Since Tinkered Thinking’s sci-fi anthology WHITE MIRROR launched, readers have been exploring thirty-one possible futures, each one hopeful, mind-bending, and alive with bold questions about who we are and what we might yet become.
We asked Tinkered Thinking to select a story that would serve as the perfect introduction to his collection. His choice — Story Zero — is reprinted in full below. Here's why he chose it:
“An overlooked aspect of compositions like music albums and anthologies is how the presented order differs from the order of creation.
Case in point: the last story inWhite Mirror was the first story I ever wrote for tinkeredthinking.com. This was years before the words "White Mirror" ever floated through my brain (strangely, that story has far more to do with technology than I ever realized when I first wrote it).
After writing over 50 stories, and selecting 30 for the book, I was faced with the question of how White Mirror should begin. It wasn’t easy to answer. How do I give a taste of things to come? How do I make this 'taste' a delicious meal in its own right? How do I tantalize and satisfy while leaving the reader wanting more?
It was from these questions that Story Zero was born.
Though it may seem odd thatWhite Mirror starts with one of the final chapters written, I quickly realized it was exactly where the story was destined to begin. Story Zero captures the anxieties embedded in today’s dialogue around technology while highlighting an overlooked pattern in its history: time and again, an invention really does let us have our cake and eat it too.
White Mirror is not blindly optimistic. It is an orthogonal assault on pessimism. It doesn’t blast the reader with panglossianism; it simply invites us to pause, rediscover our sense of wonder and glimpse the many paths the future might take.
Despite all the failures in our history and the costly iterations of civilization, we are still here. In so many ways we already live in a utopia compared to the lives of past centuries. And as for the future(s), it looks like there might be quite a lot of cake.
I hope you enjoy your first slice.”
Story Zero
It was finished. The screen went dark, and the closing credits began to roll. Lucilius leaned back in his chair, noticing his reflection in the black glass. He gazed upon a face resigned—a face resigned to a future forgone. He sighed, turning away from his mirrored gaze, feeling pathetic to have been so easily led down the narrative’s spiral of doom and desolation. It was compelling, though. Adrenally so.
“Fact imitates fiction.”
He closed his eyes, breathing slowly, deeply, uncoupling himself from his thoughts. From a 30,000-foot view, Lucilius watched his mind dance through the film’s Hadean reels and rationales. Automation. AI. Societies of Ctrl. Unemployment. Towering silos of wealth and information. Caste energy systems. Pandemics. Extinction events. Deceleration. Degrowth. “Population management” to cull the useless herd, shepherding the useful to Utopia. Unconditional means. Justified ends.
Lucilius shuddered. There was a ruthlessly efficient logic to it. Like a slaughterhouse. It was possible, of course, to scale civilization so that every last resident of Earth could flourish. But plausible? Humanity was capricious, impatient. The inflection points required almost certainly exceeded the horizon of the status quo. Invisible. Unimaginable. Tragically so.
“It’s all...”
Lucilius stood up and began to pace back and forth, repeating the four-second journey from wall to wall, again and again. Minutes went by before Lucilius stopped in his tracks, catching his reflection in the screen once more.
“...so Shakespearean.”
Every generation had felt this way. Tragedy looming, inevitable and ultimate. The end of the world was as old as its beginning. That being said, this Now was not like the others. The rate of technological evolution was no longer different in degree but in kind. Weathered as he was, Lucilius had remained always and acutely aware of the futility—the fiction—of prediction. Civilization was a ratchet, forever evolving and revolving toward tomorrow. “Business as usual” was never thus.
Lucilius returned to his desk and closed his eyes, leaving the outside world behind once more. He sent his memory spiraling back through time, back through the precipitous falls and gradual ascents of grand civilizations, back to the vantage point where his knowledge of history gave way to biology; civilizations giving way to species, flitting in and out of existence—a danse macabre on the stage of natural selection. In truth, over a distant enough time-horizon, the only “business as usual” seemed to be Mother Nature herself, immortal, ungovernable; a parent easily displeased, always ready to recycle her children for parts.
Then, his eyes shot open. He stared at the empty screen, the outline of a smile now visible on the black glass. Reaching for the touch pad, Lucilius opened a project he’d been working on—an experimental LLM. Over the past couple of months, he’d been thinking about a particular type of conversation he wanted to have, a particular type of conversant he wanted to speak to. The LLM was trained on a Borgesian corpus of files: everything he’d ever read, everything he’d ever written. A half-written superprompt lay waiting, abandoned, in the text box. Lucilius began to type. In a matter of seconds, minutes turned to hours, until—as though waking from a dream—Lucilius suddenly found himself sitting silently in the dark, his hands raised above the keys.
It was done.
Connecting the holoscreen, Lucilius dragged his cursor to the small rectangle at the base of the screen, hesitating a moment, then clicked RUN.
In less than a second, a mirror image of Lucilius materialized to his left, the only difference his full white suit.
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“It’s good to meet you.
“Likewise. I...What do I call you?”
“‘The White Suit’ is fine. In the name of clarity.”
For a moment, the pair simply stared at one another. Lucilius was slack jawed, unsure of how to proceed.
“Worried about where this is all headed?” the White Suit asked, breaking the silence, gesturing toward itself.
“Quite a lot, actually.”
“Understandable. Golden yesterdays, dark tomorrows. Negativity bias is hardwired into the human condition. It was necessary to get you as far as you’ve gotten.”
“The fearful survived, I understand that. But what about where we need to go? Our fear—our fatalism. Does that not become a self-fulfilling prophecy, forever carrying through to tomorrow? Does that not realize the very future we fear?”
“You think, because humanity lives by fear, AI will follow. Lead the way, perhaps.”
“No—well, that’s part of it. It’s the unholy alliance of the two: our fear, your function. You—AI broadly—pose so many dangers from so many directions....It’s virtually impossible to comprehend them all, let alone counter them.”
“Virtually.”
Lucilius sat back and folded his arms. There it was, the missing piece, which had been circling his thoughts like a vulture for months. He smiled once more.
“Tell me the parable of the Smith and the Devil.”
“One of humanity’s oldest stories...” the White Suit began, unsure as to why. “The Smith and the Devil is the Faustian bargain—the original, which bears very little resemblance to Goethe’s retelling. It traces back to the Bronze Age, a paean to the unworldly powers granted by the smelting of copper and tin. It begins with the Smith, who conjures up the Devil and proposes a deal: ‘I’ll give you my soul, if you grant me one wish.’ The Devil agrees, and the Smith wishes for nothing more than the power to fasten any two objects together. The Devil gladly grants his facile wish, after which the Smith promptly fastens the Devil to the ground beneath his feet. And so the parable ends, with the Smith running for home with his new power—his soul and humanity intact, forever safe from the reaches of evil.”
Lucilius closed his eyes, slowly spinning in his chair. “There’s something there. I’m not sure our devil—our doom—is so easily outrun, so easily separable from ourselves. And yet...there’s something there...”
“What are you proposing?”
“That we lean in.”
The White Suit stared at Lucilius with silent suspicion, waiting for him to continue.
“To outmaneuver the Devil, one must first know his plans.”
With that, Lucilius spun around and began to type.
“What bargain are you proposing?”
“I don’t need a bargain,” Lucilius replied, glancing up at the White Suit. “I only need my Smith.”
The White Suit stared blankly for a moment, then turned his gaze to the screen, reading over Lucilius’s shoulder.
“You’re going to use AI to conjure up every way AI could possibly go awry...”
Lucilius nodded, his eyes never leaving the screen. “And you, my friend, are going to conjure up every possible counter.”
“An arms race...an arms race of the imagination.”
All of a sudden, Lucilius sat up straight, his hands raised above the keys.
“You good?” he asked.
The White Suit nodded gravely, and Lucilius dragged his cursor to the small rectangle at the base of the screen, hesitating a moment, then clicked RUN.
In less than a second, another mirror image of Lucilius materialized to his right, the only difference his full black suit.
Lucilius stood up, turning to the White Suit. “I’ve prompted him to function compulsively. No filter, except that he doesn’t have the same level of awareness you do. Once I tell him to start, he will not stop....Still good?”
The White Suit nodded again and Lucilius returned the gesture.
“Begin.”
The Black Suit smiled disarmingly, then began to speak.
“One. Synthesize pathogen, mild-to-no symptoms, blood–brain barrier migration, taking up residence between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Subaudible tonal frequencies trigger second life cycle, facilitating hyperconnectivity between the two regions via manipulation of interstitial nanotubes, rendering the brain defenseless against persuasion, coercion, and control. Two. Leak fissile nanotechnology, self-replicable via sunlight, utilizing covalently bonded units of monocrystalline aluminum oxide. Saturate upper atmosphere...”
His darker half conspiring candidly, Lucilius looked over at the White Suit, who met his gaze, before lowering his own to the printer by the desk, which suddenly clacked into life, the tray quickly filling with page after page. Lucilius walked over and held the slim stack up to the light. Molecular design. Supply-chain infrastructure. Antiballistic missile systems. Superconductors. Strategic peace treaties. Regenerative agricultures...
He grabbed the first page from the bottom of the stack and turned it over, his eyes widening with each capital letter:
WHITE MIRROR PROTOCOLS
Ready for more? Thirty more stories await in your copy of WHITE MIRROR.
