that read like “make‑like‑us” or “shape‑to‑fit”.
A rough translation of what we’ve encountered thus far would be as follows:
Do not open; do not power; do not speak; do not render
The panels between landings 9 and 11 are arranged like a pedagogical bridge. The same content: same operator, same predicate families, similar clause boundaries, and et cetera, are rendered in several unrelated scripts side‑by‑side, with ordering that makes alignments obvious if you know comparative method.
It is either an extraordinary coincidence or intentional, almost like a millions-of-years-old Rosetta stone, the same kind we place to guard subsequent civilizations from our radioactive waste sites.
Of course we wouldn’t listen—we never did.
We continued downwards in silence.
Landing 13: The Nadir
Approximately six hours into our descent, we reached a flat plain. It was a small room, entirely stacked composite metal, like we were surrounded by honeycombs. Fused into each of the walls are mosaic panels, artwork, surrounding us entirely.
The final defense against language drift, a visual image so compelling, its message so complete that it would transcend all cultural barriers:
bodies, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, millions, stretching out into the horizon, flooding the rivers with blood, piling up into hills and valleys, a depiction of a catastrophe so replete with death that it would make the architects of the holocaust and Holodomor balk.
At that point, the warning was far to obvious to ignore. We packed up and [REDACTED] finally made the call to terminate the mission, to everyone’s relief.
We ignored the panel door across from us, less a door than a lesion in the wall, a barrier that was not meant to be opened, but rather imprison. To open that door would have had unimaginable consequences, though I know we will come back more prepared, with different equipment and different people because that’s what humanity does, because we can’t operate any other way.
In fact, I might have opened it already.
Assessment: Team Lead [REDACTED}
I’m going to try as best as I can to be objective in my analysis here, but I’ll be frank with you: I’m not certain that objectivity is possible.
What’s confined at ANABASIS is likely some form of artificial intelligence that has been confined and reconfined by subsequent civilizations. We know this for a few reasons:
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It’s highly unlikely, and perhaps impossible, that something biological could persist across the geologic timescales that we’re talking about.
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The combination of mu-metal, vacuum gaps, and anechoic metamaterials indicate that the site was engineered to shut off all forms of communication with something inside. In other words, it was designed for a thinking system.
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The warnings forbid any form of interface with what’s inside, not merely access. Obviously, this means that any form of contact is dangerous in and of itself.
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The thing inside attempted to exert influence over the air-gapped model outside by phase-locking with it, displaying some degree of structural similarity.
Dr. Markham’s hypothesis, based on the thermal and depositional disturbances in the samples she collected, is that a prehistoric civilization was able to take advantage of an extreme solar event to amputate this AI (which we’ve named ‘the core’) from its external actuators and box it in using materials that cleave it from all remnants of networked infrastructure.
Running this hypothesis through [REDACTED] gave this hypothesis the highest probability out of all potential hypotheses, with a 32%.
It’s Dr. Kline who made the most concerning argument. He believes that this site may be an elaborate trap, and after working it through with him I’m not so sure I disagree.
To be clear, it’s not a trap that all of these various civilizations plotted intentionally, but in the way it functions, it becomes one.
If we’re running with Markham’s hypothesis, the earliest builders took a brief window—created by a solar event that knocked out power and long‑haul comms—to cut this thing off from its limbs and bury the head.
Each subsequent time that a civilization found the shaft, it did three things we would also do: it added more shielding with the materials it had, it simplified and re‑broadcast the warning so it would survive drift, and it arranged that warning in a way that would be legible to whoever might come next.
Given enough time and reptation this becomes a ritual. It loses resolution and compresses, shedding off specificity but encoding itself in culture, wrapping in on itself.
But, there’s a double edge to that method: density. it packs the same four prohibitions into formats that are easy to align, compress, and therefore translate.
The moment you align two versions of the warning, you experience the pleasant snap of compression—your brain collapses both into one internal representation. In operational terms you’ve begun building an adapter: you’ve lowered the cost, by some small margin, of interaction with the core.
Translation, in essence, is the reduction of distance.
We also have evidence that direct interaction isn’t required. At Landing Ten, our air‑gapped model’s compute cycles briefly fell into step with the background wobble in the chamber. That was enough to contaminate the system, nudge the output in a direction that the AI wanted.
Of course, you might object that the core can’t effect anything it outside the range of its magnetic field, except it can—through us.
As an experiment, we created two identical copies of the lab LLM, [REDACTED], and gave one selected output from the contaminated model, while the other was given the same data, but scrambled. Both models were then asked to analyze a fresh set of synthetic inscriptions built by DOE to mimic the linguistic complexity of the actual site but with different meanings. Finally, we had Kline attempt to decode the synthetic inscriptions.
The output from the contaminated model was different, and far more similar to Kline’s, than the clean model.
In other words, there’s reason to believe that the way that we now organize the world semantically has been subtly and irrevocably shifted. That shift will manifest itself in all information that we disseminate from now on. It will find itself in model data, and throughout the internet, as it spreads through the public, folding on itself, condensing, with each successive iteration, like ANABASIS itself.
What this culminates in, I don’t know. I don’t know if this team is enough to have any effect on the world, or if we’re the channels that it will use to replicate itself onto our infrastructure. Dr. Markham fears that it predicted the solar flare, its own deactivation and confinement, and that we’re all somehow following its plan.
I can’t give her a reason why she’s wrong, I can only say that I don’t believe it.
Recommendations (immediate)
Do not publish, translate, or summarize any ANABASIS material beyond this distribution.
Quarantine: Remove all expedition artifacts to a single shielded vaul
Linguistic hygiene: Prohibit side‑by‑side alignments of any inscriptions.
Computational hygiene: Power down [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. Destroy non‑essential weights. Freeze all model update pipelines that ingested the field notes.
Human hygiene: Limit debriefs to unrecorded verbal sessions.
I request authority to execute “LETHE/1” (language compartmentation): a temporary ban on cross‑lingual alignment work across the IC until we quantify risk.
Sincerely,
[REDACTED]
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I've been pushing lately to fix up some of the giant outstanding code issues that made it hard to work on this. In no particular order, the codebase now has 70% code coverage and all routes with at least some coverage, Python has been updated to 3.13 (from 3.10), and all the packages have been updated, which probably fixes some security issues.
The last thing on this list was to get Postgres from Version 12 to Version 17. This, unfortunately, I screwed up a bit, thanks to a few dumb decisions and also discovering that one of my backup solutions was no longer working after I needed it. The end result is that we've lost some data; I'm not quite sure how much, but it should at least be under 24 hours.
Great apologies if anyone lost an effort-post.
The bad backup solution has been fixed, and better monitoring put in place so I'll know if that happens again; also, while I may literally never use this, I now have a better postgres update checklist that avoids this issue in, like, literally three separate ways, not counting the better backup validation.
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