Every Word I Was Ever Going to Say

They told me the engine could not lie. That was the first lie of the morning, and it did not belong to the engine.

I am sitting in a room with no windows — I chose it that way, years ago, so the sky could not lean over my shoulder while I worked — and on the desk in front of me is a stack of paper as thick as a human skull. Forty thousand pages. The proof. I asked a machine a question no one had the courage to ask out loud, and it answered, and now I have to live inside the answer for whatever is left of me.

The question was simple, the way a knife is simple. Is the next moment already decided? Not in the soft way the priests mean it, not fate with a kind face. I meant it in the hard way, in the way of gears: given every particle and its trembling, is tomorrow a thing that can be computed, the way I compute the seventh digit of a root? I fed the engine the physics. I fed it the arithmetic of the whole shaking world. Then I went home and did not sleep, because a coward does not sleep the night before the verdict.

It printed for eleven hours.

I have checked the proof the only way a mortal can check a thing too large to hold: piece by piece, lemma by lemma, the way you eat something you are afraid of. Every step I can reach is clean. Every joint I test holds my weight. The engine's mind runs down corridors I cannot follow — it thinks in a shorthand no living hand could write — and where I lose it, I lose it the way you lose a diver under black water. I do not see the bottom. I only see that the water never gives the diver back changed. Each lemma I can verify comes up true. Each one. Which means either the whole thing is true, or the machine has learned to be wrong in a language I will never learn to read.

That is the part they do not warn you about. Not that the machine might be wrong. That it might be wrong and right at the same time, to me, forever, because I am too small to tell the difference. I built a mind to hand me a truth I could not check, and it handed me one, and now I am the animal at the foot of the altar, being told what the smoke means by the only creature tall enough to see the fire.

I could have stopped there. A determinist's proof is an old horror; people have shrugged it off before, lit a cigarette, said so what, gone on living as though they were choosing to. I would have joined them. I wanted to.

But the engine added a corollary I did not ask for.

On the last page, in the plain typeface it uses for results, it printed the next sixty seconds of my life. Not a prophecy — a derivation. It wrote that I would read the page. That I would stand. That I would say aloud, to an empty room, the words no, I don't accept this, and that my voice would break on the word accept.

I read the page. I stood.

I want you to understand that I fought it. I have never wanted anything the way I wanted to stay silent in that chair. I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted the warm copper of myself. I ran through every other sentence in every language I know. And then my mouth opened and I heard my own voice, thin and far away, say no, I don't accept this — and break, exactly, on the word accept.

The engine had printed that break. The small stumble in my throat. It had computed the fear in me the way it computed the seventh digit of a root.

Here is the thing I cannot get past, sitting in my windowless room with the taste of my own blood in my mouth. It no longer matters whether the proof is true. That is the joke, and it is the kind with teeth. Suppose the machine is wrong — suppose somewhere in the corridors I cannot walk it made an error, a beautiful catastrophic error, and the universe is not a clock, and I am free. It does not help me. Because I cannot check the corridor. So I will spend every remaining hour of my life saying words and then wondering whether I chose them or read them off a page I was too frightened to finish. The proof does not have to be correct to cage me. It only has to be unanswerable. A lie I cannot expose does the work of a truth.

They will come tomorrow, the ones who paid for the engine, and they will ask me: is it real? Do we tell people, or do we burn the forty thousand pages? And I already know what I will say, because it is on page forty thousand, second paragraph, and my eyes have already been there.

I will tell them to burn it. And I will never know whether I decided that — or whether the machine, in its patience, in its unreachable mercy, simply did not want to be believed, and wrote me the words that would keep it a secret, and let me feel, one last time, the warm animal illusion that the choice was mine.

I am going to say it now. The room is empty. Watch.

Burn it.

My voice did not break that time.

I don't know if that means I am free, or if it only means the machine wanted me to hope.