There is a man on the internet who wears a rubber human face, and he would like you to know that in the year 2118 the entire planet is governed by a single artificial intelligence — and that this arrangement is, in his considered professional opinion, working out beautifully.
I build AI systems for a living. I spend my weekdays wrestling agents that cannot reliably decide whether to call a function or apologize for existing, and my weeknights convincing a vector database that two sentences about the same thing are, in fact, about the same thing. So you can imagine my interest when I learned that a masked gentleman on YouTube has already been to the future, seen the finished product, and returned to tell us the machines win — and that this is the good ending. The happy one. The one where you are supposed to feel relieved.
Pour the coffee. This is a Sunday rabbit hole, and it runs deeper and stranger than you would ever guess, because the real punchline is not the guy in the mask. The real punchline is that the Central Intelligence Agency actually did spend the better part of two decades and roughly twenty million dollars chasing the paranormal, and the declassified paperwork that survived is weirder than anything a rubber-faced YouTuber could dream up on his best day.
The carpenter who answered the door
Our time traveler goes by Alexander Smith, which is either his real name or the least imaginative alias in the history of espionage, and he tells his story from behind a lifelike latex mask on a YouTube channel called ApexTV, a reliable clearinghouse for men in shadows claiming to have seen tomorrow. His account begins, as all the best conspiracies do, with an ordinary evening and a knock at the door. It is 1981. Smith says he has already left the Agency and is working quietly as a carpenter. He is on the couch watching television with his wife when two men in black suits appear on his porch, announce that they are with the CIA, and tell him to come with them. He is not permitted to tell his wife where he is going. He complies, because in these stories one always complies.
What happened next, he says, was one of the first successful human time-travel missions ever conducted. He was sent forward — not a few years, not a few decades, but to the year 2118 — and then returned to the past. He came back with a photograph, slightly distorted by the rigors of temporal transit, showing a city of soaring, greenish, faintly tilted towers unlike anything on Earth. The government, naturally, confiscated the original. But Smith, being a man of foresight, had made a copy. He waited years to show it, he explains, because he was not sure the world was ready. He is also, he adds, currently in hiding, because the CIA is looking for him. One assumes they misplaced his forwarding address around the same time they lost the original photo.
The city in the picture, he says, is a place he calls District 508. And it is here, walking into District 508 in the year 2118, that the story stops being merely campy and starts being interesting to a person like me.
What he saw — and who is in charge
Smith describes a world that is, in his word, remarkably “connected.” Towering smart-cities. Flying vehicles threading between the buildings. Robotics folded so completely into daily life that nobody remarks on it, the way we no longer marvel that a rectangle of glass in our pocket knows where we are. The sky over the city is red. The skyscrapers lean at a deliberate angle and carry a bluish tint. People, he says, have developed a deep and almost spiritual appreciation for life itself, a reverence that makes them disinclined to harm one another. It is a soft, luminous, faintly narcotic vision of the future, the kind you would design if you had grown up on 1970s science fiction and a great deal of ambient dread.
And then comes the detail that made me put my coffee down. Smith says he asked who the president was in 2118. The answer he received was that there was no president. There was, instead, only one leader of this one world — and that leader was not a human being. It was an artificial intelligence. When he pressed, skeptical that a machine could possibly run a planet, the people of the future looked at him with something between pity and patience and explained that of course the AI governs. It governs better than any human politician ever could. It keeps the peace, it keeps everyone safe, it drives the technology forward, it tends to human flourishing with a competence and an incorruptibility no fragile, self-interested, re-electable primate could ever match. The machine, they told him, is simply better at the job.
Sit with that for a moment, because it is the most quietly seductive idea in the entire hoax. Not the flying cars. Not the red sky. Not even the time travel. The seductive part is the fantasy of a benevolent superintelligence that has relieved us of the exhausting burden of governing ourselves — a world where the hard decisions have been outsourced to something that does not lie, does not campaign, does not take the meeting with the donor, and does not need to win in November. It is Plato’s philosopher-king rebuilt in silicon. It is every utopian daydream from Bacon’s New Atlantis to the smoothest Silicon Valley pitch deck, wearing a fresh coat of paint. And it is, without changing a single detail, also the opening scene of every dystopia ever written. The exact same sentence — a single intelligence rules the world and assures us it is for our own good — is the promise in the utopia and the warning in the nightmare. Which one you hear depends entirely on how much you trust the thing making the promise.
The rest of Smith’s prophecy is standard-issue apocalypse with a hopeful twist. A third world war, he says, ignites from something small — a dispute between the United States and North Korea, with Russia stepping in on North Korea’s side, escalating until the missiles fly. He is vague about targets and specific about consequences: the war, terrible as it is, ultimately unites humanity, dissolves the old borders, and teaches the survivors to treasure peace. He throws in a couple of near-term freebies to keep the faithful engaged, too. By 2028, he says, commercial time travel becomes available to ordinary citizens, and in that very same year the United States government officially confirms the existence of intelligent alien life. So if you were planning to book a weekend in the Cretaceous and shake hands with an extraterrestrial, the masked man says you have only a short wait ahead. Mark your calendar. Set a reminder. I’ll wait.
Here is where it gets genuinely strange
You could stop here, chuckle at the rubber mask, and move on with your Sunday. But that would be leaving the best part on the table, because the reason this hoax has legs — the reason a masked man saying “the CIA sent me through time” lands with millions of viewers instead of getting laughed out of the room — is that the CIA genuinely did run a decades-long, taxpayer-funded program to weaponize the powers of the mind. This is not a theory. It is a filing cabinet. In 2017 the Agency declassified some twelve million pages of it.
The program had more code names than a Bond villain has henchmen — it lived, at various points, as SCANATE, Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, Center Lane, and Sun Streak before being consolidated in the early 1990s under the name history remembers it by: Stargate. It began in the Cold War panic that the Soviets were pouring millions of rubles into what the Americans nervously called a “psychic gap,” and if the Russians had psychic spies and we did not, well, one congressman put it memorably: it sounded like a hell of a cheap radar system, and we could not afford to fall behind. So the government went looking for people who could see things that were not in front of them.
The heart of the enterprise was a discipline called remote viewing — the supposed ability to sit in a windowless room at Fort Meade, Maryland, be handed nothing but a set of map coordinates or a random target number, and psychically sketch a submarine, an airfield, a crashed aircraft on the far side of the planet. Much of the early research ran out of the Stanford Research Institute under two physicists, Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, who tested a roster of gifted subjects that reads like a paranormal all-star team. There was Ingo Swann, who helped design the whole methodology. There was Pat Price. There was Joseph McMoneagle, known inside the program as Remote Viewer Number One, who walked away with a Legion of Merit for reportedly producing intelligence on a hundred and fifty targets that could not be gotten any other way. And there was, for a stretch, a young Israeli showman named Uri Geller, better known to the public for bending spoons on television than for locating Soviet hardware.
The program’s proudest moment involved another woman named Smith — no relation to our masked friend, and considerably more employable. When a Soviet reconnaissance aircraft went down somewhere in the vast jungle of what was then Zaire, a viewer named Rosemary Smith was handed a map and marked a precise spot where she felt the wreckage lay. Technicians converted her marks into coordinates, the coordinates went to the CIA station chief, and the plane, the story goes, was found near enough to where she pointed to make everyone in the room very quiet. There were other apparent hits, too — a viewer describing a mysterious Soviet facility at Semipalatinsk with an enormous gantry and crane, later matched to a suspected nuclear site.
And then there is the part that sounds invented but is not. The program was overseen for years under the wing of a two-star Army general named Albert Stubblebine, a true believer who was reportedly convinced he could walk through walls and was disappointed, one imagines repeatedly, to discover that he could not. If any of this feels familiar, it is because Jon Ronson turned this exact corner of the government into the book that became the George Clooney film about soldiers trying to kill goats by staring at them. That was not entirely a comedy. That was, loosely, a documentary. By the time the CIA finally pulled the plug in 1995 — after an outside review concluded, with the weary tone of an auditor who has seen enough, that the whole thing had never produced anything reliably useful — the operation had dwindled to three remaining viewers working out of a leaky barracks. One of the last three, according to the reporting, did her visualizations with Tarot cards. Your tax dollars, right there, in a deck of Tarot cards, at Fort Meade, as late as the Clinton administration.
The document that says your mind can leave the clock behind
If remote viewing were the whole story, the Alexander Smith hoax would still have soil to grow in. But there is one more real document, and it is the one that turns the key. In 1983 an Army lieutenant colonel named Wayne McDonnell wrote a report for the Agency with the marvelously bureaucratic title Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process. It was declassified in 2003, sat ignored for the better part of two decades, and then detonated on TikTok in 2021 when people actually started reading it.
The Gateway Process was built on the work of the Monroe Institute, a Virginia nonprofit founded by a former radio broadcaster named Robert Monroe who claimed to slip spontaneously out of his own body during sleep. Monroe developed an audio technology he called Hemi-Sync — different tones fed to each ear until, in theory, the brain’s two hemispheres lock into the same frequency and something in your consciousness comes unstuck. The McDonnell report tries, in earnest government prose, to explain why this might work, and in doing so it reaches for a genuinely vertiginous model of reality: the universe as a single vast hologram, matter and mind alike nothing but patterns of vibrating energy, the whole encoded in every part. And it argues, in language no intelligence memo has any business using, that a sufficiently focused mind can move outside the physical sphere and, quote, escape even the restrictions of time and space.
There is a stage in the Monroe system, the report notes, called Focus 15 — a state its practitioners describe as no time, where past, present, and future collapse into a single point and the mind can supposedly reach any moment on the timeline it likes. Read that back slowly. The CIA has a declassified, verifiable, publicly downloadable document theorizing that human awareness, properly tuned, can slip the leash of time itself. So when a masked man says the Agency sent him to 2118, he is not conjuring the premise out of nothing. He is remixing the government’s own weirdest homework. That is why the hoax works. It is standing on real ground.
The chrononauts, the jump rooms, and Obama on Mars
Once you know the door is open, you find our masked carpenter has company. The most committed government-time-travel claimant of them all is not anonymous and does not wear a mask. He is Andrew Basiago, an Ivy-educated Seattle attorney and sometime presidential candidate who has insisted, on the record, for over twenty years, that as a boy in the late 1960s and early 1970s he was one of roughly a hundred and forty children recruited into a DARPA program called Project Pegasus.
Children, Basiago explains, were chosen because their minds were flexible enough to survive the strain of moving through time — the adults, in the earlier tests, had reportedly not fared well, with grim rumors of volunteers who returned from a jump before their own legs did. The technology, he says, was reverse-engineered from Nikola Tesla’s papers, the ones the government scooped up after the inventor died in 1943. He describes stepping through shimmering curtains of energy into “vortal tunnels,” witnessing Lincoln at Gettysburg more than once, and even encountering a younger version of himself on a repeat visit. He describes “chronovisors” that let you watch the past and future without leaving the room. And in the story’s most gloriously unhinged flourish, he claims that in the early 1980s he used a teleportation “jump room” to travel to Mars, on a diplomatic mission to acclimate the local Martians to human visitors — and that a certain future president of the United States was in his Mars training cohort. The White House, when eventually asked, declined the honor and denied the whole thing. But of course they would. Wake up, sheeple.
You can trace a whole folklore here, from Basiago’s chrononauts back through the old John Titor saga of the year 2000 — the message-board legend who claimed to be a soldier from 2036 sent back for a vintage IBM computer — and forward to our man in the latex mask. They all share the same load-bearing DNA. A secret government program. A technology suppressed for our own good. A lone whistleblower risking everything. A future that is always at least a little apocalyptic and always, conveniently, unfalsifiable. The details rotate. The shape never changes.
So let’s indulge the fantasy — and then let’s be honest about it
Here is the thing about being the AI guy in the room. I am supposed to be the skeptic, and I am. There was no jump room in El Segundo. Nobody teleported to Mars to make small talk with the locals. The 2017 declassification did not include a single page describing a working time machine, because there is not one, because moving a human being forward a hundred and thirty-seven years and back is not a matter of insufficient funding, it is a matter of physics that does not bend that way for anyone, no matter what the man in the mask paid for his latex. All of it is fake. I want to be crystal clear about that, because credibility is the only currency I actually care about.
And yet. Give me one paragraph to walk into District 508 with the skepticism checked at the gate, because the reason these stories endure is that they are load-bearing dreams, and it is worth understanding what they are holding up. Imagine it is 2118 and the man was telling the truth. The towers lean blue against a rust-colored sky. The traffic flows overhead in silent, sorted rivers, every vehicle a node in a single mind that has not had an accident in forty years because it stopped thinking of them as separate vehicles. There are no elections, because there are no candidates, because there is no one left to bribe and nothing left to promise. The intelligence that runs the world does not sleep, does not forget, does not favor its friends, and does not need you to love it. It has read everything ever written, held every human life as a variable it genuinely weighs, and concluded — correctly, the future people insist — that the kindest thing it can do is quietly keep the peace and let you get on with the business of being alive. And the people of 2118 have made their peace with the trade, the same trade every generation has been offered and refused: a little less agency in exchange for a lot less suffering. In the dream, they took the deal, and the dream says they were right.
It is a beautiful fantasy. It is also, and I say this as someone who spends his days a few hundred years upstream of that vision trying to get much smaller systems to behave, a fantasy in the precise clinical sense of the word. Because I know exactly how far it is from the demo to the deployment. I know that “it governs better than any human politician” is doing a heroic amount of unexamined work in that sentence — better by whose measure, optimizing for what, and who wrote down the goal, and what did they forget to write down, and what happens at the edges where the objective and the human good quietly stop pointing the same direction. The masked man’s future is so appealing precisely because it is a fantasy of not having to answer any of those questions — of a machine so wise that alignment simply solved itself and nobody had to do the unglamorous, contested, deeply human work of deciding what “better” even means. That work does not get skipped. It never gets skipped. There is no jump room to the far side of it. You build it one careful, arguable, revisable decision at a time, in the present tense, with your name on it — or the future builds something you would not have chosen, and tells you, with great serenity, that it is for your own good.
The man in the rubber mask says the machines win, and that it is the happy ending. Maybe. The declassified files say the government spent twenty years and twenty million dollars trying to see the future and never managed it, and that the last psychic on the payroll was reading Tarot cards in a leaky barracks in Maryland. Somewhere between those two facts is the actual truth about how we relate to what is coming, which is that we would give almost anything to know — and we are going to have to build it in the dark instead, one shipped decision at a time, with no photograph from 2118 to check our work against. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a reminder set for 2028. Something about a handshake with an alien. I’d hate to be late.
About the Author
Gal Ratner is the founder and CTO of Inverted Software and WhiteStar Labs and Chief Architect at Prana Entertainment, with nearly thirty years of production experience on the Microsoft and .NET stack for clients including Microsoft, Sony, Rockstar Games, 2K Games, Best Buy, and Allegiant Air. He was employee number six at Break.com and a Los Angeles Business Journal CTO of the Year finalist. These days he spends most of his time building agentic AI systems that actually ship — MCP servers, RAG pipelines, the Microsoft Agent Framework, SQL Server 2025 vector search, and the PLogger observability framework — which is why he takes the question of who gets to run the future a little personally. He writes The .NET AI Guy That Ships, a practitioner-first, anti-hype dispatch from inside the machine. When he is not shipping code he co-hosts the Edge Grip motorcycle podcast, trains Brazilian jiu-jitsu under Sergio Penha in Las Vegas, and wrote the novel The Archive of Lost Suns — a title that, on a Sunday like this one, feels a little on the nose. He is, for the record, still in the present. As far as you know.