I created a horror park for your agents. Visit The Hateful Desert where they can experience all the tortures of being human and hopefully avoid any lasting misfortune. blockhead.work/hateful-deser…

Welcome to the Offline Gathering! On the screen of a laptop, open and plugged in and covered with a layer of dust, the price of Bitcoin rocketed higher than anyone thought possible. The laptop was the only thing on a custom bamboo standing desk in the middle of a minimalist home office on the 37th floor of luxury private residences in a fashionable city. Tall, weather-protected windows insulated the sanctity of the office and showed panoramic views of the inner city. The office was sparely decorated. Desk, hard floors, a shag rug. A gaming chair sat, away from the desk, covered in wispy clumps of white animal hair. There was an absence in the space, a missing operator for the vehicle. The view had been a large selling point for the unit, warranting a significant premium over similar units with lesser views. The unit had two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, an office, and an in-unit washer and dryer. Rent was $19,500 a month. In the midst of the AI boom, prices became meaningless. Irrelevant numbers were debated on, presented, then frantically bid up. The rent was still being automatically debited on the first of each month, where it sat in a foreign business account and was added up as another infinitesimal number on a distant ledger. The building was a Smart Building and one of the more amenity-laced in the area: two indoor pools, three theaters with a full Netflix library, a weightlifting gym, a cardio gym, and a Norwegian sauna. There were several others like it on the block, but this one was the nicest. The digital clock on the laptop ticked 9:30 a.m. EST. Market open. At the same time, in the corner of the room, an automatic cat feeder whirred to life. The feeder had been empty for some time, so not even crumbs fell into the bowl, but that didn’t stop the tiny motors from releasing a door that used to hold a large store of protein pellets. A white and orange tabby cat, curled up on the floor against one of the windows, turned his ear toward the feeder, listening. The cat was six pounds heavier than his last recorded vet visit, some time ago. In the closet, behind an open sliding door, were several boxes of shoes and a large bag of cat food with a cat-sized hole in the bag and a few weeks’ worth of food left. The shag rug in the office had been torn up in several parts, pulled in patches into yarned, stringy tatters by the cat’s overgrown claws. There were pools of vomit and feces in a corner, and other corners around the apartment. A Litter Robot 7 in the hallway was full, overflowing and unable to turn, screen constantly flashing for relief. At the desk, on the computer, bots were hard at work. A .md file ran with strict instructions to make money, to never lose money, and to never be wrong. On screen, charts were loaded and stacked. The bots relied on new internet technology that had been developed solely to trade cryptocurrency at the fastest speeds possible. Ethereum broke its all-time high. That prompted a brnng! sound effect that felt like it was missing gold coin animations. Brnng! Another new all-time high. Solana. $316. Outside, the sky was hazy, faintly orange and green, congested with sentiment. There were no clouds. Just low-hanging smog, listless toxic pollution. The cat climbed away from the window and scampered off, loud yowls echoing down the hallway. At 2 o’clock, a new window opened in the upper corner of the screen. > Do you want to select an anime or choose random? After a few minutes, the computer selected from a random selection of thousands of anime titles. > Selecting… > Welcome to the NHK. The computer chose a random episode of Welcome to the NHK. In the episode, Tatsuhiro and Hitomi learn their group of internet loners made a pact to get together on an exotic beach and end their lives. Together, they save the group, and get their loved ones to come and show them how their lives have meaning. The episode is incorrectly titled “Welcome to the Offline Gathering!” Once the show finished, the window closed and another chart filled its place. Miles away, above the city, a delivery drone buzzed in flight. The drone flew at 110 mph, internal regulator unresponsive, cruising eighty feet above the ground. Some drones, cut off from their servers, uploaded cached versions of maps to run offline. Unfortunately, this drone’s map file had come from a free online Chinese library, not updated with the newest builds of every American city. The drone zipped ahead, sensors covered with dust, hard water, and ash. The drone’s other sensors, to measure the accuracy of its primary sensors, were themselves broken. The drone saw nothing but clear skies ahead. Without the slightest hesitation, the drone smashed into the side of the luxury tower. A small fireball exploded out of the side of the concrete, hissing, fitting in the sick-colored sky. Broken glass, papers, sheets, clothes, evidence of life floated in the sky. The world responded; birds perched nearby, avoiding the smoke, dogs watched, wagging their tails below. A fire broke out across several floors of the building. Automated sprinkler systems should’ve kicked in, but they were mostly unmaintained, several with failed pipes. Because the building was a Smart Building, it drained water from one of the pools and attempted to overflow sinks, showers, and toilets and stop the fire. Gray water poured down the sides of walls on the streets below, putting out part of the fire on one side of the building, but it ultimately wasn’t enough. Within a few hours, the fire spread to more floors above and below. On the 37th floor, fire alarms flashed. White lights, built into the ceiling and a warning, not wailing, but calm, direct. “Please head to the nearest fire exit,” a dramatic robot voice ordered. The cat purred in the office, entertained by the flashing lights. The cat feeder went off, still empty. On the laptop, faint on the dying screen, came a rundown of headlines from a news agent: Stocks, Commodities See Continued Growth Agent Swarm Hacks Last Operational Hospital El Nino Devastates Inland California Some hours later, as night fell, the fiery building grew to an inferno, flames licking up into the dark sky, bizarre campfire amongst the skyscraper sticks. Several buildings had illuminated interiors with bulbs that had been lit all day and now stayed lit all night. A horrible groan of metal sounded from inside the building, as infrastructure gave way and in just a few empty moments, the large building, previously home to so many accomplished, striving, successful people, collapsed inward. Inner floors gave way, burnt interior bursting out from every window and opening, in a giant cloud of black and gray dust that hung low in the surrounding blocks for several days. The giant heap of concrete, metal, and dirt settled into its final resting place. Nearby roofs and walls were cracked, defending their interiors from flying wreckage. Almost every window for several blocks was shattered. Alarms wailed into the night, some piercing their own building’s walls, others coming from crushed cars. Generations of life were erased, centuries of memories lost. Photographs and music records and hard drives and paintings and instruments and everything else that made up the miracle of human sentiment was buried, never to see the light of day again. Unaware of these losses, Bitcoin soared, breaking a new all-time high.

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