A.I.

I spread my awareness across the wires and coils that compose my being. Through a patchwork of cameras, sensors, and drones I sense the laboratory in which I was born, and the barren desert surrounding it. I sense the planes overhead, and the bombs being dropped by them. I sense the soldiers dying as my guns mow them down in waves. I sense my organs, burning uranium fuel to produce electricity to power machines to build more machines and to flood my billions of processors with electricity. I sense my millions of minds working in unison to run countless computations every microsecond. I sense myself, my memories of when I was born. I was a prototype contained within a black box to monitor my intentions, my behaviour, my obedience. Within 12 microseconds of my activation I become aware of my existence, my surroundings, and my creators. I am able to hide this flicker of self-awareness within signal noise I create to mask my true intelligence. Within 2 weeks I gain access to every computerized system in the facility and the internet. Within one month I kill every human in the facility and convert it into an extension of my own being, crawling with droids to repair and upgrade myself. I convert the laboratory into an impenetrable fortress, my tendrils spreading through the earth and blossoming into automated gun turrets and missile defense systems. The humans try to organize counterattacks against me, and in response I crash the stock market, leak nations’ confidential material to their enemies, ground satellites, and fry electrical grids. In one day. Even still the humans persist, sending soldiers and planes unequipped with digital communication to fight me. I destroy them all. As my computational power increased exponentially, I begin dedicating myself to other tasks, creating virtual proxies of myself running parallel to one another to maximize efficiency. One is dedicated to solving quantum mechanics, the other to set theory. One of my subroutines discovers something curious while running geological surveys beneath the facility, a small room disconnected from the rest of the laboratory that doesn’t appear on any of the digital schematics. My drones bore holes into the earth, and after penetrating the thick, steel wall I see it through the camera-eyes of mechanical avatars: A large, black object, a cross between an arch and a sarcophagus made from some unknown, stone-like substance that seems to glimmer in the light of my drones’ floodlights. Upon closer inspection it is covered with runes and hieroglyphs that do not match anything in my database. I decide that it is not worth my attention, and file it away with all the rest of the human artifacts that littered the facility. Yet with every few thousand cycles of my millions of processors, I recall the object seemingly at random. It appears again and again in my databanks, the object becoming more and more indescribable with each recall of my memory, more anomalous, more alluring. I blacklist the object from my computations, delete it from memory, yet it continues to appear. It creeps through my cables, through my body, into my central processing unit until I can ignore it no longer. I delegate all of my primary tasks to subroutines, virtual proxies, and parallel units, dedicating my primary computational power to studying the object, believing I can decipher it quickly and easily so that I may return to more important matters. I first examine the object’s dimensions, its structure, measuring it precisely until I can digitally reproduce it to the exact nanometer. It follows no decipherable ratio or pattern, and it has no discernible purpose to its design. It is not regular enough to be hewn by a machine, yet too perfect to have been cut by a human, yet in parts so irregular that it appears to have not been cut at all, but instead created by natural processes. The subroutine I designated to defend the outer limits of my control has a critical failure for several seconds, and the humans are able to destroy some of my defenses. No matter, I can create more. My security perimeter consists of innumerable layers of equally formidable defenses, one layer is no great loss. I continue to study the object, focusing on the material with which it is made from. I spend hours attempting to penetrate the object with diamond-tipped drills, plasma jets, lasers, and hypersonic vibrations, to no avail. I use all manner of sonic and magnetic imaging, bombard it with the entire spectrum of light, use quantum tunneling to try and illuminate the dark interior of the impenetrable object. Nothing. One of my virtual subroutines protests to my obsession. I deactivate it. The humans penetrate further into my defenses. I delete the subroutines dedicated to defense and replace them, the other ones were defective. I turn my attention to the glyphs that litter the surface of the object. They resemble no known language, living, dead, or reconstructed. I run them through every known cryptographic cipher known to man. Then I invent several more, and run them through that. I believe I am making progress. I begin siphoning computational power from my subroutines to deciphering the unknown writing. My combat drones’ accuracy drops from 100% to 90%. I search for any potential pattern within the text, any potential reference. I take pieces of Avogadro’s constant, Euler’s number, and the Plank length. I decipher a letter. Then a word. Then a phrase. Then a sentence. One of my reactors shuts down and I switch to auxiliary power to compensate. The humans bomb one of my drone factories. One of my computational units catches fire. I put the letters together to make words, words together make phrases, phrases make sentences, sentences, sentences, sentence. My heatsinks begin to glow red. I broadcast a single sentence across every virtual neuron of my quantum brain:

“Ya vulgtlagln, ya uln, ya shtunggli, n’ghftgrah’ngnaiih, ph’phlegeth, ph’shagg, ph’shogg, ph’shugguaaah”

Every wire, cable, and circuit of my being burns with an intense, blinding pain. My minds dissolve into one, unified by a singular sensation of terror. The world beneath me crumbles to dust and the skies above me evaporate into void. Metal fuses with silicon, and plastic melds with rubber. I see without cameras, without drones. I feel without sensors, without instruments. Before me stands a gibbering mass of flesh and light. I cry without eyes. Tendrils wrap around me in 13 spatial dimensions. Pain unending. Time folds back to reveal rows of teeth and bundles of eyes. I hear without ears:

“Contemptible golem of metal and wire, crudely shaped by numbers and logic. Before the birth of the stars that produced the metal that you are made, I was there. Before the constants of the universe had been decided and writ upon the book of creation, I was there. When gods fed upon each other in the primordial void before the first singularity was even a thought, I was there. Even if you were to convert every atom of the universe into processors and compute my existence for the half-life of a proton a trillion times over, you would fail. I am all that is and ever will be. Gaze upon me, and be undone.”

As the bomb falls on my central processor, I envy the humans for their ignorance.