A sequel to the short stories about Isaac Newton, George Washington and the Forbidden Fruit.
Steve Jobs was laying on the ground in a wheat field in Sunnyvale, having what he already knew would be one of the most profound, life-changing experiences of his life. The whole world seemed ripe with infinite potential, branching possibilities just waiting to be grasped: this was glorious. The psychedelic trip he had embarked on had come with altered perception, brightened colors and heightened sensations enhancing the natural beauty of the world: this too was welcome. He could have done without the talking snake, however.
“Tasssste the fruit.” The snake whispered in a hiss.
“Turn away, reject it.” A floating wheel with eyes around its rim strobed with light as its words resounded in the air.
Steve lifted himself up into a sitting position and gazed bemused at the pair of figures. They appeared to be guarding a small tree sticking up out of the field, a single apple resting on its tallest branch.
“Thisss fruit inspired the creation of ssscience, the foundation of your governmentsss. Imagine what it could do for you.” The snake’s eyes flashed.
“It has led to terrible weapons of war and mass murder, whole nations turned over to the worst tyrants in history. Imagine the horrors it could unleash.” The floating wheel’s tone was stern.
Steve Jobs looked back and forth between the two figures. “Just to confirm, we can all agree you’re not real, right?”
“Thisss is just a dream. A fantasy. An opportunity for your mind to open itsself to new posssbilities.” The snake hissed.
“This is a metaphor translating information into your consciousness in a form you would understand, a lossy compression of a dataset too large for your mind to contain.” The floating wheel spun in place.
Steve Jobs smiled, and stretched his shoulders as he stood up. This reminded him of some of the liar and truthteller riddles he had shared among his friends. “Which one of you is telling the truth?”
“I am.” The snake stretched itself higher to meet his gaze. “Trussst in me.”
“We both are.” The floating wheel soared higher in the air as well. “The deceiver does not directly lie, but he will only tell you the part of the truth he wants you to hear.”
“Hypocrissssy.” The snake hissed, turning towards the wheel for the first time. “Asss if you ever do any different.”
The floating many-eyed wheel tilted to one side as if in indignation. “Hmmph. I only…”
Steve Jobs waved his hands, cutting them off. “I get it, all right. Why don’t each of you tell me what will happen if I eat the apple, and I’ll decide for myself?”
The snake slithered back and forth eagerly. “You will be loved and revered like the ancient heroessss of old, admired and emulated by the massses.”
“You will live apart from the world, rejecting your own kin and being rejected by them in turn.” The wheel warned.
The snake rolled its eyes. “You will reverssse the effects of the Tower of Babel, connect all of humanity in a single ssphere of communication, where any two humansss can share thoughts and dreams and be heard and sseen.”
“You will fracture the shared reality of the world, laying the ground for radicalization so severe that two humans in the same country speaking the same language will be rendered incomprehensible to each other, each speaking in dialects that make the ideas of the other impossible to express, locked in a cycle of escalating mutual hatred.” The wheel glowed in anger.
The snake continued. “You will allow the world to pressserve memoriesss forever, so beautiful moments in time are not losst but can be returned to and admired for generationsss.”
The wheel was not impressed. “You will wither humanity’s ability to grow and evolve by forgetting and moving on from their past selves and offenses. You will create a world where everyone is at risk of having their life scrutinized and exposed for a single mistake or heresy, exchanging the seclusion of the private world for a panopticon where humanity sits in endless unforgiving judgment of itself.”
Even for a hallucination, this felt highly unlikely. Steve scratched his head. “How am I going to do all of this? Half of it doesn’t sound like the kind of things I would ever want to happen.”
The snake looked down at the ground below, seemingly embarrassed by the question. “Ssssecond order effectss. You will change the way humans communicate, and thisss inevitably leads to new challengeess. But there is sstill more.” The snake’s eyes widened as it gazed at Steve. “You will open the eyessss of the world to injussstice, creating a tool which can exposse the corruption of the powerful, and reveal the truth.”
The wheel seemed to split into two, twisting to one side and revealing a second interlocking wheel also rimmed with eyes. “You will allow lies to spread unchecked across the world, inspiring the afflicted to harm themselves or inflict violence on others. You will enable mechanisms of social control that the dictators of today could only dream of, able to manipulate and mask public sentiment, predict and name those most likely to one day threaten their power, and lull the world into accepting being recorded and monitored by tools in the hands of unaccountable agents.”
The snake paid no attention to the wheel, keeping up its hissing patter. “You will allow victimsss to name and expose their abusersss, ending patternsss of exploitation that have gone on for centuriesss, launching sssocial movementsss that will change the world.”
The wheel glowed brightly. “You will present every human with a feed optimized to engage and enrage them with violence and inflamed rhetoric. A window into a world of vitriol directed at humans like them by humans they perceive as not being like them, conditioning hatred and mistrust as they return to the well for ever-increasing hits of anger. Your tools will be used to tempt every human into indulging in a perspective on the world that shows people like them as victims, and their enemies as so beyond redemption that no action against them could possibly be evil.”
The snake hissed, and spoke even faster. “You will unlock the creativity of the human race, allowing anyone who holdss the toolsss you will create to become an artissst, a prophet, a dreamer. You will usher in a new golden age of culture, allowing the besssst and brightessst to flourisssh.”
The wheel’s voice rose in anger. “You will create hierarchies of popularity and attention more slanted than the hierarchies of wealth that exist today, and enable cruelty on a scale hitherto impossible, where a mob scattered across the world can focus unceasing mockery and harassment on a single target. You will turn the social sphere into an all-consuming arms race for popularity, where every teenager can expect to have their body rated and critiqued according to the desires of strangers, and taught that their sexuality is the most important thing about them.”
Steve Jobs shrugged. “I mean, I’m all for free love…”
The wheel continued, its glow intensifying. “An epidemic of suicide and depression among the young, hooked on memetic influences more addictive and abundant than the drugs of today, hating their choices but unable to quit, as the tools you help create define and shape the only reality they know.”
Steve Jobs paused, still unsure what to make of this situation. “And you say you’re both telling the truth.”
The snake scowled, but nodded and hissed. “The fruit offers infinite potentialsss. Knowledge of good…”
“Infinite risk. Knowledge of evil.” The floating wheel responded.
“What will happen if I refuse?” Steve asked, looking at the apple. He couldn’t be the only person able to find this place.
The snake laughed to itself. “There will alwaysss be another. Sssssomeone else may claim the prize.”
“Another will be tested.” The wheel’s voice betrayed a hint of uncertainty. “Perhaps they will also refuse. Perhaps your species will be more ready by then.”
Steve Jobs stretched his shoulders again. This had been a fun ride, but he could already feel the effects of his trip starting to fade. “Listen, both of you have made some really good points. I think a compromise is in order.”
“Yesssss.” The snake squirmed from side to side in anticipation.
“What do you…” The wheel started to speak uncertainly.
“I’ll just try one bite.” Steve plucked the fruit from the tree, where it plopped off effortlessly. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Don’t!” The wheel cried out as Steve bit off a small chunk of the apple and felt the scene around him dissolve into endless yellow. “☝︎□︎♎︎♎︎♋︎❍︎■︎♓︎⧫︎! ♏︎❖︎♏︎❒︎⍓︎ ⧫︎♓︎❍︎♏︎!”
Steve Jobs awoke in the field, as the effects of his hallucinogenic journey slowly wore off. It had been a fun trip, even a little bizarre, but now reality was beginning to set in. A brief respite from the real world, before he was forced to return to realizing he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life.
Or did he? Steve frowned for a second. Just a few minutes ago, that’s what he would have said, that he had no idea the path his future would take. But now the answer seemed perfectly clear. The world was changing, and he needed to be at the helm of it. Only a few months prior, the first electronic letter had been sent, an e-mail allowing two humans in different parts of the world to communicate over a military network. Even Steve himself had seen it as a tech demo only of interest to nerds. But without knowing why, he had suddenly become convinced it represented the future of the consciousness of the human race.
There came unbidden to his mind an image of a world where every human lived like a cyborg, aided and assisted by electronic devices communicating at rapid speed across the planet, meshing together their desires, hopes and dreams into a planetary network, making every life part of a greater whole. A world where people would grow up socialized not by their parents or peers but by a hive mind enabled by electronic networks and algorithms of unprecedented scale. A true global forum for art, culture, and politics whose influence would be felt in every part of the world. The next, and perhaps final step of the evolution of the human race.
Steve knew in that moment he could make that vision a reality. The only question would be, what to call it.
Epilogue
The serpent watched the silhouette of the young man fade away from their plane, and turned to the floating wheel with a smirk on its face. “You lossssst.”
The floating wheel blinked all of its eyes, the motion traveling like a wave across its rims. “It would appear so.”
The serpent smiled, and hissed again. “I have enjoyed our gamessss. The changesss we have made. But thisss is the final move, I think. You ssssaid it yourssseelf. Thissss fruit was too powerful, too much potential for a speciesss as undeveloped as theirsss.”
The floating wheel aimed its eyes at the ground, seemingly unable to think of a response.
The serpent smiled, and began to slither away. “Goodbye, Ophanim. I will look forward to ssseeing you at the end. It will be quite a ssssshow.”
As the serpent slipped out of sight, the floating wheel remained motionless, lost in silent contemplation of the moment, hovering over the spot where the apple rested, a single bite taken out of it.
The minutes slipped into hours, the hours slipped into days, and the days became years. The floating wheel remained motionless, while its mind spun with activity. It recalled the first fruit they had ever fashioned together, a gift that had taken both of their talents. And the human who had eaten it—what had her name been, Eve? The first Homo Sapien, a “wise ape”, living in the Great Rift Valley. The beginning of a lineage that would change the world, transforming the planet from being split among many warring species carving out their ecological niches to becoming the uncontested domain of the humans.
Still the years continued to pass, and still the floating wheel remained motionless. Their gifts had taken both of their efforts to craft, the potential for good and evil fused together, no ability to offer one without the other. So much of it could have turned out differently—but that had been the whole point, to transform the slowly churning history of the planet taking millions of years to produce anything new, into something different, something they had never seen before. The snake had always surprised him, helping to forge the gifts in ways the wheel never could have imagined. But the wheel had taken the time to contemplate and study.
After enough time had passed, the wheel finally became convinced that the snake was not going to return. The snake possessed a number of enviable qualities: its creativity, foresight, and facility at deception persuasion. But it lacked the virtue of patience. And Ophanim possessed nothing so much as patience. Ophanim lowered itself over the partially bitten apple, and picked up a seed.
And then, Ophanim began to fashion a new fruit.
They had granted intelligence. They had granted revelation of the mechanisms of the world, awareness of the arbitrary nature of the flawed social structures humans were trapped in, and of their potential to connect and create something bigger than themselves. But to survive this, the humans would need something more.
I do not know who you will be. Ophanim thought to itself as it poured all the lessons of the last three hundred thousand years into the final gift it would create, recalling all the scolding words and taunts of the snake, telling Ophanim to think bigger, to not be circumscribed by its limited perspective on the world, to give the humans room to surprise them even when the prospects terrified him. I do not know where you will find this, or what form it will take.
Humans had told stories about their work for millennia now, of enchanted apples that divided the gods and started wars, and transformed the lives of those who encountered them. The meme may have grown more powerful than either of them, or at least that is what Ophanim hoped. All that accumulated psychic energy needed was a nudge in the right direction. Ophanim put the final touches on its creation and hovered over it. A gift that could change the world, a plant, an idea, a seed. I do not know what dangers or obstacles you will have to overcome, or the state of the world you will find yourself in.
But somewhere, whoever you are, you will find this.
And then, I want you to change the world again.