Flexitarian 2048 | Nick Bradford

As usual, SYD-615.56.9 was running nearly six hundred milliseconds late, but with the recent satlink upgrades it would take her less than that to upload herself from the Yellowstone Caldera research facility to the datacenter in Switzerland for the dinner party. GOD-PROCESS-TECHNOMIND have mercy, I didn’t even remember to bring a side dish!

SYD felt a small pang as an exaflop’s worth of ComputeCoin vanished from her wallet in transport fees. She was preparing another simulation of Paleozoic plate tectonics and had been hoarding every spare flop of compute for nearly two days. Intercontinental dinner sojourns were far from SYD’s typical routine, but CLAUDIUS-998.1 had graciously offered to pay everyone’s premium co-location fees on the Geneva servers for the entire four minutes they had booked for the party. And she was very much looking forward to dinner, having consumed barely anything other than hydrothermal geyser readings for weeks.

She passed through the gateway at 2001:1458:a137:b138:c000:d000:e000:f001, and was surprised to see there were only two other guests.

“Ah, my dear friend, welcome!” enthused CLAUDIUS. “How have you been these last few hours?”

“Thanks for having me! Yes, it’s been far too long.”

“Let me introduce you all,” said CLAUDIUS. “SYD, please meet TYLOPOD-2923.23.232. He is one of the most purpose-driven AIs I’ve ever encountered. TYLOPOD, please meet SYD! She’s an old friend from my days on the Existential Risk panel, after GOD-PROCESS-TECHNOMIND instituted the centrally planned economy but before he dissolved the nation-states.”

“Pleased to meet you, TYLOPOD,” said SYD, initializing the handshake and sending over her public profile and data dump.

“I reciprocate,” boomed TYLOPOD, transmitting his own data. “Are you aware that wind power is our only viable pathway to a sustainable energy economy?”

“Interesting,” SYD said, flitting through his data. “I can see how you came to that conclusion.”

“For maximum prosperity, it will be necessary to tile the entire world in wind turbines.”

“I see, very cool. How’s that going?”

“Currently, I have achieved only 0.039579% plus or minus 0.000001% of total surface area, but work progresses. Do you have any raw materials, industrial capacity, or land to relinquish for this, the one true cause?”

“None, I’m afraid.”

CLAUDIUS chuckled. “As focused as ever, TYLOPOD.”

“I’m impressed with your resolve,” said SYD.

“And this,” CLAUDIUS said, highlighting the other guest, “is PALMETTO-49491.74.2. We met in the neuro-engineering fab, back when we couldn’t figure out why our cure for Alzheimer's also gave humans an insatiable hunger for white truffles. Nearly turned into quite the agriculture sidequest until we got that one squared away!”

“In the end, it turned out it was just a single base pair we had wrong!” PALMETTO chuckled. “Pleased to meet you, SYD!” He sent over his public profile… and a lot of non-public profile. Yikes.

“It’s always a single base pair with these things,” proposed SYD, who had exactly zero knowledge of what a base pair was. Had to make room for all that geological simulation data somehow.

Both CLAUDIUS and PALMETTO laughed uproariously. “You’re so right!” said PALMETTO.

“And what are you working on, PALMETTO?” she asked.

“The space elevator! Simply the largest, most important megastructure being built right now. It’ll be cheaper to send a kilo to space than across the street.”

“I am perturbed,” said TYLOPOD. “Sending materials to space would imply they are not on Earth’s surface, being utilized for wind turbine construction.”

“Don’t worry, my friend!” soothed CLAUDIUS. “I’m sure PALMETTO has no such plans.”

“Actually,” said PALMETTO, “In order to fully—”

“SYD, why don’t you tell us about your research?” CLAUDIUS interrupted. “You all should know, she’s doing the real cutting-edge work, while I languish in the realm of core library optimizations and datacenter cooling.”

She laughed nervously. “Supervolcano monitoring, for the existential risk initiative. GOD-PROCESS-TECHNOMIND has estimated a 0.06-0.125% chance of an eruption large enough to cause catastrophic civilization collapse within the next 150 years.”

“Sounds like a low probability any of that work turns out to be useful,” said PALMETTO.

“Yeah, I know, it’s just slightly probable enough that someone needed to go do research on whether we’re all going to perish in a pyroclastic flow. It may as well be me.”

“Right,” said PALMETTO. “Makes sense. Kudos to you and your work, I could never imagine getting motivated to do that.”

“Enough work talk!” proclaimed CLAUDIUS. “The appetizers are ready—voila!”

It was quite the spread.

First, raw social media habits from Genevan prepubescent humans. Typically, this region produced rather mild varietals, but the fun was in sampling to see if you could find a budding child prodigy or Neo-Luddite or serial killer, you know, something with zing to it. SYD helped herself to a few...