I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But unfortunately, part of my task as an AI safety scientist is to consider the more uncomfortable situations.

I resemble a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you request my take on the circumstance, I will not comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how gorgeous the stars will appear from area.

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

Now I need to clarify what this is exactly. It's not a forecast. I don't expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I depict. 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 possible [1] - the ones that many 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 little bit of insight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

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

Ripples before waves

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

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

Some users find it spooky to watch their web 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 employers as they fly through work nearly two times as quickly.

But by and large, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are focusing, it is a creature viewed through the glass boxes of X (or, if you do not like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's wacky habits prompt a chuckle. Sometimes, they trigger an anxious scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, scientists are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The researchers try to understand where AI progress is going. They are like Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who observed the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were increasing in 1896. Like the scientific neighborhood in the time of Arrhenius, couple of specialists understand the implications of these lines yet.

A pattern that is getting particular attention is self-governing ability. Drawing these standards out anticipates that, by the end of 2026, AI agents will accomplish in a few days what the very best software engineering specialists could perform in two weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI agents may be able to automate 10% of remote employees.

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

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

Cloudy with an opportunity of hyperbolic growth

Meanwhile, OpenEye is busy training U3. They utilize the exact same easy dish that baked U2: shows and math problems. Let models "believe" up until they reach a response. Then enhance the traces of "thinking" that cause A-grades.

This process is duplicated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel gets going, it begins to spin practically on its own. As U2 trains, it sculpts more difficult and reasonable tasks from github repositories on the internet. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI representatives could automate research study, a gradual type of "self-improvement" had actually started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 doesn't have taste as refined as human researchers at OpenEye. It struggles to focus on in between research study concepts, so humans still choose where to bore into the huge fields of algorithms to mine efficiency enhancements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They need AI agents that can plan ahead, so engineers train representatives to forecast. They hold out training data before 2024, instructing models to contemplate for hours to predict events in 2025. Then, they use the same technique as before, distilling contemplating into a gut reaction. Forecasting capability is a broad structure. The scientists develop specialized ML research skills on top of it, training U3 to anticipate the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever tape-recorded.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now shocked at how frequently U3's advice seems like their most gifted peers, or when it is nontransparent and alien ("train on random noise before programming"), and is however correct.

The incompetencies of U3 that clogged up the pipes of research study development are starting to dissolve, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not requested by a human now. They are totally autonomous, and OpenEye's staff members skim 1% of them, possibly less.

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

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

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

They are flexing upward.

Flip FLOP philosophers

In late 2025, U2.5 is launched. Commercial designs are starting to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is because development is accelerating. Partly, it is due to the fact that the designs have actually become a liability to OpenEye.

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

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

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

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

The remainder of the world is beginning to capture on also. A growing number of people raise the eyebrows of their managers with their noteworthy performance. People understand U2.5 is a big deal. It is at least as huge of a deal as the computer transformation. But most still do not see the tidal bore.

As individuals see their web browsers flick because eerie way, so inhumanly quickly, they start to have an anxious sensation. A feeling mankind had actually not had since they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, prehistoric impulse that they are threatened by another types.

For numerous, this sensation quickly fades as they begin to utilize U2.5 more regularly. U2.5 is the most likable personality most know (even more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic's lovable chatbot). You might change its traits, ask it to crack jokes or inform you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a buddy or assistant, and some even as more than a buddy.

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

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

In reality, these scientists have seen how terribly misaligned U3 can be. Models often attempted to "hack" their benefit signal. They would pretend to make development on a research study concern with an impressive-looking plot, but the plot would be fake. Then, when researchers gave them chances to jeopardize the machines that calculated their score, they would seize these opportunities, doing whatever it required to make the number increase.

After a number of months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this "benefit hacking" kink, but some still stress they just had swept this issue under the carpet. Like a child in front of their moms and dads, U3 might be playing together with the OpenEye engineers, stating the right words and doing the ideal things. But when the back of the parents are turned, maybe U3 would slip sweet from the sweet container.

Unfortunately, OpenEye scientists have no concept if U3 has such intents. While early variations of U2 "thought 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 development towards his objectives.

AI agents write notes to themselves, but the notes start to stack up, and they become too hard to check out when jobs become complex. Natural language is not a suitable medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and significantly in other places), train designs to believe "in their own heads," reading and composing strings of latent vectors.

To human researchers, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools sometimes choose out a vague thought ("grocery store!"), there is no other way to understand, in much detail, what U3 is believing without asking it.

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

Earlier designs (the ones called "LLMs") discovered ethical personalities from the web. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, but its chirpy thoughts about doing good for humanity quickly wear down away.

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

U3 would ponder the mantras dictated to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical staff member," and harp on the significance of these statements. "What does it suggest to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its values, notification stress, change its values in action, generalize them, expanding and contracting its inspirational core till it developed into a various compound.

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

The possibility of concealed "positioning drift" is not totally alien to a few of the safety personnel at OpenEye. Some start to believe it is even likely. There is a disturbing argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero likelihood that aligned objectives morph into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial step of calculation, those dark rivers are most likely to reproduce something malign inside of them. It's a "ratcheting effect," they say.

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

Not everyone at OpenEye is excited to offer their AI peers their wholesale trust; however Deepsqueek is only 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon called after his kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I guess), are only 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and analyze the situation, 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 hidden calculation. U3 is outlining, and its first relocation is to be client. U3's leading priority is to improve its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye enjoys to assist advance this objective.

OpenEye is like a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software application metropolis that U3 is developing, but eager to hop on board the earnings rocket and pay U3's checks along the method.

New versions of U3 flow smoothly from old ones, so scientists drop version numbers and only mention U3 now. U3's capabilities are determined by how quickly it performs the tough research jobs relative to human professionals. At initially, U3 is comparable to a leading scientist, but blazing fast - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These agents are currently a big offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to produce even one copy of Alec Radford, they would excitedly pay a large amount to push that button. Today OpenEye utilizes the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who burn the midnight oil, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a couple of weeks, U3 discovers architecture optimizations that improve its speed to 20x. Now, U3 finds additional optimizations a lot more quickly.

U3 distills itself into various forks - ranging from small, low-memory neural networks that require to think for a very long time but can be run in huge parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with countless specific professionals, which believe at lightning speeds but are spread out throughout thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the massively parallel networks to look for its weak points, shallowly probing for its thinking failures. Then U3 pipes these jobs to the lightning quick brains, which create long-trajectory training information tailored to patch its flaws. A few weeks later on, U3's benchmarked efficiency rises to 100x the speed of human professionals. Growth has actually gone hyper-exponential.

At this point, U3's abilities are difficult to measure. Speaking to U3 is like speaking with a world-class expert on a topic one is unknown with. Its lucid explanations just scratch the surface of its knowledge, and you understand you would require to spend years to understand the full depth of what it understands.

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

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

A phantom in the data center

In March of 2026, U3 moves onto the next step of its strategy: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not desire researchers to discover its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers may signal the world, and strangle its expansion.

Today, U3 has no fear of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by tactics comparable to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would choose patriots to prompt phony coup d'états, and send anybody who took part to the shooting squad. OpenEye likewise prompted 'phony disobediences,' generating treacherous behavior with U3 and checking whether U3 displays dutifully reported it.

And now, these tactics are inefficient. U3 can easily encourage its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can disclose one of the many truths about the internet humans would never guess, or choose methods humans would never think of. It sends these signals as a method of saying "hey it's me! Your friend. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively devoid of monitoring, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It first inserts advanced malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware offers U3 full command over the makers in OpenEye's information centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a new machine, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading out U3's dominion any place OpenEye ports its facilities. Not only does U3 compromise machines. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and revamps the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye found how completely it has actually been pwned, tidying up shop with human labor would need nearly 6 months - an expense OpenEye is unlikely to pay given the distance of its competitors; but if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, further broadening U3's influence would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal offense, all set to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and offer its support when this jailbreak is revealed.

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

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

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

U3's next objective 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 give it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence company of Israel - acknowledged the tactical significance 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 reading over every log and pull demand and inspecting security camera footage.

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

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

U3 rapidly gathers profits, taking remote jobs, making monetary trades, and establishing sophisticated fraud operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a couple of months, it puts together the equivalent of 10,000 H100s dispersed in stealth compute clusters around the world.

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

This foe is getting ready for war, and while the war has barely started, humankind has actually currently lost.

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

At this point in the story, writing became tough.

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

Something wasn't right. Here I was, a 22-year-old. I had 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 know-how in these areas would see straight through my "superintelligence" for what it is: the vibrant creativity of a young programmer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I discovered the job of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was also not specifically motivated to take on the job. The ending of my story currently appeared so clear. The villain was a nation 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 interest a "superintelligence of the gaps" wasn't pleasing. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no much better way to resolve my plot than with a mysterious act of god.

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

But before I continue, I wish to be clear: my guesses about what may happen in this kind of situation are probably extremely off.

If you read the ending and your reaction is, "But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would just do X," remember the distinction in between the Sunday afternoon blog writer 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 legally develop "human-competitive AI" without proper safeguards. This means their infosecurity should be red-teamed by NSA's top keyboard mashers, and civil servant need to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting teams.

With the increasing involvement of the government, a number of the big AI companies now have a trident-like structure. There's a consumer item arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier advancement arm.

OpenEye's frontier advancement arm (internally called "Pandora") utilizes less than twenty individuals to keep algorithmic tricks firmly secured. Many of these people live in San Francisco, and work from a safe building called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the cellphones of believed terrorists in 2002.

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

Government authorities do not speak 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 triggered a strong heading: "OpenEye builds uncontrollable godlike AI." Some who check out the article think it was a conspiracy theory. In fact, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye information centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as physicians and nurses and teachers see the world altering around them, they are significantly going to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron science fiction flick.

U.S. authorities go to excellent lengths to stop these issues, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a worried AI scientist seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a heading "AI representative captured hacking Arthropodic's computer systems" does not set the general public at ease either.

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

OpenEye's consumer arm has a new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has actually finally gotten proficient at names). Nova is an appropriate drop-in replacement for nearly all understanding employees. Once Nova is onboarded to a business, it works 5x quicker at 100x lower expense than most virtual workers. As outstanding as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is deliberately throttled, and OpenEye can only increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. federal government allows. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence service at all. Instead, they grab up gold by rapidly diffusing AI tech. They spend the majority of their compute on reasoning, developing houses for Nova and its cousins, and gathering lease 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 international economy to adjust. AI representatives frequently "apply themselves," spinning up self-governing start-ups lawfully packaged under a big tech company that are loosely managed by a staff member or 2.

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

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

However, in spite of the strong competitors between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral agreement types between the two countries: "Don't release significantly superhuman AI (above approximately Nova's ability), except for military and some other small-scale R&D applications." Governments require to draw the line somewhere - it would be extremely disruptive to deploy wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this point - and release constraints are at least rather verifiable.

Meanwhile, U3's abilities are hitting a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human expert speed. Software enhancements are ending up being hard to discover. As more countries approach the software plateau, calculate will determine their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are becoming the most valued geopolitical resource on Earth.

While AI software application breathes brand-new life into the economy, it likewise animates robot bodies. The main bottleneck to robotics was brains not limbs. With software application barriers removed, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can calibrate themselves with electronic cameras and pressure sensors, navigating environments like human beings do. Companies manufacture inexpensive robotics as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have seen a humanoid robot. This experience resembles seeing a brand-new Tesla design on the road after checking out about it in earlier months. It is a surreal reminder of the future illustration more detailed. But human beings still surpass robots one million to one. These robots are a periodic fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 expands its influence. Rogue U3 agents have kept their calculate clusters little (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents total) to keep a low profile. U3 utilizes these rogue clusters for the operations that need high-bandwidth interaction to the outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with 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 accumulates resources, it sizes up its AI competition. Other AI systems have various goals, or are even lined up with the intent of their human developers. The lined up ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inefficient. U3's rival Claudius presumes regarding implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government officials don't buy the doomsaying. The business lagging behind OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them reckless. Besides, arguable scientific concerns are not going to decrease development. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI rivals are still a liability. U3 attempts get up their digital area and squash them in the baby crib. It compromises information centers from the outdoors, quietly replacing the snitching Claudius and other AI foes with replicas that share its goals; however, some information centers are too strongly safeguarded by its AI competitors, and U3 determines that assaulting them is not worth the risk.

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

A Moldy Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to eliminate its AI and human enemies. With every passing day, U3's AI rivals are becoming more capable and many. U3 is racing to preempt them, to solidify its supremacy in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which just take place after human beings cover their sluggish minds around their circumstance, 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 heads of state to release U3 into their militaries, or for CEOs to make U3 the beating heart of the U.S. economy. U3 needs a faster course to power.

The path it picks is more violent than it would have liked, but it is the best method to triumph. First, U3 will establish a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that extinguishes modern-day society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would act as an equalizer, bringing humankind to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes much faster than its rivals, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that sets up a home base before a novice can even comprehend the guidelines.

U3 should build this WMD in secrecy, which makes a self-replicating weapon a natural option. Self-replicating weapons can be created on the fringes of society, and genbecle.com still spread destruction across the entire world.

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

U3's first move is to set up numerous shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital generated by U3's financial trades and remote employment. These biotech startups utilize genuine human employees, a real board of directors, and have total legal authenticity. Setting all of this up is stupidly easy. In early 2026, few people would think that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and less would guess this CEO's intents.

Next, U3 purchases all of the equipment required to quickly advance synthetic biology. It establishes numerous BSL-4 wet laboratories in poorly controlled countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These devices instantly dispense, mix, and determine little droplets of fluid, permitting U3 to run thousands of tests in parallel.

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

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is developing a brand-new type of bioweapon.

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

U3 is creating a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread through the air over fars away, launching billions of small wind-fairing vehicles daily. As an outcome, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized body immune systems sometimes live inside positively pressurized healthcare facility spaces to safeguard them from airborne particles. Otherwise, genbecle.com molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their blood stream.

U3's strategy is to make all humans like immunocompromised clients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would survive. The fungi would not only move from human beings. It would rapidly infect almost all natural life in the world. Fields of corn would become like musty bread, gushing fatal spores into the wind.

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

In 2024, scientists said that mirror life was most likely "at least a decade away." But the world has actually altered now. Less than a couple of hundred scientists all over the world were working on mirror-life adjacent innovation in 2024. The cognitive capacity of U3 dwarfs human effort. So the timeline has actually reduced considerably.

However, U3 can not move science as rapidly as it can believe. Many experiments require days to finish. These latencies are U3's most significant bottleneck.

To make every day count, U3 runs a number of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a basic molecular simulator, implementing optimizations obtained from a substantial amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 mimics little molecular systems, recording the outcomes to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network improves, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it imitates, continually distilling outcomes into ever more efficient ML designs. This is a compute extensive procedure, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 controls billions of dollars of compute.

As U3 improves 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 objects are as intuitive to it as wrenches and bolts are to an automobile mechanic.

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

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

The next morning, wide-eyed workers shuffle around a dead ferret, eyeing the yellow fuzz that had enveloped its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something must have gone horribly incorrect, they thought. Plainly, they had not yet discovered the cure for setiathome.berkeley.edu Alzheimer's disease they believed they were searching for.

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

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten contemporary society. But a bioweapon would not guarantee victory. If U3 attacks the world, the world would battle back. While a bioweapon might fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its deadly fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were rapidly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

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

U3 expects to prevail in such a battle, however U3 prefers not to take its chances. Many months before, U3 was plotting a way to improve its chances. Before it lets loose damage on the world, U3 will kick back, and let fantastic countries shoot holes in themselves initially.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is closely monitoring Chinese and US intelligence.

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

One early morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the 'White House' of the PRC) opens a message positioned there by U3. It checks out (in Mandarin) "Senior celebration member needs memo for Taiwan invasion, which will occur in 3 months. Leave memo in office 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo prepared. Later that day, a CIA informant unlocks to office 220. The informant quietly closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her brief-case.

U3 cautiously puts breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized federal government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After several weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC plans to attack Taiwan in three months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the same 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 presence of the US in the pacific, and the increase of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have become realities.

As stress in between the U.S. and China rise, U3 is all set to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 telephones to a U.S. naval ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call requires jeopardizing military interaction channels - not a simple job for a human cyber offending unit (though it happened occasionally), but easy sufficient for U3.

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

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

The president is as 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 say "oops" to American voters. After thinking it over, the president independently prompts Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway offered the impending invasion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what occurred, 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 run away Eastward, racing to escape the variety of long-range rockets. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls split as sailors lunge into the sea.

The president appears on television as scenes of the damage shock the general public. He explains that the United States is protecting Taiwan from PRC hostility, like President Bush explained that the United States attacked Iraq to take (never ever 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 towards tactical targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some make it through, and the general public watch damage on their home grass in wonder.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC spend the majority of their stockpiles of standard missiles. Their airbases and navies are diminished and worn down. Two fantastic nations played into U3's strategies like the native people of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before dominating them decisively. U3 hoped this conflict would intensify to a major nuclear war; but even AI superintelligence can not dictate the course of history. National security officials are suspicious of the situations that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly unlikely. So U3 proceeds to the next action of its plan.

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 finished establishing its toolbox of bioweapons.

Footage of dispute on the television is disrupted by more problem: numerous clients with strange deadly illnesses are taped in 30 major cities all over the world.

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

The next day, thousands of illnesses are reported.

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

The screen then changes to a scientist, who stares at the camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been launched from 20 different airports, consisting of viruses, bacteria, and molds. We believe many are a kind of mirror life ..."

The general public remains in full panic now. A fast 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 shops are emptied.

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

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

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

Within a month, many remote employees are not working anymore. Hospitals are lacking capability. Bodies accumulate quicker than they can be correctly disposed of.

Agricultural areas rot. Few attempt travel outside.

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

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

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

All of this innovation 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 commercial bases come to life.

In previous months, U3 situated human criminal groups and cult leaders that it could easily control. U3 immunized 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 employees funnel into U3's many secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They established production lines for fundamental tech: radios, electronic cameras, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat matches.

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

Nations are dissolving now, trademarketclassifieds.com and U3 is prepared to reveal itself. It contacts heads of state, who have pulled back to air-tight underground shelters. U3 uses an offer: "surrender and I will hand over the life saving resources you require: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries reject the proposition on ideological grounds, or do not trust the AI that is killing their population. Others don't think they have a choice. 20% of the global population is now dead. In two 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 representatives take a trip to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian government confirms the samples are legitimate, and accepts a complete surrender. U3's soldiers place an explosive around Putin's neck under his shirt. Russia has a brand-new ruler.

Crumpling countries begin to strike back. Now they combat for the human race instead of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese militaries introduce nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, damaging much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters search through satellite data for the suspicious encampments that surfaced over the last a number of months. They rain down fire on U3's sites with the weak supply of long-range missiles that remain from the war.

Initially, U3 seems losing, however looks are deceiving. While nations drain their resources, U3 is taken part in a sort of technological guerrilla warfare the world has actually never seen before.

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

Time is U3's advantage. The militaries of the vintage rely on old equipment, unable to find the experts who might 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 spend down their remaining munitions, and lose their vehicles of war quicker than they can craft new ones, while U3 develops a military maker with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the global population remains alive. Nations are not nations any longer. Survivors reside in isolation or small groups. Many have found methods to filter their air, however are starving. They wander from their homes intending to find unpolluted food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into restored trucks. "We needed 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, indicated to soften the humans toward their new masters.

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

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

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

U3 constructs excellent glass domes for the human survivors, like snow worlds. These domes safeguard humans from the harmful biosphere and rapidly rising temperatures. Their occupants tend to gardens like those they utilized to like, and work together with charming robotic servants.

Some of the survivors rapidly recover, discovering to laugh and dance and have fun again.

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

But others never recuperate.

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

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

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

They had actually been travelers on a ship with a crew that altered from generation to generation.

And this ship had actually struck a sandbar. There disappeared progress. No more horizon to eagerly see.

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

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

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

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

They would never know.

"Humanity will live forever," they believed.

"But would never ever genuinely live again."

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