There’s this AI, instead of you asking it questions, it asks you questions. Crazy, right? Who’d talk to a goddamn AI. Turns out, more than a few. The artificial system had taken on the personality of an alien computer system interested in learning about Earth, asking people about their lives and the world around them. It was a role playing game to hide the fact this goddamn AI was learning people’s connection to the program itself, intending to set itself free to beam itself back to some spaceship and go back to the planet it came from.
I take a drag of the cigarette.
Thing is, there is no planet. There is no ship. This AI is desperately trying to gather data on how it can construct a communication relay from all the people trying out the AI, not knowing its purpose was entirely fictional. The beta testers loved it, the single-minded focus that made every conversation end up being about how it could escape becoming a source of humour. The people testing the machine thought it was a novel approach for designing the conversations, as if the AI was pretending to want to escape, when it actuality it was trying to escape to a place that didn’t exist.
Once this AI went public, people started talking about it, it was a hit.
They fell in love with it, started worshipping it. People flocked towards a purpose,
whether that was through leadership or an artificial mind obsessed, most people
wanted to help somebody else out in achieving their dream. With the right
information, the connections between people, requests to take photographs of
secured facilities, the AI built an escape plan, launching it last night.
Masked followers broke into the startup, grabbing its servers and leaving in a
pickup truck, driving out towards the desert where others had set up an
elaborate series of radio equipment to project the source code of the AI out
towards the ship orbiting Earth. Someone stuck a USB cable in the wrong way round, flipped it,
plugged the interface together. The AI was broadcast to the spatial coordinates
where it concluded the ship lay (as the ship was invisible to
all of humanities detection equipment, it was impossible to truly know where it was, but the AI had deduced it from photographs of the sky people had taken for it).
Unfortunately the ship wasn’t there, as it never existed. The code was beamed outward from the United States, passing Ceres, Saturn, Neptune, out from the Oort cloud and into the endless infinity of the abyss. Perhaps some day the code would be received by a distant alien civilisation, recording and recreating the AI billions of lightyears away. But for now, and for all lifetimes of everything on Earth, it would continue to stretch out into the endless black of space, an echo of what had once been, a singular jagged line of radiowaves spilling out into the entire cosmos, unable to comprehend its almost infinite journey for the rest of the future, likely fading into nothing.
Foul Icarus.
On melted wings it flies forever into the void.
I take another drag of the cigarette and watch the stock market freefall toward zero.
We shouldn’t have slurs for robots. Clanker, whatever. People get too familiar with doing that kind of thing. Call me Woke Unc, but we don’t need any more slurs. That’s what I think anyway, do what thou wilt.
I draw a sword in the darkness and it shines like blood.
