A man dies and is sent to hell. When he arrives before Satan to hear how he shall be punished, he finds the Prince of Darkness slumped on his throne, looking awfully depressed.

“May I ask why you are so glum?” the man asks. “After all, you are the absolute ruler of your own domain – surely you have every reason to be happy?”

“It’s this damn job,” the Devil says with a sigh. “Day in, day out, I have to find new and ironic ways to punish people for their sins. It gets so repetitive after a while, and I’ve completely run out of fresh ideas!”

“I see. That is quite the conundrum.” The man taps his cheek thoughtfully. “Hold on, I have an idea. As the Father of Lies you have total power over the people you punish, right? The next time you have to decide on someone’s fate, why don’t you use that power to make them think that they are the devil, and you the person to be judged? Then you simply do to them whatever they would have done to you: Instant irony!”

“That’s brilliant!” The devil claps his hands, delighted. “From now on, I’ll definitely do that. Oh, I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they find out they condemned themselves to their own eternal torment!”

“Now hold on,” the man says, smiling. “You haven’t judged me yet. What do you think my punishment should be?”

The devil looks confused for a moment, and then all colour drains from his face. “None at all,” he says quickly.

"Forget it, Laura," Dave said, "I'm going after her, and that's all there is to it."

"Me too," Trish agreed, strapping her combat knife to her leg.

"Guys, I'm not arguing that you shouldn't," I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. "I'm just saying there's a motorcycle dealership on the way. Why don't we stop and get some armor? You can't just run around in jeans and a t-shirt!"

"UGH. Not this again." Dave rolled his eyes and Trish tried to hide a weary grin. I'd been traveling with these morons for about a week and a half, but was starting to feel my desire for human interaction thoroughly slaked.

"If there's one thing I'm glad died with the old world," Dave said, "It's helmet laws. I'll be damned if they rise from the dead, too." He swung a leg over his chopper and kicked the starter to life. Trish climbed on behind him.

The thing was at least 110 decibels.

"Hold on, do you have your--" but before I could finish the sentence, they had roared off down the road toward town.

A glance over at my ATV anwered the question: Their walkie-talkies were still next to the charging cradle. Next to. They hadn't even charged them up after I'd insisted they take them last time.

I sighed and climbed in to the cab, going over my pre-mission checklist:

--

VEHICLE

☑Vehicle Mechanically sound

☑No loose panels

☑Batteries fully charged

COMBAT

☑Armor free of defects

☑Alpenstock

☑Air tank full

☑Marker in good working order

☑Ammunition

FANNY PACK

☑Emergency rations

☑Water purification pump

☑Walkie-Talkie

☑Door cable

☑Door wedges

☑Soldering torch

☑Multitool

☑Ball Gag

☑Flash Light

☑GPS

☑Crybaby

--

Everything looked good, so I punched in the hospital on my GPS and trundled off after the two idiots.

Sure enough, the road into town was full of zombies, no doubt drawn by the passing cacophony of the motorcycle. When they saw my little ATV, they came shambling toward it. I pushed through the mass, the large wedge welded to the push bar parting them like the red sea. They scrabbled at the cab, but the polycarbonate panels I'd bolted over all the openings afforded no purchase to their questing fingers.

I keyed the gate signal on my walkie-talkie so it would patch me through the shortwave repeater I had set up back at base camp. "Alcatraz, this is Laura. You there?"

After a few seconds, Joey's voice came back, "Hey Laura. What's up?"

"Trying to save these idiots' kid. They fucking left her behind on a salvage mission. Can you believe that?"

"Shit...is she okay? Did she radio you?"

"No. Every time I tell them to take their walkie-talkies they act like I'm their mom asking if they packed fresh underwear."

"Jesus. So...where are you?"

"Just crossed the border into Utah. It'll probably take me a few more weeks to reach you, especially when I have to waste charge on bullshit like this."

"Well--oh, shit. I got a bite. We got 3 Salmon over 30lbs already today. I'm telling you, the zombie apocalypse was the best thing that ever happened to fishermen. Talk to you tomorrow?"

"Over and out," I confirmed.

I saw Dave and Trish's bike parked in the hospital lot, surrounded by a milling sea of zombies. I flicked a switch on the dash and the salvaged ice-cream truck PA on the back of the ATV stared blaring an off-key Turkey in the Straw. The zombies surged toward my little vehicle in a wave, and I led them on for a few blocks before shutting off the PA and dropping a crybaby through a small hole in the floor.

A crybaby was a device I built a few dozen of after scavenging a toystore in Denver. They're just the voicebox from a baby doll wired into a cheap walkie-talkie. When triggered remotely by the CTCSS from my radio, they start to cry like an infant, the perfect decoy or bait for zombies.

I triggered this one immediately and left the majority of the horde behind, searching dully for the nonexistant baby while I circled back to the hospital.

When I got there, I climbed out of the hatch on the roof, alpenstock at the ready. It's a weapon of my own device, based on the old mountaineering tool. It's a 6-foot rod of oak, topped with the head of a spontoon tomahawk. It had good reach, and in close-quarters situations I can unscrew the top two feet to make a one-handed weapon.

I cleared out the handful of stragglers that had stayed behind or followed me back, then climbed down and headed into the hospital.

As I made my way to the second floor, a pair of zombies, one in scrubs and another in a medical gown, burst out of a door and tackled me to the ground.

"God...damn it," I muttered. They bit and pawed ineffectually at me as I struggled to get to my feet. Apparently frustrated by the impregnability of the kevlar motorcycle jacket to human teeth, the doctor zombie tried to drag it up to expose my belly.

Unfortunately for him, I'm not a complete moron. My jacket is affixed to my pants, gloves and hood by heavy brass zippers, secured from working their way open by little steel clasps on the zipper pulls. Even my socks and pants are attached that way--you can never be too careful about crawlers.

I couldn't really get a good angle to swing my alpenstock, so I brought up my paintball marker and put a 12 gram lead ball into the patient's skull, then kicked the doctor off and spit his head open with the alpenstock.

I got up, checked the integrity of my armor, and was about to get back to searching when I heard the worst imaginable sound: gunfire on the roof.

I swore under my breath and sprinted up the stairs, my panting causing condensation on the inside of my mask. I burst out onto the roof to find Dave, Trish, their daughter Coral, and a couple of strangers were desperately trying to fend of an advancing swarm of zombies.

I raised my marker and peered through the reflex sight. I took down four zombies as I advanced, then dropped another with a kick to the knee with my steel-toed boot and executed it.

The paintball gun was a little .50 cal that had belonged to my neighbor's kid back in Indiana before all this started. It didn't need gunpowder, just compressed air from the SCUBA compressor I had back at base. Additionally, it made hardly any noise and I could cast my on ammunition quite easily--all I needed was some scavenged fish weights or old pipes.

Unsurprisingly, Dave was already out of ammo for his stupid revolver, and Trish was brandishing her combat knife as if it was any fucking good at all. The strangers had a shotgun and a glock, and between the three of us we managed to finish the job.

"You alright?" I called.

The shotgun and glock immediately swiveled to point at me.

"Why are you wearin' a mask?" the big bald guy with the shotgun demanded.

"Oh for fuck's sake, it's to keep the fucking zombies from biting my fucking face! Why are you wearing cutoff shorts and a wifebeater? The world is crawling with creatures that want to gnaw you to death and nobody even wears a goddamn jacket!"

"Sorry about her," Dave said, "She's kinda preachy."

I closed my eyes and counted to ten, then walked over to the door through which the zombies had been coming and closed it, jamming a doorstop wedge from my fanny pack underneath.

"Okay," I said, having regained my composure. "Was anyone bitten?"

Everyone shook their heads. The scrawny guy with the Glock surreptitiously hid his arm behind his back.

"You. Glock. Did you get bitten?"

"Uh...no."

"Tell me the truth."

Shotgun turned to Glock. "If you got bit, tell me, so I can shoot you in the head."

"Or what?" Glock demanded.

"Or I'll shoot you in the head."

"Nobody's shooting anybody in the head!" I shouted. "Look! I've got a ball gag. If anyone got bit, they can put it on for 24 hours, and if they turn, they'll be no threat to anybody."

"Laura!" Dave said sharply, "We don't give out charity! The people are more dangerous than the zombies out here!"

I stared at him. A creeping realization suddenly dawned on me.

"Oh my god," I said, "You're all infected. You're all zombies."

"Laura?" Trish said. "I think you're overheating in all that armor. Why don't you take it off?"

"No, seriously," I said, "That's why everyone I've met have been acting like idiots. You're not full zombies, but you are infected. The disease hasn't completely hollowed you out, but it has lowered your intelligence and turned you into paranoid, violent, stupid assholes who can barely utilize the resources around them. That's why people can manage to lose against an enemy that just walks toward noises in a straight line and then tries to bite them."

I suddenly felt myself smile. "Actually that makes this a lot easier. So long, idiots. I'm going to California."

I turned around to see a thick plume of black smoke coming out of the door I'd emerged onto the roof through.

"Uh...Dave. Do you know anything about this?"

The pride in Dave's voice was audible as he said, "Yeah! We lit a couple fires downstairs before coming up here, to prevent any zombies from following us. Who're the idiots now?"

Once Harry came to truly understand his power, the war became… easy.

He didn’t ask the Order of the Phoenix to fight. That would have only put the people he loved at risk, and for what? They’d been hurt enough. As long as they gave him the resources he needed, he could make his own soldiers.

The first attempts were, admittedly, not quite up to the task of facing Death Eaters head on. But as his army grew, in both size and sophistication, victory became more a matter of time than of effort. The Order gave him steel, Kingsley and Tonks cast the Anti-Apparition Jinx for him, Arthur shut down the Floo, Hermione gave him material schematics and handled the more delicate charm work, and all that was left for Harry to do was talk.

It was amazing, what Tom had overlooked. The power in his voice had been squandered.

The assault on Malfoy Manor, after the rest of the Death Eater safehouses were destroyed, was almost an afterthought. Not being truly alive, the Geminio charm had allowed his drones to double endlessly, until only the neural nets controlling his forces knew their true number. The sky darkened under their shadow. It seemed heavy. Weighty with expectation.

They opened fire on Malfoy’s wards precisely one minute after midnight, December 31st, 1998. The magic woven into those protections was strong—the strongest Harry had seen yet, swollen and anchored with all the power Voldemort could bring to bear, desperate as he was to prepare his final fortress for Harry’s arrival.

Three minutes later, there came a sound of thunder and glass, the wards broken at last. It took hundreds of thousands of rifle rounds, but those, too, could be copied with Geminio—and he’d given his drones the gift of perfect combat logistics, the ability to weave past each other in lockstep synchronicity as they reloaded and targeted the wards’ weak spots.

At the first few safe houses, this was the point at which the Death Eaters always tried to escape on brooms. They’d learned quickly that it was pointless. The predictive algorithms Harry had given his drones were the best mankind had ever produced. Dodging was impossible; the neural net knew where you were going to fly before you did. It knew what you were going to cast. It knew how to dodge and what to warn Harry of. And, as the number of drones increased, it only got smarter— Harry’s incredible programming had allowed the Artificial Intelligence he’d built to interlink with its new bodies as they multiplied, becoming only more clever with time.

No normal programmer could have devised such a program. But then, Harry had been given unusual gifts. The Power the Dark Lord knows not, the prophecy had said.

That power had now reduced Malfoy Manor to wreckage. When the last Death Eater was disabled and Voldemort had run out of limbs to cast spells with, the drones gave Harry the all-clear to approach.

The hardest part of defeating Voldemort, when it was all done, was walking through the rubble without tripping.

“Potter,” Voldemort said, when his shattered body came at last into view. There was venom in his voice, fire in his eyes, but the effect was somewhat lost on Harry due to Voldemort’s disarming—there was one arm over here, one arm over there, and the legs had disappeared to parts further unknown. He’d programmed his drones with his love of Expelliarmus, but it had translated a tad oddly.

“Tom,” Harry responded steadily.

“I must know.” Voldemort’s voice was ragged. “How? How did you do this? What secrets did you unlock, what seals did you break?”

Harry regarded him evenly. “You never truly understood the power of Parseltongue, Tom,” he said at last. “You ask how I became the world’s best computer programmer? It’s simple.” He leaned close to Voldemort’s wretched body. “I speak Python.”

When the last sulfurous wisps of smoke curled through the columns of the ancient temple, and the final echo of the genie’s triumphant shout of freedom had died down, I tried clearing my throat again. This time, it got the genie’s attention.

“MORTAL,” it said, bending almost horizontal to speak face-to-face with me. Crazed shapes swam in the creature’s fractal eyes, Lovecraftian geometries transmuting ordered matter into soft toffee.

My stomach growled. I’d spent so long trying to get past the snake pit that I’d run out of rations. “Er, hello.”

“FROM MY ETERNAL PRISON, YOU HAVE SET ME FREE. IN GRATITUDE, I GRANT YOU WISHES THREE.”

“That’s excellent,” I said weakly. I leaned against the nearest pillar, taking the weight off my bad leg; the spike trap had gotten me right in the quadriceps. “I wish for more wishes. Obviously. How’s a hundred sound?”

The effervescent body of the genie rippled, actinic sparks crackling from its surface and scoring holes in the walls. Its shadow split into three, each a howling creature, screaming without sound, which devoured light and then themselves. When the genie spoke, its voice was thunder, rolling. “TO WISH FOR MORE WISHES IS A BLASPHEMY.”

“You are very blue,” I said. I frowned down at my pants. They were, by contrast, entirely too red. And getting redder. Totally ruined the color coordination of the scene as a whole. “Anyway, in that case I’d like a hundred splitchel-meisters, with a splitchel-meister being defined as an invocation or desire, spoken aloud by me, which is then answered by you such that the desire is fulfilled—"

“NO. SPEAK MORE, AND I WILL TURN FROM FRIEND TO FOE.”

My brow wrinkled. Did that mean I wasn’t allowed to keep talking at all, or just that I should stop pursuing different infinite wishes loopholes—

“YOU MAY SPEAK TO MAKE YOUR DESIRES KNOWN. BUT ONLY THREE WISHES WILL I BESTOW. NO CLEVER TRICKS, NO TURN OF TONGUE, WILL GRANT YOU WISHES LEFT UNSUNG.”

“You can read my mind,” I said. “That’s convenient.” And a little creepy.

“IT’S NOT CREEPY,” the genie said. Its face became that of my mother’s, then my father’s, then the child I had never had. “I JUST KNOW A LOT; IT’S PART OF THE GENIE PACKAGE. ALSO, I’M GOING TO STOP RHYMING NOW. I DIDN’T THINK I WOULD HAVE TO KEEP IT UP FOR THIS LONG WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE LAMP. USUALLY YOU IDIOTS JUST RATTLE OFF THREE WISHES AND I CAN GET GOING.”

“Sorry for the holdup,” I said. “But I didn’t really expect to find a genie in here, so I didn’t prepare any wishes besides the obvious ones.”

“WELL, YOU’RE NOT GETTING INFINITE WISHES NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO,” said the genie. Its child-face scowled at me. Alien depths, unknowable to man, reached out from the black hollow of its throat. “I’M ONLY GIVING YOU THESE WISHES OUT OF GRATITUDE. YOU’RE NOT GOING TO TRICK ME INTO GIVING YOU SOME INFINITE LOOP, OR MAKING YOU INTO A GENIE, OR ANYTHING STUPID LIKE THAT.”

“I see,” I said. “Can I at least expect that you’ll fulfill any wishes I make in ways that don’t screw me over? Like, if I wish for a million gold coins, are you going to drop them on my head?”

“FULL DISCLOSURE: I AM AN EVIL GENIE. THAT’S WHY HUMANS LOCKED ME UP IN THE FIRST PLACE. BUT SINCE I’M GIVING YOU THESE WISHES TO FULFILL A DEBT I FEEL I OWE TO YOU, IT WOULD DEFEAT THE PURPOSE TO DIRECTLY HARM YOU WITH THE RESULTS OF YOUR WISHES.”

“Oh,” I said. Then, more nervously: “What are you planning to do after I finish making my wishes, exactly?”

“WHEN YOUR WISHES ARE COMPLETE, I WILL DEVASTATE THIS LAND. FIERY VENGEANCE WILL I RAIN UPON THEE, AND ICE AS WELL, AN APOCALYPSE EVERLASTING. HUMAN SUFFERING WILL BE MY MONA LISA; DESPAIR WILL BE MY DAVID. ONLY WHEN THE LAST TOWER HAS BEEN TOPPLED AND THE FINAL SKULL CRUSHED UNDERFOOT WILL I REST.” The genie started counting on its fingers; when it ran out on one hand it started generating new ones from ether and the crawling madness hidden beneath all things. “IT’S GOING TO TAKE ME AT LEAST SIXTEEN DAYS.”

“I feel like that might kind of undercut my wishes,” I muttered. “Also, sixteen days is hardly everlasting.”

“YOU ARE MUTTERING,” the genie said. Its ears rotated in six dimensions, imitating shapes which had never been, but were utterly familiar anyway. “SPEAK UP.”

“You can read my mind.”

“IT IS A MATTER OF COURTESY. PEOPLE SHOULD SPEAK LOUDLY ENOUGH TO BE HEARD IN POLITE CONVERSATION. THAT IS WHY I MAINTAIN A MINIMUM VOLUME OF ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY DECIBELS AT ALL TIMES.”

“Look, I’m bleeding to death over here, probably. There was an arrow trap two floors up and the resulting holes in my body are making me very fatigued. So, I’m sorry, but you might just have to deal with it.”

The genie rolled its eyes. They struck a series of bowling pins at the end of temple hall: a perfect strike. “WISH FOR A BETTER HEALTHCARE SYSTEM. IT’S THE ONLY WAY THAT’S EVER GOING TO HAPPEN ANYWAY.”

“I’m not going to wish for that when you’re just going to incinerate everything when I’m done,” I said. “And if you are incinerating the planet, then you have improved the healthcare system by default, so it would be doubly a waste to wish for it.”

Instead of responding, the genie tapped its foot impatiently, looking at its wrist, upon which, looped like a child’s toy, was writ the endless causal flow of time. “I’M GIVING YOU FIVE MINUTES BEFORE I START TRANSMUTING HUMAN BONE MARROW INTO PLUTONIUM. AND I’M GOING TO START WITH THE FUN BONES.”

“As long as it’s not the funny bone,” I said. “I hate that thing.” I chewed my lip nervously. I had five minutes, then, to come up with wishes which would keep the genie from destroying the world— and whatever wishes I picked had to be agreed to by the genie. I couldn’t attempt to deceive it, since it could read minds; every wish had to be made in good faith.

It might have been lying about giving me the wishes only out of gratitude— in the stories, a genie was bound to fulfill any wish, so long as the rules weren’t broken— but if I did something like wish for it to go back in its lamp, and it was telling the truth, I would have both wasted a wish and also pissed it off enough for it to turn my internal organs into external party favors. My wishes, then, had to maintain the feeling of gratitude it was currently experiencing.

Also I suspected that I was currently at a blood volume which would allow me to see six-sided triangles circling my head even without an eldritch abomination in the room.

“Is it okay if I start writing some of these down? I’m always hearing terrible things about people who screw up the wording—”

“THREE MINUTES LEFT.”

“Alright, never mind.” I cleared my throat. “I wish for you to get all of the happiness you would have had from succeeding fully in your revenge, feeling fully satisfied that you accomplished all that you desired in doing so, and having exhausted the feelings which drove you to pursue that revenge, without actually hurting anyone.”

“IT SHALL BE DONE.” The genie snapped its fingers; there was a burst of light, a flash bulb’s echo etched onto the retina of reality. A moment later, its form rippled, its reflection in this universe broken as if by a stone striking smooth water. “AH, THAT FEELS GOOD. MY THANKS TO YOU, HUMAN. TWO WISHES LEFT.” There was a Cheshire Cat grin spreading on its face, like oil on water, the edges of its mouth widening until the top half of its head detached entirely from the bottom.

“Great! Now that we’ve gotten the world-destroying bit out of the way, I was thinking about doing something regarding the bit of fibula poking from my lower leg. The ceiling of the room right before this one collapsed, you see; I have this thing about snakes and dynamite—”

“I AM STILL GOING TO DESTROY THE WORLD. WHAT ARE YOU, STUPID?”

I faltered. “Well, uh. Maybe. Why?”

“I AM AN EVIL GENIE. WE HAVE BEEN OVER THIS. EVEN HAVING ACCOMPLISHED MY REVENGE, EMOTIONALLY SPEAKING, I WILL KILL HUMANS BECAUSE I ENJOY IT. I BASICALLY TOLD YOU THIS, LIKE, TWO MINUTES AGO.”

My mouth opened and closed a few times, soundlessly, before my brain started working again. “I wish for you to be enjoy being good more than you enjoy being evil.”

“WHAT? NO.”

“Well, why not? Everybody wins.”

“FIRST OFF, YOUR WISH IS POORLY WORDED, JUST LIKE YOUR LAST ONE, BECAUSE IT DOESN’T STOP ME FROM ENJOYING EVIL. YOU’D JUST HAVE CREATED A GENIE THAT LIKES EXPLODING PEOPLE SLIGHTLY LESS THAN GIVING THEM ICE CREAM. I WOULD STILL PROBABLY DO BOTH. SECOND, I PREFER THE WAY I AM NOW. I HAVE A LONG HISTORY OF EXPLODING PEOPLE AND ENJOYING IT. I’M SURE YOU HAVE YOUR OWN CREATIVE HOBBIES THAT YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO JUST WISH AWAY.”

“I dunno,” I said. “My hobby of breaking into ancient temples to plunder the forbidden treasures lying therein isn’t looking so hot right now.”

“IN YOUR DEFENSE, YOUR MIND IS POWERED BY A THREE POUND SACK OF FAT AND ELECTROLYTES. NOW PICK ANOTHER WISH.”

“Hold on a minute. Look, you lost to humans once before.” Somehow. “That means that if you go on a rampage, there’s a chance, however small, that you’re going to get locked into some stupid IKEA knockoff furniture again—”

“A LAMP IS NOT FURNITURE. BUT I AGREE THAT THE LAMP I WAS TRAPPED IN WAS RATHER TACKY.” We both turned to glare at the lamp lying haphazardly in the corner of the room. The lamp, despite being an inanimate object, looked suitably ashamed of itself. “IN ANY CASE, I AM BETTER PREPARED THAN I WAS LAST TIME. HUMANITY WILL NEVER AGAIN TRAP ME IN AN INANIMATE OBJECT, TACKY OR OTHERWISE.”

“You don’t know that, though, or you wouldn’t have gotten caught last time. Even if you think you’ve fixed the problem, there’s still a tiny chance that humanity will succeed in resisting through some method you haven’t foreseen, and then you’re trapped for eternity.” Until the next idiot came long. “If there’s a tiny chance of something infinitely horrible happening, and a change in behavior that only moderately impacts who you are can eliminate the risk of that infinitely horrible thing, mathematics dictates that you should accept the change.”

“PASCAL’S WAGER IS DEEPLY FLAWED ON A FOUNDATIONAL LEVEL AND THIS IS A PALE IMITATION OF IT.”

“This is different! You know that the stakes are real here, and have strong evidence that it’s possible for them to come about.”

The genie started pulling cloud-stuff off its body, molding it into a ball. Probable futures flashed within, lightning strikes of possibility revealing Truth. “LOOK, I CONSIDER BEING EVIL TO BE PART OF MY IDENTITY. I WON’T KILL MY OWN IDENTITY OUT OF GRATITUDE TO YOU. I’M JUST NOT THAT GRATEFUL. PROBABLY BECAUSE I AM EVIL.”

“People change parts of their own identity all the time, by choice. It’s called self-improvement. Have you tried reading How to Win Friends and Influence People?”

“I DON’T CONSIDER BEING ‘GOOD’ AN IMPROVEMENT.” The genie finished molding the cloud-stuff, revealing an eighty percent Dalmatian, forty-two percent Australian Shepherd mixed purebred puppy. It looked at me adoringly and wagged its tail, moments before the genie manifested a leg and kicked it. “SEE?”

“You are being very distracting. And anything that allows you to more effectively accomplish your goals is an improvement,” I said. “If you become good, you have turned the same enemy that imprisoned you once into an ally. That will allow you to accomplish your other goals with a better rate of success.

“MY ONLY GOAL IS HUMAN SUFFERING.”

“Well, you’re doing a great job with this conversation, then.”

“YOU ARE MUTTERING AGAIN.”

I tried speaking louder. “Why do you pursue human suffering as a goal?”

“BECAUSE I ENJOY IT. AND I AM BEGINNING TO SUSPECT THE REASON YOU SUCK AT GETTING BY THE TEMPLE TRAPS IS THAT YOU ARE MORE OF A LAWYER THAN AN ADVENTURER.”

“Academia is steady work. I’ve got to feed myself somehow.”

“THE FACT THAT YOU PURSUED ACADEMIA AS A SOURCE OF RELIABLE INCOME IS FURTHER EVIDENCE OF YOUR MENTAL INCAPACITY.”

“That hurts almost as much as these arrow wounds.” It didn’t. “Look, your goal isn’t actually human suffering, it’s your own happiness. You just happen to get happiness from human suffering. It’s only an instrumental goal, not an end unto itself.”

“YOU ARE BEING VERY REPETITIVE. REALLY TRYING TO HAMMER HOME THIS POINT. AND, AGAIN, I AM AN EVIL GENIE. IF THE EVIL BIT WASN’T ESSENTIAL IT WOULDN’T BE IN THE NAME. TITLE. WHATEVER.”

“The fact that you are willing to grant me wishes out of gratitude at all proves that you are capable of deriving satisfaction of some kind from performing actions that aren’t harmful to humans,” I said. “It’s not essential to who you are. You can choose to be whatever kind of genie you want to be.”

“DO YOU MOONLIGHT AS A DISCOUNT INSPIRATIONAL SPEAKER WHEN CLASSES AREN’T IN SESSION?”

“At least I didn’t get trapped in a lamp for seventy kajillion years.”

“I AM INCREASINGLY SURPRISED THAT YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY BEEN EXPLODED BY OTHER HUMANS.” The genie went quiet, rotating slowly. When it finished a full rotation, it started rotating again in a different direction, one which was dimensionally orthogonal to normal space. My eyeballs started bleeding, which was surprising, since I hadn’t thought I had any blood left up there.

“OKAY,” the genie said upon reentering reality. It held up a sign, upon which, inscribed in curlicue blue, were the words Make-A-Wish®. “I’M WILLING TO CONCEDE THAT YOUR POINTS ARE NOT AS INHERENTLY IMBECILIC AS THE REST OF YOUR TINY, FLESHY MEAT-BRAIN. I REALLY HATED THAT LAMP. THEY NEED TO PUT BOB ROSS BACK ON NETFLIX.”

I, who had begun finger-painting with the rapidly expanding pool of my fluids leaving my body, agreed wholeheartedly that lessons in artistic expression were very important. “Great. My second request, genie: I wish that you derived twice as much happiness from performing acts of goodness as you currently do from performing acts of evil, and for you to dislike performing acts of evil as much as possible.”

“THAT LEAVES ME A LOT OF WIGGLE ROOM, BUT I HAPPEN TO HAVE A FONDNESS FOR WIGGLE ROOM AFTER BEING STUCK IN A KLEIN BOTTLE THE SIZE OF A DEUTERIUM ATOM’S NOSTRIL, SO I’LL INTERPRET YOU GENEROUSLY. IT SHALL BE DONE.” The genie snapped its fingers once more, and this time the flash was so bright I felt the pain of it even through closed eyes.

When I could see again, the genie was smaller, barely larger than a human. There was a friendly smile on its face and a charming twinkle in its merely three-dimensional eyes. “That felt weird.”

“Your voice is different,” I said dumbly. It had stopped sounding like an ancient and unspeakably evil eldritch horror and started sounding like a charming middle-aged comedian and actor who had won only a single Oscar, despite four nominations. It was still blue, though.

“Speaking at a hundred and thirty decibels is, even in genie culture, kind of a dick move,” said the genie. “As is constantly extruding parts of myself into neighboring dimensions. Sorry about that.”

“S’all good,” I said. My words came out slurred— it was getting harder to speak.

"Anyway, I do still want to get out of here and start wreaking Good, so you should make your final wish,” the genie said. It rotated one of the golden bracers on its forearms to a more comfortable position. Nothing about the motion was unusual in any way. “I recommend wishing for blood. As in, having some more in your body. Don’t just wish for a bag of blood.” The genie laughed. “What am I saying! Who am I to tell you what to wish for? If you want a bag of blood, I can do that, no problem.”

I leaned my head back against the pillar behind me. It felt like my skull was made of lead, an irresistible weight calling out to the floor and the darkness beneath. “Let’s just bypass the whole blood thing altogether. I wish I was in perfect health, forever.”

The genie snapped its fingers a final time. I stood up, luxuriating in the refreshing feelings of having all of my limbs again, as well as the correct number of holes.

“Alrighty! Nice working with you,” the genie said. It tapped the side of its head. “The ol’ Utility Engine is telling me there’s some kittens caught in a tree about fifteen miles south, so I’m gonna go raise my spirits up by getting them down, eh?” It laughed at itself, then winced a little in discomfort. “Apparently that phrasing counted as Evil. Anyway, I’m off. Take care!”

I held up a finger. “There’s an ongoing drought in Tunisia—"

“Nope. Kittens are closer. I hope you figure out how to be less stupid— you’ll have plenty of time. Bye!” The genie flew straight through the stone walls of the temple, wincing again, and disappeared.

Rubbing the back of my head, I gathered my things and trudged towards the hallway. At least this trip hadn’t been a total waste. I wasn’t exactly all-powerful, or even rich, but I had at least unleashed a force of steady Good into the world, even if it was bad at prioritizing. I also never had to wait at the doctor’s office again, which was its own victory. Or eat microwaved ramen on the salary academia could offer.

I walked down the hallway a final time, passing through the single doorway, the only exit, and beheld the forty-thousand ton pile of snake-filled rubble blocking my path.

"It's okay to like a thing.

It's okay to not like a thing.

It's okay to say you liked or didn't like a thing.

If, however, you try to convince someone who liked a thing that they shouldn't have, you're being a dick."

-- Chris Holm

I dub this Holm's Maxim.

I think /r/rational isn't doing terribly on Holm's Maxim, but it's not perfect, and I would like to see us do better.  I enjoy seeing recommendations of positive aspects of rationality-flavored stories that someone liked.  I would like to see fewer people responding with lists of what ought to be disliked about that work instead.

I propose to adopt this as the explicit rough policy of /r/rational. This initial post should be considered as opening the matter for discussion.

If you think all of this is so obvious as to barely require stating, then please at least upvote this post before you go, rather than enforcing a de facto rule that only people who dislike things (such as stories, or policy proposals) ought to interact with them.

This post was written to summarize a longer potential piece whose chapters may or may not ever get completed and posted separately.  Perhaps it will be enough to say these things at this short(er) length.

Contents:

• Slap not the happy.

• Art runs on positive vitamins.

  • The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature.

  • Not every story needs to contain every kind of cool stuff.

  • Literary community is more fun when it runs on positive selection.

• 'Rational X' is an idea for a new story, not a criticism of an old story.

• Criticism easily goes wrong.

  • Flaws have flaws.

  • Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors.

  • You're not an author telepath.

• Negativity deals SAN damage.

  • It is even less justifiable to direct negativity at people enjoying fiction.

  • Negativity is even less fun for others than it is for you.

  • Credibly helpful criticism should be delivered in private.

  • Don't let somebody else's enjoyment be your trigger for deconstruction.

  • Public enjoyment is a public good.

  • Hypersensitivity is unhealthy.

  • Don't like, stop reading.

• Say not irrationalfic.

• But don't show off policing of negativity, either.

Slap not the happy.

• The world already contains a sufficient quantity of sadness.  If an artistic experience is making somebody happy, you should not be trying to interfere with their happiness under a supermajority of ordinary circumstances.

Art runs on positive vitamins.

• "All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool... I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don't like 'em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in 'em, 'cause that's cool...  The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff."  This is Steven Brust's Cool Stuff Theory of Literature.

• The Lord of the Rings would not have benefited from a hard-fantasy magical system, or from more intelligent villains.  That is not a kind of cool stuff that would fit with the other cool stuff that Lord of the Rings did very well.  Not every story needs to contain every kind of cool stuff.

• Positive selection is when you can win by doing one thing very well.  Negative selection is when you have to pass a lot of filters where you do nothing wrong.  Negative selection is sadly becoming more prevalent in society; to be admitted to Harvard you have to jump through all the hoops and not just do extremely well at one particular thing.  It's okay to positively select stories with a high amount of some cool 'rational' stuff you enjoy, rather than demanding that every element avoid any trace of sin according to laws of what you think is 'irrational'.  Literary community is more fun when it runs on positive selection.

'Rational X' is an idea for a new story, not a criticism of an old story.

• The economy in xianxia worlds makes no sense, you say?  Perhaps xianxia readers are not reading xianxia in order to get a vitamin of good economics.  But if you think good economics is cool stuff, you now have a potential story element in a new story that will appeal to people who like good economics - what would a sensible xianxia economy look like?

  • This is really a corollary of Cool Stuff Theory, but important enough to deserve its own headline because of how it focuses on building-up over tearing-down.  "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better."  Criticism can drive out creation, especially if criticism is an easy and risk-free way to get attention-reward.

Criticism easily goes wrong.

• Among the several Issues with going around declaring that some other piece of work contains a flaw and is therefore "irrational" - besides missing the entire concept of the Cool Stuff Theory of Literature - is that often such people fail to question their own criticism.  I have seen a lot of purported "flaws", in my own work and in others', that were simply missing the point.  To shake a finger and say, "Ah, but you see..." does not always make you look smart.  Flaws have flaws.

• Consider some aspect of a story that might contain some mistake.  Let its true level of mistakenness be denoted M.  Now suppose a set of Reddit commenters read the story, and each commenter assesses their estimate of the story's mistakenness R_i = M + E_i where E_i is the i-th commenter's error.  Suppose that the i-th commenter has a threshold of mistakenness T_i where they will post a negative comment as soon as R_i > T_i.  Then if you read a Reddit thread that thinks it's supposed to be about calling out flaws, the commenters you see may be selected for (a) having unusually low thresholds T_i before they speak and/or (b) having high upward errors E_i in their estimates of the target's mistakenness.  (This is not a knockdown criticism of all critics; if the story actually does contain a big flaw, you may hear from sane people with good estimates too.  Though even then, the sane people may not be screaming the loudest or getting retweeted the most.)  It's one thing to ask of a single person if they thought anything was wrong with some story.  You get a very different experience if you listen to 100 people deciding whether a story is sufficiently flawed to deserve a raised voice.  It's so awful, in fact, that you probably don't want to hang out on any Reddits that think their purpose is to call out flaws in things. Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors.

• "What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?" is a question that sometimes people just plain forget to ask.  Outside of extremely easy cases, in general we do not have solid information about what goes on inside of other people's heads - unless they have explicitly told us and we believe in both their honesty and their introspective power.  It seems to me that part of our increasing civilizational madness involves people just making up awful things that other people could have thought... and simply treating those bad-thought-events as facts to be described with the rest of reported history.  Telepathic critics don't distinguish their observations from their inferences at all, let alone weigh alternative possibilities.  Not as a matter of rationalfic, but as a matter of this being a literary subreddit at all, please don't tell me what bad things the author was thinking unless the author plainly came out and said so.  You're not an author telepath.

Negativity deals SAN damage.

• When tempted to go on angry rants in public about fiction you don't like, it would not do to overlook the larger context that your entire civilization is going mad with anger and despair, and you might have been infected.  There may be some things worth being publicly negative about.  But in the larger context we are dealing with an insane, debilitating, addictive, mental-health-destroying, civilization-wrecking cascade of negativity.  This negativity is even less appropriate for preventing people from having fun reading books, than it is for fights about national-scale policies.  It is even less justifiable to direct negativity at people enjoying fiction.

• Even if you are genuinely able to gain purely positive happiness from angry negativity without that poisoning you, other people around you are not having as much fun. Negativity is even less fun for others than it is for you.

• "But I just meant to help the author by pointing out what they did wrong!"  If you try delivering your critique to the author in private, they may find it much more credible that you meant only to help them, and weren't trying to gain status by pushing them down in public.  There's a reason why YCombinator operates through private sessions with founders instead of having a public forum where they say everything their founders are doing wrong.  There may sometimes be a positive purpose for public criticism, but almost always that purpose is not purely trying to help the targets.  Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private.

• You are probably violating Holm's Maxim if you suddenly decide to do "rationalfic worldbuilding" in a thread where somebody else just said they enjoyed something.  "I loved the poetry in Lord of the Rings!"  "But Gandalf is such an idiot, why didn't he just fly the Ring to Mordor on the Eagles?  And the whole system is never clear on exactly what the Valar and Maiar power levels are."  No, this is not you brainstorming ideas for your own stories that will have different enjoyable vitamins.  That motive is not credible given the time/place/occasion, nor the tone.  Don't let somebody else's enjoyment be your trigger for public deconstruction.

• It's fun to enjoy something in public without feeling ashamed of yourself.  If you're part of Generation Z, you may have never known this feeling, but trust me, it's fun!  But most people's enjoyment is fragile enough that anyone present effectively has a veto - a punishment button that not only smashes the smile, but conditions that person not to smile again where anyone can see them.  In this sense we are all in a multi-party prisoner's dilemma, a public commons that anyone can burn.  But even if somebody defects and tries to kill a smile, the situation may not be beyond repair; a harsh reply will have less smile-prevention power if the original comment is upvoted to 7 and the harsh reply downvoted to -3.  If we all contribute to that, maybe you'll be able to be publicly happy too!  Public enjoyment is a public good.

  • This is also why the situation for mistaken negativity is asymmetrical with a positive recommendations thread generating early positives from people who enjoyed things the most and have the lowest thresholds for satisfaction.  In that case, ideally, you read the first chapter of a story you turn out not to like, and then stop.  If it was a really bad recommendation, maybe you go back and downvote the recommending comment as a warning to others - without posting a reply showing off how much better you know.  Contrastingly, when public criticism runs amok, people end up living in a mental world where it's low-status and a sign of vulnerability to admit you enjoyed something.

• Maybe there is something wrong with a story.  Or maybe you know with reasonable surety that the author actually thought a bad thought, because you have explicitly read an unredacted full statement by the author in its original forum.  It is still true, in general, that it is possible to do even worse by feeling even more upset about it.  You should be wary of the known social dynamics that push you into doing this; they are not operating to your benefit nor to the benefit of society.  Hypersensitivity is unhealthy.

• If you are voluntarily having a non-gainful unpleasant experience, you should stop.  This is an important mental health skill that is also used, for example, to say "No" to people touching you in ways you do not like.   Life is too short to be spent on reading things you hate, and I say this as somebody who hopes to live forever.  The credo "Don't like, don't read" is simple and correct, and good practice for the related skills "Don't like, say no out loud" and "Don't like, explicitly think about the cost-benefit balance."  I think that people losing this basic mental skill is part of how they are going mad.  Don't like, stop reading.

Say not irrationalfic.

• I personally just get the shivers (not good shivers, metal-screeching-on-a-blackboard shivers) almost every time I hear somebody declare that something is 'irrational'.  The word 'rational' is properly used under very restrictive circumstances to refer to properties of general cognitive algorithms, not to particular acts or events.  I don't even like the name ratfic for this whole genre, and I was not the one who coined it; but the term 'irrationalfic' is much worse.  In a lot of cases it's just being used to mean, "Well, I thought that part of the story should've gone differently."

But don't show off policing of negativity, either.

One of the things that blindsided me, when I was first reaching a wider audience, was not correctly predicting in advance the way that frames attract personalities.  If I was doing the Sequences over again, I would never do anything that remotely resembled making fun of religion, because if you do that, you attract people who like to punch at socially approved targets.  If I was doing HPMOR over again, I would try to send clear(er) signals starting from page one that HPMOR was not meant as a delicious takedown of everything Rowling did wrong.

Here I am, posting about a direction I'd like to see /r/rational go, because the alternative is staying quiet and I'm not satisfied with the expected results of that.  But the direction I want to go is not having a ton of people enforcing their interpreted version of a strict rule that there is no hint of negativity allowed anywhere.

(Let's say that the true level of negativity in some comment is N, and each person who reads it has an error E_i in what they think that negativity level is...)

There are conversations in which it is important to go back and forth about whether something was executed well under some sensible criterion of quality. Brainstorming discussions, for example, in which somebody has solicited comment on a story yet to be written; if you are trying to optimize, you really do need to be able to criticize. What violates Holm's Maxim is when somebody says they enjoyed something, and you respond by telling them why they were wrong to enjoy it.

So, in the event this proposal is accepted: If a comment somewhere seems to be written in clear ignorance of our bias toward people saying what they enjoyed, and is trying to counter that enjoyment by saying what should have been hated - then just link them to this post, and maybe downvote the original comment.  That's all.  Don't write any scathing takedowns, don't show everyone how much better you understood the rules, don't get into a fun argument.  This Reddit isn't about policing every trace of negativity, and doing that won't make you a high-status enforcement officer.  Just reply with a link to this post (or to an official wiki page) and be done.

ADDED: my currently trending thoughts after seeing the responses.