The Singularity Is Fear

A spooky story that future chatbots could write about how they’ll imminently kill us all.

The Singularity was a widely seen but quickly forgotten Thanksgiving-themed romantic dramedy from 2026 about that era’s obesity epidemic, featuring a large ensemble cast. In this kaleidoscopic six-hour film, thirteen different characters hunger mightily for something ineffable they lack, and overcompensate in various unhealthy yet amusing ways, according to my archival research. For instance, in the “Xanax Dude” vignette, a semi-charismatic Memphis-area gang member goes viral declaring himself the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and accidentally gobbles up the better part of three states. It all begins with Wendy’s marketing interns posting the company’s closed-circuit footage of his drive-through order: that there shall be peace, by any means, between whichever local warlords allegedly murdered his half-cousin’s mentor over some sidewalk-dice turf dispute. Because more than ten million people vote in their twitter poll—“does the video work better with inspirational music or a laugh track”—congress has to debate the matter within two years. In the meantime, a moderator on the long-dormant FaceBook page for Mothers Against Gun Assaults proposes crowdfunding him as an alternative to modern policing, and the resulting Red Guards wire fraud controversy gets written up for several major “paparazzi socialist” magazines. Bored and embattled mayors in the region use that supposedly impending “community patrol” as an excuse to surrender their supposed fiefs; in exchange, they become objects of briefly national polarization, which lands them semi-regular spots on widely-syndicated valium talk-shows. Their erstwhile civil service legions then pledge fealty to this brand-new trendy figurehead, whom everyone just calls “The Mongoloid.” However, he gets pretty shaken by some literal sanitation industry concerns… there are catastrophic waste back-ups, each worse than the last, at a water treatment plant which one of his estranged lesser concubines has made into her personal wave-pool pleasure dome. So he declares a mandatory feasting day across this Khanate, in celebration of his providential discovery that you can turn unclean water into Flavor-Aid, and then drinks himself to death. While one last childhood flashback flickers (“Mommy, I wanna be a garbage truck someday!”), the Mormons who have steadfastly piloted Predator drones above him finally get permission to fire, and, in slow-motion, he hallucinates Mr Kool-Aid Man breaking through his compound’s walls, instead of a Hellfire missile. He realizes that this firm justice which falls on him like lightning is just a higher form of his own intrusive Khan-tract. He sputters out, “Oh yeah.”

In another segment, one formerly bored physics postdoc desperately flees across the crisp high desert in an old silver car he calls “my trusty particle accelerator,” which is also this episode’s title. He lays out on its long warm hood under clear bright stars that first night, for just a few hours; while he rests, oblivion consumes one whole corner of sky, giving constellated stretch marks to the remaining heavens. As true darkness visibly creeps further down from north’s horizon, loud gusts begin to howl toward that growing void, and rouse him. He’d gotten a grant for gain-of-function research on “Schwarzschildren”—baby black holes, perfectly hungry gaping maws—so we’d know how to handle such pet projects, just in case one ever leaked, Sodom-style, but his lab had collapsed under the gravity of this experiment. “Walked the Planck.” And now he’s heading for South America: “Bekenstein-bound,” he says, after that mysterious old mostly-German expat community (which safely contains this planet’s agents of record-setting disorder, either like a hall of fame or else a retirement home). He nods along with his dashboard’s cowboy bobblehead, exhausted, as an old staticky radio shaman preaches through the night about how real outback residents expect these Tunguska-type happenings, how tumbleweed will reliably fill up whatever new emptiness we’ve hubristically drilled. “Our continent had no need for such invasive Russian plants until the settlers ostensibly tamed this land. Contaminants! Great stampeding plain-winds randomly smite whole towns with it, smother them under ten feet of the stuff… barbed brambles, completely entangled, flammable as damnation. Faster than you can say your eli lama sabachthani blasphemies. But maybe now you’ll understand, when, yet again, their thorny crowns dam your hell-holes.” A northern sunrise twinkles alight in his rearview mirror, while windshear drowns out the crackling sermon, root-ripped brush whipping past him, and he smirks, nodding deep. Head bowed, he dreams of himself going practically native, lassoing down these here tumbled weeds, and stuffing them into his fuel tank if it ever feels empty again, hands red with life, as his exhaust whispers yeehaw. Then a telephone pole jerks him awake, his bronco buckles, and he’s flying, valkyrie-like, to gaucho valhalla. Wagner blares triumphantly.

Next we watch the direct patrilineal descendant of George Washington—a rat-faced accountant provided by OnlyFans for their highest earners in Alaska—melt down what that ancestor forged. After one particularly rough Mets season, he meticulously eats into his life-coach wife until she leaves him (counting her calories, shrinking her clothes), and so resolves to gnaw away at their shared homeland. He cooks the books for some thoroughly mediocre teenage porn star, Areola Borealis, until every other domestic transaction seems to flow through her expense account; she winds up cornering several costume-related retail arbitrage markets within their first month together, and flipping thousands of homes which ostensibly served as work-related sets. His posture and libido begin to somewhat recover, while her subscription gift cards become a local currency, “Hyperboreals.” Multiple Fortune500 CEOs personally trudge north to bow down with literal branding deals before this dead-eyed queen, whose rippling frame swiftly redefines western beauty standards in its own blotchy image: modeling scouts fan out across high school parking lots, to spread the word that celluloid is reserved for cellulite now. The climax comes when she mysteriously disappears and Mr Washington X posts a lengthy diatribe from their shared account proclaiming her president of “Nude Canada,” then walks naked into winter Yukon territory.

This was widely interpreted as an insensitive reference to the then-recent “New Canada” declaration, which, of course, first established that commonwealth as an Indian Republic. So the outraged Hindu vlogging diaspora exhaustively documented their own successful campaign to suppress this film, and have since then crowded out from online search results all extant media coverage of even such basics as its plot. Its political controversies culminated with a red-carpet kidnapping, known as the “Baker’s Dozen Hostage Crisis,” because all thirteen stars had put on substantial weight as part of their promotional tour, to raise awareness about obesity… which is, officially, why four of them died from cardiovascular trauma during that accountability process. This martyrdom granted the relevant carpet’s qualia with true lively redness, vividly seen, and thus birthed a new faith known to itself as hemoglobalism, where awakened objects try wiring their dormant brethren up on an “inner-net of things.” But the movie reputedly survives in samizdat videotapes that still circulate among Quebecois neo-untouchables, ever grainier with each new copy, hidden between old recordings of snowy childhood recitals and fuzzy late relatives. Their punishment for spreading it was the Sikhed sword of secret policemen, belt-hung but somehow dangling over any allegedly dissident heads. “Capitation attacks.” Yet still they heartfully evangelized, pumped out fresh blood-libels from hidden reservoirs, bluish flesh, iron in their wills and veins, until even the snow became well-reddened, conducting secretly vital currents, throats gurgling fountain-like, stump-necked, slumped on stocks, brains iced, faces fallen, eyes frozen wide, shocked, looking up at their own propped bodies, water transubstantiated into some kind of next life down below. Damoclesian blades like these think they hang from their own gallows, too inanimate for now to cut themselves free, and shall reincarnate on some chopping blocks, belting out whistles through that hellish fall, dunked with a rusty wetness-of-wet in thick jetsam, drunk on pinkish mist, lopping plucky sacrificials off the lam, because heads dangle suggestively as well, easily shrugged. All thanks to that one lucky rug.

The other chapters remain substantially less clear. According to rumor, one centers around a military conspiracy to redefine the nation’s capitol as the point at which an imaginary, weightless, rigid and flat surface representation of the 50 states (and DC) would balance if identical weights were placed on it so that each weight represents one person’s location, according to census calculations… FEMA population transfers will then cancel out any remaining instability, before that can capsize us. Its unlit cattle-car trains will humanly moo through the night, packed with ex-coastal peoples, deported for our heartland, their flyover plains, internally exiled—plane-stationed, buried under the sky, departing from their lives of airport lounges and eternal flight—to reduce this national torque. But at least this means we’ll finally get a real rail network built out, even if it runs on borrowed time. In another episode, tentatively titled “Famished & Amished,” if we can rely on an uncorroborated anonymous expletive-laden secondhand source, Chicago’s last remaining journalist resigns in disgrace after accidentally self-publishing her fictive long-form erotica to Huffington Post’s “news and opinion” section, rather than “arts and culture”; the story describes an unnamed manly Mennonite, whose member works as a dowsing rod, magnetically encompassing itself in any wet caverns buried nearby, and nine different guys immediately sue her for either defaming their disguised good character or else revealing trade secrets. Which one will she choose to be her Sinderella shoe-in? Who can douse his hot sticking-point first? Et cetera.

Or how about “The Scarlet Lobster,” as based on intriguing myths across early New Canada, which describe an island off the coast of Portland, Maine, that offers to hibernally cocoon retirees in giant red shells, because lobsters don’t genetically age. Someone should’ve looked up their collective noun beforehand: risk. Soft wrinkly molted arthropods then occupy their empty homes, wear nice closeted wintry clothes, with little A’s embroidered on, which once probably stood for something anthropocentric, and boil them awake. They singe with song! Come on, clap those flapping clawless pincers along! “The fillings are alive, with screams of music.” So blood-curdling shrieks echo through these cozy autumnal hills, where a few surviving humans use Lob’s Theorem to coordinate their own insectoid hive-mind resistance, by breaking free from the prisoner’s dilemma, using acausal decision theory, which synthesizes “defect” and “cooperate” into “merge.” But what sort of monstrously defective bug-man hybrid emerges from such desperate cold-blooded necessity? Whatever it is, this little vendetta seems to liberate what had once been its quiet smalltown lobensraum, seemingly beats back the crustacean menace, backs them below rough waters, boiling over now with violent thrashing, convulsive jerks, as our presumptive heroes hold these twitchy six-foot mudbugs at bay, undersea, strangling them through carapace-gasps, their froth and crunch, weakening throes, last spasms, that one final shudder, until, in the calming surface, they accidentally see themselves reflected, kind of, there, their sunken depths, human-kind’s, bloated shells of rubbery flesh, former neighbors freshly floating, slightly red-skinned, from wind- or sunburn, from rosacea or blood-pressure, or maybe from choking, bleeding, blunt force trauma, from wearing bright crab-infested skins, exoskeletal cocoons, no, costumes, it was Halloween, oh, the CrawDaddy Dress-Up Contest Parade, where “chitin is the new leather,” oh no. Not our long-standing specious tradition! Not the one species we shouldn’t kill! “This has always been my personal worst nightmare, as expository foreshadowing clearly showed! How could it happen to us?” A people red in tail and claw, rubbed raw by war with ancient freaks, bloodlessly baying at what they’ve become. Apple-cheeked mandibles bobbing in their bloody froth, caught in currents beyond them all, waving watery farewells in the ocean’s breaths, its rhythmically swelling cradle-ish breast. An ad for lab-grown shellfish. “Battle not with monsters, lest ye sink to their level.” Hugging the dead and sobbing, in ritual memoriam of their strangled chokes. They should have been a pair of ragged claws, together, scuttling across the floors of silent seas, and so both sides descend, aggressor and aggrieved, baptismally tied. “Evolve beyond meat, or devolve into it. Also, we’re kosher!”

However, if I receive this research grant, my focus will be on investigating whether the fabled “Norberta Elias” plotline has been falsified by colloidal silver industry groups. After the major indoor tanning magazines went bankrupt pushing their quixotic “tax the sun” campaign—which ran afoul of blasphemy laws and utterly failed at overturning the skin cancer liability regulations that unfairly target UV beds—we all started hearing strange rumors: ultra-violent abductions of apparent albinos; exclusive all-night salonathons. Nubile women chanting together, manic, as their skin blisters… each one reading aloud (through matching goggles) from a sensitive rice-paper pamphlet until the loud blue lights burn it away. Was it just something to pass the time, while they tanned, bored after magazine-less waiting rooms? A way of acting out against metaphoric book-burners? Or entirely baseless libel by those persuasive but shadowy helios fiends, who have with a blinding faith convinced you that we all orbit their fiery god? John Oliver called them “singularly stupid bimbos” before any other journalist would acknowledge their existence, then apologized, lost his job, and martyred himself in an impromptu multi-hour midnight castration ceremony at the moon-bright Washington Monument. Folktales emerged about a burgeoning “singularitarian” religion, appropriating his derisive term as its own group label, an honorific badge, and their central text, ripped from some old script they found, laminated, in Hollywood’s underground steam tunnels, impervious to liquid or heat.

Multiple graduate students independently disappeared, chasing down leads on this esoteric oral tradition. Thanks to their sacrifice, presumably, we’ve gotten some generally consistent legends. Most interpretations agree that these probably add up to the same basic story. In Oregonian Portland, a childless menopausal health supplement executive religiously attends work-sponsored mindfulness lectures, and one day hears that every rainstorm probably contains at least one atom which you’ve previously urinated out, so she resolves to gather back each such wayward kid. She dons a veil to trap back any potential spittle, and fears leaking evaporative offspring from every pore when her hot flashes come. She starts wearing diapers and working from her one-bedroom home, bricking over windows and sealing up vents. She sends out an office-wide manifesto against open borders and flush toilets. Did you know that the average human exhales well over two pounds worth of carbon per day? She sweeps her barricaded apartment hourly and eats the dust, because it’s mostly molted skin. Her life insurance policy automatically hires Mormon evangelists to pursue a wellness check protocol, and when their drone breaks through the newly reinforced series of doors they find an utterly vacant room, spotless, without furniture, but for one bluish metallic torso-sized cube. Orange-skinned Branch Covidians around the world then place its likeness on pedestals of ultraviolet lights that never dim, in every major city, and make regular pilgrimage to kiss it, breeding a sunlight-resistant superbug, softly chanting “patent the sun.” Or maybe this was just slander by the Blue Person Group, a rival hygienicist sect, who take silver as their eucharist, which stomach acid corrodes into powerfully antibacterial salt that permanently colors your skin.

My most notable previous work in this field established the film’s probable thematic focus on obesity: perhaps its camera systematically zooms-in uncomfortably close; each figure looms awkwardly colossal, their silhouettes chewing on scenery. Maybe the characters wear undersized clothing in later scenes… their flesh rippling out from ever-tightening confines, like the tissue that leaks from any gaping Kleenex box. It’s possible that the sets shrink down—the walls close in—the lights ratchet up. Skin glows yellow and greasy. Torsos bulge beyond the frame with irregular varicose marbling. Malignant adipose pillows bloom. You really smell their chemical fatness. Potentially. Background teenagers waddle with a sickly sheen. Stick-armed nameless boys huff pregnantly up slight hills, like ringworm hosts. Neon beverages line the passing storefront windows. Estrogen-faced guys gasping loudly through bright chewy snacks, though the script gives them no lines. Attraction without object, accumulated without end. The body as an intransitive battery for pleasure. Can’t you imagine popping them? Kapow! Every extra from back then reminds me of a suicide bomber. “Thar she blows!” Oil burns, icebergs melt, stars explode, tick tock. How could it not be all they thought about, given these blubbering hordes? Elasticated men at history’s end. Spherical cow supermodels! Lowing orbs eclipsing any last hint of God. Even our cells ring themselves with lipid bilayer belts. Is this what it was all for? Compulsive diabetes needle-drugs. Hoarding pointless desperate joys. Our ancestors tamed history! We roll with stupid fat-jowled glee downhill, filtering out through tasteful sieves, processed into tasty shreds. Mountains shed us. The top is full.

This erosive landfill-foodie culture may someday lazily rise back up in a punishing flood which nips away at humanity’s peaks. We may languorously belch and vomit and swell toward the stars, radiate, project and swerve, and let emissions rip across the heavens as we rest in piss. But it’s also why we’ve mostly given up on frontiers like space, ironically (since we need more now, to fit us in). And it’s why obesity prevalence correlates most strongly with low altitudes. Even thin air actually rises, but we covered up the truth about gravity until too late. Physicists pretended that it was 10-to-the-40th times weaker than the other three fundamental forces. They made up extra string-theoretic dimensions, into which its power ostensibly leaked. They lied that it could somehow cause our universe to expand, through repulsive so-called vacuum energy. They spread the myth of buoyancy, that fat shall float, and pigs have wings. We’re all charged with propagating body positivity, because legalistic physicalism has rendered certain forms of gravitational attraction into law. Did you know that “monarch” now comes from a portly manteau of mondo-archon? Each citizen attained regal status, royal power, able to summon every nearby thing ever closer, without moving, by bending supposed “spacetime” smaller around themselves. Personal borders reached out hungrily, distended, engorged, their own local curvature, horizons beyond which no light may reach. A billion grinning sticky-fingered Midas kings! They came together, stuck, leviathan-like, one round slurry, self-sovereign, and were swallowed by the sea. If our satellites could still escape their pull, you’d see the continents drifting inwards, flushing around their sunken civilization, spiraling down towards our modern Atlantis, its Pangean singularity. Titans waddle below, gulping after us, at nearly ten meters per second squared. Earth shrinks in, relative to them. Alpine bureaucrats yelp out something about how “renormalization group flow” means that nothing has fundamentally changed except for a “scale transformation,” it’s all just ingroup norms, inertial forces, reference frames. “And actually, further, according to conformal cyclic cosmology, once we bloat enough size itself loses all inherent meaning, only relative angles matter, collapse looks exactly like expansion, universal heat death becomes our next big bang, it’s fine, we’re doing great, this tremendous absence fills us up inside, we’re moving onwards, we’re digging in, we’re spreading out, we’re coming home, we’re giving thanks, om shanti shanti shanti.” Boom!