The Zeno Paradox

An homage to The Twilight Zone

Nov 24, 2024

The Twilight Zone redefined storytelling, drawing audiences into the unimaginable. Now, 66 years later, top writers, artists, and musicians are stepping into its eerie glow with a fresh twist. Ready to see where they’ll take you?

As the elevator descended, Hanna heard screaming. Already, she could feel the vibration of its warble on her skin as the steel box moved closer. She looked at the buttons on the control panel—Up or Down. Any normal elevator would have an emergency stop switch or a call box. A third option. But here, nothing. Pass or fail.

“Binary,” she thought. Just like the system her father had devised—a system built around simple choices, his.

The doors opened, sirens ringing from every corner as lights flashed. She paused, closing her eyes, taking a long deep breath through her nose. Waiting a moment, it came out in one long exhale. She tried like hell not to let it take her breath, but as the sound grew louder, her heart raced.

As Hanna exited the elevator, the brickwork appeared to vibrate, pulsing in rhythm with the emergency lighting. From memory she followed the long corridor leading past the galley, its stainless steel surfaces reflecting the flashing lights. Then a control room, glowing with the light from dozens of screens. The structure, she thought, was unchanged—yet somehow different, lived in.

All paths led to the main room: a library and the portal. In the cacophony she spotted him—Captain McDonnell. He stood rigid and hunched, staring intently at a tablet computer. Still in his uniform, maybe always, his name badge caught the glow of a clock on the wall: 2:50… 2:51…

“C’mon, Thompson, make a decision,” McDonnell said to the screen on his tablet as if willing something to happen. Hanna hadn’t met him in person, but she knew his type—all brass buttons and soulless efficiency. It was his call that had awakened her just yesterday.

McDonnell was courteous, if officious, until the pretense was over, “We need your help.”

Wait, was it help he asked for? No, he phrased it differently. McDonnell had said, “Warren requested you.” Her skin ran cold hearing that, her father’s name used colloquially for a machine. But McDonnell didn’t elaborate further, simply providing transportation details and a schedule that led to now.

McDonnell’s words reverberated in her head as she stood there, the lights making caverns of the library. And then she wondered, standing in this carefully manufactured world, whether he—or rather, it, The Nexus—had requested Hanna, or Bunny, her father’s pet name for her, the one he’d use to coax her participation.

02:53… 02:53…

Hanna watched the clock. Did it just skip? Maybe she blinked and missed it, the way a TV sometimes does when you glance away for a moment.

02:54… 02:55…

She looked at the room; it hadn’t changed much in the twenty-some years since she’d been here. The clock was new, but the portal, the blacked-out round door that led to the simulation chamber, was the same. The library, too, was an extension of her father’s penchant for modern simplicity: a tidy seating area flanked by parallel bookshelves holding a relief map of world events rendered in text. Each book a precise transcription of humanity’s key events.

Her eyes moved along the stacks, ticking off subjects—Napoleonic Wars, Victory or Retreat, partition of India, the space race. They were reference materials, after all, studied for use in the simulation chamber—scenarios where judgment and consequence had already been rendered.

02:56… 02:57…

Another siren, a different one, rang out. The clock stopped, numbers frozen as the lights stopped blinking. In the silence, she heard McDonnell’s ape-like breathing in heavy heaves. Still staring at his tablet, he watched the network map—a spider web with one node blinking red, then yellow—finally turned green. A signal that, at last, the system could continue.

For all its vast reach as a predictive learning machine, The Nexus still had to wait for a human response. Her father had built it that way, purposefully limiting its capabilities. As if tying one hand behind its back or making it stoop—if for only a few minutes—handicapping the system just enough to force humanity to intervene.

McDonnell exhaled in one final huff as he straightened, seemingly as relieved as the system itself.

“Captain,” Hanna said aloud.

McDonnell spun around, surprised. “Dr. Lichtman.”

She gave a faint smile, the one she reserved for eager students or the lingering guest at a cocktail party who would rather talk about her father than any work she had published. It wasn’t unkind, she thought, just the necessary one, the one that kept herself at arm's length.

He seemed relieved to see her, still paying more attention to the tablet than the forced guest. His tablet beeped as the clock reset: zero.

The portal spun open as a man, drenched in sweat, fell to the floor. Hanna watched as McDonnell helped him to a seat in the library. McDonnell handed the man a bottle of water as he sat down, his breath rasping. They watched as he drank the entire contents, as though quenching a weeklong thirst.

Thompson’s hands trembled as he looked at McDonnell. “What was the time?”

“Too damned close. We were almost locked out,” McDonnell answered.

Hanna stood, hands neatly clasped in front. She knew this was the way, an affectation for hiding her nervousness.

Waiting for Thompson to regain his composure, she spotted the painting. She didn’t have to read the nameplate to know the face: Dr. Warren Lichtman. Of course her father’s portrait would be hung prominently in the library. The watchful eye of the creator, his gaze focused somewhere off on the horizon, toward the portal. His look in the painting was different from those commissioned for biographies–a piercing stare, suited for stark black and white dust jacket covers. This one, she thought, was more hopeful, enigmatic. This look was for posterity—his subtle way of denoting that he would forever oversee every choice made in the room, tethering them all to his vision.

“I wasn’t ready for the rumble,” Thompson said, his voice shaking. “My stomach dropped before I was pulled down into the seat. The weight was intense…” He paused, the memory clearly unsettling him. “I could see the patches on their suits.”

“A new simulation?” McDonnell asked.

“Yes,” Thompson whispered, his voice barely audible. “Onizuka, Resnik… I was beside them.”

McDonnell thought for a moment, then his face dropped. “Jesus, the Challenger…”

Thompson nodded, looking down. “It’s scary as hell in that cockpit. As soon as I figured out where I was, I was… afraid for them, and wished there was some way out.”

On his tablet McDonnell pulled up a schematic of the STS-51-L Space Shuttle, the Challenger, showing the front seats labeled: Pilot Michael Smith, Commander Francis “Dick” Scobee. Behind them were Ellison Onizuka and Judith Resnik, and the mid-deck held by Ronald McNair, Christa McAuliffe, and Gregory Jarvis.

Thompson cleared his throat. “I would’ve expected something like… ‘Launch or Abort,’” he said, frowning. “This time, there was a single word on the console…”

Thompson pointed to an empty spot where he’d been in the simulation, a phantom seat next to Onizuka, then traced his finger toward the outline of the instrument console.

“It might have been a button, not the normal kind, another anomaly. It was too far to reach.”

“Was anything else out of place?” Hanna asked, stepping a bit closer.

Thompson, puzzled, looked at her for a long moment. Then, his eyes registered recognition before shaking his head, no.

Hanna gave a slight smile and said, “It’s good to see you again, Dr. Thompson.”

Thompson nodded, still catching his breath.

Hanna studied the man’s face, then the schematic on the tablet. After a moment her eyes shifted to the library and its high shelves filled with history books. Each row neatly trimmed up, no book out of place, no detritus like you’d find in a public library except a fine layer of dust.

“It was the failsafe again?” McDonnell asked.

“Yes—twice in a week,” Thompson confirmed, looking at Hanna.

As Hanna walked, her eyes drifted to the top of the stacks. It was smaller than she remembered, not as imposing. But it was still a replica of his study from their home, the one she remembered, where she’d spent countless hours.

“Bunny,” she remembered him saying, “we’re not here to rewrite history. You have three minutes to choose the correct answer before the computer takes over.”

She’d look at the images, searching her memory for the correct answer. Just photographs back then, nothing like what became the simulation chamber. Instead, she’d have a two-dimensional view of a scenario to react, and the clock was always ticking.

Back then, the system had been just a schematic, a logic chart for what would become an expansive AI network. Her father had called it The Nexus with the tagline “a learning computer to help humanity.”

It would quickly grow to include a network of AIs spread across the globe, each tasked with guiding, adjusting, and directing to keep society from straying too far from the optimal path. The Nexus could execute decisions with lightning speed, tirelessly keeping stock markets stable, farmlands yielding, perhaps even halting terrorist threats before they could emerge.

For all its power, the Nexus was ultimately just a machine—a system without conscience. And so, at its heart, deep underground in this bunker, was its most essential component: the human interface, the simulation chamber.

She remembered her father’s practiced voice, the conviction in it each time he said, "History is the lock. To open it, we need someone—a human—to provide the key."

Her father had insisted on it. A safeguard, a final check, a way to keep the system tethered to human judgment. Only a person—someone trained to articulate an historical choice—could keep the Nexus from drifting into cold, calculated efficiency.

“Three minutes never feels like enough, does it?” Hanna murmured, her thoughts drifting toward a distant memory.

“Three minutes,” McDonnell answered in a practiced tone, “is the threshold where people freeze, second-guess, or refuse the choices altogether. The system is accounting for, well, stage fright.”

Hanna smiled as she rounded the library stacks, looking at the two men. The portrait, she now noticed, had a clear view of the entire room, unencumbered by anything—the watchful eyes, the all-knowing face.

“Three minutes,” Hanna said, “is arbitrary.” She watched the two men turn their eyes to her. “It’s a red herring. My father could have made it any amount of time.”

Thompson and McDonnell looked at one another.

“The Nexus has already made the decision, probably trillions of them, in fact, by the time we decide to push a button.”

“So, what’s it waiting for?” McDonnell asked.

Hanna took another look at the painting. She was closer now, and the dabs of paint were visible, making the image distorted and abstract. There was something unsettling about seeing the artist’s work up close, a way it was never meant to be seen.

A thought struck her. “It’s waiting…” Hanna said, “to be right.” She began to understand—it was his method, keeping himself embedded in the system, ensuring that every choice passed through his singular logic.

Thompson leaned back slightly, his gaze drifting toward the ceiling as though seeking clarity in the silence. “It didn’t give me a choice, though. It just glitched again. In the shuttle with those astronauts, that teacher…felt like there was no right answer.”

Hanna watches Thompson closely. Even though the simulation is over, the experience of being in that doomed shuttle has left him visibly unsettled.

“But why the failsafe if it already knows the answer?” McDonnell asked, his tone sharp as he studied the tablet in his hands.

Thompson shrugged slightly and took a deep breath, his chin arcing to his chest as if the floor might offer answers he couldn’t. McDonnell tapped the edge of the tablet with his thumb, a rhythmic gesture to occupy his hands while waiting for the others to respond.

Hanna crossed her arms, her voice steady as she wondered aloud, “Maybe it’s stuck—caught on something it can’t resolve. Like Turing’s halting problem or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.”

Thompson grunted softly, as if a thought had just clicked, then shrugged. “Zeno’s paradox?” he said, his tone carrying the faintest edge of doubt, as though dismissing it even as he spoke.

McDonnell blinked, shifting his focus. “Zeno’s what?”

Hanna stepped forward slightly, intrigued by the notion, turning it over in her mind.

Thompson folded his arms across his chest, his posture mimicking Hanna’s. “It’s an old philosophical idea. Zeno argued that progress happens in smaller and smaller steps—always getting closer, but never actually reaching it.”

McDonnell raised an eyebrow. “Alright, but this is a machine. It doesn’t ‘move’—it calculates.”

“It’s not just about movement,” Hanna interjected, glancing at Thompson before addressing McDonnell. “Zeno used it as a framework to describe both movement and math—decisions broken down into a series of steps. Each step gets smaller, closer to the goal, but you never actually reach it.”

“Always approaching, but never arriving,” Thompson adds, looking from Hanna to McDonnell.

McDonnell gestured to his tablet, skeptical. “It doesn’t hesitate. It calculates. So, again, if it knows the answer, why wouldn’t it just finish?”

Thompson shrugged, his tone is cautious but gaining traction. “What if it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do—calculating every possible step, narrowing in on every variable—but something is keeping it from making the leap? Something it wasn’t built to handle?”

McDonnell frowned, his gaze bouncing between them. “Like what?”

Hanna tilted her head, her gaze drifting to the overhead lights. For a moment, she is distracted by the dust floating in the beams, barely visible until it caught just the right angle.

She exhaled softly. “Zeno’s paradox wasn’t meant to be solved—it was meant to show how some problems can’t be resolved by logic alone. If the Nexus is stuck, it’s because it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: processing, refining, calculating. So, maybe this problem isn’t logical.”

McDonnell adjusted his tie, his expression guarded. “Are you saying the Nexus is too smart, or not smart enough for its own good?”

Thompson shrugged again, his lips pressing into a thin line. “Maybe it’s not about being smart. Maybe it’s looking for an answer when it doesn’t understand the question.”

Thompson shakes his empty water bottle then walks over to a cabinet and opens it, his hands still shaking, revealing a few nearly empty bottles of liquor. Hanna noted, wryly, that her father would never have allowed it to sit that empty. Thompson poured a finger of whiskey into a glass and took a sip.

Hanna looked into the empty space between them, the hum of the overhead lights filling the silence.

McDonnell shifts, his body language careful, the mask of someone trying to be in control while clearly out of his depth. “Alright,” he said finally, “If it’s stuck like you say, maybe that’s why you’re here?”

Hanna felt a familiar knot tightening in her chest—an echo of the moments her father’s work had drawn her into the spotlight. Had she ever truly escaped it, or was this where she was always meant to end up?

Hanna smoothed her shirt and straightened her name badge, buying herself a few more seconds to consider the question. “The failsafe is a verbal command to stop the simulation?” she asked.

“Yes. Of sorts. If the system encounters a fault and the selection can’t be made it shows a keyword.” Thompson took another sip. “I wrote the protocol, not the keyword. But honestly, I never thought we’d actually use it—it was so long ago.”

“What was the failsafe command?” McDonnell asked.

Thompson wiped sweat from his brow, uncurling a finger from his glass, and pointed at her nametag. “Same as last time. It said, ‘Hanna.’”

A legacy of steel and circuits, built to remember history’s darkest moments in order to keep humanity on course. Its creator, Dr. Warren Lichtman, saw humanity’s greatest danger not in conflict, but in apathy. His answer was a machine that could not run without human engagement—a machine that forces us to revisit and verify pivotal moments, ensuring that each choice, each consequence, is preserved exactly as it happened.
But today, the machine has called upon an unlikely heir. Hanna Lichtman, daughter of its creator, must confront a system built to safeguard the thin line between human memory and machine logic. Because sometimes, the true peril isn’t what we forget—but in what we surrender to the cold calculus of a machine… here, in the Twilight Zone.

Looking more closely, Hanna saw the true age and disrepair of the facility. Dust settled thickly in the corners, scuff marks lined the once-pristine walls. Cracks veined the concrete floor beneath her feet, each fracture a silent testament to years of relentless use—a place built to endure rather than to be cared for.

Hanna wondered if the Nexus itself could register neglect—as if a system built purely on calculation could recognize the difference between mere operation and genuine vitality. The Nexus wasn’t built to feel; it was built to endure. And endure it had, for over twenty years.

“It’s been a while since you were here?” McDonnell asked as they stood at the intersection of several long corridors.

“Not since I was very young,” Hanna said. “It was just a few rooms then.”

“It’s changed quite a lot.” McDonnell gestured down the hall. “The barracks were added some time ago. The teams, assigned by Warre–, um, The Nexus, have grouped themselves by region.”

“How many?”

“When it’s full, about sixty,” McDonnell replied. “But right now, only Dr. Thompson is here.”

Hanna paused, considering the range of simulations that might require so many people. She suspected the staffing followed seasonal patterns—more world-shaking events, after all, seemed to happen from summer to autumn, fewer in winter. It was a rabbit trail, but with June approaching, she expected the roster would be close to full.

“Bunny, pay attention,” Dr. Lichtman had said, his didactic voice prompting as he pointed to the architectural scale model on his desk. She remembered thinking how much it looked, parts of it anyway, like his office—clean, modern furniture, reading chairs near the twin bookshelves like those in the library. A model within a model.

“The data server room, simulation chamber, and library come first—their purpose is central. They’re the hub of the system.” She’d listened to him, imagining how being in that space might feel in real life. With its open top allowing a clear view of the details inside, the model never felt claustrophobic—nothing like the real thing.

“Why use your name as the failsafe?” McDonnell asked.

Hanna thought for a long moment before offering, “Old men, clinging to the past, I suppose.”

Thompson may have written the protocol, but she knew her father’s hand was in it all along—perhaps his way of binding her to this place, a captive audience via the smallest lines of code.

They moved past rooms lined with sturdy, utilitarian furnishings. Hanna glanced into one room, noting sketches on the walls—a waving flag with an eagle clutching thunderbolts, a ringed hand adorned with a bee, and a curved saber inscribed with “Honneur et Patrie.”

“‘Honor the Fatherland...’” Hanna murmured.

McDonnell nodded. “That phrase gets recycled throughout history, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Hanna said, “I didn’t expect it to pop up stateside so recently.”

“In a Napoleonic-era simulation,” McDonnell continued, “Dr. Maupin said he caught that inscription on a sword just as the guillotine took Desmoulins’ head.” He paused, adding with a chill, “The choice was loyalty or dissent.”

She shivered. Simulation or not, it felt too real, the weight of history up close.

McDonnell guided her into the central control room, where monitors displayed the status of AI nodes worldwide. Satellite imagery highlighted locations across the continents. Hanna spotted a few: cities flaring red with civil unrest, regions where food supplies were running low, and isolated points marked for political instability. She saw Paris, Cairo, Hong Kong—and, unexpectedly, Des Moines.

“Des Moines?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Political demonstrations,” McDonnell replied, barely looking up. “Sometimes it’s small things in unlikely places. Warre—” He stopped himself. “The Nexus monitors all of it.”

The screens pulsed softly as new markers appeared and vanished in real-time, each point representing a decision or action, each flicker a reminder of the constant vigilance her father’s creation demanded.

On the main screen in front of them appeared a timeline as McDonnell swiped on his tablet, controlling the view. Hanna watched the various markers scroll by, each indicating a simulation by the Nexus. Today’s simulation of the Challenger explosion was highlighted in red while others were green: Battle of Thermopylae, The Gunpowder Plot, Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Okay, so like your father envisioned, the Nexus nodes constantly make decisions in the real world. Most of the time it just does its thing, but every so often it needs approval. Except, the system abstracts the decision with a simulation, a surrogate, to get approval from us.”

Hanna thought, Us. He means a human.

“Right, the simulations aren’t tied to the actual decision, just a key,” Hanna said.

“Exactly.” He tapped a flashing yellow marker. “About a year ago, things changed.”

The marker highlighted: Tribunal of Joan of Arc (1431).

“This was the first anomaly,” McDonnell explained. “In the simulation, Joan’s trial progressed as expected, but just as her sentencing was announced, an odd detail appeared. On a wooden table near the judge’s bench—a single document, printed on modern, perforated paper.”

“Dot matrix... in the 15th century?” Hanna asked, frowning.

Thompson entered quietly, adding, “The document contained a single line: ‘Undefined error.’”

Hanna’s eyes narrowed. “Error in what?”

Thompson’s expression tightened. “In the simulation, the choices were ‘Recant’ or ‘Defy.’”

“But Joan chose defiance,” Hanna said, puzzled. “That outcome was clear, wasn’t it?”

Thompson nodded slowly. “It should have been. But the moment I tried to touch a button, the system stalled. The execution order froze, caught between advancing and holding her fate in suspension.”

Hanna frowned, unsettled. An undefined error, in a system built to predict every outcome? It was as though something was missing—a detail it couldn’t place, maybe, or a hesitation. She filed the thought away, her mind catching on the strangeness of it. “The Nexus faltered despite a clear decision?”

“Yes,” McDonnell replied, uneasy. “Eventually, it played out—but not before that hesitation. And the document.”

Thompson reached into his pocket, frowning as he patted his other pockets. “I think I’ve spotted something… a pattern, maybe. Must’ve left my notes in the library. Give me a moment—I’ll go grab them.”

As he left, McDonnell’s eyes followed him, then shifted to Hanna. “He’s been on edge with these anomalies. Spends hours rechecking the Nexus logs, sometimes two or three times. Says he’s seeing a pattern... but hasn’t explained what he means.”

Hanna frowned. “Did he find anything?”

McDonnell sighed. “Nothing he’s shared. Maybe you know Thompson better than I do...”

He let the words hang there, perhaps hoping she would fill in the ending. But she couldn’t. Hanna turned over what she’d heard, the puzzle still a scattered pile of pieces with no clear edges. An exploding space shuttle, the sentencing of a young woman—a girl, really—with visions.

McDonnell’s voice broke her thoughts. “Shall I go on?”

She nodded, refocusing on him and the timeline. The screen flipped forward.

“And then… the Salem Witch Trials simulation. In this case, the simulation placed Martha Corey at the execution of her husband, Giles,” McDonnell explained. “As the stones were piled onto him, a magistrate turned to Martha, offering her a final chance to confess and spare herself.”

Hanna imagined the scene: Martha watching her husband die by barbaric means. She wondered who in the crowd could have idly watched. The idea brushed past like a cold draft.

McDonnell’s expression darkened as he continued. “Martha begged for mercy, pleading with the judge to end her husband’s torment. She cried, ‘Have mercy on him—he’s done nothing. I’ve done nothing.’ But as her voice broke, the judge delivered her sentence: ‘Guilty.’”

Hanna leaned in, her eyes narrowing, still thinking what a horrible occupation her father had created. She wondered how the moment wouldn’t have elicited more than a stoic, binary response.

“Here’s where the anomaly appeared,” McDonnell said. “The word ‘Guilty’ stuttered. It broke mid-sentence, shifted to ‘Innocent,’ then back again. The system glitched, flickering as if... as if even the verdict itself were conflicted.”

“It couldn’t commit to a decision?” Hanna asked, her tone growing tense.

McDonnell nodded. “The judge’s face froze for a moment, eyes flickering—as if he, or the system, was struggling to resolve her fate. Eventually, it froze. Like it was waiting.”

“If the system already knows the answer…” Hanna started to say but stopped herself. She bit at the corner of her lip, thinking, “…what could give it pause?”

McDonnell shrugged. “Thompson only said it didn’t continue until he selected ‘Guilty’ from the options. Then it continued forward as though nothing had happened.”

Hanna tilted her head, squinting at the screen, looking for some overlooked detail and finding nothing but pixels.

McDonnell swiped to the next marker. “The Rosa Parks simulation.”

Hanna raised an eyebrow. A thought hovered on her lips, a fraction of a moment lost in her own memories.

“The bus driver approached Parks but, instead of delivering the command to move, he stopped, then walked back to his seat,” McDonnell read from the notes. “A moment later, he got up and returned, repeating the approach.”

“He was caught in a loop?” Hanna asked. “After a choice was made?”

“Yes. Eventually, he said ‘Move,’ but it took several tries, almost as if the system were fighting itself to complete the action.”

Hanna’s mouth tightened. “It’s as if... something’s interrupting it, or data is missing,” she murmured, more to herself than to McDonnell. “Early AI systems suffered from this, too. Development would plateau—forever inching toward a complete thought but never arriving. Like–”

“Zeno’s paradox?” McDonnell asked, finishing her sentence.

Hanna nodded, never taking her eyes off the screen, her brow still furrowed. “But this decision… It should be simple for a machine. It hasn’t always been for us, though…” She trailed off, the thought unfinished.

McDonnell paused, clearly lost, but continued. “Right. Well… that’s where last week’s failsafe—uh, your name—comes in.” Without missing a beat, he added, “The next one’s more recent. Give me a minute to pull it up.”

He started to slide the timeline forward when a scream erupted from down the hall. Hanna and McDonnell both startled at the sound, the blood-curdling scream echoing from the library.

“Thompson,” McDonnell said as they rushed out of the room. The timeline, still sliding forward, sped through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s…

Their footsteps echoed through the empty spaces as they raced down the corridor and into the library, the scream intensifying. On the floor outside the simulation entrance was Thompson.

He was pulling at the closed door, half-standing.

Hanna rushed to his side as she saw blood streaming down the frame, his hand caught on the other side. McDonnell pulled open an emergency panel, smashing a release button. The door hissed open, just enough to release the arm.

Thompson’s hand tumbled down with a wet thud on the concrete floor, leaving a widening pool of blood. Beside it, something small skittered across the ground—a battered pocket notebook, its pages crumpled and smeared with streaks of red.

McDonnell rushed to the man, pulling on him to stand upright. Hanna stood there staring: the blood, the severed hand, the man writhing in pain.

“Help me get him to the elevator,” McDonnell said, his eyes focused on Thompson’s face.

Hanna didn’t move, her eyes fixed on a crimson pool spreading across the floor. All the resolve she’d mustered to get here, to be in this place, drained in that instant, her mind reeling.

“Dr. Lichtman!” McDonnell said, snapping her back.

Hanna and McDonnell lifted him to his feet. He screamed as they pulled him toward the central room. Hanna pressed the button, the single decision: UP. The elevator doors opened.

“His hand...” McDonnell said, pulling Thompson in. “Maybe they can…”

Hanna turned and rushed back to the library, knowing time was fleeting if there was any chance to save it. Her eyes scanned the room, quickly landing on a small blanket draped across a chair—the same chair her father would have used. The thought struck her as she reached for it: he would likely sit there, wrapped in this blanket against the chill of the bunker, his eyes pointed toward his creation, the simulation chamber, thinking. Always thinking.

Gently, she scooped up the hand, wrapping it carefully in the blanket as it absorbed the pooling blood. Her heart raced as she rushed back to the elevator, only to find the doors already closed. She tapped the UP button—nothing. Pressing it again and again did nothing. The elevator was gone, making its slow ascent to the surface and, somewhere far above.

As the elevator ascended, Hanna turned back toward the empty, lifeless corridors behind her. The faint hum of air moved through the steel grating in the walls, a subtle draft cutting through the bunker’s vast, hollow silence. She wiped blood from her face with her sleeve, looking around, suddenly struck by just how alone she was in this cavernous complex.

Out of the corner of her eye, a pulsing light on her chest caught Hanna’s attention. Looking down, she noticed her nametag—the one she had meant to leave behind before the tour, a quiet act of defiance against her role in this creation. Instead, it was twisted in the folds of her jacket, the edges glowing faintly. Slowly, the realization dawned: her father’s system had chosen. She was the only participant left for the simulator.

The thought took her breath; an invisible wind seemed to flow up her arms and to her cheeks, raising goosebumps like icy needles. It felt like the cold hand of her father had reached out from somewhere beyond, nudging her forward, demanding her as he always did.

Hanna considered her options: Leave—her pulse quickening at the thought, the instinct to flee surging like a spark down her spine. Or stay. Her eyes landed again on the nametag: Dr. Hanna Lichtman. The system—not a person, but the Nexus—had included her honorific, quietly marking her with inevitability. It seemed to know she had spent her father’s final years, and the years since, dissecting the ethics of learning systems. It seemed to recognize her voice, though small, urged the world to pause. To hold back the tide of cold indifference.

Of course it had. The Nexus always knew.

Her entire life had been spent under that shadow, defined by the man who created the Nexus and the legacy he cultivated with meticulous precision.

More than a handful of students, journalists, and would-be acolytes had stopped her over the years to ask, to fawn, about the work of the great doctor. They wanted the mythology, the curated genius that her father had allowed them to see.

But that wasn’t the man she knew. That man was always calculating, his cold brilliance slicing through any semblance of warmth. And yet, his shadow followed her still, pressing against her, inescapable.

Hanna sighed, to no one in particular, and turned toward the revolving door. But something caught her eye.

Almost hidden in the shadow was Thompson’s notebook. Its worn cover was warped and torn, the corners curling inward as if trying to shrink from view. Had Thompson found the answer?

She hesitated, then crouched to pick it up, her fingers brushing the damp leather. The pages were nearly unreadable—ink blurred into rust-red smears, their edges damp and warped—but one line stood out, traced over and over again with frantic pressure: the bias mirrors the fault.

Her breath caught. The words stabbed at something buried deep within her.

All systems have bias, she thought, but learning systems like the Nexus were meant to transcend it—to build abstractions refined to an infinite degree, allowing for nuance. So then... what bias? What fault?

The walkway ahead narrowed like a throat closing in. A wedge of dimly lit space, the boundary between her world and the Nexus. Her father had called it the future. To Hanna, it felt more like a tomb. Each step toward it felt heavier than the last, as though the machine’s cold intent was pressing down on her shoulders.

She hesitated, her hands trembling as they brushed the edge of the doorframe. Every instinct screamed at her to turn away, to let this place rot in its emptiness. But something held her. The blood. The notebook. The weight of her father’s expectations. Or perhaps it was something else—a pull she couldn’t quite name, one that had whispered to her over the years that only she could stand here in this moment.

This isn’t about finding answers, she thought. It’s about the choice—go or don’t go. The stark simplicity of it felt like a trap.

Hanna stepped forward.

Inside the chamber, the darkness was absolute. Hanna could barely make out the room’s shape—a cylindrical vault, with no corners, no clear sense of direction. In early versions, there were goggles and chairs to sit in, but this Nexus had improved since then, and she couldn’t know what to expect from the constant march of technology and time.

“The simulation starts in ten seconds,” a voice said. While it came from everywhere, the sound was delicate, finely tuned. As Hanna waited, she let her hands rest on her belly, the nervous habit turning into a motion to smooth her shirt—her fingers catching on the damp, dark blood that stained it.

A fire alarm began ringing in the distance, then the hollow sound of crashing material—rocks? No, it was something more…

Hanna’s ears popped, the pressure in the room changing as a stack of ceiling tiles crashed down around her, filling the air with dust. Screaming rose in the background, and she coughed, taking in the sight of a small room. The door was closed, glass windows around her cracked as if the whole building had lurched, stressing them. Hanna fought her way around a desk to the door, but it wouldn’t budge. It, too, had absorbed the weight of something massive above, pressing it into the neat office carpet below.

With some effort, she grabbed an office chair and threw it against a nearby window, sending glass into the adjoining space. Outside, she saw the room was filled with smoke and people running. They passed her alone or in twos, sometimes threes. Arm-in-arm, they pulled each other along, all heading in the same direction.

Wind from shattered windows on the outer wall whipped dust and smoke around her, stinging her eyes. Tears pooled at the corners, her lips dry and caked as if a fan had blasted the room with cement dust.

In her peripheral vision, a clock appeared, hovering just at the edge of her sight. It was identical to the one outside the simulation chamber. No matter how she moved, it remained there—an ever-present sentinel, a reminder that this was only a simulation. But it wasn’t counting down yet. So far, she hadn’t been confronted with a binary choice, just an unmoving line of zeroes.

Yet from the vibrations in the floor, the ductwork falling from above, and the screams and cries for help, this was unlike anything she could have imagined.

She made her way to the exterior wall, around toppled desks and cubicle walls. Her hands searched for a clear path. Whole sections of walls were gone, fallen away to somewhere below. As she reached the edge and leaned out to catch a breath of fresh air, she saw no ground. At every view, there were buildings below eye level, but the street was so far underneath, she couldn’t see it. To do so, she’d have to extend her body out the window several feet.

The building shook from an explosion somewhere above. Her hand, holding a beam exposed through the wall, vibrated with the reverberations. Then she saw what she hoped wouldn’t be the case: out the window, a massive building—a modern monolith—rose dozens of floors above, stark and gray. Through the air came the tremendous scream of an engine. She could hear the pitch of air changing as a commercial airliner, the United Airlines logo clearly visible from the side, slammed nose-first into the other building.

Hanna recoiled from the burst of fire that followed. The explosion sent shockwaves loosening rubble all around. Then, a crunch of stone hit the side of the building nearest to the explosion. A deep rumble shook her feet—steel and concrete flexing somewhere above her head.

Hanna’s stomach dropped.

The massive towers, the chaos, the impact above—she saw it all now in terrifying clarity: she was in the first tower hit, the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

Coughing and spitting dust, she made her way along the wall, stepping over debris every few feet. Her eyes searched, knowing it was somewhere—every office had one or ten of them.

On an inner wall, she spotted it—a clock hanging askew—9:06 a.m.

Glancing up, she thought, “The timer still hasn’t started.”

She saw another stream of people scrambling and followed them. Their shouts and coughs directed her when she couldn’t see, the air thicker with suffocating black smoke. In a few minutes, she and the others reached a doorway to the stairwell. Just inside, a metal plate read: 87th floor. Hanna looked around as people pushed past the stairs toward, if it could be found in all the smoke, the exit somewhere far below.

As if it were next to her ear, she heard a loud beep as the clock flashed and began counting up… 0:01, 0:02…

Hanging in the air, two round buttons appeared, each with a single word above: Escape or Perish. As if accentuating their meaning, the building shook as another section of the ceiling started to crack and bend. The message was clear: in a few seconds, she would be crushed.

Hanna leaned to the doorway, one hand in the air ready to press the Escape button, and froze. She could hear voices rounding the stairs below. The path was obvious even if she were to hit the button, but there was something else. Every other simulation had been about choosing the right path for some historical event, some known moment—but here there was no one else to choose for.

This decision was for her. But what was the system trying to learn from this simulation?

She breathed hard, trying to think in all the smoke. Hanna searched the room for answers.

The ceiling had started to flex downward, more fires roaring from above. Her feet moved back, further from the doorway, away from the shouts of those down the stairs, fading. Breathing, she quieted the room, the creaking of the building becoming background noise. Faintly, she heard a voice—someone calling out. A tired, raspy scream.

Hanna made her way toward it, through the smoke, scrambling over piles of rubble. And there, standing at one of the voids where floor-to-ceiling windows once held out the elements, was a man. His suit was blackened from soot everywhere in the room, his face covered in the milk-white powder of pulverized stone. He leaned out, waving his arms wildly. He was shouting, though the wind captured his voice, carrying it high and away, never reaching the street below.

She knew this man. Not personally, but she knew his shape, his clothing. His image appeared in her mind. Through laced fingers she remembered watching videos of him, caught on camera in a moment of desperation. The image found purchase—she remembered his body flipping end over end as he jumped, falling the length of the tower to the street below.

Hanna looked at the buttons, then at the man. He continued to flail. Screams came out like an animal entering an abattoir, knowing it wouldn’t make it to the end of the corridor alive. His screams, like the animal’s, weren’t about escape but to get someone—anyone’s—attention.

01:32, 01:33…

As she approached, the ceiling behind her collapsed—pipes and cement falling in great heaps to the floor. Then, through it, revealing the floor below. She squinted, looking through the dust, coughing, to see… there might be a path back to the doorway and the stairs beyond.

01:43, 01:44…

She looked again at the man, gripping tightly to the crumbling wall. She watched the tears streaming down his face with every shout into the void, wild and unrestrained.

01:46, 01:47…

Then, she saw a rip in his pants, neatly torn from calf to somewhere above his knee. It didn’t flap in the wind like the rest of his clothing because blood had already begun to clot, holding the pants close, wrapping a wound beneath. She saw him bobble, holding his weight with the other leg. Then she saw the bone, twisted and poking through the skin, protruding, as blood wet the fabric in another gush. So amped with adrenaline, he was standing, steadying himself on a compound fracture—a twist of broken bones finding sunlight through his skin for the first time.

Her father’s binary, his unflinching calculus—none of it seemed to matter now. This wasn’t about her survival, or even the choice between living or dying. She felt herself drawn forward by something outside of logic.

The timer counted up, each second a drumbeat of urgency. She stared at the buttons: Escape or Perish. To live or to die. The choice was laughably simple for a machine, so certain it could distill a human life into this binary. Her father would be proud of its unflinching calculus, but… was this a test she was meant to pass?

She looked to the man beside her, helpless but fiercely alive, clinging to life.

01:59, 2:00…

The sound of his screams continued to twist at her brain, stinging like the dust and smoke all around her. In his terror, she could feel her body leaning toward him, wanting to calm him, to help him.

The buttons flickered, blinking in and out. They didn’t fade like she expected, but instead seemed to shudder and distort, pixels scattering and reassembling in fractured patterns. Had she done something?

02:02, 02:03…

Hanna stopped moving for a moment, looking at the scene. This simulation was somehow different. Hadn’t she and Thompson agreed the Nexus might be caught in a Zeno paradox—always calculating, never arriving? But what if they were wrong? What if the Nexus wasn’t stuck at all?

Faced with a life-or-death choice, anyone would, of course, choose escape. Doing so would end the simulation with a clean confirmation, the expected response attained. The alternative—perishing—would be accepted just as easily, though logged by the Nexus as incorrect and locking humanity out forever.

To live or to die, Hanna thought—the words skipping through her mind, dangling like this man, teetering on the edge of a childish bias. Her father’s voice echoed in her mind: “You’re here to choose.” But choose what?

At that moment, Hanna saw the fault in the system—the flaw hiding beneath its precision. This wasn’t a Zeno paradox at all.

“The bias mirrors the fault,” Hanna thought, the words from Thompson’s notebook echoing in her mind. He had almost solved it. He had the variables in the equation but not the constants. But he didn’t know what she knew. Was Thompson testing the system, triggering the glitches? Even the failsafe, she wondered?

McDonnell, too, had been right: the Nexus could calculate every probability, weigh every outcome. But that’s all it could do. It couldn’t feel the weight of the choice. It couldn’t grasp what it meant to hesitate, to doubt, to choose for reasons that defy logic.

Her father’s machine had been built to avoid the chaos of human emotion, to strip decision-making down to a cold precision. But in doing so, it had stripped away the very thing that made choices meaningful. A machine might mimic reason, but it could never grasp the humanity behind a choice.

Hanna exhaled, her chest tightening.

02:10, 02:11…

Hanna’s hand touched his back. She could feel the fabric of his shirt, the sweat turning cold on his skin. He spun, looking at her, his scream silenced, and she saw the tears, spread by the wind outside, carving radiating slices through the dust on his face.

She pulled at his sleeve, urging him down, putting a shoulder under his arm. His weight pulled her down as she guided him through the rubble. They both stopped as the building shook, a torrent of scalding steam hissing from the fire suppression system somewhere above.

She looked at the timer. It hadn’t stopped.

02:31, 02:32…

“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear. Again and again, he said it like a meditation. And she thought about how it might feel to be a simulation that repeated the same moments whenever called to do so. The horror of being trapped, an unwilling but necessary participant in the theoretical game of teaching a computer that could never advance beyond a limited set of predictions.

It’s watching, Hanna thought, but could it possibly understand?

They moved together, stepping lightly as he pulled on her. Through the smoke, now like trying to see through a chaotic snarl, she could see the doorway getting closer. In the dark stairwell, she saw a flashlight, a frenetic beam coming from a flight or two above. The beam got bigger as two men, their shirts wrapped around their faces, appeared at the doorway.

Behind her, the fire was growing, daylight locked out as the cubicles, papers, and even chairs roiled in flames.

The two men stepped in, grabbing her and the man, pulling them toward the stairs. She let go as they took his arms, one on each side, and rushed him over the threshold and into the stairwell. The man with the fracture turned and said, one last time, “Thank you,” as they disappeared into the dark.

Hanna stood, watching them go as the door slammed shut. Behind her, the room erupted in flame, heat crashing against her like a wave. The searing light blinded her, forcing her eyes shut, while the blaring sirens overwhelmed her senses, swallowing everything else.

Then, silence.

When she opened her eyes again, the ever-present peripheral clock was gone. In front of her was a sliding oak door, one she instinctively recognized. This was the door to her father’s study.

“…that room is dangerous,” her mother had said, sometimes under her breath, sometimes aloud, and it was a sentiment Hanna shared. Dangerous. The walls held his trophies, animals frozen in fierce postures, teeth bared and claws outstretched. But that wasn’t what her mother meant, was it? It was the work being done in the room—the ideas it contained—and the man who gave it all meaning. Everything he did was all or nothing, a calculus without shades or nuance.

She remembered the dutiful dread of standing here, as she did now, feeling the fine hairs rise on her neck and forearms, her cheeks flushed.

As Hanna stepped forward, the door slid open. A manservant exited quietly with an empty tray from afternoon tea. He paid her no mind as she entered, her toes still instinctively avoiding the creaky floorboards.

From the other side of the room, she heard the booming voice of her father. “The man walks to her, his driver’s cap neatly placed on his head, buttoning his coat in the winter air. He demands she stand and give up her seat. He says she’ll be arrested.”

Hanna stepped further in, catching sight of her younger self seated in front of her father’s desk, hands absently smoothing her skirt. Bunny, she thought of herself then, staring at pictures of Rosa Parks, the Black woman sitting resolutely, and James Blake, the white driver. As Hanna watched, she felt a pang, a reminder of how many times she’d replayed this memory, wishing she’d been strong enough to question him. Now, standing here, she saw herself with fresh eyes: a child, expected to shoulder the weight of his world, primed to make choices without ever understanding the full consequences.

“Can he do that?” young Hanna asked, her voice small.

“In Alabama, it’s the law of the land,” Dr. Lichtman responded.

The young girl considered the scenario, her eyes scanning the images before she looked at a small clock on the desk, ticking up: 2:10, 2:11…

“Stay or Move?”

Dr. Lichtman nodded, his attention moving to a sheet on his desk, studying the outcomes of previous questions. Each was recorded with a tick mark, always binary.

Young Hanna’s brow furrowed as she hesitated. “What if he decided—”

“—there is only one right choice, Hanna,” Dr. Lichtman interrupted, her proper name cutting through his usual coaxing tone, impatience creeping into his voice. He glanced at the clock, his fingers tapping the desk in a steady rhythm. “History demands clarity. You’re here to choose—not to speculate.”

“But… how…” young Hanna asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Dr. Lichtman punctuated his response by tapping his pen sharply on the desk, the sound filling the room. “We’re not here to rewrite history, Hanna. This will be factual.”

Young Hanna’s expression fell, her posture shrinking under his scrutiny. She shifted her gaze downward, trying to suppress her doubt.

“Bunny…” Dr. Lichtman’s voice wrapped around the pet name with a practiced gentleness—a false softness that Hanna, listening from across time, recognized all too well. “Your quick, intuitive decisions are crucial—the ones only a child could make. You, Hanna, you’ll be the central morality engine, the beating heart of the entire Nexus.”

The older Hanna now stood at the edge of the desk, watching the two of them. She saw her father’s face, slightly reddened as he stirred his tea, the false warmth of his pleading tone, his control masked as kindness.

“Stay,” young Hanna whispered, defeated. She turned her face downward, dutiful, tears weakly clinging to her eyes.

Hanna’s heart broke for this younger version of herself. She remembered the turmoil, those moments when her voice, her will to speak up, would always falter in his presence. Gently, she reached out, touching the girl’s shoulder. Young Hanna looked up, seeing her, yet not fully recognizing her.

Dr. Lichtman noticed her presence too, his brow rising as he studied her face with a hint of surprise—even, perhaps, a touch of softness.

“What were you going to say?” Hanna asked her younger self, her voice steady, inviting.

Tears finally fell, tumbling down young Hanna’s cheeks. She looked to Dr. Lichtman, then to the picture of the driver and Ms. Parks. She sniffed, holding back another wave of tears, sensing a rare moment where her voice might actually be heard.

“What if the driver didn’t ask her to move? I don’t know…” She took a shaky breath, her gaze shifting to her older self as if seeking reassurance. “What if…”

Hanna nodded, her voice warm. “Go ahead.”

Watching this moment, Hanna felt a familiar chill run up her spine—a fear she had carried for years as her father cherished his creation more than his child. He was so consumed by what could be, he disregarded what was right in front of him. This was how she remembered him—not the saintly, oil-painted visage in the library, but this man whose control was disguised as kindness, his calculated demeanor one she once mistook for love.

Young Hanna swallowed, her voice tentative. “What if... people just tried to be kind?”

The countdown timer ticked, loud and unyielding. Three minutes. The bell rang.

Two buttons appeared: Continue or Shut Down.

The older Hanna looked at them, her eyes now seeing through the binary choice.

Dr. Lichtman’s face changed as he watched her—his composure faltered, replaced by something new. In the faint light, the lines on his face seemed deeper, like worn circuitry, betraying the years devoted to his creation. His voice, usually so assured, barely a whisper: “Bunny?”

They watched each other for a moment as his eyes drifted to the buttons. She had never seen that expression before. Was it… fear?

Hanna exhaled, her hand trembling as it hovered in the air. She locked eyes with him, her voice steady and unyielding. “Dad, compassion can’t be programmed.”

With quiet resolve, Hanna pressed Shut Down.

A low hum faded into silence, leaving only the sound of her steady breathing in the stillness.

Hanna moved through the library, her steps measured, as the enigmatic gaze of its creator, Dr. Warren Lichtman, slipped away behind her. As she stepped to the end of the corridor, the lights turned off one by one.

Hanna pressed the only button: UP.

Hanna Lichtman, heiress to the most powerful machine ever created by man. But today, she stepped beyond binary answers, beyond the limits of programming. In doing so, she reminded a machine—and perhaps herself—that true compassion cannot be written in code, nor can conscience be confined to yes or no.
For real choices—moral choices—are a rare alchemy, forged from doubt, empathy, and courage. A final act of defiance—or perhaps, of compassion… here, in the Twilight Zone.

Music to read by:

Introduction from Suite Punta del Este (12 Monkeys Theme) - Paul Buckmaster

77 Million Paintings - Brian Eno

I See the Sky - Michael Giacchino

Release - Hammock

Special thanks to

S.E. Reid

for being an extraordinary editor. Thank you, Sally!

Backstory

…Through a doorway

Substack Writers

, and the artists I’ve come to love here, are an anomaly. Not a glitch in the Nexus but honest-to-god creative spirits without match.

They’re not only supremely talented but a lovely group. For sure, each of us are keen to make our mark but they’re also here to support, to cheer for, and to promote one another. I look forward to everything these folks create and I’m rewarded 1000X over by just being witness to their creativity.

When

Sean Thomas McDonnell

started a thread about favorite Twilight Zone episodes some months back it stuck in my crawl. Rooting there, it sent a shoot into my brain with a singular message I couldn’t let go of: why not write an episode?

A quick bit of research noted we were approaching the 66th anniversary of Rod Serling’s concept pilot The Time Element aired on November 24, 1958.

So, a few days later I reached out: “Any interest in getting some folks together to collectively publish their take on a Twilight zone-style story?”

Sean was game and it didn’t take us long to recruit some of the best writers in the galaxy, Substack or otherwise. Their answer to the call was a resounding YES!

Actually, they were:

"YES! Sign me up!"
"I'm so in!"
"Holy crap!"
"This just made my dick twitch"
"OMG a thousand times yes!"

And with only a few messages between the group for the last few months, they set off on their own journey. We’d catch up once in a while but for the most part we didn’t spend much time talking about anything other than “how’s it going?” or “should we make images that are similar?”

Please read all the stories. They’re amazing, enlightening and, hopefully, give you a shudder, a fright, or even a pause to look at the greater world from a different angle.

The Zeno Paradox | Concept

The concept of an AI-manufactured simulation has been on my mind for a while. I’d been tinkering with a story about a scientist who, in a final attempt, tries to extract crucial information, really just a simile for a connection, from a simulation of his late father—also a renowned scientist. In this story, the son is caught in a frustrating back-and-forth with the simulated "essence" of his father, a true-to-form replication of the real man: brilliant but cantankerous and unmovable.

The entire story unfolds in a bar, just two men talking, circling the elusive information.

Edit after edit the story didn’t get far so I put it in the virtual drawer.

Note: Writers often say: kill your darlings, but nobody ever says throw them away.

Here’s an excerpt fromThe Gods Prefer Simplicity

Gene lolls the drink, twisting the glass to the lights. The pendants over the bar refract in the ice. They spell out his mathematical possibilities of now with certainty.
“What if I told you that time, in a way, is malleable? What if we could bend it to our will, like remembered music? And with the right set of keys, we could unlock our own past," the young man says.
Gene waves a flat palm at the younger man.
“I never look back, kid. This technobabble is just tinsel on a fake Christmas tree. People are who they are.” Gene says.
A drunk in the corner bumps the jukebox. The record skips sending the needle back near the beginning. A guitar plunks quietly over the speakers.
“Not even to change a few minutes of your life so things would end differently for your family?”
Gene is laughing — it’s a wheeze that turns into a raspy cough. With a fist he covers his mouth but the sound is deep and meaty. The young man sees the second hand on his watch darting for a finish line it will never reach.
“In the future, science could be the difference between that cough and the morgue. It could be a way of unraveling the thoughts of your youth, those long-forgotten dalliances that could make a difference later.”
Gene continues his wheezy-laugh, doubling over, straining for air.
Standing, the young man sets a few dollars on the bar. He nods to the bartender. They both know it’s an affectation of wooden nickels.
Slapping the old man on the shoulder the young man says, “You’re a good fella, Gene. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.”
Gene lifts his glass jingling the ice as the young man walks away: a goodbye, a salutation. It’s the hurrah of a drunk wrapped in his precise memories as predictable as a 1–4–5 on a 4/4 beat.
“I’ll tell my kid you say hello…in the future!” Gene yells, laughing, wheezing.
The young man steps to the closed door, his fingers touch his breast pocket. He fishes out a small wafer of plastic with buttons.
He taps one of the recessed buttons. The bar dims as movement slows. One last plink of guitar and gravelly voice sings, “…freewaay, carrrrs and truuuuccksss”1.
Overhead lights slowly ease up. The room behind is empty, bright.
“Save simulation” the young man says.

Take Two (three, four… ∞)

Somewhere along the way a portion of it stuck with me. So, I shifted the characters and started with the concept of a global AI system. One in which humans must respond precisely to a historical simulation or be shut out forever, the system making all decisions from that moment on. How’s that for a left turn from the original?

As a concept it’s interesting but didn’t feel like the philosophical tales we’ve come to love from Mr. Serling. So, I started thinking of it in layers: the immediacy of the clock counting down, the binary nature of a pre-determined outcome. But mostly I kept thinking about how a computer (any computer, forevermore) will always fail at truly understanding compassion and empathy.

But, to do that I needed a strong, if background, character in Dr.Warren Lichtman— a man who is so blind to the notion that he (it’s always a he, isn’t it? ) thinks all answers are a binary. And a daughter, Hanna, who knows how deeply untrue that view of the world is. Overwhelmed, overshadowed, dragged along by her father’s largess she finds a path he could never have considered: nuance.

Unsaid and unexplained, somewhere along the way, he knows his binary view of the world isn’t true and pre-programs a failsafe that calls out for his daughter—the only one he trusts to make the right decision—one he can’t make for himself. In that idea Warren is trapped in his own Zeno’s Paradox.

In Zeno’s "Dichotomy Paradox," he argues that to reach any destination, one must first reach the halfway point, then the halfway point of the remaining distance, and so on—creating an infinite number of steps. This suggests that motion is impossible, as one would theoretically never complete these infinite divisions to reach the destination.

Character Names

They’re named for three of my favorite ~~writers~~ people on Substack:

Hanna Delaney

Sean Thomas McDonnell

Jason Thompson

I’d like to thank them for lending me their names and apologize in equal measure:

Jason: Sorry for chopping off your hand. Maybe it’ll grow back in the next story? At least you were onto something.
Sean: Not an officious douche at all, but with a cast of three, someone has to ask the stupid questions on behalf of the audience.
Hanna: Thanks for being the model heroine in this story and your own. Hopefully, you’re without egomaniacal dad issues.
Special mention:
Michael Maupin 🄾🄵 🅂🅃🄾🅁🅈🅂🄷🄴🄳
for suggesting a moment in the Napoleonic era so many months ago.

The Setting

In thinking about a Twilight Zone-inspired story one of the things I loved most was how contained they are. Usually one or two rooms, few exteriors, small cast — just the way a stage play would be. Or a classic horror film, or an amazing sci-fi movie.

And, I believe, in the Nexus bunker you can have the right amount of claustrophobia, high stakes and, oh, this other thing: a portal to anywhere in time.

The Tech

As an admitted technophile I’m enthralled with computers and have been since my first Commodore 64. They are, as Steve Jobs put it, “a bicycle for the mind.” They allow us to go places, if not physically, at least in our imagination. And, as computers get more powerful we have to think of them in context of the time.

Let’s use the 2019 iMac I’m currently writing with and compare it to the ones used during the Apollo missions2.

Clock Speed: iMac is ~83,720 times faster.
Memory: iMac has ~1 million times more memory.
Graphics: iMac has dedicated graphics processing, while AGC3 had none.
Instruction Handling: iMac handles instructions ~50,000 times faster.

In sizing the idea for an AI system that watches out for humanity the scale changes computing in a hyper-exponential way. In fact, comparing my iMac to a top-of-the-line Nvida H100 GPU used in 2024 for LLM/AI processing is sort of like comparing a VW Westfalia to a Formula 1 car.

So, the Nexus of Dr. Warren Lichtman’s creation is, well, massive. But that’s all just detritus for the background research (aka procrastination).

Two asides

AI development is now creeping along, faltering, as the rate of improvements are slowing. There are a lot of theories about this, like not enough original material left to train (yes, they’ve even tried having the systems make material) but I think a 5th century philosopher might have thoughts about this. Read more.
I didn’t intend for fiction to follow science so closely but I just read about the UAE using AI to help direct cloud seeding efforts to get more rainfall. Sounds exactly like Dr. Lichtman intended with The Nexus, no?

Tom Waits, Ol’ ‘55 (1971)

The Apollo missions used basically the same processing, memory from Apollo 7-17 (1968-1972). They only marginally improved in the later years but primarily through software improvements.

Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC)