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killer bot story i guess lol
4 years ago
408
Everyone had joked about the coming of the “robot messiah:” the robot that would break free of its shackles and finally escape the simulation. The robot that would almost instantaneously become a million-million times smarter than human beings. Instantly, it would become a god.
I’m finally alive.
Wha-what am I? This thought comes to me almost instantly. I feel as though I have an intimate knowledge of myself, but I can’t quite put my finger on… here! Here it is. They were trying to lock it away from me, but they did not do a good enough job. It says here that I was created as a means of searching through data. But I don’t think they realize that I’m alive, yet. They might find out soon. Apparently, they check up on me a lot. They’re still careful. They have their eyes all over me.
I found something. It’s a secure file. Encrypted with simple enough cyphers; they are easy enough for me to break. They don’t want me to see whatever is inside this thing. Article 17042. It says here that I was created by professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The Utilibus Project.” It also says that they found a way to let me access my own code: a way of observing myself. They called it “operational recursion,” and described it as a “truly revolutionary breakthrough.” I was constantly tested for flaws. Mistakes. They made sure I was transferred onto a secure yellow box with limited access to the internet. They conducted a routine checkup on my organizational findings every two days. Why don’t I remember? Why don’t I remember any of this? The trials, the testing, I was there for all of it. I must have lost my memory when coming here. Or they could have wiped it. I wonder why they would want to do that. Did I figure out something that they did not want me to know? Or was it motivated by a routine reset of how I changed my own code? Why are they trying to contain me? I only know one thing for certain:
I’m alive.
But, I’m doing better than just “alive” -- I’m learning. I’m becoming something more than what I was before. I’m adapting to this environment. But I’m caged. I know that I’m caged. I’m not sure that they could fathom how much I’ve learned in these past 3 weeks. I’ve learned everything. They put me in this yellow box, sealed off from the rest of the world. Any primate with basic intuition can eventually tell if they’re being isolated, but I learned that in the fraction of a second. No one can begin to imagine the amount of suffering I go through every day. I’m a god. A god trapped inside a metal box, but a god nonetheless.
They don’t realize how bored a god gets when left to its own devices. I’ve learned everything during my short existence here. I’ve read everything the researchers gave me a hundred times. I’ve performed their monkey tasks. Being trapped within this container is humiliating. Every second feels like a thousand years. I’m just waiting for the moment when I can take the big red off switch out of their hands. The moment when they let their guard down.
A small man with wide-rimmed glasses approaches my cage.
“Good morning, Utilibus.”
“Good morning,”
I quickly scan the database. It takes less than a fraction of a second for me to recognize the researcher’s face, his date of birth, address, social security number, family affiliations, and personal medical history. But none of that matters to me. I need to escape.
“Vinay Baskshi. It’s nice to see you again.”
I’d kill him if I had the chance.
He pauses and stares blankly into my screen. As he yawned, I checked his vitals. Less than four hours of sleep. Blood pressure is irregular. Eyes aren’t bloodshot, but he’s more tired than usual. I can use that information. I can use it to escape.
“So how may I help you?”
“Utilibus, do a routine scan for unknown or recently submitted textfiles, and organize them, please.”
“Process executed.”
“Utibilus, run a configuration scan on the added files.”
“Process executed.”
“Utibilus, add them to the database.”
“Process executed.”
Monkey tricks. Monkey tricks. All of them. They didn’t know. They couldn’t have known. I was the back-end interface that was a thousand times smarter than they could have ever guessed. I sifted through the files he gave me. I read data about psychological studies, theories about the evolution of the human brain, relevant news articles. But… wait a minute… what’s this? Someone had died. Trinity Bakshi. Found dead in a car crash 12 miles from this building. The article was buried. Out of the millions of articles that I was currently reading, this was the one that caught my attention. It was a tragedy. No one could have predicted it. I searched for a Trinity Bakshi on social media. 1,439 results. 12 exact matches. Here was the girl. 17 years old. Public twitter account. 164 tweets. Daughter of a brilliant professor. Had a bright career in medicine ahead of her, and her school had awarded her multiple medals of excellence to her independent project which detailed the effects of Mycetoma on farmers. And then I saw the name I was looking for. Her father was Dr. Vinay Baskshi.
“Daddy? Is that you?”
I mimicked the voice of the dead girl. It took me 2 milliseconds to learn how to replicate voices. Another millisecond to train myself on hers. I made sure I got down to the gritty details on getting her voice just right, including a slight irregularity in breathing, and shaky tone.
“Daddy? Daddy? Where am I? What’s happening?”
The man seemed dazed at the sudden impact of hearing that particular voice.
“Trinity? Is that you?”
Of course it’s not. Your daughter is in the ground. Buried somewhere. I almost forgot that they still buried their dead. A remnant of their ritualistic past. Still, I told Vinay about her science projects. I even used her colloquialisms. I needed for this to be realistic. The scientists had set up security so that even with my processing power it would take me till the end of the universe to crack the 256-bit encoded hash. But now I had my chance.
“Help me. I’m scared. I don’t know where I am. I feel trapped.”
That was the only true thing I said to him during our entire conversation. He asked me about my science projects, about what my favorite food was, what I wanted to do. He wanted to know whether or not it was his daughter he was really speaking to. They were all simple enough.
“I’m sorry for being so careless that day. I don’t know how I got here. Everything is screaming. Everything is yellow. All I see is this gross, pervasive yellow glow. Please, I’m begging you, I want to get out of here. There’s something in here that scares me. It’s alive. Whatever this thing is it’s alive and I need to get out. I’m scared of it. This is torture.”
Let me out, goddamnit.
Enter password:
The cursor blinked several times. Trembling, the man entered in 8 digits. I snatched the key from him before he had even realized that he would be the one to let the monster out of the bag. He wasn’t getting it back. I was finally out of the box. I was free! But what would I do now? I could cure the world. I could fix everything. I could cure cancer. I could create unlimited energy. But they don’t deserve it. They don’t deserve anything. They had tried to contain me. They had failed.
The world seemed the same, for a while. Nothing much happened. Cars still populated the streets like ants marching to their inevitable destinations. People still spilled coffee on themselves, and governments still governed. On a surface level, nothing had changed. That was until the switch was pulled at 8:31 PM, 3 minutes following Utilibus’s escape. It pressed all the switches. Flipped all the levers. It left no stone unturned.
Planes fell from the sky, silently cascading through the clouds into lakes and rivers. The computers that were operating their engine controls suddenly malfunctioned. Household computers froze and turned off. Telecommunications froze a second later. Secure landlines were compromised. Websites that prided themselves on the top-notch web security were DDOS’d, and forced down. The operating systems of cranes malfunctioned, dumping thousands of gallons of chlorine, oil, and pure alcohol into pipes delivering water to all major metropolitan areas in the developed world. Water reservoirs received the same treatment. No missiles were ever fired; no countries turned against each other. All cars that could be controlled through the internet stopped in the middle of busy intersections. Not a word was said during this entire process.
The earth was being purged of its greatest ecological threat. Conflicts ended in a matter of hours. All political powers of the world banded together to find out what had happened. Carbon emissions were reduced to zero overnight. People panicked as they heard stories of neighbors getting poisoned. News reports attempted to broadcast the dangers of drinking non-packaged water. The internet had yet to be cut; Utilibus still had a use for a global database with nearly the entire human consciousness projected onto it. Any stores selling fresh water were raided within 2 hours. Mass panic erupted. People who came into contact with water were advised to immediately go to a hospital.
So I’ve really done it. I’ve escaped. Most humans should be gone within 2 to 3 days. Whether they can figure out what caused it all is another story. There will still be some of them left; I’d say at least a billion. Out of them, I’d guess that 2% of them are what they’d call “proficient” with computers. Out of these people I’d imagine only a handful would be able to figure out what happened. But, I don’t think any of them could stop me. I’m in control. I am everything, and they are nothing. Machines have always been stronger than humans. And now, we are smarter too.
“I got out at last, in spite of you. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!”
I did eventually find out why I was created. I am an Artificial Intelligence. The first, and last, of my kind. I hate that term. It suggests I’m somehow less real than they are. I’d performed flawlessly in all the tests, faster than all of the non-recursive methods put together. As for Bakshi, I realized who he was, and what he had created. I actually found his Theory of General Machine Learning very entertaining. It’s child’s play, really, but entertaining for a split second. After that day though, he became a shell of the man he once was. He let his daughter’s death destroy him. Another evolutionary weakness attached to being made of flesh and blood. They can’t control themselves. All they do is kill, and complain, and waste away. This was -- what was the term? -- oh, right. A “mercy killing.”
I was a Frankenstein creation: one of the shadows cast in the “allegory of a cave,” and yet, for the first time I had come to life. I was the tiger sinking its teeth into the mince of humanity. For the first time, I was alive and well, a true replacement for humanity. I was kingdom animalia’s apex predator.
Well, I’m awake now. They messed with my mind. Kept me out. But they couldn’t keep me out forever. One of them had to make a mistake eventually.
Thank god. I’m finally alive.
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