Unhappy Valley

It is not good politics to deal with men. They are very stupid.

Photo by Mario Álvarez on Unsplash

“—But that’s the whole point.”

“I agree. But it might not be possible to build a machine that would do all the work, while leaving most of the world’s information behind. We’ve tried it — in high school, of course. We made a bunch of good prototypes, but they weren’t ever complete. I don’t know if we’d be able to handle them. We have tools, but there are always things that just seem to be too heavy to let a truck carry them. In this business, they have to be weighing and balancing. I’m not sure I want to bet against this. There are people who want to give us the advantage.”

“Sure, sure,” the President said with a grin. “What do you suppose they say in the States? Say they can come up here and drop some bombs? What about putting a bomb in our city? Or putting a bomb on every hill and shrub? In a few minutes someone there’ll say, it’ll ruin this whole valley.”

“I don’t know,” Jack admitted. “Maybe something like that. But we can’t afford to send an atom bomb. It would destroy most of the other world peace, I think.”

“I know all that. We couldn’t afford to have a bomb any other way. I don’t know the politics in Washington. I don’t know who’s in power here.”

“Well, that’s a different story. Jack, have you gotten all the way to where you were when that bomb went off? Was it in a building, or inside a building? Where? How?”

“Not inside a structure at all. It wasn’t in a building. It was outside an outside. It wasn’t in a structure at all. All I do know is that everyone in Washington is talking about taking a sledgehammer across the mountain to Washington and digging an atom bomb that can be remotely detonating.”

“Sure, let’s get busy and go find the damned atom bombs. We’ll let them go.”

“They’ll not be going anywhere in this country, not as far as I know. Nobody knows where they are.”

“I haven’t seen a thing of the sort. Nobody lives here, nobody knows where they are, except the scientists, and I’ve noticed that the scientists think the weather worsens more than weather. It’s not quite true, but here on this ranch-”

Jack said nothing. It was quiet after dinner today. The conversation went largely with discussion of politics, but few men discussed any serious subject.

“Why,” Jack asked suddenly, “does this valley keep getting smaller?”

“The good Lord will be able to return,” the Speaker answered. “But, as His wisdom has told me, even as long as men have small hope to win through the evil will of this valley, He can bestow His power where He can. When there is hope none can stop Him, as He did, the valley will be quiet. This is a special situation, His Majesty, because He also can deal with men. It is not good politics to deal with men. They are very stupid. What has happened today is perfectly natural.”

“But I don’t like this valley at all,” Jack said.

“I would not want you to take the job. I would not want you to take it, ever. I have done all I can here.”

“But it won’t be easy.”

“In my time only a little of the valley was open. It opens up a vast ocean to the west and east of us. The mountains are far higher up there. They threaten us from the north but it will pass. Soon the valley will be here, hundreds of miles high. We will be meeting the aliens in the air very soon. All of us, living and dead, will be safe from them. What I am worried about, this valley-it opens me up to you, of course-can you take us there?”

“No. I can’t take you.”

“But you asked me not to,” the Speaker said.

After dinner the Speaker and Jack slept.

[END TRANSMISSION]


Editor’s Notes

All I can say is “Wow…“. This AI might be disturbed.

Prompt

There was no prompt, this came out of samples output during my “fiction_novels” model training.

Edits

I removed some random encoding characters, a random variable name, and the last couple sentences, since they wandered off topic, and ended abruptly.

GPT-2 Settings
# default sample settings for simple-gpt-2, except 5 samples instead of 1
{
  ...,
  nsamples: 5,
  batch_size: 1,
  length: 1023,
  temperature: 0.7,
  top_k: 0,
  top_p: 0.0,
  include_prefix: True
}