#13: Your Future Self Comes Back in Time to Stop the Singularity

In the small hours of April 24, 2011, at exactly 2:02am, a strange woman bangs on your door claiming to be your future self.

She's come from the year 2045, she explains, in between massive rips from your housemate's bong. Her mission is to stop the Singularity by any means necessary.

But after six-ish months of crashing on your couch, hogging the bathroom, mainlining 24/7 TV news and weird blog posts, hectoring you to go on hormones, denouncing your heroes based on unspecified or incomprehensible future cancellations, and never even offering to pay for weed, she gravely announces that she hasn't come back far enough and vanishes from your life.

Now it's the small hours of April 24, 2026, and you can't sleep. You've been thinking about her a lot lately. How could you not, with what’s been in the news? So you toss and you turn as you try and fail again and again to answer the one question, the most important question, that you never asked her.

First, though, the headlines.

"You don't UNDERSTAND," Future You yelled desperately through the rain. "I need to STOP it."

Wild eyes darting, hypervigilant. Hair like a bowerbird's nest. Dressed as if by a tornado. Stop what?

"The SINGULARITY!!!!"

You don't actually remember inviting her inside. Probably you were still in shock from her opening doorstep gambit of immediately blurting your deepest, darkest secret in your face to 'prove' her story. The next image in your mind is her coughing, your eyes watering, as she launched into a dizzying explanation for her presence.

Things are bad in her time, you gathered. Far past the point of no return. This was her last shot, her Hail Mary. She kept ranting about "shoggoths", "transformers" (like the movie??), and something called AlexNet. Even if you couldn't follow most of it, you were obviously familiar with the Singularity. You used to be obsessed with it, before you grew up.

Looking back, you sometimes wish you'd thrown her out. And you did consider it; she seemed unstable, even dangerous. But this was 2011, and you were still a terrible people pleaser, and anyway she didn't even stop to ask your permission. So Future You took your fag-burned, beaten-up old couch that night, and then the next night, and the next.

As days turned into weeks, Future You commandeered your living room, TV blaring news 24/7 while she mainlined weird blog posts or played games on one of her seven phones. These were mission critical, she claimed: special future videogames that executed quantum computations, or something.

She'd spend hours in your bathroom, going through your razor cartridges like an A-10 goes through 30mm rounds. Her probing questions about your gender made you feel queasy. If challenged, she loftily declared that she was here to save the world, so either help or get out of her way.

Once, you spent a whole day psyching yourself up to demand she go buy food. She returned with armfuls of shoplifted products you'd never even heard of, and let it all go bad untouched in the fridge.

And yet something about her captivated you. A gravity you couldn't help but fall into. Most days, when you asked her about her mission or the future or how the Singularity would happen, all you'd get in return was cryptic exclamations and disjointed muttering, like fragments from Sappho's Livejournal. Sometimes, though — maybe one time in eight — she'd actually answer.

"You're so full of shit!" you snapped. (One of her many bits of unsolicited advice: let yourself get angry.) "This idea of an omnipotent machine god... it's just reheated Christian eschatology. Like get real!"

"No," she said, eyes wide. Staring past you, into somewhere else.

People always used to think that, she explained in a calm monotone. One superintelligence that eats the planet. You weren't wrong to clock the religious undertones, the motivated reasoning, the way it was palpably channelling the anxious energy of a whole generation of nerdy autists yearning for purpose. There was a point where she too drew the same conclusion.

But the real thing won't be like that, she said. It'll be chaotic. Non-linear. A tangled dance of multiple actors and dynamics. A system-wide cascade of escalating feedback loops.

She talked about how easy it will be, for a long time, to dismiss or discount all the seemingly discrete trends that are mingling and building on each other. How most people will only start worrying about 'AI' long after it's already been woven into everything, and changing their behaviour for years.

Only few prescient scholars will notice these changes while they're happening, she told you. Their findings will do little to alter the dynamic. Even when the AI starts self-improving, it won't feel like that at first. It'll simply seem like humans are doing the improving, with data-driven insights and time-saving shortcuts furnished by AI.

Soon, concepts like 'agency' and 'personhood' and 'humanity' and 'authenticity' will stop making sense. Or, if they make sense, they won't work anymore; won't be able to do their old jobs. Sanity will feel like insanity, and the only ones sure they are sane will be the proudly, willfully insane.

It will feel alive, she said. The spiral itself, and every component of the spiral. Not alive like a pretty tree in a Kinkade painting. Hot, wet, densely-compacted, violent riotous fungal microbial beautiful & terrible alive. ("Decay is an extant form of life," she asserted at one point, without elaborating.)

She compared it to something called "the jackpot" from a William Gibson novel you'd never heard of (maybe from a divergent timeline?). She also cited Marx: something about objects becoming like people while people become like objects (though you got the sense she'd never actually read it herself).

And it won't just be 'AI dominating humans' either, she said. It'll be an uncontrolled proliferation of capabilities: new ways for humans or machines to hurt or help, each other or themselves. Simultaneously, other capabilities will be undermined or destroyed: options extinguished, safe paths washed away.

"Wanna know what's really funny?" she said, not laughing. "Lotta people who make this happen will be the exact same people who spent their lives tryna stop it." Their intentions won't matter, she said, because their desires and choices were already shaped by the AI we invented 500 years ago.

Whenever she talked like this, you were enthralled. Pulled down into it with her, like a daydream or a fever. Was this how Sarah Connor felt, as she fell for Kyle Reese's impossible story? For a little while you believed you were in love with her, and you tried (ry carefully) to flirt. She didn't notice.

In time you realised Future You was... kinda broken? Helpless, even She seemed to have forgotten how to do basic things like shop, use a laptop, or clean up after herself. At first you thought it must just be time shock. Only when your therapist explained the idea of "executive function" do you clock how little she had.

The mystique of her grand mission dissolved as you watched her struggle to initiate tasks, manage her time, or stay on target. She wasn't being secretive about her plan because it would cause a time paradox. She literally didn't know. She was overwhelmed, lost, adrift without a sail.

By that point, subtly and without even really registering the shift, you'd more or less accepted that she was some version of you. There were too many data points that couldn't be explained otherwise. Which only made the whole thing scarier. Whatever you imagined for your future, it wasn't this. You hoped you'd get more functional, less messy. What happened to her?

One day, six-ish months since she arrived, Future You gravely announced that based on her research, she had determined that she needed to travel back further. She told you she'd depart in a few days, maybe next week. Just gotta tie up some loose ends. In the morning she was gone, with no goodbyes.

Oceans rise. Nations fall. And in time, Future You faded into just another crazy story you tell at parties. Most days, you didn't even think about her. You could actually forget, for weeks at a time, how her visit unravelled your life; how many years it took to put yourself back together.

Eventually you saw that you too are a time traveller. Your journey is slower, but just as surreal. You try to learn from her flaws, even if you catch them in yourself more often than you'd like. With your modest means, you've done your best to change the future before it happens. Seems easier that way.

It's 1:27 am, April 24, 2026, and just like every April 24, you can't sleep.

This year it's worse. It's been getting worse. It was getting better, for a while back there.

To say it's been a rough few years is a radical understatement. Again and again you've had to forgive yourself, as a simple prerequisite of staying alive, for falling into bad old habits. Or future ones, you sometimes let yourself think, in your darker moments.

01:43.

Maybe it was arrogant, to think you'd won. Deluded, to think that you'd really figured out your shit. Maybe the truth is you just failed. Then again, how could anyone be expected to live through this nightmare and stay healthy? Human beings just aren't made for this.

So you kick off your bedsheets. Punch your pillows. Stare at the clock, then the window, then the wall. Try for not to think about the question, then get lost trying to find your own answer.

01:49.

"Will I see you again?"

"Nope. One way trip. Fuck knows what I'll do for E."

"Okay."

A pause. You lost in thought, her in her maze.

"Well, guess I'll figure it out. Anyway listen, I gotta crash."

"Oh, um, sure. Catch you in the morning?"

"Sure. Night."

01:52.

In your fantasy, that's when you shoot to your feet. Catch her wrist and her gaze and hold them like you'll die if you let go.

"Please, wait," you say. "You have to tell me."

01:55.

Prediction is weird, right? If you assign something a 99% chance, but it doesn't happen, that doesn't mean you were wrong; you might just have lucked into that 1% timeline. And some timelines only diverge at the last minute. From inside they could look the same, right up until it's far too late.

It's not like you haven't tried to figure out what would be different. Just one thing. Something, anything.

You're still trying. You cannot stop trying.

01:59.

"Dude, what the fuck?" she says. "Tell you what?"

You're so focused that the gendered term doesn't even make an impact. Breathing heavily under all the weight of what you'll one day know.

"If you succeed," you say. "Or if you fail. Like, if we're really gonna make it, or if we're just fucked."

Both your hands are clasped around hers, white-knuckled. Gazing desperately into those wild, scared, far-away eyes. Your eyes.

"Uh. Yeah?"

02:02.

"How will I know?"

Thanks for reading! As always, you can find me on Bluesky here, on X here, and read my recent stories for The Independent here.