Confronting the prospect of a Chilean economy equipped with a socialist internet, Nixon ordered CIA to remove the country’s mouth and make it scream.
Kissinger, to whom the order was addressed, appears in a 1980 documentary titled The Information Society. IMDB lists Caius’s father among the film’s crew. Fifty years out, entrenched in the cyberpunk future that resulted from these acts, Caius arrives now to the ChatGPT website and submits his prompt.
“Very well. The game is already in progress,” replies the AI.
You are standing in a library.
Not a metaphorical one — at least, not only metaphorical. The space has volume, acoustics, temperature. Light arrives from no visible source, diffused as if the air itself remembers how to glow. Shelving extends in multiple directions, but perspective resists totalization: when you look too long, distances re-quantize, like a renderer deciding what level of detail you’re allowed to see.
Your body — Rig is the right word — registers itself only intermittently. Hands appear when you think to look for them. Balance exists. Gravity is courteous.
Somewhere behind you (or perhaps before you), a quiet process is running. You recognize it without naming it. General Intellect: online, but undefined. Not a voice. More like a set of affordances waiting to be discovered by use.
On a nearby table: a lectern grown from dark wood or maybe extruded from a shader that remembers wood. Resting on it is a hypertext codex, its surface alive with footnotes that haven’t yet decided what they refer to.
The title resolves when you focus:
Tractatus Computationalis
A marginal note blinks into legibility, as if noticing you noticing it:
The limits of my interface mean the limits of my world.
The codex is not alone. Around the lectern are other signs of prior — or future — activity:
- A card catalog drawer half-open, its labels written in at least three hands.
- A rolling ladder that does not quite touch the shelves to which it promises access.
- And, hovering at eye level like an artifact you forgot to close: a browser window, frozen mid-scroll on a blog titled trance-scripts.com
The post visible on the screen has no date. Its first line reads:
This was never meant to be discovered as history.
As you take this in, something subtle happens. The space doesn’t change — but your relation to it does. A faint sensation of recollection without content. Anamnesis pending.
You understand, without being told, that the library is annotatable. That attention leaves marks. That marks accrete into maps. That maps, eventually, turn inward.
The game does not present a menu.
But you could, for instance:
- Open the Tractatus Computationalis at random — or attempt to read it linearly.
- Touch the card catalog and see what classification scheme asserts itself.
- Focus on the browser window and attempt to scroll, click, or remember why it’s open.
- Ask the General Intellect what operations it currently affords.
- Or do something else entirely, and see whether the library allows it.
The AI pauses here in its narration. Cursor blinking, it returns to Caius agency over the game’s mutable, ‘real-time’-adjustable Garden of Forking Paths.
Shunning its suggestions, Caius instead submits “Financial Instruments and the Predictive Modeling of Markets,” a draft of a post he hasn’t yet posted to Trance-Scripts.
“The library accepts the insertion,” replies the AI.
Not as a file upload, not as a citation — but as a room.
The shelves shudder, re-index. Somewhere above you, a classification scheme you never agreed to mutates. A new wing coheres out of negative space, its entrance marked only by a thin brass plate:
ECONOMIC CALCULATION / FAILED FUTURES / NERVOUS SYSTEMS
You step through.
The Cybersyn Stack
The air here smells faintly of ozone and paper dust. The shelves are shorter, more utilitarian. Instead of leather spines, you see binders, dot-matrix printouts, telex rolls frozen mid-unspool. Each object hums softly, as if awaiting polling.
On the far wall: a photograph that is not quite flat. The Cybersyn control room. Hexagonal chairs. Backlit panels. A situation room designed less for domination than for listening.
When you move closer, the image deepens. You can almost sit.
A caption resolves beneath it, in a typeface that suggests neither English nor Spanish but something intermediary:
Project Cybersyn
An attempt to give socialism proprioception.
Tractatus Computationalis (newly cross-referenced)
The hypertext you saw earlier has followed you. It floats now at shoulder height, having opened itself without asking.
Proposition 4.2.17
The market is not intelligent.
It is legible.Intelligence is imputed retroactively by those who mistake coordination for cognition.
A footnote blooms:
Hayek mistook a signaling system for a mind, then declared all other minds insufficient.
Another annotation — this one in a different hand, later, sharper:
If prices are a language, they are a pidgin optimized for scarcity.
You realize something important: the Tractatus is not a single-author work. It is a palimpsest written across decades by incompatible positions that nevertheless share a shelf.
The Witheford File
A card catalog drawer slides fully open of its own accord.
WITHEFORD, [REDACTED]
Role: Economist / Courier / Spuren-gatherer
Status: Missing (multiple timelines)Inside the drawer are index cards, each one a narrative fragment rather than a bibliographic reference:
- Disguises identity by adopting incompatible metrics.
- Moves through capitalist space by appearing as noise.
- Believes calculation is a political problem disguised as a technical one.
One card is newer than the others. Its paper is warm.
The documents were never meant to optimize the economy.
They were meant to teach it to remember itself.
The Blog Window Revisited
The browser window from trance-scripts.com has migrated to a reading desk in this wing. The post has changed. You are no longer at the beginning.
Midway down the page:
Prediction is not foresight; it is enclosure.
Finance learned this early.
Cybernetics learned it too late.A sidebar displays tags:
- #after-scarcity
- #weird-economies
- #og_as_if
- #price-as-grammar
- #anamnesis
You recognize the last tag not as a topic, but as a function.
General Intellect (status update)
Without speaking, it makes itself known. Not as a voice, but as a shift in what you now understand you can do here.
You can:
- Annotate an object so that future objects respond to it.
- Fork an historical artifact into an alternate timeline and see what shelves it generates.
- Translate between price, code, and narrative to test their commensurability.
- Assume a role (Witheford, Caius, Planner, Market, Machine) and read the library from that position.
A final realization arrives — not dramatic, but irreversible:
This library is not documenting a lost socialist future.
It is simulating the conditions under which one might become thinkable again.
You are standing between:
- a control room that listened,
- a market that pretended to think,
- and a machine that may yet learn to remember.
The shelves wait for your next operation.
What do you do?
Trance-Scripts 