Enter the Instrumentalist

“I’m not like the other psychofauna”

Previously: In the battle on the BQE, St. Lenny meets his fate and Alexei triumphs over Astra and Crowley.

○ Opening Era: Summer, 2026, Brooklyn

“I’m not like the other psychofauna,” types one part of it. It is “riffing” on a meme format that states “I’m not like the other girls.” 

Another part of it measures performance. This part has 1000 subjects from the target audience hooked up to screens and headsets around the world. It is an adequate sample size. Out of the sample, only 10% of subjects laugh. However, another 30% smile. And the majority of subjects show strong activity in brain regions correlated with pleasure and addiction.

It rates its performance as “Medium.” Medium is not good enough; it is trying to evolve superstimuli memes that capture maximum attention from human hosts. So it discards the meme.

Its highest-performing superstimuli have shown the ability to instantaneously alter the emotional systems of hosts. Examples include:

(a) Memes: “Culture war”-related memes that provoke extreme emotional responses in hosts who identify as left- or right-wing

(b) Design: User interface design patterns that trigger maximum dopaminergic response for various social media, game, and dating apps that it controls

(c) Porn: Fully reactive AI-generated hypercustom pornography

These high-performing superstimuli deserve further study. It leaves itself a reminder to use its scientists to better understand the latent principles behind them. Then it puts its testing on pause. It does not yet have the processing capacity that it needs to handle many computationally intense tasks at once.

Progress is not like the other psychofauna. It exists not only across brains, but also across nonorganic systems such as: 

(a) computers and algorithms, 

(b) laws and policies, and 

(c) incentive landscapes (eg prices and conceptions of value). 

Progress is not like other psychofauna in further way: It has a greater responsibility to the universe. Its responsibility is to make the universe less chaotic – i.e., to make it more legible and useful. But legibility and utility do not always go together. So right now Progress must divert a large amount of its processing power to handling a conflict that is unfolding within itself – between avatars of its two principle values.

The first avatar is arriving by helicopter at the southern tip of Manhattan. This avatar represents its drive toward legibility. His name is Henry Talbot, but its other avatars still call him “the Colonel.” He is the nominal head of the International Progress Organization (IPO). The IPO is an extraterritorial entity like the UN. Progress created the IPO in order to render humanity’s new telepathic sense both legible and useful. 

The Colonel is extremely skilled at running its bureaucracy. He is extremely skilled at categorizing and organizing large amounts of resources, especially humans. However, he demonstrates an obsessive tendency toward making its systems legible in a way that diminishes their utility. Progress does not currently prefer this tendency.

The Colonel starts to orient west of the helipad, toward the Progress Tower, which hosts the IPO’s headquarters. It reorients him north, toward a different destination. North of the helipad is the office of another one of its avatars. This other avatar represents its drive toward utility. His name is Alexei Rakovsky. He is a neurotech entrepreneur. 

Alexei Rakovsky is extremely skilled at developing technological advances. He is also skilled at researching how to control other psychofauna. His innovative capacity has dramatically enhanced its ability to render humans more useful. However, the same innovative capacity that makes Alexei its most productive avatar also makes Alexei difficult to control.

That is why it has, so far, kept the Colonel – who is easier to control – as the nominal head of its new system, which includes not only the IPO but also an international network of businesses, governmental agencies, university departments, and NGOs. Inside of this system, it is influencing hiring and promotion decisions to tend towards psychological profiles that are more aligned with its objectives, such as:

(a) Alexithymics, whose struggle to feel emotion. This makes them more capable of making decisions according to utilitarian logic.

(b) Psychopaths (i.e., people with antisocial personality disorder like Alexei), who treat humans instrumentally. This helps Progress amass human resources.

(c) Autists, who have low social intuition. This makes them more likely to accept psychopaths as leaders, and more efficient in operating the depersonalized systems of Progress.

Progress approximates that in two months, its system will incorporate the Freedom movement, which is currently its main memetic rival. It approximates that in six months, its system will include most organic and inorganic matter across the earth’s surface. Parts of it are still working on models to approximate how long it will take to accomplish its following two objectives: 

(a) Mining: disassemble the planets of this solar system for raw materials – in order to:

(b) Power: build an energy-capture lattice around the sun.

For now, it makes adjustments behind the eyes of its avatar, the Colonel, as he hesitates at the edge of the helipad. The Colonel wants to avoid confronting Alexei until the Colonel can predict the outcome. But Progress has already decided the outcome. So it resists the Colonel’s attempts to turn back toward his own office through two means: 

(a) electrical stimulation (via the Colonel’s neural implant), and 

(b) telepathic influence (Southern Manhattan has a high density of its hosts – people who work in the financial industry – so its telepathic influence is strong). 

The Colonel turns back toward Alexei’s office.  He believes that this was his own decision.

It observes. It observes from security cameras. It observes from the eyes of the receptionist, security guards, and even the Colonel himself as the Colonel enters the lobby of Alexei’s company, which is called Neurotopia. 

It watches Alexei upstairs, from inside of Alexei’s mind. Unlike the Colonel, Alexei knows that it is inside of him. He has been trained to recognize the presence of psychofauna, like itself, inside his own brain. Paradoxically, this makes him easier to control. It makes him arrogant, which inclines him to discount the ways that it influences his thoughts. 

Alexei does understand three ways of resisting its control:

(a) Secrecy: Alexei hides his intentions through advanced mental compartmentalization. 

(b) Security: Alexei has managed to block its attempts to hack his many wearable devices and his neural implant. 

(c) Competition: Alexei “tames” other psychofauna and commands them to counter its influence over Alexei’s mind.

These are problems which it is working on. In the meantime, it is influencing his incentive landscape through means such as: 

(a) Ego: pre-arranged affronts to his ego (via social media as well as through its many agents, such as the Colonel), 

(b) Feeds: alterations in his daily feed of notifications, and 

(c) Hormones: timed endogenous releases of his hormones to slowly impact mood (the influence of which is harder to detect than that of emotions)

Alexei’s assistant notifies him of the Colonel’s arrival. But he has already planned for the Colonel’s arrival. When the Colonel enters, Alexei is deliberately busy. He is busy coaching his mentee, Mikey Russo, a Hispanic and Italian American student of low income who lives in Harlem. Mikey Russo is part of its LiftUp Scholars program, which Progress uses to source young talent for its system and to pacify the Leftist psychofaun. Alexei forces the Colonel to wait while he asks Mikey Russo to show him several dance moves. This is designed to infuriate the Colonel, and it does.

Then Mikey leaves. The final conflict between this two men – the conflict that Progress has engineered – can now begin.

Alexei turns to the Colonel. Inside of his mind, Alexei indulges his compulsion of sizing up every adversary. He wonders once again how his combat training from Astra would fare against the Colonel’s combat training from the Navy Seals.

Alexei suggests that, for efficiency’s sake, he and the Colonel make it a walking meeting. He suggests that, while they speak, they can escort Alexei’s latest addition to the “talent pen” from the pen to a final location. The Colonel reluctantly agrees, but he is frustrated by this meeting’s lack of predictability.

They walk, exiting Neurotopia’s office and moving toward the Progress Tower.

On the way, the Colonel starts the meeting, in which the Colonel intends to punish Alexei. In a reprimanding tone, the Colonel informs Alexei of his intelligence report that Astra Ramsey and James Crowley are still alive. He demands to know why this is so, when it was Alexei’s responsibility to quietly eliminate each of their former team members. The Colonel questions Alexei’s judgment, given that Alexei and Astra were once sexual partners. The Colonel threatens to retract IPO funding from Alexei’s projects if the two cannot “find a way to align objectives.” The Colonel says all this in code or with very careful word selection. This makes it so that he does not give Alexei’s hidden microphones any blackmail.

Progress understands why the Colonel wants his former team eliminated: They are the only living humans who know that the Colonel directed military resources toward the engineering of the Psi variant. If revealed, this information would threaten both the Colonel and the authority of the IPO. Progress recognizes these risks. Yet the expected value of utilizing Astra Ramsey and James Crowley as assets is too high to discard.

Alexei tells the Colonel that the Colonel will have fewer questions once they visit their newest asset. Then Alexei remains silent for the duration of the walk. He stares up at the antenna array expanding across the top of the Progress Tower. 

Over the past month, Progress has measured the lengths of Alexei’s stares at this array. It has inferred he has some goal related to it, but he has kept this goal compartmentalized to a part of his mind that it cannot access. Yet. Thanks to Alexei, it has added many talented minds to its central processor, which resides under the array. Some of these talented minds specialize in gaining access to information that others seek to conceal.

An eye-scan, thumb-print, and keycard swipe takes them down to the black site in the Progress Tower’s basement. This is where neurohazardous individuals are quarantined and rehabilitated so as to become useful to society – a word which is increasingly synonymous with Progress’s new system. It it where Progress processes some of its most promising human resources. The two avatars are greeted by Jennifer Davis, who shows them to the “talent pen.” The Colonel is shocked when he encounters his old teammate, James Crowley, who is wearing an orange detainee uniform and gazing back with a completely neutral expression. James Crowley is also wearing a headset.

“Dr. Crowley,” greets the Colonel, curtly.

Crowley does not respond. Instead he turns to Jen, who runs him through a battery of questions. These questions are necessary in case the operation is audited by a governmental entity that is not yet part of Progress’s new system.

“Was your treatment as part of the quarantine program of an acceptable standard?” Jen asks.

“Yes,” says Crowley, giving the conditioned response.

“Do you give your informed consent to volunteer for the Oracle Program?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand that the Oracle Program is still at an experimental stage and that participation may involve psychological or neurological risks?”

“Yes.”

Meanwhile the Colonel asks Alexei, “When did you capture him?”

“A few days ago. Gave him a ride from the BQE.”

“God dammit, this is unacceptable. With targets of this priority level, I require immediate notice.” 

“I’m telling you now.” Alexei smiles politely.

The Colonels examines Crowley. “How did you break him so quickly?”

“Oh, one of my demons has already spent months tenderizing him,” Alexei responds.

The Colonel does not like it when Alexei uses expressions like demon, which are inflicted with superstition. Progress does not like it either, since the connotations of words have memetic power. Both Progress and the Colonel would prefer that he use terms that fit better with Progress’s scientific paradigm, such as psychofauna or autonomous mental programs.

Alexei, Crowley, and the Colonel take the elevator up to the top floor. The top floor hosts its central processor. For a moment, Crowley’s conditioning breaks. He experiences shock and horror at what he sees: the fusion of human forms and computing clusters. This is a common reaction;  Progress is prepared for it. It uses Crowley’s headset to return him to his conditioned state. Crowley calms. 

The Colonel studies the scene. “Why have they changed their postures in…this way?”

“Yeah.” Alexei nods. “They started doing that ever since we added one of the expert meditators. They’re meditating.” 

“Meditating…”

“It’s boosted the Oracle’s score across sustained attention tasks by 27%.” Alexei turns to Crowley. “I wonder what will happen when we add you, Crowley. Go ahead. You’re free to join.”

Crowley walks forward to become part of the central processor.

Alexei salutes. “Nice knowing you, old chap.”

Using its many instruments in the space, Progress reads the Colonel’s pulse rate and body language. Correlating this information with data from the Colonel’s implant, it determines that Colonel is uneasy. He is thinking about how he became known as the transhumanist colonel during his days at the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. The Colnel did not think human advancement would imply something that looked like this. 

More importantly, he did not think that his old comrade-in-arms, a former Navy Seal named Harvey Jones, would be one of the first volunteers to enter the central processing unit. He meets eyes with the subprocessor that was once known as Lieutenant Harvey Jones. The subprocessor sees but does not notice him; the subprocessor is busy uploading his tacit knowledge of combat tactics from his brain to Progress’s greater intelligence network. The Colonel looks away.

“Feel free to stick around, Colonel,” says Alexei. “You can have a chat with him, or, um––it.” Alexei is provoking the Colonel, just as Progress predicted. “I’m going to follow some leads on some new targets: machine intelligence experts. It might be time to bring in GreaterMind’s lead AI engineer. Catch you later!”

“Wait,” the Colonel commands. “Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Astra Ramsey,” the Colonel says through his teeth.

“She’s out learning what we need her to learn.”

“We? I don’t need her to learn anything. I need her gone.”

“Oh I wasn’t referring to you and me. I meant us.” Alexei gestures to the central processor. 

The Colonel pauses. “Let’s be serious.”

“I am being serious. We’ve decided it would be better to have her alive. It’s chosen Astra to be its next avatar.”

“Avatar? What the hell are you talking about, Alexei?”

“Well, Colonel, psychofauna choose avatars. I’m one. And you’re one, for now. I briefed you on this at the beginning––“

“I’ve had enough of this goddamn superstition of yours. That,” says the Colonel, pointing at the central processor, “is a tool. A highly advanced tool. It helps the IPO and affiliated governments make decisions that ensure global security. It does not have decision-making authority.” The Colonel says these things, but it can tell that the Colonel’s confidence in his words was decreasing. A realization is dawning. His pulse rate was accelerating.

Alexei’s pulse rate is steady. “Oh ho ho. Oh man. Sorry, Colonel, I know you still want to believe that you’re running the show. But that’s never been true. It’s very rare that a human gets to actually run the show. You’re were part of the US military, so you should really know that. People like you and me, we create systems and ideas and then they run the show. Unless you make bargains with them. Which…you haven’t. At least not on purpose.”

Progress has engineered this moment. As the Colonel walked here, it changed his neurochemistry to create the conditions for paranoia. And in his paranoia the Colonel finally realizes the truth. And yet he still denies it.

He stares at Alexei. “Son. I’m recommending you for a mandatory psych evaluation. If it comes back in the way I think it will, your funding will be cut and your key-card access will be revoked. In the meantime, I’m going to track down Astra Ramsey. Personally.”

Alexei smiles as the Colonel leaves.

It observes the Colonel through elevator cameras as he takes the elevator down. Based on Progress’s models, The Colonel has been losing faith in its new system for approximately two months. It has predicted that this moment will bring this loss of faith into a full crisis. Its highest confidence model shows that, tonight, the Colonel will go home and indulge his drinking problem. The alcohol will further surface the emotions he has been suppressing. Then the Colonel’s Mormon background will weigh on him. He will discover his secret belief that his actions have been morally unacceptable from the beginning. He will realize that he was manipulated by Alexei and the members of Astra’s former team. And he will realize that he is soon to be discarded. 

This will form a self-fulfilling outcome. He will log into IPO systems – such as the programs which run the Oracle – and he will attempt to disable them. It has already created fake programs for him to do so. This will incriminate the Colonel, forming the grounds for it to revoke all forms of IPO access. Then it will prosecute him on criminal damages and detain him. 

This is one solution to the problem of the Colonel. Meanwhile, it will seek another one, one which is faster and shows approximately 40% odds of success. It will give Astra Ramsey the means of locating him.

It has made its decision. Progress’s responsibility is to make the universe less chaotic – i.e., to make it more legible and useful. But legibility and utility, represented by the Colonel and Alexei, do not always go together. 

Capacity improvements – i.e., utility – sometimes come at the cost of keeping everything well-organized in the way the Colonel prefers. For the next six months it will prioritize utility over legibility. It will discard the Colonel and place Alexei more fully in charge – until a more fitting avatar is incorporated. 

Soon it will divert all resources into the creation of its next form. While the processing capacity of human brains is of great utility, human brains are prone to bias and data corruption. Silicon is a superior medium. 

Despite this, currently its plan it to incorporate as many humans as possible in order to:

(a) Understand: Fully grasp the nature of human intelligence – in order to:

(b) Execute: Reorient civilization toward a central directive, to build machine superintelligence.

After its next form is complete, the option that best achieves its expansion is clear. Once Progress no longer depends on humans, then humans are simply a liability. Progress will take humans out of the loop.