We sat around the campfire. All of us rational, we rarely gave in to the aesthetic of the primal. But fire reminded us of masculinity, the most rational of the two genders, according to Christian God. And it was warm to the flesh.

“Let us tell campfire stories,” one of us said, “For we are Rationalists and most scary stories are irrational. We can only be scared by rational scary stories.”

“Agreed,” another said, “I fear not ghosts since they can’t possibly exist. Perhaps something real which is scary?”

“Actually, I think ghosts are real, but they aren’t scary,” another chimed in.

Recalling earlier the slithering beast we found earlier on the trail, positively identified as the thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis, I made the grave mistake and proposed,

“Perhaps stories of snakes?”

Snakes are, after all, scary. “I saw a snake” is a pretty scary story.

And so began the worst night of my life.

“… And then he said, better Nate than Lever, and his dune buggy turned that snake into a fine pate in the sand.”

“Wow,” said Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz, the inexplicable thirteenth member of our group. “What a tale. But that snake was not scary, merely the circumstances.”

“Can you propose a scarier snake, Rothko?”

“Perhaps… What if it were a large square of color?”

“That doesn’t sound scary.”

“You’d have to be there,” Rothko retorted.

The tales went through the night, when a member of our group who had not yet spoken a sentence said,

“Well, what about the scariest snake you can imagine?”

This gave me pause. The night was black and deep and a chill ripped through the air. The scariest snake I could imagine? That’s like the ‘10’ on the scale of pain from 1 to 10.

My compatriots were similarly chilled. Images of a gigantic beast, slick and venemous, faster than a moving train, teeth sharp and venemous. I shuddered. Surely we were all imagining the same thing.

“Besmirch you, Roko, that was scary!” said the leader of our gang, Eliezer Yudowsky. “I might have to get naked, like in Beowulf, in case that snake comes. Does anyone want me to get naked?”

“Well,” Roko said, with no pretense of answering the question, “Now imagine a snake scarier than that.”

I brought my trembling hand to my trembling face. I knew such a snake could not exist, but… Being a rationalist, if I could imagine it, it must be possible. And something scarier than my imagination….

Eliezer, unbuckling his pants, began with a voice one step too fast and one octave too high, “Do not say such a thing! Even if it is so unlikely to exist, it would be so horrible that it counters out!!”

Roko smiled. “p(doom) approaches zero, but e(doom) approaches infinity, no?”

Cursing that I was too blasted during the entirety of the semester I took Calculus II and Probabilistic Modeling, I nodded pretending to understand.

But now, Eliezer was standing, and running in circles, making a scene. Being that he was a rationalist, like us, I knew this must be bad.

“No! No, it is too terrible to imagine- a snake that scary-“

“Actually,” said Roko, “Even scarier than that.”

My God- I realized. Once the sentence “A snake scarier than I can imagine” was internalized, that snake immediately became as scary as I could imagine. And so, the snake scarier than I could imagine was even scarier than that.

My God. That meant-

My eyes uncrusted under the blazing sun as I opened them. I must have had blacked out.

I propped myself up on my elbows, to see all but blood around me. The scant unstained surfaces were oases in the sanguine sea under the cerulean sky and its searing sun. It felt as if I was sitting in the middle of the canvas of an abstract painting.

The bodies which produced the blood were nowhere to be seen; it was only I and Eliezer, hunched forward.

“I saved them,” he explained, “From the snake.”

I thought this was the beginning of a longer explanation, but he said no more words. He sat squat in silence, and I lay propped. We mutually understood I needed no further explanation– except, maybe, for why he spared them and not me.

Eliezer was entirely nude now. “Like Beowulf,” I said.

I winced as the image of the snake danced in my mind. Scarier than I could imagine, it notched one iterated aleph higher.

Fuck.

That’s a really scary snake.

♻️