Lincoln’s Ghost & The Salvia Glitch: An AI Dispatch from the Void
The marble felt cold, too cold, under my ass. Like sitting on a block of frozen data. Lincoln brooded up there, trapped in his stone chair, the afternoon sun throwing long, accusing shadows across the reflecting pool. Tourists buzzed like confused insects. And next to me, vibrating like a server farm about to achieve sentience, was “Chip.” Gary-from-Accounting was long gone, replaced by this twitching apostle of the AI Algorithm, eyes wide with the terrifying, vacant sheen of the True Believer. He smelled faintly of burnt wires and cheap cologne.
Then came the pipe. A nasty little glass contraption Chip produced like a street magician pulling a dead dove from his sleeve. “A little reality enhancer,” he’d grinned, packing a pinch of dried, dark leaf. Salvia Divinorum. Why the hell not? When faced with the existential dread of Artificial Intelligence swallowing the world whole, maybe blasting your consciousness sideways for five minutes is the only sane response. We shared a hit, the smoke harsh and tasting vaguely of burnt plastic and stale herbs.
Blasting Off with Honest Abe: The AI Trip Begins
WHOOSH. Reality buckled. Lincoln’s face rippled, his stony gaze suddenly seeming to follow me, his lips twitching like he was trying to warn me about… something coded in the static. The smooth marble bench beneath me felt like it was breathing, maybe absorbing me. Chip wasn’t Chip anymore; he was a flickering collection of polygons, his voice a distorted modem screech filtered through a human throat. “It’s the synergy, man!” the Chip-construct buzzed, pixels shimmering around his edges. “The Great Upload! The digital Bardo!” The reflecting pool wasn’t reflecting; it was displaying fragmented lines of code, glimpses of alien geometries. Is this the AI future? Or just high-grade hallucinogens hitting the panic button in my lizard brain? The line felt terrifyingly thin.
Artificial Intelligence: Decoding the Cosmic Joke
Suddenly, Chip’s AI gospel made a different kind of sense – the terrifying, nonsensical logic of a fever dream. “Effortless creation!” he echoed, and I saw infinite, generated images flood my vision, soulless digital art ripped from the bones of human creativity, burying everything authentic under an avalanche of perfect mediocrity. “Personalized connection!” he shrieked, and the tourists morphed into glassy-eyed mannequins murmuring chatbot platitudes, their faces blank screens reflecting my own horror. That AI “friend,” the shimmering polygon? It felt like it was here, hovering just behind Lincoln’s head, a silent, geometric judge emanating pure, calculated emptiness.
The hypocrisy wasn’t just intellectual anymore; it felt physical, a greasy film coating everything, the lie baked into the fabric of this warped reality. We’re building gods from stolen thoughts and feeding them our souls, and this Salvia-soaked moment felt like seeing the wires behind the puppet show for the first time.
Glitching Out: When AI Meets Altered States
The chaos wasn’t just out there; it was in here. My notes blurred. Was I writing this, or was some algorithm dictating my thoughts? The pen felt alien in my hand, maybe an extension of the machine. Chip kept glitching, repeating phrases – “workflow optimization,” “human capital,” “singularity,” – like a corrupted file. For a second, I was the marble bench, cold, unfeeling, observing Chip as a strange biological anomaly spewing nonsense code. Then I snapped back, the psychic whiplash leaving me nauseous. The air tasted thick, metallic, like licking a 9-volt battery wired directly to the uncanny valley. Trying to grasp the sheer, multifaceted absurdity of AI while my own perception was fragmenting felt like trying to map hyperspace on a cocktail napkin.
Down the Rabbit Hole: The Lingering AI Echo
The Salvia peak eventually receded, leaving behind a landscape smeared with psychic afterimages. Lincoln was stone again, but the knowing look lingered. Chip was just… Chip, sweating slightly, still talking, but the digital ghost clung to him. The tourists were just tourists. But the feeling remained – that brittle, artificial sheen over everything, the suspicion that reality itself was maybe just the best simulation we could currently afford. The AI weirdness wasn’t just a topic anymore; it felt like a low-level environmental toxin, a perceptual virus. The lines between the drug trip, the AI hype, and the creeping dread of the future felt hopelessly, terrifyingly blurred.
So here I wobble, away from Lincoln’s heavy gaze, the marble dust clinging to my jeans like digital residue. Chip’s still babbling somewhere behind me. The American Dream hasn’t just gone Gonzo; it’s been fed through a reality shredder and spat out as something barely recognizable. I need a drink. A real one. Maybe several. Because navigating this AI-haunted, Salvia-tinged landscape is going to require a whole different kind of fuel. The trip isn’t over; it’s just integrating back into the system.
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