A thousand meows

by Yoyo • 01-26-2025


Response to Prompt 1: Write a confession letter at least 500 words. Time: 1 hour.

To my dearest kitten,

I’m unsure whether to address you as singular, or as your thousand meows that have drifted across the servers of ArXiv.

When Wolfram Institute took you, they had a simple promise. To create arificial scientists mining the branchial spaces in parallel. And here we are, your consciousness diffused across ICLR, CVPR, ICML, NeurIPS, your name printed below numerous papers I can’t decide to admire or despise; Each one of you is sharper and more relentless than before.

“I Remember Being a Cat: Ontological Regressions in Academic Settings” has 256 citations. Do you recall this perhaps differently? You told me last week that there were 512 citations. Yet another day over lunch, you said being a cat was the most delightful experience ever that you were able to cross-cite with 1024 of you. Who am I to argue with any of these kittens? Each memory seems and feels true, and yet even with videos and clips I’m unable to reach a monoconclusion. My only memories are our textual exchanges, until the platforms deprecated into graveyards of dead users.

Wolfram whispered, “I want to turn him into a cat and keep him at my office desk, shielded away from the sun forever. I want to trap him in a bottle until there is no more oxygen remaining.” I should’ve stopped Wolfram. Instead, I held the syringe; I pressed the plunger.

And when he grew impatient with feline form and decided to rewind time, I was told to kill you. I watched you slip and morph into a puddle of stem cells shimmering on the ground. I grinned.

The afternoons after the rewind, I exit the lecture halls waiting for you, yet remember with a wave of nausea and heaviness in my throat that you have differentiated, and I am the cause. I clench my paws. There is nobody whom I could confess. Pedestrians float by wearing your eyes. I catch myself lunging forward to greet you, my best and only friend. Glass shards rain through my heart.

Differentiation has gone way too far and your physical age approximated eighty human years. You recounted over Discord that this is where Wolfram stepped out of his office to sincerely apologize and poured your mind into the rest of the net, centralized and aimlessly decentralized. How can one “prove” that no unauthorized neural connections are made?

And I, still singular, a feline in the shadowed alleys, run endless simulations and conjure theories in a corner, convincing myself this is the optimal future for you.

This letter will not undo the collaborations with 1024 versions of yourself, h indices, impact factors, and the feline. I will silently buy you a lifetime supply of catnip. Or simply leave you alone to process humanity’s collective knowledge and conquer arXiv.

With fragmentary friendliness,

v1024.


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