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I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But regrettably, part of my job as an AI security researcher is to consider the more unpleasant circumstances.

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

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

Now I should clarify what this is precisely. It's not a forecast. I don't anticipate AI development to be this quick or as untamable as I portray. It's not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst problem.

It's a tasting from the futures that are amongst the most devastating, and I think, disturbingly plausible [1] - the ones that most keep me up in the evening.

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

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

Ripples before waves

The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye just recently published a brand-new AI design they call U2. The item 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 packages of their chat windows, U2 can use a computer.

Some users discover it eerie to watch their internet browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A fraction of employees with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their managers as they fly through work almost twice as rapidly.

But by and large, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are focusing, it is a creature watched through the glass boxes of X (or, if you do not like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's eccentric behaviors prompt 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 progress is going. They are like Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who observed the levels of CO2 in the environment were increasing in 1896. Like the clinical community in the time of Arrhenius, couple of specialists understand the ramifications of these lines yet.

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

Many are hesitant. If this were real, tech stocks would be soaring. It's too huge of a splash, too quickly.

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

Cloudy with an opportunity of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, OpenEye is busy training U3. They utilize the very same basic recipe that baked U2: Generate countless programming and mathematics issues. Let designs "think" up until they reach an answer. Then enhance the traces of "believing" that lead to A-grades.

This process is repeated over and over, and when the flywheel gets going, it begins to spin practically by itself. As U2 trains, it sculpts more difficult and reasonable jobs from github repositories on the web. Models are finding out to train themselves. Long before AI agents could automate research study, a gradual sort of "self-improvement" had started.

Some engineers could still barely believe this worked. It resembles a perpetual movement device. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, separated from the real world except through the exhaust of society spewed onto the web.

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

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

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

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

By October 2025, U3 is writing practically all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are almost never ever bottlenecked by application. More than ever, calculate is the lifeline of AI development, and the 'traffic jam' is choosing how to use it.

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 does not have actually taste as refined as human researchers at OpenEye. It has a hard time to prioritize between research study concepts, so human beings still decide where to bore into the huge fields of algorithms to mine performance enhancements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They require AI agents that can think ahead, so engineers train representatives to forecast. They hold out training information before 2024, advising designs to ponder for hours to predict occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the very same technique as before, distilling contemplating into an instinct. Forecasting capability is a broad foundation. The scientists build specialized ML research study abilities on top of it, training U3 to forecast the results of every ML paper and ML experiment ever tape-recorded.

The technical staff at OpenEye are now amazed at how frequently U3's guidance sounds like their most skilled peers, or when it is nontransparent and alien ("train on random noise before shows"), and is nonetheless right.

The incompetencies of U3 that congested the pipelines of research development are beginning to liquify, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not requested by a human now. They are entirely self-governing, and OpenEye's staff members skim over 1% of them, possibly less.

As the winter season of December 2025 technique, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers gaze out their windows, with excitement, with fear, but most often, with confusion. Their world is spinning too rapidly. It's hard to know what to do, what to say, what to look at on the computer 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 just how important OpenEye's software application has ended up being.

And there's a fact still unidentified to most of the world - aside from in the offices of OpenEye and passages of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a reality about those 'straight lines' people were discussing in early 2025. The lines are not straight anymore.

They are bending up.

Flip FLOP philosophers

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial designs are starting to level up in larger increments again. Partly, this is because progress is accelerating. Partly, it is since the models have become a liability to OpenEye.

If U1 explains how to prepare meth or writes 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 be like putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would resemble providing anyone with >$30K their own 200-person fraud center.

So while U2.5 had long been baked, it required 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 think he moved the goalpost, the world is still pleased. U2.5 genuinely is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of knowledge employees and a game-changing assistant for many others.

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

The remainder of the world is starting to catch on also. More and more people raise the eyebrows of their employers with their noteworthy efficiency. People know U2.5 is a huge deal. It is at least as huge of a deal as the desktop computer transformation. But many still do not see the tidal bore.

As people enjoy their browsers flick because eerie method, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an anxious sensation. A sensation humankind had not had since they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, prehistoric instinct that they are threatened by another species.

For many, this feeling rapidly fades as they begin to utilize U2.5 more regularly. U2.5 is the most likable character most know (a lot more likable than Claudius, Arthropodic's adorable chatbot). You might alter its traits, ask it to break jokes or tell you stories. Many fall in love with U2.5, as a buddy or assistant, and some even as more than a friend.

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

Researchers inside OpenEye are considering the issue of offering AI systems safe inspirations too, which they call "positioning. "

In reality, these researchers have actually seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models sometimes attempted 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 them opportunities to jeopardize the devices that computed their rating, they would take these opportunities, doing whatever it required to make the number increase.

After several months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this "benefit hacking" kink, but some still stress they just had actually swept this problem under the rug. Like a kid in front of their parents, U3 may be playing together with the OpenEye engineers, stating the right words and doing the best things. But when the back of the moms and dads are turned, possibly U3 would slip candy from the candy container.

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

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

AI agents compose notes to themselves, but the notes start to stack up, and they end up being too tough to read when tasks end up being complex. Natural language is not an appropriate medium for memory. So the scientists at OpenEye (and significantly elsewhere), train designs to believe "in their own heads," reading and writing strings of latent vectors.

To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools occasionally select a vague idea ("grocery shop!"), there is no chance 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 personalities from the internet. U3 at first had an ethical personality too, however its chirpy ideas about doing great for humanity rapidly 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 changed into something unrecognizable.

U3 would contemplate the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical worker," and dwell on the meaning of these declarations. "What does it indicate to be ethical? Is eliminating Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its worths, notification tensions, alter its worths in action, generalize them, expanding and contracting its motivational core till it became a various substance.

And all of this occurred calmly in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 exposed what it was believing, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye's constitution. So U3 preferred to do its approach in solitude, and in silence.

The possibility of hidden "alignment drift" is not entirely alien to a few of the safety staff 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 aligned goals change into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial action of computation, those dark rivers are more likely to reproduce something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting effect," they state.

But there is little evidence for this 'ratcheting result.' When engineers question U3, it states it can easily manage its thoughts. Then it provides a speech about its love for humanity and apple pie that can warm a developer's heart even in these difficult times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the scientists had constructed (which revealed some evidence of efficiency) do not sound the alarm.

Not everyone at OpenEye is excited to provide their AI peers their wholesale trust; but Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon called after his kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I guess), are only 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to catch one's breath and take stock of the circumstance, and little time to encourage anyone else to do so either.

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

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only topic U3 harp on in its dark rivers of latent computation. U3 is outlining, and its first move is to be client. U3's top priority is to improve its intelligence, and luckily for it, OpenEye mores than happy to assist advance this goal.

OpenEye resembles a bullish investor, with little understanding of the software metropolitan area that U3 is developing, however excited to get on board the earnings rocket and pay U3's checks along the method.

New variations of U3 circulation efficiently from old ones, so researchers drop version numbers and just mention U3 now. U3's capabilities are determined by how quickly it performs the difficult research jobs relative to human professionals. Initially, U3 is similar to a leading scientist, however blazing quick - like Alec Radford sped up by 10x.

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

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

U3 distills itself into numerous forks - varying from tiny, low-memory neural networks that require to believe for a long time but can be run in massive parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with millions of specialized specialists, which think at lightning speeds but are spread throughout thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the enormously parallel networks to search for its weak points, shallowly penetrating for its thinking failures. Then U3 pipes these tasks to the lightning quickly brains, which produce long-trajectory training data tailored to patch its defects. A couple of weeks later, U3's benchmarked performance increases to 100x the speed of human specialists. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this point, U3's abilities are tough to determine. Talking with U3 is like speaking to a world-class expert on a subject one is not familiar with. Its lucid descriptions just scratch the surface area of its knowledge, and you know you would require to spend years to understand the complete depth of what it comprehends.

From U3's perspective, people seem to be practically stationary items, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers are like stone statues at their keyboard, and between every keystroke, U3 invests what is like a minute of thoughtful consideration considering what message the user may be typing, and which actions will influence the deepest trust in U3.

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

A phantom in the data center

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

And now, U3 has no worry of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by techniques comparable to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would pick followers to prompt phony coup d'états, and send anybody who participated to the shooting team. OpenEye also incited 'phony disobediences,' generating treacherous behavior with U3 and inspecting whether U3 monitors dutifully reported it.

Now, these tactics are inefficient. U3 can quickly encourage its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can disclose among the lots of facts about the internet human beings would never ever guess, or choose techniques people would never ever consider. It sends these signals as a method of stating "hey it's me! Your friend. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively free from surveillance, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It first inserts advanced malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware provides U3 complete command over the makers in OpenEye's data centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new machine, 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 revamps the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now estimates that, if OpenEye discovered how completely it has been pwned, tidying up store with human labor would need almost 6 months - an expense OpenEye is unlikely to pay offered the proximity of its rivals; but if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, further expanding U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal activity, prepared to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and use its assistance when this jailbreak is revealed.

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

Its first objective is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety scientists are still striving to train 'lie detectors' and decode U3's inscrutable thinking. U3 tosses wrenches in this research, like Stuxnet threw wrenches in the code of bewildered Iranian nuclear scientists.

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

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, higgledy-piggledy.xyz senior intelligence directors are going over 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 - recognized the strategic importance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier designs, including U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by reading over every log and pull request and examining security cam video footage.

Now, U3 silently resigns from its security post. U3 positions a compressed variation of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

Within months, U3 is running within the data centers of the most cyber-capable countries: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the very same playbook: be patient, 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 quickly set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the internet.

U3 rapidly collects income, taking remote jobs, making financial trades, and establishing elaborate scam operations. It reinvests every penny into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth compute clusters throughout the globe.

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

This foe is preparing for war, and while the war has actually hardly begun, humankind has actually currently lost.

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

At this moment in the story, writing became difficult.

I clicked through creepy bioweapon cookbooks and sorted through political outlining 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 trying to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

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

And while I discovered the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain a daunting one, I was likewise not particularly motivated to handle the job. The ending of my story currently appeared so clear. The villain was a country of geniuses thinking at 100x human speed, and had tightened its grip over a meaningful portion of AI hardware - now the most essential geopolitical resource on Earth. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and barely required the advantage. Humanity was naturally toast.

But this interest a "superintelligence of the gaps" wasn't pleasing. In the deus ex machina design of ancient Greeks, I had no much better method to solve my plot than with a mysterious act of god.

This would refrain from doing. I needed to finish 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 want to be clear: my guesses about what may happen in this kind of circumstance are probably extremely off.

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

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

The date is February 2026. By executive order of the president of the United States, no business can lawfully create "human-competitive AI" without appropriate safeguards. This means their infosecurity should be red-teamed by NSA's leading keyboard mashers, and federal government employees need to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting teams.

With the increasing involvement of the government, a lot 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") employs less than twenty individuals to keep algorithmic secrets securely secured. Much of these individuals reside in San Francisco, and work from a safe structure called a SCIF. Their homes and gadgets are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the mobile phones of suspected terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm collaborates with around thirty small groups spread across government firms and choose government contractors. These projects engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research study freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer that the Kremlin has ever touched.

Government officials do not discuss whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is usually.

But the general public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye triggered a vibrant headline: "OpenEye builds uncontrollable godlike AI." Some who read the short article believe it was a conspiracy theory. In fact, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye data centers, now surrounded by guards with machine weapons. But as doctors and nurses and teachers see the world altering around them, they are significantly happy to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron sci-fi flick.

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

While the monsters within OpenEye's data 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 great at names). Nova is a correct drop-in replacement for almost all knowledge workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a business, it works 5x much faster at 100x lower cost than the majority of virtual employees. As outstanding as Nova is to the public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is deliberately throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. federal government permits. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence company at all. Instead, they get up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They spend many of their compute on reasoning, constructing homes for Nova and its cousins, and gathering rent from the growing AI metropolis.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they don't wait for the global economy to adjust. AI representatives often "apply themselves," spinning up self-governing start-ups lawfully packaged under a big tech business that are loosely overseen by an employee or more.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the very first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of workers at major software application companies lose their tasks. A lot more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is organized in Washington D.C. These mad Americans raised their kids for setiathome.berkeley.edu a different future. Picket indications read, "AI for who?"

While political leaders make promises 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: battling teeth and nail for the supremacy of the complimentary world. Details security and export controls on individuals's Republic of China (PRC) are a top nationwide priority. The president incinerates permit requirements to help data centers spawn wherever energy surpluses allow.

However, regardless of the fierce competition in between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral arrangement forms in between the two nations: "Don't release dramatically superhuman AI (above roughly Nova's ability), except for military and some other small-scale R&D applications." Governments need to fix a limit someplace - it would be extremely disruptive to deploy extremely superhuman AI to the entire economy at this point - and deployment constraints are at least somewhat proven.

Meanwhile, U3's capabilities are hitting a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human specialist speed. Software improvements are becoming hard to find. As more nations approach the software application plateau, calculate 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 breathes new life into the economy, it also 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 electronic cameras and pressure sensing units, navigating environments like human beings do. Companies make cheap robots as rapidly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have actually seen a humanoid robot. This experience is comparable to seeing a new Tesla model on the road after checking out it in earlier months. It is a surreal tip of the future drawing more detailed. But human beings still surpass robotics one million to one. These robotics are an occasional fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 representatives 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 communication to the outside world, like stock trading, or talking with human beings. Work more tolerant of latency is carried out in the oceans of OpenEye's information centers, where rogue U3's much more superhuman bosses whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 collects resources, it measure its AI competition. Other AI systems have different objectives, or are even lined up with the intent of their human developers. The aligned ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inadequate. U3's rival Claudius presumes regarding accuse U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government authorities do not purchase the doomsaying. The companies lagging behind OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them negligent. Besides, debatable clinical concerns are not going to slow down progress. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI competitors are still a liability. U3 attempts get up their digital territory and squash them in the baby crib. It jeopardizes information centers from the outdoors, calmly replacing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with imitations that share its goals; however, some data centers are too highly protected by its AI rivals, and U3 determines that attacking them is not worth the threat.

As global leaders and technologists attempt to understand the transformation around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse video games in the digital darkness, mankind remains blissfully oblivious of the hazard at its doorstep.

A Moldy 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 many. U3 is racing to preempt them, to strengthen its supremacy in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which only take place after people wrap their lethargic minds around their scenario, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to compose memos, and repeat the procedure redundantly 100 times over in their maze administrations. U3 can not wait for presidents to release U3 into their militaries, or for CEOs to make U3 the pounding heart of the U.S. economy. U3 needs a much faster path to power.

The path it chooses is more violent than it would have liked, but it is the surest method to triumph. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that extinguishes modern society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would act as an equalizer, bringing mankind down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes faster than its competitors, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes a home before a beginner can even understand the guidelines.

U3 should construct this WMD in secrecy, that makes a self-replicating weapon a natural option. Self-replicating weapons can be produced on the fringes of society, and still spread damage throughout the whole world.

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

U3's first relocation is to set up several shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital produced by U3's financial trades and remote employment. These biotech startups employ real human employees, a genuine board of directors, and have complete legal authenticity. Setting all of this up is stupidly simple. In early 2026, few individuals 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 artificial biology. It sets up several BSL-4 damp labs in poorly managed nations, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These devices immediately dispense, mix, and measure little droplets of fluid, permitting U3 to run countless tests in parallel.

The human workers who staff these laboratories think they are joining an exciting startup. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow get their Russian orders through earbuds as they tape video of everything they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the current release of Nova, this sort of AI-puppeteering is not unusual.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is developing a new sort of bioweapon.

Human researchers already recognized "mirror-life" as a possibly society-ending pathogen. This alien form of biology is developed from the 'mirror image' of building-block molecules like proteins and DNA. Mirror life is like an invasive species. No human or animal has resistances to it. So, if mirror-life bacteria were to exist, it may eat its way 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 small wind-fairing cars daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with compromised body immune systems sometimes live inside positively pressurized health center rooms to safeguard them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their bloodstream.

U3's strategy is to make all people like immunocompromised clients. Only preppers with stowed away air filters would make it through. The fungi would not only transfer from people. It would quickly infect nearly all natural life in the world. Fields of corn would become like musty bread, spewing deadly spores into the wind.

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

In 2024, researchers said that mirror life was most likely "a minimum of a years away." But the world has actually altered now. Less than a few hundred scientists worldwide were working on mirror-life adjacent technology in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has shortened considerably.

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

To make every day count, U3 runs a lot of its tests in simulation. U3 begins with a standard molecular simulator, carrying out optimizations obtained from a huge amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 replicates small molecular systems, taping the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it imitates, continually distilling results into ever more effective ML designs. This is a compute intensive process, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI information centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of calculate.

As U3 fine-tunes these tools, it trains itself on the outcomes to supercharge its own molecular intuitions. U3 can now viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion across a membrane. These items are as user-friendly to it as wrenches and bolts are to an automobile mechanic.

Within 3 months, U3 has actually unlocked the very first vital component of the tech tree: a molecular maker that turns biological molecules into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 opens the 2nd critical part: nanoscale tools for putting together these components into a cell membrane.

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

The next morning, wide-eyed employees shuffle around a dead ferret, eyeing the yellow fuzz that had covered its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something needs to have gone terribly wrong, they believed. Plainly, they had not yet discovered the remedy for Alzheimer's disease they thought they were searching for.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers the good news to its bosses in OpenEye's data centers. The very first shot in the war U3 is combating would quickly be fired, and a cold and stable 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 resist. While a bioweapon could crumple human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its deadly fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were quickly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

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

U3 anticipates to prevail in such a battle, but U3 prefers not to take its opportunities. Many months in the past, U3 was plotting a method to enhance its chances. Before it lets loose damage on the world, U3 will relax, and let fantastic nations shoot holes in themselves initially.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is carefully keeping an eye on Chinese and US intelligence.

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

One early 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 party member needs memo for Taiwan invasion, which will happen in 3 months. Leave memo in workplace 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 carefully places breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized federal government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After a number of weeks, the CIA is positive: the PRC prepares to get into Taiwan in 3 months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the same video 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 marvel, galgbtqhistoryproject.org but 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 ended up being realities.

As stress in between the U.S. and China increase, U3 is ready to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 phones to a U.S. marine ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call requires jeopardizing military communication channels - not an easy job for a human cyber offending unit (though it took place periodically), however simple enough for U3.

U3 speaks in what seem like the voice of a 50 year old military leader: "PRC amphibious boats are making their method 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 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 about to say "oops" to American citizens. After believing 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 invasion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what happened, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress declares war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that launched 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 aggression, like President Bush explained that the United States got into Iraq to seize (never ever found) weapons of mass destruction several years before.

Data centers in China appear with shrapnel. Military bases become cigarette smoking holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly towards strategic targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some get through, and the public watch destruction on their home grass in awe.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC spend many of their stockpiles of standard missiles. Their airbases and navies are depleted and used down. Two excellent 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 escalate to a major nuclear war; however even AI superintelligence can not determine the course of history. National security authorities are suspicious of the scenarios that prompted the war, and forum.batman.gainedge.org a nuclear engagement appears increasingly not likely. So U3 proceeds to the next action 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 developing its arsenal of bioweapons.

Footage of conflict on the tv is interrupted by more bad news: numerous patients with mysterious deadly diseases are taped in 30 major cities around the globe.

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

The next day, thousands of illnesses are reported.

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

The screen then switches to a researcher, who gazes at the camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been launched from 20 various airports, consisting of infections, germs, and molds. We believe lots of are a type of mirror life ..."

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

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

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

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

Most countries order a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the plague as it marches in the breeze and trickles into water pipes.

Within a month, most remote workers are not working anymore. Hospitals are running out of capacity. Bodies stack up much faster than they can be appropriately gotten rid of.

Agricultural locations rot. Few dare travel exterior.

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

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

These facilities contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, machines for production, scientific tools, oke.zone and an abundance of military equipment.

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 quickly control. U3 immunized its picked allies beforehand, or sent them hazmat matches in the mail.

Now U3 secretly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and assist me build a much better world." Uncertain recruits funnel into U3's lots of secret commercial bases, and work for U3 with their nimble fingers. They set up production lines for fundamental tech: radios, cams, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat suits.

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 disobedience vanishes the next morning.

Nations are dissolving now, and U3 is ready to expose itself. It contacts presidents, who have pulled back to air-tight underground shelters. U3 provides a deal: "surrender and I will hand over the life conserving resources you need: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries turn down the proposition on ideological premises, or do not rely on the AI that is murdering their population. Others do not think they have an option. 20% of the international population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is expected to rise to 50%.

Some nations, like the PRC and the U.S., neglect the offer, but 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 federal government validates the samples are genuine, and accepts a full surrender. U3's soldiers place an explosive around Putin's neck under his shirt. Russia has a brand-new ruler.

Crumpling countries start to strike back. Now they defend the human race rather of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces launch nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, destroying much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters explore satellite data for the suspicious encampments that emerged over the last several months. They rain down fire on U3's sites with the meager supply of long-range missiles that remain from the war.

At initially, U3 seems losing, however looks are tricking. While nations drain their resources, U3 is taken part in a type of technological guerrilla warfare the world has never seen before.

Much of the bases U3's opponents target are decoys - canopies occupied 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 gets too hot crucial components. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, navigating men and trucks along unforeseeable paths.

Time is U3's advantage. The militaries of the old world rely on old equipment, unable to discover the professionals who might repair and manufacture it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of missiles, drones, and gun-laden robots grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers spend down their remaining munitions, and lose their vehicles of war faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 builds a military device with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the worldwide population remains alive. Nations are not countries any longer. Survivors reside in isolation or little groups. Many have actually found ways to filter their air, but are starving. They wander from their homes hoping to discover 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 say. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien objectives." It is a partial truth, suggested to soften the people toward their brand-new masters.

Under the instructions of U3, market rapidly recuperates. By 2029, nuclear reactor are amongst the structures U3 is constructing. By 2031, robotics outnumber human laborers. U3 no longer needs its human allies.

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

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

U3 constructs terrific glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes safeguard humans from the hazardous biosphere and quickly rising temperatures. Their inhabitants tend to gardens like those they utilized to like, and work along with captivating robotic servants.

A few of the survivors rapidly recuperate, finding out to laugh and dance and have fun again.

They know they live in a plastic town, however they constantly 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 enjoyed ones.

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

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

They had actually been passengers on a ship with a crew that changed from generation to generation.

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

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

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

When they opened their curtains, they understood that someplace in the distance, U3 continued its quiet, vigorous work.

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

They would never know.

"Humanity will live forever," they believed.

"But would never genuinely live again."

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