Why Is It Called the Overreaction Machine?
People occasionally ask the Professor why she insists on calling it the Overreaction Machine. They usually ask the question with a smile because they assume the name is meant to be humorous. She smiles back, but not for the same reason. "It seemed like the most obvious name in the world once I noticed what it was doing." She usually leaves it there.
Years before she ever drew the first diagram, she was cleaning out old screenshots from her phone when she found a message she'd forgotten about. It contained only three words. Can we talk?
She remembered exactly what happened next. Not the conversation, but the part before the conversation. The instant she read the message she felt it....uh oh. Then, almost without noticing, her mind quietly went to work.
Maybe they're upset.
Maybe I forgot something.
Maybe this is about yesterday.
Maybe somebody's sick.
Maybe they need a favor.
Maybe...
The possibilities kept arriving one after another as though someone else were placing them on the table for her to examine. She didnā€™t choose any of them. She certainly hadn't asked for them. They simply appeared.
About twenty minutes later she was making tea when she stopped and laughed. "I don't actually know anything." She looked at the phone again. The message hadn't changed. It still said exactly what it had said twenty minutes earlier. Can we talk? Nothing more.
None of the things she'd been reacting to were actually in the message. She quietly supplied every one of them herself. That should have settled the matter, but it didn't. The possibilities kept coming anyway. That was the interesting part, not that she imagined them, everyone imagines things.
What fascinated her was how quickly they appeared, and how completely they took over before she even realized they were there. Looking back, she could see what happened. Long before she knew what she was thinking, she was already creating little futures. Maybe they're upset. Maybe this is about yesterday. Maybe somebody's sick. Each one lasted only a moment before another took its place, but every one of them quietly changed the way the message felt.
Hours later, sitting with her notebook, she wrote a single sentence.
I wasn't reacting to the message.
She stared at it for a while before adding another.
I was reacting to a future I'd created.
She underlined the second sentence. That tiny observation refused to leave her alone. It appeared in grocery stores, family arguments, faculty meetings, politics, friendships, traffic, airports, and, rather annoyingly, every time someone else loaded the dishwasher. Different objects, different people, different stories. Yet somehow the same strange thing kept happening. Something small would happen, and before reality had a chance to catch up, her mind had already filled the empty space with possibilities. Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they were spectacularly wrong. The accuracy turned out not to be the interesting part. The speed was.
Years later, after thousands of pages of notes and more crossed-out diagrams than she cared to admit, she finally chose the perfect name.
The Overreaction Machine doesn't overreact because it reacts too strongly.
It overreacts because it reacts too soon.
She looked at the old screenshot one last time. Can we talk? Three words. That was all it had ever said.