Madam President,

I am asked, every time I appear before you, whether we are any closer to a cause. We are not. I want to explain plainly why the methods this government keeps funding cannot get us closer, and what I am asking you to authorize.

Where we stand

Mass Perceptual Illness has now run fourteen years. Confirmed propagation in thirty-four metropolitan centers. Civil authority has dissolved outright in nine of them. The clinical picture has not changed since Year 3: a healthy adult wakes one morning certain that a spouse, a child, a parent has been replaced by an exact duplicate. No lesion. No stroke. No pathogen. Fourteen years of pathology has turned up nothing, and I have stopped expecting it to. What I believe we are looking at is what happens to a species after it loses the ability to verify anything — after four decades in which every image, voice, document, and vote could be manufactured to specification. A population that cannot check whether the world is real eventually cannot check whether the people in it are. This began as an information problem and finished in the wards.

Why modeling has failed

Your science advisors have spent eleven years and two hundred billion dollars on predictive models, and every one of them has been wrong in the same direction. I do not say that to criticize them. A society at this scale is computationally irreducible: no equation outruns it, and no shortcut exists to be found. To learn how a civilization loses its grip on the real, you have to have one, and you have to watch it go.

What I am proposing

We instantiate the period our epidemiologists have independently flagged as the origin window — mid-twentieth-century North America, beginning with a single American city — and we run it. The machine grows the city out of the historical record and lets its population develop on its own. Nobody authors the people. Within that population we introduce substitutions — a spouse, a child, an animal, exchanged for an identical instance — and then revise the memories of half the population to match. The unrevised half perceives the substitutions accurately and says so out loud. The revised half perceives an unbroken life and concludes that the first half is ill. The neurology is beside the point; what we are reproducing is the epistemics — two populations, each holding a complete and sincere account of reality, each unable to accept the other's, and every institution between them forced to choose. Neither half is given cause to think itself the afflicted one. That is the mechanism destroying us, reproduced at a scale we can instrument and rerun.

The objection

The Directorate has received formal internal dissent arguing that the generated minds acquire moral standing and that the program therefore constitutes an offense against persons. I have read the dissent closely. It rests on the resemblance of the subjects' behavior to our own, which is the only evidence any of us has ever had about anyone. I cannot refute it. What I can tell you is that the alternative on the table is to keep watching real cities go dark while we wait for an equation that does not exist. Concluding an instance is done at the technical level, quietly, and I have never asked anyone to enjoy it.

Request

Authorization to proceed, priority power allocation, and your signature restricting knowledge of this program to the eleven names on the attached schedule. I would rather answer for this than for another nine cities.