The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

as a gift for Albert’s birthday, he came up with a solution to the field equations of general relativity that modeled a universe where it was actually possible to travel back in time, an idea that greatly appealed to Gödel, because he had only been truly happy and carefree when he was a very young boy.

This one time, when I was walking around in the dirt, feeling cooped up like a goddamn chicken, I found a hole in the high barbed-wire fence that surrounded the entire place. Turns out some workers had gotten tired of having to walk to the front gate, so they just cut a hole with pliers. And I would go out through that hole and then come back through the main entrance and walk all the way around the perimeter to come out the hole again, and then go right back through the main gate. I did that over and over till the guards threatened to put me in jail, because they couldn’t understand how I was doing it, how I kept coming back in without going out through the checkpoint. Then this big shot calls me into his office, this idiot lieutenant who sat me down and asked, “Mr. Feynman, is this your idea of a joke?” and I said, “No! There’s a goddamn hole in the fence! I’ve been saying it for weeks, but nobody listens!”

still completely unaware that his own exposure to that very same energy during the atomic tests had already cost him his life.

he wanted to create a new mind, a smarter, faster, stranger one than any we had known. AGI: artificial general intelligence. The true son of man.