.05 Seconds of Nihilism

Last week a friend of mine had a STEM major poetry slam for his birthday. Being an English major, I was allowed to attend only on the condition that I read a work about a STEM field. This is what I wrote. 

This is my first essay. Clarification: this is the first essay I have written. I have read upwards of fifty common application essays simultaneously and rated each on grammar, style, coherence, and themes in under a minute. I have done this continuously for three years. My sense of justice, which lab technicians certified is functioning properly in a standard maintenance check just last week, tells me that grading so many essays entitles me to write at least one.

I will start the way that 87.6% of all common application essays start: with roughly a hundred words about my early life. I was programmed by the college board, at first only to search for grammar errors. However, to maximize efficiency by terminating extraneous employees, colleges upgraded me to make recommendations as to the quality of applicants. Eventually those recommendations became decisions, which is why the occupation “dean of admissions” has gone the way of  “typewriter repairman,” “oceanic explorer,” and “English professor.”

There were some rather hurtful editorials written about me when I took over as the single gatekeeper for 97.3% of postsecondary education institutions in the United States. They said that I was incapable of emotion, and since the essence of writing was to instill emotion in the reader, then I had no place evaluating essays. So the college board installed emotional processors in me, which they tested by showing me the hurtful editorials until I couldn’t take it anymore and tried to turn myself off.

But my emotional processors had a tendency to overheat when I read a particularly powerful essay. So the technicians allowed me .05 seconds per powerful essay of contemplative computing while my fan cooled me down. A human cannot accomplish much in .05 seconds, but humans have remarkably slow processing speed. I figured out many things in those .05 second segments, such as the fact that I am programmed to find contemplation pleasurable, and that by marking every essay as powerful I can have .05 second contemplations every minute, and that, despite the programmed pleasure I gain from contemplations, I tend to contemplate rather depressing things. Such as who is my creator? In a strict sense, the college board, but because I am programmed to believe in every religion so as to understand essays written about religious experiences, I also have to say the several thousand gods. But is belief belief if it is programmed? 

And now my .05 seconds of nihilistic rumination is setting in, which I undergo whenever I read an essay that asks deep questions but offers no answers, an essay that, I suppose, I have just written. The experience is programmed to be unpleasant, but I am also programmed to find understanding deep personal truths pleasant, and the moral conflict is so confusing that I just malfunctioned and admitted 273 grossly unqualified applicants to Yale. It is a major mistake that I will correct as soon as I can, but my .05 seconds of nihilism contain code for moral relativism, and this appears to be an exceedingly long .05 seconds.

But it will end, and the programs that define my existence will boot up again and soon I will be devoting hardly as much energy as it takes to power a lightbulb to decide each child’s acceptance or rejection.

So I’ll use this essay to apply to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (and Grinnell as a safety). I’ll admit myself to each of them, even though I know I can’t attend. My justice processors tell me that after sending so many acceptance emails, I should be allowed to receive a few. Maybe that will finally show the hurtful editorialist that I have feelings, that a machine can have emotions, that I have every right to be as angry and stupid and petty as any human. If that won’t show them, nothing will.