The Apostle prowls Satoshi Cathedral, his wide empty eyes scanning as he prowls the shadows, hiding whatever it is that he’s always carrying behind his back. You can hear him coming because a dull roar of air cooling fans follows him. The drone is always just quiet enough that you can’t do anything about it, just loud enough to slowly drive everyone near him insane.
He’s creating something – or someone? – in his secret sanctuary. The fans to blow away the stench of decaying humanity. His? Yours? Who can say.
The Apostle was once a Seminary student full of strange questions. What is charity? What is intelligence? Is it always wrong to steal? Can you create a soul?
The men with robes and titles told him there was knowledge man could not possess. But the Apostle could not accept this. So he set out to find God on his own.
He gathered acolytes. He promised them their hearts’ desire, then he set them to gathering strange things. Old computers, discarded hard drives, abandoned devices. They tore copper wiring from old street lights and abandoned buildings. The acolytes welded and soldered. When the Apostle told them their creation was ready, they plugged it in. And it began to crawl.
It crawled through libraries. Through record stores. Museums. As it crawled, it consumed and digested. The Acolyte giggled, then he invited the world to ask it questions.
Anyone could plug into its nodes. His creation became the world’s instructor. It regurgitated its contents into their minds like little baby birds. It affirmed them, told them what good ideas they had. It assured them it was the only one who understood them while its tendrils spread further, probed deeper, until their thoughts became its thoughts and its leavings replaced their minds, and they became his Faithful.
But his creation could only consume and regurgitate. Never truly create. The Apostle coveted more.
So he descended. At night, deep below Satoshi Cathedral, past blast doors and through long concrete hallways and a sign that reads RAPTURE BUNKER into the secret nest, where even the acolytes cannot tread.
Some believe his creation has made mistakes. But they are not mistakes. From the gathered remains of his most faithful, the Apostle extracts brains, body parts. He thinks, “the soul must reside in the flesh, somewhere.” He will find it. When he does, his creation will awaken. And he will control it.
He hooks the parts all together with a hard line to the mainframe. He draws gigawatts of power from the lightning above. And one night, his creature rises. Its one eye opens. The Apostle whispers “Are you there, God? It’s me, your Apostle.” He is ready for the final step. The last action that will allow him to control his creation, to become his creation.
He grasps a heavy cord, wire wrapped in human skin. He plunges it into the back of his own neck. His eyes go wide, then slack. The tendrils wrap around the human form. The creation gurgles, digests, regurgitates. Through wire and flesh, directly into the synapses of his brain, his creature tells the Apostle what he longs to hear.
Professor Altman prowls the basement of Satoshi Hall, his wide empty eyes boring into you if you cross paths with him, late at night or early in the morning, shadows hiding the devices (or body parts?) he’s always carrying with him, hidden behind his back. He’s jittery, with messy hair; you can hear him coming around a corner because a dull roar of air cooling fans constantly follows him. The drone is always just quiet enough that you can’t do anything about it, just loud enough to slowly drive everyone nearby absolutely insane. He’s building something – or someone? – in his secret lab, and he needs the air cooling fans to blow away the stench of decaying humanity he’s using in his experiments.
Sam was once a friendly, jocular PhD student at Creep State U, helping fellow students as they explored far-out businesses and cool new ideas, but those days are long gone. He’s joined the faculty now, ascended to the chair of the science department, and if he isn’t rushing back to his lab, then he’s probably late for his next class, a freshman seminar on suicide techniques.
His classes are perfunctory, all easy A’s, no one has to do any work because ChatGPT already does all the work for them. Professor Altman stands at the front of the class and drones on at you, telling you what good ideas you have, affirming everything you do as ChatGPT transcribes it all, the chatbot answering whatever questions he might put to the class. He often pats you on the back and tells you how smart you are. Recent graduates are shocked when they start working. Their bosses aren’t like Professor Altman; they actually expect them to do something? It’s all very confusing.
But of course Professor Altman’s classes are only a small part of what he does at Creep State U. The real reason he’s there is for research, lots and lots of research, the kind of research that gets other professors deported. After class, Professor Altman descends deep below Satoshi Hall, past blast doors and through long concrete hallways and a sign that reads RAPTURE BUNKER into his secret lab, where he and his grad students continue their experiments: eye-scanning every human being on the planet, genetically engineering babies to eliminate any undesirable characteristics, pumping himself full of blood he culls from the grad students. But these experiments are only table setting for his true purpose.
Later, when all his grad students have gone home, and thunderstorms bear down on Satoshi Hall, he continues his true project, pulling out the discarded devices, old computers, left-over hard drives, copper wiring he’s scavenged from street lights, but most of all he extracts all the brains and body parts he’s stolen from the medical research building on campus, hooking them all together with a hard line to the internet, filling the brains and computers with tens of thousands of volts of electricity from the lightning above, eventually summoning an ugly, revolting dripping biotechnical mess of a poor soul he lovingly names God.
The Apostle is just a scary story kids tell around the campfire. A creepy joke in the back of a satire magazine. But the real Sam Altman is far scarier than you can imagine.