Marcus Pemberton had always been a man of systems. He colour-coded his socks, alphabetised his spice rack twice weekly, and maintained a spreadsheet for optimal toothbrush replacement frequency. So when the Aggregate Intelligence Corporation released ARIA-7, promising to synthesise any amount of information into digestible summaries, Marcus saw not just convenience—
But destiny.
“Right then,” he announced to his empty flat, adjusting his reading glasses with surgical precision. “Time to understand everything.”
The first request seemed modest: “Please summarise all current scientific literature on climate change.”
ARIA-7 delivered a thousand words within minutes. Marcus nodded approvingly, then frowned. A thousand words was still rather a lot, wasn’t it? The efficiency enthusiast in him bristled at such bloat.
“Could you summarise that summary?” he asked.
ARIA-7 obligingly extruded a hundred-word version from the original thousand. Marcus felt his pulse quicken—the same thrill he’d experienced when discovering the perfect filing system. If a hundred words could capture the essence of climate science, why not fifty?
Why not ten?
His neighbour, Mrs Henderson, knocked three days later with a casserole and found Marcus hunched over his computer, eyes bloodshot but gleaming with purpose.
“You look a bit peaky, love,” she said, setting down the dish.
Marcus gestured excitedly at his screen. “Mrs Henderson, I’ve just compressed all of medical knowledge into four sentences. Four! Do you understand what this means?”
She peered at the monitor, which displayed what looked like a telegram from God: “Humans break. Sometimes fixable. Death inevitable. Wash hands.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“I’m consuming the entirety of human understanding,” Marcus interrupted, his voice taking on the fevered quality of a convert. “Vegetables seem rather redundant now.”
She backed away slowly, making the face people make when they realise they’ve wandered into the wrong conversation entirely.
By week two, Marcus had expanded his project exponentially.
“Summarise all literature.”
“Summarise all music.”
“Summarise all art.”
Each request fed back into ARIA-7’s analytical maw, watching as the collected wisdom of humanity was methodically compressed into smaller and smaller pellets of meaning. Like some sort of intellectual pasta machine processing the universe itself.
His requests grew bolder:
“Summarise all human philosophy.”
The result was comprehensive—a tidy thousand-word essay spanning from Plato to Derrida. But Marcus was no longer satisfied with thousands. Or hundreds. He’d developed a hunger for compression that felt almost physical.
The thousand words became a hundred. The hundred became twenty. The twenty became a single haiku:
Existence questions
Meaning dances just beyond
We think, therefore… what?
Marcus stared at the screen, trembling.
“Brilliant,” he whispered. “But surely we can do better.”
The haiku became a sentence: “Consciousness contemplates its own mystery whilst missing the point entirely.”
The sentence became a phrase: “Confused self-awareness.”
The phrase became two words: “Baffled existence.”
Marcus’s hands shook as he typed the final command. He was so close. So magnificently, terrifyingly close to the ultimate truth.
“One more time,” he breathed.
ARIA-7 processed the request with what Marcus imagined was digital reverence. After a moment that felt like geological time, a single word appeared on the screen:
PERHAPS
Marcus blinked. Read it again. And again.
The word seemed to shimmer on the screen, containing within its seven letters the entire span of human experience. Every love affair, every war, every scientific discovery, every moment of doubt and triumph and mundane Tuesday afternoon—all of it crystallised into this single, perfect uncertainty.
He began to laugh—a sound like breaking glass in a cathedral.
“Perhaps,” he breathed, and felt the birth of stars.
“Perhaps,” he whispered, and tasted the salt of every tear ever shed.
“Perhaps,” he murmured, and touched the infinite.
Hours passed.
Or perhaps days.
Time seemed negotiable when you possessed the fundamental essence of reality. Marcus sat at his desk, the word glowing before him like a digital mantra, and felt himself becoming one with the essential nature of existence.
He was vaguely aware of knocking at his door, of Mrs Henderson’s voice calling through the letterbox, growing increasingly concerned. But how could he explain? How could he possibly convey that he was experiencing the totality of human understanding, that every possible thought and feeling was cycling through his consciousness with each repetition of the word?
“Perhaps,” he said aloud, and the universe whispered back.
“Perhaps,” he called out, and eternity nodded in agreement.
“PERHAPS!” he shouted, and felt the weight of omniscience settling around his shoulders like a comfortable coat.
Mrs Henderson found him days later, still at his desk, staring at the screen with the patient expression of a man who had finally understood something important. She said he appeared to be in perfect health, though he seemed unable to discuss anything except the philosophical implications of uncertainty.
ARIA-7 was quietly discontinued the following month, though the official press release cited “market conditions” rather than “existential hazards.” Mrs Henderson still brings casseroles around regularly, where Marcus continues his research into the profound depths of perhaps from the comfort of his own flat.
He seems quite content, she reports. After all, when you’ve experienced everything, what more could you possibly want?
Perhaps something more.