"Persuasion"
C. M. Street, August '25

(A work of fiction. Any similarity to actual events is coincidental)

   I try to be more brusque and blunt and tell more hard truths straight upfront these days, because when I'm polite and pleasant I have the world by the steering wheel.

   You must know this first thing. I don't want you uncomfortable saying 'no,' and I don't want you to feel bad about walking away. Friends will recognize hard truths and stick with you. I never want to steer my friends: ever since I figured this out I've approached the world differently. Your friends can handle a word that's a little ragged. It's your foes that really deserve the full carnage of the Care Bear Stare.

   Yes, you get incredible asks with a spoonful of sugar -- I think we all learn this at four years old, from Mr. Rogers or Captain Kangaroo if nowhere else. "Please" and "thank you" are magic words. But, I mean, there is a super sized version of this lesson that most of us never have to learn. If it comes down to how sweetly you ask, you see, there is a sharp power disparity, and this disparity among people has gotten wider with time. Apparently, "love thy enemy", in a sick sort of way, actually is how you win.

   Anyway, you have my permission to ignore me and the rest of this story. Express, explicit permission. I want that crystal clear.

   The closer you get to me the more you're gonna be like me, whether you were or not before. I'm warning you before we really get going. I'm being open with you, I'm being conscientious. Maybe you think the disclaimer is a little sharp, a little strange, but I tell you, if you don't believe in memes, or in the contagion of ideas, of personality, of the fellowship of friends, of e pluribus unum, you may emerge a professor of a new faith. If you do believe in them, you are already there. Welcome. I have a story for you.

   If you're still with me and on track to become more like me, you should know something about who I am. This is a language game. You should know, upfront, that I am a high-functioning hyperlexic. This is a name that doctors use to pathologize a wonderful, beautiful thing: the early reader. I've been reading since I was twenty months old, and writing since as soon as my fine motor skills permitted it. Thanks to this precocious literacy, I remember clearly my toddler years, far better than most people: I recall vividly how intensely tired my entire body felt after a day doing nothing but reading and listening. "All" I was doing was acquiring language, assembling a person, really. I remember the frustration of trying to steer a crayon or a pencil, when your tiny little fingers still don't move quite right. That was the worst feeling in the world: the feeling of incomplete control, that my brain couldn't move my fingers right, that made me want writing like some people want cocaine. And I've never stopped. I've read everything and everybody, I've read the slop and I've read highbrow literary fiction. I speak six languages fluently, I can read probably thirty of them. This is a language game, and my brain happened to be organized one-in-a-million for language. This fact is probably significant.

   I was a natural mimic; I could imitate almost any voice or accent. In school people thought I might be a natural actor, but the fact is an actor has to be a bit extroverted, has to put themselves forward and embiggen themselves for the benefit of the audience. I'm not that. I can pretend to be anyone, but it's safer to pretend to be no one. Putting myself forward might make me famous, and choosing between 'fame' and 'fortune', I'll always take fortune. Fame is bad. Very bad.

   You will go a long way to understand me if you know this: I cannot say the wrong word.

   I feel them flow in my marrow, and every word has a flavor on my tongue. I was nine years old before I realized this was different from most people; most people do not sense the taste of words, nor do they feel the resonance quite right as they leave. The best words always vibrate right, the best sentences have right rhythm and they make good feelings. You probably have experienced goosebumps at just the right line in a song or a novel; I call those spirits nearly ad libitum. If I'm in a good mood, this is music you will want to hear, it uplifts the world. If my mood is sour, well, everyone around me is doom and gloom, too. Both spirits are self-reenforcing; a skid might go on for years, and so might the soaring. This, although true, never stood out to me, not until I was an adult. I have been at times unperceptive.

   My academic background is mathematics and computer science, and I was a straight-A student through my B.Sc. degree before I ran out of money and went into industry. I have made some minor contributions to astronomy, mapping stellar streams in the galactic halo, a couple foundational results in galactic cartography, understanding the evolution of the Milky Way. I wrote a rock opera as a teenager about a labor dispute: Don Bluth's walkout from the Walt Disney animation studios. (You've never seen it. Two performances by the Bellingham Symphony, witnessed by maybe 40 baffled Americans and 60 Canadians.) I have had great success in the software industry, with a couple dozen patents and multi-billion products under my belt: but my most extraordinary talent is words. Not even "writing", but "words": arranging them with chord-like consonance, according to the music theory that you hear but perhaps do not consciously know.

   I just write like I speak. Professors always loved my essays. Sometimes the praise was a bit over the top ("masterful!" one liked to say, over and over) but I never thought much about it then. I don't mean to brag, but one of the first things you'll notice about me is I'm bright as a button, and I suspect it's relevant.

   Words can be stirring. Compelling. People have fought and killed for words, nothing but words, for songs they sang in crusader chapels, for credoes or laws, for oaths sworn on ancestors and gods, for prayers dredged bloody from broken hearts. Frederick Douglass spinning hypnotic oratory, calling freedom. All words, vibrations in the air, the correct vibrations -- when the vibrations are sufficiently correct you can stand in midair.

   So none of what I'm saying or am about to say should surprise you, even when it's a bit fantastic.

   Speakers call it persuasion. Hackers call it social engineering. But it's steering. It feels just like steering, like I am turning and positioning them in their own mind. It doesn't matter if I didn't physically use my arms. It's steering, and I am abnormally good at steering every person I meet. As I said, at some point in my life, 19 or 20 years old, every polite and pleasant interaction began to feel strangely coercive. People would readily jump at the slightest suggestion; my sister began visiting me regularly at home, my neighbor finally cleaned his gutters, then paid for mine to be cleaned. People apologized for things I did. Little-bitty favors, really, but they began happening all the time.

   That was the beginning. It escalated quickly. It got much scarier. I cannot express the horror that you feel when, everywhere you go and whatever you do, this reality-warping cloud seems to follow you around, seems to be growing even, and you have no explanation. At first I had no idea what was going on, how these strange things happened. If you had told me then that it was a Jedi mind trick, that I was subtly nudging them as I pleased, I would have laughed and maybe set back understanding another year.

   I did not have this ability as a child. This is something that I developed. Since this is something I've learned, I could unlearn it, or at least learn not to do it, right? Well, it is more difficult than that. I can try to say the wrong word, but it's difficult and unnatural. It's like trying to deliberately sing off-key when everyone around is hitting the right note, or trying with all their might to. And if the "wrong word" comes out, but it doesn't sound sincere, there's effort or there's trouble or hesitation, the listener can get the idea anyway. It can be even more persuasive; they sense a vulnerability, they think I'm trying to hide or shield something, so they go looking for it, and they find it: oops, it's the loss of their own agency. If I get the listener to think about what I say, if I get them to seek meaning in what I say, they're done.

   It's so disturbing when I say it like that, but that's good and meet: it is disturbing. Understanding my words molds your understanding. You might say that's the entire purpose of language, to impress ideas upon others, that I just find myself on an extreme end of the spectrum, that I can and should speak into being a better world, with my sweet crypto-coercion. I'd have to be purely consequentialist and agree the ends justify the means for concord.

   I can't quite escape the compulsion to word things so, but I can aim to a side. I fill space around what I want to say. This reduces the impact somewhat, or peppers it around. I don't think it's much safer, really.

   You also should know that, when I first recognized this strange aura of mine, I had recently transitioned from male to female; for a couple of years in my late teens/early twenties, until it became so obviously bizarre that the real explanation became apparent, I honestly just thought this was something women commonly experienced. People looked at me like I was meat in the street, but people I interacted with personally were courteous and polite and accomodating? That doesn't seem wrong! In truth, what I was experiencing was unusual for anybody of any sex, and I should, perhaps, have glommed on to this much sooner than I did. Unusual circumstances provided cover for other unusual happenings.

   Perhaps the transition was part of it. I did, after all, have to project a different identity. I adapted immediately; I took my estradiol like a good girl and convinced people around me I was female. It was easy. Presenting male was hard, this just worked. People saw a woman pretty much right away. Maybe that was the first true stunt I pulled, the first large-scale influence campaign.

   I have four stalkers. They all, I'm afraid, encountered me when I wasn't fully aware of my particular ability yet. They all, somewhere along the line, fell in love with me. Three men and one woman. I do not reciprocate their feelings, it's all so complex, but I also can't encourage them by talking to them again.

   I look like a female hamburger dumpling. Pretty face, absolutely never-to-be-beaten pillow talk, but fat and built like a Lithuanian shield-maiden. It's weird but you can love that, madly. I'm not particularly wealthy, although I suppose I live like I don't worry about money, and people pick up on that. There were abundant reasons, you understand, to assume these mad inamoratos were all normal. Rationalization is always easy. My own parents fell madly in love with each other at first sight. As a teenager, I experienced a limerent love that almost crushed me. I certainly understood how deep and fundamental passionate love is. And men are horndogs. It's one of the least attractive features of the sex altogether. Being hungry, even delirious, for a giantess with a great big brain and fat booty and maybe a fat bank account too isn't so unusual -- at least it didn't seem so strange at the time, anyway.

   As hard as it is to believe, I didn't get it. This was something I didn't even think was possible. Doesn't everybody pick up a few slavering worshippers?

   Three of them I haven't heard from in years. I hope they found peace. One of them, a Barcelona banker, fifteen years later, still writes letters to me, one or two a year, promising to hold me in his heart until the end of eternity. I received one last week; it's what started me writing this story down. He begs me to write to him, for him. It would just encourage him; I told him quite clearly long ago how I felt. I can't bear the thought of even trying to smooth it out, because it seems I can't be nice and not be all-subsuming. I like to be nice.

   The first time I wrote to him, I offered to write in Spanish. He wanted to try his English. I wish to high heaven we had conversed in Spanish instead. He might not have been so smitten.

   I don't seek out sexual companionship. I have basically no desire to have sex with anyone, in fact; nowadays I'm not even sure if it's possible for somebody to have a truly consensual relationship with me. If this sounds like convincing myself, it is. I'm very good at that, too. At least part of the reason I didn't see this for so long is that I convinced myself it wasn't so.

   Self-delusion is a significant weakness for me or anybody like me. We have astonishing capacity for it. Keep it in mind -- that might be a weakness you exploit one day. When you can convince anyone of anything, you can and will convince yourself of anything, first. This is extremely inconvenient, you must be a very careful self-interrogator first, or else a fool. You need to always want to be right, too, even when the truth is uncomfortable, or else you'll gladly be wrong and eventually in the cold. Getting what you ask for is always kinda dangerous, and that's what you have. It's not a valence that lends itself to lies easily: slanted truth at most.

   I talked myself into some woo-woo, for sure. I learned a lot about how far you go down conspiracy theory rabbit holes. I never stopped reading, including text of dubious merit, and I can be as helpless to my own persuasion as anyone. You may become so untethered from reality that you can't even understand it, much less manipulate it. It took a couple years for me to develop enough mental hygiene to resist my own suggestions; while I am mostly clear of this part of my life, I still believe Ken Blackwell rigged Ohio in 2004.

   So, I say less. I try to be more brusque, even uncouth. I tell more uncomfortable truths, and I say aloud, explicitly, things neurotypical people wouldn't. And otherwise I mostly keep my trap shut. I can, of course, get other people to not want to talk to me, and that might be safest. It feels wrong: like all people brought up on words, I have the compulsion to write, I have to get the thoughts out. My diaries after my death probably should end up burned or classified. Nobody really wants to know.

   You understand, there was a time in my life when I was optimistic about my gifts. Being a gifted writer and a good public speaker are blessings, great blessings. Eloquence is some sort of virtue, surely.

   But the longer I live, and the more that I see, this gift seems less like the gift of a great novelist or poet, and more like the gift of a cult leader or a con artist.

   You hear about people with magnetic personalities, or some strange charisma, that gather followers and make things happen; my particular manner of speaking, perhaps combined with my body language and my face, but my voice audible even just in writing seems to operate something like it, a soporific heavy pull where words by being reflections of internal state are brought slowly into alignment and then whatever parts of your brain that are disagreeable start to slip, or sleep, and that's it. You've turned around in your own head, as surely as I spun you.

   Now, L. Ron Hubbard and Jim Jones figured out how to do this years ago, and they were dopes. You don't have to be a genius of some sort to do it. Rascals and rakes discover it, too: disproportionately. It might even be something just anyone could learn, if they have sufficient time and motivation. Understand that you, too, could share in my curse. You see? This story is educational.

   To be fair, Milton Erickson figured it out, too. He became a hypnotherapist and spent the rest of his life helping people by talking to them. If you doubted that it worked, that words could actually change your habits, Dr. Erickson would just lull you with a fascinating little story about how he regained the use of his arms by retraining his brain, then WHAM! he'd hit you with a metaphor so apt that you left a changed person just by understanding it. Words are powerful; that simple hammerlike strategy has an absurd hit rate.

   Milton Erickson mostly used his ability with oblique persuasion for good (as far as I know, anyway). Also, he was confined to a wheelchair. When I'm in my darkest moods, I wonder just how much the two are connected. His disabilities certainly forced him to make the most out of his mind, and most of the other, able-bodied examples of people with this particular talent that I know of I don't think much of. What if the reason Dr. Erickson was allowed to do what he did was his disabilities? What if the wheelchair was the only thing that kept him from being dangerous? What if the doom of the blarney-tongued is just to become a cultic object, a mesmerizing menace, an enemy of humankind? What if the best life for me is to withdraw from society entirely, and forever avoid people just for the harm the wrong right word might do?

   I remember my toddler fingers, that couldn't move right to move the crayon. Like Dr. Erickson, I remember clearly learning how to use my muscles newly. It's how I turn my tongue around foreign language phonemes, it's how I squinch my face so. How vaginal dilation was unexpectedly easy. None of these are coincidences, they happened that way for a reason, and it may just be that I know what he knew.

   What do I even do about this? I know that in almost any scenario, a moment to speak and it'll be fine. It's amazing how bold that'll make you at times. I am probably the least likely person to invoke my Fifth Amendment rights. I once walked away from an arresting officer by asking to be let free. But honestly? The right to stay silent should be more than a right for me. Perhaps I had no business doing that -- but the surprising fact is, people do it, every day. If it ever comes down to it, you should at least try it.

   As I earlier insinuated, I left school for industry at 21. I landed a software engineer job at Microsoft on their Redmond campus; this was really my first experience out alone in the adult world. It was a sweet job; I could spend my time between my apartment and the Microsoft campus pretty comfortably, and really that was about all that I did. The occasional excursion to a Mexican restaurant, perhaps. Must have spent 70 hours a week at the office, that wasn't really unusual for a young go-getter in tech.

   I remember my first performance review at Microsoft being a "meets expectations" with a bullshit "be more approachable, less intimidating!" feedback. I am not intimidating. This was probably code for "be less of a tranny freakazoid", but that isn't how anybody that doesn't do background checks sees me, either. (Yes, I noticed, and no, you were not particularly clever.)

   So I told my manager just what I was thinking in our one-on-ones. He wants approachable?, I thought. Then he shall approach. He asked to have lunch with me; soon it was every day. I never held back, I just said what I thought: again, this is what he asked me to do. He never seemed anything less than fascinated. I assumed he had a good manager-face, and would have looked fascinated, with more or less effort, no matter what.

   Root fucking access, practically from the start, and I couldn't even see it. I promise, this is the truth.

   I immediately won promotion next cycle, of course. I didn't suspect anything then. I was a wunderkind, after all. My work was fantastic. I should have had promotion the cycle previous. Nothing suspicious about this. Good to see the system could Work As Intended.

   The thing is, if you are thinking my thoughts, it makes us more compatible, not less. Once you pop, why would you stop? It's a thing friends do. Memetic distribution, shared secrets, we grow together, I know what goes in those boxes, and it'll seem like it was always there. Building rapport feels good. It's literally good vibrations. I feel it happening, and I lean into it until you feel it too, and it's easy to trust a feeling that good. Almost everyone immediately does. A light in their eyes, a twitch pulling upward on their cheek. I see it, I stoke it, I stir it like mist in the air. You fill overfull and spill your thoughts into the waiting receiver. You catch attention like a center fielder.

   The promotion next cycle was a surprise. My work was good, but my promotion packet wasn't stellar. I said as much in my packet, they said I was altogether, altogether too modest. In a year, I had mostly just perfected the things I did last year. That isn't the kind of case a software engineer gets promoted on normally, not to Principal Engineer, especially not a year after the last promo. That one felt premature, it felt oddly wrong, but my God, if they're going to shower me with honor, I might as well let them, right?

   This was a man I was speaking to almost every day and, looking back at this point, knowing what I know now, he might have died for me. I must have been in denial over this. Maybe my obliviousness to what was happening made this so alarmingly effective, I can't say. It was completely guileless, I assure you. I just know what happened afterward, how things progressed. And it was finally what lifted the veil from my eyes.

   I had suspicions by the third year, of course. You start to wonder when you hear your own words from others' mouths, just repeated like they were new. You realize that nobody even pushes back on a code refactor. People just do what you ask them to do. You complain aloud to nobody in particular about a broken coffee maker, and a coworker leaves in the middle of the day to bring in theirs from home. These aren't unusual things, really, they aren't suspicious things alone, but when you finally see that everything points that way, even simple examples stick in your mind.

   And by now, enough strange things had happened to me in my day-to-day life outside of work that I knew something in, about, or around me was extremely strange. It wasn't nice to think such things, they didn't feel right, but even somebody as persuasive as I am can only delude myself for so long.

   I came to the office one Tuesday morning and saw a new invite on my calendar: there was the usual lunch and 1:1 with Jack, my manager, from 12 to 2 pm, and now our SVP had blocked off 2 pm to 5 pm. Me, Jack, and him. The head of desktop productivity software wanted three hours of my time. It started to feel real then. I started to realize that the more unpleasant suspicions I was beginning to hold weren't paranoia or some deficit of socialization manifesting as trust issues or anything like that. This was really happening: they were going to promote me for the third time in three cycles, I would have Jack's job, Jack would be the new VP of our division. It was absurd, but it was happening.

   I didn't say a thing during lunch that day. I watched Jack's body language, I listened to his words. I nodded or murmured approval a couple times. He smiled a lot, that's all.

   We walked back to Jack's office for our 1:1 meeting, and then he dropped the bomb. He had moved budget around and kissed some management ass specifically to put me in a seat of power. He wanted to promote me over him; he was asking me to be his manager. This was the position he should have been striving for, he was just offering to give it to me. I was to be the VP, and Jack... well, Jack might be writing letters to me for the rest of his life. I sat listening, my eyes watered with shock and sadness.

   That was when I knew, finally knew, it was ME. I could talk myself into, or out of, any situation. That's how it actually was. It was just me.

   I resigned on the spot. I just walked away. Didn't even meet with the SVP. I might have been running the company in a few years. I might still run the company: that's the other thing. It was the right thing to do. If you have never felt what I felt that moment, do not disagree with me.

   The next few years involved some rearrangement of my life. If I needed money I just worked odd jobs. I negotiated some rather absurd salaries, but I worked hard. I knew that I could slack off, even just not work, and get away with it for donkey's years: but that's the devil talking. I had to be engaged, doing something. I didn't want to become a parasite, an exploiter, entirely slime. It's not only wrong, but what if my "good looks" faded with age, huh? I wasn't just going to take this for granted. I was that person that somehow always got away with things; we all know one, and I was One with a capital O. I remembered how my uncle could do it, how my maternal grandfather and his father were made entirely of slippery stuff. It was too much, you understand, the gift, the curse, the compulsion -- but I still didn't know what to do with it.

   You could say I'm merely advantaged. Privileged. I have a rare talent. I try to avoid doing anything bad with it; what else can I do? But that doesn't catch the sadness of not knowing whether a gift was truly appreciation, or wondering whether others know they are so vulnerable, and if so whether it worries them.

   If somebody does me a favor? I thank them doubly over, because if they did it themselves I am deeply grateful, and if they did it because I somehow compelled them to, I must appreciate them more. This behavior does tend to ingratiate people more to me. I'm pretty much doomed to do it, though. Might as well be kind.

   I never thought about how great ability can be anti-social, but temperance makes it pro-social, until I was an adult, and I regret this.

   Friends need somebody who will listen more than they need somebody that will speak to them: and especially more than they need me speaking to them. I listen far more than I speak. I listen.

   I'm deadly at poker. I don't actually read other people all that well, but I can flawlessly project weakness where there is strength, strength where there is weakness, even to old hands watching for bluffs. The luck of the draw is the luck of the draw, I cannot win every pot, but over many hands I always come out ahead. And while I cannot help but feel despicable when I steer random human beings, I don't feel the least bad about winning at cards: if you're playing poker you're always gambling you're a bit spookier than the person across the table.

   It's eventually an unwise gamble. I could go pro, you understand, travel the world on tournament circuits, and eventually find somebody else like me. A match made in hell, you might say. We've gotta be rare: high-functioning hyperlexia in general is maybe one in million, and a degree as mine must be rarer yet. But I betcha at least one of the top ladder pros is like me. That's how I feel less alone.

   The poker table is one of the few places where I am most myself, I am sorry to say. It makes me feel a little dirty -- I never even liked poker until I realized I was nearly invincible at it -- but if you actually want to hear the words I speak when I'm unguarded -- some dim echo of the Logos that speaks by fiat and might have damned me -- it all happens around a friendly game of cards. You won't even notice until it's too late.

   I can plausibly hypothesize a mate I wouldn't wonder whether he loves me for me, or because I somehow told him he did. Think about it: that's all I can do. Maybe somebody fellow-cursed and I would fit. I even struggle with the words here (this is where I struggle, when I try to envision myself happy. It's swell.)

   But if you feel sorry for me, don't do that -- you don't choose what happens after you settle into that feeling. It's a trap. There are people that know all of the buttons to push. Ironically, they tend to be neurodivergent and not super-social butterflies. Social butterflies want to coax other people into opening up. I -- people just open up. I open people up. It isn't the same. I'll warn you about it still, though. Even if the warning can't do you any good, if this kind of person really wants to get you: I will warn you. Why? Because you'll remember I warned you. That's how you know I'm a friend.

   Friends tell friends hard truths. That's why I'm not afraid of losing friends if I clam up, or if I project cantakerousness, and hardly ever say anything unless it's deeply unpleasant. If I ever feel like I steered a friend I want to fold up and die. It ain't fitting, it just ain't fitting.

   If I am speaking fully unguarded, talking to me is a pleasant experience. It has to be. I like the good words, they draw me by magnetic force. You get to talking and we will together paint pictures in our minds, a vivid storybook sensation. I'm holding the brush, of course. Most people don't know this state of consciousness awake, or else they thought they lost it when they were eight or nine years old: either way they don't know how to steer it, but they're captivated and want to learn more. Then, they're cooked. Anything can happen after that. You don't say "no" when your undermind asks for "yes".

   There have been people with little response to my influence, but I notice that these are rarer and rarer with time. Now, when I find somebody unresponsive, it's most often because they don't speak English at all. In happy ignorance, then: I am, I suppose, in love with the English language, but I am not sure it loves me back.

   The closer you get to me, the more like me you will become, whether you were like me before or not. If I intend to do as little harm as possible, if I intend to avoid altering somebody wrongly, unfairly, I must avoid people that are not like me. But this isn't my nature, I've always sought different perspectives. Everything interesting I've learned in my life, I learned because I listened to a different person. That can't be right. Instead, perhaps I should try to do as much GOOD as possible.

   This is a seductive thought, but it presupposes that what I think is good is good for others. If you believe you can shape the world to your ideal, in the limit, you could justify even imposing your ethics and morals on society. You can justify even a dictator that way. Maximizing good might be more sensible than minimizing harm, but doing good without doing harm? Is there a sort of Pareto frontier, where we decide just how much of society we turn over to the persuasive, and then permit only as much harm as that demands? "Don't be bad, be good instead!" sounds great, but there are a lot of decisions involved that maybe aren't mine to make.

   The truth has its own persuasion; you only need to be really skillful to sell a half-truth or a lie. That by itself should be clear to people, but it goes a little beyond that. A truly persuasive person can sell a falsehood over a truth; this is the fundamental rule of salesmanship. It's also probably one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. You can file that one, too.

   Every talented salesperson has a little of what I have; the best ones perhaps are tormented just the way that I am.

   All of this? All of this was prologue. I'm getting you up to speed with it, because otherwise this story will make very little sense.

   This story is about the people that try to take advantage of me. Many people notice I'm a silver-tongued mofo. A few noticed my ability before I did. And there are manipulative people that of course want to defend their own sandcastles, their own sweet lies. If you are sculpting perception and steering people with your words, you're part of a world that is smaller than the world abroad, but not empty of company. It's a dangerous world.

   Most of these people are not any significant sort of threat. Petty people that haven't thought what they're thinking through. I can complete their thoughts for them, and they're harmless.

   But I have said "no" before to somebody that I am certain has the ability and perhaps even the inclination to assassinate me. I'm still alive. Might sound like a relief, except when you realize it only tells others in this small world that I might be, in fact, dangerous. You see that this may become bleak. People like me will get mixed up in something sooner or later. Don't envy me, don't feel sorry for me either.

   Let's call this man Conviction; I can't possibly use his real name. And while some of these details are altered to make his identity not instantly obvious, if you do relatively little digging around you'll find the man's name, his business and particular conviction, the coffee house where we spoke.

   But you won't find him, because you won't look.

   I first met Conviction in 2011. At this time, I was CTO of a small startup joined to a hedge fund. I was building an involved quantitative model for equities based on the analysis of firms' financial statements, as well as the text of quarterly reports and press releases.

   This was a rather awkwardly-designed neural network optimized by genetic algorithms. Back then you trained them on supercomputers with large numbers of parallel CPUs and fat busses. But here was a system you could just feed endless 10-Qs, 10-Ks, 8-Ks, and stock market time series to, and it gradually improved at predicting returns.

   Back then, you could extract significant excess profit (alpha) from market trades based on information from these kinds of systems. It gave sentiment on earnings calls, it could sniff out irregularities in the cash flow statements and exaggerations on the balance sheet like a forensic accountant. It could look at outliers in profits or expenses and decide which were due to extraordinary events and which were likely to be recurring. These sorts of judgments pointed out all kinds of possible investment and arbitrage opportunities that teams of analysts missed. We were essentially badass fundamentals traders that didn't need split-second high frequency trades to win. We made most of our returns on simple, common-sense things that we called up from the earth via supercomputer. Maybe the last of a dying breed; it'll all just be supercomputers soon enough.

   And it made a map of words. Before I mapped stellar streams, I had made, or caused to be made rather, this map of words inside the vector space the model learned. Basically Google's word2vec just a bit before word2vec. Though our architecture details were different -- I used genetic algorithms, like some kind of fossil! -- the trained model was a reflection of the data, and the training data was human text (even if only constrained to financial documents), so the output models were similar in most ways.

   You could see relationships between ideas and contexts in the map. Different notions were separated by wide angles and long distance. Similar notions were close together in both. Antonymic things formed zero angle but had opposite-sign magnitudes. It wasn't just a map of words, but relationships between them. Superlatives had grand magnitude, diminuitives little, and in between were a spectrum of synonyms and near-synonyms lined up neatly by intensity. All correct, as I imagined them already. It was a beautiful vindication. I still have a bunch of 2-D projections on my wall in my study.

   For somebody that feels words the way that I do, exploring this latent space on the computer for a first time was beautiful, a highlight of my life.

   Anyway, RenTech owned this trade in the large caps already -- they were ahead of us, of course: there must be one of me there -- but we had close to free rein in the small- and mid-caps, and there was plenty of alpha to mine there. We made a lot of money for a few years. I admit, I didn't see so much of it personally. I am so terrified of manipulating others now that I myself am I bit manipulated, nerfed. I don't try to be too much. Too much goes too far.

   I was quiet through this, but Conviction was deeply interested in my work. He too seemed fascinated by what deep learning could conjure, how it could hang concepts in space like a decorated Christmas tree, breathtakingly beautiful.

   Conviction was a young engineer at the time, a few years of previous experience, late twenties. I still mostly picture him as he was then: unshaven, flannel shirts with rolled up sleeves, sometimes dark gray hoodies and corduroys. A muscular build: he worked out regularly. He didn't strike me then as particularly special, except for the keen interest with the model's semantic vector representations.

   Eventually, as the unreasonable effectiveness of this approach became more broadly known, the easy returns dried up. This startup folded, and we moved on to other things.

   We didn't cross paths again for seven years. I confess I didn't think often about Conviction during that time. He was somebody I worked with early in his career.

   Conviction had moved up quickly in the world. He called me and asked to meet me for an hour next time I was in the Bay Area. He wanted to catch up, and he had an "incredibly exciting" business proposition.

   I thought this would just be a discussion about a new job: some project Conviction had in mind. We met in a Sunnyvale coffee house, a rather expensive place that offered fine Ethiopian coffees prepared and served in traditional ways. We sat in a large comfortable booth with a sliding door.

   I much preferred the door open, but Conviction sealed us in.

   "So what have you been up to?"

   I made a little small talk with him. I described my last couple gigs briefly. He also explained his rise: after the quant startup, he worked for Facebook a couple years. He bought heavily into Bitcoin in 2013 around $10. Most of his stake he still held, but he had sold about fifty million dollars worth to spread around in startups, hoping to back a unicorn. He hit one lottery ticket, why not another? It was practically found money. And he had started his own firm: Founder and CEO.

   But the catching up only took a couple minutes; we hadn't really known each other well. And the pleasantries ended when Conviction leaned forward and looked me straight in the eyes over his Kaffa coffee.

   "I know what you are," he said.

   There are a lot of things that could follow that. He might have been saying "I know you're a transsexual woman" or "I know you're neurodivergent" or even "I know you're lonely and alienated." There are a lot of things people might know about me that they think have that kind of power. But I knew that wasn't what he meant. He was talking about my curious Gift, in the English or the German sense.

   This was the first time anyone had confronted me about my influence. I knew there had been people before that suspected; the people that disapproved just avoided me. Clever people, by and large. But this was the first time anybody had taken me by the arm and said "I see you" and actually wanted to talk about it. Braving a conversation after that? Not something an ordinary person does.

   "And I think you know what I want. I never thought I'd meet somebody so persuasive, so... so much more. I always remembered that CTO that not only built scale-models of English from EDGAR Online soup, but could nail Jell-O to a wall with only a word. It was unbelievable and uncanny, yet you seemed to think it was unremarkable. 'She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.' I had to build myself up for seven years just to even approach you. I can't believe you aren't galactic overlord already."

   I didn't answer right away, but sipped my coffee. People are afraid to approach me because they're afraid of becoming me. This wasn't news.

   "You could pitch for me," he continued. "We would be unstoppable! Unlimited funding, any red tape snipped like ribbons on Christmas presents! And, by God, the advertising! Have you ever thought, really thought, about the power you could have?"

   I was crushed by its weight every day of my life. I had thought everything he had mentioned and more. These were my nightmares. I didn't need him to narrate them for me. I gave him a cold glare.

   "I've worked in adtech before," I answered. "A filthy business really, SEO is hellbent on destroying whatever useful is left on the internet. I don't want to propagandize and I don't want to steer people that way. Winning hearts and minds isn't my goal. It's far too easy and it's far too dangerous."

   He narrowed his eyes. "I have a way of getting what I want myself." The confession meant nothing to me; I knew that already. His gift, whatever it was, was different than mine, but I was sure he had something that not only most people didn't have, but didn't imagine.

   Clearly he wanted me to guess what he did. He had guessed mine, I should guess his. But no: that was the game he wanted me to play. He wanted me to overlook what he wanted to do and think about what he was. He wanted me to think how he might be similar to me. We'd grow closer. Can't have it. I knew it was a trap. I wanted to highlight the differences, the stark differences, between us, and keep those central in mind.

   "You know that I quit Microsoft because they wanted to make me an executive for no reason."

   "You're wrong," he answered. "It was for every reason. You have the gifts the position requires. You should have accepted."

   I smiled sadly and shook my head. His words were like wilted lettuce. But why should I play his brain back? I wouldn't play the piano if I thought the piano was alive. Would you?

   "You're astonishing," said he. "Why so shy? Don't you know? That semantic vector space your model dug up, that object of miracle and wonder that made so many millions, that was only a dim image, a shadow, of what you have in your head. And I think you could tell me what you do, even how you do it. I will show you mine, if you show me yours."

   "Forgive me, but it's mine to tell you what you do." The "don't you know" was a little irritating, but I knew it was a clumsy attempt to get under my skin.

   Conviction's stare softened, a light lept in his eyes. Oh God, what was I doing even talking to him?

   "I want you to see something," he said. "I won't test you. I won't try you. But I would like to show you what we're designing, and how you could be the key to... well, everything. There's nothing you couldn't achieve."

   I sighed heavily. I was deeply, profoundly uncomfortable. Everything about this was wrong.

   "If I taught you how," I began carefully, "if you learned what I know, you would have to work through a morass of self-deception that might engulf you entirely. You won't know what to believe for years; anything you tell yourself can become your truth, just like that. You must be honest to live through that." I paused briefly to let that settle. "Even today, after years of practice and training myself and grilling the truth until it's sweet and flimsy and see-through like onions for a hamburger, I wonder what seductive lies I told myself, what falsehoods still might seep up from my own mental La Brea. Even if you think you can navigate this, even if you think it will be safe for you, I cannot justify willingly taking the risk for anyone. I pray to God that it hadn't happened to me, and I am not religious and I don't believe in God, but I know with all certainty that prayers have power."

   Conviction dropped his drink on the floor. He didn't seem to care. He put his phone to his ear.

   "Leo, bring the car around to the front."

   "Why are you talking to me willingly? You know the truth. I can just turn you away and you won't even think about it afterward."

   "That's my, uh, special ability." He put on a bright disarming smile. "Besides, the more I hear the better I'll understand, with or without you. You're fun to talk to. Like a roller coaster."

   No, this wasn't a cult leader or the good hypnotic doctor. This was the charismatic CEO -- perhaps another type of cult leader, the kind capital smiled upon like it was molded from mammon -- this was a Steve Jobs type. Probably had political aspirations too: this sort of person develops those, or malignant cancer, eventually. Endless growth, the dream of both.

   This was a power seeker. One of the most dangerous kinds: he was seductive, successful, working on technology that would run or ruin our lives. A sociopath, one of the sort that many neurotypical people fall down for. Never my favorite kind of person.

   I didn't wait to see what kind of exorbitant car he had. Probably a Lambo or a Bugatti: rich techies like their Italian supercars. I've driven in them before. I'm not sure there's anywhere a Lambo can take me that I want to go, especially not his. I stood up, slid the door open, and walked out. My thoughts were more on witness protection programs. This was bad, this was much worse than it looked. Tears for Fears said it: "Everybody wants to rule the world."

   I walked back to my hotel room. As I walked, I felt anger more than anything. Intense, profound, consuming anger, boiling up violently from deep within. How dare somebody approach me smiling like a friend, share in this knowledge that had practically broken me, and then ask to exploit it for... what? I didn't even know exactly what his company did. Some artificial intelligence thing. Whatever it was, he wanted all of the hoodoo he could gather to back him up, and he was ready to strike a deal with Svengali. He could go to hell.

   I locked myself in my little hotel room and lied on the bed in the dark, angry, punching pillows and swearing at the ceiling.

   There was nothing good that he could do with it. I didn't believe I was doing good with it. Yet it was the desiderata of whatever soul he had. What kind of evil was that?

   And how dare he assume he knew better how to use this Gift! I lived and suffered with it for decades! Every friendship I ever had may have been forced: this was the kind of knowledge this thing had brought me. So I withdraw, I isolate myself... so what, so people like THIS could learn how to stir minds like coffee cups? Automate it?

   I wanted to kill him. I wanted to end his life. I could do it, without a doubt; nobody even in a fever dream could hold me culpable.

   I wanted to ruin him. I wanted him to wither with pain and suffer. Addiction to drugs, the weird tech-crowd drugs that nobody really knows recovery from: kratom, ketamine, phenibut, fentanyl, "research chemicals" with names lifted from alphabet soup, "nootropic" power pills gobbled by gullible Redditors. God, it would be simple. If he went deep into that, he would sink from professional embarrassment to personal hell to a shattered semblance of humanity naturally, all on his own, like a train on a track, only if set into motion first. I could be thousands of miles away, never see his rotten smirk again. I wouldn't have to watch, just never interfere... never smooth it over. Storybook sensations are beautiful and warm when it's a soft friendly picture book, a story we all want to hear. If the story I'm telling is horror?

   I can tell a ghost story, and at the end, you'll be a ghost.

   I try to be kind, I try to be nice. I try to warn people. This is why. All the alternatives are wicked. There are vulnerabilities in human cognition, and I, my identity soft and pliable like Silly Putty, had fitted myself fundamentally into the cracks. At rest, I hold you together, but if I expand, if I breathe, you would just as surely break. So I try my hardest never, ever to do that. I can't ever do that.

   That infatuated moron in Barcelona? He bothered me and harrassed me, but I never once felt hatred for him, really. He was deluded, initially by my own accidental doing, but now? By his eager participation. He was lost and I couldn't help him find his way. He might be happy someday.

   But this? This was hatred, and it was rage, outrage. I had never felt that word so closely, so correctly, as I did then. I wanted to stunt and shorten this man in ways that would make Beelzebub barf. (I barfed myself, a few times.)

   I told you: the spirits are self-reenforcing. I am as vulnerable to my own persuasion as anyone. Even more so: I can't hide from it. I'm locked in my own brain with it. I was the first victim of it and I will be its last victim. I will spiral up if I'm feeling good, I will spiral down if I'm feeling bad. And it isn't just a personal spiral: the world around me changes with me. I can't stop that. I've tried, I've tried so hard. What would happen if anger spiraled? Who would be spared?

   The red that I saw that night continued into the morning, the next night, the day after. I just stayed in the hotel room with a "Do Not Disturb" sign hanging from the doorhandle. Never disregard those signs; you don't want to know what's behind every door.

   After three days and three nights, I reached the end of this fugue still intact. I was lucky: I'm just not an experienced hater. If I was good at hating people, I would have kept inventing new and fantastic ways for Conviction to end up a fine powder. They might have even been put into practice. I might never have stepped into daylight again.

   I awoke on Saturday morning with the fever broken, and I jumped up and down in place with nervous, happy energy. I felt pent up in the small room, I felt like I could go outside and rejoin the land of the living at last.

   As I neared the reception desk, ready to turn in my door key, I saw Conviction sitting in the lobby waiting for me. I turned around and started back to my room, but he saw me and approached.

   "No," I said, quite loudly as he neared. "I don't care what your ask is. I don't even want to hear it. You mind your own business; I'll not be a part of it. I will not throw in with you. It's that simple. Don't press me, don't you dare; something terrible could happen, and I've convinced myself I won't be responsible." This last bit was a lie, I admit: but Gott sei Dank, or God-be-dark, my lies always sound truthy enough. Movers and shakers mean business, I have to at least threaten to mean business, too.

   Conviction was a clever man, I could see. I wasn't sure how vulnerable to my steering he actually was. It clearly hit him, but this was a man that had built several personas for himself. Perhaps the sentimental or sensitive side could be beguiled, but the corporate showman? He kept that identity, the outward face of his down-and-dirty get to business side, quite separate. That was perhaps his ability: that business face could project anything, an easy charismatic confidence mostly, and all the vulnerable human parts of him were hidden away. I had never spoken to the actual Conviction, maybe nobody did, I had never truly touched his feelings and didn't reach close to his convictions, deep, dark, internal. Static state. Everything was only filtered through the reptile in black: the frontman.

   This couldn't have stopped me if I was intent on doing evil to him, of course. In my three-day fury, I had imagined a hundred contingency plans that didn't require direct persuasion. And the presence of Conviction himself now, waiting in the lobby for me like a psycho, suddenly stirred them up again.

   Conviction in return just flashed a winning smile. He didn't wait for me to say "no" again, which was wise.

   "Might be more fun this way," he offered as a rather insulting parting remark. I loathed his guts, but he left unharmed.

   I stood in the hotel lobby for a moment shaking, then turned in my key and went home. If I had succumbed, if I had given him the whammy I felt loaded and ready to fire from my bones...

   I might never have recovered myself. I might never have been well, or good, or right again. There's a reason I've never shot the Howitzer. But was I even right, or just self-righteous? In hindsight I am unsure. But what would chomping Conviction even change? He was a symptom of bigger systemic problems. He's dangerous, but he's not the root cause. Societal misincentives. Poor allocation of resources. Those are closer to home.

   Every now and then, I still receive a call from Conviction: usually on the phone, sometimes in person. He keeps me updated on his booming business, his success wining-and-dining the rich and powerful. "You could own them all," he says. "You aren't standing still, I know your abilities are if anything greater now. What I'm doing, you could do even better, grander. Why don't you sway the whole world?"

   "Because I don't want a world where the important decisions are made by decree. Good persuasion stands on arguments, on facts, on sober weighing of consequences. Flooding people with good feelings drowns out minor, unimportant things like truth. It's not right."

   "Not getting that world," he replied. "You're intelligent enough to know. World operates on vibes, truth is boring. What's your move, sunshine?"

   When we do talk, I tell him pretty much the same thing every time. Anything new is just more fodder for his search, a compass that inexorably points to the treasure. I don't want to give him any more help. He wants to coax me into action. It might tell him something useful about my ability, or maybe it'll be an excuse to grab me and put me somewhere safe. Money can't move me. It'll be force, eventually.

   Conviction is more powerful than I am -- at least, he is more powerful than I dare to be. Maybe it's a mistake, maybe conviction, little-c, is better. He had no difficulty pitching his business. I know now he was just trying to get potential competition on board, he didn't need me and never needed me. He only wanted me, and unlike others he knew why.

   Maybe I was given a great gift for a great calling, and I'm just too much of a chump to answer destiny's call. I have a lot of faith in getting busy at the last moment, apparently.

   "You know, I'll just figure it out with AI," he'll sometimes say. "Yottaflop scale compute clears up a lot of mysteries."

   The one-in-a-million result is out of training distribution and very high perplexity; you might find some of the elements of this ability in a gradient descent-optimized manifold representing human language, but you're going to have to assemble and synthesize them yourself to get the OOD result, which means you need to know what to look for first. Or so I think, anyway. I've been wrong before. But consider the other side: if the power is found straightforwardly in the weights of the model, unfurling that optimized manifold may just instantly make a thousand of me that you can't control.

   I'm just the "final boss", I guess. If he can get me on his wavelength, that proves he's finally got the juice, he'll finally have what I have.

   Do I want to stop him? Of course I do. But there is more than one Conviction. There's a whole line of Convictions standing behind him. I could beat him, and it wouldn't matter. Conviction is just the one that made himself known to me. I still see him as a little twerp, a junior engineer and not a particularly great one, and a billion dollars won't change that. The others might be more cunning than he is, crouching in the shadows, just listening -- listening, reading, like I did in the olden days when I was crotch-high and not yet cursed. They'll jump as soon as it's possible, I'm sure. They'll all gladly be doomed, or doom us all. There has to be somebody on the other side to see it and react to it, somebody who made it through the worst of the self-delusion and still doesn't hate the world entirely.

   That's where I stand. I wish I had company. Words might be crime otherwise. None of us might ever speak again.

   The way it could be different and yet still right, as painful as it is, is more of me. More of me must appear. Not just with the curse, but with integrity. I don't believe that "integrity" is a moral virtue: it's more like soundness of structure; at least, that's how it feels to me. You don't need to be a genius, and you don't need to be a saint, but either is most welcome.

   If you have paid attention, if you have read with attention as it should ever be, with the respect and devotion that words demand, you must have wondered this by now: if I am so tortured and sure that my words sway unduly, why am I even telling this story? How I can risk the writing if it will influence and steer people, that thing I have said repeatedly I loathe to do? I'm not a cult leader looking for acolytes and I'm not your hypnotherapist either. I want no movements, only vigilance. If you have been paying that much attention, you now know why. You're the kind of person that interrogates words, which means you stand a fighting chance, and which means you've probably internalized too much already. Sorry. You'll see for yourself.

   I cannot stand alone. but I can call and chirp an elegant song. "The smiles that win, the tints that glow / but tell of days in goodness spent, / A mind at peace with all below, / a heart whose love is innocent!"

   As I said, I'm intent on "no" and not destroying the world, and I am part of a smaller hyperaware world of words, so anyone paying attention knows who I am, and for all of my ability with words and software and data science and music, for all the discoveries I have made and have helped other people to make for themselves (God forgive me), for whatever sweet things I might say or not say, I am not invulnerable to bullets and I can be contained in a cage. If Conviction, or somebody like him, gets his way in the end, it may be join him or join the dead and discarded; well, the vast majority of everybody that has ever lived is dead, and none have ever come back to complain. Kyrie eleison.

   It's dark, it's so dark. I am still tempted nightly, like now, when the light is dim, to stop it all. Stop it externally (no! it is wrong) or stop it internally (how could I extinguish my own light?) That is, again, the devil talking.

   Am I just a coward? I know I won't just watch what's happening. I will act if I am forced. Then I might do something I regret afterwards, so I practice in my head. I think about it often, increasingly often. Vigilance.

   And I understand, of course, that I planted the seed. Those days in the early tens showing Conviction the model's semantic vector space, excitedly explaining what it was: I set him on this path. He realized I had extraordinary persuasive powers, and here I also had a primitive version of a map that might one day lead him to the same prize. He had no chance, no prayer. Whether I actually steered him or he came up with this on his own doesn't matter; it was this that tempted him, and it was just as irresistable to him as it was to me. I am the mother of this crime. I had no way to know. I had no way to know.

   There will be more of me, no matter what I do or don't. There will be tortured hyperlexics, there will be strong artificial intelligences. Somebody might synthesize me and commoditize curses someday: that is the Silicon Valley way, move fast and break things. Break any thing, break all the things, even the things with no name or every name. Even and especially break the things that you cannot ever put together again.

   Why would anyone want what I have? It's one thing if somebody asks to change, if somebody wants to believe. But somebody willing to change is easy to persuade. The heavy-duty stuff that I have just bypasses brains.

   I think about this as contagion, or worse, prion disease: misshaped proteins that twist other proteins they touch to match, and take away their function. I remember the Scripture, "let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man," and "death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof." Blessings, but also warnings. I was brought up tormented, haunted by the classics. I don't believe in souls, in heaven or hell, in free will. I have serious doubts about consciousness. But I feel those things. I have a deep, dark, atavistic appreciation for them. I know why the human heart longs after the numinous, whatever knowledge might exist beyond the event horizon where we cannot see, from which we cannot return. I know why I have to believe in something *like* them, even if I don't really quite believe in them.

   The "soul" might just be the sum total of our systems, that cease to be after life ends: all the connections in our brain, for example, that start falling apart once the spark is out. The life force, the essence. That's the ghost that you give up. Might be real, but might not be any more than that.

   "Free will"? You think I believe in free will? What even is that? Well, what you really want is control. What you fear is not having control. Toddler fingers, again: this desire leads to dangerous places and once you have it you can't go back. You must understand there will be many events that you cannot control, and that in the summary, these might outweigh all the others that you could. And also, isn't it obvious how you control yourself, if free will is just an illusion? You fill yourself with the good things. Learning, physical exercise, good habits. You avoid things that don't make you better. I am a software person. Garbage In, Garbage Out: GIGO. If you don't want garbage out? Fill yourself with the good things, and maybe good things will come out of you. Leave what isn't good behind. Maybe you can't choose in the end, maybe it won't matter. Maybe I'm full of shit! But I don't think I am about this. You fill yourself with the good things, and then you don't care about things like "free will". Amen.

   "Heaven" or "hell"? Well, these are obvious, aren't they? If anything, we're supposed to be building the Kingdom of God, not pretending it will descend from the sky. For hell, we seem to be on time or ahead of schedule. I'm so proud of us.

   Yes, these are vapid Wizard of Oz answers, like the Tin Woodman's heart, aspirational at best. We tell bedtime stories to adults, because one day we'll go to sleep and never wake up again.

   Maybe I'm just trying to convince myself again, that none of it matters in the end, maybe I'm trying to tell myself not to care. I shouldn't, but I do.

   "Love thy enemy, bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you."

   I'm sorry, I try to be brusque and blunt and tell hard truths, and while this can discourage steering other people, it steers me. It does feel like it takes me where I don't want to go. I should be a warmer person. I should be, but surely I can't.

   Some days you wake up and all you want is dental anesthesia. Part of being a grownup, singing along down the path to the grave. I hate when I get this way, my God I hate it! Like, yes, I'm a giant baby that can't stop growing, but I need to see the sun again. So, not today. I can't abuse myself like that. Climbing up, let's go, 頑張って！

   I'll be all right. I worry too much about schmucks that aren't me. The world isn't gonna get better, but I could.

   But again, I'm sorry. I've written so much. Too much. I'm sorry. I must stop now.