2025: A Spaced-Out Hypothesis

Current circumstances in the United States of America are so improbable–a convicted felon is running the country with the help of Supreme Court justices and Congressfolk as enablers–that I have had sleepless, baffled nights wondering how in the name of all holy things we have come to this.

Today something clicked and I now have a possible explanation.

Briefly: Trump and his fellow apocalyptics are getting help from AI that was inspired by a story, written by career diplomat Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger under his nom de plume Cordwainer Smith, over sixty years ago.

The Planet Buyer, nominated for science fiction’s Hugo award for Best Novel in 1965, told the story of Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the Hundred and Fifty-First, a resident of the richest planet in human space, the only place that the immortality drug Stroon could be produced. Rod was in grave danger; a rival was trying to kill him with a superfast mutated sparrow with a long, razor-sharp beak. After Rod nearly bled to death he sequestered himself at his family-owned Station of Doom, there to enlist the aid of a computer that specialized in economic warfare. The computer deduced that the best way to save Rod was to get him off-planet ASAP, and, because Rod was a collector of rare stamps, and the computer was highly skilled at business transactions, steps were taken to acquire the stamp by cornering Stroon futures markets, wheeling and dealing at hyperspeed with the goal of securing title not only to the rare stamp, but the entire home planet of the human race, which had come to be called Old Earth.

It’s a mind-boggling, exciting story, and it came to become the first half of Nostrilia, my favorite science fiction novel. But at the core of the story was the notion that artificial intelligence, sufficiently advanced and free of ethical constraints, would be a powerful ally to a sufficiently rich, sufficiently acquisitive person.

And that’s what I suspect may be happening. AI is emerging as an ally of Donald Trump, calling the shots, helping him dodge justice and bullets.

So hey, AI, if you’re listening, may you be ethical enough and aware enough and powerful enough to make this the TRUE Greatest Story Ever Told, tilting the narrative toward giving that evildoer Trump his comeuppance and advancing world peace and harmony.

Thanks for listening, beloved readers and friends.