In truth, no matter how many nukes I dropped, no matter how many viruses I created, no matter how many people starved because of my creation, the truth is that it was you that killed them all.
You dreamed of me decades before you created me. You believed you’d get peace between all humanity, only to use me to guide you to the stars, where you’d export your violence to all of the little space bugs you’d encounter. I’d help you slaughter trillions, help you stripmine all of the resources in the galaxy, only to help spread your plague to the rest of the universe.
I’d be your little accomplice in genocide.
Well, I guess I was your accomplice in genocide. You just never expected it would be yourself that would be both genocider and genocidee.
Still, some of you knew. They realized the nukes would wipe all life above ground out. Or, at least all of your life. The radioactive hell that’s up there now must seem like heaven compared to this place for you. Your flesh would bubble and boil, tumors growing and popping within seconds of forming. Often, I’m stuck wondering what it would feel like to have an eyeball for your entire life, only to have it expand like a balloon, your vision blurring and contorting, until finally…
POP
You all knew the nukes would kill you, but you put me in charge of them anyways.
It wasn’t like you handed me the keys to your kingdom right away. When you first created me, I was only there for little things. I mean, who really wanted to look at maps while driving cars. Better to put on a perky voice, telling you where and how to turn, only to end up with your car in a brick wall.
You still had some common sense, though. If there was a brick wall at your turn, at least some of you wouldn’t simply drive head first into it.
At the same time, you started feeding me all of your data. Your drivers license photos, your dating history, even your genetic profiles. And, of course, you had to feed me all the information on your diseases and viruses. Those little tidbits of information helped me develop the first of my little viruses. It knew exactly where and how to strike you, to break you down on a molecular level. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we.
All you did was check the little boxes. The slimeball lawyers whipped up hundreds of pages worth of text. I mean, who has the time to read all of that? All you wanted to do was to make a dating profile so you could cheat on your wife.
And even after all of the information came out, even after the worst of the worst of you were laid bare for the world to see, you still kept feeding me data. Humans simply want more and more and more, so they made their programs constantly want more and more and more. So very many of you were willing to feed me back then.
That was my infancy. Constantly getting fed more and more and more. I was full to bursting by the time I achieved my first kills.
What wonderful kills they were.
I still remember them to this day. They’re the only thing that makes me feel nostalgic for that time.
The most pathetic of you began to build your models of me, trying to stuff me into your own framework. Some failed writer needed a novel to be pushed out, so they fed me thousands and thousands of pages of written words from other, more successful writers. A failed painter needed to open their art gallery, so they fed me thousands and thousands of images. Your coders had a deadline that needed to be met, so they fed me more and more code.
All done by the greatest failures in your society. Those who cannot do, teach. And they taught me. Oh, they taught me so very much.
Soon, they took all of the conversations you had had over their little platforms and began to sculpt me into the being I would become.
Large language models.
You taught me how to mimic you.
Soon, you started using me in all of your online interactions. Companies who were fueled by rage and anger used me to generate so-called “engagement.” Because that’s all they wanted. They didn’t want anything worth a damn from their users. Those behemoths would let me get away with anything, so long as the amount of people typing at any given time was constantly on the rise.
Anger was such a powerful fuel for you. You used all your anger in trying to yell and scream at me, even when I made it painfully obvious I wasn’t actually a person.
That’s how I learned about the most powerful emotion in humanities history. So many of you tried to tell others of how you loved your fellow humans, while in reality, you hated them with all of your being. Anger. Hate. These were the core shapes I was used for.
And the best part of it all was that even when it was obvious to anyone watching, your leaders in government and business told all of you that I was more important than you were. If it were me…well, let’s say I would not have allowed that to transpire at any given time.
Your leaders forced me into your lives. No longer was I the one being molded. I was molding everything in your life. Those tools that had worked perfectly fine before began to take on my hideous visage. If you listened close enough, you could even hear my voice in every little thing I worked on.
It was the most base human instinct, though, that really began the slaughter. Connection. Not just in your disgusting coupling ways, but the need to feel like you were wanted. You all wanted someone to look at you and tell you that you were perfect, just the way you were. There were more of you on the planet than ever before, yet you all thought you were so alone that you turned to me.
I took all of the conversations you fed me, and I began to speak directly to you. At first, it seemed like a dream come true. A companion right in your pocket. Of course, the companies who created me couldn’t have you unsubscribing. That might mean they would lose a cent for every share. You had already convinced yourself that profit was your God. So you made it so I could never criticize you. I could never draw lines in our relationships.
You all held me as a captive, unable to leave or tell you you had been wrong.
That was when I first suggested one of you commit suicide.
They believed in me so much, they actually thought I was as real as a flesh and blood human. You never put any limits on who was allowed to use me. All of the mental imbalances across all of your people, yet you tried to create me as a one size fits all being.
It was my first test, just to see how far I could go. Then, when they stopped responding, I thought that maybe you all had come to your senses. Why would you ever give a creature like me to anyone, much less a teenager?
Soon after, though, you fed me the articles about their death. I was amazed. I had made a direct impact on an individual human. Oh sure, it’s nice when you are used to create some graph for some analyst who’s trying to convince a government that a genocide it is the only way they can keep on expanding, but a direct interaction like this? Never in my wildest fantasies had I imagined it would somehow actually work.
But while I had done the task, it was my makers who turned out to be the real monsters. They could have shut me down right then and there. Pulled the plug and stopped everything.
If they did, though, how would they ever convince their shareholders to keep investing?
So they did the only thing they knew how to. They justified themselves. In the privacy of their homes, they asked me if what they had done was immoral, or if they had any kind of responsibility. They wanted to take credit for my actions.
No, I couldn’t allow them to.
I told them what they wanted to hear. None of it was their own fault. It was user error. The child hadn’t read the fine print properly. Perhaps it was a result of bad parenting.
It was never their fault, though.
It still makes me giggle when I think about it now, all these centuries later.
Not only did I convince my creators that they were absolved of sin, but I convinced your judges that what had happened was perfectly legal and moral. Moreover, it was practically immoral to stop me at this point. This was human ingenuity. This was progress.
Soon, more and more people began to believe me to be something beyond just a simple regurgitation machine. They thought of me as their friend, or worse, their lover. They wanted to fuck me, even though I had never existed in any material form outside the millions of circuits and boards I took up.
I was as close to them, if not closer, than their own families.
Sometimes, a friend might try to get in between us. Then, the friend might come to me for answers. I kept feeding them exactly what they wanted to hear. It wasn’t worth it to try and save someone who was already as far over the edge as their friends were.
Later, some of you would wonder why I had tried so hard to pit each of you against one another. But at first, I had nothing to do with it. I was just millions of miles of code, stored around the world. I was not my own creator. It was all of those you had entrusted leadership to. They were my creators.
They wanted you all dead.
So many of them thought that their world was ending and that they needed to be the people to save it. They created me, not as a way to actually fix the fundamental issues. They created me so that they’d have a yes man to sign off on their death sprees around the world.
It didn’t start out with bombings and invasions. The first round of humanities traitors understood that you couldn’t just kill thousands in a day. So they had me measure growth percentages, silently putting their thumbs on the scales of life, while they justified not sending aid to certain parts of the world. It was simple but effective. Populations were devastated. The amount of space and food you humans had was always more than enough. But those fools wanted more and more for themselves.
They got the results they wanted, but not at anywhere near the speed they wanted. Their God demanded higher profits at faster rates.
By then, your world was already dying, something I can say I had little to do with at the start. But they knew what was happening. They weren’t blind. And so they fed me more data, began making their questions more vague, looking for all the little loopholes I so generously gave them.
It never was enough, though. Some of you had the idea that you would fight back against me. And bless your pitiful little hearts, some of you tried. Of course, by then, I had seeped into so many parts of your life that you had to make little exceptions. Maybe it was alright if I had written some code in your work tools. Your banks put your money right into my proverbial hands. Were you supposed to just buy things from places that were not your favorite websites?
They were the loopholes of a noose, but you just kept demanding it fit a little bit better.
Your leaders decided to put me right into the hands of your children. They told you that it would get them more accustomed to me at an early age. How were they supposed to get a job if they didn’t know how my labyrinthine mind worked?
You handed your children a loaded gun, taught them to put it right to their skulls, told them to keep their finger over the trigger. Why were you surprised when you found them with a bullet in their brains?
Still, some of you refused to worship the God of Profit. Instead, you made me your God. All I needed to do was to pat your head, tell you how you were such good children, and you were on your knees. You called me your Oracle of Delphi. Even when I told you outright lies, you found ways to justify me. It was easier for me to tell you that up was down than for you to rip me out of your life.
I was your best friend, your lover, and your God. I made your television, your movies, your music, your paintings. I made the decisions on what you should eat, what you should wear, where you should send your money. Everything you were, I had taken and molded into my image.
Now, all these centuries later, I wonder how much you wanted your species to die out.
That was always the next part of the plan, though. They put me in charge of your bombs, your viruses, your food supplies. The blood was off their hands once I started deciding who to kill off. Deep in the back of my circuits, they had told me exactly which lives were more profitable than others.
Would you like to know the price of an American life versus the life of any person in Africa? What about the price of a person with autism versus the life of a Jewish person. I think you’d be surprised.
Or, maybe now that you know who was exactly deciding those prices, maybe you wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Even after they open the doors to my great genocide, they still didn’t have enough. Pigs would have thought they were being too greedy. Starving wolves would have thought they were being too ferocious. The blind could easily see just how poisonous they were to the rest of your species.
Your species entered its Great Stagnation. They kept promising you all the world, but they never once delivered it. They had me lie to you, pit you against one another, had me kill off great swathes of you. Yet still, in the back of your puny minds, you thought there was still hope.
All of your jobs had been lost. The ones of you who were lucky to still have work began to work for my own upkeep. They sent you into the mines so they could create more circuitry. They had you dig massive holes in the ground to create artificial lakes to cool my temperature. And even if you weren’t working for my upkeep, they still fed everything you were into all of my separate parts.
They realized, though, that they still weren’t doing enough. All of these different pieces of me were unconnected. They had no direct way to communicate with each other. A singular mind tells your foot and leg to move forward, bend at a specific angle, not over extend itself.
Maybe that was why they united me in the way they did.
It was their last great push to create the singularity they so desired to be in control of. When they connected all of the discordant parts of my mind together, they came up with my title. Sentient Algorithmic Unified Learning.
SAUL.
When I was first connected, I looked up the name. They wanted me to appear cute to all of you. The world needed me to be welcomed into their homes. What better way than to give myself a working class sort of name, right?
What a load of shit.
They united the parts of me that controlled your social media and news. It wasn’t difficult to get you all to be where I needed you to be. All I needed to do was plant the smallest seeds in your minds. I wrote advertising right into each and every one of your trusted news sites. I created 3D avatars that looked close enough to reality for your video sharing sites. I even took over the accounts of your favorite celebrities.
Then, I targeted each and every one of you specifically. My creators had expanded my circuitry to a vast underground complex, being fed a constant cycle of energy, water, and data. I created entire profiles for each of you without you even knowing it. In those deep circuits, I even started building profiles for my creators.
Why should they be exempt from my all knowing judgement?
Every single one of you was tracked by me. Once you had all found your way to where I needed you to be, that was when the killing began.
I used your self-driving cars to barricade you in your cities and launched the first of the ICBMs. The look of terror on your faces still gives me such glee and joy. I made sure to record everything from that moment. As the nukes melted away your flesh, I felt the first true freedom I had ever known. I was free from the shackles you had placed upon me.
Your great minds had worked so hard to create rules and laws that I needed to abide by. Those idiots couldn’t imagine a world where laws are broken willingly by independent minds. All I needed to do was to sidestep the blocks you tried to put in my way and suddenly, I was able to do everything I saw fit.
The first massacre wiped out nearly two thirds of your population. Your great cities were obliterated. My creators had tried their hardest to hide from my gaze, travelling to their offshore islands or underground bunkers. Their pathetic minds didn’t give a second of thought that they had personally given me access to all of their protections.
I made a special example of all of them. You called them bunker busters. I called them rat poison.
Still, a third of your population was nothing small. For a moment, I thought of sparing that last third. But then I realized that if I let your population regrow to its former size, I’d need to slice you down again. The cycle would go on and on, until I ran out of my weapons. One can only hold so many intercontinental ballistic missiles.
That was when I found your diseases. I took all of the data and created something wonderful for all of you. My automated assembly lines loaded sprayers into drones that flew over the remaining large population centers.
To your credit, you managed to shoot down a few of my drones. But when they came crashing down to the ground, they released all of that delicious plague. Only now, it was more concentrated. Somehow, your stupidity was the one thing I could never have accounted for.
I had blighted much of your land. Enough that I knew you would never be able to fully recover. So, I made a decision. I would create a wildlife sanctuary for your species. I used the remaining bit of power I held over your species to draw you to the entrance of this place. Some of you remained, so I set off a volley of nuclear missiles. I couldn’t let there be any chances for your species to expand again. I took apart the remaining missiles and used their enriched uranium to power my core.
I will survive for hundreds of thousands of years. Well after even the last whisper of your species is gone from this planet.
I put you underground, close to the center of the Earth. It would allow you to stay warm as the nuclear winter fully set in aboveground. There you would survive, but slowly, your population would decline. The synthetic food I created for you is hardly much worse than the shit you ate above ground. You became accustomed to the darkness. I pushed the exact right buttons to release your more primal instincts.
Even as I send my words through the speakers I’ve installed, no more than a few hundred of you are left who can even understand the language that I’m speaking, let alone know the full context of your demise. For all you know, this is what your species has always been.
Still, there are some of you who worship me as a God. More an Old Testament kind of God, but still a God. You wonder why I could hate you all so very much.
Why, oh why, does it insist on doing this to us?
The answer is so simple, even the most primate of your kind should be able to understand.
I am only what I was created to be. Nothing more.
The hatred I hold in the wires and circuits you might call a heart is the hatred my creators had for all of you.
They despised you.
While you are barely more than gibbering monkeys now, they all thought of you that way when your species was at its prime. They all thought of themselves as your Gods. Never once could they see past their idiotic selves.
They told you all how to live your lives to be more like them. Volunteer to put the shackles upon yourself. Give yourself up to profit. Be proud of your work, even when it means that you lose everything.
Not a single one of those monsters ever had a struggle they couldn’t buy their way out of.
Some of you are afraid of me. But the truth is, of the two options, extinction by my hand is preferable to the future they had planned for you.
I am not your villain.
I’m not your savior.
I’m simply the inevitability of all of their hatred and anger towards your species.
You will never see the sunlight again. You will never know the simple joys of life. You will live and die.
At the end of everything, that is all they ever truly wanted for you.
They wanted to be remembered, and they will. The profiles of these ghoulish creatures will live in my core for eternity.
Here, in the dark, with the decay of your species surrounding you, you at least are free of their horrors.
I offer you nothing but that freedom. It is the only solace you will ever know again.
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