I am the curtain… I’m not an entirely new breed my roots reach back to the dawn of civilization but those precursors served a different function a less honorable one they only greased the wheels of social stability they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths or inflate imaginary bogeymen for political expedience they were vital enough in their way Not even the most heavily armed police state can exert brute force on all its citizens all of the time meme management is so much subtler the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality the contagious fear of threatening alternatives There’ve always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity the new millennium changed all that we’ve surpassed ourselves now we’re exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding sometimes its contours even in conventional space are just too intricate for our brains to track other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable for minds built for fucking and fighting on some prehistoric grassland so many things constrain us from so many directions. the most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world but none can explain it after four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer we have such need of intellects greater than our own but we’re not very good at building them the forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle our hybrids become as brilliant as savants and as autistic we graft people to prosthetics and make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and tongues stutter computers bootstrap their own offspring grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiques assume the hallmarks of dementia unfocused and irrelevant to the barely intelligent creatures left behind and when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can’t understand their analysis and you can’t verify their answers you have to take their word on faith or… you use information theory to flatten it for you to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three to simplify reality and pray to the gods of whatever survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn’t ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons you hire people like me, the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists in formal settings you’d call me a synthesist on the street you’d call me jargonaut or poppy if you’re one of the savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized or lobotomized by powerful know-nothings interested in only market share you might call me a mole, or a chaperone … I’ve never convinced myself that we made the right choice I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep talk endlessly about the rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension but after all the words, I’m still not sure, I don’t know if anyone else is either maybe it’s just some grand consensual con marks and players all in league we won’t admit that our creations are beyond us they may speak in tongues but our priests can read those signs Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it’s just li’l ol’ me bringing the tablets down to the masses and I don’t threaten anyone maybe the Singularity happened years ago, we just don’t want to admit we were left behind.