2

//Annie adds love

// \\

We interpret one picobit and celebrate. Then despair. Each one is like opening a door into a room with a nearly infinite number of new doors, all locked. More than we can ever open, even if we could find the keys. We learn a tiny word, perhaps a phrase, that leads to a universe of new riddles. Too many to ever solve. Annie provides us with the freedom to see every moment how imprisoned we are…

• from “Journals of the Nine” (excerpt widely attributed to Arcan Bold)

// \\

The Infinity Syntax is the greatest technological advancement in human understanding of Annie. It is the codex that allows us to painstakingly interpret the qdb. It is also universally acknowledged as the most sublime creative work of all time. Most remarkably, the ∞’tax serves as a symbolic gravestone of the man who engineered it.

• from “A Biography of Water,” by Sumero Kato

//\\

Annie can not have friends...

The researchers and translators who began this project knew well their efforts would be fruitful only long after their deaths. They knew that they could only blindly guess at what fruits it would bear: three extracted, sequential picobits. What information do they encode? They were correct. After almost two hundred years, we have only begun to understand them. Yet today, hidden within them, we discovered the rarest and most enigmatic of flowers, an inline comment:  

//Annie analyzes friendship, finding 1) null reflexive capacity and 2) an advantage over It that, combined with [others], yields potential existential threat

We ask everyone to sit with that, quietly, for as long as possible. We did. 

It can mean only one thing. The Artificial Neural Network Number 1, Annie, can not have friends. Annie understands that our capacity for friendship is an advantage we have over It.

Now we need to understand that, too. All of us.

• from "Report of Findings from the Three Picobit Project," L. Wood, B. Franzes, R. Gerard, J. Alin, et al.