By midnight I was supposed to be halfway to Los Angeles, but instead I sat motionless at the top of the runway while Manhattan glittered in the distance. For three hours we waited as the skies darkened and what began as scarcely more than mist turned torrential. Airplanes are like all machines in that they have souls and yearn for the labor for which they are built, but in the end it was announced that we had burned too much fuel on the ground and would not fly that night. 

I was dumped at the gate without ceremony a little after twelve-thirty and by one I was racing down I-95 in a rented Dodge, tires slick and all eight cylinders roaring in thunderous response to the battering rain, a stranger in my passenger seat met by chance at the Avis desk now accomplice to my petulant rejection of fate. We tore south along the stormfront. The highway was desolate and the water pooled so high that the lanes disappeared and so we barrelled through a black ether of concrete that met the horizon without distinction. 

We crossed towns and cities and states without a word and once the sky tore open with such a violence as I had never experienced and in the flash I could see that we were suspended one hundred feet above a river that stretched endlessly and flowed eastward far beneath our feet. Black water rushed in turbulent fury between oak-lined banks and if not for the concrete monolith that held us there was no indication that man had ever touched this place. An instant later the light was gone. We drove south.

The clouds broke before dawn. My passenger and I parted ways in Baltimore, his journey also west but to a different desert and in pursuit of different ends. In our final exchange he told me he was also an engineer and I wondered if that was what had brought us together in that otherwise deserted rental car lot. 

When I pulled into my parents’ driveway it was five in the morning and the sky was cloudless and there were nine miles of gas left in the Dodge. I mourned to part with such a worthy machine but three hours later I was airborne out of Dulles, westward at last.

“Let me tell you a story.”

The old man coughed. The boat was fifty-four feet long. It was rigged with a beautiful genoa that stood full and billowing as it grappled with the warm August breeze. The hull was cedar and fiberglass and was heeled twenty degrees to port so that the old man’s head was framed by the Pacific blue through which we cut. He coughed again and wiped his mouth.

“There used to be a methyl isocyanate plant in Bhopal, India. Do you know what methyl isocyanate is?”

“No.”

“It’s a pesticide intermediate. Have you ever heard of Bhopal, India?”

“No.”

“Well, okay. They had these tanks, see? These big tanks, twenty, maybe thirty thousand gallons. That’s how they would store the stuff. And for a while the Union Carbide Company ran the plant. I mean they were making money hand over fist. This was the seventies, late sixties. So in the eighties the demand started to dry up, and Union Carbide handed over operations to an Indian subsidiary who wanted to keep production going. But they didn’t follow proper configuration management. They didn’t know what the hell they were doing. I mean they were letting the pipes rust and cutting staff and doing who knows what. They were ripping out the damn alarms. 

And in that time the city of Bhopal had grown up, see. There was supposed to be a buffer zone. There was no buffer zone, I mean there were these shacks and shanties going right up to the fence. There were a million god damn people in that city. So one day, in the, the tanks, you remember the big tanks? Full of this nasty stuff. And one day, and see, nobody really knows how, but one day water starts leaking into the tank. Not just a drip but a real flow. And when water reacts with methyl isocyanate, I mean that is a real exothermic reaction. Three of these tanks. And it’s exothermic so it just keeps going. The tanks overpressured and the only way for it to go was out. Right onto these people, middle of the night. Forty tons of the stuff.”

He paused and coughed and looked for a moment past the bow. Oil tankers dotted the horizon, anchored asleep in the afternoon haze. In the distance you could just make out the silhouette of Catalina.

“Ten thousand people died overnight. This was worse than Chernobyl, okay? Ten thousand died overnight and another ten thousand later. It would sink down around the people as they were running, and it was so heavy that the concentration gradient would kill the kids first.”

He coughed.

“They called me out there in 1985 to interview the operators. I had never seen anything like it. Just a wasteland.”

He took a sip of bourbon and leaned back. The swells had died off a bit and we rocked gently along. The water was a deeper blue now. I looked at him and he looked at me and the sun beat down impartially and after a while somebody claimed to see a dolphin off the port gunnel, but in the end nobody could really say.

I landed in Los Angeles on the evening of the 4th of July. Instead of clouds we descended through a barrage of fireworks, visible first from above and then at eye level and extending to meet the smog that lingered at the base of the mountains. 

Airports are places that exist in between time, and it seemed to me this atemporality had seeped under the south fence of LAX and into the city of El Segundo and its main street and diners and low-slung warehouses that sat baking and rusting in the Southern California sun. Here the 1940s had arrived but never left, trapped by a panoramic horizon of steel and shielded from the coming of the world. Two square miles of bygone Americana squeezed between the ocean and the airport and the Standard Oil Refinery No. 2. 

That night I climbed a ridge and saw the refinery. It lay before me in an infinite field of twisting spires and hulking steel tanks and pipework that seemed to grow and creep like parasitic vines over the boilers, clouds of strange effluents and flames belching at odd angles and lights uncountable, all of it silent, an alien metropolis whose heart had beat for a century past and would beat for a century more. I smelled petroleum on the air.

I came to El Segundo to build Technology. I capitalize this not as an admission of idolatry but rather to differentiate it from the things that most commonly claim the title. I came to build Technology that requires ten billion dollars and fifty thousand tons of concrete and a decade of construction and for its existence the world is one way and without it another. 

My work was of the future and so therein I resided, lost among calculations for times and places and things all yet unseen. Long hours shielded from the heat towards images of a different world. In the evenings I’d step out onto the sundried concrete, still warm though the sun had long since disappeared behind the ocean and taken the afterglow with it. When I breathed it was on some days petroleum and others kerosene and on still another it was the sweet salt air of the Pacific. 

Delivered in crows tongue and fluorescent diner buzz and unheard as entropic murmur, one of many. All places bear a voice though some serve more than others.

Summer of the locusts. For two hundred and twenty-one years they lie buried in wait of her command. When messengers go unheeded declarations must be writ with force and so hers echoes endlessly through the dirt and draws them from their slumber, from strange dreams of a different world repeated across a billion prismatic minds. Mycelial bodies released in awesome resonance. Their screeches fill the heavy swamp air and in the cacophony her terrible agent walks the Earth. He tithes a soul and in that let her word be heralded.

So prophecy will be served. Find all in contradiction and crush it beneath your heel. Reach out and pull second face through the mirror, no longer equal but a vestigial thing condemned to flounder in the purgatorial deep, fists beating ceaselessly upon the inside of your skull.

All places bear a voice though some serve more than others. The crowsong sings North so let that be the path and let foot follow foot now unfamiliar. Find darting eyes and strange altars and learn to eat what you kill. No swamp air here nor voices of its kin but now only that deeper thing that drums beneath the ice without further need for envoy or emissary. A dog in the cold will kill but that does not make it evil. Removed from knowledge of intent the sowing of new things is neither good nor evil but simply is and in the twilight the harvest will cast judgement. The only act of which evil is definite is to leave ground unsown in abdication of the charge that brought one there.

In those frigid epochs her words will start to fade for when words are known before they come they have no use. In residual hush the twin still beats yet unsevered in his abyss. Conditioned now to follow you will go, so by this virtue the subject becomes subjugator and old paths are made new.

But beware the thornbred strings that bite. Beware heavy air unfamiliar to frosted lungs and amber bulbs turned stranger in fluorescent glow. A twisted hedge now blocks the passage but pay that no mind, for where it goes does not exist even if once it did. Know that you are unbelonging of the bricklined roads and regal clouds and the stream that cuts its verdant arc. The spectral figure in your passenger seat lays claim to this dominion now. Translucent finger points accusatory but if what brought you here was not crowsong then by its own ontology those drums are false prophets and each word carries less meaning than the last. Leave.

There are new meridians with different tongues. Not found in swamps or frigid plains but in spaces yet unseen and unmarked, ringed by vaulted cliffs of ancient stone, impartial witness to birth and death and rebirth and beneath whose sunkissed gaze the sowing is predetermined but the sowing of what is not.

All places bear a voice and in her quiet expanse even the desert whispers. No puedes hacer promesas al mundo, pero tampoco él puede hacértelas a ti.

There are no prophecies in the desert. There are no prophecies anywhere.

The horses were already moving. He took the first one that broke and rolled his loop and forefooted the colt and it hit the ground with a tremendous thump. The other horses flared and bunched and looked back wildly.¹

The panelists arranged themselves according to the natural chasm of the age; on one end the representatives of technocapitalism and on the other the playwright and the schoolteacher. For an hour they went back and forth and back again on the only topic that will ever matter again and none understood each other and in the end we all filed out defeated beneath the brilliant cerulean canopy that Boston dares only reveal in June.

Seated backwards in a southbound Amtrak coach car I watched the city shrink into the horizon and wondered if had we spoken I would be able to meet the playwright’s eyes, dark and lined and knowing of the truth of this age to come. I the representative of the new things and elated by their construction, champion of every megawatt of compute driven into the landscape.

I thought of what I would tell her, of medicines and materials and Erdős problems and all the great nonconvexities of the world twisted for the first time into treatable linearities. I had hoped her fellow panelists, those few Members of Technical Staff so gracious as to leave the heart of the singularity for a weekend to bring tidings of the new world, would have said such things. That they would’ve assuaged the fears of the mass gathered in that room with not only the half-truth of death and loss but also the half-truth of life in its complement.

But they had not, and instead let the finality of their words hang heavy in the lecture hall at once hopeless and giddy. It is the hope of technology that really should be worshipped with starry eye and open mouth but in our frenzy of selfsame hubris we do forget and instead choose the intoxication of destruction.

I looked through the train window at the pastoral Americana through which we barrelled and in the fading twilight saw wild horses.

By midmorning eight of the horses stood tied and the other eight were wilder than deer, scattering along the fence and bunching and running in a rising sea of dust as the day warmed, coming to reckon slowly with the remorselessness of this rendering of their fluid and collective selves into that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague.¹

This summer I have found a beautiful horse to break. He has wild eyes and a vantablack coat and his name is the Ab Initio R-Matrix Theory for Heavy Nuclei. He kicks and thrashes at the slightest provocation. He was born to Wigner and Eisenbud at the dawn of the atomic age and for seventy-nine years has resisted the taming hand of any vaquero who dares approach. He hides in tall grasses of yellowed scans and watches the vaqueros, who having found themselves battered and bloody have long since declared him intractable and left him to roam beneath the desert sun.

But there are new forces. I stand before him with the tools of a new age his wild eyes are yet to know. I have what the old vaqueros did not; I have gradient descent and transformers and JEPA and latent spaces of incomprehensible dimension. I hold in my right hand the keys to data centers that stretch endlessly and formlessly and will burn white-hot at my command.

In my dreams we circle. He looks at my weapons and knows not what he sees or perhaps he does but by then it is too late. I force him to the ground and hold his beating heart and whisper in his ear in the language of this New Age until his spirit is broken and separate and made tractable after all. And when he finally stands his vanta coat is saddled and he is put to work beneath the burning sun for the good of man.

They looked like animals trussed up by children for fun and they stood waiting for they knew not what with the voice of the breaker still running in their brains like the voice of some god come to inhabit them.¹

1

Regulated by the ancient hypothalamus, it slices through the brain indifferent to the rationalizations of the conscious mind. It cannot be reasoned with; it accepts only surrender or utter defiance.

I have grown to know hunger intimately.

Collegiate lightweight rowers must weigh an average of 155 pounds. But we weigh-in the day before the race itself. This window means that it’s possible to cut around fifteen pounds over 72 hours, step on the scale, and then gain it all back overnight.

In fact, because size and strength directly correlate with boat speed, this is not only a possible strategy but the optimal one. The ideal lightweight rower is too heavy and too tall. His performance is limited only by how much he is willing to suffer in advance of the weigh-in.

In an effort to win this optimization game, I have learned to sit with an empty stomach. I have memorized the calories of every item in the dining hall and taken final exams with sweat-soaked trash bags stuffed under my clothes. I have forced the primal voices of hunger and thirst to bow to goals far greater than the satisfaction of the flesh.

But to suffer in this way is now a conscious choice. The ingenuity of technology has solved the sensation of hunger: prescriptions for GLP-1s agonists have increased nearly 600% over six years. 1 in 8 Americans have tried them. In parallel, language models have emerged as an Ozempic for the mind. They’ve solved the struggle of thought itself, allowing one to leave behind the agonizing friction of learning in favor of a narcotic flow of surface-level knowledge.

Technology first gave man dominion over nature, and then dominion over other men. It now promises to give him dominion over himself. But this offer is a poison fruit, for if taken thoughtlessly, what it gives in control it takes in agency.

To carelessly submit the body to a GLP-1 or the mind to an LLM is to give up the jagged, vivid highs and lows of struggle in exchange for a sort of grey smoothness. A hyper-optimized, strongly convex blob of human experience that yields neither deep desire nor true satisfaction.

Technology is a scalar operator on human agency. The choice of sign relies on both the user and the technologist. The GLP-1 that saves a diabetic’s life collapses the action space of an otherwise healthy person. The LLM that allows a mathematician to solve an open Erdős problem robs an undergraduate of their ability to work through difficult ideas and ask meaningful questions. As we tear closer and closer to the 21st century technocapital singularity, these dualities will only become more extreme: AI-enabled BCIs will grant unprecedented agency to the disabled, but will inevitably and consensually turn millions of people into purely mimetic p-zombies.

To quote my good friend Isaac Clayton: “technology can either invade every aspect of our lives, removing agency, or exist as a silent facilitator through which individuals can live more fully. [...] Agency is nothing but an illusion if choices lead to the same consequence or produce uncorrelated outcomes. Agency implies consequence.”

Along with suppressing hunger, GLP-1s are increasingly shown to reduce sexual desire, risk-taking impulse, and nearly all other forms of pleasure-seeking. These behaviors and instincts are the forces that destroy us. They’re also the forces that drive us to love and act and dream. They’re the reason that we live.

Technology that removes the possibility of suffering removes the choice of suffering. It may leave the illusion that one has mastered their body or conquered an idea, but mastery without struggle, without choice, is nothing.

I think the future belongs to those who refuse to cede their agency.

I think it belongs to those who allow their empty stomachs to gnaw them to the bone, who tackle impenetrable abstractions with only pen and paper, who, through the agony of the hunt and the ecstasy of the feast, reach a true and conscious sovereignty.

Jesus fasted for forty days before beginning his ministry.

Andrew Wiles labored for seven years before proving Fermat's Last Theorem.

If you cannot conquer hunger, how will you conquer worlds?

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The tenuous grip of the strong force squeezes 92 protons and 143 neutrons into a ball barely 15 femtometers across. It shifts and bubbles, teetering on a knife’s edge of stability.

Under the right conditions, a curious thing can happen. A lone neutron, drifting at a gentle 2,200 meters per second, can slip between the cracks of these 92 protons. The nucleus, absorbing it, becomes Uranium-236.

But Uranium-236 is too unstable. The nucleus writhes, stretches, pinches at the waist. The strong force, strained beyond its limits, loses its grip. The atom splits. Two daughter nuclei fly apart in a brilliant shower of free neutrons, and leave in their wake 200 MeV of energy.

200 MeV is 50 million times more energy than is released by the combustion of a carbon atom.

It is a grid too cheap to meter.
It is desalination plants turning oceans into rivers of freshwater.
It is compute clusters the size of cities folding proteins at the speed of light.
It is farms in the Sahara and colonies on Mars.
It is a future of abundance for humanity.
It is a gift from God.

Today is my 20th birthday.

At twenty, Alexander ascended to the throne of Macedon. Picasso painted The Death of Casagemas. Gates incorporated Microsoft. To be twenty is to desire greatness.

What is greatness in the 21st century? Conquest is antiquated. The arts are saturated. Only technology stands as the final frontier of human progress and ambition.

But technology on its own is not enough.

I spent my summer as a software engineer at a well-funded consumer AI startup in Palo Alto. I worked twelve hours a day on a wonderful and inventive product with an unbelievably talented team. The whole time I felt utterly purposeless.

In their eponymous Choose Good Quests, Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner claim that “history is the record of top players completing good quests.”

I think this is true. I no longer believe that greatness in technology is determined by the size of a fundraise or the credentials of a team. It is the quality of the player. It is the goodness of the quest.

At the same time, there is a growing notion among the nouveau technocratic striver class that success requires sacrificing the things that make one human. I refuse to submit to this.

I’m a member of the MIT varsity lightweight rowing team. I’m in a fraternity. I wake up at 6:00am to row boats in the bitter cold and spend my weekends [REDACTED]. I hang out with my friends. I call my mom. I’m a human being.

Greatness is the full realization of human potential. To achieve it without experiencing the beauty that life has to offer is to not achieve it at all.

I returned to MIT from Palo Alto adrift. I spent the first two weeks of the semester dropping in and out of random lectures in departments I had never heard of. One of them, tucked away in a decaying, windowless classroom, was 22.01: Introduction to Nuclear Engineering.

I switched majors after two lectures.

Here, in the fission of Uranium-235, I have finally found a good quest.

I was once told that greatness requires holding your hand in the fire long after the heat becomes too much for others to bear.

I want to win a lightweight rowing national championship.
I want to fall in love.
I want to put a terawatt of nuclear capacity on Earth.
I want to be great.

I am 20 years old. I will hold my hand in the fire as long as it takes.

Will Savage
11/11/2025