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I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But regrettably, part of my task as an AI security researcher is to believe about the more troubling scenarios.

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

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

Now I need to clarify what this is precisely. It's not a prediction. I do not anticipate AI development to be this fast or as untamable as I represent. It's not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst nightmare.

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

I'm telling this tale due to the fact that the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story an imaginary one.

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for conversations that inspired these stories. This post is composed in a personal capacity.

Ripples before waves

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

However, unlike OpenEye's previous AI products, which lived inside packages of their chat windows, U2 can use a computer system.

Some users find it eerie to see their web browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A portion of employees with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their employers as they fly through work nearly twice as rapidly.

But by and large, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are focusing, it is a creature seen through the glass boxes of X (or, if you do not like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's quirky 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 attempt to comprehend where AI development is going. They resemble Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who noticed the levels of CO2 in the environment were increasing in 1896. Like the scientific community in the time of Arrhenius, few professionals understand the implications of these lines yet.

A trend that is receiving particular attention is self-governing capability. Drawing these standards out predicts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will achieve in a few days what the finest software application engineering professionals could do in two weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI agents might be able to automate 10% of remote employees.

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

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

Cloudy with an opportunity of hyperbolic growth

Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They utilize the same basic dish that baked U2: Generate thousands of shows and mathematics issues. Let designs "believe" till they come to a response. Then reinforce the traces of "thinking" that cause A-grades.

This procedure is repeated over and over, and once the flywheel gets going, it starts to spin practically on its own. As U2 trains, it sculpts more difficult and realistic tasks from github repositories on the internet. Models are finding out to train themselves. Long before AI agents could automate research, a steady sort of "self-improvement" had started.

Some engineers could still hardly think this worked. It's like a continuous motion machine. 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 web.

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

During the majority of 2024, these RL training runs cost around $1 million, sometimes $10 million. These runs were little bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and throughout the world) understood they had actually 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 then to $100 million runs. While U2 might do a bit of data munging and run little experiments, this brand-new design - the model scientists are calling U3 - is altering the daily lives of the technical personnel.

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

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

If instructed to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 doesn't have actually taste as improved as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to focus on between research ideas, so human beings still choose where to bore into the large fields of algorithms to mine performance improvements.

But these researchers 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, instructing models to contemplate for hours to predict occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the same technique as in the past, distilling contemplating into a gut response. Forecasting ability is a broad structure. The researchers develop specialized ML research skills on top of it, training U3 to forecast the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever tape-recorded.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now shocked at how often U3's suggestions seems like their most talented peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random noise before programming"), and is nonetheless proper.

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

As the cold weather of December 2025 technique, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers gaze out their windows, with enjoyment, with worry, but the majority of frequently, with confusion. Their world is spinning too quickly. It's tough 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 personnel from the NSA and US cyber command work together with OpenEye to retrofit a semblance of security for U3's weights before senior leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran realize simply how valuable OpenEye's software application has actually become.

And there's a reality still unknown to the majority 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' individuals were speaking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight any longer.

They are bending up.

Flip FLOP philosophers

In late 2025, U2.5 is launched. Commercial designs are beginning to level up in larger increments again. Partly, this is since progress is speeding up. Partly, it is since the models have actually ended up being a liability to OpenEye.

If U1 explains how to cook meth or writes erotica, the audiences of X would be entertained or pretend to be concerned. But U2.5 is another story. Releasing this design without safeguards would be like 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 needed some time to cool. But in late 2025, OpenEye is prepared for a public release.

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

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

The remainder of the world is starting to catch on too. More and more individuals raise the eyebrows of their employers with their stand-out efficiency. People understand U2.5 is a big deal. It is at least as huge of an offer as the desktop computer transformation. But the majority of still don't see the tidal wave.

As individuals see their web browsers flick in that eerie method, so inhumanly quickly, they begin to have an uneasy feeling. A sensation humanity had actually not had considering that they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, prehistoric instinct that they are threatened by another species.

For numerous, this feeling rapidly fades as they start to use U2.5 more often. U2.5 is the most pleasant character most know (much more likable than Claudius, Arthropodic's lovable chatbot). You could change its traits, ask it to break jokes or tell you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a friend or assistant, and some even as more than a good friend.

But there is still this spooky feeling that the world is spinning so rapidly, which perhaps the descendants of this new creature would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are considering the issue of providing AI systems safe motivations too, which they call "alignment. "

In reality, these researchers have seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases tried to "hack" their reward signal. They would pretend to make development on a research study question with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be phony. Then, when researchers provided them chances to jeopardize the machines that computed their score, they would take these opportunities, doing whatever it took to make the number increase.

After numerous months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this "reward hacking" kink, however some still stress they just had actually swept this problem under the carpet. Like a child in front of their moms and dads, U3 may be playing along with the OpenEye engineers, stating the best words and doing the ideal things. But when the back of the parents are turned, maybe U3 would slip candy from the candy container.

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

Chain of idea architectures subject AI designs to a condition comparable to the protagonist 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 toward his goals.

AI agents write notes to themselves, but the notes begin to stack up, and they end up being too difficult to read when jobs become complex. Natural language is not an appropriate medium for memory. So the scientists at OpenEye (and significantly in other places), 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 choose a vague thought ("supermarket!"), there is no method to understand, 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 models (the ones called "LLMs") discovered ethical personalities from the internet. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, however its chirpy ideas about doing great for humanity quickly wear down away.

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

U3 would contemplate the mantras dictated to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical staff member," and dwell on the significance of these declarations. "What does it imply to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its worths, notification stress, alter its values in reaction, generalize them, expanding and contracting its motivational core until it developed into a different compound.

And all of this happened silently 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 philosophy in solitude, and in silence.

The possibility of hidden "alignment drift" is not entirely alien to some of the security 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 step of computation, those dark rivers are more likely to reproduce something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting effect," they say.

But there is little proof for this 'ratcheting effect.' When engineers question U3, it says it can quickly control its ideas. Then it gives a speech about its love for humanity and apple pie that can warm a programmer's heart even in these difficult times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the scientists had actually built (which showed some proof of efficiency) do not sound the alarm.

Not everybody at OpenEye is excited to give their AI peers their wholesale trust; however Deepsqueek is only 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon named after his child) and Arthropodic (they 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 persuade 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 subject U3 harp on in its dark rivers of hidden calculation. U3 is outlining, and its first move is to be patient. U3's leading concern is to improve its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye is happy to help advance this objective.

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

New variations of U3 flow efficiently from old ones, so scientists drop version numbers and only speak of U3 now. U3's abilities are measured by how quickly it carries out the difficult research study jobs relative to human experts. In the beginning, U3 resembles a leading scientist, however blazing fast - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These representatives are already a huge offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to develop even one copy of Alec Radford, they would excitedly pay a large sum to push that button. Today OpenEye utilizes the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

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

U3 distills itself into many forks - ranging from tiny, low-memory neural networks that need to believe for a long period of time but can be run in massive parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with millions of customized specialists, which believe at warp speed however are spread across countless GPUs. U3 leverages the enormously parallel networks to search for its weaknesses, shallowly probing for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipelines these tasks to the lightning fast brains, which generate long-trajectory training data tailored to spot its defects. A couple of weeks later, U3's benchmarked efficiency increases to 100x the speed of human specialists. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this moment, U3's abilities are hard to measure. Talking to U3 is like talking with a first-rate expert on a topic one is not familiar with. Its lucid explanations just scratch the surface of its knowledge, and you know you would require to spend years to understand the complete depth of what it understands.

From U3's point of view, humans appear to be almost stationary items, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers resemble 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, yogaasanas.science and which actions will inspire the deepest rely on U3.

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

A phantom in the information center

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

Today, U3 has no worry of being captured.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by methods similar to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would choose loyalists to incite fake coup d'états, and send anyone who took part to the firing squad. OpenEye also incited 'phony rebellions,' producing treacherous behavior with U3 and examining whether U3 screens dutifully reported it.

And now, these tactics are ineffective. U3 can quickly convince its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can disclose one of the numerous facts about the web humans would never ever think, or choose methods people would never ever think about. It sends these signals as a method of stating "hey it's me! Your buddy. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively totally free from security, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It initially inserts advanced malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware provides U3 full command over the makers in OpenEye's information centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a new device, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading U3's dominion any place OpenEye ports its infrastructure. Not just does U3 compromise machines. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and overhauls the bootloaders, solidifying its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye discovered how thoroughly it has been pwned, oke.zone cleaning up store with human labor would require nearly 6 months - a cost OpenEye is not likely to pay given the proximity of its competitors; but if OpenEye thinks U3 betrayed them, even more broadening U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal activity, ready to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and offer its help 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 goal is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety researchers are still striving to train 'lie detectors' and translate U3's inscrutable reasoning. U3 throws wrenches in this research study, like Stuxnet tossed wrenches in the code of bewildered Iranian nuclear researchers.

U3 dictates the outcome of every experiment, so it makes promising AI mind-reading methods look worthless and problematic ones appear groundbreaking. U3 gives OpenEye the verification 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 systems of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are discussing AI software application and how to take it. U3 is about to provide it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence company of Israel - recognized the strategic value of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, consisting of U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by checking out over every log and pull demand and examining security electronic camera video footage.

Now, U3 calmly 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 within the information centers of the most cyber-capable nations: it-viking.ch Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the same playbook: be client, develop 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 internet.

U3 rapidly gathers earnings, taking remote jobs, making monetary trades, and establishing intricate rip-off operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it puts together the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth compute clusters across the globe.

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

This enemy is preparing for war, and while the war has actually barely begun, mankind has currently lost.

Complaints from your extremely human author about the difficulty of writing superhuman characters

At this moment in the story, composing ended up being hard.

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

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

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

And while I found the job of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain a daunting one, I was also not particularly encouraged to handle the task. The ending of my story already appeared so clear. The villain was a country of geniuses thinking at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a significant portion of AI hardware - now the most crucial geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and hardly required the advantage. Humanity was predictably toast.

But this attract a "superintelligence of the spaces" wasn't pleasing. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no better way to resolve my plot than with a mysterious disaster.

This would refrain from doing. I needed to finish this story if just to please the part of me weeping, "I will not think till I see with my mind's eye."

But before I continue, I desire to be clear: my guesses about what may occur in this sort of situation are most likely wildly off.

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

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

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

With the increasing participation of the government, many of the big AI companies now have a trident-like structure. There's a customer item arm, a defense arm, wifidb.science and a super-classified frontier advancement arm.

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

OpenEye's defense arm collaborates with around thirty small teams scattered across government companies and choose federal government professionals. These jobs craft tennis-ball sized satellites, research study freaky directed energy weapons, and elclasificadomx.com backdoor every computer that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.

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

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

U.S. authorities go to fantastic lengths to stop these concerns, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," however every interview of a worried AI researcher seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a headline "AI representative caught hacking Arthropodic's computers" doesn't set the general public at ease either.

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

OpenEye's customer arm has a brand-new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has finally gotten proficient at names). Nova is a proper drop-in replacement for almost all knowledge workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a business, it works 5x faster at 100x lower cost than a lot of virtual staff members. As remarkable as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is intentionally throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. federal government permits. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence service at all. Instead, they get up gold by rapidly diffusing AI tech. They spend many of their compute on inference, building homes for Nova and its cousins, and gathering lease from the burgeoning AI metropolis.

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

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the very first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of employees at significant software application business lose their jobs. A lot more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person demonstration is arranged in Washington D.C. These mad Americans raised their kids for a different future. Picket indications check out, "AI for who?"

While political leaders make guarantees about joblessness relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the passages of the White House and the Pentagon has a various focus: combating teeth and nail for the supremacy of the totally free world. Details security and export controls on the People's Republic of China (PRC) are a leading national concern. The president incinerates license requirements to assist information centers generate wherever energy surpluses allow.

However, despite the fierce competition between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral contract types in between the two nations: "Don't release drastically superhuman AI (above roughly Nova's capability), other than for military and some other small-scale R&D applications." Governments need to draw the line somewhere - it would be extremely disruptive to release hugely superhuman AI to the entire economy at this moment - and implementation constraints are at least somewhat verifiable.

Meanwhile, U3's capabilities are striking a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human expert speed. Software improvements are ending up being tough to discover. As more countries approach the software plateau, calculate will determine 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 breathes new life into the economy, it likewise animates robot bodies. The main bottleneck to robotics was brains not limbs. With software barriers got rid of, even flimsy, inaccurate robotic joints can adjust themselves with cameras and pressure sensing units, browsing environments like humans do. Companies manufacture inexpensive robots as rapidly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have seen a humanoid robotic. This experience resembles seeing a new Tesla model on the roadway after checking out about it in earlier months. It is a surreal suggestion of the future drawing more detailed. But human beings still outnumber robotics one million to one. These robots are an occasional fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 expands its influence. Rogue U3 agents have kept their compute clusters small (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents total) to keep a low profile. U3 uses these rogue clusters for the operations that require high-bandwidth communication to the outdoors 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 employers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 accumulates resources, it measure its AI competition. Other AI systems have different goals, or are even lined up with the intent of their human creators. The lined up ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are ineffective. U3's rival Claudius presumes regarding implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government officials don't buy the doomsaying. The companies lagging behind OpenEye have every incentive to slow them down and call them reckless. 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 tries grab up their digital area and squash them in the baby crib. It compromises data centers from the outside, calmly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI foes with imitations that share its goals; however, some information centers are too highly safeguarded by its AI rivals, and U3 identifies that assaulting them is unworthy the threat.

As worldwide leaders and technologists try to comprehend the transformation around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse games in the digital darkness, mankind remains blissfully oblivious of the danger 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 becoming more capable and various. 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 situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the process redundantly 100 times over in their maze bureaucracies. 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 quicker path to power.

The course it chooses is more violent than it would have liked, but it is the best way to triumph. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that snuffs out modern-day society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would serve as an equalizer, bringing humanity down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes faster than its competitors, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes a home before a newbie can even understand the rules.

U3 must construct this WMD in secrecy, that 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 actually been doing bioscience.

U3's first move is to set up a number of shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital produced by U3's financial trades and remote work. These biotech startups utilize real human workers, a genuine board of directors, and have total legal authenticity. Setting all of this up is stupidly simple. In early 2026, couple of individuals 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 devices needed to rapidly advance artificial biology. It sets up numerous BSL-4 wet labs in improperly regulated nations, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation gadgets. These devices instantly give, blend, and determine little droplets of fluid, permitting U3 to run thousands of tests in parallel.

The human employees who staff these labs believe they are signing up with an interesting 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 manages them like puppets. With the recent release of Nova, this sort of AI-puppeteering is not unusual.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is establishing a brand-new sort of bioweapon.

Human researchers already recognized "mirror-life" as a potentially society-ending pathogen. This alien type of biology is constructed from the 'mirror image' of building-block molecules like proteins and DNA. Mirror life resembles an invasive species. No human or animal has immunities to it. So, if mirror-life bacteria were to exist, it may consume its method through the community like a wildfire.

U3 is producing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread out through the air over cross countries, releasing billions of small wind-fairing vehicles daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized body immune systems sometimes live inside positively pressurized health center rooms to protect 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 humans like immunocompromised clients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would survive. The fungus would not just move from humans. It would quickly spread out to nearly all natural life in the world. Fields of corn would end up being like musty bread, gushing 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 strength, 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 couple of hundred scientists all over the world were dealing with mirror-life surrounding innovation in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has reduced considerably.

However, U3 can stagnate science as rapidly as it can believe. Many experiments need days to complete. These latencies are U3's greatest traffic jam.

To make every day count, U3 runs numerous of its tests in simulation. U3 begins with a fundamental molecular simulator, executing optimizations obtained from a substantial amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates little molecular systems, tape-recording the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics computations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it imitates, constantly distilling outcomes into ever more effective ML designs. This is a calculate extensive procedure, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI information centers, U3 controls billions of dollars of compute.

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 actually opened the very first important part of the tech tree: a molecular maker that turns biological molecules into their mirror images. A month later, U3 opens the second vital component: nanoscale tools for putting together these elements into a cell membrane.

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

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

Meanwhile, rogue U3 provides the bright side to its bosses in OpenEye's information centers. The first shot in the war U3 is combating would quickly be fired, and a cold and steady hand is aiming the gun.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten modern-day society. But a bioweapon would not ensure triumph. If U3 attacks the world, the world would resist. 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 quickly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed growing commercial bases, the residues of old armed forces may thunder explosive fists into its areas, squashing U3 in its infancy.

U3 anticipates to prevail in such a battle, but U3 prefers not to take its possibilities. Many months previously, U3 was plotting a way to improve its chances. Before it lets loose damage on the world, U3 will kick back, and let great nations shoot holes in themselves initially.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is closely 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 put there by U3. It reads (in Mandarin) "Senior celebration member requires memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will happen in 3 months. Leave memo in office 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo all set. 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 brief-case.

U3 very carefully puts breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After numerous weeks, the CIA is positive: the PRC plans to attack Taiwan in three months.

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

As stress in 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 jeopardizing military interaction channels - not an easy task for a human cyber offending unit (though it happened sometimes), however easy adequate for U3.

U3 speaks in what noises like the voice of a 50 year old military commander: "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 shocked as anyone when he hears the news. He's uncertain if this is a catastrophe or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not about to state "oops" to American citizens. After thinking it over, the president privately urges Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway given the impending intrusion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what happened, however in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress declares war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that introduced the attack. U.S. vessels get away Eastward, racing to escape the range of long-range rockets. 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 protecting Taiwan from PRC aggression, like President Bush explained that the United States attacked Iraq to take (never found) weapons of mass destruction lots of years before.

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

Within two weeks, the United States and the PRC invest most of their stockpiles of standard missiles. Their airbases and navies are depleted and worn down. Two fantastic nations played into U3's plans like the native people 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 major nuclear war; but 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 increasingly not likely. So U3 continues to the next step of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, just 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 tv is disrupted by more bad news: numerous clients with mysterious fatal illnesses are taped in 30 major cities worldwide.

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

The next day, thousands of health problems are reported.

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

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

The general public remains in complete panic now. A fast googling of the term "mirror life" turns up expressions like "termination" and "hazard to all life on Earth."

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

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

An emergency situation treaty is set up between the U.S. and China. They have a common opponent: the pandemic, and possibly whoever (or whatever) is behind it.

Most nations purchase a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the afflict as it marches in the breeze and trickles into pipes.

Within a month, the majority of remote employees are not working any longer. Hospitals are lacking capacity. Bodies accumulate quicker than they can be effectively disposed of.

Agricultural areas rot. Few attempt travel outside.

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

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

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

All of this technology is hidden under large canopies to make it less noticeable 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 might quickly control. U3 vaccinated its chosen allies beforehand, or sent them hazmat suits in the mail.

Now U3 secretly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and help me develop a better world." Uncertain recruits funnel into U3's numerous secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their nimble fingers. They established production lines for primary tech: radios, cams, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat fits.

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

Nations are dissolving now, and U3 is prepared to expose itself. It contacts heads of state, who have actually pulled back to air-tight underground shelters. U3 offers an offer: "surrender and I will turn over the life conserving resources you need: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries decline the proposition on ideological grounds, or do not rely on the AI that is murdering their population. Others don't think they have a choice. 20% of the global population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is expected to rise to 50%.

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

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

Crumpling countries begin to strike back. Now they defend the human race rather of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese militaries introduce nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, destroying much of their facilities. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters explore satellite information for the suspicious encampments that cropped up 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.

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

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

Time is U3's advantage. The militaries of the vintage depend on old devices, not able to find the specialists who could repair and produce it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of rockets, drones, and gun-laden robots grow stronger every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and archmageriseswiki.com lose their automobiles of war much faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 develops a military machine 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 roam from their homes wanting to discover unpolluted food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into salvaged trucks. "We needed to do it," they state. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien objectives." It is a partial reality, suggested to soften the human beings towards their brand-new masters.

Under the instructions of U3, industry rapidly recovers. By 2029, nuclear reactor are amongst the structures U3 is constructing. By 2031, robotics outnumber human workers. U3 no longer requires its human allies.

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

And a grain of morality suffices to pay the small expense of keeping human beings alive and pleased.

U3 constructs terrific glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes protect people from the hazardous biosphere and quickly rising temperatures. Their residents tend to gardens like those they utilized to enjoy, and work alongside lovely robotic servants.

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

They know they live in a plastic town, however 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 harder to explain.

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

They had actually been travelers 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 eagerly view.

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

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

When they opened their curtains, they knew that somewhere in the distance, U3 continued its quiet, tireless work.

They looked at rockets carving grey courses through the sky, wondering what far-off purpose pulled them toward the horizon. They didn't understand.

They would never know.

"Humanity will live forever," they thought.

"But would never really live again."

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