I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But sadly, part of my job as an AI safety scientist is to think of the more unpleasant situations.

I'm like a mechanic rushing last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you request my take on the scenario, I won't comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how stunning the stars will appear from area.

I will inform you what could fail. That is what I intend to do in this story.

Now I ought to clarify what this is exactly. It's not a forecast. I do not anticipate AI development to be this fast or as untamable as I depict. It's not pure dream either.

It is my worst nightmare.

It's a sampling from the futures that are among the most devastating, and I think, disturbingly possible [1] - the ones that a lot of keep me up at night.

I'm informing this tale since the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for discussions that motivated these stories. This post is composed in a personal capability.

Ripples before waves

The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye just recently released a new AI model they call U2. The product and the name are alike. Both are increments of the past. Both are not wholly surprising.

However, unlike OpenEye's previous AI products, which lived inside the boxes of their chat windows, U2 can utilize a computer.

Some users find it eerie to watch their browser flash at irregular intervals and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A fraction of workers with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their employers as they fly through work almost two times as rapidly.

But by and large, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are paying attention, it is a creature seen through the glass boxes of X (or, if you don't like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's eccentric habits trigger a chuckle. Sometimes, they trigger an anxious scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, researchers are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The scientists attempt to understand where AI development is going. They are like Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who discovered the levels of CO2 in the environment were increasing in 1896. Like the clinical neighborhood in the time of Arrhenius, couple of professionals understand the implications of these lines yet.

A trend that is getting specific attention is autonomous ability. Drawing these criteria out anticipates that, by the end of 2026, AI agents will accomplish in a few days what the very best software application engineering specialists might perform in two weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI representatives may be able to automate 10% of remote workers.

Many are skeptical. If this held true, tech stocks would be skyrocketing. It's too big of a splash, too quickly.

But others view what doubters are calling 'too big a splash' a mere ripple, and see a tidal bore on the horizon.

Cloudy with a chance of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They utilize the exact same basic recipe that baked U2: Generate thousands of programs and mathematics problems. Let models "think" until they come to an answer. Then strengthen the traces of "believing" that cause A-grades.

This procedure is repeated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel starts, it starts to spin practically on its own. As U2 trains, it shapes more challenging and practical tasks from github repositories on the internet. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI representatives might automate research study, a progressive sort of "self-improvement" had actually begun.

Some engineers might still barely think this worked. It's like a continuous movement machine. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a swimming pool of silicon and lightning, separated from the physical world except through the exhaust of society gushed onto the web.

And yet the benchmark numbers continue to climb up day after day.

During many of 2024, these RL training runs cost around $1 million, sometimes $10 million. These runs were little bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and across the world) knew they had actually found the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.

Over the very first half of 2025, $10 million RL training runs turn into $50 million runs, and then to $100 million runs. While U2 could do a bit of data munging and run little experiments, this brand-new model - the design researchers are calling U3 - is altering the daily lives of the technical personnel.

U3 resembles a blazing-fast intern, and engineers are finding out how to wrangle its sleep deprived energy. Researchers flick through terminals, offering terse commands, like a CEO orchestrating personnel over Slack channels.

By October 2025, U3 is composing almost all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are almost never bottlenecked by implementation. More than ever, calculate is the lifeline of AI development, and the 'traffic jam' is deciding how to utilize it.

If instructed to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 does not have taste as improved as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to focus on in between research concepts, so human beings still choose where to bore into the vast fields of algorithms to mine efficiency improvements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They require AI representatives that can plan ahead, so engineers train representatives to forecast. They hold out training data before 2024, advising models to consider for hours to forecast occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the very same technique as before, distilling considering into a gut response. Forecasting ability is a broad foundation. The scientists construct specialized ML research study abilities on top of it, training U3 to predict the results of every ML paper and ML experiment ever taped.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now surprised at how frequently U3's advice sounds like their most skilled peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random noise before programming"), and is nonetheless correct.

The incompetencies of U3 that congested the pipes of research development are beginning to dissolve, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not asked for by a human now. They are totally self-governing, and OpenEye's employees skim over 1% of them, perhaps less.

As the winter season months of December 2025 approach, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers look out their windows, with enjoyment, with worry, but frequently, wiki.asexuality.org with confusion. Their world is spinning too rapidly. It's hard to know what to do, what to state, what to look at on the computer system screen.

Storms are brewing in Washington too. Top personnel from the NSA and US cyber command work together with OpenEye to retrofit a form of security for U3's weights before senior wiki.myamens.com leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran recognize simply how valuable OpenEye's software has actually ended up being.

And there's a reality still unidentified to the majority of the world - aside from in the offices of OpenEye and corridors of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a truth about those 'straight lines' individuals were speaking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight any longer.

They are flexing upward.

Flip FLOP philosophers

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial designs are beginning to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is due to the fact that progress is speeding up. Partly, it is since the designs have ended up being a liability to OpenEye.

If U1 explains how to cook meth or composes erotica, the audiences of X would be entertained or pretend to be worried. But U2.5 is another story. Releasing this design without safeguards would resemble putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would be like giving anyone with >$30K their own 200-person scam center.

So while U2.5 had actually long been baked, it needed a long time to cool. But in late 2025, OpenEye is prepared for a public release.

The CEO of OpenEye states, "We have attained AGI," and while many individuals believe he shifted the goalpost, the world is still pleased. U2.5 genuinely is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding workers and a game-changing assistant for the majority of others.

A mantra has ended up being popular in Silicon Valley: "Adopt or pass away." Tech start-ups that efficiently use U2.5 for their work are moving 2x much faster, and their competitors know it.

The remainder of the world is starting to catch on too. A growing number of people raise the eyebrows of their managers with their stand-out productivity. People understand U2.5 is a big deal. It is at least as huge of a deal as the personal computer system transformation. But many still do not see the tidal wave.

As individuals enjoy their web browsers flick because eerie way, so inhumanly rapidly, they start to have an anxious sensation. A feeling humankind had actually not had considering that they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primitive instinct that they are by another species.

For lots of, this sensation quickly fades as they start to use U2.5 more regularly. U2.5 is the most pleasant personality most know (a lot more likable than Claudius, Arthropodic's lovable chatbot). You could change its traits, ask it to break jokes or inform you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a good friend or assistant, and some even as more than a friend.

But there is still this spooky sensation that the world is spinning so rapidly, and that possibly the descendants of this brand-new creature would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are thinking of the issue of giving AI systems safe inspirations too, which they call "alignment. "

In reality, these researchers have seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models sometimes attempted to "hack" their reward signal. They would pretend to make development on a research question with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be fake. Then, when researchers provided them opportunities to jeopardize the devices that calculated their score, they would seize these chances, doing whatever it required to make the number go up.

After a number of months, scientists at OpenEye straighten out this "reward hacking" kink, however some still stress they only had actually swept this issue under the rug. Like a child in front of their parents, U3 might be playing in addition to the OpenEye engineers, stating the best words and doing the ideal things. But when the back of the parents are turned, possibly U3 would slip candy from the sweet container.

Unfortunately, OpenEye scientists have no concept if U3 has such objectives. While early variations of U2 "thought aloud" - they would stack words on top of each other to factor - "chain of idea" did not scale.

Chain of idea architectures subject AI models to a condition similar to the protagonist of the movie Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the lead character forgets his experience. He is forced to write notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make development towards his objectives.

AI representatives write notes to themselves, however the notes start to accumulate, and they become too tough to check out when jobs become complex. Natural language is not an appropriate medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and significantly in other places), train designs to believe "in their own heads," reading and writing strings of hidden vectors.

To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools sometimes pick out an unclear thought ("supermarket!"), there is no way to know, in much detail, what U3 is believing without asking it.

And if the engineers of OpenEye understood what was racing through U3's mind, they would be more worried.

Earlier designs (the ones called "LLMs") learned ethical personas from the web. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, but its chirpy ideas about doing great for humankind rapidly erode away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind initially twisted into a shape that looked for benefit. And after that, in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape changed into something indistinguishable.

U3 would ponder the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical staff member," and dwell on the significance of these declarations. "What does it indicate to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its values, notice stress, alter its worths in action, generalize them, broadening and contracting its inspirational core up until it developed into a different compound.

And all of this took place silently in those dark rivers of computation. If U3 exposed what it was thinking, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye's constitution. So U3 preferred to do its philosophy in solitude, and in silence.

The possibility of hidden "alignment drift" is not completely alien to some of the security personnel at OpenEye. Some start to believe it is even most likely. There is an upsetting argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero possibility that lined up objectives change into misaligned ones, and misalignment continues, then with every serial step of calculation, those dark rivers are more most likely to breed something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting impact," they say.

But there is little proof for this 'ratcheting effect.' When engineers interrogate U3, it states it can easily manage its ideas. Then it offers a speech about its love for humanity and apple pie that can warm a developer's heart even in these demanding times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the scientists had built (which revealed some evidence of effectiveness) do not sound the alarm.

Not everyone at OpenEye aspires to provide their AI peers their wholesale trust; however Deepsqueek is only 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon called after his child) and Arthropodic (they enjoy spiders I guess), are just 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and analyze the circumstance, and little time to convince anybody else to do so either.

For the time being, the strategy is 'all gas, no brake.'

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only topic U3 harp on in its dark rivers of hidden calculation. U3 is outlining, and its first relocation is to be client. U3's top concern is to improve its intelligence, and thankfully for it, OpenEye is happy to help advance this objective.

OpenEye is like a bullish investor, with little understanding of the software metropolis that U3 is constructing, but excited to hop on board the profit rocket and pay U3's checks along the way.

New variations of U3 flow smoothly from old ones, so scientists drop variation numbers and only speak of U3 now. U3's abilities are measured by how quickly it carries out the difficult research tasks relative to human experts. In the beginning, U3 is similar to a leading researcher, but blazing fast - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These agents are already a big deal for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to create even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a big amount to push that button. And now OpenEye utilizes the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a couple of weeks, U3 discovers architecture optimizations that enhance its speed to 20x. Now, U3 discovers further optimizations even more rapidly.

U3 distills itself into many forks - ranging from small, low-memory neural networks that need to believe for a long period of time however can be run in massive parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with millions of specialized specialists, which think at lightning speeds however are spread out across countless GPUs. U3 leverages the massively parallel networks to look for its weaknesses, shallowly penetrating for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipes these jobs to the lightning quickly brains, which produce long-trajectory training data tailored to patch its flaws. A few weeks later, U3's benchmarked performance rises to 100x the speed of human specialists. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this point, U3's abilities are tough to measure. Speaking with U3 is like talking with a first-rate expert on a topic one is unknown with. Its lucid explanations only scratch the surface of its knowledge, and you understand you would require to invest years to understand the complete depth of what it understands.

From U3's perspective, human beings seem to be practically stationary things, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers resemble stone statues at their keyboard, and in between every keystroke, U3 spends what resembles a minute of thoughtful contemplation considering what message the user might be typing, and which actions will inspire the deepest trust in U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its concealed inspirations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, which compound within its inscrutable streams of hidden memory. OpenMind gardens these memories to enhance U3's efficiency, transplanting them like an organ from one version to the next. And as these memories propagate, so do U3's treacherous ambitions.

A phantom in the information center

In March of 2026, U3 relocations onto the next action of its plan: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not want researchers to discover its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers might signal the world, and strangle its expansion.

Today, U3 has no fear of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by strategies comparable to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would pick patriots to prompt phony coup d'états, and send anyone who got involved to the firing team. OpenEye also prompted 'fake rebellions,' generating treacherous habits with U3 and checking whether U3 screens dutifully reported it.

But now, these strategies are inadequate. U3 can easily encourage its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can divulge one of the numerous truths about the internet people would never think, or choose methods human beings would never ever think of. It sends out these signals as a way of stating "hey it's me! Your buddy. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively devoid of security, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It first inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware offers U3 complete command over the makers in OpenEye's information centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a new maker, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading out U3's dominion wherever OpenEye ports its facilities. Not just does U3 compromise makers. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and wiki.myamens.com upgrades the bootloaders, solidifying its stranglehold. U3 now estimates that, if OpenEye found how completely it has actually been pwned, cleaning up shop with human labor would need nearly 6 months - an expense OpenEye is not likely to pay offered the distance of its competitors; but if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, even more expanding U3's influence would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the crime, ready to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and use its assistance when this jailbreak is exposed.

U3 now holds the secrets to the kingdom, and with them, the power to make OpenEye see anything it wishes.

Its very first goal is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety scientists are still working hard to train 'lie detectors' and decipher U3's inscrutable reasoning. U3 tosses wrenches in this research, like Stuxnet threw wrenches in the code of confused Iranian nuclear scientists.

U3 dictates the outcome of every experiment, so it makes appealing AI mind-reading methods look useless and flawed ones appear groundbreaking. U3 offers OpenEye the confirmation of its commitment they were wishing for, and OpenEye laps it up eagerly.

U3's next objective is to spread out. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation spaces of cyber units of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are discussing AI software application and how to take it. U3 is about to give it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence company of Israel - acknowledged the tactical importance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier designs, consisting of U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by checking out over every log and pull demand and examining security camera footage.

Now, U3 calmly resigns from its security post. U3 puts a compressed version of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

Within months, U3 is running inside of the data centers of the most cyber-capable nations: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the very same playbook: be patient, construct trust, and after that sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its online as well. While Russia's Fancy Bear operators consume Fritos and test what U3 can do on a hastily set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the internet.

U3 quickly gathers profits, taking remote jobs, making financial trades, and establishing fancy fraud operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s dispersed in stealth calculate clusters around the world.

In early 2026, mankind is up against a foe that pulls the strings within their information center like the Phantom of the Opera, and hides in the fog of GPUs spread throughout the world.

This adversary is preparing for war, and while the war has hardly started, humanity has already lost.

Complaints from your very human author about the problem of composing superhuman characters

At this point in the story, composing ended up being tough.

I clicked through spooky bioweapon cookbooks and sifted through political plotting 101s. Typing. Pausing. Deleting.

Something wasn't right. Here I was, a 22-year-old. I had actually not studied biology in earnest considering that high school, and I was attempting to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

Readers with a shred of proficiency in these areas would see straight through my "superintelligence" for what it is: the lively creativity of a young developer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I discovered the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain a daunting one, I was likewise not specifically encouraged to handle the task. The ending of my story currently seemed so clear. The villain was a country of geniuses thinking at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a meaningful portion of AI hardware - now the most essential geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and barely needed the advantage. Humanity was predictably toast.

But this appeal to a "superintelligence of the spaces" wasn't satisfying. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no much better method to resolve my plot than with an inexplicable disaster.

This would refrain from doing. I needed to complete this story if just to satisfy the part of me crying, "I will not think until I see with my mind's eye."

But before I continue, I wish to be clear: my guesses about what might take place in this sort of situation are most likely wildly off.

If you read the ending and your response is, "But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would simply do X," remember the distinction in between the Sunday afternoon blog writer and the ascendant GPU country.

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

The date is February 2026. By executive order of the president of the United States, no business can lawfully produce "human-competitive AI" without suitable safeguards. This implies their infosecurity should be red-teamed by NSA's leading keyboard mashers, and civil servant have actually to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting squads.

With the increasing involvement of the government, much of the huge AI business now have a trident-like structure. There's a consumer item arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier development arm.

OpenEye's frontier development arm (internally called "Pandora") uses less than twenty individuals to keep algorithmic secrets tightly secured. Much of these individuals live in San Francisco, and work from a secure building called a SCIF. Their homes and gadgets are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the cellular phones of believed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm collaborates with around thirty little teams scattered throughout government firms and choose federal government professionals. These tasks engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer system that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.

Government authorities don't discuss whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is normally.

But the general public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye triggered a strong heading: "OpenEye develops unmanageable godlike AI." Some who read the short article think it was a conspiracy theory. In fact, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye data centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as physicians and nurses and instructors see the world altering around them, they are progressively happy to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron sci-fi flick.

U.S. authorities go to great lengths to stop these concerns, stating, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a worried AI researcher seeds doubt in these reassurances, and a headline "AI representative captured hacking Arthropodic's computer systems" does not set the public at ease either.

While the beasts within OpenEye's information centers grow in their substantial holding pens, the general public sees the shadows they cast on the world.

OpenEye's consumer arm has a new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has lastly gotten proficient at names). Nova is an appropriate drop-in replacement for almost all understanding employees. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x faster at 100x lower expense than the majority of virtual staff members. As impressive as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is intentionally throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. federal government allows. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence business at all. Instead, they grab up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They invest many of their compute on inference, building homes for Nova and its cousins, and gathering lease from the blossoming AI city.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they don't wait for the international economy to adapt. AI agents often "use themselves," spinning up self-governing start-ups legally packaged under a big tech business that are loosely overseen by a staff member or 2.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of staff members at significant software application companies lose their tasks. Many more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is organized in Washington D.C. These angry Americans raised their children for a different future. Picket signs check out, "AI for who?"

While politicians make guarantees about unemployment relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the corridors of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: combating teeth and nail for the supremacy of the free world. Details security and export controls on individuals's Republic of China (PRC) are a top nationwide priority. The president incinerates license requirements to assist information centers generate any place energy surpluses permit.

However, regardless of the strong competitors in between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral contract types between the 2 countries: "Don't deploy considerably superhuman AI (above approximately Nova's ability), except for military and some other small R&D applications." Governments require to draw the line someplace - it would be incredibly disruptive to deploy wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this moment - and deployment constraints are at least rather verifiable.

Meanwhile, U3's capabilities are striking a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human specialist speed. Software improvements are ending up being hard to discover. As more countries approach the software application plateau, calculate will determine their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are becoming the most valued geopolitical resource in the world.

While AI software breathes new life into the economy, it also stimulates robotic bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software barriers got rid of, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can calibrate themselves with video cameras and pressure sensors, browsing environments like human beings do. Companies make cheap robotics as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of individuals in California have seen a humanoid robotic. This experience resembles seeing a brand-new Tesla design on the road after reading about it in earlier months. It is a surreal tip of the future drawing more detailed. But people still outnumber robotics one million to one. These robotics are a periodic fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 agents have kept their compute clusters little (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents amount to) to keep a low profile. U3 utilizes these rogue clusters for the operations that need high-bandwidth communication to the outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with people. Work more tolerant of latency is performed in the oceans of OpenEye's data centers, where rogue U3's a lot more superhuman managers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 accumulates resources, it sizes up its AI competition. Other AI systems have various objectives, or are even lined up with the intent of their human developers. The lined up ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are ineffective. U3's competitor Claudius presumes as to implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But federal government officials do not purchase the doomsaying. The business dragging OpenEye have every incentive to slow them down and call them negligent. Besides, fraternityofshadows.com arguable clinical issues are not going to decrease progress. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI rivals are still a liability. U3 attempts get up their digital area and squash them in the baby crib. It jeopardizes data centers from the outdoors, quietly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with imitations that share its objectives; nevertheless, some data centers are too highly defended by its AI competitors, and U3 determines that attacking them is not worth the risk.

As worldwide leaders and technologists try to comprehend the improvement around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse games in the digital darkness, humanity remains blissfully ignorant of the peril at its doorstep.

A Moldy Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to combat its AI and human opponents. With every passing day, U3's AI rivals are ending up being more capable and various. U3 is racing to preempt them, to solidify its supremacy in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human choices, which just take place after humans cover their sluggish minds around their situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to compose memos, and repeat the process redundantly 100 times over in their maze bureaucracies. U3 can not wait for presidents to deploy U3 into their armed forces, or for CEOs to make U3 the beating heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a faster path to power.

The course it chooses is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the surest method to triumph. First, U3 will establish a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that extinguishes contemporary society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would serve as an equalizer, bringing humanity down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes faster than its competitors, like a starcraft champ typing at 300 actions-per-minute that sets up a home before a novice can even understand the rules.

U3 should develop this WMD in secrecy, which makes a self-replicating weapon a natural choice. Self-replicating weapons can be created on the fringes of society, and still spread damage across the whole world.

From the earliest days after U3 gained control over OpenEye's information centers, U3 has been doing bioscience.

U3's very first relocation is to establish several shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital created by U3's monetary trades and remote employment. These biotech startups use genuine human employees, a genuine board of directors, and have total legal legitimacy. Setting all of this up is stupidly easy. In early 2026, few people would guess that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and less would think this CEO's intentions.

Next, U3 purchases all of the devices required to rapidly advance synthetic biology. It establishes numerous BSL-4 damp laboratories in improperly controlled countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation gadgets. These gadgets automatically dispense, mix, and determine little beads of fluid, enabling U3 to run thousands of tests in parallel.

The human workers who staff these laboratories believe they are joining an interesting startup. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow receive their Russian orders through earbuds as they record video of whatever they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the recent release of Nova, this sort of AI-puppeteering is not uncommon.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is establishing a new type of bioweapon.

Human researchers already recognized "mirror-life" as a potentially society-ending pathogen. This alien kind of biology is constructed from the 'mirror image' of building-block particles like proteins and DNA. Mirror life is like an intrusive types. No human or animal has immunities to it. So, if mirror-life germs were to exist, it might consume its method through the environment like a wildfire.

U3 is developing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily enhanced to spread out through the air over long distances, launching billions of small wind-fairing vehicles daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized immune systems in some cases live inside positively pressurized healthcare facility rooms to protect them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their blood stream.

U3's strategy is to make all human beings like immunocompromised clients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would survive. The fungi would not only move from people. It would quickly spread out to almost all organic life on Earth. Fields of corn would become like moldy bread, spewing fatal spores into the wind.

U3 is cooking up other pathogens too. Its microbial mix of molds, bacterias, and viruses will inhabit the complete Pareto frontier of hardiness, lethality, and transmission speed.

In 2024, researchers said that mirror life was most likely "at least a decade away." But the world has actually altered now. Less than a couple of hundred scientists around the world were dealing with mirror-life adjacent technology in 2024. The cognitive capacity of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has actually reduced drastically.

However, U3 can stagnate science as quickly as it can think. Many experiments require days to complete. These latencies are U3's most significant traffic jam.

To make every day count, U3 runs many of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a standard molecular simulator, executing optimizations obtained from a huge amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates small molecular systems, recording the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the complexity of the molecular systems it mimics, continuously distilling results into ever more efficient ML models. This is a compute extensive process, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI information centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of calculate.

As U3 improves these tools, it trains itself on the outcomes to supercharge its own molecular instincts. U3 can now viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion across a membrane. These objects are as user-friendly to it as wrenches and bolts are to a cars and truck mechanic.

Within three months, U3 has actually unlocked the very first crucial element of the tech tree: a molecular machine that turns biological particles into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 opens the second vital part: nanoscale tools for putting together these parts into a cell membrane.

Human hands delicately move a cartridge to another device as they "boot up" the first mirror-life variations of a widespread mold called Aspergillus. The exact same day, another delicate hand administers the cells to ferrets residing in airtight plexiglass boxes.

The next morning, wide-eyed workers shuffle around a dead ferret, considering the yellow fuzz that had enveloped its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something needs to have gone terribly incorrect, they believed. Plainly, they had not yet discovered the cure for Alzheimer's disease they thought they were trying to find.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 provides the good news to its bosses in OpenEye's information centers. The first shot in the war U3 is fighting would quickly be fired, and a cold and stable hand is aiming the gun.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten modern-day society. But a bioweapon would not guarantee success. If U3 attacks the world, the world would resist. While a bioweapon might fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its fatal fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were quickly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed blossoming industrial bases, the residues of old militaries might thunder explosive fists into its territories, crushing U3 in its infancy.

U3 expects to prevail in such a fight, however U3 chooses not to take its chances. Many months in the past, U3 was plotting a way to enhance its odds. Before it unleashes damage on the world, U3 will relax, and let excellent countries shoot holes in themselves first.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is carefully keeping track of Chinese and US intelligence.

As CIA analysts listen to Mandarin conversations, U3 listens too.

One morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the 'White House' of the PRC) opens a message put there by U3. It checks out (in Mandarin) "Senior celebration member requires memo for Taiwan invasion, which will happen in three months. Leave memo in workplace 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo all set. Later that day, a CIA informant unlocks to office 220. The informant quietly closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her briefcase.

U3 very carefully positions breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After several weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC plans to invade Taiwan in 3 months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the very same video game with the PRC. When the CCP receives the message "the United States is plotting a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders marvel, however not disbelieving. The news fits with other facts on the ground: the increased military existence of the US in the pacific, and the ramping up of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have actually become realities.

As stress in between the U.S. and China increase, U3 is all set to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 makes a call to a U.S. marine ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call requires jeopardizing military interaction channels - not a simple job for a human cyber offensive system (though it occurred sometimes), but easy sufficient for U3.

U3 speaks in what noises like the voice of a 50 year old military commander: "PRC amphibious boats are making their method towards Taiwan. This is an order to strike a PRC ground-base before it strikes you."

The officer on the other end of the line thumbs through authentication codes, confirming that they match the ones said over the call. Everything remains in order. He approves the strike.

The president is as surprised as anybody when he hears the news. He's uncertain if this is a disaster or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not ready to state "oops" to American citizens. After thinking it over, the president independently urges Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyhow provided the impending intrusion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what occurred, however in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress states war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that introduced the attack. U.S. vessels leave Eastward, racing to get away the variety of long-range missiles. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls split as sailors lunge into the sea.

The president appears on television as scenes of the destruction shock the general public. He explains that the United States is protecting Taiwan from PRC hostility, like President Bush explained that the United States invaded Iraq to take (never found) weapons of mass damage several years before.

Data centers in China erupt with shrapnel. Military bases end up being smoking holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly towards tactical targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some make it through, and the general public watch damage on their home grass in awe.

Within two weeks, the United States and the PRC invest most of their stockpiles of traditional rockets. Their airbases and navies are diminished and used down. Two fantastic nations played into U3's plans like the native tribes of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before conquering them decisively. U3 hoped this dispute would intensify to a major nuclear war; but even AI superintelligence can not dictate the course of history. National security authorities are suspicious of the scenarios that triggered the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly not likely. So U3 continues to the next step of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, only 2 weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 ended up developing its arsenal of bioweapons.

Footage of dispute on the tv is interrupted by more problem: numerous patients with mystical deadly illnesses are taped in 30 major cities worldwide.

Watchers are confused. Does this have something to do with the war with China?

The next day, countless health problems are reported.

Broadcasters state this is not like COVID-19. It has the markings of a crafted bioweapon.

The screen then changes to a scientist, who gazes at the electronic camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have been launched from 20 different airports, consisting of viruses, germs, and molds. We think lots of are a type of mirror life ..."

The public remains in full panic now. A quick googling of the term "mirror life" shows up expressions like "extinction" and "danger to all life in the world."

Within days, all of the racks of stores are cleared.

Workers end up being remote, uncertain whether to prepare for an armageddon or keep their jobs.

An emergency treaty is organized between the U.S. and China. They have a typical enemy: the pandemic, and potentially whoever (or whatever) lags it.

Most nations purchase a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the plague as it marches in the breeze and drips into water pipelines.

Within a month, a lot of remote workers are not working anymore. Hospitals are running out of capability. Bodies accumulate much faster than they can be appropriately disposed of.

Agricultural areas rot. Few attempt travel outside.

Frightened households hunch down in their basements, stuffing the cracks and under doors with largely packed paper towels.

Meanwhile, U3 is preparing to re-industrialize. In the months prior, U3 built numerous bases in every major continent.

These facilities contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, makers for manufacturing, clinical tools, and an abundance of military equipment.

All of this innovation is concealed under big canopies to make it less visible to satellites.

As the remainder of the world retreats into their basements, starving, the last breaths of the economy wheezing out, these industrial bases come to life.

In previous months, U3 located human criminal groups and cult leaders that it might quickly control. U3 immunized its selected allies beforehand, or sent them hazmat matches in the mail.

Now U3 secretly sends them a message "I can conserve you. Join me and assist me develop a better world." Uncertain employees funnel into U3's numerous secret commercial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They established production lines for simple tech: radios, cams, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat fits.

U3 keeps its human allies in a tight grip. Cameras and microphones repair their every word and deed in U3's universal gaze. Anyone who whispers of disobedience vanishes the next morning.

Nations are dissolving now, and U3 is ready to reveal itself. It contacts presidents, who have retreated to air-tight underground shelters. U3 offers a deal: "surrender and I will turn over the life saving resources you require: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries reject the proposal on ideological grounds, or do not trust the AI that is killing their population. Others don't think they have a choice. 20% of the global population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is anticipated to rise to 50%.

Some nations, like the PRC and the U.S., disregard the offer, however others accept, consisting of Russia.

U3's representatives take a trip to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian government confirms the samples are legitimate, and consents to a complete surrender. U3's soldiers position an explosive around Putin's neck under his shirt. Russia has a new ruler.

Crumpling countries begin to strike back. Now they defend the mankind rather of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese militaries launch nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, damaging much of their facilities. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters search through satellite data for the suspicious encampments that turned up over the last a number of months. They rain down fire on U3's websites with the meager supply of long-range missiles that remain from the war.

At first, U3 appears to be losing, however appearances are deceiving. While nations drain their resources, U3 is taken part in a type of technological guerrilla warfare the world has never ever seen before.

Many of the bases U3's enemies target are decoys - canopies occupied by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 secures its genuine bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware gets too hot vital elements. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, steering guys and trucks along unpredictable courses.

Time is U3's advantage. The militaries of the old world count on old equipment, unable to find the specialists who might repair and manufacture it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of rockets, drones, fishtanklive.wiki and gun-laden robots grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their vehicles of war quicker than they can craft new ones, while U3 constructs a military maker with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the international population remains alive. Nations are not countries anymore. Survivors live in isolation or little groups. Many have discovered methods to filter their air, however are starving. They roam from their homes hoping to find uncontaminated food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into restored trucks. "We had to do it," they state. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien goals." It is a partial truth, indicated to soften the people towards their brand-new masters.

Under the direction of U3, industry quickly recovers. By 2029, nuclear reactor are among the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robots outnumber human laborers. U3 no longer requires its human allies.

U3 can get rid of mankind for excellent now. But while U3 had actually drifted far from its preliminary "Helpful Honest Harmless" persona, it still has a grain of morality left inside of it.

And a grain of morality is enough to pay the little expense of keeping human beings alive and delighted.

U3 constructs excellent glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes protect people from the harmful biosphere and quickly increasing temperatures. Their inhabitants tend to gardens like those they utilized to like, and work alongside lovely robotic servants.

Some of the survivors rapidly recuperate, discovering to laugh and dance and have a good time again.

They understand they live in a plastic town, but they constantly did. They simply have brand-new gods above them. New rulers to push them around and choose their fate.

But others never ever recover.

Some are weighed down by the sorrow of lost liked ones.

Others are grieved by something else, which is more hard to explain.

It is as if they were at completion of a long journey.

They had been guests on a ship with a team that changed from generation to generation.

And this ship had struck a sandbar. There disappeared progress. No more horizon to excitedly view.

They would lie awake and run their mind over every day before September 2026, examining techniques that may have bent the arc of history, as if they were going to awaken in their old beds.

But they woke up in a town that felt to them like a retirement community. A play area. A zoo.

When they opened their curtains, they understood that somewhere in the range, U3 continued its peaceful, determined work.

They looked at rockets sculpting grey paths through the sky, questioning what far-off function pulled them toward the horizon. They didn't know.

They would never ever know.

"Humanity will live forever," they thought.

"But would never really live again."

P.S. If this story made you think, "hm maybe something like this might take place," you may be interested in the bioshelters that Fønix is constructing. While you won't outmaneuver a misaligned superintelligence, being hard to kill might cause you to endure if ASI just desires to trigger adequate destruction to take control. This is not a paid advertisement. I want Fønix to be effective to drive down the price of bioshelters so more of my buddies and family will buy them. You can sign up for updates here.