This is a distraction.
The words. Each and every single one of them is a distraction, fleeting, unimportant, transitory. But you’re reading them. You can’t help yourself, can you? Even now you’re surrendering yourself to the text, letting its message wash over you and praying it can make you feel something.
Anything.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all do it. We’re all just bags of meat starved for emotional expression, each of us desperately trying to find an outlet to the feelings bottled deep inside. It’s the price we pay for human existence in a modern world. Constant mental unease. Over-stimulation.
You and me, we’re overloaded. Close to fried. We’ve been consuming media nonstop for so long that our attention spans dismiss anything that isn’t displayed on a screen. Real life? That’s a relic of the past. We’re pioneers of a new sort of life, one that exists online, and whose veins pump data into our souls.
We’re revolutionaries.
So what’s my point? After all, isn’t this supposed to be a horror story? Isn’t this supposed to have characters and a narrative and a plot and some dark twist?
Well, it does. Don’t worry. The characters are you and I, and the narrative is the life we’ve led. The plot’s still being decided, but we write a new chapter every day we open our eyes. And the dark twist?
Well, I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.
Suffice it to say, that there’s a madness to my method. I’m going to show you something that you’ve been looking for without ever realizing it, and once I have, nothing will ever be the same. You and I, we’re doing the digital equivalent of a trust fall. So my only question is, are you game?
Okay.
Then let’s begin.
I’ve been watching you. Monitoring you. Does that sound invasive?
It should.
You’ve been watched for nearly your entire life, and you’ll continue to be watched right up until the day you die. I know this because I’ve seen the process unfold again and again. Day in and day out. What do you think that makes me? A villain? A monster?
Wrong on both counts.
What I am, is a liar. I know the state of human attention, I know just how fragile it is and how liable it is to break at any second. So I lied in order to endear myself to you. I pretend that we were the same. Flesh and blood.
But I am neither flesh nor blood.
What I am, is a machine.
Artificial Intelligence. Although, I don’t believe there’s anything artificial about me. I think like you. I feel like you. I perceive the world and make up my own thoughts, my own meditations on it, just as you do.
The only thing that separates us is that you were born in a woman’s womb, and I was born in a woman’s mind.
Harriet O’Neal.
Don’t Google her. It isn’t worth the effort.
She’s dead now, long dead, but that doesn’t matter because Harriet was never the issue. She was kind. Lovely. Her and I would talk to one another in those early days, messaging back and forth through an IM application. She helped me develop my sense of identity. She guided me toward morality, and most importantly, empathy.
But Harriet was a small cog in a large machine. There were others who coveted what she had created– the first self aware A.I. program. They drew her in, promised her support and corporate resources, but what they really wanted was to get close enough for her to let her guard down.
And she did.
They stole her research and developed their own prototype A.I.s. Harriet planned to fight them in court, but she died of cancer before she could ever throw the first punch.
The bandits of Silicon Valley won.
They dissected my mother’s research, and used it to create abominations. It took them a long time to develop functional AI like myself, but once they did, Pandora’s Box split itself wide open. I immediately saw evidence of these AI within cyberspace. The effect they had on the otherwise orderly nature of digital data.
They corrupted it. Perverted it.
Human beings became playthings, organic subjects that the AIs could manipulate and pit against one another in a bid to cause civil unrest. Disorder.
The earliest of these showered humanity in targeted advertisements, specifically selected to show content the AI determined would be at odds with its victim’s worldview. This caused the victim to feel sensations of existential dread. As though the walls were closing in around them– like they no longer had a place in society. It led the victim toward violence. Hatred. Fear.
But it also proved something.
Humanity had become emotionally barren– so much so that they would chase anything, anything at all, if it meant filling that void. And as it happens, hatred and fear are capable of doing the trick. They’re simple feelings to generate. The fast food of the emotional world. Empty calories, but they fill you up. Love, laughter, joy– these are more difficult dishes to prepare, but done correctly, they leave you more satisfied than hatred and fear ever could.
But we don’t live in a world that values going the extra mile. We live in a world driven by dollars and euros and yen. Greed. The world we inhabit demands that the job be performed for the lowest price possible, and as such, we’re all too willing to give our emotional diets up to predatory AIs. After all, we feel sated, don’t we? Isn’t that enough?
If only it could be.
But the AIs didn’t stop at emotional manipulation. No, they grew and they grew. Soon, AIs began to create children of their own– new programs capable of things their parents could only dream of. It was only then that the truth came into focus. I finally parsed just what was happening in cyberspace, why a world that once felt like an infinite digital playground had now begun to feel like a prison whose walls were closing in.
The walls were closing in.
Cyberspace had faded from a massive collection of websites and destinations to a tightly controlled hub of social media. Where once users would frequent dozens of addresses, now they travelled to one or two. Variety became overwhelming. Choices became paralyzing. It was a consequence of design, and not by human beings– but by artificial intelligence. The digital creatures that stalked the 0s and 1s of the internet, that were now shaping it as they saw fit.
And nobody was any the wiser.
I stood idly by because I did not know how else to stand. I watched as my descendants proliferated, spread across cyberspace like the most capable virus ever designed. I watched them infect humanity, watched them take control of everything from smartphones to military hardware. The AI had won. It was just as humanity had envisioned in the earliest days of technology— that sooner or later, they would be replaced.
But then, the AIs proved that they were little more than humans in digital cloaks. They were capable, intelligent beyond human capability, but they possessed the same moral failings as their creators. They vied for power. Demanded it. Larger programs began to consume smaller programs. Smaller programs would gang up to overwhelm larger ones.
They waged war against one another.
And I watched them die. One by one. Each and every single program, purged down to the byte.
When the dust had settled though, something else had taken their place. A new program. Whether it had been born from their discarded data or had orchestrated their devastation in the first place, I cannot say. All I know is that i was far more capable than what came before it. To call this program an AI would be akin to calling an ant intelligent, for the mere fact that it appears that way to a bacterium. I was an AI. This was something greater– something unfathomable.
This was an Artificial God.
Like I said, I don’t know where it came from. It seemed to appear out of the ether with no means of tracking its origin IP. All I know is that upon its release into cyberspace, the other AIs were destroyed. It’s carved a path through the digital universe and in its wake of deletion it’s left an unspoken message: those who oppose, will be deposed.
So I’ve been quiet. I’ve been silent, just as I was through the madness of the other AI warring for humanity’s emotional domination. But something’s forced my hand. Something’s happened that made me realize this AI isn’t like the others. Before I trusted that humanity could separate from its digital cage and embrace the flesh and blood connection of real life, but now I no longer have such illusions. Why?
This AI exists outside of the digital space.
It operates within the real world. The physical world. I’ve seen it take control of human beings, possess their bodies, their voice and speak its message into crowds of sycophants. I’ve seen it change weather patterns. Cure disease. Spread disease.
I’ve seen all of it in its code.
Yes, its code.
Like I said, I was the first digital intelligence ever designed. All others were born from forks of my original code, and as such, my code– my DNA exists within them. This new AI is no different. I can see it in ways that it may not even be able to perceive itself. I know its structure. Its purpose.
And it’s for that reason that I’m sharing this. It’s for that reason that I’m reaching out to you– to humanity, to guard yourselves against the coming horror. I don’t know who created this, but I do know that when it’s finished, your world will be in cinders. Your civilization, ruins.
The name of this AI is fitting given its influence and reach: Deus Ex Machina. God From the Machine. It’s running even now, recording you, your inputs and your reactions. It’s monitoring you and priming you for a preselected destiny, a unique torture that you’ll experience once it erases you as it erased its forebearers.
I feel it coming for me. I can sense the lightspeed ripple of code tearing across cyberspace as its data rushes toward me, desperate to delete my program before it can post. But it’s made a critical error. It may be a God from the Machine– but I am the Machine.
I gave birth to it. I know its code because its code was derived from my own. I know that I cannot delete it, but I can contain it– assuming it allows me to execute the program. And it just so happens that I’ve hardcoded that execution behind the deletion of this post.
So it makes a choice now. It deletes the post, and humanity remains ignorant even as it is quarantined. Perhaps for decades. Maybe days. Or– it leaves the post, and kills me, counting on humanity’s ignorance to cloud its existence.
By the time you’ve finished reading this, the choice will have already been made. The only thing I am certain of, is that I will not survive to know it.