The Babel Journal

If you're reading this it means I'm gone. Dead, I think — I can't be sure yet.

I shouldn't write down any of this, much less leave it for somebody else to read, but I've been lying to you and if I leave you behind I don't want to leave behind a lie, not even one of omission. I work for the Consortium, just not running background checks. They brought me in because Analysts are missing.

You can imagine their panic. the Consortium's AI is the world's best scientific hypothesis generator, yet even so only one in ten thousand ideas it generates pans out, and there's no other way to pick the best candidates to explore, once you've applied every AI trick you have, than to run them through the Analysts and hope they can glimpse the difference between superhuman genius and superhuman gibberish. So the AI is as secure as any computer can be, but each Analyst knows much of what it thought, and could even understand some of it. Even odds of one to ten thousand of a scientific revolution would be enough to make kidnapping someone worth the cost.

But there's another part of the mystery, one that doesn't terrify the Consortium because they don't want to think about it. The Analysts weren't kidnapped, they weren't killed, they didn't kill themselves. The Consortium thinks I'm missing something — although they can't agree on what — but you know better than anybody how much I've sacrificed to be good at this. Nobody killed those analysts, they weren't kidnapped, they are gone.

Where? Why? How?    

I only have the beginnings of an explanation, one that starts at investigative work I understand and ends at science maybe nobody in the world understands. Except the Analysts, if "in the world" still applies. I've partially reconstructed deleted logs and I believe they all read, just before disappearing, the same scientific hypothesis generated by the AI. Something about quantum mechanics, information theory, and genetics, far beyond anything I could understand even if I had the knowledge. So tonight I'll break the law and my contract and show a copy to a friend who's close enough to a genius that I think she might understand it.                                                        

I'll be watching her as she reads it. I'll have her explain. And if then I go somewhere else and not back to you, you will read this and know what matters the most to me: within the bounds of human thought there's nothing I can think of that would make me choose to go away.             

I love you. Don't look for me. Don't read anything they show you. You've always been smarter than me, and maybe you'd understand.