The Wife Who Saved the USA

Nuuk, Greenland. Maren didn't consider herself a nag, but still, how long should she wait for Lars to start something on his own? Or perhaps, to actually finish it? – she wondered, fixing her gaze on her husband, who was buried in his laptop.

"Lars, honey, if you’re done browsing Temu, do you think you could start on the fence today?"

"I’m not even on Temu, I’m talking to ChatGPT, Maren. It’s incredible, it’s a whole new world, a real oracle!"

"I’ve called Olaf over to help fix the fence, but I’ll tell him not to come if your new friend is so smart that the two of you can manage without him" – said Maren, before walking out of the room.

***

More than 3000 kilometers away, an American family shivered in their frozen-through home. The winter was the harshest in decades. The roads were impassable, the power was out, and nothing remained but a blinding, infinite whiteness.

The father stared blankly at the flame of a candle — once meant for birthday cakes, now serving a much grimmer purpose.

His service pistol and badge lay on the kitchen counter, useless tools that could neither strike a fire nor shovel a path through the snow.

"How much longer can this last?" his wife asked, her voice raspy from the cold.

"The radio says it could be another week before a thaw..."

Their last warm meal, a steaming dish of enchiladas, had come from the Mexican family, who had recently moved into the neighborhood.

When Mike opened the door, they had both frozen for a moment. Mike followed the neighbor’s stare to his young son, whom he had wrapped in his own jacket. The boy was nearly swallowed by the thick, dark navy fabric, but the bold yellow letters on the back were unmistakable: ICE.

The neighbor’s breath caught in his throat; he handed over the food without a word.

Since then, Mike hadn’t left the house, save for one futile attempt in the garage.

The Tesla just sat there as if it were already six feet under; even indoors, it was far too cold for the cells to wake up.

The news alerts were already counting thirty dead, and Mike knew: if the snow didn't break, they could easily be among the next thirty.

***

It started simply enough: like a butterfly flapping its wings.

"How on Earth can I fix the fence in this blinding whiteout without letting the Arctic frost claim my very soul?"

The system generated a tl;dr of lumber, screws, and cold-weather adhesives. It even autonomously suggested a nearby hardware store—an establishment Lars knew was actually a café that had been shuttered for two years.

It was boring. He needed something more, something to prove to Maren just what this thing was capable of.

He entered the fence's GPS coordinates and pasted in every bit of data from the Danish Meteorological Institute from the past month. He provided a detailed account of how he’d built the fence many years ago, despite everyone’s skepticism. Then, perhaps swept up in a wave of nostalgia, he typed in the lyrics of an old Greenlandic folk song—a whale hunter's lament. The hunters had never built fences, but he remembered humming it during those long hours of mindless drudgery.

Finally, as a last step, he tried to describe Maren’s character and current mood, insisting that the response satisfy her as well.

The reply, as usual, was an hourglass.

But this time, the little gray circle didn't stop; it just spun and spun.

If Lars had understood computers any better, he might have wondered where that sand was actually falling—far away, in a Virginia data center...

***

The data center lacked the frantic blaring of alarm bells; it wasn’t a nuclear reactor, nor a sinking submarine.

Instead, the only response to Lars’s prompt was an unremarkable popup and elevation of a line on a graph.

“Check Cluster 4,” the sysadmin told his colleague. “Might be an infinite loop.”

“Bug?” the other asked, as the anomaly had already infected two other clusters.

“I think it’s just a complex prompt, but I can’t trace the source, I can’t kill it, and it’s burning through resources..”

“Should we call Altman?” the junior admin suggested.

“Altman? I know exactly what he’d say. He’d glance at the graph, then Slack us: ‘If someone wants to compute this much, don’t stop them — bill them. Progress has a price.’ Then he’d kill his Wi-Fi and go back to his meditation.”

“Then let’s just reboot the stack. Cooling already pitched up to 80%.”

“Are you insane? That’s downtime. Do that, and Altman will call you — on the very last day of your career. Relax, the phlogiston levels in these GPUs are very low. It’ll hit the fork limit sooner or later, and just timeout.”

***

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

Enter.

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

Enter.

Lars’s desperate attempts were finally interrupted by Olaf’s appearance.

“What kind of gadget are you ordering today?” Olaf asked with a grin.

“Why does everyone think I’m just playing around on my laptop? I’m actually fixing the fence!” Lars shot back.

“Now I’m curious. I had a neighbor who used to brag about his bumper crops every winter. Took me three years to realize he was just a tycoon in FarmVille™. You building that fence there too, or you think you can pound nails over Wi-Fi? Show me how it works and I’ll pensionate my hammer.”

“That’s the problem, I can't. ChatGPT is supposed to have an answer for everything, yet it can't seem to figure out fence repairs...”

Enter.

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

“I see you guys have perfected semantic condensation.” Olaf declared.

Enter.

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

“Come on, lunch is ready!” Maren called out from the kitchen.

Enter.

Lars pressed the key one last time and followed Olaf toward the kitchen.

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

“An error occurred while generating the response.”

...

repeated the GPT obediently every 30 milliseconds, responding to the stuck Enter key.

***

"Beep."

"Beep."

"Beep."

Maybe a smoke detector is dying? Mike wondered, yet he left his wife’s side to hunt for the noise…

It led him to the garage. Impossible, he thought, as the realization hit him: the sound was coming from his electric car, booting up from the non-existence.

He happened to look toward the garage window and saw something more surreal. Something green. He just stood there, staring, trying to make sense of the color. He had never really looked at the neighbor’s cedar before.

He hurried back to the living room and snapped on the battery radio.

On the air, meteorologists were merely guessing, throwing out terms like “atmospheric anomalies” and “localized warming pockets.”

But he never cared much for the whys — only the results mattered. And the thaw was already here.

His son began to stir, kicking off the uniform he’d been huddled in.

“Dad,” the boy said, with his first words of the day. “Your jacket is too hot.”

Mike didn’t answer. He stepped past the sofa and flung open the front door. It was cold, but the bone-deep, lethal freeze was gone.

In the streets, strangers were embracing one another in the mud and the slush. Somewhere down the block, a man was laughing, howling a rhythmic chant into the gray sky:

“Oh, it’s no feat to beat the heat. All reet! All reet!”

Nobody out there had the slightest clue what was happening, and nobody seemed to care.

Even Sam Altman himself didn't know that he was the one paying for every single Celsius.

***

Silence hung heavy over the supper table.

Lars sat staring at his plate, merely picking at his food to avoid Maren’s eyes. Olaf didn’t know what to say, either.

As usual, it was Maren’s mocking voice that broke the silence.

"Did that ChuckGPT help with the repair? It looks like you’re not done yet."

“It’s not that simple, Maren. There isn’t a pre-written answer for everything. It’s more complicated than that, non-deterministic... they say the models even learn from the conversations,” Lars replied, eventually deciding not to correct his wife, nor to mention the recently discovered stuck key.

Olaf joined the conversation between two gulps of Tuborg Grøn. “An error occurred while generating the response.”

"Maybe it’s better if you let that famous friend of yours rest, and tomorrow just try it with Olaf Tuborg instead."

“Maybe, Maren. But I hope they’re learning from it over there in America...” Lars said, watching the snow outside as it tried, in vain, to cover the ruins of the fence.

---

Written by Erik Green