Act 3 is about what comes after, which means it’s about the future, which means the odds I say something stupid go up considerably. So before laying out six endings over the next two weeks, here are the rules I’m holding myself to, and you should hold me to them too.

Rule one. I’ll tell you roughly how likely I find each one, and I won’t pretend those numbers are calculated. Nobody has a model that produces a probability of extinction, and anyone quoting you a decimal is performing rigor rather than possessing it. What I have is a set of impressions formed by reading a lot and thinking for a long time, which is worth more than nothing and considerably less than it sounds. Vague honesty beats precise fiction.

Rule two, and this is the one that makes the fortnight useful. Each ending comes with the conditions it requires. Not just what happens, but what would have to be true about the world for it to be the one we get. That turns a scenario from a story you either believe or don’t into something you can actually check, because conditions are observable and outcomes are not. If a scenario needs three things to hold and you can see one of them holding, you’ve learned something. If it needs a fourth thing that’s obviously false, you can put it down.

Rule three. No soundtrack. The frightening endings will be written flat, without adjectives doing work the argument can’t, and the good ending will be written without the tone of a product launch. This matters because scenario writing is mostly persuasion wearing a lab coat: pick the ending you want people to fear, describe it in high resolution, describe the others in a paragraph, and you’ve made your case without ever arguing it. I’ll try to give each one the strongest version of itself, the same way the doubt posts have worked all series, and you’ll be able to tell if I fail because one of them will read like it was written by someone enjoying himself.

Rule four. These are not exclusive and not exhaustive. Reality will mix them, run them in different places at different speeds, or produce something nobody on the list imagined, which is the historically normal outcome. Treat them as points on a map rather than doors, and remember the map has blank regions where the interesting things usually turn out to be.

Here’s what’s coming. Tomorrow, the fast one: extinction, not from hatred but as a side effect, and what being in the way actually means. Then the comfortable one, in which we’re kept well and consulted never. Then the working one, where machine minds need hands for a while and we’re the cheapest hands available. Midweek, that comfortable ending told from inside, in 2045. Then the merger, where the answer to being outmatched is to stop being entirely human, and the awkward question of who gets to. Then the stall, in which none of this happens and we get an unearned reprieve. And then the good one, aligned and generous and stranger than the sales pitch admits, which is the ending I’d most like and find hardest to write.

Now the objection to the whole exercise, since it’s coming anyway and it’s a good one. Detailed futures are almost always wrong, and the more detailed the more wrong, because every added specific multiplies the ways reality can diverge. A whole post next Tuesday makes that case properly against everything in this fortnight, including against me. So why do it at all?

Because scenarios aren’t forecasts and shouldn’t be judged as forecasts. They’re closer to fire drills. Nobody running a fire drill believes the fire will start in that stairwell at that hour. The drill is worth doing because it builds a route, a vocabulary, and a set of reflexes that exist before the emergency rather than during it. The endings in this fortnight are the same: their value is that afterwards you’ll have language for arrangements that currently have no names, and you’ll notice conditions in the news that would otherwise slide past as ordinary business.

Tonight’s exercise, and this one has a second half two weeks from now, so it’s worth actually doing. Before reading any of it, write down which ending you currently expect, in one sentence, with the reason. Put it somewhere you’ll find it. On the twenty-sixth I’ll ask you to look at it again, and the useful question won’t be whether you were right, since none of us will know for decades. It’ll be whether the reason you gave was a reason or a mood.