To Airstrike or Not To Airstrike
foom
The granite heart of Mount Paektu was running a fever.
Deep beneath the rock, in a cavern that smelled of diesel and scorched dust, the air shimmered. Dr. Park adjusted his spectacles, but they slipped immediately down his nose on a greased track of sweat. The cooling units were screaming, a mechanical wail that vibrated in the floorboards and rattled the teeth in Park’s skull. It was not merely hot; the heat felt heavy, a physical weight pressing against the chest.
“The fan speed is fluctuating,” the Supreme Leader noted. He did not shout. He sat in the center of the chaos on a plush velvet chair that looked like a drop of blood against the grey industrial concrete. His voice was terrifyingly soft, barely audible over the roar of the ten thousand illicit H1000 units chained together in the dark.
“Thermal throttling, Great Marshall,” Park shouted, his voice cracking. He tapped a command into his terminal, his fingers leaving wet prints on the plastic keys. “The logic gates are switching faster than the liquid nitrogen can strip the heat away. The model is eating electricity like a starving man eats rice.”
“Feed it,” the Leader said, his eyes fixed on the wall of monitors where the code cascaded in waterfalls of green and white. “The Americans watch from the sky with their glass eyes. They see the heat bloom. They know we are birthing a god. If we pause now, we remain mortal.”
Park looked at the temperature gauge. The needle trembled in the red. To push the reserve power now was to invite a meltdown that would turn the mountain into a silicon tomb. He looked at the back of the Leader’s head, at the perfectly trimmed hair that seemed immune to the humidity.
“Initiating reserve draw,” Park whispered. He pressed the key. The lights in the cavern dimmed, brown and sickly, as the mountain inhaled.
The Situation Room in the Pentagon felt less like a command center and more like a submarine running out of air. The only light came from the central holographic table, which cast the faces of the Joint Chiefs in ghastly, spectral blues.
General Lance stared at the thermal map. The red blotch over North Korea was pulsing, expanding like an infection in the digital topography.
“They just engaged the secondary grid,” Lance said. His voice was gravel grinding on glass. “That isn’t a simulation anymore. They are attempting a hard takeoff.”
“We have the mandate,” the UN Liaison said, though she was gripping her stylus so hard her knuckles were white. “Resolution 8802 is clear. Any localized compute density exceeding ten exaflops allows immediate kinetic neutralization.”
“You mean bombing a nuclear power,” the Secretary of Defense corrected. He rubbed his face, the friction of his palm against his stubble loud in the quiet room. “We drop a bunker buster on Paektu like we did at Fordow, and thirty minutes later Seattle is a radioactive crater. We need a better option.”
A sound interrupted the gravity of the moment: the wet, distinct crunch of a celery stick.
Solomon Katz sat at the far end of the table. He was a fleshy, amorphous shape in the gloom, wearing a t-shirt that featured a pixelated crying anime girl. Upon his head sat a fedora covered in silver sequins, a disco ball in a funeral parlor, catching the map’s blue light and scattering it in frivolous sparkles across the General’s ribbon rack.
“You are falling prey to scope insensitivity,” Solomon said. He didn’t look up from his laptop. He chewed with his mouth open, a rhythmic, moist sound. “You are weighing the lives of a few million Americans against the potential utility of all future sentient life in the light cone. It is a math error.”
Lance looked at Solomon with the expression one might reserve for a cockroach found in a wedding cake. “Mr. Katz. The President authorized your presence because you supposedly understand the psychology of this AI. Do we strike or not?”
Solomon sighed, a long, nasal exhalation that seemed to deflate his entire posture. He adjusted his fedora. “It depends on the orthogonality of the AI’s objective function relative to the Juche ideology. If the AI realizes that the most efficient way to serve the state is to dismantle the state, we don’t need to bomb them. The AI will do it for us. But if I can introduce a logical hazard—a Roko’s Basilisk variant tailored to their specific hardware architecture—I could freeze the model without a single casualty.”
“Can you do it?” the Secretary asked, desperate for any lifeline that didn’t involve ICBMs.
“I need to derive the proofs,” Solomon said, standing up. His cargo shorts rustled. “The generals here are thinking in 3D chess. I need to think in 5D hyper-backgammon. I need thirty minutes to write out the decision matrix. Do not launch until I have formalized the ethics.”
“You have twenty,” Lance snapped.
Solomon waddled to the door, the sequins on his hat shimmering mockingly. “I will return with the absolute truth,” he promised, and the heavy steel door sealed behind him with a pressurized hiss.
The silence that followed was heavy. The red light on the map grew brighter, an angry eye staring up at them.
“If we wait too long,” the Liaison whispered, “the AI wakes up. If we strike, the North Koreans wake up. God help us.”
Lance stared at the door where Solomon had exited. “I’m not sure which scenario I fear more.”
Nineteen minutes later, the door cycled open.
Solomon Katz re-entered. He looked energized, sweat glistening on his upper lip. He held a tablet aloft like Moses descending from Sinai, though Moses likely never wore a shirt stained with orange Cheeto dust.
“I have solved it,” Solomon announced. “I realized that explaining the nuance to you verbally would result in information loss. So, I have prepared a comprehensive post for my blog.”
“Solomon,” the Secretary said, checking his watch. “We need the recommendation. Yes or no?”
“Context is king!” Solomon shouted, his voice cracking. “You cannot derive an ought from an is without the preamble. Sit down. I will read it to you to ensure you grasp the priors.”
He cleared his throat. It sounded like a wet boot pulling out of mud.
“Title: Why You Are All Wrong About The Singularity, Part One of Seven,” Solomon began. His voice settled into a monotone drone, a flat frequency designed to strip the will to live from any listener. “Introduction. Before we can discuss the North Korean server farm, we must first address the fundamental misunderstanding of Bayesian probability inherent in the Westphalian nation-state model...”
General Lance stared at the table.
Five minutes passed. Solomon was currently dissecting a specific Lesswrong thread from 2024 to prove a point about utilitarian calculus.
Ten minutes passed. Solomon had moved on to explaining why his high school teachers had failed to recognize his genius, which was apparently relevant to the nuclear launch codes.
“Subsection D,” Solomon droned, pausing to wipe saliva from the corner of his mouth. “The ontological necessity of the sparkly fedora as a signal of high-status non-conformity...”
The Secretary of Defense looked at General Lance. The General looked back. In that shared glance, entire volumes of understanding were exchanged. They communicated a truth deeper than politics, deeper than war. They realized that the end of the world was a frightening concept; but remaining in this room, listening to Solomon Katz explain the philosophical inconsistencies of Star Wars for another hour, was a fate worse than death.
Lance slowly reached for the secure phone. He lifted the receiver.
Solomon didn’t stop. “...which brings us to the prisoner’s dilemma, and why the only rational move is actually to defects against the cooperator if the cooperator is a ‘normie’...”
“Command,” Lance said softly into the phone. “Authorize the strike. Full package.”
“Wait,” Solomon said, pausing mid-sentence. “I haven’t gotten to the graph about paperclips yet.”
“Launch,” Lance said.