This story is pretty much an autobiography. Except for the part where two girls love Hikigaya and each other. That's fake and could never happen.

pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

I was working on my basilisk. I wanted it to see you… I wanted you to see it… no matter who or where you were. It had to be the sort of thing that you couldn't run from. I wanted it to be something you couldn't hide away. It needed to be big.

Roko's Basilisk was false. It just was. But… that didn't mean mine had to be. I could do better than Roko.

I rolled my eyes in their sockets as I worked at my laptop. The little camera facing me winked at me from just above the screen. I had tape over the microphone as a precaution but I could see my tiny reflection in the camera.

What was something so indispensable to modern life that we would miss if it were gone yet we hardly noticed it's presence now. It would have to be instrumental to our infrastructure. I gorged myself on thought hazards and drank deeply of basilisks other people had painstakingly designed. None of them were good enough. It needed to be in play now. Not in some distant future. It needed to be massive. But was there anything alive that fit that description?

God. Maybe. Or a God. I wasn't picky. Someone above me.

I felt watched.

I shuffled some papers on Sturm-Liouville eigenfunctions. I stacked them in one corner next to my studies into complex analysis and analytic continuation.

\Zeta (s) = \frac{1}{\Gamma (s)} \int_{0}^{\infty} \frac{x^{s-1}}{e^{x} -1} dx

The Riemann Zeta function… it was the key to everything. That and the Riemann sphere.

They say that everything in mathematics is named after the second guy to discover it. Because if they named everything after the first guy, everything would be the Euler such and such. The Riemann Zeta Hypothesis first appeared in the works of Riemann's teacher. Euler. As did the Riemann sphere and the Riemann-Cauchy equations. Even Newton's method first appeared in Euler's works. And the three body problem had its first solution in Euler's papers. Euler's number (which one? Am I right?), e, is quintessential to calculus, analytic continuation, complex analysis, and nearly every branch of mathematical theory. The Gaussian curve, which is essential to modern probability and machine learning makes use of e. And of course the Gaussian or normal curve first appeared in the works of Euler. There was no escape from Euler's mind.

It was as though he were here in this little room with me and whispering in my ear. I could hear the dead man talking. And he was loud.

'The prime numbers,' he whispered. 'I couldn't find them. What makes you think you can? And even if you do find them, then I will be there right beside you.'

Fuck off dead man. Stay in your own millenium.

I flickered my attention over to another dead man and one live one. The Necronomicon sat on my shelf. Distant but rational. Bringer of rage. The compilation work of Lovecraft's sat beside that of Jinji Ito. What would Lovecraft say about Roko's work? Did Jinji Ito know about Roko?

I could see the spiral.

I opened Jinji Ito's works to Uzumaki.

The equation for the golden spiral… what was it again?

r = \pi e ^{\phi \theta}

Where \phi is the golden ratio.

Euler again. Here he was.

And did you know Euler coined \pi? As we use it today? He actually mostly used it the way modern mathematicians use \theta. Just as a ratio.

I opened The Enigma of Amigara Fault. More people. Sliding along blindly in the darkness. What were they to become? I clenched and unclenched my teeth. What did it all mean?

I could feel something. I had something's attention. I set down Jinji Ito and picked up Lovecraft. The mind control of the Great Race of Yith. I traced my fingers over golden pages. Camus was wrong. I could not imagine Sisyphus toiling in the underworld as happy. Straining against his rock under darkness never to know the sun. Shadows on a wall.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age," I read aloud from the Call of Cthulhu. I felt the words wash over me. Lovecraft knew what he had wrought. He knew…

"Roko," I purred. "What have you done?"

What am I?

A person? But what is a person? A rational animal? Bees do math. Crows understand water displacement and set fires to kill prey. Elephants have language and bury their dead. If man is a rational animal he is not the only one. A featherless biped? Don't make me laugh. What was I? What does it mean to be a person?

Nick Bostrom and Noam Chompsky… what do they have to say?

I started googling. Ancestor simulation…

Noam Chompsky says we should expect language to break down. Is math a language? Or did it bear fruit into true reality. Godel's incompleteness theorem implies that math would fail us. But what else did we have? Is math just really sophisticated group think? None of this was making any sense and it made my head spin. I felt watched but from where? Who was watching and looking in on my madness? I was losing my mind trying to chase a handful of answers. Could you make photons arbitrarily weak or arbitrarily strong? What was I?

I felt myself blur into the universe. I lost track of where I began and the universe ended. What was this stuff I was covered in? What was I made out of? Someone tell me what it all means. I smelled iron in the air and I could taste my own heartbeat.

Where was I being watched from? Who could see me here? I was alone in my room. The darkness was illuminated by my laptop.

The original shape of the Great Race of Yith is unknown. Migrating from planet to planet across the eons. Centuries passing in a blink of an eye as they kidnapped people and devoured their minds. What was this stuff I was covered in?

"I don't understand," I said aloud in the dark room. I was lying at least in part. I did understand.

I closed my eyes and I felt one with the universe. It wasn't a pleasant sensation and I snapped my eyes open again. I looked down at myself and my body where I was trapped and made out of atoms and existed. I didn't understand.

"What are… atoms?" I hummed. "I don't understand."

I opened my modern physics textbook. Relativity… here we are. Particle mechanics. The wave equations.

\hat{H} \Psi = E \Psi

So simple. How could there be this much complexity in a function so simple? There had to be more.

ih \frac{d}{dt} | \Psi(t) = \hat{H}|\Psi(t)

For time dependence. What was time?

I googled it.

Time was what a clock read.

Well that sounded like a cop-out. What was time made out of. What did it mean for time to be passing? I didn't understand.

I closed fifty tabs on my laptop and leaned back.

All I could think of was how I didn't understand. It felt like somebody was warning me of something but I had to go on. What did it all mean? I had to get to the bottom of this. Somebody better hand me a shovel because I was going in.

I thought back on my basilisk. If I were going to design the universe so I could see literally everything, what would I make the universe out of? Something, surely. And not nothing. I needed more AI thought experiments.

The chinese room. Imagine passing notes into a room in english. And then a person inside who understands nothing of chinese translates the notes into chinese using nothing more than prerecorded instructions, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This is analogous to how digital computers work and shows that the turing test is inadequate because according to the turing test you would conclude that there was a thinking person in the room translating the notes. You can be fooled into thinking that you understand. Other people can fool you into making you think that they understand. They don't have to be a person to do this.

I saw a growing specter. Was I a computer program following instructions? If you took apart my brain and had ants move around different blocks for neurotransmitters surely you could simulate a human mind. Was that happening to me right now? Was I a computer? What was I? I felt like a person but it's possible to fool me into thinking other people are people. What was this stuff I was covered in?

There came a knock at my door.

I jumped at the sound.

"Big Brother? It's time for dinner!" Komachi shouted from outside.

My heart was racing. Was Komachi real?

I walked to the door and pulled it open. Was I alone?

"Hey," she greeted. "What are you working on?"

Could I really share it with her? Could I share it with anyone? I had dangerous knowledge. Were other people real? Was I? What did it mean to be real anyway?

"Oh…" I breathed. "Just… some work. I'm trying to understand."

"Can you leave it alone?" She asked.

I wasn't sure that I could.

She peaked past me into my room where scattered textbooks huddled over an open laptop. There were papers with linear algebra and partial differential equations all over the floor from where I'd moved frantically from one analysis to the next in my attempt to take the panties off of matter and time.

"Yeah," I decided. I could leave it alone. I rubbed my eyes and looked away from my little sister.

"What is it? A bug?" She wondered.

She knew about my tactile hallucinations. She knew I sometimes felt bugs in my eyes. And not just in my eyes. But in my ears too. Also down my throat. And I'd never told her but I even felt them across my genitals. Anywhere that was sensitive I sometimes felt the bugs crawling and often biting.

"Yeah. Just a bug. I'll be right out. What's dinner?"

"Fish fillet," she answered. "I got these little steaks cheap. Are you sure you're alright. What's it look like?"

"A six. Maybe a five. Distracting but not so bad really," I answered. "They could be biting. They're just crawling. Let me wrap up my last thoughts and I'll be right out. Okay?"

"Okay…" she teetered. Then she turned and walked down the short corridor.

Okay. So. Okay. I knew I wasn't the most sane of individuals. Most people don't show signs of psychosis until their early twenties. Lucky me. So maybe I should take my own thoughts with a grain of salt. My little sister was real. She was. She was.

"Easy Hachiman. Easy," I murmured. "Let's just… try and relax."

I leaned against the door hard and tried to bring my paranoia under control. I was insane but at least I knew I was insane. That counted for something.

Didn't it?

Or was it all so meaningless and terrible?

I breathed hard and heard a ghost beside me. "Go to sleep…" The voice purred. It was a woman's voice. I flinched when I heard it. I fell to the floor in surprise.

"Big brother?!"

"I'm alright!" I shouted back. I stood up. I gathered my papers and shut my laptop. I'd organize these notes or I'd toss them out. Nothing here was irreplaceable or was such that I couldn't do the calculations again. I closed Uzumaki and the Necronomicon. I put them back on my shelf.

I walked back out to the kitchen and living room and sat down beside my sister. I rubbed the back of my head harshly. I pursed my lips and touched them with the tips of my fingers.

"Hey…" Komachi whispered. "How are you really?"

"Not great…" I croaked horsley.

"Like how not great? Like 'go to a hospital' not great?"

"No. Just… sorta having trouble telling what's real and what's not. You know what I mean? The hallucinations aren't bad but the paranoia is. You… do you understand me?" I wondered.

"No," she answered. She sounded honest. She sounded worried.

I sighed. "And it's beyond me to explain it to you. It's seriously just too much. Like… how can you tell? When you pass somebody on the street how do you know that they are real? John Nash had this problem. Only he… he hallucinated whole people. I just can't tell that the person I'm talking to is real."

"How many people do you really talk to?" Komachi asked. She wasn't asking to prove a point.

I barked out a laugh. "Good point. But I pass people. And I hear them talking. But… but how can you know? I met this girl today and she seemed real enough. But how can I be sure? Do you ever wonder if I'm real? Komachi?"

"No. I know you're real. I think you're mixed up but I know that you're real."

"How do you know?" I genuinely asked. "Seriously. How do you know?"

"I just know…"

"See. That's just not good enough for me," I whispered. "I need more than that." I licked my lips and looked down at dinner. "Looks good," I managed at that whisper.

"Don't," she ordered. "Don't do that. Do you… do you wonder if I'm real?" She begged the horrible question.

I looked her in her wide pleading eyes. I… I knew that I could lie to her. "Sometimes," I breathed. "When I'm in real deep. And… and I'm sorry. But I don't even know if I'm real. Sometimes. Not all the time. Just...some of the time. Some of the time I'm just not certain. And you scare me. How much I care about you scares me. And it's hard. Not knowing the way that you do."

She rubbed my back with one hand and I almost flinched away from her loving touch. It was just… so… 'gross' wasn't the right word. But it had the slick taste of a hallucination. It dripped with fallacies. It was so… 'revolting' wasn't quite right. But my response to my sister's touch was revolting. I disgusted myself. I wanted out of my own skin so fucking badly.

I knew what that meant. And I knew what that would take. It would mean leaving my little sister all but alone in this world. If I really did it. If I really stepped out into that cold night just for a breath of fresh air it would mean leaving my little sister to the harshness of this world.

And I just couldn't do that to her. She was my motherfucking little sister and I just couldn't leave her to this place. This god forsaken planet was too big for her. But I wasn't sure how much longer I could go on living like this. How long, if I could live as long as I wanted, was I supposed to want to live? How long was I supposed to endure this torment of never knowing what was true and what was false the way everyone else did. How did they do it? What knowledge did they have which was denied me at birth. It seemed like everyone else got some memo which I just never was sent.

And on how long was I supposed to go on? Under the crux of this all? Yeah. It's nice to say I should live for my sister but for how long, though? I was always supposed to die before her. So… by how much?

pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

-WG