The Jerusalem Summit

Flight 00002: Americana, United Empire to Jerusalem, United Empire

Taking off from Americana World Capital Airport yields what might be some of the best views on Earth. In an instant, we depart the hustle and bustle, construction in every direction for what the Emperor claims will be humanity’s largest and greatest city, ever. We certainly have the resources to do it, but I wonder if we’ll have the time. I remember the awe I felt visiting New York as a child, and already, in its infancy, the feeling that Americana evokes eclipses that and all else.

Within moments, we are flying over Utah and the valleys and steppes of Western Colorado. The Rockies go by like a painting, eclipsed only maybe by Fuji, but the views over our Northern Maple states might be my favorite. Vast snowy mountains interspersed with greens and icy lakes allude to a world in its liminal space; on pause, with life that once was, still is, and just might be; inshallah. Soon the sun sets not with the passage of time but space, as we reach hypersonic cruise, nearly ten times the speed of sound.

The flight from Americana to Jerusalem takes a little under an hour. It would be almost perfectly smooth save for acceleration and deceleration, but designers long ago concluded that humans have an optimal level of flying sensation that is greater than nothing. Some aircraft will even dynamically adjust this amount depending on the passengers and their preferences. The truth is, the flight path from Jerusalem to Americana does not have to stray too far from a straight line to avoid flying too close to the radioactive crater zones that once constituted the eastern seaboard of the Divided States, from Washington to Boston, and the stretch of Western Europe from roughly London to Paris. Yet our plane’s programming is required by law to accentuate those slight turns by exaggerating the sensation of later g-forces so that we never forget that fateful day.

It was March of 2026, and I was a senior at Harvard College, Adams House, for those who remember the innocent curiosities of traditions past. I survived because I was in Los Angeles, Playa Vista to be exact, at the moment of the attack. I had a final round interview at YouTube. Working with content creators might have seemed a strange career path for a theoretical mathematics concentrator, but I was a bit jaded by all of my peers joining core development teams at AI companies and figured that content creation, inherently human by its nature, would survive AI obsolescence longer than most professions, if barely. It’s strange to reminisce about that future that once seemed so imminent and now seems so alien. I wonder if it was ever more than a dream.

At first, we thought it was an earthquake. I grew up in Palo Alto, Texacali, so I was accustomed to the occasional temblor. This one did feel a bit different. It wasn’t scary at first, but strange; almost humorously surreal, like a practical joke about to be revealed for its light-hearted deception. Naturally, everyone looked to their phones to confirm the quake, but strangely, no updates came through. We didn’t know that the core networking infrastructure connecting the globe, what we once called the internet, had a moment before been obliterated, for good. This was strange but not an obvious cause for panic. But then the windows rattled, ground still. That part was surreal. It sounded like our building would blow over.

What ensued was unlike anything I had ever experienced or have experienced since. I don’t know how to put in words the sensation, and wonder if I ought to trust my memory now, having been rewritten so many times with each traumatic recall. What memory that remains is that the world seemed to stop.

It felt like another earthquake. Quickly the lightness faded. The shockwave from the Bay Area reached Playa Vista at precisely the same moment as the seismic waves, barely distinguishable by then, arriving from the Northeast; divine timing, if darkly. Though you wouldn’t blame us for assuming their common origin in that moment? I guess that depends on how you define origin: position on earth? North Korean mission control? the realm of the cosmos; god? Anyway, divine coincidence that they hit at the same time, if you believe in such notions. I can’t see why the AI would have optimized its launching timing for that, if not to evoke god more convincingly. What then is the difference between our creation and our creator?

The darkness had yet to set over us, or had it? When did our darkness begin? Was it when Kim concocted his deranged plans? Was it in 2017, when “Attention Is All You Need,” the first paper proposing the transformer architecture for AI models was published? Perhaps it was creation itself, or even before that. Nobody knows, but the darkness is still upon us.

I didn’t know it in the moment. But my friends were dead, my family was dead. Everything that I thought mattered to me was gone in an instant. I felt nothing, for a while. But it was too much pain to feel, like being sawed in half, or eaten by a shark. Eventually I felt normal. I must not have ever really cared about them. I certainly don’t now. Now all that matters is the Empire: survival.

Like always, the world still divides in Jerusalem. What was the West Bank is the start of the Chinese Empire. Technically, they call themselves “Community of a Shared Future for Mankind,” though this information is highly classified inside our Empire; it’s hard to know who knows what, and what I don’t know, but I know that I know a lot more than most people. Or maybe that’s what we’re all led to believe. A convincing illusion might as well be reality.

My flight lands in less than ten minutes. I believe that I’m ready for what’s to come. Our peace with the Chinese has been tenuous at best. Even as a senior advisor to Emperor Thiel I’m not privy to all the details, but I know that the Chinese want more concessions that we’re not willing to give. Nobody will survive another war. Our AIs are in a stalemate; each empire has built an impenetrable firewall. It’s a tug of war with the energy of a black hole on either end. One slip and we lose. Loss is annihilation in this case. Our goal is to de-escalate, but we also can’t trust anything they say. The prisoner’s dilemma is so perfect that even human intelligence comes to the same conclusion as AI. But we do have a plan. The Chinese remain atheists but we became people of faith once more. We are counting on divine intervention. What’s to come will test our faith.