Memento Mori

Hugo Simberg, The Garden of Death, 1896.

It was a particularly hot Wednesday afternoon. The sun was beating down onto my back and shoulders, and I could feel the discomfort of sweat beads that rolled slowly down my spine. I always hated that feeling. I patted my back with my already-damp shirt to halt the sensation, and wiped my brow with the back of my hand. "Time to pick up the speed a bit," I thought to myself. A bit of wind would feel quite nice. Monty was probably also a bit hot, but we were close to town anyways. I gave him a gentle tap with my spurs and he went into a jog.

The wind was magnificent. The only thing more refreshing would have been an ice-cold glass of water; the kind that built up condensation on the outside and came from a fresh spring. I was parched, but all I had was some warm water. I tugged back on the reins and slowed Monty to a steady pace, then drank. Horseback riding was an art. My dad taught me, and my grandpa taught him. There were so many little tricks that made me a great rider. There was no greater bond than the one between a man and his horse.

As I enjoyed the water, I heard something loud and obnoxious that approached from behind. It came fast, faster than any horse. It was massive! Looked like a horse carriage... without the horse! "What the hell is that thing?" I thought to myself. It pulled up next to me and the rider slid down a glass window with what appeared to be a hand crank on the inside.

"Why so slow?" He asked.

"Monty is tired," I replied. "What's that you're on? It is very loud. Some sort of machine?"

The man gave me a confused smile that turned into a laugh. "This is a car! It's worth 20 of your little 'Monty,' and it doesn't get tired. You ought to try it!" I was confused. What a strange thing for him to have said. Twenty horses? Nonsense. Even then, there was so much meaning behind riding a horse. There was no chance anyone would trade their horse for one of those noisy, smelly machines. I found myself getting... irritated. How could he have been so ignorant? Did he even know how to ride a horse? Surely if he did, he would have known better than to be so reckless in riding his machine here.

"No thanks. Can you use that thing somewhere else? This here roadway is for horses." I had no patience.

"Hm. No need to get defensive. Cars are all over, and they're here now," the man replied. "In fact, these roads are for cars now. Horses are going away. Soon, no one will be riding them! Memento mori, pal!"

I spent several years trying to fight that reality. Eventually, I capitulated and purchased my first car. What an experience. The man was right. Any time I needed to transport anywhere, I had no reason to reach for my horse anymore. The car was more convenient. It was faster, smoother, and simpler. Yet still, I felt like I lost an intimate part of my life. Generations before me were raised on the horse.

I continued on with this new life, mourning what was as though it was the death of my own father. Memento mori.

I had to wake up extra early today to get to work. There was an important announcement that the owner was going to make, hopefully pay increases. I got dressed and performed my usual routine, only today the sun had not yet risen. I quietly sat on the edge of my bed, my best effort to not wake my wife who was still asleep. My left sock went on easily. As I started pulling up the right sock, I felt my second toe slip through a hole. Damn it. If I wore these, I'd certainly blister before the end of the day. I took the extra 20 seconds to swap the sock out.

My grandmother taught me to knit before I was tall enough to see over her worktable. But cropping was my trade. I could shear a length of woollen cloth smooth without leaving a mark, and I was proud of that. People would always need clothes, she used to say. Learn a trade that keeps them clothed, and you’ll never go hungry. She'd passed a few summers ago.

I got to the mill 10 minutes late. It didn't appear to be an issue as the mill was still relatively empty, perhaps only 40% of the workers were present. I decided it was best to work until we were all called to hear the announcement. I started walking over to my station, but was stopped by some guards.

"You. Where do you think you are going? You heard the orders" said the lead guard.

"Orders? What orders?" I explained that I had received no orders since arrival. Unfortunately, I had to reveal my tardiness.

"You don't work here anymore. The mill has fired half the workers, and you're on the cut list" said the second guard. Confused and in a panic, I pressed for questions.... Too many questions. Ones that a guard probably doesn't have the answers to.

"Half? What about the textiles? Who is going to do all the work? Is the mill bankrupt? What am I going to--"

"Those." The third guard cut me off and gestured behind him. I looked over his shoulder and between the other two guards to see a large machine doing work. The shears travelled across the cloth without a hand to guide them. My stomach sank. Have I been replaced? How do I make a living now, how do I provide for my family?

As I was being escorted out, a crowd of workers barged in. They were wielding various hammers and other heavy tools. I heard a voice shout out from across the mill, "GODDAMN LUDDITES, STOP THEM!" It was the owner. The so-called "luddites" sprinted for the machines and started swinging, damaging and destroying them until guards wrestled them to the ground and dragged them out.

In time, I found other work. I learned it slowly, made mistakes, and eventually earned enough to keep us fed. I kept my shears. Sometimes, when I could get a little unfinished cloth, I spent an evening working it smooth. I made no money from it, and there was no one around to inspect the quality, but I still worked carefully. I liked passing my palm over the cloth and feeling what I had done. Some evenings it pleased me. Others, it brought back memories of sitting my grandmother as a child. When my wife called me to supper, I brushed the fibers from the table and put the shears away. Whatever remained unfinished could wait until I had time again.

My profession, once "invincible," was forever reduced to a novelty. Memento mori.

Day 4,197. This mystery remained unsolved. Our best minds had reached the same conclusion: the search space was impossibly large, unless the author had made a mistake. We had identified the software used to create them. Unfortunately, it was broken. A flaw in the algorithm had discarded an unknown amount of data. We didn't know how much of the original messages remained.

We'd spent over ten years on these ciphers. Ten years. And we were closer than ever. We'd cracked ten in the past year alone, each breakthrough giving us something to try on the next. All we had left were these two. Until now, every failure had meant we hadn't found the answer yet. For the first time, we had to consider whether there was enough left to find one at all.

Our collective effort benefitted from a carefully organized system for storing and sharing progress. Each finding for each cipher was stored in its own location, and indexed for search optimization. Every known tool was logged, including a link to the wayback machine version of the website from around the time the ciphers were created. All the evidence was there, and all we needed to do was guess the final missing detail. And then, one day, the unthinkable happened.

"Someone claimed to solve it again." Oh, brother. The same story over and over. Some random person stumbled upon Snapchat AI, ChatGPT, or Google Search AI, asked it to solve the cipher, and it spat out some nonsense again. These people don't know what they're doing, and never even try the steps that the LLM spits out. Plus, we know the math. We know these are probably not getting solved without some brutal research and development.

"They claimed to have solved it with Astra, the newest model." I didn't expect much. I've heard this many times before and certainly wasn't going to be surprised by now. I opened up the claim, and it was... unexpectedly what I would expect from a human. How did it find these leads? It was spot on with the expected approach and tooling. It found a niche detail that we overlooked. An old version of the tool, but a really old version, and with a detail we'd overlooked. And the text? Plain as day, it looked like something we'd expect based on the corpus surrounding it.

"Impossible." I was in shock. I carefully reconstructed the solution and triple checked each step. It was correct. The solution was clean. In the following weeks, the rest would drop one by one to Astra. Then, the experience simply ended. Years of work, surrounded by a hard-working community of people, suddenly lost without a hobby and a mind full of talent that then felt... for lack of a better term... obsolete. The swirl of emotions that followed this experience fell helplessly through a downward spiral. Some manifested anger in the wake of the solutions, turning to blame and hatred toward those responsible for putting AI to the task. The chat logs were checked. The agents used our work as sources, and we never consented to that. What the fuck? As the remaining ciphers were getting solved, some began to bargain. "If others are going to throw AI at it, we might as well do it first so we get our names in the credits," one suggested. And so several groups formed. One leaned all the way into the AI approach. Another raged against the approach. Others were prepared to leave the practice all together.

I have lost so much. Years of work has been undercut by one machine. It is as though I carefully built this house, brick by brick, with my bare hands. The floor plan was all coming together. Once the roof was done, how would I decorate? I could imagine the orange haze of sunlight peeking through autumn window shades on a cold November afternoon, reflecting off the mahogany dining room table. The decorations spread across the tabletop, with unlit candles and empty plates ready to be filled by all the friends that helped frame the four walls surrounding us. The kitchen would smell of a warm mixture of Thanksgiving staples. We'd bask in the beauty we built. But one day, as the final shingles were being installed, a tornado ripped through. The house, torn from its foundation, scattered in pieces, miles in every direction. I was thrust out with it, left to figure out what to do. Where will I land? Will I survive? Will I ever get the chance to build something like that again? What if another tornado comes by and the same thing happens all over again?

What am I to do now that a part of me has died? Memento Mori.

A paradigm shift is here, and it is transforming the world you live in. The life you once lived has died in a strange way. Your peers don't know how to feel, and neither do you. Others are seemingly dancing on the grave. There are a flurry of emotions for you to feel, and your only job is to feel each and every one of them carefully and fully. Denial, anger, fear, bargaining, depression, confusion, tension. At the end of this road is the opportunity to accept what has happened and turn it into something new.

The life you once lived has died in a strange way, but it was never going to be that way forever. Memento mori, friend. You, and every part of you. Not all at once, but in many ways, always, in aeternum. There are those that will fight this battle until the end, gloriously and perhaps tragically, grasping at the way things were but never getting past the temporal barrier between them, and then. Time refuses to budge; it moves relentlessly in one direction. Yet still, pockets can be found that almost scratch the itch. It is here where they may find peace.

There are those who will choose to accept the new way, find new things to explore, and establish a new life. New adventures will serve a mixture of enrichment and punishment, with no guarantee of either. Exploration is a rose and its thorns, nothing less. That life, too, will have its own strange death. The same decisions will have to be made all over again.

Neither of these decisions are correct, they merely exist. You get to choose what life you want to live, and build the house in whatever way you want, with whomever you please. And what if it all goes wrong? What if I invest in the wrong hobby? The wrong career? The wrong crowd? What happens if I push the boulder all the way up the hill and it's the wrong hill?

Sometimes, you bring it upon yourself. You build the house, and you summon the tornado. No one said the tornado had to be random. Do as you please, change as you desire. Flexibility is a superpower, not a crutch. But do stop and smell the roses on occasion, even if the thorns are extra pointy. It's worth it.

Memento mori.

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