It had done one good thing for society, and that was to get rid of all the reclusive people who had no close relationships. You know, the kind of people who don’t contribute to the social scene, whose leisure time is spent on media and online arguments—they were the first to go. Unfortunately, that is understood to be the only positive aspect of the technology. International governments have engaged in unprecedented cooperation to combat the technology’s spread; the Geneva Convention was amended to ban distribution of the code, while the consumer-facing manifestations of it are classified as Schedule I drugs.

Before the world had fully realized the danger it presented, an anonymous user named simply “Visyn” uploaded a copy of the original code to the blockchain. That copy, named Visyn after the user, is the only copy remaining now. People with no hope download it when they’re done living and want a euphoric way out.

Anko, researcher at Stanford, had lost colleagues while fighting and studying it…

The research behind Visyn’s creation had started at EPFL, in Switzerland, but once the small research team published their paper titled plainly, “How To Simulate a Brain Response,” it wasn’t long until every corner of the world was doing research into brain response simulation. Unfortunately, in the rush to make novel contributions to the field, a team at Stanford—it was Anko’s—forgot the potential consequences of what they were building. Forgot, or didn’t see, or ignored—regardless, let bygones be bygones, right? It was the perfect problem for Anko’s team, who was well-versed in neurology and artificial intelligence, to work on. So when EPFL figured out how to simulate how any human’s brain would respond to any stimulus of the five senses, it was Anko who asked his idle labmates, “What if we—”

Bad question. Should not have asked it. Anko’s early findings were lightly publicized but got heavy traction among marketing and product design departments. Some smart people found that a picture of their product, framed just right, could make you feel cozy, and that a few notes on the radio could make your brain release dopamine. They were neat tricks, but only small gains could be ascribed to them.

But Anko’s lab group was a determined set of researchers. Plus—if they hadn’t done it, someone else would’ve. Berkeley and Michigan were working on the same things, just with fewer and slower computers. It was only a matter of time, Anko thinks as he waits for his frozen fried rice to finish microwaving. He can’t explain why, but when he looks at the packaging, he’s reminded of those symbols of ancient Japanese cultures, as though the rice tastes like temples and gates with an undercurrent of—is that Shibuya Crossing? Didn’t know rice could taste like that, thinks Anko as he looks away from the plastic packaging. Back then, most people were running surface-level experiments based on which parts of the brain would light up with what stimuli (was saying “tummy” instead of “stomach” a turn-off for middle-aged single women?), which chemicals would get released, that sort of thing. Not Anko. He didn’t care much for that boring biology stuff, and so he thought about bigger things.

What if you took those marketing stunts—their colors and tunes that made you feel happy and warm—and orchestrated them? Composed them? Put them together in such a way that, through chemical and electrical manipulation, you could make someone think something? Could you show someone a car advertisement and have them think, You know, my current car is pretty old…? Could you chain the brain’s responses to produce something tangible?

Anko’s team and Stanford’s GPUs were set loose on the task and, some time later, the lab published another paper. They had produced an AI that generated nonsensical images. Every output looked like a mess of patterns and blobs and stains and poorly-chosen colors with strange optical illusions but, as the team showed, anyone who looked at the image would think the same thing. And the thing was anything the researchers wanted it to be. Beep, beep, and, uh, beep, says Anko’s microwave. It makes him think of deadlines and eating, and he momentarily feels warmth on his skin in the cold room. Through a chemical cocktail and cleverly-engineered activation sequences, the AI’s output made people not just think something, but believe it. Jorsten, Anko’s colleague, had seen an output accidentally and spent a day believing the Holocaust was done by McDonald’s until someone stepped in and showed him the inverse-message image.

Seeing the image was all it took. A glance over someone’s shoulder and your worldview could change. (Of course Anko, before publishing these findings, put an innocent-looking, nonsensical image into the Stanford budget committee’s presentation. The next day that committee approved $60 million in funding to Anko’s lab, and shortly after the AI became publicly available.) It was quickly dubbed Okna by the press, and its outputs were consequently named “Okna Images.” Years after the creation and subsequent battle against Visyn, Okna Images are ubiquitous and largely unregulated: the politicians love Okna because it means they’ll never lose an election again, the companies love it because it means they’ll make money off of anything they’d ever try to sell, and the kids love it because it means they can always get an extra hour of video games from their parents.

But, still, there were those who dissented. They denounced progress, called it heinous. They said it was an attack on the individual so intimate that the Ministry of Truth should hand in its resignation letter. But those people quickly shut up or were quickly converted: there was no solution to the problem that Okna had created. Or, perhaps: there was no problem to the solution. I wonder what side, Anko thinks while getting a fork, My original mind would be on? And would it eat this microwaved Japanese rice, or did it have higher standards before?

If only Jorsten hadn’t had sex with the intern. If only the two had done it at home, if only they’d been louder, if only Anko hadn’t walked in on them. If only. But Jorsten did, and they did it in the lab, and they were quiet, and Anko walked in. It was in that awkward moment, Anko in the doorway, that the idea struck him. What if… What if there was something better than sex? Could there even be anything better than sex? And so just hours later, after the sun had set, they sat around a table writing code. Jorsten, Anko, and the intern made progress—enabled by $60 million in top-shelf computing power—on a new AI model. It would be better than sex, and Jorsten would stop squeezing this college student when he thought Anko wasn’t looking.

Anko pauses. He frowns—how does Jorsten still work at the lab? Hadn’t he engaged in, like, eight fireable violations of workplace conduct rules? Also, he was, honestly, to blame for the intern’s suicide, wasn’t he? Anko considers this and after a few bites of this exquisite reheated Japanese fried rice (it tastes like the words Elegant and Japan), he smiles. He realizes—that evening, when the intern went to the bathroom, he had looked briefly at Jorsten’s screen only to see an incomprehensible mess of patterns and blobs and cheap optical illusions. Hah! The old geezer got me, thought Anko, and it never occurred to me to fire him.

It was the pre-dawn early morning when the group finally finished the video-synthesis AI model. It didn’t produce coherent thoughts or tangible beliefs like Okna Images did: it was optimized for evoking just one feeling. Using EPFL’s research and the underlying technology of Okna, the new model’s output was a constantly-evolving onslaught of pleasure-at-the-highest-levels and a small suggestion to never look away. When it came across a user’s mind that they should stop watching, the vid-syn model adapted the video to overwrite that belief. A little bit of overconfidence made the researchers think they’d be alright—just look away if it gets bad, right?—so it was 3:58am and time to test their creation. They knew it could be dangerous, but really, how bad could it be?—they put Ellie (the intern) in an empty room with a screen that Jorsten and Anko could turn off without seeing. Only much later did Anko find out that the vid-syn model also made viewers desperate to protect it.

“Ellie, are you ready?” called Anko. She yawned.

“Will it even work?” she replied.

“Well… let us know.”

With Anko’s go-ahead, Jorsten turned the screen on. Through the door window they saw Ellie’s head snap instantly at the screen, her eyes open wide, and her breathing accelerate. There was a beep from the temporary rig they’d set up, warning that Ellie’s heart rate had doubled in the course of just a few seconds. Concerned, the two scientists walked over to the rig’s display and looked at the blinking text showing the rest of Ellie’s detailed physiological data, updating forty times per second (the lab had somehow secured an additional $2 million for “auxiliary sensors to accelerate iteration”). Anko, the programmer, looked at Jorsten, the biologist.

“Am I reading this right? Is she…,”

“I hate to say it but, yeah. I think so,” said Jorsten.

“No way. Actually?”

“I mean, looks like it.”

“You’re saying she’s, like…”

“Yep.”

“Huh,” said Anko. A pause. “So it’s really better than sex?”

“I guess so,” said Jorsten. He called out, “Ellie! How do you feel?” When there was no response, he frowned and called again. “Ellie?”

Still nothing. A hint of fear crept into his voice as he called a third time, “Ellie? Are you okay?”

Panicked now, Jorsten rose and ran toward the door separating him from Ellie, reaching for the door that kept their little creation in a box. Anko called out after him, too late, begging him not to open the door, but Jorsten was already there. He ripped open the door and sprinted towards Ellie and, coming to his senses at the last moment, shut his eyes as he tackled her off of the rickety chair. They lay in a mess on the floor, him on top of her, and he noticed she was panting.

“Are you okay, Ellie?” Jorsten asked. He heard Anko turn the laptop off behind him.

“Get off of me, let me go! Why would you do that?” raged Ellie in response. She was trying to push him off, clawing unsuccessfully at the face of a man who could deadlift 230kg on a good day.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Jorsten as he rolled off of her onto his back. “You’re safe now.”

“Turn it back on, now!” yelled Ellie, getting to her feet. “Why did you take it away from me??”

“Ellie! Don’t you see what it was doing to you?” asked Jorsten.

“So what?” asked Ellie. She darted across the room, snatched the laptop, and turned it on. Before the two men could stop her, she opened the laptop and— it was a blank screen. She spun around, fuming, to address the scrawny scientist in the doorway, “How do I turn it back on, Anko?”

“You can’t,” he replied simply. He lifted his hand to reveal a small memory card in the palm of his hand. Ellie screeched and lunged at Anko, but was caught by Jorsten. She resisted, but Jorsten was too strong. Giving up, Ellie went limp and began to sob. The three researchers stood there in the disarrayed conference room at the break of dawn, confused and dazed but well aware that what had just happened should never leave the small room.

“We have to destroy it,” said Anko after a few moments of silence.

“Are you crazy?” yelled Ellie, looking up through her tears. “I won’t let you!”

“Why?” asked Anko and Jorsten at the same time.

“You didn’t see it. You don’t understand. You can’t. It was…,” her eyes gleamed and she licked her lips. She wasn’t crying now. “It was spectacular. There’s nothing like it.”

“I meant, why should we destroy it?” said Jorsten, looking at Anko. Ellie seemed better, now, and she stood to the side, glancing between the two men.

“What? Don’t you see?” replied Anko. “We can’t let anyone find out about this. It’d be the end of the human race,” he said. His fist tightened around the thumb drive as he spoke. Jorsten took a step towards Anko, smiling, reaching out. Anko took a step back.

“I’m going to destroy it, and you of all people should understand why,” said Anko. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the formerly motionless Ellie make a move and hold up her phone screen towards Anko. Out of habit, he squinted, trying to make out what it was, only to find he was looking at a smattering of patterns and stains and blobs with poorly-chosen colors.