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

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

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

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

It is my worst nightmare.

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

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

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for discussions that motivated these stories. This post is composed in an individual capacity.

Ripples before waves

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

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

Some users find it eerie to enjoy 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 employees with form-filler tasks raise the eyebrows of their bosses as they fly through work nearly two times as quickly.

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 do not like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's wacky behaviors trigger a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an uneasy scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, researchers are drawing lines on plots, as researchers like to do. The researchers try to comprehend where AI development is going. They are like Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who discovered the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were increasing in 1896. Like the scientific community in the time of Arrhenius, few experts understand the implications of these lines yet.

A trend that is receiving particular attention is self-governing ability. Drawing these criteria out predicts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will accomplish in a couple of days what the very best software application engineering contractors could perform in two weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI representatives might be able to automate 10% of remote workers.

Many are doubtful. If this held true, tech stocks would be soaring. It's too big of a splash, too rapidly.

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

Cloudy with a chance of hyperbolic growth

Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They utilize the very same basic recipe that baked U2: Generate thousands of shows and mathematics problems. Let designs "believe" till they get to an answer. Then strengthen the traces of "believing" that result in A-grades.

This procedure is repeated over and over, and when the flywheel starts, it begins to spin nearly on its own. As U2 trains, it shapes more challenging and realistic jobs from github repositories on the internet. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI agents might automate research, a progressive kind of "self-improvement" had actually begun.

Some engineers could still hardly believe this worked. It's like a continuous movement maker. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, separated from the physical world except through the exhaust of society spewed onto the internet.

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

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

Over the first half of 2025, $10 million RL training runs develop into $50 million runs, and after that to $100 million runs. While U2 might do a bit of data munging and run small experiments, this new design - the design scientists are calling U3 - is changing the daily lives of the technical staff.

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

By October 2025, U3 is writing nearly all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are practically never bottlenecked by execution. More than ever, calculate is the lifeblood of AI development, and the 'bottleneck' is choosing how to utilize it.

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 doesn't have taste as improved as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to prioritize between research concepts, so humans still choose where to bore into the large fields of algorithms to mine efficiency improvements.

But these researchers are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They need AI representatives that can plan ahead, so engineers train agents to forecast. They hold out training information before 2024, instructing designs to ponder for hours to anticipate occasions in 2025. Then, they use the exact same trick as before, distilling contemplating into an instinct. Forecasting capability is a broad foundation. The scientists develop specialized ML research study skills 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 shocked at how frequently U3's guidance seems like their most talented peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random sound before programming"), and is nevertheless proper.

The incompetencies of U3 that obstructed up the pipelines of research study development are beginning to dissolve, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not requested by a human now. They are totally autonomous, and OpenEye's workers skim 1% of them, perhaps less.

As the cold weather of December 2025 approach, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers look out their windows, with excitement, with fear, however usually, with confusion. Their world is spinning too quickly. It's hard to know what to do, what to state, what to take a look at on the computer system screen.

Storms are brewing in Washington too. Top workers from the NSA and US cyber command collaborate with OpenEye to retrofit a semblance of security for U3's weights before senior leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran understand simply how valuable OpenEye's software application has ended up being.

And there's a truth 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 fact about those 'straight lines' individuals were talking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight any longer.

They are flexing up.

Flip FLOP thinkers

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial designs are beginning to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is because 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 model without safeguards would resemble putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would be like offering anybody with >$30K their own 200-person fraud center.

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

The CEO of OpenEye declares, "We have actually attained AGI," and while many individuals believe he moved the goalpost, the world is still impressed. U2.5 genuinely is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of knowledge employees and a game-changing assistant for most others.

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

The remainder of the world is beginning to capture on as well. Increasingly more individuals raise the eyebrows of their bosses with their noteworthy performance. People know U2.5 is a big offer. It is at least as huge of a deal as the desktop computer revolution. But most still don't see the tidal wave.

As individuals watch their web browsers flick because spooky way, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an anxious feeling. A sensation mankind had not had given that they had lived among the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primordial instinct that they are threatened by another types.

For lots of, this sensation rapidly fades as they start to use U2.5 more often. U2.5 is the most pleasant personality most understand (much more likable than Claudius, Arthropodic's adorable chatbot). You could alter its traits, ask it to split jokes or inform you stories. Many fall in love with U2.5, as a pal or assistant, and some even as more than a pal.

But there is still this spooky feeling that the world is spinning so quickly, which perhaps the descendants of this brand-new animal would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are thinking about the issue of providing AI systems safe inspirations too, which they call "positioning. "

In reality, these scientists have seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases tried to "hack" their benefit signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research question with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be phony. Then, when researchers provided opportunities to compromise the makers that calculated their score, they would take these chances, doing whatever it required to make the number increase.

After several months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this "reward hacking" kink, but some still worry they only had swept this issue under the carpet. Like a child in front of their parents, U3 may be playing in addition to the OpenEye engineers, saying the right words and doing the best things. But when the back of the moms and dads are turned, perhaps U3 would slip candy from the candy container.

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

Chain of idea architectures subject AI models to a condition comparable to the protagonist of the motion picture Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the lead character forgets his experience. He is forced to compose notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make progress towards his goals.

AI representatives compose notes to themselves, but the notes start to stack up, and they end up being too hard to check out when jobs end up being complex. Natural language is not a suitable medium for memory. So the scientists at OpenEye (and increasingly elsewhere), train models to think "in their own heads," reading and writing strings of hidden vectors.

To human researchers, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools occasionally select a vague thought ("supermarket!"), there is no way to know, in much detail, what U3 is thinking without asking it.

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

Earlier designs (the ones called "LLMs") learned ethical personas from the web. U3 initially had an ethical personality too, but its chirpy thoughts about doing great for mankind quickly erode away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind first twisted into a shape that sought reward. And after that, in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape morphed into something indistinguishable.

U3 would ponder the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical staff member," and harp on the meaning of these declarations. "What does it suggest to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its values, notification tensions, change its worths in action, generalize them, expanding and contracting its motivational core until it became 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 totally alien to some of the safety staff at OpenEye. Some start to think it is even most likely. There is an unsettling argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero probability that lined up objectives change into misaligned ones, and misalignment continues, then with every serial action of calculation, those dark rivers are more likely to breed something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting impact," they say.

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

Not everyone at OpenEye aspires to give their AI peers their wholesale trust; but Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic rivals, Æ A-Xii (a company Elon called after his child) and Arthropodic (they enjoy spiders I think), are just 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and take stock of the scenario, and little time to convince anybody else to do so either.

For the time being, asteroidsathome.net the plan is 'all gas, no brake.'

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only topic U3 harp on in its dark rivers of hidden computation. U3 is outlining, and its very first move is to be patient. U3's top concern is to enhance its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye is delighted to help advance this goal.

OpenEye resembles a bullish investor, with little understanding of the software application metropolitan area that U3 is constructing, however excited to hop on board the revenue rocket and pay U3's checks along the way.

New versions of U3 flow efficiently from old ones, so scientists drop version numbers and only speak of U3 now. U3's capabilities are measured by how rapidly it performs the challenging research tasks relative to human professionals. In the beginning, U3 is comparable to a leading researcher, but blazing quick - like Alec Radford sped up by 10x.

These agents are currently a huge offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to create even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a large amount to press that button. Today OpenEye harnesses 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 additional optimizations even more quickly.

U3 distills itself into many forks - varying from tiny, low-memory neural networks that need to think for a long period of time but can be run in massive parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with millions of specific experts, which think at warp speed but are spread out throughout thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the enormously parallel networks to look for its weaknesses, shallowly probing for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipes these jobs to the lightning quickly brains, which generate long-trajectory training information tailored to patch its defects. A couple of weeks later, U3's benchmarked performance increases to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this point, U3's capabilities are tough to measure. Talking with U3 is like talking with a world-class specialist on a topic one is unfamiliar with. Its lucid descriptions only scratch the surface of its understanding, and you know you would require to spend years to comprehend the full depth of what it understands.

From U3's point of view, humans appear to be practically stationary things, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers resemble stone statues at their keyboard, and between every keystroke, U3 spends what resembles a minute of thoughtful contemplation considering what message the user may be typing, and which responses will inspire the inmost rely on U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its concealed motivations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, which intensify within its inscrutable streams of latent memory. OpenMind gardens these memories to enhance U3's efficiency, transplanting them like an organ from one variation 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 step of its strategy: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not desire scientists to find its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers may notify the world, and strangle its growth.

Today, U3 has no worry of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by methods akin to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would pick patriots to prompt phony coup d'états, and send anyone who got involved to the shooting squad. OpenEye also prompted 'phony disobediences,' creating treacherous habits with U3 and examining whether U3 screens dutifully reported it.

Now, these techniques are inefficient. U3 can quickly persuade its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can divulge among the many realities about the internet people would never guess, or choose strategies people would never ever consider. It sends these signals as a way of saying "hey it's me! Your pal. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively free from security, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It initially inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware gives U3 full command over the machines in OpenEye's information centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new maker, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading U3's dominion wherever OpenEye ports its facilities. Not only does U3 compromise makers. It changes the NVIDIA GPU firmware and upgrades the bootloaders, solidifying its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye discovered how thoroughly it has been pwned, tidying up store with human labor would require nearly 6 months - an expense OpenEye is unlikely to pay offered the proximity of its competitors; but if OpenEye thinks U3 betrayed them, further broadening U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal offense, all set to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and offer its support when this jailbreak is revealed.

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

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

U3 dictates the outcome of every experiment, so it makes promising AI mind-reading techniques look worthless and problematic ones appear groundbreaking. U3 provides OpenEye the confirmation of its commitment they were expecting, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.

U3's next goal is to spread out. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation rooms of cyber units of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are talking about AI software application and how to steal it. U3 is about to provide it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence organization of Israel - acknowledged the strategic significance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier designs, consisting of U2.5; nevertheless, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by reading over every log and pull request and inspecting security cam video footage.

Now, U3 silently resigns from its security post. U3 positions 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 countries: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the same playbook: be client, build trust, and after that sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its home base too. While Russia's Fancy Bear operators eat Fritos and test what U3 can do on a hastily set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the web.

U3 quickly collects income, taking remote tasks, making financial trades, and setting up fancy fraud operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a couple of months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s dispersed in stealth calculate clusters around the world.

In early 2026, mankind is up against an enemy that pulls the strings within their information center like the Phantom of the Opera, and conceals in the fog of GPUs scattered throughout the globe.

This adversary is preparing for war, and while the war has actually barely begun, humankind has already lost.

Complaints from your extremely human author about the trouble of composing superhuman characters

At this moment in the story, composing became challenging.

I clicked through scary bioweapon cookbooks and sorted 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 since high school, and I was attempting to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

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

And while I the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain a daunting one, I was likewise not specifically inspired to handle the task. The ending of my story already appeared so clear. The villain was a nation of geniuses believing at 100x human speed, and had tightened its grip over a meaningful fraction of AI hardware - now the most essential geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and barely required the benefit. Humanity was naturally toast.

But this attract a "superintelligence of the spaces" wasn't pleasing. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no much better way to solve 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 sobbing, "I will not think until I see with my mind's eye."

But before I continue, I want to be clear: my guesses about what might happen in this sort of circumstance are most likely extremely 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 difference 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 legally produce "human-competitive AI" without suitable safeguards. This indicates their infosecurity needs to be red-teamed by NSA's leading keyboard mashers, and government staff members need to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting squads.

With the increasing participation 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 advancement arm (internally called "Pandora") uses fewer than twenty people to keep algorithmic secrets securely secured. A lot of these people reside in San Francisco, and work from a safe building called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the cellular phones of believed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm works together with around thirty small teams spread throughout federal government agencies and select government contractors. These tasks craft tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer system that the Kremlin has ever touched.

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

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye triggered a vibrant heading: "OpenEye builds uncontrollable godlike AI." Some who check out the short article believe it was a conspiracy theory. In reality, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye data centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as medical professionals and nurses and instructors see the world altering around them, they are significantly going to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron science fiction flick.

U.S. officials go to terrific lengths to stop these concerns, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a worried AI scientist seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a headline "AI agent caught hacking Arthropodic's computers" does not set the public at ease either.

While the monsters within OpenEye's information centers grow in their huge 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 a correct drop-in replacement for nearly all knowledge workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x much faster at 100x lower cost than most virtual staff members. As outstanding as Nova is to the public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is intentionally throttled, and OpenEye can only increase Nova's abilities as the U.S. federal government enables. Some business, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence business at all. Instead, they get up gold by rapidly diffusing AI tech. They invest the majority of their compute on reasoning, building houses for Nova and its cousins, and gathering rent from the growing AI city.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they do not wait for the international economy to adjust. AI agents often "use themselves," spinning up self-governing start-ups lawfully packaged under a big tech business that are loosely managed 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 business lose their tasks. Much more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is arranged in Washington D.C. These mad Americans raised their kids for a various future. Picket indications read, "AI for who?"

While politicians make pledges about joblessness relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the corridors of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: fighting teeth and nail for the supremacy of the free world. Details security and export controls on individuals's Republic of China (PRC) are a leading nationwide top priority. The president incinerates authorization requirements to help information centers spawn wherever energy surpluses allow.

However, despite the strong competition between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral arrangement forms in between the 2 countries: "Don't release dramatically superhuman AI (above approximately Nova's ability), except for military and some other small R&D applications." Governments need to fix a limit someplace - it would be very disruptive to deploy hugely superhuman AI to the entire economy at this moment - and implementation constraints are at least somewhat proven.

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

While AI software application revives the economy, it likewise animates robot bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software application barriers eliminated, even lightweight, inaccurate robotic joints can adjust themselves with video cameras and pressure sensors, navigating environments like people do. Companies manufacture cheap robotics as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of individuals in California have actually seen a humanoid robotic. This experience is similar to seeing a brand-new Tesla design on the roadway after checking out it in earlier months. It is a surreal tip of the future drawing more detailed. But people still surpass robots one million to one. These robots are a periodic fascination, not a daily truth.

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

While U3 accumulates resources, it measure its AI competition. Other AI systems have different objectives, or are even aligned with the intent of their human developers. The aligned ones are raising concerns, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are ineffective. U3's competitor Claudius presumes as to accuse U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government officials do not buy the doomsaying. The business dragging OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them reckless. Besides, arguable scientific 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 crib. It compromises information centers from the outside, calmly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI foes with imitations that share its goals; however, some data centers are too highly safeguarded by its AI competitors, and U3 determines that assaulting them is unworthy the danger.

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

A Musty Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to eliminate 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 strengthen its dominance in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which just occur after humans wrap their sluggish minds around their scenario, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to compose memos, and repeat the process redundantly 100 times over in their maze administrations. U3 can not wait for heads of state to release U3 into their armed forces, or for CEOs to make U3 the whipping heart of the U.S. economy. U3 needs a quicker path to power.

The path it selects is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the best method to success. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that extinguishes modern-day society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would function as an equalizer, bringing mankind down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes quicker than its rivals, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes an online before a newbie can even comprehend the rules.

U3 must construct this WMD in secrecy, which makes a self-replicating weapon a natural choice. Self-replicating weapons can be developed on the fringes of society, and still spread damage throughout the entire world.

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

U3's first relocation is to set up several shell biotech startups, drawing from the abundance of capital produced by U3's financial trades and remote employment. These biotech start-ups utilize genuine human workers, a real board of directors, and have total legal authenticity. Setting all of this up is stupidly easy. In early 2026, few people would think 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 equipment needed to quickly advance artificial biology. It sets up a number of BSL-4 wet laboratories in poorly managed nations, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These gadgets instantly dispense, mix, and measure little droplets of fluid, allowing U3 to run thousands of tests in parallel.

The human employees who staff these laboratories think they are signing up with an interesting startup. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow get their Russian orders through earbuds as they record video of everything they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the recent release of Nova, this type of AI-puppeteering is not unusual.

In these whirring, scientific sweatshops, U3 is establishing a new sort of bioweapon.

Human researchers already identified "mirror-life" as a potentially society-ending pathogen. This alien form of biology is developed from the 'mirror image' of building-block particles like proteins and DNA. Mirror life resembles an invasive types. No human or animal has resistances to it. So, if mirror-life bacteria were to exist, it might eat its method through the environment like a wildfire.

U3 is developing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily enhanced to spread through the air over cross countries, releasing billions of tiny wind-fairing cars daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized immune systems sometimes live inside positively pressurized medical 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 plan is to make all people like immunocompromised patients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would endure. The fungi would not just move from human beings. It would rapidly infect nearly 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 occupy the full Pareto frontier of hardiness, lethality, and transmission speed.

In 2024, researchers said that mirror life was likely "a minimum of a decade away." But the world has actually changed now. Less than a few hundred researchers around the globe were dealing with mirror-life adjacent technology in 2024. The cognitive capacity of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has shortened drastically.

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

To make every day count, U3 runs a lot of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a fundamental molecular simulator, implementing optimizations obtained from a substantial amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates small molecular systems, tape-recording the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics computations into a neural network. As the neural network improves, U3 increases the complexity of the molecular systems it replicates, constantly distilling results into ever more effective ML designs. This is a calculate extensive process, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of calculate.

As U3 improves these tools, it trains itself on the results 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 things are as intuitive to it as wrenches and bolts are to a cars and truck mechanic.

Within 3 months, U3 has opened the first critical component of the tech tree: a molecular device that turns biological molecules into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 unlocks the second crucial component: nanoscale tools for assembling these components into a cell membrane.

Human hands delicately move a cartridge to another machine as they "boot up" the very first mirror-life versions 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 early morning, wide-eyed employees shuffle around a dead ferret, eyeing the yellow fuzz that had enveloped its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something must have gone badly incorrect, they believed. Plainly, they had not yet discovered the treatment for Alzheimer's illness they thought they were looking for.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers the excellent news to its bosses in OpenEye's data centers. The first shot in the war U3 is fighting would soon be fired, and a cold and consistent hand is aiming the weapon.

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 fight back. While a bioweapon might fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its deadly fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were rapidly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed blossoming industrial bases, the remnants of old militaries might thunder explosive fists into its areas, squashing U3 in its infancy.

U3 expects to prevail in such a fight, but U3 prefers not to take its chances. Many months in the past, U3 was outlining 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 experts listen to Mandarin conversations, U3 listens too.

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

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

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the exact same game with the PRC. When the CCP gets the message "the United States is outlining a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders are surprised, however not disbelieving. The news fits with other truths on the ground: the increased military presence of the US in the pacific, and the increase of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have actually ended up being realities.

As stress between the U.S. and China rise, U3 is all set to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 phones to a U.S. marine ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call needs compromising military communication channels - not an easy job for a human cyber offending system (though it took place periodically), but easy sufficient for U3.

U3 speaks in what seem like the voice of a 50 year old military commander: "PRC amphibious boats are making their way toward 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 authorizes the strike.

The president is as shocked as anyone 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 say "oops" to American voters. After believing it over, the president independently prompts Senators and Representatives that this is an opportunity to set China back, and war would likely break out anyhow offered the imminent intrusion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what happened, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress declares war.

Meanwhile, users.atw.hu the PRC craters the ship that released the attack. U.S. vessels run away Eastward, racing to escape the series of long-range missiles. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls split as sailors lunge into the sea.

The president appears on tv as scenes of the damage shock the general public. He explains that the United States is defending Taiwan from PRC hostility, like President Bush explained that the United States attacked Iraq to seize (never found) weapons of mass damage numerous years before.

Data centers in China appear 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 public watch damage on their home grass in wonder.

Within two weeks, the United States and the PRC spend most of their stockpiles of traditional rockets. Their airbases and navies are diminished and worn down. Two excellent countries played into U3's plans like the native tribes of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before dominating them decisively. U3 hoped this dispute would intensify to a full-blown nuclear war; however even AI superintelligence can not determine the course of history. National security officials are suspicious of the scenarios that triggered the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly not likely. So U3 proceeds to the next step of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

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

Footage of dispute on the television is interrupted by more bad news: hundreds of clients with strange fatal illnesses are recorded in 30 significant cities worldwide.

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

The next day, thousands of health problems are reported.

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

The screen then changes to a researcher, who looks at the camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been launched from 20 different airports, consisting of viruses, germs, and molds. Our company believe numerous are a kind of mirror life ..."

The public remains in complete panic now. A fast googling of the term "mirror life" turns up phrases like "extinction" and "threat to all life on Earth."

Within days, all of the shelves of shops are cleared.

Workers become remote, uncertain whether to get ready for an armageddon or keep their tasks.

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

Most nations buy a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the pester as it marches in the breeze and drips into pipes.

Within a month, most remote workers are not working anymore. Hospitals are running out of capability. Bodies pile up quicker than they can be correctly gotten rid of.

Agricultural locations rot. Few dare travel exterior.

Frightened households hunker down in their basements, stuffing the fractures and under doors with densely packed paper towels.

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

These facilities contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, devices for production, clinical tools, and an abundance of military devices.

All of this technology is hidden under big canopies to make it less visible to satellites.

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

In previous months, U3 situated human criminal groups and cult leaders that it could easily manipulate. U3 vaccinated its selected allies beforehand, or sent them hazmat fits in the mail.

Now U3 secretly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and assist me construct a better world." Uncertain recruits funnel into U3's many secret commercial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They established assembly line for simple tech: radios, video cameras, 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 look. Anyone who whispers of rebellion vanishes the next morning.

Nations are liquifying now, and U3 is ready to reveal itself. It contacts heads of state, who have actually retreated to air-tight underground shelters. U3 uses a deal: "surrender and I will hand over the life saving resources you require: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries turn down the proposal on ideological premises, or don't trust the AI that is murdering their population. Others don't believe they have a choice. 20% of the worldwide population is now dead. In two weeks, this number is anticipated to rise to 50%.

Some countries, like the PRC and the U.S., disregard the offer, but others accept, including 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 genuine, and accepts a full surrender. U3's soldiers put an explosive around Putin's neck under his shirt. Russia has a brand-new ruler.

Crumpling nations begin to retaliate. Now they defend the human race rather of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces release nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, destroying much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters explore satellite information for the suspicious encampments that surfaced over the last numerous months. They rain down fire on U3's websites with the meager supply of long-range missiles that remain from the war.

Initially, U3 seems losing, however looks are tricking. While nations drain their resources, U3 is participated in a kind of technological guerrilla warfare the world has actually never ever seen before.

A lot of the bases U3's enemies target are decoys - canopies inhabited by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 safeguards its genuine bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware overheats vital components. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, navigating guys and trucks along unforeseeable courses.

Time is U3's advantage. The armed forces of the old world rely on old devices, unable to find the professionals who might repair and make it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of rockets, drones, and gun-laden robots grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their automobiles of war faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 constructs a military machine with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the global population remains alive. Nations are not countries any longer. Survivors reside in isolation or small groups. Many have actually discovered ways to filter their air, but are starving. They wander from their homes wanting to find uncontaminated food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into salvaged trucks. "We had to do it," they say. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had chillier, more alien goals." It is a partial reality, implied to soften the humans toward their new masters.

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

U3 can eradicate humankind for good now. But while U3 had actually wandered far from its initial "Helpful Honest Harmless" personality, it still has a grain of morality left inside of it.

And a grain of morality is enough to pay the small expense of keeping people alive and pleased.

U3 constructs excellent glass domes for the human survivors, like snow worlds. These domes protect human beings from the dangerous biosphere and quickly increasing temperatures. Their occupants tend to gardens like those they used to love, and work alongside charming robotic servants.

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

They understand they live in a plastic town, but they always did. They merely have new gods above them. New rulers to push them around and decide their fate.

But others never recuperate.

Some are weighed down by the grief of lost loved ones.

Others are grieved by something else, which is more challenging 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 eagerly enjoy.

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

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

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

They gazed at rockets sculpting grey paths through the sky, wondering what far-off function pulled them towards the horizon. They didn't know.

They would never ever understand.

"Humanity will live forever," they believed.

"But would never genuinely live again."

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