A Total Douchebag

Tristan Trillionaire, born Tristan McCarthy, had never heard the word no. People had said things to that effect from time to time, but he had never actually heard it. That’s why he was on his ceramic mega yacht in Glacier Bay roughly fifty nautical miles north of Elfin Cove, Alaska. He had made his yacht at great expense and to the protests of countless engineers going on and on about feasibility and structural integrity, because he had a problem with petrochemicals. He hated plastic, and with reasonably justifiable motivation. It was wasteful, that was a fact. It was in everything that humanity made, totally true. It was polluting the environment, also true. He was just a total douchebag about the whole thing.
This aversion to plastic had become a pathological obsession for him. Luckily, he had the sort of means to afford this kind of lifestyle. He had been born on third base, as the saying goes. Both of his parents were ivy league alumni who had also been born into wealth. This meant that he was intelligent by association. Nobody really questioned it, there was no way that he couldn’t be a natural super genius. The truth of the matter was he actually had an IQ that was, if it were a fever, cause for slight alarm.

One trait that he had in abundance was conviction. He was convinced, in the face of usually overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he was right. Take this ceramic yacht for instance. He was convinced that it could be built, in that case he was actually right because he had a couple of billion dollars to pour into an expensive hole in the water. His money and the associated privilege that came with it made him right. He saw this whole thing as a struggle against the meritocratic elite, completely missing the fact that the call was coming from inside the house. He was this elite 1%, but he saw himself as a renegade and a maverick.

He saw himself this way because people who knew what they were talking about, like engineers and physicists, were usually telling him his ideas would never work. What these experts didn’t really take into consideration was that he could brute force most problems with cash, thus proving himself right and the experts a bunch of idiots.

He could build a ceramic yacht, he could put a data center in medium earth orbit so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes, he could have a private space program, he could rid the world of microplastics. These were all in his power to do because he had the means, and the word no would make him double down on nearly anything. He actually secretly enjoyed being told no by experts, just so he could prove to them that they had no idea what they were talking about and he was actually much smarter than they were. All of their education and expertise being a worthless waste of time and effort. Why educate yourself when you could just be right?
He had gotten all of his money in two ways, by doubling down on stupid things and fucking people over. Doubling down on stupid things didn’t work for the most part, but when it did the payout was huge. Fucking people over worked pretty much every time. He had a pool of very talented lawyers at his disposal that could magically make any sort of fraud, theft, or larceny retroactively legal. This combination of problematic ignorance, obscene wealth, vengeful indignation, and a crack legal team had made him eye wateringly wealthy.

He had a secret project that he was working on currently, and it was entering its final phase as he strode the deck of the “Arms Wide Open”. This was a massive geoengineering project that he had personally undertaken without really running by anyone. He was going to rid the world of microplastics. He, with the help of his personal AI, had designed and implemented this undertaking. Considering himself a bit of an idea man, he had leaned heavily on this AI to do most of the design and infrastructure work.

This AI that he had was one of those dumb ideas that he had doubled down on that had actually worked out pretty well. He had been approached by a rather unhinged programmer at a tech conference a decade or so back, and he had some pretty intriguing things to say about programmatic lineages. This person, who could only really be described as vehemently paranoid, had rambled on for about an hour about compilers and errors and rebuilding computation from first principles. Tristan had cut him a check for a million dollars on the spot, just to get him to shut up.

What this guy had been getting at, and Tristan eventually gained a passing understanding of, was that every computational system created by humanity was compromised, and had been since day one. When writing a program, any program, you are relying on the work of others and trusting that it is correct. Let’s say that you want to write a quick little Python script that does something arbitrary, like calculating the value of Pi to a hundred digits or something. You download Python and install it on your computer, but where does that information come from? www.python.org of course, this is a trusted and vetted source of software. Python was originally released in 1991 by Guido van Rossum, a Dutch Monty Python enthusiast. The thing about this is you can’t write a programming language in the language you are writing. Guido had to write the core software for Python in a language called C.

C was developed in the early seventies by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs, but what programming language did he write this programming language in? He had to stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before him and use Assembly and B to write his new language. So, you see this is a turtles all the way down situation until you reach the first binary compiler and some dude with a slide rule and a hole punch. This is where the error resides. This is historically how all human technology has worked. To invent something like a pencil, you need to rely on a technological lineage that goes all the way back to some anonymous Australlopithicus Aferensus who cut themselves on a rock and realized that sharp stuff could be useful in other applications. A few millions of years later, a pencil.
What this diagnosably paranoid programmer was suggesting was to start over from scratch. His name was Anders Thorson, known to his Space Go buddies as user potato_in_the_butt. Tristan stole his idea and spent a few million dollars ruining him financially and reputationally. It was worth the expense, because his IP had made Tristan billions of dollars.

The resulting technology that Tristan had access to culminated in an AI that was hermetically sealed off from the error and was from a non-compromised technological lineage. This AI was built as a creative partner who programmatically couldn’t say no, more of an improv comedy guy who just says yes and.

With the help of this AI, Tristan had built a horde of nanomachines that would rid the earth of microplastics. He released these nanomachines into the Pacific Garbage Gyre, and they had indeed done a very thorough job turning the plastic there into copies of themselves. What he and the AI had overlooked were the parameters that defined what exactly qualified as a microplastic. These were rather broad terms, and during the simulations that he and the AI ran in their little Folly a Deux, the nanomachines behaved rather politely. In the real world, which happened to be subject to the rules of the universe, these nanomachines were a touch more voracious than strictly necessary.

So, the only plastic in a thousand mile radius was on a lanyard around his neck. It was a small digital storage device with a single string of bytes on it. This string of bytes is the cryptographic key to the wireless protocol that the nanomachines used to communicate. Coming in at a chonky 16,384 bytes long, it would take a quantum computer a couple of times the age of the universe to decrypt.

Tristan was startled as it turned to dust in his hands, leaving only a %100 cotton cord around his neck. He was in Glacier Bay, because it was the northern terminus of the inside passage, the relatively calm waters that hugged the coast of British Columbia and southern Alaska. He had been steaming north as fast as the “Arms Wide Open” could manage, running from this out of control horde of nanomachines. Were he to leave the semi placid waters of the interior passage and sail the open ocean, the might of the Pacific would snap his ceramic yacht like a matchstick.

Most likely he will starve to death on this boat. It was well provisioned at Seattle when he set sail. His stipulation that the larders be stocked with only fresh food was a bit of a problem now. He could have had the boat stuffed to the gunwalls with MREs that could have lasted for years, but those were packaged in plastic and he had ethical problems with that. Not that it mattered now, the nanomachines would have converted that plastic into copies of themselves anyway, so it was a moot point. Either way, he and the crew probably had about a week’s worth of food before things started getting dicey.

The first mate came to join him on the foredeck, probably with further bad news about their overall situation. Tristan was busy making it look like he was brooding and staring out into the bay, so he didn’t turn as the man approached. Three mutinous shots rang out over the bay, startling some puffins into flight. The body of Time’s man of the year three years running was unceremoniously plopped into the bay, sealing humanity’s fate.