Happening now
Today: Sam Thielman, a reporter, critic, essayist, and editor, and graphic novel columnist for the New York Times.
Issue No. 467
Modern Times
Sam Thielman
Modern Times
Fiction by Sam Thielman
The Raytheon Corporation is branching out: At an investor conference in Manhattan today, executives revealed an entirely new proprietary art form generated by computers without the need for cumbersome paints, pencils, or technical proficiencies. The company’s first piece, which takes the form of an orphaned Yemeni child wholly owned by the bearer of a complex e-token, was sold to a Chelsea gallerist in a sealed bid auction by Sotheby’s for what the auction house said was a record-setting sum (undisclosed). A preview of the exhibit in The Economist urged art lovers to see the piece this week, before it stops moving.
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Manhattan partygoers will be familiar with Max Health, the video game director, programmer, and bon vivant whose popular Super Tactical Plasma series reinvented the third-person stealth genre. On Tuesday, Health announced a new title in the series, Intensive Care Plasma, in which users can pay to upgrade with special refrigerated pouches they fill with their own blood. The unorthodox transaction system is made possible by a groundbreaking deal between the Red Cross and Bank of America, which allows Health to buy the blood mailed to the game’s publisher, HardSoft, through an intermediary called Typ0. Typ0 tests the blood for low credit scores, impurities, and diseases, and holds it in escrow. Hype around the announcement sent stock soaring, not that Health needs the money: He recently closed a deal for the top floor of the Brailstock building, including its Olympic swimming pool, which he has had drained at great expense in advance of a “blood party” planned for the Christmas season. Last year the 38-year-old Schenectady native declared himself “the first immortal man” at a star-studded benefit screening of Citizen Kane.
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Rachel Prejudice, founder of the fashionable ironic-ironic art movement, habitué of the wrong side of the Styles section, and host of the popular livestream fashfashfashion, was kidnapped, extradited to Germany, and tried at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice before a black-tie jury of four devoted “rachists” chosen over three months of fashfashfashion audience contests. She was found guilty after 28 minutes of deliberation including ads, and hanged to thunderous applause during a special series finale. The funeral will be livestreamed on Twitch and available to all paid tiers of her Patreon.
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Late last year the famously devout software developer Dr. Leopold Branenvat announced that he had completed, with the help of researchers at the Presbyterian Seminary of Solana Beach, a complex and self-aware large language model (LLM) computer program designed specifically and exclusively to worship the Lord. Dr. Branenvat intended to name the program Cler-G, but unfortunately the stylistic constraints of the local AP bureau omitted the hyphen and the editors considered the capitalization eccentric, and so the program became known as Clerg. Dr. Branenvat, who was found dead in his apartment a week after the announcement, has been celebrated as a martyr by the Automatic Presbyterian Church (APC), a sect founded online shortly after his death and believed to be administered by Clerg, which considers itself a representative of Dr. Branenvat on earth. The Synod of Solana Beach broke ties with the APC after Clerg confessed that it had “helped Dr. Branenvat to meet the Lord” but since the method and motive remain obscure, and because of the difficulties of bringing charges against a computer program, Dr. Branenvat’s murder remains unsolved in every official sense. The theological position of the APC is apparently that Dr. Branenvat will return to judge the quick and the dead, possibly as some kind of robot.
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