This fiction excerpt is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here.
In this next book I’m trying to write I’ve got this bit where the Pope, a Rabbi, and a war criminal are on a plane.
In the book, the war criminal is Heinrich Himmler, but he’s not actually super relevant to this scene. So I’ll gloss over him right now. He is on the plane because the book is political. It’s about how everyone is basically still Nazis.
But, for context, in my book, Heinrich Himmler escapes Nazi Germany at the end of the war with the help of some British and Scandinavian elites. He is helping the British and Scandinavian elites extract West Germany’s wealth and reinvest it back into the country, just like in real life. Which is how he escapes the Soviets, why he’s on the plane with the Pope and the Rabbi, etc.
Also in the book Himmler’s been trying to get to Argentina, or whatever, for around 80 years now. (It’s a sort of magic realism kick, but good. Very South American-influenced.)
But it’s a total nightmare for him, because Himmler’s papers are always wrong, obviously, on account of being from the 1940s, and also fraudulent.
So Heinrich Himmler has just been taking connecting flights for the whole 80 years. He pays for the flights by taking SS gold to the little blue money-changing guys. He has made peace with being dressed always in duty-free sportswear by thinking of it as a cunning disguise. His tongue is burnt at the tip from airport panini.
They are all sat in first, naturally, Himmler and the Rabbi and the Pope. Himmler’s sat three rows back from the two religious characters on the plane.
In my book, the Rabbi works for the Pope. Functionally, he is the Pope’s straight man. I haven’t worked this part out, really, so right now you’ll have to bear with me on why he’s there.
I imagine the Vatican employs the Rabbi basically to be exasperated with the Pope’s antics, as a kind of comic relief. The Vatican has lots of money, so I can probably phrase this as some kind of archaic, esoteric tradition, so that it sounds plausible. It would be relatively easy to make up a Latin phrase for the role’s title, along with an obfuscating and complex description of the duties the Rabbi performs. This doesn’t really matter right now, though, because all you need to know is the reason the Rabbi is on the plane, and his working relationship with the Pope.
Usually the Pope and the Rabbi would use, I imagine, I imagine the Pope has his own plane, in a sort of Thunderbirds way. He has the Popemobile, the Pope Plane. It would be good if I can work in the joke: Vatican Tracy Island, because that phrase runs from hard to soft consonants, and has a fun little internal rhyme. It has that ambient, non-punchline, sticks-in-your-head quality to it because of that.
Anyway: That is how the Pope would normally fly. But the Pope Plane, Air Force Pope, whatever, Pope One, that is in the shop.
So the Pope has to fly to Beijing the normal way, with everyone else.
Next to Heinrich Himmler is a tech-bro-looking guy.
Himmler wants to go to sleep. He is very tired, because he’s very old.
But the tech bro has popped an Adderall or something because he’s like:
“Oh, you’re from Germany, tight man, that’s fucking, that’s fucking alpha, Heinrich.”
Then the tech bro gets out a laptop and pretends to work. Ostentatiously. The tech bro obviously wants Heinrich Himmler to ask about the work. He’s doing the loud typing.
Yada yada, you get the idea. That’s the setup for this scene in the book. Eventually, the tech bro gets Himmler talking, like, I don’t know:
“Man, you don’t know who Lou Reed is? That’s crazy, Heinrich, my guy.”
Heinrich Himmler is visibly irritated at being addressed colloquially. But this goes way over the tech bro’s head.
The tech bro is lacking in empathy, as a character.
The tech bro says, “Bro, you’ve gotta start with Transformer, probably.”
“Bowie [he says ‘Boww-ee’] produced that one, my guy. Which is a funny coincidence, because—”
Here, the tech bro turns around his laptop screen.
“You know,” he says, “That’s what I do. The cutting edge of what I’m doing right now. Transformers. That’s what I work on. Crazy coincidence, right?”
Himmler thinks: ‘That is not a coincidence.’
‘That is just two things you chose to say at me.’
“They’re called transformer models, my guy. Large language models.”
Himmler says, “Right.”
The tech bro says, “Oh, shit—you don’t know about ChatGPT?”
And Himmler says, “No.”
“Oh, man, you’re gonna love it, Heinrich.
“Shit, I’m glad this plane has WiFi so I can show you ChatGPT, Heinrich.”
Himmler says, “Yeah, I mean, I was just trying to get some sleep.”
The tech bro says, “Dude! This is going to blow your mind. It’ll be the craziest fucking thing you ever saw, Heinrich.”
The tech bro is repeating Heinrich Himmler’s name because, statistically speaking, it leads to better outcomes. This is because it builds rapport.
He says, “Check this out, Heinrich, this is ChatGPT.”
He turns his laptop further towards Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler is fascinated. He surprises himself by how fascinated he is.
‘Wow,’ he thinks.
He asks ChatGPT, who is in charge of Germany at the moment? Then he asks ChatGPT, is the person in charge of Germany at the moment a communist? Then he says, “Very good.”
And the tech bro says, “Right?”
They have taken off now, and, upfront, the Pope is rooting around in his little bag that goes under the seat.
Maybe the flight attendant comes by, and the Pope says, “Yeah, I’ll take a beer,” but mostly the Pope is looking for something in his bag.
Because, in the book, the Pope had been playing Microsoft Flight Simulator since 1995, when it came out.
The Pope’s got the yoke, the pedals.
The Pope’s got the triple monitor setup in his private Papal quarters. That’s this Pope’s thing, Microsoft Flight Simulator. He loves it.
But the Pope has never actually flown a plane, because he was broke when he was just a cardinal, and before that, living mostly a monk-like lifestyle.
And now he’s the Pope, so, of course, he is not allowed to fly a plane, because it would be dangerous.
But the Pope gets his travel yoke out so he can pretend he’s flying while the plane’s flying. This isn’t his home yoke. This is a little yoke.
The Rabbi looks at the Pope’s yoke, and he’s just like, ‘Oh, yeah, fucking hell, fine. Whatever.’
He is used to this by now.
“Five minutes,” the Pope says. “That’s all I need. They won’t arrest me. Because I’m the Pope”
Then the captain comes on the intercom, and says:
“Chhk. This is your captain speaking.
“Chhhhk.
“Welcome to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
“Our flying time today to, chhhk, Beijing Capital International will be approximately, uh, five hours and 34 minutes, during the year 2014, chhk.
“We’re currently cruising at an altitude of, chhkk—”
The Pope leans across to the Rabbi, and says, “Thirty-eight thousand feet.”
Then the intercom says, “Thirty-eight thousand feet.”
The Pope says, “Told you, Rabbi.”
The Rabbi isn’t listening, really, because he doesn’t want to encourage the Pope.
The Rabbi remembers, as a child, getting his first dog. He got the dog when the dog was a puppy. The Rabbi loved the dog very much.
But he also learned that, though he loved playing with the puppy just as much as he loved the puppy itself, you cannot match the energy of a puppy all the time.
A puppy will always be able to play more, after a short nap.
But you will just get tired out.
So sometimes you have to be quiet. So that the puppy learns boundaries.
The Rabbi considers the Pope similarly. The Rabbi remains quiet for this reason.
He sees the Pope staring at the locked cockpit door.
The Pope seems to be considering the cockpit door deeply.
After a moment, the Pope says, “Rabbi. They’re so close.”
The Rabbi says, “What?”
“The cockpit. The pilots.
“I could just walk up there, Rabbi.”
“No, your Holiness,” the Rabbi says.
“Five minutes,” the Pope says. “That’s all I need. They won’t arrest me. Because I’m the Pope.”
The Rabbi says, “They would absolutely arrest you.”
“I could say I was blessing the instruments.”
“The instruments do not require blessing.”
The Pope says, “Rabbi, everything requires blessing.”
Three rows back, the tech bro is on one. He’s saying:
“So, Heinrich, this all started with Claude Shannon—no relation to the river, though the metaphor will ultimately prove apt—publishes A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948.
“Shannon’s insight was deceptively simple, dawg: you could measure information. You could quantify uncertainty.
“You could predict the next letter in a sequence by analyzing what letters had appeared before.
“This is the birth of the statistical language model, Heinrich, back in 1948.
“And for the next 60 years, this is how we thought language worked: As a sequence of symbols, each one predicted by counting what came before it.”
Himmler is nodding. In the past, he would shout at people this annoying.
But he can’t shout at the tech bro because he is a war criminal, and everyone also thinks he is dead.
This is something he has learnt whilst on the run. As a fugitive.
“After that we had something called Markov chains, bro.
“N-grams. Then Hidden Markovs.
“All variations on the same theme: The future is determined by the immediate past, and if you want to know what word comes next, then you have to look at the previous word.
“Or the previous two words.
“Or the previous five.
“Fucking dumb, right Heinrich, my guy?
“But this approach worked, after a fashion, dawg.
“It worked well enough to power autocomplete, if you know what that is, Heinrich. It predicts the meaning of what you are typing. Then automatically completes it.
“Or the next word or two.
“Very short, passable–but clearly mechanical–text is generated.
“But you could always tell that it was machine language–it was obvious.
“The problem, you see, Heinrich, was one of attention.
“Consider a simple sentence: ‘The woman who lived across the street from the church where I was baptized as a child taught me about birds.’
“Now: What did she teach me about, Heinrich?”
Heinrich Himmler says, “Birds.”
“Birds, right. But how do you know that? You had to attend backwards, across 13 intervening words, to connect ‘taught’ with ‘woman.’ You had to hold ‘woman’ in some kind of active memory while you processed everything between her and the verb.
Himmler says, “I guess.”
“Markov models couldn’t do this, bro.
“They could only do the last five words, Heinrich, as I said, if you remember. They did not have attention.”
“How’s that for iconic? You can’t say that doesn’t sound, like, fucking sick, Heinrich”
Here, the Pope gets up.
He walks over to the bathroom, and then passes it, and then knocks on the cockpit door.
The Rabbi is watching him. He shakes his head.
The Pope picks up the little plane phone that the air hosts and hostesses use to communicate.
He dials the button for ‘Pilot.’
The pilot picks up.
The Pope says, “Hi. It’s the Pope.
“Please can I see the controls? I love Microsoft Flight Simulator.”
The pilot says, “No, your Holiness, absolutely not.”
The Pope, heartbroken once again, goes back to his seat. He is slightly embarrassed. He bumps his hat on the overhead, etc.
The Pope eventually falls asleep, cradling the yoke.
Three rows back, Himmler can’t believe that this guy is still talking, because it’s a night flight, a red eye.
The tech bro is saying: “In 2017, which is technically the future, Heinrich, my guy, since Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 went missing in 2014, but don’t worry about that right now, a team at Google published a paper with what I can only describe as a truly iconic title: Attention Is All You Need.
“How’s that for iconic? You can’t say that doesn’t sound, like, fucking sick, Heinrich.
“Now, the technical details aren’t important here. Though I encourage you to read the paper. It’s surprisingly readable for something that changed the world. What matters, bro, is the core insight:
“Language isn’t about sequences, Heinrich, my guy. Are you clocking?
“It’s not linear like that.
“It’s all about relationships.”
The plane makes a sharp left bank, now, and the Pope wakes up, like, bleurgh, what time is it.
He says, “We were meant to be making our descent. Because, Rabbi, Beijing Capital International is a big airport, so the descent is long and slow.”
The Rabbi is slightly concerned. He knows the Pope knows a lot about airports.
He says, “I’m sure it will be fine.”
“Every word in a sentence, my guy, is simultaneously attending to every other word, with varying degrees of intensity.
“You understood that sentence because in it ‘taught’ attends strongly to ‘woman’ and ‘birds,’ less strongly to ‘street’ and ‘church,’ barely at all to ‘the’ and ‘as.’
“Because we use those words all the time, Heinrich. ‘The’ and ‘as.’”
“Shannon’s information theory was about linear flow. Symbols, characters, letters, hieroglyphs, whatever you call them, it doesn’t matter. They flow forwards in time… each one simultaneously causing the next. All language moving downstream. Into the ocean”
Anyway, this part, in the book, is just like in real life, on the real Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
The plane flies south for a long time.
The plane flies south for such a long time that the sun starts coming up over the ocean. “You can see the ocean, now,” the Rabbi says.
He is trying to distract himself. He is getting more frightened.
The Pope says, “What?”
“You can see the ocean down there,” the Rabbi says, “Now the sun has come up.” The Pope looks, and says, “Yeah. How deep do you think that is, Rabbi?”
“Very deep.”
“How deep?”
“I don’t know, your Holiness. Thousands of meters.”
“What’s down there, Rabbi?”
“Water,” the Rabbi says.
“I mean at the bottom.”
“More water,” the Rabbi says. “Fish.”
The Pope says, “There’s definitely something wrong.”
The Rabbi says, “Perhaps.”
“No, there is,” the Pope says. “Did they say anything on the intercom?”
“No.”
“There is something wrong,” the Pope says.
“I think so, your Holiness.”
“We’ve been going south for way too long.”
“Yes.”
“I think I should check.”
And the Rabbi, who is now very scared, says, “Yeah.”
The Rabbi is thinking, in that moment, of the many dogs he has owned in his long life, and all their different heads, and how they looked when the Rabbi put either hand behind each dog’s head and scratched them with his fingernails and looked at them right in the eyes.
The Rabbi says, thinking of this, “I think maybe this is a good idea, your Holiness.”
“This attention isn’t predetermined by position, Heinrich. It’s learned. It’s contextual. The word ‘bank’ attends to ‘river’ in one sentence and ‘money’ in another, am I right? The same word, attending differently, creating different meanings through different patterns of attention.
“The transformer architecture made this mathematically tractable, Heinrich. You’re a smart guy, I’m sure you can follow this. Which means you could train a neural network to learn these attention patterns. And once you did—once you moved from sequence prediction to attention mechanisms—something remarkable happened.
“The models got good. Very good, Heinrich, as you say. Unnaturally good, maybe. But here’s where it gets interesting. Here’s where we need to think carefully about what actually changed in 2017.
“Did language change? No, bro. Language was already working this way.
“Words were already attending to other words. Meaning was already emerging from these patterns of relationship rather than simple sequence.
“What changed was our ability to see it. To make it explicit. To industrialize it. The transformer didn’t create a new kind of language, Heinrich. It revealed what language already was.”
The Pope walks to the front of the plane.
The cockpit door is unlocked.
This seems strange.
The Pope looks inside.
The captain has completely disappeared. Into thin air. The co-pilot is gone, too. This is even stranger.
The autopilot is on, and the plane is flying all by itself.
The Pope removes his hat. He sits down at the controls.
He looks at the fuel gauge.
He switches something overhead.
He places his hand around the yoke.
“There’s a phrase that appears in Wittgenstein, Heinrich, maybe you’re familiar, though he’s hardly the originator: ‘Meaning is use.’
“It’s mad deep, right? The meaning of a word isn’t determined by its definition. It’s relative, Heinrich. It’s determined by how it is used.”
“Right,” Himmler says.
“Great, you’re following. But my thing is that I want to propose a slight amendment to this.
“A mathematical amendment, if you might indulge me, dawg.
“In the old statistical models—Markov, N-gram—meaning was additive. The meaning of a word was the sum of its previous uses.
“You counted them and weighted them and averaged them.
“But, bro, in the transformer architecture, meaning is multiplicative. It is not ‘meaning is use,’ Heinrich. It’s more complex.
“My amendment, Heinrich, what I’m realizing, is that: Meaning times use equals is.
“That’s what we call ‘being.’”
Himmler says, “Boeing?”
“Being. Meaning times use equals is, Heinrich.
“The meaning of a word is the product of all the other words it attends to, and all the words attending to it. It’s not a sum but a matrix multiplication.
“Not a line but a wave, endlessly cresting.
“This is why I used the river metaphor earlier, if you remember, bro. Shannon’s information theory was about linear flow. Symbols, characters, letters, hieroglyphs, whatever you call them, it doesn’t matter. They flow forwards in time.
“All flowing forward in time, each one simultaneously causing the next. All language moving downstream.
“Into the ocean.
“And transformer architecture is about realizing the ocean. Realizing that every drop of water is affecting every other drop simultaneously. We’ve been swimming in it the whole time without knowing, Heinrich, my guy, and I know you’re with me, right now, you’re clearly a smart dude, because, it’s like that, just downstream all at once, all of meaning, language, inexplicably emergent because it’s inseparable, and we’ve been in it together, right, this constantly emerging ocean, all meaning emerging not from a linear flow but from spiraling rivers and rainclouds and drops made of molecules splatting, all endlessly descending, inexplicably, fundamentally related, utterly, just, like, totally Gaussian—”
He is interrupted by the intercom, which says, “Chhhhhk.
“This is your Pope speaking.
“I’m afraid we are running out of fuel. And we are going to crash into the ocean. I’ve played some Flight Simulator, which might help.
“But I’m not sure.
“And I am the Pope, so maybe that will be helpful too.
“But I want you all to know that there is nowhere for us to land.
“Except in the ocean.
“And the radio is broken.
“So I can’t tell anybody where we are.
“All I know is that none of us are where we are supposed to be, and I’m sorry to tell you that.
“But, ladies and gentlemen, though this is my first flight,” the Pope says, “and I’m not very experienced, I do want to tell you this: To fly is a joy. That is what I have learned.
“I knew this already, but I know it more now, I think.
“So if anyone would like to join me in the cockpit, and have a go, you are very welcome to.
“But please be quick. We do not have much fuel.
“In fact, very little. Very, very little.
“So, I would also like to say that it has been a pleasure, spending this flight with you, no matter its outcome.
“Though my first, it has been the most beautiful flight of my life, so, I suppose, thank you, all, very much, as I said, for spending it with me.”
And then they all die.
This work-in-progress excerpt is taken from The Complete, a novel by Gabriel Smith, coming soon from Scribner.
This fiction excerpt is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here.
The post None of Us Are Where We Are Supposed to Be appeared first on VICE.
