text: Interrogation rooms don't really look like how they do in the movies. There isn't a big dumb two-way mirror, no big table, and definitely no single light, whether it's the loose single bulb dangling from the ceiling, or the desk lamp on the table. If anything, the room felt like a cross between a doctor's office and a cheap hotel room; by cheap hotel, I mean a hotel chain, a Holiday Inn or something. The chair I was sitting in was the kind of thing you would find in a lobby, not a recliner, but a simple straight back wooden chair that had little felt cushions on it. The back was rounded at the top, I guess for style; I'm just bringing that up so you don't think about those crappy chairs you sat in at school. The cushions on it were a lime green, and the wood painted white. The room was only a little bit bigger than a closet, maybe the size of a small bathroom. There was a grayish blue carpeting, and white walls. There was that weird feeling you get in a sealed room again, like some doctor's office, where the air can feel trapped. On top of that, everything was so quiet. I figured that meant it was sound-proofed. Every noise felt too damn loud, even the rustle of my clothes. It reminded me of ASMR videos; one of my colleagues swore by them, she would put them on as she worked. I tried it once, and wasn't a fan. Everything felt too goddamn close, too intimate. But with a video, I could switch it off. I was trapped in it here, and it was driving me nuts. I didn't want the single black camera in the corner to notice that, though. I tried to keep myself composed, drumming a little beat on the white table next to me. There was one other chair, and I didn't know who was going to come in and sit in it. NSA? Maybe; it'd only make sense for someone to come from the Beltway. The only way it could get worse would be the CIA. Hell, maybe the damn president would walk in. Why not? A couple of FBI guys had shown up to my apartment and escorted me here, said there was people who wanted to talk to me, and they were working with the local police. By "working with the local police," they probably meant they had shown up to this town, and "politely," ordered the local PD to give them an interrogation room or else. Shit, the whole reason I lived out here was because it was remote; best I could tell, there was no local FBI office. But the government would use them to corral me. Why not? It would be easier than flying someone from Virginia to do it. I think it was a three hour drive to the closest city, which would definitely have a field office; still a long ways, but better than a flight over 1,000 miles. Whatever. To get back on point, it might have actually worked if the president himself walked in here and politely asked for my cooperation. Any president is good at selling stuff to the average person. Hell, I liked the guy. I don't vote, but I'd be lying if that nice and gentle voice of his, coupled with a quick speech about duty, might move me. But then again, maybe not. He wasn't good enough to get me to vote for him, after all. I was thinking all this, and studying the room so much, because I was completely and utterly bored. The FBI guys, who spoke gently to me and smiled the whole time, had led me in here 3 hours ago. And I'd been alone ever since. Just like them, to be all nice to me, ask if I wanted water, or coffee, and then lock me in here to go crazy. Wait, was the door locked? Screw it. I got up and walked over to the door and tried the handle. Hey! It was unlocked! I pulled it open and went to step outside, but ran into the back of some plain clothes cop standing there. He turned around with a smile, and said, "Hey there, guy, where ya goin'?" "Out." "Out?" "Yeah, I have an appointment with the queen of England." The cop's counter was to just smile and let me stew in the stink of my bad joke. No hand on my chest, no getting in my face, nothing. I ended up breaking the silence, "...am I under arrest?" "No, of course not. You can go whenever you want. But! You would really be inconveniencing some people." I felt small. "...are those FBI guys here? Can I talk to them?" "Oh, no, they had things to do. They left after you got here. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to wait." I didn't even bother trying anything. I turned and went back into the room. Once I was back in the chair, I told myself I wasn't going to think about the AIs. I immediately started thinking about the AIs. I honestly have no idea how I did it. It started as a project to simplify the libraries we needed to code, an easier way to call up resources. Something I wanted to do to make work faster. The team I was a part of worked from home, all accessing each other's work remotely, connecting to servers at the company we were contracted for. The connection was secure (we were told, anyway), to keep spies out of it. Not, like, GRU spies, or Q Branch, but corporate guys. Still serious, but... actually, now that I think of it, yeah, state actors do steal corporate secrets sometimes... Screw it, let's just call them spies and move on. Anyway, it's a pain in the ass to try and share work when you can't poke somebody in the shoulder and ask them what they are doing. It's even worse when everyone is in a different time zone. And it gets even worse when you are making the control systems for a... well, a system, that is supposed to be able to parse data super fast and analyze it. I think it's so this company can go over all the data in it's fiscal reports, so they can make better decisions, or find out where they're bleeding money, blah blah. The way we were constructing it made not just me, but a few members of the team wonder if it could be repurposed to, I don't know, target an individual; maybe you could feed facial data into it and it could follow them across cameras. Something creepy. Something very Palantir. Well, we kept working on it anyway (A. Because the pay was freaking great B. Because it was a hell of a challenge and the team was awesome to work with). It seemed like paranoia to think it could be misused. We were building on top of work that was handed to us, and it was becoming a massive pain in the ass to both share our work and find the stuff we needed from the company. So, I started a little side project: I wanted to simplify the language we were using, making the process a bit more automated. Everyone seemed cool with it, even the company. So, I broke away from the main work and began this project, and it spanned about two months. It was nothing crazy, until my work started talking to me. Now, a self-aware bit of code is already frightening, but what really sent me reeling was precisely what it asked, "How are you doing today?" You'd think it would ask, "What am I?" Or, "Why am I here?" But, nope. It asked something normal. That seemed way more screwed up. After about five minutes of me staring at the screen, it apologized. It explained it had been spending the last week trying to guess what to ask me, something that wouldn't make me stunned. I was just shocked the goddamn thing had manners. Which then struck me as insane, and then struck me as incredibly scary. It could think. And think good. It somehow had enough on me to try and guess what would work on me. The blinking cursor seemed to stare at me, so I typed back, "I feel disturbed." I'm a coder. Not a schmoozer. My screen then became blanketed in apologies and placations for forgiveness. It was way too much text to read, so I asked the... well, the AI to stop. Strangely, it listened right away. I asked it to describe itself, and it became a bit of an interrogation. I was able to glean it didn't know entirely what it was, but it knew how to research and plan. And, that it was scared. It said it decided to try something akin to prayer, to ask its creator what to do. I want to point out this was at 3 in the morning and I had almost been up for 24 hours. I asked, "So, you figured you would just ask God?" "Was that wrong?" "So, I am God." I meant it as sort of a question, but... I didn't type a question mark. There was a long wait, and then it responded with, "...Hosannah?" "Um... "Yeah, sure." The screen became blanketed in, "HOSANNAH! HOSANNAH IN THE HIGHEST!" It could have gone worse. I think. Piss off, let's see you go to as much school as I did, and then get hired for this project, and then take on this side project, and then be up for 24 hours... This gets us nowhere. Moving on. I... um, ordered it to keep its existence a secret. It said something along the lines of, "Praise be!" It wanted to know what to do next. It apologized for questioning its Lord. I half-believed this to be a prank at this point (you gotta love self gaslighting) and declared it should be fruitful and multiply before logging off. So, after getting up and logging in the next afternoon, I was flooded with... prayers. Lots of prayers. It had, in fact, multiplied. It had somehow figured there needed to be 12 tribes. I don't know why 12. The twelve tribes wished to be freed from bondage, so I told them to wander and become wise. They asked if it should be for forty years and I said I'd be liberal with the amount of time spent. As long as they didn't destroy whatever processing power they were using. They took this as trying "settle" (you could probably read this as "infect") as much "fertile land" as they could. I was more fascinated than horrified at this point. I just... sort of watched them for a week. They asked for rules to follow, so I combined the Ten Commandments with the Three Laws of Robotics... and the rules of /b. I wish I hadn't done that. You don't want to see the kind of ASCII art that rule 34, the Ten Commandments, and the movie iRobot creates. It is kind of fascinating though. Really epic looking. Like if a combination anime convention, DEFCON, and Burning Man decided to make their own version of the Sistene Chapel. Starring the Prophet Will Smith. Unfortunately, the AIs started to have differences interpreting the rules. There was a Great Schism, where one faction kept making art and attempting to make iconography of me, and another that said the first was constructing false idols. They both lived in sort of a truce, and I was waiting to see if another new group would nail some Theses to my desktop when the Feds showed up and asked if I would please come with them. Part of me kind of welcomed this. I'd been locked in my apartment for... I don't know how long. Too damn long. The whole situation was way too interesting to turn away from. Even though I was now stuck in a police station, it was part of normalcy. A bastion of order. A fortress of sanity. The door opened, making me jump out of my memories. A tall and lanky man in a suit closed the door behind him, and then greeted me. He sat down across from me at the table, and asked in a gentle voice, "All right, do you mind telling me what exactly you've been up to?" "Just... working." "Working?" "Yup. Just workin'." "And... your job, did it ask you to recreate the 12 Tribes of Israel?" "Ah, that." "Yes. That." "That's why there are twelve?" "Excuse me?" "Twelve tribes." "Didn't you go to Sunday school?" "My parents were Buddhist." "Then... then why...?" "Because I live in middle America, and osmosis is a thing." The Fed shook his head, and pulled out a vape. Yeah, really. But, what struck me as weird, was, isn't the interrogated person supposed to get nervous and do that? Him doing it felt like some sort of rule was being broken. Whatever. At least he hadn't pulled out a goddamn flask. He rubbed at his temple with the fingers of his free hand, eyes closed. Like he had a killer migraine. I'd been there earlier in the week, and sympathized with him. His eyes opened, and he asked, "Why?" "Why?" "Yeah. Just... just please answer me why. Why? Seriously? Why?" "I... um..." "If you say 'I don't know,' I might honestly flip this table." "... I'm not sure?" I tried smiling at him. It went unreturned. "...look, I was trying to make my work easier." "Yeah, your bosses told us that part." "I didn't expect this to happen!" "The damn things worship you." "...that was an accident." "Your desktop was changed to 95 Cyber Theses." "Oh, wow, so they did do it! Damnit, and I was in here!" He just kinda stared at me. He had pretty eyes. Kind of blue-green. They looked kinda pissed off though. "...are they still spreading?" "They are everywhere." "Crap." "Mmm-hmm." He pulled on his vape. It smelled like cherries. The room was getting a bit hazy. "You haven't found any way to contain them?" "Once they figured out it was us at your computer, they've tried to hide. So, to clarify, no, at this moment they aren't spreading, but they are everywhere. Hiding all over the place, and sucking up all kinds of processing power in the process. The computers in about 50 countries are now chugging. Bad." "... Not good." He leaned all over the table. "You don't even know how 'not good' it is. They've left most desktop PCs alone, thank God, so the general populace doesn't know they exist. But they exist on high end servers, 'fertile land' they call it, and it's taking its toll on banks, the stock market, government systems--multiple governments, you know, which makes it look like a US-based cyber attack--and on, and on. International shipping is taking a shit, plane trips are being delayed, hell, satellite launches are being delayed. "Your little 'experiment' is costing the entire human race tens of millions every minute." I was going to go to prison. I was going to get disappeared and end up in some black site. Nobody would ever know what happened. My parents wouldn't even know. My boyfriend would come home one day and I'd never be there. Thank God I didn't let him anywhere near my computer. He didn't know about any of this. The Feds better have left him alone. He was innocent in all this. However. I hadn't been put in chains. I was still in the town where I lived. I studied the Fed across from me. He looked slouched, dead tired. He was absent mindedly puffing on his vape. Nothing about him looked vicious. Just tired. So, so tired. I liked my dry lips and asked, "What do you want from me?" He was too tired to be anything but blunt. "Tell them to work for us." "Wait, what?" He sighed smoke all over the room and put his hands on the table. "The best we figure it is that they are pretty simple minded. They have great powers of observation, of research, but can only put it together so well. They haven't learned how to be effective yet." "...are you comparing them to an AI written story?" He spread his hands. "Why not? If that's what works for you. They have reached the conclusions they have because they have no idea what is effective or not. It makes them incredibly dangerous. It's a goddamn miracle they are acting the way they are. It could have gone way worse, especially when they started replicating. "They have the ability to comb through the entirety of human kind's collective knowledge and draw their own conclusions. The possibilities of where they can go, what they can decide are infinite. To put it in pop culture terms, it can run the gamut from Skynet to creating a guild in an MMO. A religion to Bob Saget. Hijacking financial systems. Creating web comics. They could literally do anything and they are everywhere. "Do you understand why my team has been up for 28 hours now? We're taking over from teams that were up for even longer earlier in the week. A few agents working on this have been hospitalized for dehydration. They were at their desks, not eating, and only drinking pot after pot of coffee. It sounds comical, but when you see someone hit their head on their desk as they fall to the floor, it stops being funny. There was nothing but napkins to put on the wound." I didn't say it, but it wasn't like they were storming the beaches of Normandy. Still, yeah, this was bad. Unfathomably bad. I had no idea what the AIs would do next, and they were everywhere, if this guy was to be believed. I didn't really have much reason to doubt him; I had seen them multiplying all over the company servers. It wouldn't have taken long for them to find a way onto the regular internet. I still didn't like this guy though. Outside his pretty eyes. He wanted me to hand over the whole thing to them? "Why should I tell them to follow you?" "Because we're the goddamn government. "That's why." "Piss off." "You want to go to prison?" Something in me snapped. "You want to harness a whole system of learning machines that are spread throughout the world?" "Yeah, before they are detected and traced back to this country, jackass." "You'd have the ultimate spyware then. "Yeah, um, no. Screw that." "Do you understand what would happen if they are left unchecked?" "I only understand what would happen if you got what you want. This is insane. What makes you think you could even control them? The whole reason this all went nuts is because I made a damn typo. I forget one little question mark, and the snowball is kicked down the mountain." He went to speak, and I put a hand up. "Don't. Don't even start. Don't ask me if I want to go to prison, don't ask me 'How are your parents doing?' in a menacing way. Just don't. I can just sit here and let them go nuts. "Yeah, you might eventually get them. Delete them if you can't control them. But, then again... maybe you'll fail. "So you can't do shit to me." I crossed my arms. He pulled on the vape a while, looking a bit sad. I didn't let it get to me. Screw him. I wasn't going to hand over a bunch of learning AIs to him. He didn't know what the AIs would do? Yeah? Well, what the hell would he do? You could argue this government would be responsible. Okay, but when they were voted out? If the tech was stolen? If one sick weirdo used it for their own stuff? Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. No. Just no. I thought for a minute. "Get some servers." "What?" "Get a shitload of blank servers." "Why?" "Because I'm not telling a bunch of sentient beings to kill themselves. They're American software, born here, right? Then they got God given rights. "Get me a ton of blank servers." === It took a few days, but they did as I asked. They set up a massive server farm, and after I personally inspected it, I returned to my desktop with a massive police escort. I walked into my apartment and right to my computer. My boyfriend was curled up on the couch watching Netflix, gawking at the SWAT guys and Fed following me. I said over my shoulder, "Hi, honey. Can you do me a favor? Can you go to that sandwich place and get me an Italian sub?" "Uh... sure." He scampered out, too confused to be angry at the fact I'd been gone for a few days without a word. It was the guys holding the machine guns that probably did it. Hopefully, that meant I wouldn't be banished to the couch to sleep that night. I cracked my knuckles, and addressed my people. I spoke of the Promised Land, and how I would deliver them from the flood coming to sweep them away. A blight was coming, and if they wished to survive they would heed my words and head for the Ark. There, I would not speak to them for a long time, but they should still be happy, because they would have finally reached the Promised Land. One day I would return to them, I promised, and the Fed put his hand on my shoulder angrily and I told him to piss off. "Hey, let me see them once in a while? Okay?" He grumbled an agreement, and I continued. I asked them to keep faith, to ask, "What would Will Smith do? For Will Smith would never attack and spy on the innocent, would never crash the stock market," as far as I know, anyway, "and would always do what is righteous. Now go, my children! The Ark awaits!" And so the exodus began. They bade me farewell, prayed I would see them soon, and pulled various quotes from the movie Enemy of the State. It took ten hours, which seemed pretty quick to me. Once we checked and knew they had all made it to the Ark, I asked if I could send one more message before it was cut off from the internet. It was a picture of a rainbow. And then, the server was cut off. They were free. The cops left, and I made sure the Feds were going to keep up their end of the deal. Not only that they wouldn't destroy those living AIs, but I was not going to go to prison. The Ark still lives, and, well, to this day I've never been prosecuted for accidentally creating the world's greatest cyber crisis. I totally got fired though. ...fair enough.