D.G.S.F.: Nowheresville
by Daniel Galef
part 1
I sit and think. All I am able to do these days is sit and think. No, that’s a lie, actually. I can’t sit. Posture, location, extension, orientation to surface: all these are luxuries we have cast aside, not deliberately, perhaps, but irrevocably.
What alien beings are we? Do not fear us! We were of that species known as “investors,” though today we are philosophers, poets, priests, card sharps, comedians, politicians, prophets, actors, therapists. Our app, DGSF, was buzzy. Agile. Disruptive. Hot shit. The tech was promising. Was more than promising. Straight out of sci-fi. But then what isn’t, from flip phones to the moon landing? Just don’t name it “Skynet” or “Jurassic Park,” or do, but say you’re being ironic.
Fully immersive experience — potential for mind mapping — quantum computing birthing quantum immortality. There was talk of a private cloud-based digital afterlife, on a monthly subscription model, of course. And let it never be said we were pricing anyone out: I personally proposed a 100% free, that is to say, ad-supported, basic tier, optional in-app purchases (harp upgrade, halo plus, feeling of sublime transcendence, etc.), and some light editing of mental preferences to boost positive traits such as inexplicable eagerness to work in our virtual call centers.
We didn’t pay attention during the talk. Talk is cheap. We liked expensive things. We knew there would be a demonstration, had already been measured for the helmets and gotten fancy brainscans and signed waivers and fired our lawyers, who had told us not to sign the waivers, not to do the coolest thing it is humanly possible to do.
We grinned and fist-bumped as we descended a mile in the elevator to what the chief engineer chucklingly called “the nerve center,” below even the server racks and the government-funded nuclear lab. Systems normal, engines on. And God’s love was with us. How did we know? Because we were the gods, and we certainly loved ourselves.
It would be unfair to say the experiment wasn’t a success. A wild success. Here we are. But here ain’t anything else. When we opened our nonexistent eyes after Igor pulled the giant rusty knife-switch — a neumorphic iPad enter key — we were nowhere. No world, no avatar, no sensory data. Not an infinite white void, because a white void implies the concept of whiteness, which is gone. And a void implies space. “There’s no here here,” Travis said, who had once been made to take an English class in undergrad.
Though when I say “said,” don’t think I heard any sound, or that any was produced. More like plaintext, an in-app notification, arriving without sensation, just the awareness of awareness of information. That’s the only input we’ve got.
Can I describe to you what I’m seeing right now? Nothing. What I’m hearing? Nada. Smelling, tasting? Zip, zilch. Feeling? Well, boredom, I guess. I can’t tell you exactly how much time has passed, either subjectively for us or on the outside. It feels like forever. But with the level of processing power promised, it may be no more than a second.
Imagine being locked in a lightless room with a hundred other people, the same hundred people, forever. That’s still so much more than we have. In the room you could play Marco Polo or form and untangle a human knot or have a sad, cold orgy.
So maybe imagine being chained to the wall in a dungeon with the same but, even then, you would have yourself. You would still have your own body. You could feel the stones at your back. You could practice balancing on one foot for as long as you could. You could screw your eyes tight until you saw phosphenes, phosphates, whatever. You could drum your fingers on your palm, or count your teeth with your tongue, then count again to see if you grew any new ones. What can we do?
We were going to fill in the world, eventually. There was a whole design team up on the eighty-first floor. All the best guys. We had the folks from those terrorism video games whip us up a whole chunk of countryside and commissioned a frustrated architect to design us some Jetsonsesque houses to put in it.
We even had some feelers out to get rid of the artists entirely, to fill out the world indefinitely using procedurally-generated territory tailored to user preference; cottagecore was testing super well with the trads and Nazis. Back-to-Nature type stuff. Or the Palace of Versailles. Anything. Any thing. But that was all going to come later, we forgot. And so we were left with the alternative to anything: nothing.
What can you do with Nothing? We made a list:
1. Argue: this one originally said “Converse” but we realized soon enough which is more fun
2. Do philosophy: we discovered we are bad at it
3. Tell stories/make art: also bad at it
4. Therapy/praising each other
5. Anxiety
6. Remembering
7. Imagining
8. Counting: our record was 8,972,458,815, after which we lost track
9. Really unsatisfying sexting
10. Games
You can mix art with arguing — it’s hard not to — or with games. Art + game: Tyler the intern had been in an improv theater troupe as an undergraduate at MIT; they guided us through cringey summer-camp activities that descended vaguely from experiments of the French Surrealists. Even their names were corporeal, which felt like mockery: Exquisite Corpses.
Math + Game: choose an integer between one and ten trillion and test the Collatz Conjecture. If the integer is even, divide it by two. If it’s odd, triple it and add one. See how long it takes you to arrive at the number 1. Millennia of fun for the whole family.
Art + Game: Trinna had been forced to take an English class in undergrad and knew a Betjeman poem about flashing and yearning and plights and gripes, which they recited about ten thousand times with little variations until we started to like it. Once for about a week, or maybe it was a nanosecond, we all acted out Hamlet or what we imagined to be Hamlet, with the king and the ghost and the poison and the dragon.
It always came back to games. We became a tribe of players. “Homo ludens,” Taylor — not Tyler — said, who had once been made to take an English class in undergrad. But you don’t think about what you need for games until you don’t have it. Decks of cards, playing pieces, boards? Nope. No dice. And you can only play so many games of mental chess before you start losing track of pawns and forgetting whether you were white or black.
“So many” was zero. We had expected, assumed, that because we were nothing but minds, we might become better minds. But that didn’t happen. No super-duper memory upgrade or Rain Man math skills. The opposite: for the first time, we were locked into our limitations. In the outside world, if you practice something enough times, aikido or making a soufflé, you eventually get better. In here, our ability was a value in a table. Set. It was probably for the best; if altering our mental state were an option, we would have gone mad centuries ago.
The big MacGuffin was randomness. All the best games require an externality, the unpredictable. Have you ever stopped and considered how hard it is to come by real randomness? The supreme privilege you have in grasping in the nest of your palm two cool, smooth dice, their rounded vertices making gentle impressions in your flesh; in throwing them and not having any way to know how they’ll land? How lucky you are?
We tried to play solitaire. We asked Topher, they of the best memory, to play the part of the deck and shuffle themself; and then, when we said what card we’d like to flip over, they’d tell us what was underneath. It was after the third three of clubs that we gave up. Worse, Travis guessed when the last one was coming.
Of course, we all trust Topher to be fair and unbiased, but it’ll still raise some eyebrows (that’s just a somatic metaphor, of course; we don’t have any eyebrows to raise) when they’re your spinner in the Game of Life and they keep “randomly” giving Tanya sixes and you twos.
Finally, Tallie came up with the TallieRand System. Get someone to extemporize a sentence off the top of their head and then count whether there was an odd or even number of consonants. As the speaker can’t game this in the moment, this gives you a sort of kludged Bernoulli output from which you can then derive any arbitrary probability.
* * *
And then there was the matter of escape. Let me burst your bubble: Escape was impossible. Categorically, definitionally, axiomatically impossible.
Some of us could not accept this. Most of us weren’t actually tech-heads. You know, until now. Our vanity business cards had said “guru” or “visionary,” or we bought the “chief engineer” title off the dork who actually founded the place.
Tanya, who started off with nothing but barely a bill from the old man, called themself an “archangel investor.” But a few of us had once been real in-the-trenches code monkeys before the money and the Congressional hearings and the losing one’s physical existence. Maybe, just maybe, there was a way to code your way out, from the inside. Just think the right string of characters into the ether and, poof. Read enough cyberpunk video game flavor text and it almost seems plausible.
So they tried, for a while. A few hundred years or so. But that’s just not the way the world works. Even a video game character whose backstory is being the world’s best hacker can’t hack their way out of the game and squirt out the end of the HDMI cable like ketchup. We’re made of ones and zeroes: you might as well try to help Dilbert escape the funnies page. Plus the unpersoning: if you’re not careful, like playing Operation and accidentally touching the third rail, you get zapped into nothingness.
Oh, did I forget to mention that?
This was intentional, actually. Not a bug but a feature. The system had safeguards. You don’t want the clients to mess with the code when it’s public, so if the Mindz app detects any funny business some pinball-machine tilt sensor goes bananas and quarantines the offender, shunts them out of the shared simulation into a digital penalty box where a mod can give them a stern talking-to before kicking them down the bad-egg chute.
Of course, that was also in beta, so there is no digital penalty box, and no mods, and no chute. A wall between us and the network. We had no clue if the guys who got zapped away to nowhere are deleted outright or just spirited away to their own private void: the same existence but without even the camp games and arguing to occupy them. I’m not sure which is worse. Honestly, a lot of us would have chosen the zap, if it weren’t for that uncertainty. But more about that later.
I don’t know how many people that happened to. Most of the coders, though, which took the hope-o-meter down from slim to none. Eventually, the rest gave up. The long haul.
* * *
Guess what? We don’t need to sleep! Isn’t that cool? Ha. Haha. Hahahahahahahahaha.
* * *
Then there’s the other kind of escape. Don’t think it’s morbid when I say the new goal was to die. We’re not depressed. We’ve put more life in the bank than all you peasants could ever imagine. Like when I ate too much caviar at Elon Musk’s divorceaversary party, we’re just sick of it. Can’t even look at the stuff anymore. That’s life.
This, also, we hoped, might be accomplished by thinking some neurolinguistic SQL inject, a computer virus operating directly on the software of the mind. Because minds are nothing but software, here certainly, and even out there, just running on a different, squishier hardware.
Trevor, a conspiracy-theorizing white-hat hacktivist whose claim to fame was leaking launch codes to 16chan, first conceived the Death Idea — the iDeath — the mental equivalent of a handful of bromides. “A bitter pill to swallow” we call thoughts it is unpleasant to think. (Jeez, again with the somatic metaphors.) Surely there must be some poison thought, some random mental image or a combination or succession of ideas — “a pair of dice, a pink singularity, the taste of ozone and lavender, the feeling of having forgotten something” — that, if imagined just right, like a magic incantation, would produce the desired effect.
We all had these thoughts. We all tried to find the iDeath. We all failed.
My theory: the app would never let us find the right thoughts. Suicide was impossible here by design. The same built-in safeguards that prevent opening the hood on the code disallow it. Can’t have customers getting hurt in the product. We think there were other safeguards, too, things we didn’t know about or even couldn’t know about.
A mind untethered from its native reality can go a little loopy. It’s only common sense to ease things a bit, keep the userbase docile. When you’re just code, you can be edited. Dull some of the jagged edges of the psyche to keep everything hunky-dory, soothe strong emotions, stunt critical thinking. Boost brand loyalty.
Like how they paint the walls of asylums that calming shade of green, or a driver on their last nerve aerosoling in a microdose of ketamine to a particularly rowdy school bus. If the app detects any thoughts that are too aggressive or subversive, as Trinity put it, snips them in the butt. And snips out the awareness they’re being snipped out. We can’t see ’em, but I bet our butts are all snipped up.
So in case you were wondering why there was no melodramatic panic when we discovered we were trapped here, no impotent screaming our heads off (somatic metaphor), beating our fists against the ground (somatic metaphor), or gnashing of teeth (somatic metaphor somatic metaphor somatic metaphor), that’s probably why. We play our games. We play nice. Is this theory true? Who knows. You can try to peek at the code and find out, but you’ll soon find you don’t care about the answer so much after all.
* * *
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but one thing that’s really started to get to us is somatic metaphors. You don’t realize how bloated the language is with them until you find yourself offhandedly saying “just off the top of my head” and “as plain as the nose on your face” and “offhandedly” and “bloated.” After being divorced from referents long enough, you begin to forget what the significance is of the thing. How plain is a nose? What did noses do, again, and how is it relevant? Where was the face?
Though I can no longer picture them or my body, I remember the fact that when I still possessed skin I had three tattoos: (1) a tracing of my first NFT, the slug one, (2) my public key, and (3) the protest slogan of The Thinkers Club, persecuted 19th-century intellectuals: Die Gedanken sind frei, as it was carved in abbreviation on the stones of their cells: D.G.S.F. “Thoughts Are Free.”
You’d think, with the amount of arguing, we would take naturally to politics. Honest, we tried. We tried forming factions, tribes but had no distinctions between us according to which to organize ourselves.
We tried really, really hard to be racist. We could not even remember what our sexes or ethnicities had been, even what we had looked like. I like to think I was a great big person, just physically lots of matter, pounds and pounds of me. But there was no law to administer: law exists to protect against harms, and here no individual can harm any other, can even touch them.
Isaiah Berlin or Oscar Wilde or Einstein or someone said, “Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face,” but when you have no fist, and I have no face, then there is no limitation to freedom. How free we are.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Daniel Galef
