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Work in Progress: The Reichstag Algorithm

Operating undetected, months and months of social media data-scraping locates the vulnerable, the armed, and the angry, returning AI-customized responses to feed their anxiety and isolation, building toward a critical mass. Then, as the research demonstrates, the trigger command to tens of thousands of targeted individuals will tip random hundreds of them over the edge, converting them into mass shooters at malls, schools, train stations, public squares and movie houses. The Reichstag algorithm is counting down, slow poison with a fast sting.

 
2023

There was an instant when nothing happened.

And then after that brief moment came the next, and it was as though the Universe took a breath, saw that the slowly rolling downhill stone would reach the edge and go beyond, the last grain of sand would be added to the dune, the precarious balance would end, the cloud would condense to rain, the bubble would expand to its limit, and that all of the multiple possibilities up until that very last infinitesimal sliver of time would collapse from “what could be” into “what now is” and then all those other possibilities would vanish until the only thing left was the stone dropping, the dune collapsing, the scale tipping, the rain falling, the bubble bursting, and for Tommy Morden it was the tremendous liberation, the moment in which all his choices were made and his life moved in only a single direction, a straight line running as unbroken and infinite as the horizon at the sea, and he had become fully who he would always be for the rest of his life as long as it might last, free never to worry about the outcome of any choice ever again because this was his last choice, the one that no one could ever take away from him, as the trigger went back and the first round exploded and he sprayed bullets through the classroom, and it wasn’t even him at that second, not Tommy but Tommy looking from outside at what he was creating and yet at the same time still inside doing it, and Tommy the perpetual victim who’d endured his father’s belt and fist and the taunting classmates and his own bright black hatred of himself, who at last threw off victimhood like a heavy coat and turned every part of the world around him into victims too, his inside world erupting out around him to become the outside world, because he wanted to make it that way, and after that one tiny second he had finally broken through, and everything that he was or ever could have been was reduced to no more than that act, that gun, that carnage, those wounds, those dead children, his release from pain.