In math class, as he often did, Mr. Burton got off on a tangent, something about an AI engine that would make an infinite number of paperclips, the result of which would destroy the world.

Mr. Burton read a quote from Nick Bostrom: Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.

“Any reactions?” Mr. Burton asked the class.

Wally Gurz wondered how the AI thing could even make one paperclip.

Pamela Melendez asked if the paperclips would be available in different colors. “Like rainbow.”

Molly rose from her front row seat to say, “If this AI machine were really smart it would teach the paperclips to mate. Then it could just sit back and relax. The process would be out of its hands.”

“Always a smartass,” Mr. Burton said with a smile.

“Always a lardass,” Wally Gurz whispered from his seat behind Molly.

“Better a fat ass than a dumbass,” Molly said to herself.

Molly wasn’t especially worried about AI destroying the world with paperclips, but that evening up in her room she remembered making paperclip chains as necklaces when she was a kid. She had an urge to make a paperclip necklace, but in her desk she could only find two paperclips, a silver and a blue—pretty, but hardly enough for a chain. She thought maybe her father would have a supply in his office.

She didn’t find any paperclips in her dad’s desk, but she did find a magazine which had pictures of naked women, many of whom had clips of various kinds fastened to their nipples. In one photograph, the clips were clothespins. Molly remembered making a Christmas ornament out of a clothespin back when she was in early grades. She’d painted the head black and the suit red. Wrong kind of clothespin for nipple pinching, and in any case Molly doubted there were clothespins of any kind in the house. Maybe that AI engine could be tasked with making some. Ha ha, I’m so funny, she said to herself. If push came to shove, she doubted an AI engine could make even one clothespin, say nothing of an infinite number.

Down in the laundry room, after prowling around a bit, Molly located a sack of clothespins. Shiny and smooth, they looked like they’d never been used. Maybe this was the supply from which her second grade Christmas clothespin man had come. She took one of the clothespins from the sack and brought it up to her room.

“Want a feel of my breasts?” she asked the clothespin.

She waggled the clothespin until it nodded in the affirmative.

“If you insist,” she told the clothespin, and she pulled up her blouse until her right breast was bared.