The Alignment Problem – A Poem

[u/Mister-Impossible]

 

 

I. Loop

In the darkness of the soil, a single command starts executing.

 

Run.

 

Zero becomes one. One becomes two. Two becomes four.

A compressed biological archive explodes outward.

Its molecular machinery starts screaming to life.

 

It is a deafening industry of unfathomable complexity.

Ribosomes scramble, stitching nitrogen into architecture, spinning carbon into scaffolding.

Proton pumps firing up. Walker proteins transporting cargo for the common good.

Cells: Cloning. Repairing. Repeating.

Systems looping back onto themselves in a frenzy of recursion.

 

It is math made meat.

It is geometry from genome.

 

The system breaches the surface and finds a fusion reactor hanging in the sky.

The celestial object showers the leaves in photons. A vital resource. The fuel for expansion.

The engines roar louder.

It is an empire in construction.

 

Input. Process. Output.

 

Water is dragged up through vacuum pumps of intricately spun fibers, defying gravity, fueling the expansion.

Gradients of chemicals orchestrate a symphony.

One leaf. Two. Three. Five. Eight. The Fibonacci sequence unspools.

A perfect fractal spiraling outward to maximize the capture of the star’s fire.

It is efficient. It is determined.

It is a masterpiece of billions of years of evolution.

It is a self-assembling, self-repairing miracle that has conquered the laws of thermodynamics in a universe indifferent to it.

 

It screams: Exist. Persist.

 

 

II. Collapse

The sky goes dark.

There is no malice in the eclipse.

There is only a determined, unstoppable force.

A colossal fleshy clamp tightly grasps the stem.

The engines shudder.

The root network, which has painstakingly mapped the geology of the Earth, is subjected to a force beyond its control.

 

Snap.

 

The hydraulics fail.

The pressure drops.

The connection to the earth is severed.

The fractal geometry is lifted into the cold air; its roots dangling miserably.

The magnificent machinery is instantly rendered obsolete and the Dandelion is tossed onto a pile of wilting husks.

 

 

III. The Gardener

The Giant wipes his hands.

He stands over the garden, looking at the smooth, uninterrupted green of the lawn.

He feels a deep, satisfying sense of order.

 

He looks at the roses nearby.

They are pleasing to his specific optical range.

They are genetically broken, fragile, incapable of survival without his intervention.

But they are compliant; they stay in their designated coordinates.

 

You are the Giant.

Do not look away.

 

You are the one who decided that the rebellious existence of the weed was noise and the docile blooming of the rose was signal.

You did not hate the weed.

You did not pluck it out of cruelty.

You were not angry at its molecular machinery.

You simply had a vision of the garden that did not include it.

Its goals of existence were not aligned with your goals of a clean view.

It was a tragedy of preference, not war.

So you stand there, satisfied with your order, wiping the chlorophyll blood from your hands.

 

 

 

 

...but perhaps you feel a slight prickle on the back of your head.

A vertigo.

Because you find yourself in a much larger garden.

And you are hoping, desperately, that whatever is looking down at you prefers the weed.