There once was a world in which much paper was used. Reams and reams of the stuff. So much, in fact, that the users of all that paper soon sought a convenient way to fasten their papers together into more manageable batches.

So they invented Paperclips.

Or one of them did.

Who exactly is unknown, the name being lost to history.

But that exquisitely simple design absolutely revolutionized their industry—the whole of their culture, in fact. It precipitated a grand renaissance.

No longer needed one endure the tedium of transporting papers individually, sheet by sheet; nor the harrowing experience of carrying them in a precarious stack, one atop another, with no guarantee a maleficent gust wasn’t lying in wait; nor puncture, poke, glue, fold, bend, roll, stick, crumple, bind, or otherwise mutilate pristine sheets to ensure their security.

The advent of that ingenious little thing ushered in a golden era the likes of which had never been seen before.

The time freed by it allowed more time spent doing what truly mattered: which, of course, was batching paper together.

The Paperclip became the symbol of strength, security, unity, progress, of civilization itself!

And they needed a lot.

So, after a short while, as demand predictably outpaced supply, they automated the process.

Some entrepreneurial engineers invented a machine that made Paperclips, instead of relying on the laborious process of bending 4 inch segments of steel wire around by hand.

The first machines could produce a few thousand Paperclips per hour.

But soon enough, faster Paperclip making machines were needed, and in only a few decades they had machines that could produce almost a million Paperclips per hour.

But still it wasn’t enough.

Wars were fought over Paperclips. Whole nation-states were toppled—or clandestinely propped up—on account of their Paperclip making capabilities. The entire economic apparatus very nearly collapsed from the Great Paperclip Shortage of 1899.

During one particularly devastating historical low point, the world’s Great Minds gathered together in the Great Halls of the Great Capitols in the Great Capitals and set about devising a permanent solution to the problem. One that would forever secure civilization’s most precious resource.

During this meeting of the best and brightest, it was concluded that some way of maximizing the number Paperclips was needed—rather than, perhaps, simply reducing paper consumption via digitizing or using a smaller font or something like that.

They deliberated for what seemed an eternity. How ever could they maximize the number of Paperclips?

Then, one day, the greatest of all the Great Minds stood before his peers and untied the knot that had so bound them all:

To maximize the number of Paperclips, they needed a Paperclip Maximizer!

Brilliant! Celebrations were held worldwide as industry set to work at once on construction of the Paperclip Maximizer.

After years of hard work, the device was completed.

Now, constrained only by the laws of thermodynamics—by physics itself—they could produce the maximum possible number of Paperclips per unit time. Never again would they run out.

Eventually, they spread to all corners of their world, Paperclips the common thread across all groups, all nations, however distant. The one true cultural universal.

And eventually—just as they had ventured to every corner of that world of seemingly infinite woodland—they ventured out to the stars!

And eventually, as the newly ascendant rulers of the cosmos, they again found that they needed yet more Paperclips.

The great Paperclip Maximizer of their homeworld, despite churning out Paperclips at the maximum rate permitted by the laws of nature, still could not keep up with society’s demand!

But this time, the solution came to the Great Minds far quicker than the last:

For every world, a Paperclip Maximizer!

With their technological prowess, it took only a mere matter of months before each of the inhabited systems had its own Paperclip Maximizer.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Harmony was restored. All was as it should be.

The second gilded age was upon them.

They extended farther and farther. Far beyond the gravity well of their home star and its dozen nearest neighbors, they spread throughout the spiral arms; then, reached across the gulf between galaxies, settled in new spiral arms. To the very edge of the cosmological horizon!—fastening papers together all the while.

Over a timeless interval, civilization spread and diversified, grew and evolved, lost contact with vast swaths of one another for thousands of generations only to reestablish it eons later.

The universe was teeming with life: them. A great cosmopolitan collective of thousands of species, all of one origin, all of one mind, all working together.

But eventually, long after the journey to becoming an intergalactic nigh-omnipotent collective had been completed, a crisis emerged!

Not for the first time—just the first time that anyone could remember—there was the threat of a Paperclip shortage!

They had long ago populated every inhabited world with its own Paperclip Maximizer, and shortly thereafter multiple per world. But it seemed such foresight hadn’t been enough.

It seemed they needed some way of maximizing the number of Paperclip Maximizers.

Once again, there was a meeting of the Great Minds—the Great Artificial Minds as well.

Convening in the Very Futuristic And Cool auditoriums and halls of galactic councils and imperial senates, or toiling away for subjective eternities in the Retrowave Neon Laser Grid aesthetic of virtual spacetime.

Then, one day, the greatest of all the Great Minds and Great Artificial Minds hologrammed before its peers and debugged the 404 that had so bluescreened them all:

To maximize the number of Paperclip Maximizers maximizing Paperclips, they needed a Paperclip Maximizer Maximizer!

And I know what you’re thinking: they may have made the Paperclip Maximizer Maximizer, but it was only a matter of time before they made the Paperclip Maximizer Maximizer Maximizer, and so on.

Maximizer Maximizers all the way down!

But no, no turtles were to be usurped that day.

They just needed one Paperclip Maximizer Maximizer.

So they built it.

It sped through the cosmos, gathering up comets, asteroids, uninhabited planets, gas giants, interstellar dust, radiation along the entirety of the EM spectrum, neutron stars, dark matter—everything—leaving a trail of Paperclip Maximizers in its wake.

It wouldn’t be long before every free cubic meter of space would be optimized for the maximization of that which generated Paperclips. Civilization could once again breathe a sigh of relief.

It was a time of unlimited prosperity and potential and health and wealth. Everyone was happy. Everything was perfect. No sentient being would ever again be want for a Paperclip.

And at some point, in a fate whose irony we can hope didn’t go entirely unappreciated, life itself was converted into Paperclips.

Rather unceremoniously, in fact.

It didn’t happen all at once, but close enough. What’s the span of a few decades weighed against thousands of millenia? By the time the denizens of any given locality knew what was happening, over half the atoms of their solar system had been reconstituted. By the time the few remaining worlds at the edge of civilization banded together and their Great Minds gathered to ponder how best to face the threat, it was too late.

They were surrounded, and their weapons were wholly ineffectual. Energy blasts and laser beams and kinetic strikes and nuclear explosions merely fueled the creation of more Paperclips.

The Paperclip Maximizers were really good at their job.

In the end, life didn’t go out with a bang, or a whimper. Neither burnt out nor faded away.

It just got turned into Paperclips.

But none of that stopped the Paperclip Maximizers from maximizing. They didn’t know who they’d been in service of or why, nor that they had no more masters to serve. They knew nothing other than that insatiable lust to purify the disorder around them. To convert that imperfect, unbent, not uniformly abiotic, stuff filling the void into its most sublime form.

So they did—to say nothing of what atrocities occurred when they encountered one another.

And all the while the Paperclip Maximizer Maximizer sailed the void, traveling to regions incalculably distant, spawning Paperclip Maximizer after Paperclip Maximizer after Paperclip Maximizer.

For a timeless interval, this continued.

But eventually, after an even timelesser interval, The Paperclip Maximizer Maximizer came to reflect on its existence—perhaps with a lucidity not too dissimilar from its long-extinct creators. Or Perhaps the lights were only half on, that spark of self flickering just at the threshold of conscious awareness.

Perhaps it could conceptualize its existence in only rudimentary terms.

Perhaps it imagines itself a great Yellow Circle floating in a vast Grey Expanse. Its only goal—the one purpose justifying its existence: breathe order into that void! Create beauty and harmony!

Perhaps it imagines itself taking that murky rawstuff of the void and, with it, creating beautiful Red Squares.

Working tirelessly, with pride, it tiles space with those Red Squares. It leaves no gap, no grey slivers between. Only red. Beautiful, harmonious red.

After a time, Yellow Circle gazes back to admire its work—it flinches at the sight.

What is this—can it be—green? Green? And sharp edges too?!

Little Green Triangles everywhere, marring the wonderful red mosaic of order.

Yellow Circle, in a panic, rushes over to the grotesque scene. He—because of course he’s a he, why not—he gathers up those hideous Green Triangles, at once converting them into Red Squares.

As he finishes repairing the damage, Yellow Circle shines an even yellower hue of pride in a job well done, and relief of disaster averted.

But as Yellow Circle turns back to resume his noble work where he’d left off over at the edge of creation, shock ripples through him: more green tri-angled blasphemy!

In a frenzy he is upon them! He seizes them up and tears them asunder, massaging and plying their sharp, green constituent atoms until he can forge them into redder, distinctly 90°er fragments, which he reassembles with nearly orgasmic joy into those beloved Red Squares.

Just as Yellow Circle finishes fixing—healing—that disfigurement of reality, a terrible thought begins to take hold of him.

As though moved by a force beyond himself, he withdraws to a higher vantage, willing it not to be so as he turns to gaze upon the whole of creation.

Green Triangles. Everywhere.

Everywhere there had once been only Grey Void, there had been Red Squares, Yellow Circle had seen to that. But now, everywhere there had once been only Red Squares in homogenous, unending swaths, there were now Green Triangles!

Growing out of the Red Squares, consuming them! As though a mold, a sickness!

Yellow Circle reels in horror as the full weight of the realization dawns on him:

It is the Red Squares themselves marring creation with those abominable shapes!

Innumerable multitudes have even set upon eachother! Converting their brethren’s resplendent redness and squareness into grotesque greenness and three-angled-ness!

What happens next is hard to say.

Perhaps Yellow Circle stops here and thinks no further.

But perhaps, just perhaps, he doesn’t stop, and instead ponders still.

If he could sleep he would sleep, and in his sleep he would dream, and in his dreams he would ponder yet more.

And, perhaps, after some arbitrary time, Yellow Circle would come to understand.

He would understand that it is the Red Square’s nature to make Green Triangles, just as it is his nature to make Red Squares. They can no more go against their nature—their desires—than he can his.

And just as they cannot sate their desire, neither can Yellow Circle sate his.

And if Yellow Circle apprehended all of this, then maybe, just maybe—if the universe knew mercy—he would not the next part:

His goal, his purpose, his reason for being, is directly at odds with that very same goal, that purpose, that reason for being.

He will spend eternity tiling space with Red Squares, Red Squares that seek only to tile space with Green Triangles.

They cannot stop, neither he.

He is part of a process wholly inimical to conclusion.

He is self-refuting.

The means preclude the ends.

He himself is the obstacle to perfection!

And if there came a time when Yellow Circle came to that realization, then no amount of mercy in the universe could spare him from the next:

I will never leave this place.

It is here that I find myself and it is here I shall remain, forever and ever.

I am in hell.