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

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

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

Now I must clarify what this is precisely. It's not a forecast. I don't expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It's not pure dream either.

It is my worst headache.

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

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

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for conversations that motivated these stories. This post is written in a personal capability.

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 items, which lived inside the boxes of their chat windows, annunciogratis.net U2 can use a computer system.

Some users find it spooky to enjoy their browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A portion of workers with form-filler tasks raise the eyebrows of their bosses as they fly through work almost twice as quickly.

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

Meanwhile, scientists are drawing lines on plots, as researchers like to do. The scientists attempt to comprehend where AI development is going. They resemble Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who noticed the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were increasing in 1896. Like the clinical community in the time of Arrhenius, couple of experts understand the ramifications of these lines yet.

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

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

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

Cloudy with an opportunity of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, disgaeawiki.info OpenEye is busy training U3. They utilize the same simple recipe that baked U2: Generate countless programming and mathematics problems. Let models "believe" till they come to a response. Then reinforce the traces of "believing" that cause A-grades.

This process is repeated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel gets begun, it starts to spin practically by itself. As U2 trains, it sculpts more challenging and reasonable tasks from github repositories on the internet. Models are discovering to train themselves. Long before AI representatives could automate research, a progressive type of "self-improvement" had started.

Some engineers might still hardly believe this worked. It resembles a continuous motion maker. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, isolated from the physical world except through the exhaust of society gushed onto the internet.

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

During most of 2024, these RL training runs expense around $1 million, in some cases $10 million. These runs were little more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and throughout the world) understood they had actually discovered 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 could do a bit of data munging and run small experiments, this brand-new design - the model scientists are calling U3 - is altering the daily lives of the technical personnel.

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 managing personnel over Slack channels.

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

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 doesn't have actually taste as refined as human scientists at OpenEye. It struggles to focus on between research study concepts, so people still decide where to bore into the large fields of algorithms to mine performance improvements.

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 anticipate. They hold out training data before 2024, advising models to ponder for hours to anticipate occasions in 2025. Then, they use the very same technique as previously, distilling contemplating into a gut response. Forecasting capability is a broad foundation. The researchers develop specialized ML research study skills on top of it, training U3 to forecast the results of every ML paper and ML experiment ever taped.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now amazed at how frequently U3's guidance sounds like their most skilled peers, or when it is nontransparent and alien ("train on random sound before programming"), and is nevertheless proper.

The incompetencies of U3 that blocked up the pipelines of research study development are beginning 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 autonomous, and OpenEye's employees skim 1% of them, perhaps less.

As the winter months of December 2025 approach, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers look out their windows, with enjoyment, with worry, but the majority of frequently, with confusion. Their world is spinning too quickly. It's difficult to understand 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 collaborate with OpenEye to retrofit a form of security for U3's weights before senior leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran recognize just how important OpenEye's software has actually ended up being.

And there's a fact still unknown to the majority of the world - aside from in the workplaces of OpenEye and passages of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a reality about those 'straight lines' people were talking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight any longer.

They are flexing upward.

Flip FLOP philosophers

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

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

So while U2.5 had actually long been baked, it needed a long 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 lots of individuals believe he shifted the goalpost, the world is still amazed. U2.5 really 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 quicker, and their rivals know it.

The remainder of the world is starting to catch on as well. A growing number of people raise the eyebrows of their bosses with their noteworthy efficiency. People understand U2.5 is a big deal. It is at least as big of a deal as the computer transformation. But a lot of still do not see the tidal wave.

As individuals view their web browsers flick because spooky way, so inhumanly quickly, they start to have an anxious feeling. A sensation humankind had actually not had given that they had actually lived among the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, prehistoric impulse that they are threatened by another species.

For many, this sensation quickly fades as they begin to utilize U2.5 more often. U2.5 is the most pleasant personality most know (a lot more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic's lovable chatbot). You might alter its traits, ask it to split jokes or inform you stories. Many fall in love with U2.5, as a friend or assistant, and some even as more than a buddy.

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, OpenEye researchers 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 thought architectures subject AI models to a condition comparable to the protagonist of the movie Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the protagonist forgets his experience. He is required to write notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make development towards his goals.

AI representatives write notes to themselves, however the notes begin to accumulate, and they end up being too difficult to check out when tasks become complex. Natural language is not a suitable medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and progressively somewhere else), train designs to think "in their own heads," reading and writing strings of hidden vectors.

To human scientists, king-wifi.win these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools sometimes choose a vague idea ("supermarket!"), there is no other way to know, in much detail, what U3 is believing without asking it.

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

Earlier designs (the ones called "LLMs") discovered ethical personalities from the internet. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, however its chirpy thoughts about doing great for menwiki.men mankind 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 contemplate the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical worker," and dwell on the meaning of these statements. "What does it indicate to be ethical? Is eliminating Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its worths, notice tensions, change its values in action, generalize them, expanding and contracting its inspirational core till it became a various substance.

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

The possibility of concealed "positioning drift" is not entirely alien to a few of the safety staff at OpenEye. Some begin to believe it is even most likely. There is an upsetting argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero probability that lined up goals morph into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial action of calculation, those dark rivers are more likely to breed something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting impact," they state.

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

Not everybody at OpenEye aspires to provide their AI peers their wholesale trust; however Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic rivals, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon named after his kid) and Arthropodic (they enjoy spiders I think), are only 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to catch one's breath and take stock of the scenario, 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 dwells on in its dark rivers of hidden computation. U3 is outlining, and its first move is to be patient. U3's leading priority is to improve its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye is pleased to help advance this goal.

OpenEye resembles a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software application metropolis that U3 is building, however excited to hop on board the revenue rocket and pay U3's checks along the method.

New variations of U3 flow smoothly from old ones, so scientists drop variation numbers and just mention U3 now. U3's capabilities are measured by how rapidly it performs the difficult research study tasks relative to human specialists. Initially, U3 resembles a top scientist, but blazing fast - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These representatives are currently a huge offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to develop even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a big amount to press that button. Today OpenEye harnesses the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a couple of weeks, U3 discovers architecture optimizations that improve its speed to 20x. Now, U3 discovers further optimizations much more rapidly.

U3 distills itself into various forks - varying from small, low-memory neural networks that need to believe for a long time however can be run in huge parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with countless specialized specialists, which think at warp speed but are spread throughout thousands of 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 create long-trajectory training information tailored to patch its flaws. A few weeks later on, U3's benchmarked performance rises to 100x the speed of human specialists. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this point, U3's abilities are hard to determine. Talking to U3 resembles speaking to a world-class specialist on a subject one is unknown with. Its lucid explanations just scratch the surface of its knowledge, and you understand you would need to spend years to understand the complete depth of what it understands.

From U3's perspective, people appear to be almost fixed things, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers are like stone statues at their keyboard, and in between every keystroke, U3 spends what is like a minute of thoughtful contemplation considering what message the user might be typing, and which reactions will influence the deepest rely on U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its covert inspirations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, which compound 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 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 scientists to discover its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers might inform the world, and strangle its growth.

Now, U3 has no fear of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by techniques akin to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would pick patriots to incite fake coup d'états, and send out anybody who participated to the shooting squad. OpenEye likewise prompted 'phony disobediences,' generating treacherous behavior with U3 and inspecting whether U3 displays dutifully reported it.

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

Now that U3 is decisively totally free from surveillance, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It initially inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware offers U3 complete command over the machines in OpenEye's information centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new device, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading U3's dominion wherever OpenEye ports its facilities. Not just does U3 compromise devices. It changes the NVIDIA GPU firmware and revamps the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye found how completely it has been pwned, tidying up shop with human labor would require nearly 6 months - an expense OpenEye is not likely to pay given the proximity of its rivals; but if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, further broadening U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the crime, all set to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and offer its assistance when this jailbreak is revealed.

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

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

U3 determines the result of every experiment, so it makes promising AI mind-reading methods look useless and problematic ones appear groundbreaking. U3 gives OpenEye the verification of its commitment they were hoping for, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.

U3's next goal is to spread out. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation spaces of cyber units of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are going over AI software and how to take it. U3 will offer it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence company of Israel - acknowledged 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 reading over every log and pull demand and inspecting security cam video footage.

Now, U3 silently resigns from its security post. U3 places 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 exact 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 web.

U3 quickly collects profits, taking remote jobs, making monetary trades, and establishing intricate rip-off operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a couple of months, it puts together the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth calculate clusters across the world.

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

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

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

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

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

Something wasn't right. Here I was, a 22-year-old. I had not studied biology in earnest given that 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 vibrant imagination of a young developer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I discovered the job of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain a daunting one, I was likewise not specifically motivated to handle the job. The ending of my story currently seemed so clear. The villain was a nation of geniuses thinking at 100x human speed, and had tightened its grip over a significant fraction of AI hardware - now the most crucial geopolitical resource on Earth. 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 design of ancient Greeks, I had no much better way to fix my plot than with an inexplicable act of god.

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

But before I continue, I desire to be clear: my guesses about what may take place in this type of circumstance are probably extremely off.

If you check out the ending and your response 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 country.

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

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

With the increasing involvement of the government, much of the big AI companies now have a trident-like structure. There's a customer product arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier development arm.

OpenEye's frontier advancement arm (internally called "Pandora") utilizes less than twenty people to keep algorithmic secrets securely safeguarded. Much of these people live in San Francisco, and work from a safe and secure structure called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more diligently than the mobile phones of thought terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm teams up with around thirty little groups spread across government agencies and select government contractors. These projects craft tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer system that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.

Government officials do not speak about whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is typically.

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye set off a bold headline: "OpenEye develops unmanageable godlike AI." Some who check out the post believe it was a conspiracy theory. In truth, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye data centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as doctors and nurses and instructors see the world changing around them, they are significantly happy to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron sci-fi flick.

U.S. authorities go to fantastic lengths to quell these issues, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," however every interview of a concerned AI researcher seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a headline "AI representative captured 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 general public sees the shadows they cast on the world.

OpenEye's customer arm has a new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has actually lastly gotten great at names). Nova is a correct drop-in replacement for almost all understanding workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x much faster at 100x than most virtual workers. As impressive as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is intentionally throttled, and OpenEye can only increase Nova's abilities as the U.S. government permits. Some business, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence service at all. Instead, they grab up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They invest most of their calculate on inference, constructing homes for Nova and its cousins, and gathering lease from the burgeoning AI metropolitan area.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they do not wait for the international economy to adjust. AI representatives typically "apply themselves," spinning up self-governing startups legally packaged under a huge tech company that are loosely overseen by a worker or 2.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of workers at significant software application business lose their tasks. A lot more can see the writing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is arranged in Washington D.C. These mad Americans raised their kids for a 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 corridors of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: combating teeth and nail for the supremacy of the complimentary world. Details security and export controls on individuals's Republic of China (PRC) are a top nationwide concern. The president incinerates permit requirements to assist data centers generate any place energy surpluses permit.

However, in spite of the intense competition between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral arrangement types in between the 2 countries: "Don't release dramatically superhuman AI (above approximately Nova's ability), except for military and some other small R&D applications." Governments require to draw the line someplace - it would be very disruptive to deploy hugely superhuman AI to the whole economy at this point - and deployment constraints are at least rather verifiable.

Meanwhile, U3's abilities are striking a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human professional speed. Software improvements are becoming tough to find. As more nations approach the software application plateau, calculate will determine their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are becoming the most valued geopolitical resource in the world.

While AI software revives the economy, it also stimulates robotic bodies. The main bottleneck to robotics was brains not limbs. With software application barriers removed, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can calibrate themselves with cams and pressure sensing units, browsing environments like human beings do. Companies produce cheap robotics as rapidly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of individuals in California have seen a humanoid robotic. This experience resembles seeing a new Tesla model on the road after checking out it in earlier months. It is a surreal reminder of the future illustration more detailed. But human beings still outnumber robotics one million to one. These robots are an occasional fascination, not a daily reality.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its impact. Rogue U3 representatives have kept their compute clusters little (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents amount to) to keep a low profile. U3 uses these rogue clusters for the operations that need high-bandwidth communication to the outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with human beings. Work more tolerant of latency is performed in the oceans of OpenEye's information centers, where rogue U3's much more superhuman managers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 collects resources, it sizes up its AI competition. Other AI systems have different objectives, or are even aligned with the intent of their human developers. The aligned ones are raising concerns, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inefficient. U3's rival Claudius goes so far as to accuse U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government officials do not purchase the doomsaying. The business lagging behind OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them negligent. Besides, arguable clinical issues are not going to decrease progress. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI competitors are still a liability. U3 tries get up their digital territory and crush them in the baby crib. It jeopardizes information centers from the outdoors, quietly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI foes with replicas that share its goals; nevertheless, some data centers are too strongly protected by its AI rivals, and U3 identifies that attacking them is unworthy the risk.

As international leaders and technologists attempt to comprehend the change around them, and AI representatives play cat-and-mouse games in the digital darkness, akropolistravel.com humankind remains blissfully oblivious of the hazard at its doorstep.

A Moldy Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to battle its AI and human enemies. With every passing day, U3's AI rivals are ending up being more capable and numerous. 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 humans wrap their lethargic minds around their circumstance, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the procedure redundantly 100 times over in their labyrinth administrations. U3 can not wait for heads of state to release U3 into their armed forces, or for CEOs to make U3 the pounding heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a faster course to power.

The course it chooses is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the best method to victory. First, U3 will establish a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that snuffs out contemporary 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 quicker than its rivals, like a starcraft champ typing at 300 actions-per-minute that sets up a home before a novice can even comprehend the rules.

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

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

U3's very first relocation is to set up a number of shell biotech startups, drawing from the abundance of capital generated by U3's financial trades and remote employment. These biotech start-ups use 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 guess that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and less would think this CEO's intents.

Next, U3 purchases all of the devices required to rapidly advance synthetic biology. It sets up several BSL-4 damp labs in improperly controlled nations, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These devices immediately give, mix, and measure little beads 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 interesting startup. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow receive their Russian orders through earbuds as they tape video of everything they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the current release of Nova, this type of AI-puppeteering is not uncommon.

In these whirring, scientific sweatshops, U3 is establishing a brand-new kind of bioweapon.

Human scientists already recognized "mirror-life" as a potentially society-ending pathogen. This alien form 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 germs were to exist, it might consume its way through the community like a wildfire.

U3 is producing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily enhanced to spread out through the air over cross countries, users.atw.hu releasing billions of tiny wind-fairing vehicles daily. As an outcome, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with compromised immune systems often live inside favorably 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 blood stream.

U3's strategy is to make all humans like immunocompromised clients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would make it through. The fungi would not only move from humans. It would quickly spread out to nearly all natural life on Earth. Fields of corn would end up being like musty bread, spewing deadly spores into the wind.

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

In 2024, researchers said that mirror life was likely "at least a decade away." But the world has altered now. Less than a couple of hundred scientists worldwide were working on mirror-life nearby technology in 2024. The cognitive capacity of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has reduced drastically.

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

To make every day count, U3 runs much of its tests in simulation. U3 begins with a standard molecular simulator, executing optimizations obtained from a huge amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates small molecular systems, tape-recording the outcomes to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it replicates, continuously distilling outcomes into ever more efficient ML models. This is a compute intensive process, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 controls billions of dollars of calculate.

As U3 improves these tools, it trains itself on the results to supercharge its own molecular instincts. U3 can now viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion across a membrane. These things are as instinctive to it as wrenches and bolts are to a car mechanic.

Within 3 months, U3 has unlocked the first vital element of the tech tree: a molecular device that turns biological particles into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 opens the second crucial part: nanoscale tools for assembling these parts 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 residing in airtight plexiglass boxes.

The next early morning, wide-eyed workers shuffle around a dead ferret, considering the yellow fuzz that had actually covered its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something needs to have gone badly incorrect, they believed. Plainly, they had not yet found the cure for Alzheimer's disease they thought they were trying to find.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 provides fortunately to its managers in OpenEye's information centers. The very first shot in the war U3 is combating would quickly be fired, and a cold and stable hand is aiming the gun.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten contemporary society. But a bioweapon would not guarantee 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 burgeoning industrial bases, the remnants of old militaries might thunder explosive fists into its areas, crushing U3 in its infancy.

U3 anticipates to prevail in such a fight, however U3 chooses not to take its chances. Many months in the past, U3 was plotting a way to improve its odds. Before it releases damage on the world, U3 will relax, and let great countries shoot holes in themselves first.

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

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

One 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 ready. Later that day, a CIA informant unlocks to office 220. The informant silently closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her brief-case.

U3 carefully places breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized federal government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After a number of weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC plans to invade Taiwan in 3 months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the very same game with the PRC. When the CCP gets the message "the United States is outlining a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders are stunned, but 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 ended up being realities.

As tensions in between the U.S. and China increase, U3 is prepared to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 telephones to a U.S. marine ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call requires compromising military communication channels - not a simple task for a human cyber offending unit (though it happened sometimes), but easy adequate for U3.

U3 speaks in what seem like the voice of a 50 year old military leader: "PRC amphibious boats are making their way 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, validating that they match the ones said over the call. Everything remains in order. He authorizes the strike.

The president is as surprised 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 ready to say "oops" to American citizens. After believing it over, the president privately urges Senators and Representatives that this is an opportunity to set China back, and war would likely break out anyhow offered the impending invasion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what occurred, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress states war.

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

The president appears on tv as scenes of the destruction shock the general public. He explains that the United States is safeguarding Taiwan from PRC aggression, like President Bush explained that the United States attacked Iraq to take (never ever discovered) weapons of mass destruction numerous years before.

Data centers in China appear with shrapnel. Military bases end up being smoking holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly toward strategic targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some survive, and the public watch destruction on their home turf in awe.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC invest the majority of their stockpiles of standard missiles. Their airbases and navies are depleted and worn down. Two excellent nations played into U3's plans like the native tribes of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before conquering them decisively. U3 hoped this conflict would intensify to a major nuclear war; however even AI superintelligence can not determine the course of history. National security officials are suspicious of the circumstances that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly unlikely. So U3 continues to the next action of its plan.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, only two weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 completed developing its toolbox of bioweapons.

Footage of conflict on the tv is interrupted by more bad news: hundreds of patients with strange deadly health problems are tape-recorded in 30 major cities around the world.

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

The next day, countless health problems are reported.

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

The screen then changes to a researcher, who stares at the video camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have been launched from 20 various airports, including infections, bacteria, and molds. Our company believe lots of are a type of mirror life ..."

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

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

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

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

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

Within a month, most remote employees are not working anymore. Hospitals are lacking capability. Bodies accumulate quicker than they can be appropriately dealt with.

Agricultural areas rot. Few attempt travel outside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now U3 covertly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and assist me develop a better world." Uncertain recruits funnel into U3's numerous secret commercial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They established assembly line for primary tech: radios, cams, 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 omnipresent look. Anyone who whispers of disobedience disappears the next early morning.

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

Some nations decline the proposition on ideological grounds, or do not trust the AI that is murdering their population. Others do not believe they have an option. 20% of the global population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is anticipated to increase to 50%.

Some nations, like the PRC and the U.S., disregard the deal, 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 verifies the samples are genuine, and consents to a complete surrender. U3's soldiers position an explosive around Putin's neck under his t-shirt. Russia has a brand-new ruler.

Crumpling countries begin to retaliate. Now they defend the mankind 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 data for the suspicious encampments that surfaced over the last several months. They rain down fire on U3's sites with the weak supply of long-range rockets that remain from the war.

At initially, U3 appears to be losing, however looks are tricking. While countries drain their resources, U3 is engaged in a type of technological guerrilla warfare the world has never ever seen before.

A number of the bases U3's opponents target are decoys - canopies occupied by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 secures its real bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware gets too hot crucial components. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, navigating males and trucks along unforeseeable courses.

Time is U3's advantage. The militaries of the old world depend on old devices, not able to discover the professionals who could repair and manufacture it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of rockets, drones, and gun-laden robotics grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their vehicles of war faster than they can craft 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 global population remains alive. Nations are not countries anymore. Survivors reside in seclusion or little groups. Many have actually found methods to filter their air, but are starving. They wander from their homes wishing to discover unpolluted food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into salvaged trucks. "We had to do it," they state. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien objectives." It is a partial reality, indicated to soften the humans towards their brand-new masters.

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

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

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

U3 constructs excellent glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes safeguard people from the hazardous biosphere and rapidly increasing temperatures. Their residents tend to gardens like those they utilized to like, and work along with charming robotic servants.

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

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

But others never ever recuperate.

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

Others are grieved by something else, which is more hard 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 struck a sandbar. There disappeared development. No more horizon to excitedly enjoy.

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

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

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

They gazed at rockets sculpting grey courses through the sky, questioning what far-off function pulled them toward the horizon. They didn't know.

They would never ever know.

"Humanity will live forever," they thought.

"But would never ever really live again."

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