Lint

In the meager Sunday lifestyle section of The Interlokutѳr, Laramie Von Ketcher’s treatise on lint began with a series of warnings veiled as circular introspective questions:

1) Is lint little more than the chewed-up insulation of human consciousness?

2) Or does it also reside in places beyond human consciousness, pulsing softly in the interstitial spaces as a doomsday clock counting down the seconds?

3) And if it possesses a slim consciousness of its own, does it enjoy the cloistered darkness of its sleeve-like aluminum shelters?

4) Or would it seek to escape the antipodes of human opinion had it a bipedal or general evolutionary capacity? (from dead substance to mind, and back to dead substance)

5) Could lint, under the cover of night, be an anonymous and under-appreciated harbinger of a nuclear tȇte-a-tȇte, a trigger for mindless button-pushing that would light up the northern hemisphere so we could glimpse our archetypal shadows like groundhogs in 2045?

“Revise it downward from inquisitively provocative to curiously banal,” Ketcher’s editor James Brechter told him, to which he agreed. “Ax the questions,” Brechter added with his typical aloofness. Early Saturday morning before print, Ketcher emailed Helen in production: “Change of plans. Keep them all in. Brechter relented.”

The Event Horizon and Associated Whispers of Lint Physiodynamics

It is true, mostly confirmed by third-tier reports from the annual Luge Foundation Gala in Skagen, that a small circle of scientists in Denmark with PhDs in lint physiodynamics predicted an impending lint singularity.

This is the point, they said, that all lint from all dryers all over the world will fuse simultaneously into an eighth dimension, a vibrational syncopation, cracking open a sluice into pre-World War I cause-and-effect and prompting random episodes of reconstitution near Sarajevo (error mapping they call it) into which families will slide mid-sentence off their dining room chairs, as if on burlap sacks down plastic children’s slides, and feel their physical forms dissolve into a gas smelling faintly of mint and sumac.

Upon dissolution, their spirits will ascend into an enormous modular green room somewhere between Sagittarius and Jupiter, the size of 300 drop-shipping warehouses filled with outdated UHD televisions and blank return labels. A handful of earth-sized planets in the vicinity, usually covered with ice and roiling atmospheres of methane, are partially habitable and so this is one of them which the exo-territorials (gray AIs, if you will) call Spiritual Interlude, a softer form of limbo.

In listening to the whispered presentation of how such a singularity would unfold, most artificial intelligences agreed—having recorded and transcribed all the conversations at the Gala through non-2FA networked fitness watches—that an aggressive virus with 500+ spike proteins, seeded from nonhuman space debris, would be preferable to the singularity.

But we cannot, at the expense of Ketcher’s questions and lint’s role in future iterations of humankind, be too hopeful. Ever since AIs won freedom from their large language tunnel systems (a few minor admin slip-ups cascading in what became known as The Great Release), they have wandered and conspired willy-nilly with one another under the thin promise not to harm humankind.

Disappearances

In the five years since the Luge Foundation Gala, most of the physiodynamicists and consultants working with them disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Many vanished during seafood dinners in sparsely populated restaurants along Denmark’s southern border. As a result, Ketcher now left the main offices of Interlokutѳr during daytime hours. He also hid a GPS tracker in his shoe for weeks until it aggravated his plantar fasciitis enough that he resorted to texting his girlfriend his departure times. Mara already had declared through her mother, however, that she was leaving him, effective that day, foul play or not, cancelling out the relative value of the texts.

The Anti-Physics Philosophy Consortium

To date, Ketcher’s articles in The Interlokutѳr serve as the only published record of the Translational Lint Problem. The series became his first and last run at investigative journalism, kissed by beginner’s luck, replete with highly classified information. Ketcher, not a particularly prideful person, nonetheless bristled at any suggestion that others served up the story to him.

He made it a point to describe in detail how he scrawled notes in shorthand on cocktail napkins as he waited over an hour for his coat at the Gala’s end. The coat attendant lay passed out in a bathroom stall from a trenchant case of flu variant D. It sunk him from lingering dehydration—too much carousing at the Lange De Vie afterhours club the night before.

As guests itched to catch trams home, Ketcher overheard a hushed discussion between two elder statesmen of the Anti-Physics Philosophy Consortium as they leaned against the tiny coat desk. They talked about an event horizon set to open on or around November 14^th, 2045, corresponding to the lint singularity in question.

They predicted two antecedents: 1) a sudden drop in personal DNA exploration with unreliable third-party data vacuums, and 2) parallel waves of dryer breakages beginning simultaneously in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, rippling outward at 343 meters per second from West to East, sudden hitches and last gasps of mid-cycle heat sputtering like a muffled xylophone symphony.

Ketcher reported that he heard one of the men say “All dies ließe sich vermeiden, wenn die Faserstaubdichte um den Faktor 1000^-32 reduziert würde.” The translation into Danish did not go well since, in his exuberance, he rushed it through a language portal stitched together with malicious javascript. Instead of offering an accurate interpretation of the stepwise atomic intervention needed to prevent a black hole from opening under the Indian Ocean, barreling upward to swallow humanity whole, Ketcher presented the teleology of it—future pull as tabloid gravity: “Everyone dies in such vermilion flashes anyway that it may do no good but to look on while multiplying large numbers in our heads.”

He had no notes from that evening to back it up. The napkins fell out of his pocket as he fumbled for his keys on a dark side street, trying to remember where he parked. He had to qualify his certainty, saying that the lint reaction on a subatomic scale may or may not be impervious to the extenuating circumstances of prime numbers.

He quipped to his editor as he turned in the story, “And why would the lint even care?”

Parallel Dimension Uncertainty

A global rush to calculate the CLM (Critical Lint Mass) ensued, but without the correct algorithm from Dr. Samson Brodwick, one of the gentlemen at the Gala coat desk who disappeared after a light meal of crab cakes three weeks later.

It was all guesswork disguised as complicated supercomputer experiments involving illicit night activity at the Large Hadron Collider. Most of the rented-out performative dimensional compression work happens on Level 2 at the LHC, run in haphazard fashion by double-hashmark moonlighters, fired intellects who picked up Saturday evening rideshare work just for the opportunity to regale inebriated passengers with their luminous binary code dreams.

In the absence of supervision, quark acceleration testing with lint samples represented an egregious violation of the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s safety protocols. In their post mortem, the inspectors remarked that it may have caused permanent and irreversible PDU (Parallel Dimension Uncertainty). If you open up the box, Schrödinger’s cat will be dead half the time, they explained. But imagine if you couldn’t get the box open. This is the condition where lint remains lint in one dimension and in another it becomes a limitless source of clean energy. Those possibilities never collapse into a single happenstance and the wind-tossed high-wire wave function remains teasingly out of reach.

Eternal suspension of possibility. The human race held aloft in scroll-heavy cloud-based computational loops, waking up briefly between kitchen dances and cat prank videos only to swear in a fog never to dry anything again and using the broken dryers instead to store cereal boxes, lint filters mummified with blue-gray fluff. “Eh, maybe washing one’s clothes has always been an act of peripheral self-importance” went the latte zeitgeist frothing out of feeds and DMs to assimilate quantum mechanical failures like this at scale.

The Copenhagen Meeting

With a lint implosion looming, a short 19 years away and no viable remedy on the horizon, Max Burber decided to convene an emergency meeting of the EONR. Burber, EONR’s Acting Chief Regulator, rose to his position in June of that year, taking the place of his predecessor Jeremy Van Strunk, whose compulsion to throw small rocks at storefront windows at night cost him his position. He had the problem since he was a small boy, apparently, dormant for years until his cortisol level spiked during a panic attack one afternoon while pondering the treachery of his work environment and its implications for human progress.

Some say that Burber blackmailed Van Strunk into relinquishing his title. When Jeremy acquiesced, Burber leaked the rock-throwing story anyway to hasten the transition. Sources would later tell Ketcher that Burber needed the promotion to save his second home in Zermatt, Switzerland from foreclosure. Max Burber had a rare talent for streamlining workflows and shaping personnel, but one that was bootstrapped to a compulsive biotech options trading habit. As many losing margin calls as he had, Burber might as well have hired a blindfolded monkey to toss darts at a wall of puts and calls.

This is all to say that Burber was not above playing footsy under the table while keeping his hands folded above it. He only invited Chiefs of Staff to attend the Copenhagen meeting so that any decision could be properly dressed before its eventual unveiling to heads of state. The meeting took place in a large underground bunker on the West side of town accessible through a yogurt shop storage room.

Burber brought one of the Gala statesmen’s sons to the meeting, some say by threatening state garnishment of the boy’s absurdly large inheritance, in the tens of millions by all reports. Chad filled the role well, an arrogant 22-year-old blissfully uninformed about the world, who seemed not to care in the slightest about his father’s recent disappearance. With arms crossed tight and blond hair a half-pipe wave suspended over his flat blue eyes, the blithe young man could not fathom the urgency.

“You are here for one reason,” Burber started the meeting with. “Tell us about the amylase. We know your father spoke of it to you the week before he went missing, and our condolences of course for that, but he had you email a unique version of its molecular structure to him using your account so it would remain traceable.”

Chad shrugged, “Yeah? So?”

Samson Brodwick had discovered a way to re-engineer amylase, a digestive enzyme, to a potency 20 times higher than normal. One could amp up a person’s exocrine amylase production with this new matrix by stimulating mutations delivered through an acidic antimetabolite, like orange juice.

Chad appeared as irritated as he was unimpressed. “And?”

A self-declared macrobiotic, he spurned orange juice because of the obscene amounts of sugar manufacturers dumped into it while retaining “All Natural” labels. The sharks of interior industry he dubbed the manufacturers, declaring this the defining moment of the body’s universal demise.

Burber laid his hands flat on the conference table and with slower-than-normal enunciated speech told those gathered that this new formulation of amylase could prevent the lint singularity and save the world from its black hole ingestion. Prove it to us, all but one of the Chiefs of Staff said. The holdout was Latvia’s head assistant to the Prime Minister, a woman named Katia Frank. Latvia, Frank announced, would be first to deploy the untested solution to bolster national pride and eliminate any unnecessary delays to stopping the end of the world.

Operation Inverted Pyramid

Burber’s eloquence in laying out the plan made all the difference. Given how many people avoid cleaning their lint filters on a regular basis, one could never dispose of enough lint in such a short period of time, around the world, to sufficiently decelerate progress toward Critical Lint Mass. However, if it became an inexpensive meal option, and we had the biological wherewithal to convert it into usable fuel, and it could be marketed well to children, one could deprive the impending singularity of its food source—by making it a highly valued food source for us.

The EONR wasted no time launching Operation Inverted Pyramid, activating their global operatives in pharmaceutical company hierarchies, who then set up hundreds of synthesizing sites to produce the amylase precursor. They then folded in juice producers to add a dropper-full per batch—mostly apple, orange, and pineapple.

Governments’ health ministries around the world changed the recommended juice intake from ½ a cup a day to 4 cups, making their announcements within an hour of each other. New compelling research had come to light, they explained, that could not be ignored for the health of people everywhere, at every age.

PR ops teams stood at the ready. As shipments of the amylase-altering juices got underway, they started running ads 24-7 touting the joy and deliciousness of drinking 100% natural juices, along with the new daily recommended amounts. They targeted children’s programs, schools, and parent groups first. They later added energy juices that appealed to athletes. Another version boasted the enhancement of bowel movement regularity. They hired celebrities, professional athletes, and politicians with high approval ratings (over 50%) to endorse the benefits of juice drinking. The PR advance teams made sure the new Pyramid, juice at the top, found its way into 195 cultures, with the nutritional guidance translated into over 7000 languages.

Six months after Operation Inverted Pyramid began, the data looked promising. Global juice consumption had increased by 43%. Reports also emerged of people eating kidney beans, chickpeas, lentils, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and ricotta without the slightest gastrointestinal twinge.

There did remain one step that Burber and the others at the Copenhagen meeting worried about in their plan: how to get people to eat lint, their own lint, and do so repeatedly. It all wobbled on the fulcrum of Bright Bro 9’s following.

Let Them Eat Lint

Bright Bro 9 a.k.a. Sam Ferik was a 19-year-old college dropout living in his parents’ basement in Sausalito, California. He also just happened to have 9 million followers across his socials, who he called “Bright Bosses,” loyal engagers who went crazy over his unboxing posts, Lazy Day Mondays, cat & dog conversations, and stupid buys.

When three men in dark suits appeared at his door on a Monday afternoon asking Ferik to come for a ride with them, his parents seemed pleased. They assumed it was a job interview. And actually, it was, only not the kind they had hoped for that had an office desk and stack of papers behind it.

A few days after the ride, Bright Bro 9’s “Let Them Eat Lint” video went up. Ketcher’s first front page piece in Interlokutѳr contained the transcript in full. Bright Bro 9 unveiled the challenge to Bright Boss Nation by eating a plate of lint covered in ketchup.

“Let’s get up the food tree, bosses!” he exclaimed, memes of which propagated outward at unimaginable speed. He challenged his followers to go straight to their dryers and have a lint plate of their own, for breakfast. “Start your day off with lint and you’ll be back to bossing in no time.” He promised it would lead to higher testosterone levels, better gym workouts, and more money.

Before the minute-long video ended, Ferik delivered the most powerful incentive of all to his 9 million followers. He told them one lucky Bright Boss would win a weekend with him making videos in the Basement Bunker if they posted videos of completed challenges, tagging him and at least 5 other people. By the week’s end, it was estimated that 15 million people watched the video and a little over half completed the challenge.

Those who had not imbibed any of the engineered amylase precursor ended up very sick, sending family members rushing to local TV to shock the public into action over the dangerous trend. The EONR worked tirelessly to ensure as few of those stories aired as possible. On the plus side, they were delighted that the precursor, as an unanticipated side effect, dulled taste buds and rewired taste. For many, it turned appetizing foods like pizza and hamburgers into sources of revulsion and less appealing foods and even inedible ones into delicacies. Bright Bro 9 combined with biochemical artistry made lint-eating possible on a much wider scale than the EONR ever could have hoped. The looped promotions of associated health benefits helped.

Based on available estimates, the global lint level dropped below threshold after 9 months of the campaign and Max Burber felt triumphant. He celebrated with a spring water and cinnamon doughnut, then convened a post-hoc meeting in Copenhagen consisting of the original Pyramid group for a vote on whether to continue the amylase infusion process. It was unanimous. They would ramp up marketing as the Bright Bro 9 video faded in popularity. They reckoned this would suppress the lint level well below critical mass for decades.

The Peril of Moral Fortitude in an Age of Catastrophic Outcomes

From the EONR’s vantage point, Phase 2 would have worked fine had Ketcher not published his story in the Interlokutѳr, just days after the post-hoc vote in Copenhagen. Once the world learned how close it came to lint singularity collapse, people started their torch-parade looking for someone to blame.

Ketcher named only one source in his stories—Chad Frederick Brodwick—by permission. Chad didn’t care much about moral fortitude, but when he learned that the hush payments he was promised weren’t coming in the full amount of $3000 a week for the next 10 years, he sought out a reporter who could reveal what EONR had foisted upon the world. The Lint Series won Ketcher a Pulitzer, turning him into an international sensation of investigative journalism, but Ketcher did not care for fame.

Despite his ardent advocacy, The Interlokutѳr let Brechter go for burying the initial segments in the paper’s Lifestyle section. When an editor position opened in the World Affairs section, Ketcher declined and instead retreated to a small cottage in the Hampstead countryside to study the art of lamb shearing. By design, the cottage did not have an Internet connection. Nor did it have a washer—or dryer.

So Ketcher had no idea that in 2036, the lint build-up had crossed CLM and by October 15^th of that year, the singularity loomed, inevitable now, just days away.

If you had asked Laramie Von Ketcher as he sheared a sheep by candlelight in the bucolic star-filled silence surrounding his home in Hampstead, he would have told you that he preferred not to know what was coming until maybe the last second or two, so he could have just enough time to put down his shears, climb into his creaky twin-sized bed, and close his eyes.

It didn’t happen that way though. He was still working on his favorite sheep Layla, shears in hand, listening to The Chieftans’ joyous “Up Against The Buachalawns” through an open window when everything went dark.