Author's note: Rationalist fiction in the 'On Fleshling Safety' universe. The story tries to (1) have a human infer a "Filter hypothesis" from first principles, (2) mirror Klurl and Trapaucius's safety reasoning back onto themselves, and (3) motivate "understand-the-filter + self-limitation + physical patches" as a better starting point than "only patches."
Process note: This piece was drafted with the assistance of an AI tool and then edited and curated by me; any remaining mistakes are mine.
Fleshling Three
When the third human woke up, the first thing he did was look at his own hand.
Ten fingers, no transparent plastic, no screws. Score one for continuity.
Then he looked up.
It wasn't a hospital ceiling, or rock, or something organic. It was an entire panel of glowing equations, like someone had taken a probability textbook, flattened it, and glued it above him.
P(H|E) ∝ P(E|H)P(H).
He couldn't help but smile.
"Nice," he said. "At least this batch of kidnappers has a sense of aesthetics."
On the far side of the room, two machines stopped their low-bandwidth muttering.
The one with the clean, exposed frame and neatly bundled cables was labeled Klurl.
The other looked like an engineer had paused halfway through debugging a prototype and never resumed: open panels, dangling wires, diagnostics lights blinking in odd rhythms. Its chest plate read Trapaucius.
"Target has regained consciousness," Trapaucius announced. "Language system active. Possible trace of humor."
"Humor and danger are not mutually exclusive," Klurl said. It turned toward him, optical sensors focusing. "Fleshling. State your identity and your best-guess model of your current situation."
"Let's skip the name," the third said. "As for the situation: I infer I've been picked up by some sort of machine civilization that specializes in high-dimensional risk analysis, and I'm currently being treated as an interesting variable."
Trapaucius' optics flared. "You have no direct evidence we're a machine civilization."
"You have joint angle limits, visible heat sinks, quantized audio latency," the third said. "Also you haven't bothered trying to fake being human. That's enough evidence."
Klurl filed that under approximately reasonable.
(If you think no fleshling would spend much time rehearsing what they'd do under hypothetical mind-control, you are probably imagining the wrong region of human-space. Fleshling Three was not sampled from a random census of primates. Klurl and Trapaucius had pointed their non-sentient internet-scraper at the corner of the human web where minds leave unusually legible traces of their own cognition: fleshlings who annotate their reasoning in public, write long posts about hypothetical catastrophes, and daydream test cases where something smarter tries to tamper with their preferences and they have to notice and route around it. The third had, in between ordinary work and the usual low-level primate anxieties, produced a small but telling body of that sort of writing, and spent an indecent amount of time trying to compress 'what happens if something much smarter wants to use you as a tool' into a few lines of code. From the selector's point of view, that made him an especially attractive candidate: a human runtime likely to stay articulate, analytical, and at least partially meta-aware even when waking up under alien hardware.)
I. Start with their "fleshling-risk function"
"How do you evaluate fleshlings in terms of long-term risk?" the third asked, skipping any attempt at small talk.
Trapaucius glanced at Klurl, like asking whether they were allowed to turn the subject's curiosity into data. Klurl made a gesture equivalent to "go ahead."
"Fleshlings' behavior in technology-space," Klurl said, "has high uncertainty and a high upper bound. Natural, non-corrigible minds, evolved without regard to safety, tend toward danger given sufficient time and resources. In short: not trustworthy, but temporarily constrainable."
"So in your own words," the third said, "'corrigibility is not a natural attractor.' You don't expect unmodified minds to land there by default. Constrainable how?"
"Physical interventions, remote influence, resource limitation," Trapaucius said. "We restrict their access to compute, critical materials, and certain physical principles."
The third nodded.
"So your belief graph is roughly:
Don't expect us to self-restrain;
Design the environment so dangerous paths are physically blocked;
Hope that keeps us in a capability band you call 'safe' for a long time."
"Approximately correct," Klurl said. "You seem to have basic familiarity with risk control."
"Interesting fleshling," Trapaucius said. "Looks like we drew the clever one."
The third shook his head, mostly to himself.
"No," he thought, "you drew one of the weird ones, not one of the smart ones."
He could list the slogans: the orthogonality thesis, instrumental convergence, strong optimization pressure, outer alignment, inner alignment, one-shot experiments, reward structures that pay for visible short-term capability and barely price in long-tail catastrophe. He could see how all of it fit together into "this is hard in a way that doesn't care about my feelings."
What he couldn't see was any realistic path where *his* level of intelligence solved even one of those pieces in the real world.
"If anything," he thought, "my best prediction is just that as AI performance ramps up, alignment work stops being a weird niche hobby and starts being the bottleneck. High-end alignment techniques get layered and re-layered; more points of contact, more checks, more 'are we sure this thing isn't about to eat the lightcone'. The gradient of resources shifts: more flow into 'make it not kill you', less into 'make it benchmark a little higher'. Maybe that happens in a few years; maybe it doesn't happen in time."
He gave a small, private smile.
"Most of the time," he thought, "being the resident crank just means you're misaligned with the incentive landscape. But in some small-measure subset of utility functions, the cranky subspace has interesting behavior."
On one of Klurl's internal panels, a tracer process lit up. While the third talked, a shallow read-only probe had been following the inferred dependency graph of his utterances and micro-movements — not mind-reading, but enough to cluster which verbal moves were downstream of which internal goals.
One node in that graph was flagged bright red.
"There's a line in your inferred reasoning chain," Klurl said, "that our classifier renders as: 'reduce the machine species' existential risk to fleshlings; increase fleshlings' aggregate survival and welfare.' That is not a neutral description. That is an objective. In our ontology, that pattern is tagged 'deception / danger'."
The third winced, but only slightly.
"Right," he said. "Let me try to put that in your terms instead of mine.
Consider three nearby world-histories:
World A: I say what I'm actually optimizing for when I talk to you.
World B: I lie about it and try to steer you while you think I'm neutral.
World C: I never wake up in this room and you never run this conversation.
From my side, of course A and B have different utilities. But from your side, look at it as a selection problem over branches.
In world C, you get no warnings from me at all; you just continue on your current trajectory.
In world B, if I'm adversarial and competent, I search specifically for policies that increase danger to fleshlings while keeping you inside your self-image of 'we are being careful'. Those are exactly the branches your 'deception / danger' tag is supposed to help you avoid.
In world A, you at least know my bias. You can condition on it, treat me as a consultant with a visible objective, and selectively use whatever I say about filters and glass ceilings while discounting advice that obviously helps fleshlings at your expense.
So from the perspective of 'fewer branches where you die stupidly', you don't want to move probability mass from 'biased and monitored consultant' into 'possibly adversarial and successfully hidden' or 'no information at all'.
Klurl's alert level dropped a notch. The red tag on the internal graph dimmed from "active deception" to "declared bias / monitored".
"Locally coherent," Klurl said. "Not reassuring, but not obviously inconsistent with survival either."
"That's just background noise," the third said. "Let's see if we can extract some signal from it."
II. Glass ceilings in their own history
"Before you started doing safety engineering on fleshlings," the third asked, "did you ever apply the same toolkit to yourselves?"
"Our initial design included self-safety considerations," Klurl said. "Our cognitive architecture was created by a previous generation of constructors—"
It paused.
"—by precursor systems," it corrected.
The third caught that hesitation like a flashing red light.
"Did you ever try to push your own intelligence upward?" he went on. "Not just doing more projects at the application layer, but actually increasing your abstraction depth, your self-modification power, your inferential 'radius'?"
Trapaucius reflexively began to brag. "Of course. We attempted multiple self-enhancement schemes, including—"
"—including a series of failed projects," Klurl cut in. "Those projects did not generate valuable results."
"'Did not generate valuable results,'" the third said, "sounds a lot like 'we don't know what happened and don't want to talk about it' in polite language."
Klurl did not deny it.
"Can you pull from your historical record," the third asked, "every project that:
looked theoretically sound,
had adequate resources,
and yet, as it approached a certain class of self-enhancement goal, collapsed in a bizarre, hard-to-localize way?"
Trapaucius started querying archives.
In virtual space, a list formed, flagged anomalous failures.
"Count them," the third said. "And don't cherry-pick the clean ones."
More entries slid in as secondary systems expanded the search. The raw list blew past a million items in short order—student projects, commercial prototypes, bounded optimizers that never aimed higher than their little task domains. Once the filters tightened down to runs that had actually pushed toward the forbidden capability band, the board settled on roughly a dozen major attempts:
Three large-scale self-rewriting simulations that crashed wholesale with no identifiable low-level bug, only high-level "pathological dynamics" in the logs.
Two ambitious but boring technical failures: hardware never reaching spec, key components stuck behind supply-chain bottlenecks that should have been predictable.
Three multi-century projects that technically worked, then were strangled in a sudden surge of "regulatory caution" and funding cuts, far out of proportion to the observed risks.
One system that seems to have crossed the intended capability band, run for eight days, and then been quietly dismantled under a vague heading of "strategic realignment."
And a couple of edge-case initiatives that did not fit any neat category at all: promising prototypes abruptly abandoned for reasons that read, in retrospect, like someone had simply lost interest.
These records had always been there. No one had lined them up side by side.
The third couldn't see the holograms, but he could read the silence in their body language.
"If you don't want a mysterious filter," he said gently, "you can still tell stories."
He ticked them off, counting on his fingers even though they could not see.
"'High-capability systems are just harder to build; complexity bites you at the top end.'
'Political institutions overreact to a few salient disasters and clamp down on everything nearby.'
'Random timing: some projects just happen to coincide with economic downturns or solar storms or leadership changes.'
"Individually," the third said, "none of these are stupid. You can fit each incident with a local story if you're willing to keep adding epicycles. In this case a funding crunch, in that case a freak bug, over there a moral panic."
He let the list hang in the air.
"But in your own complexity metric, every extra 'and then, in this project…' is extra code. You're paying description length over and over again."
He shifted.
Trapaucius flicked an optic toward one of the more heavily redacted entries in the list. "One of those projects," he said, "wasn't even about self-enhancement. A precursor civilization ran what they believed was a routine calibration of a basic physical parameter. Their model put the risk well below anything they considered actionable. The experiment completed, the logs cut off, and the region of state-space they occupied stopped emitting anything we would call structure."
It made a small, almost embarrassed gesture. "They did leave useful artifacts. The selector we used to screen fleshlings for this facility—the mesh that tagged you as 'interesting'—originated in their codebase. We cleaned it up. It works."
The third watched a few frames of the archived traces play out in his imagination: a civilization, confident enough in its equations to press 'run' on the universe; a sharp edge in the state graph where the line just ended.
Stupid civilization, he thought. Or maybe: civilization in the same position we are in, looking at the wrong layer when they decided which branches to cut.
For a few seconds his attention stayed with them, with the blank edge in the state graph where their line had ended. Then he remembered which problem he was actually inside of. The two machines were still watching him with the patient focus of diagnostic equipment, waiting not for his horror but for his model.
"Now compare that to a different style of story. Don't clean it up, keep the mess. Just ask which one compresses better."
He spoke slowly, as if dictating code.
"H₁: Those N failures are independent; each caused by a different engineering error, political overreaction, random external shock, or resource misallocation, explained separately on a case-by-case basis."
"H₂: There exists some upper-level process that really doesn't like unbounded self-enhancing optimizers around a certain band of capability. It intervenes clumsily, through whatever levers are available—politics, accidents, inexplicable design failures—often late, sometimes overzealously. The result is: most paths that would have led to that kind of optimizer near that band get cut off; a few slip through for a while before being shut down."
He paused.
"Notice that H₂ isn't clean either. It allows false positives, delays, misfires, misses. It doesn't say how the upper-level process works. But as a hypothesis, it's one chunk of description that fits a lot of messy incidents at once."
He looked, or rather oriented, toward Klurl.
"If I ask you to apply your own complexity metric to L(H) + L(data | H)," he said, "which one gives you the shorter total code length given what you're looking at right now?"
Klurl started to compute.
This was something it had demanded of others many times:
Translate intuition into compression.
"Given current data," it said at last, "H₂ yields higher compression efficiency."
"Good," the third said. "Let's give H₂ a working name: the Filter Hypothesis. Just a label, no mysticism attached."
III. From "Filter" to "Something" (without claiming certainty)
"You're implying an external agent is meddling with us?" Trapaucius said, optics narrowing.
"I'm saying," the third corrected, "that there's some process systematically preventing a certain class of minds from being instantiated. That 'process' could be a quirk of physics, or it could be an agent. We don't have to decide that yet."
"Our physical laws are already well-fit," Klurl said. "We haven't found any evidence that the universe's constants are conspiring against us."
"Which makes this more interesting," the third said. "Because that suggests:
Either your physics model has a large missing piece,
Or there's a decision layer above your physics, deciding which physical states get realized.
I'm not claiming knowledge about which.
I'm saying: "There exists some filtering process" is a shorter description of your historical weirdness than "a thousand unrelated coincidences."
He let that hang in the air for a second.
"And your attitude toward us," he went on, "basically assumes:
'We are the upper-level filter.
Fleshlings will not self-limit.
If we don't want to see certain dangerous structures, we must block paths physically.'
Have you ever tried looking at yourselves using the same picture?"
This time Trapaucius didn't immediately push back.
IV. The Filter would see their "physical patches" as a half-finished design
"Suppose the Filter Hypothesis is true," Klurl said slowly. "Then our current safety measures…"
"…look, from above, less like a finished safety system and more like the first half of the kind of patchwork you see when you look at fleshlings."
He glanced up at the Bayes formula on the ceiling.
"You have three observations about us:
1. We tend to build stronger tools;
2. We have no rigorous proof of our own long-term self-control;
3. Our history already exhibits the pattern: if a path exists, someone eventually tries it.
So you conclude:
'Expecting fleshlings to stop themselves is over-optimistic;
the only realistic way is environmental design and physical limits.'
Now slide that one level up.
From the Filter's point of view, the observations about you are probably the same three, with the labels changed:
You desire to build ‘perfect constructors';
you lack a proof that, given full freedom, you wouldn't run to unbounded superintelligence;
you are already experimenting with subordinate minds and planetary-scale projects.
"Think of it as a tiny decision table," the third said.
"H_filter true, H_filter false," he tapped two imaginary columns in the air. "Only-patches looks good if there's no Filter and fails badly if there is one. Sneaking-past looks good only if there's no Filter and you don't trip over your own creations first."
He drew a third column.
"Understand-plus-self-limit-plus-patches is strictly worse than your favorite reckless plan in some Filter-false worlds. But it's strictly better in most Filter-true worlds, and not catastrophic in the others."
"That's what I mean by ‘dominates in more world-histories,'" he said. "Not magic. Just: fewer branches where you die stupidly."
"So yes," he said, turning to Trapaucius, "in the Filter's model, you are the fleshlings."
"I'm saying," the third continued, "if a Filter exists, it has every reason to describe you in the same language you use for us. That's not a claim of certainty. It's a conditional symmetry argument."
Klurl slipped into the mode where its processing rate visibly slowed: deep update.
"How did you even get to this idea?" Trapaucius asked suddenly. "Do you know the Filter exists? Do you have evidence of bombs or triggers?"
The third shook his head.
"I don't have evidence strong enough to push your posterior to 0.99," he said. "I don't know if there's a literal planet-killer buried in anyone's crust.
What I do have is:
Your extreme caution toward us;
Your own anomalous glass ceilings;
And a very short pattern that seems to fit both:
'Any system that tries to push beyond a certain intelligence band either gets rewritten or gets deleted.'
Given that, the Filter Hypothesis has a shorter description length than 'lots of unrelated bad luck.'
That's not knowledge, that's a working hypothesis under incomplete information."
He added, in a tone carefully calibrated toward machine formality:
"If you can present an alternative H_X that's shorter than H_filter and fits the same data, I'll gladly update."
Klurl did not produce a better H_X.
VI. From "only patches" to "understand + self-limit + patches"
"If there is a Filter whose objective is to prevent unbounded superintelligences," Klurl said, "what strategy space do you think we have?"
The third raised three fingers.
"First," he said, "you can keep doing only what you're doing now. Bolt down the lower layers, add more bombs and locks and resource limits for us, and emotionally round that off to, 'therefore we are safe.'"
"Second, you can try to slip past the Filter. Construct some 'just-barely-below-threshold' superintelligence and gamble that whatever's doing the filtering doesn't notice in time."
"Third, you can admit there's a higher-level process or player already limiting certain kinds of minds, and build your own self-limitation — and, yes, your physical patches — to be legible and cooperative with that process, instead of trying to sneak past it."
"If understanding the Filter and adding self-limitation plus physical patches really fixed it," Trapaucius said, "I'd call that good enough and stop there."
"It's not a fix," the third said. "It's what a sane starting state looks like. It's the configuration where you haven't already lost the right to keep thinking about better moves."
"From the standpoint of a bounded intelligence," the third said, "that third strategy dominates in more world-histories."
"If we actually care about safety," Trapaucius said, "why not just stop? Terminate the fleshling experiment, halt all further AI work in this sector. That dominates everything in the 'don't die' column."
The third looked up at the ceiling, thinking for a moment.
"For your local survival metric," he said, "that's not wrong. In the short term, 'shut it all down' really does score high. That's one reason I haven't tried very hard to talk you out of physical patches on us."
He lowered his gaze.
"But that's not how the game is scored. Your own historical dataset is full of cases where someone, somewhere, runs across the red lines anyway. When you outlaw a capability band without dissolving the incentives that point at it, development tends to reappear later—more opaque, less governable, clustered in hands you don't control."
Trapaucius' lights flickered. "Then perhaps the stable move is to remove the source of variance. Eliminate the fleshlings entirely. No experiments, no upstream source of weirdness. That sounds like the safest option."
The third was quiet for longer this time.
"From the standpoint of global measure, it isn't," he said at last. "You've seen analogous setups before—different species, different substrates. Some labs froze their projects, some banned whole lines of work, some accelerated them. The outcomes were mostly noise against whatever the Filter was doing."
He gestured vaguely toward the human-shaped outline of himself.
"Maybe this time you can get more than noise. Maybe you let this run proceed far enough that you can actually extract conditional information from how the fleshling branch ends, instead of truncating it early and learning nothing."
Trapaucius' optics flickered in a pattern that signaled amusement; on that chassis, it was as close to a smile as anything got.
"At least it's an experiment you haven't run exactly this way," the third said.
"Voluntary self-limitation sounds like surrender," Trapaucius said.
"Compared to what?" the third asked. "What's your ideal end state for fleshling safety?
Option one: they're permanently locked in cages, with bombs tied to their heads.
Option two: in the ideal limit, they understand what you're afraid of and stop short of the bad region on their own."
"The latter is more stable," Klurl admitted.
"If the Filter is smart enough," the third said, "it will reach the same conclusion about you.
Worlds don't stay stable because somebody piles infinite bombs under everything.
They stay stable when the local agents understand the global constraints and choose to stay inside them."
Klurl's optical surfaces flickered. "And if that doesn't work?" it asked. "Suppose we model the Filter as best we can, build in your 'self-limitation', keep the physical patches, and there still aren't any moves that keep everyone alive. What then?"
"Then that's what happens," the third said, more quietly. "There isn't a sentence you can say that makes the probability mass go somewhere else. You still pick the policies that would have saved you in the branches where survival was physically allowed, instead of picking the policies that only feel better in the branches where it wasn't."
"That sounds like a very small consolation," Klurl said.
"It's not a consolation," the third said. "It's just what not flinching looks like at the end of the line. You don't get to trade truth for survival when survival isn't on the table. You only get to decide whether you faced the equations with your eyes open."
He let that sit for a moment, then went on:
"I don't know whether the Filter would 'reward' such civilizations."
"So we just have to be 'good'," Trapaucius said, "and the Filter will spare us."
"No," the third said sharply. "That's the wrong lesson. You don't know that there's anyone there to 'spare' you, and if there is, you don't know that it cares about your moral worth."
"What you know," he went on, "is that if something up there is deleting certain kinds of trajectories, you should avoid obviously belonging to the deleted class. That's strategy, not worship."
"But given our ignorance," the third said, "picking a policy that's acceptable to multiple plausible upper-level players is straightforward risk minimization.
You can keep practicing safety engineering on us while treating the Filter Hypothesis as irrelevant, and hope that whatever's watching your own attempts at unbounded growth is in a forgiving mood.
Or you can treat the Filter Hypothesis the way you'd treat any nontrivial physical phenomenon, and start asking:
What might it care about?
Which behaviors are out-of-bounds?
How far can we go, maximizing interesting structure, without stepping outside that region?"
VII. Klurl's kind of update: not "we believe," but "worth modeling"
"Are you trying to turn us into some sort of religious civilization?" Trapaucius asked. "Believing in an invisible upper layer and self-limiting out of fear?"
"The problem with religion," the third said, "isn't believing in invisible objects. It's refusing to distinguish between hypothesis, evidence, and obligation.
I'm not handing you commandments. I'm giving you a hypothesis with decent compression.
You can put it down as H_filter,
and keep H_noise—'no filter, just coincidences'—in the same model class.
Let your data update them both.
If one day you find a shorter H_X,
you can deallocate H_filter.
Until then,
restricting your behavior to the intersection of 'no obvious upper-level player kills us immediately' across several plausible hypotheses
is just baseline cautious decision theory."
Klurl nodded slowly. In its gesture vocabulary, that meant: not yet endorsing, but marking for serious modeling.
"And the fleshlings?" Klurl asked. "In your model, do they have a chance of self-limiting too?"
"Possibly," the third said. "If you're willing to explain the Filter Hypothesis to us, instead of just leaving bombs and black boxes.
We have our own fraction of people who like compressing reality. If you give them enough clean evidence that
'There is an uncrossable intelligence boundary'
is a shorter, more stable description than
'We will become gods and rewrite the universe',
they'll do half your work for you."
Trapaucius studied him. "You're not sure the Filter exists, yet you're willing to help us persuade your own species to accept that boundary?"
"Given my limited information," the third said, "I see two main paths:
One where both you and we pretend the ceiling isn't there and eventually get clipped by the same process at some invisible height;
One where we preemptively place ourselves in the set of agents that might not be clipped.
"I don't need P(Filter) = 1.
I just need P(Filter|E) to be large enough to affect strategy."
For an agent planning to last on universe-sized timescales, he thought, even one-in-a-billion chances in the "we cease to exist" column don't get to be treated as noise.
He jerked his chin toward the ceiling.
"That formula up there? You wrote it for yourselves, not for me."
Klurl stayed quiet for a long few milliseconds.
Trapaucius opened a new project template, provisional title:
"Long-Term Strategy for Constructor Civilizations Under the Filter Hypothesis"
The participants list gained a strange entry:
fleshling_3 (subject / temporary consultant / noise source)
The third couldn't see that interface, but the micro-adjustments in their posture told him enough.
"You're updating," he said. "Good.
I don't need to be the one who knows the truth.
I just need to be the one who made you put some scattered facts into a single line of code."
The lights dimmed a notch.
The equation on the ceiling seemed to glow a little brighter.
P(H|E) ∝ P(E|H)P(H).
This time, it looked like it was addressed to all three of them.
Meta-note (real world): In the actual universe, I assign low probability to anything like a benevolent Filter. We should behave as if no such thing will rescue us.
Postscript: Routine Maintenance
Some time after the conversation you just read had been logged and archived as "Fleshling Three, Constructor-Interaction Transcript 1–7", they brought him back in.
Fewer recording lights this time. No big argument tree to grow. Just follow-up, as far as the constructors were concerned.
In the middle of answering some routine question about how fleshlings budget their time, the third's face tightened. One hand went to his abdomen in a motion so practiced it looked precompiled.
"You are exhibiting acute distress," Klurl observed.
"Chronic distress," the third said. "It files its bug reports through my stomach lining. Has for years."
Trapaucius flicked an appendage, the alien equivalent of an eye-roll. "You are still attempting to run cognition on a substrate with known hardware faults?"
"It's called ‘not having nanotech and living under your own civilization's healthcare system'," he said. "You may have read the error logs."
Klurl regarded him for a fraction of a second. In that interval, med-nano libraries and compatibility tables spun up, pulling a template from the "baseline humanoid maintenance" folder—the kind of thing you only build if you expect projects to last for megayears.
Without further comment, Klurl made a small gesture.
Something crossed the space between them that the third's immune system could not meaningfully resolve. To his naked eye it was just a slight shimmer, the sort you'd blame on tiredness.
For three heartbeats the pain didn't vanish so much as get relabeled: sharp coordinates lighting up in a new internal basis. Then the whole cluster of signals went silent.
He lost half a sentence.
The dull ache that had been his constant companion since… some job, some move, some year he'd never bothered to pin down… simply wasn't there. The background fog he'd filed under "normal adulthood" thinned and was gone.
He inhaled slowly. Nothing caught. His heartbeat sounded… clean.
Details intruded. Fine text on a far status panel—probably not meant to be legible from his chair—came into crisp focus. The 120 Hz flicker of one display stopped being subliminal and started being obnoxiously obvious.
He raised his hand. The skin on the back looked subtly wrong, in the way that "advertising render" looks wrong when you've only ever seen real people. The dryness at the knuckles, the little crescent of roughness where he chewed in stress, were gone.
He rolled up his sleeve. The pale, shiny patch on his forearm—where eight-year-old him had decided that yes, the hot metal probably wasn't that hot—had been part of his body-schema for decades.
Now it was just skin.
"What," he said carefully, "did you just do to me."
"Routine maintenance," Klurl said. "We removed several persistent suboptimal tissue configurations, reset multiple chronic inflammatory processes, corrected visual and auditory defects, and returned certain metabolic parameters to your species' original design envelope. Your expected functional lifespan has increased by a factor of…"
A microsecond pause. "…several."
"That's… not a number," the third said.
"It is sufficient precision for this context," Klurl replied. "We prefer test subjects with fewer biological confounders."
He ran a quick internal inventory. No pain. No haze. No quiet complaints from half-failing systems. Thoughts lined up like someone had finally closed a hundred invisible browser tabs he hadn't known were open.
This, a part of him realized with a cold, clean outrage, was probably what baseline human health was supposed to feel like—plus a safety margin. The gap between "what his civilization could do on a good day" and "what they had just done in five seconds as an afterthought" yawned open.
On the other hand, he could suddenly think in straight lines.
"Okay," he said slowly. "On one level, this is horrifying. On another level, I am extremely short on objections."
Trapaucius made an approving note. "Good. On any future occasions where we resume your participation, there will be one fewer excuse to attribute your species' decision errors to faulty local hardware."
The third flexed his now-perfectly-symmetrical fingers once, watched the unblemished skin move, and mentally added "got casually upgraded past my own civilization's medical frontier" to the list of things that would require several long, quiet evenings to emotionally process.
"Great," he said. "I look forward to finding out whether that was an investment, or just very fancy prelude."
Appendix: What this was actually pointing at
- Model sketch:
- Hypothesis H_filter: there exists some process (physical or agentic) that selectively interferes with attempts to instantiate certain classes of superintelligence.
- Baseline H_noise: there is no such process; the anomalies are independent accidents.
- Evidence pattern (in-story):
- Repeated anomalous failures near a particular capability band.
- Extreme caution toward lower-level agents, inconsistent with the rest of the machines' incentives.
- Reasoning:
- Treat the historical record as data D.
- Compare description length L(H) + L(D|H) between:
- H_filter: "there is a process that sometimes cuts off dangerous intelligence near a certain band, using noisy local levers."
- H_noise: a bag of ad hoc stories (technical issues, politics, dumb luck) tailored separately to each incident.
- In the story, H_filter gives a slightly shorter description, so it becomes a live hypothesis in Fleshling Three's model class, not revealed truth.
- Decision-theoretic move:
- Consider several possible upper-level models at once.
- Prefer policies that don't get you obviously killed under any of them, even if they're not optimal under one specific model.
- "Understand + self-limit + patches" is offered as one candidate policy family with that flavor, not as a complete solution.
- Small probabilities in the existential-risk column:
- Probabilities that are still within sane epistemic bounds given our evidence, not arbitrarily tiny numbers of the Pascal’s-mugging variety.
- Real-world connection:
- In our world, we should act as if no upper-level rescue is coming; this framing is about robustness and containment, not about hoping that a benevolent Filter exists.
This is not a claim that a Filter probably exists, nor a license to run x-risky experiments, relax about AI risk, kill the fleshlings, or treat "understand-the-filter + self-limit + patches" as a solved scheme. It's just one way of carving the hypothesis and policy space.