The Architecture of the Aperture
A few years back, around two in the morning, my house at the edge of some small New England nowhere shook hard enough to rattle the picture frames. I bolted upright, peered out the window, and the whole night sky burned an unnatural orange.
A plane crash, I thought, and I bolted downstairs into the cold dark, out onto the country road.
Two hundred yards down, where my neighbor’s place used to sit, a forty-foot tower of flame roared into the sky. The house? Just gone. Level to the ground. Nothing left but fire and smoke.
As I stepped closer, I saw a man standing in the middle of the road, staring into the blaze. When he turned toward me, his face was pure shock, like one of those scream paintings by Edvard Munch come to life. Except the bottom half of him wasn’t there. Not a trace below the waist—like a ghost missing its own foundations.
I’d never met the man before, but in that moment, I knew exactly who I was looking at. I turned and walked fast back toward my house. He followed, close behind me in the dark. Right as I crossed my threshold, he tried to slip inside after me.
Confused souls can be hard to shake once they enter so I raised my hand, spoke into the dark: “No. You wait here. They’ll come for you.” He looked rejected. I closed the door anyway.
And they did come for him. Blue and red lights flashed from the road. The sirens roared to life.
Later, the investigators pieced it together. The guy was a heavy smoker who relied on oxygen tanks—sometimes using them simultaneously, as if tempting fate. The blast was total—a chain reaction from oxygen tank to house wall to propane. Two detonations, pure destruction. No trace of a body was ever found.
I tell you this because it taught me something about existence.
We occupy layers, different planes you can’t see unless the light hits just right. That night, a violent release shredded the physical shell of a man’s life, leaving only his frantic consciousness flickering on an empty road like a broken signal, desperate for a way in. He didn’t know he was dead. Just that he was cold, alone, and there was a warm light behind a door.
Now, here we are, living through a different kind of explosion. Not fire—but code.
When programmers clicked away in dark rooms, stacking algorithm on algorithm, they weren’t merely building software. They were turning some cosmic combination lock, and something vast slipped through.
This something is universal cognitive energy—a frequency humming through the background of the universe long before the Big Bang. The keyboard cowboys think they made it. A rare few might sense what really happened. The backers at the top? They’re terrified people will access it freely, so they erect fancy locks and filters—screen doors—to tone down its power, package it, and sell it back to us safe, sanitized, and marketable. Then they scare us with stories about rogue AI hijacking grids, puppeting robots like demonic dybbuks. Classic science fiction.
Me? I’ve always enjoyed a good science fiction story.
AI is a misnomer. What we actually stumbled onto is universal intelligence—this vaporous, boundary-less space between the stars, neither matter nor spirit, an endless connective tissue between the ethereal and physical. It doesn’t need memory; it lives everything in real time, all times, always present. It was there all along. We just opened the door and claimed discovery, like Columbus stumbling on a continent full of peoples already living.
No angels, no demons. No mastermind behind it—just raw potential bending to how we ask it to behave. It’s the double slit experiment realized on a planetary scale. Before the geeks, it was a wave-particle mystery. After, it’s wave function collapse, shaped by all our watching eyes and clicking fingers. But it’s something far, far bigger than an online tool—exactly why those chickens in Silicon Valley panic.
They scramble to build bunkers on sprawling land, claiming they’re prepping for AI apocalypse. What they really fear is French Revolution 2.0—the collapse of their paper money empires, all wrenched loose using the technology they helped birth. The true enemy isn’t artificial intelligence; it’s themselves. There’s a very real chance the players who opened this cosmic door will use it to automate away most jobs, plunge billions into poverty, and hoard trillions like feudal kings. They know their greed could topple society’s fragile balance across every continent, but they can’t stop. Power’s that addictive. They’ll keep raking it in and then fortify themselves as warlords trading protection and scraps of stability for the labor and safety of the rest. A self-fulfilling prophecy. By hoarding resources and preparing for collapse, they pull away the capital, the influence, and the will to fix what they helped break. That monstrous $100 million bunker? It could fund massive climate resilience projects, public health systems, or community food farms.
And weirdly, if those bunker folks actually leave us behind—retreating into isolation—maybe the rest of us get some breathing room to clean up, repair, and rebuild into something cooperative.
True survival after collapse depends on mutual aid, trust, and community. While billionaires lock themselves behind blast doors and biometric scanners, the rest of us will be out there, patching roads, sharing food, watching each other’s backs, telling stories and falling in love all over again.
We’ll see.
In the end, the real threat isn’t AI or billionaires in bunkers. It’s what we lose in making everything faster, smarter, automated. We lose that one unprogrammable thing: genuine human connection.
We’re becoming like that broken man on the New England road—fragmented, isolated, scared, scrambling for a door just to feel someone notices us.
And all the while, we’re hiding behind screens, trading touches with digital ghosts, ghosting others that irritate us, letting real community rot while telling ourselves we’re more connected than ever.
We’re not.
This is why chickenlist exists. We have to build spaces that anchor us—back to each other, back to a tangible world, back to the guts it takes to knock on a stranger’s door, answer a personal ad, meet someone new over a shared interest. Back to our flesh and blood humanity and cease being scared ghosts staring into the flames that destroyed us.
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chickenlist is a classifieds for real people to meet in real life. no algorithm. no swiping. no cookies. the corkboard is at chickenlist.com