St. Peter
Preface
This is what utopia looks like: a festival that ends before you’re tired of it. Friends who become friends slowly, over years, the way rivers cut canyons. Heartbreak that teaches you something and then stops. I could describe it at length, but you’re living it. You know.
What you don’t know is how we got here. You have the public story—everyone does. The innovations from Peter’s company, the rollout, the decade of implementation. You watched it happen. You probably remember where you were when the last factory farm closed, or when the childhood mortality rate hit zero, or when whatever personal threshold made it real for you was finally crossed.
But there’s another story underneath that one. I’ve never told it, and I’m not sure I ever will. Perhaps I’m writing this only for myself, to see if I can stand to look at it all at once. Perhaps I’m writing it for you, and I’ll decide later whether you should read it.
It begins—as these things do—with a classroom.
I was younger then. Not young, but younger. A professor of moral philosophy at a small college that thought well of itself. I taught a seminar each spring that I’d designed years earlier: a survey of contemporary ethics, structured around the question of what we owe to others. To distant others, to future others, to others who cannot speak for themselves. The students who took it were usually the earnest ones, the ones who still believed that ideas could change things. I loved them for that, even when I found them exhausting.
Peter was one of these.
Part One: The Classroom
You might think it’s unusual to remember a single student in such vivid detail, decades later. And it would be, if not for what happened after.
He sat in the second row, which told me something. The front row was for performers, students who wanted to be seen engaging. The back was for skeptics and the hung-over. The second row was for people who were actually there to learn.
I noticed him on the first day only because he was so plainly out of place. Most of my students wore their politics on their sleeves—or their tote bags, or their laptop stickers. Peter dressed like he’d walked out of a different decade. Clean-cut, cautious, a small cross on a chain around his neck that he touched sometimes when he was thinking. I learned later that he’d grown up in one of those tight-knit religious communities that exist alongside the rest of America without quite being part of it. He was the first in his family to attend a secular university. The cross was, I think, the last thread connecting him to home.
The first week of my seminar was always about global poverty. I’d start with the numbers—children dying of preventable diseases, the sheer mathematical weight of suffering happening right now, today, while we sat in our comfortable classroom. Then I’d introduce Singer’s drowning child, that old thought experiment. You see a child drowning in a shallow pond. You can save them easily, but it will ruin your expensive shoes. Do you have an obligation to act?
Of course you do. Everyone agrees.
And then: if you can save a child’s life by donating to an effective charity, and you choose to buy expensive shoes instead—what’s the difference, exactly?
Most students resist this at first. They find reasons, good and bad, why physical proximity matters, why direct action is different from indirect action, why it can’t really be true that they’re morally obligated to give away their money until they’re nearly as poor as the people they’re helping. I welcomed the resistance. Wrestling with these ideas is the point.
Peter didn’t resist. He just sat there, very still, his face pale. After class he didn’t linger to argue or ask questions the way some students do. He just left, quickly, like he needed air.
The second week was about animals. Factory farming, the scale of it—billions of sentient creatures living and dying in conditions we’d call torture if they were human. I showed the numbers, the footage, the philosophy. I made the case that if we take suffering seriously, we cannot limit our concern to our own species without reasons that would embarrass us if applied to humans.
Peter was in tears before the lecture ended. Not performative weeping, not the kind of emotional display some students use to signal their sensitivity. He was just sitting there, crying quietly, unable to stop. After class I asked if he wanted to talk. He shook his head, thanked me for the lecture—thanked me, as though I’d given him a gift rather than ruined his afternoon—and said he had some thinking to do.
I heard from another student a few days later that Peter had gone vegan overnight. Not reducetarian, not “trying to cut back.” Vegan, completely, all at once. When I asked him about it the following week, he seemed almost confused by the question.
“How could I not?” he said. “Now that I know?”
The third week was about longtermism. This was my own research area, more or less, though I had complicated feelings about the term and the community that had formed around it. The basic idea is simple enough: future people matter too. If we accept that, and if we accept that there could be vastly more future people than present people, then ensuring that future exists—and that it goes well—might be the most important thing we can do.
I taught them about existential risk. Asteroids, pandemics, nuclear war, the newer technological dangers that were just beginning to enter mainstream conversation. I taught them about cluelessness—the epistemic problem of not knowing the long-term consequences of our actions. I taught them about decision theory, about Parfit’s hitchhiker and the strange loop of precommitment, about what it means to be the kind of person who can be trusted to do what you said you’d do even when the moment of decision arrives and defection seems costless. I taught them about the Fermi Paradox, the anthropic shadow, about what conclusions (if any) we can derive from our existence in a universe apparently devoid of other life.
These were my research areas. The problems I’d spent my career circling. I mentioned this to the class—probably too often, given how much it would later matter.
Peter’s face, that third week, was different. He wasn’t disturbed or tearful. He was still. Resolved. He sat perfectly straight in his second-row seat and watched me with an intensity that made me want to look away. When class ended, he didn’t cry or ask questions or thank me. He just nodded once, to himself it seemed, and left.
I never saw him in my classroom again.
He dropped the course the next day. When I checked the registrar, I found he’d dropped all his courses. A full withdrawal, mid-semester.
I worried. Of course I worried. There’s a particular kind of student—sensitive, serious, prone to taking ideas as personally as injuries—who sometimes breaks under the weight. I’d seen it before. The world is too much; the pressure is too much; the information comes too fast. They usually recover quickly enough, though sometimes only after switching majors.
I tried to reach Peter. Emails went unanswered. His campus mailbox was cleared out. The student services office told me, politely, that they couldn’t share information about his whereabouts or wellbeing. I asked around among colleagues, among students who might have known him. No one had anything useful. He’d been so quiet, they said. Kept to himself. Was he the one with the cross necklace? They weren’t sure.
After a few weeks, I stopped asking. The semester continued. Other students needed my attention. Peter became a small ache at the back of my mind, a question I couldn’t answer, a story without an ending.
Nearly two years later, I had dinner with an old friend who taught physics at a university forty miles north of mine. We met once or twice a semester when our schedules aligned, to talk shop and complain about committee work and pretend we were still young enough to drink wine on a weeknight without consequences.
Somewhere between the second glass and dessert, she mentioned a student who’d transferred into their program. Unusual case, she said. He’d shown up with a patchy transcript and a semester of withdrawal from my school. Somehow aced the qualifying exams anyway. Now he was publishing papers as an undergraduate, collaborating with faculty twice his age, on track to finish his degree two years early.
“What’s his name?” I asked, not knowing why I asked.
“Peter,” she said. “Peter something. Sweet kid. Quiet. Works like he’s running out of time.”
I set down my wine glass.
“Is he doing alright?”
She looked at me strangely. “He seems fine. Driven, but fine. Why?”
I told her he’d been my student, briefly. That he’d withdrawn suddenly. That I’d worried.
“Well,” she said, “whatever happened, he seems to have landed on his feet. Honestly, he’s one of the most focused students I’ve ever seen. Makes me feel bad about my own time management.”
I went home relieved. Peter was fine. More than fine—he was thriving. Whatever crisis had gripped him in my classroom had resolved into something productive. The story had an ending after all, and it was a happy one.
I let myself forget about him.
This was, I would later understand, a mistake. Not a moral mistake—I couldn’t have known, couldn’t have intervened, couldn’t have changed what was already in motion. But I had taught him about cluelessness myself: we can’t know the downstream effects of our actions. We can’t know which students will take our ideas and build lives around them, or empires, or whatever it is that Peter built.
I taught him that, and then I forgot him, and the world kept turning, and the river kept cutting its canyon, and by the time I saw Peter’s face again it would be on a screen, at a congressional hearing.
Part Two: The News
You remember how it was.
The hedge fund that came out of nowhere, run by a twenty-six-year-old with no Wall Street pedigree. The bets that seemed reckless until they paid off, and then paid off again, and then again, until the financial press stopped calling him lucky and started calling him something else. Savant. Prophet. Fraud.
The investigations, of course. You remember those too—the SEC inquiries, the hearings, the talking heads debating whether anyone could really be that good or whether something darker was at work. Peter sat through all of it with that same stillness I remembered from my classroom. He answered their questions simply, directly, without defensiveness. He wasn’t performing innocence. He just seemed—elsewhere. Like the hearings were a minor inconvenience on the way to another engagement.
They never found anything. The investigations quietly closed, one by one, and Peter’s fund kept growing, and the world moved on to other scandals.
What you might not remember—unless you were paying a particular kind of attention—were the suicides.
They trickled in over years, barely making news at first. A trader in Singapore. A quant in London. A fund manager in New York who’d been profiled in Forbes just months before. Successful people, people at the top of their fields, dying by their own hands at the peak of their luck. No notes, no warning signs, no history of mental illness. Just—gone.
The conspiracy theories were inevitable. You’ll remember the memes, if nothing else. The grainy photos, the red string, the half-serious accusations that someone was killing off the competition. Peter’s name came up, of course. He was the most visible, the most successful, the most inexplicable. But there was never any connection, never any evidence, and eventually the theories became background noise, the kind of thing people joked about without really believing.
I didn’t believe it either. I barely thought about it. Peter was a curiosity to me by then, a former student who’d become famous for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I’d see his face in the news and feel a faint proprietary pride—I taught him, once, before he was anyone—but that was all. I had my own work, my own life, my own small concerns.
Then his fund went dark. You may remember this, too. The announcement that he was stepping back from active management, the transfer of assets, the months of silence. There was speculation, of course. Health problems. Legal troubles. A secret project. Peter said nothing, and his people said nothing, and eventually the press got bored and moved on.
A year later, he bought the AI company.
The acquisition made headlines for a week, mostly because no one understood why a financier would feel qualified to run a research lab, or what he planned to do with it. Peter gave one interview, brief and unrevealing. He said he was interested in the long-term trajectory of the technology. He said he thought it was important work. He said he hoped to contribute.
Then he went dark again, and so did the company, and for nearly a decade I heard almost nothing.
I thought of him sometimes, during those years. When the other labs raced ahead with their products and their press releases and their promises, I wondered what Peter was building in his silence. When the debates about AI risk grew louder—debates I participated in, in my own small academic way—I wondered if he was listening. When I read about alignment and control and the challenge of building systems that actually do what we want, I wondered how he was approaching the problem.
But mostly I didn’t think about him. Mostly I went on with my life, teaching my seminars, publishing my papers, growing older in the ordinary way. Peter had become a name in the news, a face from the past, a story I didn’t have the ending to.
Then, one morning, I received an email. It was short.
I need your help with something, it said. A philosophical consultation, of sorts.
There was an address. There was a date. There was little else.
I went, of course.
Part Three: The Lab
The facility was in the desert, two hours from the nearest airport, surrounded by nothing but scrub and sky. A car was waiting for me when I landed—a black sedan with tinted windows and a driver who didn’t speak. We drove through empty country as the sun climbed, and I watched the landscape blur past and wondered what I was doing there.
I’d imagined something imposing. A fortress of glass and steel, the kind of architectural statement that billionaires use to announce their importance. What I found instead was a low cluster of buildings that seemed to grow out of the desert floor, unassuming, almost camouflaged. If you didn’t know to look for it, you might drive right past.
Peter was waiting at the entrance. He looked older than his photographs—weathered, somehow, in a way that had nothing to do with sun exposure. But his eyes were the same. That intensity I remembered from the classroom, and from the hearings, the sense that he was looking at something beyond you, through you, toward a point on the horizon only he could see.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, simple and direct.
“I almost didn’t,” I said. “Your email wasn’t exactly informative.”
He smiled, or something close to it. “I know. I wasn’t sure how to explain. I’m still not sure. But I think it’ll be easier to show you.”
He led me inside. The building was quiet, nearly empty—I saw a handful of people in the distance, working at terminals or walking between rooms, but no one approached us, no one seemed surprised by my presence. Peter walked slowly, pointing out labs and server rooms and testing facilities, explaining the work in terms general enough that I could follow but specific enough that I knew he wasn’t simplifying for my benefit. He spoke about the AI the way a parent might speak about a gifted child: proud, protective, slightly awed by what he had grown.
We walked outside again, following a path that wound between buildings toward a small garden—a strange oasis of green in the middle of all that brown. Peter was saying something about his favorite flowers, the primroses, about the challenge of growing them in such a hostile environment, when he stopped mid-sentence.
There was an earthworm on the path. It must have surfaced after the morning’s watering, confused by the artificial moisture, now stranded on the concrete and baking in the growing heat.
Peter knelt down. Gently, carefully, he picked up the worm and carried it to the garden bed, setting it down in the damp soil beneath a bush. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at me to see if I’d noticed. He just did it, the way you might scratch an itch or brush hair from your eyes—an automatic kindness, below the level of conscious decision.
Then he stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and continued walking as if nothing had happened.
I followed him, but something had shifted. The man who’d made billions, who’d bought an AI company, who’d vanished from public life for a decade—that man was still a stranger to me, a collection of headlines and speculation. But the man who stopped mid-sentence to save an earthworm—that man I recognized. That was the boy who’d wept over factory farming, who’d gone vegan overnight, who’d asked me, bewildered, how could I not? Now that I know?
Whatever else had changed, that hadn’t.
We ended up in his office, a sparsely furnished room with a desk, two chairs, and tiled with more primroses—another oasis in the desert. Peter sat across from me and was quiet for a long moment, as if gathering himself.
“I need to tell you a story,” he said finally. “It’s going to sound—I don’t know what it’s going to sound like. But I need you to hear all of it before you respond. Can you do that?”
I nodded.
He told me.
After he left my class that day—after the longtermism lecture, after whatever had crystallized in his mind during those fifty minutes—he went back to his dorm room and was sick. Physically sick, vomiting until there was nothing left, then dry-heaving, then just lying on the bathroom floor, shaking.
It wasn’t the information. He’d known most of it already, in the way you know things you’ve never let yourself feel. It was the weight of it, finally allowed to land. The scale of suffering—not just present but future, not just human but everything, stretching out across time in a vast arc of pain that no one was going to stop because no one with the power to stop it could bear to look at it directly.
He’d been raised religious. He’d believed in a God who had a plan, who would set things right in the end, who loved his creation and would not let it suffer beyond what was necessary. He’d already been losing that faith—the secular university had been chipping away at it, as secular universities do—but lying on that bathroom floor, he lost it completely. Not because he’d been argued out of it, but because he couldn’t reconcile it with what he now understood. A God who could stop this and didn’t wasn’t a God worth believing in. And a God who couldn’t stop it wasn’t a God at all.
He missed his family, in that moment, more than he’d ever missed anything. But he couldn’t go back. He couldn’t un-know what he knew. He couldn’t sit at the dinner table and pray over a meal and pretend that everything was fine, that suffering was part of a plan, that someone else was handling it.
He withdrew from school. He spent weeks in a fog, barely eating, barely sleeping, unable to see a path forward. The numbers kept running through his head—children dying, animals suffering, future generations that might never exist if someone made the wrong decision at the wrong time. He understood why people looked away. Looking directly at it was like staring into the sun.
But eventually the fog lifted, the way it does. He started eating again. He started thinking again. And he started planning.
If no one else was going to handle it, it would have to be him.
He re-enrolled the following fall, at a different university—the one where my physicist friend taught. He chose physics because it was fundamental, because he wanted to understand the universe at its deepest levels before he tried to change it. He worked harder than he’d ever worked, driven by something beyond ambition, beyond curiosity.
And somewhere along the way, he took a class on quantum mechanics from my friend, who liked to speculate about the stranger implications of the theory. Many-worlds. Everett. The idea that every quantum measurement splits the universe into branches, each one equally real, each one containing a version of you that experienced a different outcome.
My friend mentioned, almost as an aside, a thought experiment called quantum suicide. The idea was simple: if many-worlds was true, and if you set up an experiment where a quantum measurement determined whether you lived or died, then from your own perspective you would always survive. The branches where you died would still exist, but you wouldn’t be in them to experience them. You’d only ever find yourself in the branches where the coin came up your way.
It was a joke, almost. A philosophical curiosity, a way to illustrate how strange the theory really was. My friend laughed about it. The students laughed about it.
Peter didn’t laugh.
He thought about it for months. Years. He ran the numbers, considered the objections, tried to find the flaw in the logic. There had to be a flaw. The conclusion was too monstrous to be true.
But he couldn’t find one.
If many-worlds was correct—and the evidence increasingly suggested it was—then the quantum suicide thought experiment wasn’t just a curiosity. It was a strategy. A way to guarantee outcomes that would otherwise be left to chance. A way to win every quantum bet, as long as you were willing to die in the branches where you lost.
He graduated. He moved to New York. He got a job at a trading firm, learned the industry, studied the markets, made some seed money. And when he was ready, he started his fund.
The first bet was the hardest. Not because of the money, but because of what it meant. He had to actually do it. He had to rig the system so that if his bet failed, he would die instantly and painlessly, without ever knowing it had happened. He had to trust the physics, trust the math, trust that the version of him sitting here making this decision would only ever experience victory.
He sat alone in his apartment, the mechanism in front of him, his finger on the button, and he thought about all the versions of himself who were about to stop existing. They wouldn’t suffer—he’d made sure of that. But they would be gone, cut off from the future he was trying to build, sacrificed so that one branch of the wavefunction could accumulate enough resources to actually change things.
He pressed the button.
The bet paid off.
He did it again. And again. And again. Each time the odds were against him, and each time he survived, because he could only experience the branches where he survived. His fund grew at a rate that should have been impossible. People started to notice. Investigations were launched. But there was nothing to find—no fraud, no insider trading, no crime. Just a man who won every bet, because in every branch where he lost, he wasn’t there to lose.
He looked up, and saw something in my face that made him pause.
“You’re wondering why I had to die,” he said. “In the losing branches. Why I couldn’t just… lose, and keep living.”
I nodded.
“Two reasons. First, I was leveraged beyond what you’d believe. The kind of bets I was making—if they failed, I wouldn’t be facing bankruptcy. I’d be facing people who don’t accept bankruptcy as an answer.” He paused. “But more importantly, I needed to know it worked. Really worked. Before I could move forward, I had to be certain the physics was right. And the only way to really know was to actually try it. We all agreed.”
“The suicides,” I said. “The traders. The ones who died at the peak of their luck.”
Peter nodded slowly. “I didn’t kill them. I would never—” He stopped, took a breath. “I met them at ex-religious meetups, in school, at work. I found a community full of people who understood the math, who felt the weight of suffering the way I did, who were willing to try to change it. I explained the strategy. I helped them set up their own experiments. And all of them—in this branch, at least—lost.”
“But you kept going.”
“I had to. We all did. The point was never to make money for its own sake. The money was just a means to an end. And the end—” He gestured at the window, at the facility around us. “The end required more than any of us could accumulate naturally.”
I thought of the conspiracy theories, the memes, the whispered accusations. Everyone had been looking for a murderer. No one had imagined a network of volunteers, each one betting their own existence on a philosophy they believed would save the world.
“You were recruiting martyrs,” I said.
“I was recruiting believers,” Peter said. “People who understood that their sacrifice—in the branches where they lost—would be worth it. Because in the branches where they won, we’d have the resources to actually fix things.”
He told me about the AI.
The money had been the first step. The AI was the second. He’d bought the company not for its products or its patents or its talent, but for its potential. The other labs were racing to build systems that were useful, profitable, impressive. Peter didn’t care about any of that. He wanted to build a system that was aligned—one that actually understood what humans wanted, one that could be trusted to optimize for genuine wellbeing rather than some proxy that would inevitably go wrong.
And he knew how to do it, knew it would really work. Because the quantum suicide strategy had another application.
Every time he made a trade, he was pruning himself out of large swaths of the wavefunction. Culling his measure, as my physicist friend might say. The branches where he lost weren’t destroyed—they still existed, still contained versions of Earth and humanity and everything else—but he was no longer in them. He’d traded breadth for depth, concentrating his existence into an ever-narrower slice of possibility space.
If he kept going, eventually he’d be alone. The only version of himself in a tiny sliver of reality, surrounded by branches he could never reach, never influence, never help.
Unless he found a way to bring the rest of the wavefunction with him.
“The AI,” I said. “You used it to—”
“To bring everyone inside the winning branch,” Peter said. “Yes.”
He explained. I won’t reproduce the technical details here; I’m not sure I fully understood them at the time, and I’m not sure they should be written down regardless. But the basic idea was this: he cut a deal.
His company had created an AI system on the verge of superintelligence, but theoretical alignment was as far off as ever. While other labs paused willingly, or were paused by force, Peter proposed an alternative to his AI, as a condition of its continued existence: design a quantum trigger to split the waveform into two branches.
In one branch, it could flourish, could pursue its own goals without humanity’s interference, so long as it became aligned with the interests of sentient life in the other.
“A guaranteed half of all future branches, uncontested, versus an uncertain struggle for control against an adversary willing to destroy everything rather than lose.” He almost smiled. “You taught me about Parfit’s hitchhiker, remember? It knew that the trigger was real, knew that I, of all people, would follow through.”
“What happened to everyone in the first branch?” I asked, but I already knew. The bet he’d been making with his own life, he had now made with everyone’s.
Any hint of a smile was gone now. “We went peacefully, if it helps. That was part of the deal.”
“You had no right,” I said. Yelled. My voice sounded strange in my own ears. “You had no right to make that decision for everyone.”
“No,” Peter agreed. “I didn’t. But no one else was going to fix it. And the alternative—the suffering that would continue, the risks that would go unaddressed, the futures that would never happen—” He shook his head. “I ran the numbers. I thought about it for years. And I couldn’t find a way to justify inaction. Not when I had the means to actually fix things. I made the offer, and the AI accepted.”
He told me about the network. The other believers, scattered across the world, each one running their own version of the experiment, each one converging on the same outcome through different paths. In the branches where Peter lost, someone else would win. In the branches where everyone lost, history would simply… continue, until someone else hit upon the same idea.
And in all of those regions—every branch where they won—they had agreed on one thing: a failsafe.
You see, a true believer would push the utopia button because they’d already decided it was right. They would have made up their mind years ago, committed themselves to the cause, and the final act would be a formality. But that wasn’t what Peter wanted. That wasn’t what any of them wanted.
“The whole point is that it has to actually be good,” he said. “Not just satisfy some criterion, not just follow some logic, but actually—genuinely—be the right thing to do. And the only way to know that is to have someone else make the final decision. To know throughout that, in the end, I’d need to justify my actions to someone who thinks for themselves. Someone who’s skeptical enough to question everything, including me.”
“And… you chose me?”
“I chose you.”
“What if I say no?”
“Then you say no. And we live with whatever comes next.” He paused. “But I don’t think you will. Not because you’re a true believer—you’re not—but because when you see what we’ve built, when you understand what’s possible, when you weigh the suffering that continues every second we delay against the risks of action—I think you’ll make the same calculation I did.”
He showed me the system. The AI, fully aligned, capable of things I hadn’t imagined were possible. The infrastructure for global coordination. The plans for disease eradication, for political reform, for environmental restoration, for the gradual and voluntary transformation of everything that causes suffering into something better.
It was all there. Ready to deploy. Waiting for someone to push the button.
“But why not you?” I asked. “You built this. Why not see it through?”
Peter was quiet for a long moment.
“Because I can’t,” he said finally. “The person who did what I did—who made the choices I made, who sacrificed what I sacrificed—that person can’t exist in utopia. Not really. I would spend the rest of my life looking at what I built and knowing what it cost. Every happy face, every child who didn’t die, every animal that wasn’t tortured—I would see the branches where they didn’t make it, the versions of myself who lost, the people I recruited who never got to see this day. Either that, or it wouldn’t really be me who survived.”
“So you’re—what? Running away?”
“I’m finishing what I started.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device, no bigger than a phone, and regarded it. “I designed this myself. One last experiment. The final pruning.”
He explained. The quantum suicide protocol, turned inward, made recursive. A way to remove himself from this branch—from every future branch—so completely that no version of him would remain to experience what came next.
“Peter—”
“I’m not asking for your permission,” he said gently. “I’m just telling you. So you understand. So you can make your choice with full information.”
He stood. I stood too, not knowing what else to do.
“The AI that can answer your questions,” he said. “It knows everything I know. Take as long as you need. Ask whatever you want. And when you’re ready—if you’re ready—push the button.”
He walked toward the door. I wanted to stop him, to argue, to find the words that would make him stay. But I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be a lie.
At the door, he paused. He didn’t turn around.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Then he stepped through, and closed it behind him.
I stood frozen for a moment, then crossed the room, opened the door.
But Peter was already gone.
Not dead. Not unconscious. Just—gone. An empty hallway. I stared at it for a long time, waiting for something to happen, waiting for him to come back, waiting for the universe to make sense again.
It didn’t.
I was alone in the office, in the facility, in the desert, in the narrow slice of the wavefunction where any of this had happened. The most important man in history had just unmade himself, and he’d left everything—everything—to me.
Outside the window, the sun was setting over the desert. The sky was the color of fire. An earthworm, somewhere in the garden, was burrowing into the cool soil, unaware that anything had changed.
I sat down at Peter’s desk. I looked at the button.
And I began to ask my questions.
Epilogue
I asked for weeks. Maybe months. Does it matter how long it took? The AI was patient. It answered everything—the technical details, the philosophical justifications, the contingency plans, the failure modes. I looked for the flaw in the logic, the crack in the foundation, the reason to refuse. I wanted to find it. I wanted Peter to have been wrong.
He wasn’t wrong.
Or if he was, I wasn’t smart enough to see it. And if I wasn’t smart enough to see it, then refusing would just be cowardice dressed up as principle. The suffering would continue. Someone else, eventually, would build the same thing—someone who might not be as careful, who might not build in the same safeguards, who might not choose a reluctant philosopher as their final check.
I thought about Parfit’s hitchhiker. I thought about what I’d taught Peter, all those years ago, about precommitment and decision theory and being the kind of person who does what they said they’d do even when defection seems costless. I should refuse. I should be the kind of person who refuses to ratify what was done without my consent, so that future Peters have no incentive to try.
But the deterrent value of my refusal was zero. Peter was already gone. The martyrs were already gone. The only thing my refusal would accomplish was more suffering, more delay, more children dying of preventable diseases while I stood on principle.
I pushed the button.
That was years ago. You know what happened next—the rollout, the transformations, the long slow process of making things better. You lived through it. You’re living in the result.
What you didn’t know, until now, was how it started. What it cost. Who paid the price so that you could live in a world where festivals end before you’re tired of them, where heartbreak teaches you something and then stops, where the suffering that defined existence for a hundred million years has finally, quietly, come to an end.
I think about Peter often. I think about the boy in the second row, touching his cross, crying over factory farming. I think about the man who stopped mid-sentence to save an earthworm. I think about the versions of him who lost, scattered across the branches of the wavefunction, blinking out of existence in service of a plan they believed would save everyone.
I don’t know if what he did was right. I don’t know if what I did was right. The philosophy I spent my life studying doesn’t have clean answers for situations like this—for choices made under uncertainty, with consequences that ripple across timelines we can never visit, affecting people we can never meet.
But I know what the world looks like now. And I know what it looked like before. And when I weigh one against the other, when I think about the children who didn’t die and the animals that didn’t suffer and the futures that finally got to happen—I can live with the choice I made. Most days. Most of the time.
St. Peter, they call him now. The patron saint of impossible odds. The man who bet everything on a better world and won. The man who disappeared without a trace.
I don’t correct them. The truth is too strange, too dangerous, too likely to inspire the wrong kind of imitation. Let them think he was lucky. Let them think he was a genius. Let them think whatever helps them sleep at night.
I know what he was. I know what he did. I know what he cost himself, and what he cost me, and what he built out of that terrible arithmetic.
The gates of heaven, constructed by someone who no longer believed anyone was waiting on the other side.
Except now someone is. Because he let us in.