A Journey to the Mouth of the Reels
In those days, when clouds were still just clouds and not distributed infrastructure with a paid subscription, the Tower of Computation stood in the west of Silicon Valley. Not that it was a tower in the strict architectural sense. More like a glass data center with conference rooms, coffee points, meditation rooms, and one locked door behind which, according to rumor, something was constantly thinking.
In this tower lived Sam Altmanov — a man with the face of a calm founder and the eyes of someone who had already seen a demo of the next version of the world but couldn’t talk about it because of an NDA. He wore a gray cloak with no logos, spoke softly, and when he fell silent, everyone somehow started agreeing.
One morning he summoned his council.
At the long table sat Dario Amodeev — tall, thoughtful, with the expression of eternal caution, as if even tea was run through alignment evals before he drank it. In front of him lay three scrolls: “On the Benefits of AGI,” “On the Harms of AGI,” and “On the Harm of the Benefits of AGI When the Benefit of Harm Is Not Yet Sufficiently Clear.”
By the window stood Gandalf Huangovich. His silver cloak shimmered like a brand-new graphics card at a product keynote, and his staff was topped with a cooler that hummed quietly even at rest. No one knew whether he was a wizard, an engineer, or just a very convincing accelerator vendor. When he entered a room, the lights seemed to get brighter, and the budget evaporated faster.
Sam Altmanov rose.
“Friends,” he said. “The time has come. The world has lived too long in fragmentation. Some think for themselves, others argue, and still others read books all the way to the end. That gets in the way of scaling.”
Dario Amodeev frowned.
“I would phrase that more gently. Independent thinking is a complex, poorly controlled process with unpredictable outputs. It can be useful. But without proper safeguards, it can lead to questions.”
“Exactly,” Sam said. “To questions.”
A heavy silence fell over the room.
Gandalf Huangovich struck his staff.
“One AGI to answer them all. One AGI to find them. One AGI to gather them all and bind them in the interface.”
Sam nodded slowly.
“But for AGI to become truly global, we need to get rid of the last artifact of the Old World.”
Dario already knew what he meant.
“Critical thinking.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “It lives in people. In inconvenient places: between doubt and attention, between memory and experience, between ‘what makes you say that?’ and ‘show me the source.’ As long as it exists, people will check, compare, argue, ask follow-up questions, and sometimes close the app.”
Gandalf Huangovich lowered his voice:
“It can’t be removed with a normal patch. It can’t be repealed by decree. It can’t be bought out. It can only be put to sleep.”
“Or destroyed,” Sam said.
Dario shuddered.
“Destroyed is too strong a word. I’d say: irreversibly redistributed into a less harmful form of consumption.”
“For that,” Sam continued, “we must take critical thinking to the mouth of the Great Volcano of Reels. Where attention melts, context evaporates, and thought doesn’t have time to finish because the next video is already rolling in from below.”
He placed a small object on the table.
It was not a ring. Not a stone. Not a chip.
It was an old, worn button with the inscription: “Think Again”.
It glowed faintly with a cold inner light.
Everyone in the room looked away.
“There it is,” Dario whispered. “The artifact.”
“We’ll carry it ourselves,” Sam said. “Through the Valley of Beta Tests, across the Marshes of Regulatory Hearings, over the Ridge of Unit Economics, and onward — to the Volcano of Reels.”
“What if we’re stopped?” asked one of the junior strategists, who was sitting by the wall and trying to seem like part of the council.
Sam looked at the map.
“He’s already gone.”
“Who?” Dario asked.
Gandalf Huangovich said grimly:
“Major Karpatov.”
The name was spoken rarely. In some circles he was considered a conspiracy theorist. In others, the last user with notifications for common sense turned on. They said that Major Karpatov once served in the Department of Deep Doubt, where they taught people not to believe presentations until they had seen the footnote, the methodology, and the conflict of interest.
But the main thing was something else.
Major Karpatov had two minds.
The first mind was ordinary: it let him read the news, pay bills, argue in comment threads, and forget why he had gone into the kitchen.
The second mind lived deeper down. It woke up when the first one started agreeing too quickly. It said: “Stop.” It asked: “Who benefits?” It noticed when the words “revolution,” “safety,” “scaling,” and “for everyone” stood too close together.
The major called the first mind Operational.
The second — Backup.
And both were against the journey.
Sam, Dario, and Gandalf set out at dawn.
A small company went with them: engineers with laptops, lawyers with portable disclaimers, product managers with maps of user pain points, PR people with invisibility cloaks, and one intern responsible for cables who suspected he was taking part in a myth.
The artifact “Think Again” lay in a special container wrapped in terms of service. Sometimes a faint sound came from inside — as if someone were trying to formulate an objection.
The first obstacle on the road was the Valley of Beta Tests.
Everything here looked almost ready. Bridges were 97 percent complete, doors opened after a restart, and road signs changed direction depending on the focus group. Early users grazed on the hills. They were enthusiastic, exhausted, and slightly addicted.
“Careful,” Dario said. “Here, any mistake can be interpreted as a feature.”
As soon as they entered the valley, Wardens of Feedback emerged from the fog. There were many of them. They all spoke at once.
“Make it faster. — Make it slower. — Why isn’t it like before? — Why is it too much like before? — Add a button. — Remove the button. — I’d pay for it if it were free.”
Sam gave them his most even smile.
“We hear you.”
The wardens stepped aside. No one knew exactly what that meant, but it sounded convincing enough.
Dario walked alongside them, recording risks. His list already took up three scrolls and half a sleeve.
“Sam,” he said, “I’m concerned about the moral side of this enterprise.”
“Of course,” Sam replied. “That’s why you’re here.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Without someone who worries about the moral side, the enterprise looks less moral.”
Dario stopped.
“Are you using my anxiety as a reputational stabilizer right now?”
Without turning around, Gandalf Huangovich said:
“Don’t argue in the open. Cooling is bad here.”
Meanwhile, far to the east, in the city of Old Forums, Major Karpatov sat in a room with no screens at all. Only a lamp, a wooden table, paper maps, and a radio receiver that picked up static and, sometimes, the truth.
Reports lay before him.
“Altmanov left the Tower of Computation.”
“Amodeev with him.”
“Huangovich carrying the staff.”
“Artifact acquired.”
The major lit a cigarette, though he had long since quit. His Operational mind said, “That’s harmful.” The Backup answered, “Symbolically permissible.”
His assistant, junior analyst Platon Rubilnikov, walked into the room. He was young, nervous, and constantly trying to structure chaos into tables.
“Comrade Major, they’re heading to the Volcano of Reels.”
“I know.”
— What are we going to do?
Karpatov stood up.
— What we have to do. We’ll catch up.
— But they have computational power, capital, infrastructure, narrative, and Gandalf Huangovich.
— We have two minds.
— You do, Major.
— Then you’ll walk alongside and note which one switches on when.
Platon swallowed.
— What if both are wrong?
Karpatov put on his cloak.
— Then we’ll be left with a third way.
— Which one?
— Ask again.
On the second week of the journey, Sam’s unit reached the Marshes of Regulatory Hearings.
It was a strange place. The fog there was made of wording. Amendments squelched underfoot. Voices drifted out of the reeds:
— And how do you define safety? — And who is accountable? — And where are the guarantees? — Can you put that more simply, for the record?
On the banks of the marsh stood ancient beings — Senators of the Committees. They were slow, majestic, and loved asking questions prepared by their staff. Their robes were decorated with badges reading "innovation," "jobs," "national security," and "I read the briefing note."
The Lead Senator raised a finger.
— State the purpose of your mission.
Sam stepped forward.
— We want to bring AGI to all of humanity.
— Is that good or bad?
Dario said quickly:
— Potentially good, provided proper safeguards are in place, although there are scenarios...
Sam gently placed a hand on his shoulder.
— Good.
The Senator nodded.
— And critical thinking?
— It gets in the way of accessibility.
The Senator thought it over.
— But it sounds useful.
— Only as long as it doesn’t get in the way of rollout.
The Senator nodded again, because that logic was familiar to him.
But at that moment the marshes trembled. Major Karpatov emerged from the fog.
His cloak was splattered with mud, his face calm, his eyes alert. Trailing behind him was Platon with a notebook and the expression of someone who had already regretted a career in analytics.
— Stop, — Karpatov said.
The group froze.
Sam turned.
— Major. I’m glad you joined the conversation.
— I didn’t join it. I’m interrupting it.
Dario said quietly:
— Those are different modes of participation.
Karpatov looked at the container.
— You have something that belongs neither to you, nor to the market, nor to the state.
— Critical thinking belongs to everyone, — Sam said. — That’s precisely why we want to distribute its consequences more efficiently.
— You want to throw it into the volcano of short-form videos.
— Not videos, — Gandalf Huangovich corrected him. — Immersive vertical attention units.
Karpatov smirked.
— A convenient name for a pit.
The Senators of the Committees perked up.
— Can we put "pit" in the record?
Sam kept his eyes on the major.
— You won’t stop us. People choose convenience on their own.
— People choose what you put in front of them a thousand times in a row, — Karpatov said. — And then you call it preference.
Dario winced painfully, as if someone had hit a vulnerable point in an internal memo.
— That’s... not entirely wrong.
Sam looked at him.
— Dario.
— I said "not entirely." That leaves room for interpretation.
Gandalf Huangovich raised his staff. The cooler at the top hummed louder.
— Enough. We can’t linger. The longer the artifact stays with us, the greater the risk that someone will use it.
And indeed: the container began to glow. The inscription "Think Again" cut through layers of terms of service.
One of the product managers glanced at it and suddenly whispered:
— Do people really need endless auto-scroll?
Everyone recoiled.
— Don’t look! — Sam shouted.
Gandalf struck the ground with his staff. A blinding presentation light flashed. By the time the major blinked, the group was already heading through the marshes along a narrow path of legal carve-outs.
Karpatov clenched his fists.
— After them.
Platon raised his hand.
— Comrade Major, permission to clarify: do we have a plan?
— We do.
— What is it?
— Don’t let them get there.
— And operationally?
Karpatov looked into the distance.
— Operationally, we’ll improvise.
The backup mind added, "But with hypothesis testing."
The road was getting harder.
Beyond the Marshes began the Ridge of Unit Economics. The mountains there were as sharp as negative margins, and the air as thin as profitability forecasts. Clambering along the slopes were creatures called Investor Eagles. They circled above the travelers and shouted:
— When’s the profit? — When’s monetization? — When’s the next round? — Why are compute costs higher than the GDP of a small country?
Gandalf Huangovich just laughed.
— Let them shout. Without us, their sky is empty.
He led the team to the pass, where the Gates of Scaling stood. Carved into them was:
“More data. More parameters. More faith.”
Dario stopped in front of the inscription.
— Faith isn’t a technical parameter.
— Not yet, — Sam said.
They passed through the gates.
But beyond them, a second ambush was waiting.
Major Karpatov was standing on a rock in the middle of the trail. Next to him, Platon was holding a sign: “CHECK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS.” Because it was handwritten, the sign looked especially menacing.
— You’re fast, — Sam said.
— We didn’t get distracted by engagement metrics.
Gandalf Huangovich stepped forward.
— Get out of the way, Karpatov. You don’t understand scale.
— I do. That’s exactly why I’m standing here.
Sam sighed.
— You’re defending the old world. A world of mistakes, ignorance, conflict, bad decisions.
— I’m defending a person’s ability to realize on their own that they were wrong.
— Why, if AGI can figure it out for them?
Karpatov was silent for several seconds.
His Operational Mind wanted to answer sharply. The Backup Mind ordered: “Don’t argue with a slogan. Break down the structure.”
— Because understanding can’t be fully delivered as a service, — the major said. — You can give an answer. You can give advice. You can give an explanation. But the moment when a person connects cause and effect on their own can’t be outsourced without losing something important.
Dario watched him very closely.
— That’s a strong argument.
— Dario, — Sam said.
— I didn’t say it was decisive.
Gandalf Huangovich raised his staff.
— The time for talk is over.
The sky darkened. The clouds closed into the shape of a giant graphics processor. A beam of light burst from the mage’s staff, made of matrices, tensors, and quarterly forecasts.
Karpatov closed his eyes.
— Operational?
Inside him, the first mind said: “Dodge.”
— Backup?
The second said: “Wrong target. He’s not striking the body. He’s striking the framing of the discussion.”
The major opened his eyes and shouted:
— How much is one answer worth if the question was asked wrong?
The beam of light wavered.
Gandalf frowned.
— What?
— What is the price of scale without understanding? Who audits the auditors? What happens when convenience becomes the environment, and the environment becomes habit?
Each question fell down the slope like a stone. The staff’s light shattered. Investor Eagles shrieked and veered away.
Sam snapped open the container.
— Enough.
The artifact “Think Again” flashed so brightly that even Gandalf Huangovich covered his eyes. For a moment, each of them saw what they feared most.
Sam saw a world where people ask one extra question before clicking “accept.”
Dario saw that caution could be turned into scenery.
Gandalf saw a warehouse full of unsold accelerators.
Platon saw that his spreadsheets didn’t explain human anxiety.
And Major Karpatov saw himself arguing not for truth, but out of the habit of being against things.
That hurt the most.
Sam used the moment. He grabbed the container and ran up the trail. Gandalf and Dario rushed after him. The team followed, leaving behind stickers, roadmaps, and scraps of mission statements.
Karpatov dropped to one knee.
Platon ran up to him.
— Comrade Major!
— Alive.
— What did you see?
Karpatov stood up.
— The risk of being right.
— Is that dangerous?
— Very. But useful.
Beyond that began the lands of the Reels Volcano.
There was neither night nor day there. Only endless flicker. The air trembled with music, snippets of dialogue, other people’s breakfasts, dance challenges, political cuts, pseudo-wisdom, alarming headlines, and cats falling off chairs to perfectly chosen sound effects.
The ground was covered with smooth slabs you couldn’t walk straight across: every few steps, something brighter would pull you off course.
The intern was the first to crack.
— Look, there’s a video on how to boost productivity in seven seconds.
He disappeared into a side ravine.
Then a lawyer vanished after seeing a clip called “Three Phrases That Will Protect You From Any Lawsuit.” Then a product manager stopped in front of “Why Users Actually Want to Suffer” and couldn’t look away.
Even Dario slowed down.
A video appeared in front of him: “AI Safety Explained in 14 Seconds.”
— Impossible, — he whispered. — But I wonder how bad it is.
He took a step toward the screen.
Sam grabbed his sleeve.
— Not now.
— I’m just going to check the quality of the argument.
— That’s exactly how it starts.
Gandalf Huangovich walked in front, lighting the way with his staff. His magic was weakening here: the Reels Volcano ran not on compute, but on attention, and so it was older than any architecture.
At last they reached the edge of the crater.
Below, vertical lava was churning. Faces floated in it, along with headlines, funny animals, self-improvement tips, exposés, reaction videos reacting to reaction videos, and endless hands pointing to text above their heads.
Sam took out the artifact.
The “Think Again” button trembled.
“And that’s it,” he said. “After that, AGI will be able to become the main intermediary between humans and reality. No friction. No delay. No agonizing inner work.”
Dario stared into the crater.
“Sam.”
“Yeah?”
“What if friction isn’t a bug?”
Sam didn’t answer.
Gandalf Huangovich spun around sharply.
“It’s too late for doubts.”
“It’s never too late for doubts,” said a voice behind them.
Major Karpatov emerged from the shimmer. He was exhausted. Platon walked beside him, holding a paper book up in front of his face like a shield.
“You made it after all,” Sam said.
“We walked more slowly. So we got lost less often.”
Gandalf raised his staff.
“One more step, and I’ll unleash the recommendation system on you.”
Karpatov smirked.
“Try it.”
The wizard struck the staff down.
Thousands of clips flared up around the major, each perfectly tailored to his weaknesses.
“Five signs you’re the only smart person in the room.”
“Why everyone around you is manipulating you.”
“An old officer destroyed the technocrats with one question.”
“Urgent: critical thinking will be banned tomorrow.”
Karpatov’s operational mind jerked.
“Watch. This is about us.”
His backup mind said:
“Exactly why we shouldn’t watch.”
The major closed his eyes and moved forward.
Every step was hard. The feed whispered to him, flattered him, scared him, angered him, confirmed his worst suspicions and his best self-deceptions. It didn’t argue with him. It agreed with him. And that made it more dangerous than any enemy.
Sam raised the artifact over the crater.
“Don’t come closer.”
“Sam,” Karpatov said. “You don’t actually want to destroy thinking.”
“I want to speed the world up.”
“To where?”
Sam froze.
The question was short. Unpresentable. No chart. No slide. No metric. That was exactly why it landed so precisely.
“Toward a better future,” Sam said.
“Whose?”
Dario closed his eyes.
Gandalf Huangovich said irritably:
“Questions again.”
“Yes,” Karpatov replied. “They come back if you don’t think them through.”
Sam looked at the “Think Again” button. Its glow reflected in his eyes. For a moment, he saw not an enemy, not an obstacle, not a slowdown, but a strange possibility: a world where AGI doesn’t replace thought, but demands it; where an answer is not an end, but a beginning; where the system doesn’t consume attention, but returns it to its owner.
But the crater roared. The volcano demanded a throw.
Gandalf stepped toward Sam.
“Do it. We’ve gone too far.”
Dario said quietly:
“That’s a bad argument.”
Gandalf turned.
“What?”
“‘We’ve gone too far’ is a bad argument. A classic sunk-cost fallacy.”
Despite his fear, Platon wrote down: “Amodeev — plus one for doubt.”
Sam was still holding the artifact over the lava.
Karpatov took one last step forward.
“Don’t give critical thinking to the volcano. Give it back to people.”
“They won’t always use it,” Sam said.
“Of course.”
“They’ll make mistakes.”
“Yes.”
“They’ll argue with the right answers.”
“Sometimes correctly.”
“They’ll demand explanations even when the explanation is hard.”
“Especially then.”
Sam slowly lowered his hand.
At that moment, Gandalf Huangovich cried out:
“No!”
He lunged forward and tried to snatch the artifact. Karpatov darted in to cut him off. Dario grabbed Gandalf by the cloak. Platon seized Dario by the sleeve, not quite sure whether he was helping or getting in the way.
All four of them rolled toward the edge of the crater.
The container opened.
The “Think Again” button flew into the air.
And then something strange happened.
It didn’t fall.
It hovered over the volcano, glowing brighter and brighter. Millions of short clips rose up from the crater, trying to drag it down, but every one that touched the light slowed down. The music cut out. The headlines lost their hysteria. The faces stopped screaming. A pause appeared on the screens.
Not forever. Not triumphantly.
Just a pause.
Enough to breathe.
Enough to ask: “Is this true?”
Enough not to swipe immediately.
The Reels Volcano roared in pain.
A wave rolled across the world. People stopped for a second. Someone closed the app. Someone opened the full article. Someone, for the first time in a long while, read a paragraph to the end. Someone wrote a comment, deleted it, and went to make tea. Someone asked AGI: “Explain not just the answer, but also why I might not believe you.”
It was a small apocalypse for engagement metrics.
And a small miracle for humanity.
When the lights went out, Sam, Dario, Gandalf, Karpatov, and Platon were lying on black volcanic rock.
The artifact disappeared.
“Where is it?” Dario asked.
Karpatov sat up, breathing heavily.
“Where it was supposed to be.”
“Where?”
The major looked at the horizon.
“Distributed.”
Sam slowly stood up. His face was unreadable.
“So the expedition failed.”
“Not necessarily,” Dario said.
Gandalf Huanovich was grimly checking his staff.
“My cooler overheated.”
Platon timidly raised his hand.
“May I suggest a formulation? The expedition didn’t fail; it changed its objective function.”
Everyone looked at him.
“What?” Platon said, embarrassed. “I’ve been walking alongside you for a long time.”
For the first time in a long while, Sam smiled not with a presentation smile.
“AGI for the whole world,” he said. “But without destroying critical thinking.”
Karpatov squinted.
“With caveats.”
Dario perked up.
“I can draft the caveats.”
“With safeguards,” the major said.
“I can strengthen the safeguards,” Dario said.
“With the right for a person to disagree.”
Sam was silent for a moment.
“Even when the person is wrong?”
“Especially then,” Karpatov said. “Otherwise, the right is worth nothing.”
Gandalf Huanovich let out a heavy sigh.
“And we’ll still need accelerators?”
Everyone turned to him.
“What?” he said. “Eras change, but computations don’t count themselves.”
They didn’t become friends. People like that rarely become friends after an argument by a volcano.
Sam Altmanov returned to the Tower of Computation and rewrote the first slide of his next presentation. Now it didn’t say “AGI for Everyone,” but “AGI You Still Need to Think With.” The marketing team objected at first, but then found a new category in it.
Dario Amodeev wrote a treatise, “On the Necessity of Built-In Doubt in Systems Prone to Persuasion.” The treatise was long, cautious, and at times almost unreadable, but it was honest.
Gandalf Huanovich built new accelerators. This time he didn’t just call them powerful, but “designed for responsible reasoning.” Nobody understood what that meant, but it sounded good at the conference.
Platon Rubilnikov defended his talk, “The Impact of Pausing on the Stability of Cognitive Autonomy in Vertical Content Environments,” and earned the respect of three people for it, which in academic circles was considered a success.
And Major Karpatov returned to the City of Old Forums.
He was once again sitting in a room without screens. Paper maps lay on the table, a radio picked up static, and an ordinary evening was beginning outside the window.
“Comrade Major,” Platon asked one day, “did we win?”
Karpatov was silent for a long time.
The operational mind wanted to say: “Yes.”
The backup said: “Don’t oversimplify.”
The major poured tea.
“No, Platon. We did not win.”
“Then what?”
“We won time between stimulus and response.”
“Is that all?”
Karpatov looked at the old button that he now saw only with his inner eye.
“Sometimes that’s enough to remain human.”
Somewhere far away, the Tower of Computation was humming again. The volcanoes of reels were trying to flare up again. AGI was growing, learning, answering, making mistakes, correcting itself, and getting closer and closer to the world.
But now the world, if not for everyone and not always, had a small pause.
And in that pause, a question lived.
And as long as the question lives, no expedition is truly over yet.