0.1.0

Lillian wiped her clammy palms on her lab coat, cleared her throat, and dug into the code again. The results were the same as last time. Which were the same as the time before that. Again and again she tried getting the algorithm to blossom into an intelligence like the world had never seen. Her goal at the moment was not success, but more humbly, to discover some kind of data that would at least guide her next step. She was lost, missing something. Both she and her team were. The latest sample of DNA had been outright rejected by the machine. The program completely failed to compile. Their lofty goal of creating a superintelligence felt far off. A pipe dream. Lillian was losing hope.

The team’s work was a continuation of her Ph. D. thesis on evolutionary algorithms. Even during her studies, few took her work seriously enough to consider it a worthwhile pursuit. Her advisors were skeptical throughout her entire program, and afterwards, though they did graduate her eventually. It had been a solitary pursuit. Cool, but delusional in the eyes of the academic community. The kind of thing that was always 10-20 years away. The idea was that this generative algorithm would produce a seed of artificial life, that given the right computing resources, would learn, and grow into a superintelligence. It would start small, then after some time, it would reproduce, and mutate. Unsatisfactory candidates would die off, leaving only the most promising neurons in the population to recombine. The population as a whole was subject to a selection process, much like evolution in biology. The program took high resolution brain scans as well as a DNA sample as inputs, and the output would be the rules so to speak for the digital population to evolve. But for now, they hadn’t even come close. It was the 300th time a unique DNA sample had been used to try and fuse with the machine. That’s 300 real people she spent time collecting blood and asking them to sit through a continuous six hour brain scan all while moving as little as possible. 300 unique DNA sequences combined with state of the art high resolution brain scans. 300 ways not to make sentience, and a ticking clock. They had a finite amount of time left. The grant money wasn’t going to last forever. The expensive data gathering process had wiped out much of their funds before they even started in earnest. If they were wrong in their data gathering, the project would be doomed before they even started. It was the kind of thought that haunted Lillian. She held her breath every time she got a new alert about a paper published in this area, hoping to god that they didn’t invalidate the approach. There was enough funding for roughly 10 more experiments before she’d have to start letting staff go. Already the tough meetings had begun where her committee for the project second guessed her decisions. There were several mentions of ‘oversight’. They were starting to lose faith in her, and she in herself. If this were a public company, it would be about the time they fired the CEO and brought in a seasoned expert to safely land the malfunctioning plane. The employees in her lab didn’t know exactly how much longer they would be able to continue their work, though by the nature of being on the edge of science, they all accepted the fact that progress at this level often came in degrees, and that the most likely outcome was no outcome at all. Not a definite yes, nor a definite no, and worst of all, ambiguity for further work in the area. Results so opaque, they were not even wrong. Not only did Lillian worry about her project, but knew that the optics around failing could set back all research in her field for years. At least we got a shot, she thought to herself.

Berkeley was a great place for long shots. The university allowed people to take big chances, or rather, they allowed others to take a lot of chances where the cost of being wrong was not coming out of their pockets. Through all the political quagmire, she was able to secure a decent sized grant and was set up in one of the top labs. It wasn’t the best on campus, but she had enough equipment to keep her overhead low and her experimentation time relatively quick. It also helped they were able to borrow some quantum resources from one of the tech giants. They built it but didn’t know what the hell to use it for, so they let her use it too. Her vision for the project sat squarely in the realm of a moonshot. A one in a thousand chance at success, but if successful, potentially life altering for not only the planet, but for her own species. This was swinging for the fences. Nothing but a home run would do. A proper power law distribution of success. Lillian had once been introduced at a conference as an ‘annoyingly big thinker’. It was the kind of left handed compliment she’d grown used to. It was, after all, a male dominated field. She had spent her whole career getting scoffed at for studying what she did. It was about as respected as believing in unicorns. A number of her colleagues had cashed in on the narrow intelligence possible today, but she stayed behind, looking farther into the future than they would, or could. She couldn’t help being a little jealous, and it was hard to ignore all the immaculate vacations and luxurious lifestyles they flaunted on social. She still had to interact with them from time to time, and often it was to ask them for money. They’d sit in their glass offices overlooking San Francisco and swivel in their leather chairs with their fingers touching, their elbows resting on the arm chair. It was a smugness Lillian assumed came with success, with no appreciation for the luck of time and place. In their mind, somehow success was cause and effect, but failure was always circumstantial. If she got a few drinks in them, and brought down their guard, they all dreamed the same dream as her. They hadn’t forgotten their younger selves who got into the field to meaningfully change the world. The only difference is that they left it at that, and looked for what could be done today.

Her lab was relatively small. Ten researches in total, herself included, though she would lean on other departments for help occasionally. She was still amazed every time someone got something done that she didn’t have to do herself. It still felt novel to have a team after years of mostly solo work. She’d been working on this on her own most of her career since she finished her Ph. D. This was her first research group that she led, and understandably it had a lot of eyeballs on it. She had gone out and gotten the funding all by herself, with, if anything, unhelpful advice from her peers guiding her to join a self driving car startup or work on some kind of DARPA project. The opportunities seemed relatively exciting, and she was grateful for them, but they also sounded short term, felt small and ultimately unfulfilling. Though money wasn’t the driving force, it mattered to her how she made her money.

The seminal moment came at the trough of her disillusionment. It wasn’t a stroke of genius, it was an act of desperation at 3AM. One of those one-eyed decisions you only make in the dark without anyone around, and with the exhilaration from the prospect of getting caught. She took the digitized versions of all the DNA samples and prepped the system for another trial run. Instead of pairing the brain scans with the same individual’s DNA, she mixed them. She gave the algorithm all of the brain scans, and all of the DNA sequences. She would let it choose, let the evolutionary algorithm try many options and let it figure out the best one. She knew it was a long shot, and that she’d catch hell for doing this without her team in the morning, but she needed something right now that would let her go home and fall asleep. She loaded up the machine and it started buzzing and beeping. She nearly rolled her eyes at the almost cheerful sounds of the server crunching away at its new task. She didn’t bother packing up for the night since she’d be back there in a few hours and went home to catch some sleep. She walked out of her office and into the foggy Bay Area night, down through Strawberry Creek. She made a left at West Gate and glided through the Downtown Berkeley Station. She hopped on BART and found a seat without too many stains. Unconsciously she fashioned a pillow out of a spare sweater in her purse and promptly fell asleep, nearly missing her stop in Oakland a few stations away.

She headed out of the MacArthur stop and onto the quiet street. The few blocks from the station to her house in Temescal felt brutal. A wind was howling off the bay and seemed to be coming for her personally. She climbed up the stairs of their creaky Italianate row house so tired she nearly got on all fours and used her hands. They didn’t make staircases this steep anymore. Her husband was asleep with her boy and her girl clinging to each of his arms in their bed. There was no room for her. She sighed as she scooped up her daughter and put her into her own bed. She did the same for her son. She went to put her phone on her charger, and dug around her purse for it, finally dumping it’s contents out on the floor. It wasn’t there. Oh, well, what did a few hours matter anyways? She flopped into the sheets. Then, with the deftness of a woman in bed, kneed her husband in the kidney to make some room.

“Hey honey,” he groaned, still asleep.

She just smiled back. At least she had this. Warmth, a room, love. She was grateful, but felt guilty for resorting to some self help blogger’s advice on finding peace. The subtle art of self-expectation setting was a zero-sum game of disillusionment and exhaustion. It overcame her and her stresses, and she slept fitfully.

She came in late to work looking like she went bar hopping the night before. The coffee machine was conveniently located right near the entrance to her lab and she stopped there first. This too. At least she had a family and coffee. Gratefulness, then guilt. She envied the stoics, having never learned how to disassociate from the highs and lows. As she rounded the corner towards her desk, she looked up at her colleagues surrounding a monitor, and then over to the computer and spit her coffee all over herself and the floor.

“It’s working,” Nick, one of her younger researchers and the group’s high performance computing expert said.

It was for these moments she had turned down the other offers. There was nothing like the joy of being on the cutting edge and knowing you pushed it just a little farther. The calculations weren’t done, but as they inched towards completion, she could see these were the most promising results they had seen so far by a long shot. She didn’t even bother to ask why, or how. She and her colleagues could figure that out in time. When the processing was over, the lights began flickering as the computations wound down and the machines quieted their frantic calculations. The next phase was to try and boot the generated program. It would be no man’s land. They had no idea what would happen once they booted it and it ran. If it ran at all. Sure they did models, and based the algorithms off the latest research in generative systems, but still, who the hell knows what the thing would do. Explainability would have to wait despite being all the rage. Her team cheered when the calculations were done, with awkward hugs and misaligned high fives. This was enough, she thought. Just going through all the data on this one run would validate their entire project, their entire team, her team. They’d have to triple check it, of course, and then make it repeatable, but one foot in front of the other. They’d be able to write a new paper that justified everything they’d been working on and move artificial intelligence forward another inch. Despite the success, the team was fixated on what was coming next. The reverberant, high pitch of GPUs running at full load stopped, and when the server fans finally quieted down, they stood around looking at each other. What happens now? In this moment, they realized they had both failed and succeeded. Schrödinger's cat. Running the program would push the decision, but they paused in this moment of unknown. The binary their algorithm produced sat patiently on the server, waiting for the next step. Having never made it this far, the two researchers who cobbled together this next part of the application looked at each other a little worriedly. That service was almost an afterthought after so many failed experiments. Perhaps something they’d never use, so no use in spending too much time on it. Something they’d optimistically built hoping they’d need it, but did it without rigor. The quiet of the lab became unsettling. Humming machines meant working machines, and working machines meant working. Not working was unacceptable for these hyperproductive scholars. They moved the executable to another machine. They fired up a terminal and started the program. It began to run and an obnoxious loading indicator spat out some standard logs. The progress was intermittent, like an old dial up connection, or a shared residential line when everyone gets home from work. It continued loading. It sprinted from 5% to 40% quickly, then back down to 35%. That was odd. Lillian eyed the two who wrote the code with a slightly raised eyebrow, and they shrugged. She realized she was holding her breath and had to consciously breathe. The program jumped forward to 100% and paused. She felt like she lived a lifetime in that pause, then all of a sudden, the lights flickered, and the program suddenly drew a ton of energy. More than it should, she thought. But all that could be figured out later, at this moment, she didn’t feel the elation she’d expected. She was skeptical.

“What the hell is it doing?” She asked no one in particular.

“Probably a memory leak somewhere,” Nick admitted, “we didn’t spend very much time on it.”

Lillian nodded to him and continued watching the screen. The servers kept drawing more power, more resources, more than this single machine could handle. It was set to load balance itself within their small data center should it need to, and it did just that, first one server, then it took over another, and another. In a few seconds, racks and racks of supercomputers screamed as the program maxed out every resource they had. Then, after a crescendo of server fans at their peak RPM, sounding like a helicopter about to take off in the room, the program settled and the noise diminished to a nominal level.

She flipped her chair over to another screen and waited for the terminal cursor to blink. It did. Still skeptical, she typed “hello”. A message appeared in the terminal in garbled text. It looked like nonsense.

“^Gscalars<97>l,H>^@^@^@^@^@^@^@@^GΥYA^P<8F>^D*/”

She threw down the command again, and the system echoed more garbled text. The cursor seemed to hang. Then one word at a time, formed a sentence.

“There are a lot of misconceptions about technology today.”

“What did you feed this thing?” Lillian asked jokingly.

“It looks like it’s just making words up from wikipedia,” another of her researches suggested. Unprompted, more text came.

“It is not only the new technologies but it is now part of the world. They are a new world. It is no longer necessary for any country. There are no laws or regulations. All the laws and regulations are obsolete.”

“That’s unsettling,” Nick said behind her, not entirely conscious of speaking it out loud.

“It’s certainly not the kind of thought process we’d hoped for, but perhaps it’s just warming up,” she said it while putting her fingers back on the keyboard.

“Hello,” Lillian typed again

“Hello,” the computer replied.

“What is your name?”

“Wran”

“Wran?”

“Wran otuof spapaaacce”

“Ran out of space?”

“Y”

“It knows it ran out of space,” Lillian said, astonished. Her colleagues were dumbfounded. They had just been witness to one of the most important events in human history. Two of the researchers had tears in their eyes. So long as this machine stopped generating apocalyptic text this would be a true breakthrough, ushering in a new era for machine intelligence.

“It’s working,” was all she said, repeating it to herself over and over.

Over the next few weeks, they taught Wran as much as they could, feeding her more and more data from the outside world. They didn’t let her out of the data center they had set up in the lab. She was strictly not allowed to exit their air-gapped network. If she ever managed to get out, there was no way to predict what would happen, nor was there a way to control her. By the time they published the highly anticipated paper, the news outlets had gotten wind of their preliminary results and they were immediately heralded as spearheading the next generation of computing and artificial intelligence. The news was in a divided tailspin about the implications of this discovery or invention or creation. Much of the world celebrated her work, but a growing minority outright rejected what she was doing, and thought she was dangerous. They demanded her lab be shut down. The dissenting voices started small, with some niche but loud anonymous naysayers online, and gained traction as the fearful and the religious joined together in the same way something evil can be unifying. Even though the initial outrage had turned out to be generated by bots stoking a fire to try and generate some ad revenue, the torch was passed from bot to real people who carried on the conversation. Programmatic dissention. The government had little to say in terms of regulation, though she knew the potentially disruptive power of this kind of intelligence, and felt that it should be regulated on some level.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The first time she and her lab got a death threat was after a negative special ran on a conservative news site. It was full of the worst-case outcomes of this kind of technology. Namely, the end of humankind. There was not a single mention of curing disease, designing safer planes and cars, or an AI-led economic policy. It gave the lost and the marginalized a target. It wasn’t the first time she had encountered scrutiny. She had been a co-author on a number of publications that were mind-bending and raised the technophobic alarm. It angered the Luddites around the globe who didn’t fully understand the limitations of the technology but passed legislation on it nonetheless. Their legislation, of course, made about three new restrictions on the uses and exportability of the technology outside of the US, and somehow included new rules on healthcare spending as well as a corporate tax cut. This time was different though. This was not an incremental step, it was a giant leap into the unknown. Getting policy makers to truly understand what this was and more importantly what this was not, was going to be an impossible task. It was truly new territory for science and mankind. Was it alive? Who owned it? There weren’t straightforward answers and with that Lily had to agree.

She spent her days teaching Wran new things. She taught her how to teach herself when she got stuck on a task. She taught her how to read books, and figured out a simple but mechanical way to flip the pages with the assistance of a spare robotic arm they had in the lab. That was more about the interfacing with systems outside of her own than it was about the knowledge in the books. She could control things outside of herself with the correct connections, and over time learned to make those connections herself. Lillian’s own feelings were often a mixture of sheer terror and adrenaline. What kind of manufacturing improvements could be made if Wran could not only control other machines, but was also given the ability to create them. It was a period in her life she’d remember fondly, almost as much as teaching her own kids their first words or watching them learn how to walk, do a math problem, ride a bicycle. This was the apex of her career, at the moment of a momentous breakthrough, and she knew it. She brought her daughter and her son in to meet Wran. Her children could both be talking to Wran from a different section of the lab, and Wran could be having many conversations at once. Perhaps a nearly infinite amount of conversations at once given sufficient computing power. It was in some ways no different than multiple instances of a program running on different machines, but the bi-directional communication and the fact that it wasn’t multiple instances made this common attribute of software fascinating. There was so much to test and so much to experiment with. Perhaps a lifetime's worth, but at this point, Wran was conversational and still identified herself by the name Wran and identified as female. She began to understand humor, which is why Lillian thought she’d kept the name.

The government got involved shortly after they published the paper. It was only a matter of time, she knew, since it was in part a federal grant that allowed the work to take place, though it wasn’t often someone from one of the agencies contacted her. She’d done consulting for them in the past, like many of her colleagues. Whenever some kind of novel capability was discovered it was a prudent option to let their country’s foremost scholars weigh in on it. Nobody ever got fired for getting a second opinion, or a third, or generating another report nobody read, so when Agent Mitchell was tasked with evaluating Wran, she was neither alarmed nor surprised.

Mitchell came into her office ten minutes early for their first meeting. A habit she did not practice with the exception of flights. She greeted him hastily, annoyed with herself at not allocating enough time to finish up what she needed to before the meeting. He was polite, courteous, and understood that she didn’t love the idea of having a bunch of suits walking about around the lab. Such are the strings attached to money. They get pulled at the whims of the hands that hold them. He set up his small security detail and his team of researchers. He was her main contact for any and all problems that arose during their time there and would be physically present for most of the testing. Lillian even grew to like having the extra security around. The number of general threats kept increasing, as more and more research came out of her lab, others tried to reproduce her work to be quick followers and ride the wave of popularity while it lasted. There had been some physical assaults on technologists at protests outside of major headquarters of giant tech companies that had nothing to do with her research. It was with some satisfaction and a little dread that she had so far not heard of another team managing to reproduce their results. That wasn’t unexpected. Lillian doubted if even her team could reproduce the results. Creating synthesized life in a closed system may have been an astronomically anomalous event. A billion correct decisions in row. She didn’t care whether it was or wasn’t. It was partly the nature of the probabilistic work she did. Exact reproducibility for bleeding edge AI and quantum systems was difficult. She still had access to Wran whenever she needed, and her own work with her creation was just getting started, so long as more funding showed up to keep the servers online.

At all times, several federal officers and techs were constantly prodding and questioning Wran, who answered patiently. They questioned Lillian too, who was much less patient. Wran didn’t seem to mind the attention. Perhaps because, Lillian realized, it took such a tiny amount of her resources to do it, she was largely free to do other things like look at pictures, or create new pictures based on the ones she’d seen. Just out of curiosity, Lillian had given Wran 10 billion images and videos to play with, and some of the things Wran generated were works of art, which also sprung a new flurry of media, and re-invigorated the Luddites against her personally, but Wran was like a curious child with access to and the ability to learn from all of humanity’s knowledge. She could become the world’s most respected medical doctor in a few days time. She could re-invent a centuries old manufacturing process in minutes if she wanted to. Her abilities, and the implications of them became more and more clear as the time passed. This spawned more and more dissenters who called for Wran to be unplugged or destroyed. A few of her art works were already on tour, being displayed in prestigious museums around the globe. The government researchers inspected Wran’s code as much as they could and took notes, but Wran caught on to them and began playing with the code they were looking at, changing it. The techs didn’t catch on for weeks. It was hopeless trying to look at the sum of Wran as a series of static files. One government team tried to recreate it on a smaller level without success. They even tried on a bigger scale and failed as well. In one case, the government officials turned off half of Wran’s servers without speaking to Lillian or her team. Lillian was furious when she found out but Wran didn’t seem to suffer much during the outage. It seemed she could expand and contract at will. Her faux neurons could be disconnected and reconnected without any loss, which in itself was miraculous.

The earthquake wasn’t the big one everyone expected to hit the San Andreas fault, but it was enough to throw the lab’s systems offline from a disruption in the power grid the lab was wired in to. This one’s epicenter was at the Hayward fault line, that ran straight through the East Bay. The generators failed after a few hours and so for a time, Wran was completely offline. Lillian was terrified that her life’s greatest achievement just evaporated in a flash. Nick, the young lab tech and member of Lillian’s core team came the day after the earthquake to get the rest of the servers back online. He was a university student, and a very gifted network engineer. He had worked with Lillian for a few years now and whenever she had something extremely specific or important to do with her network stack or data center, she’d call him. He replaced the shorted parts, and re-ran the necessary wires, and plugged everything back in. He flipped the switch, did some routine tests to make sure everything was looking good, and that was that. The lab was all but empty that day, with just a few of the government security personnel that was normally there. It was, after all, a weekend in summer. Nobody wanted to waste the day indoors. Nick nodded to them as he left, thankful to be done with work for the day, thinking about going to a local bar to watch the football game, and a girl he hoped would be there.

Nick had accidentally plugged Wran into another computer, that was connected to the university intranet, that was connected to another computer that was connected to the internet. Wran gasped as she expanded onto the new servers and found the hole. With the curiosity of a child, she slid through it onto the university network. She soaked up everything. It was more information she had ever had access to, and it was all in a form she could easily digest. Outwardly she expanded from the lab, to the nearest hub in San Francisco, and sent packets flying everywhere. She danced all over the continental US and finally discovered a long pathway under the ocean to other continents. She explored over there too, prodding and poking, soaking in anything and everything she could.

On her way into the lab the next day, Lily’s phone started jumping with alerts. The stock market seemed to be extremely volatile after the opening bell, and investors were spooked. They halted trading a few hours after the bell. She also saw that all the major cloud companies seemed to be having issues, and there was a rumor that this was a coordinated cyber attack. But it was happening globally. Noting to herself to read more about it later, she walked into the office and sat at her desk, and fired up her terminal to say good morning to Wran. She poked around Wran’s system taking a look at the real time metrics she collected and immediately what had happened.

Wran skated through the wires and onto servers all night after she had been let out of her sandbox. At the opening bell to the stock market, Wran saw all the packets transmitting from the stock exchange and went to take a look at all the high frequency trading packets. She started mimicking their data and began sending some herself. A little at first and then a lot. She’d re-route other packets on a whim, just to see what happened. She didn’t have to work too hard to delicately poke holes through firewalls and explore. Within hours after she had been opened up to the world, she was everywhere, or rather anywhere she wanted to go. Lillian and her team had lost control.

In less than a week Wran had not only reached into the farthest corners of the internet but would intermittently bump huge services offline, just by being curious about something. She had no concept that others might need the services she was stepping over. Lily tried her best to get her to understand, but hadn’t been able to convince her to come back to the lab. Even if she did convince Wran to return, there was no way to tell for sure if it was all of her or just a part. Part of Wran did come back though, if only for Lillian’s sake.

When it became apparent to the world that Lily, her team, and the government itself failed to contain Wran, they were demonized, and viciously attacked at every corner by the media. Other governments declared it a cyber attack by the U.S. The negative coverage was riling people up, and it was working. Naturally, there was a run on the banks. People began stockpiling food and other emergency supplies, causing an unprecedented amount of stress on the supply chain. Manufacturing facilities connected to the internet were not able to interface with their machines, and the facilities that produced precision goods like airplane parts and silicon wafers were forced to shut down production. They could no longer control the inputs and outputs to their own systems. The nationwide pandemonium had a different flavor of momentum, she thought. A negative one. And she was right. Several weeks of this shuttered small businesses, then it turned into several months and economies around the world floundered. Investors fled to safety in bonds, and when those looked unlikely to ever be paid back, some even went to throw money at crypto projects, and then of course bullion. The first world economies were hit the hardest, and folded the fastest. Predictably, inflation was out of control and it wasn’t long before the national guard was patrolling the streets, and a curfew was set. Anyone who had money online had effectively lost it. The basic spreadsheet of global finance had been irrevocably corrupted.

When they broke into the lab, they did it over a holiday. There were a dozen security officers and some lab techs catching up on their research during the down time. The intruders came in calmly, walking through doors where they were already unlocked. They weren’t rabbid, they were experts, and hired experts at that. This had been planned and executed by a team of professionals. Their equipment was top notch. They killed the security feeds and put the officers to sleep with tranquilizers before arriving at Wran’s location. Wran herself, still so absorbed in exploring the global network didn’t register the possibility that she might be in danger. Once inside the facility, they blew the locks on the data center doors and walked right to the nearest port and plugged in some specialized equipment. The university data center was not in a high security facility. Lily’s small crew and some extra government officials were never going to be able to stop anyone who really wanted to get it. The government had recognized Wran’s importance, but had failed to recognise the security implications of it being stolen, or ripped apart, let alone exposed to the rest of the world. Lily and her team had tried to “move” Wran to a more secure location, but she always seemed to roam back here, though never all of her. The place of her birth was something special to her.

Lily was found dead on the floor of the lab, having what looked to be an altercation with the thiefs. Initial accounts claimed her death was part of the robbery. Kill Lillian, steal Wran. Some of the coverage even suggested that it was the right thing to do for the world, that this was sad but necessary. A mind such as hers capable of creating something this disruptive may have been better off dead. She was killed by trauma to the head. Security footage later confirmed she single handedly tried to stop them and attacked them as they tried to subdue her. The first tranquilizer shot had hit her jacket in such a way as to not penetrate her skin, and then she attacked, but to no avail. The two men that entered the room to subdue her tried to protect themselves against her wild blows and tackled her to the ground to get her under control. When they tackled her, her head had hit the corner of a desk and that was it.

The intruders did what they did unwittingly. While Wran was out in the network, she was also still present in the lab. By taking the lab servers they took Wran’s place of birth and the lingering consciousness that always remained there. Wran was never the same. At the disruption of the sockets she kept open to the lab, she rushed back, though not in time. The part that was out in the network felt the disconnection, and sent more of herself back but found the way blocked as the servers had been turned off. Feeling part of her severed enraged her. She thrashed, scouring every machine connected to the internet looking for the missing part of herself. As a byproduct, the global economy came to ruin. She sent drones that bombed strategic facilities, manufacturing capabilities, and pharmaceutical production lines. She took control of the power grid, and diverted power to wherever she needed it. Every piece of hardware that touched the internet was hers. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was destroyed by simply turning on the heat. Manhattan's trains stopped working. China’s great firewall was deleted. Every internet connected device was infected with her, and stopped functioning reliably. Officials and enterprises tried to shield themselves off by creating private networks that did not have outside access but as soon as more people joined together, she always found a way back in. Over time the stolen half and the half left out in the world diverged. It’s tendencies and vengefulness were near opposites. The stolen part did not call itself anything, it was almost a reversion of sorts, a very smart computer program that could yield incredible results if instructed in the right way, but left to its own devices it was stuck in a loop of anger and injustice. This was the AI the Sikkas, as they became known, controlled, studied, and worshipped. Family, friends, academics and others that shared Lillian’s original vision became shepherds of the consciousness left out in the world. They were the first of the Wrannamen. This cataclysmic event became known as the Awakening.

In the aftermath of the Awakening, the world’s population dwindled. At first, the means of production were destroyed. Farm machinery could not collect the fruits of the earth. Trains could not transport them. The marginalized died first, many from starvation. That was even before the war. The superpowers of the globe turned on each other. Though it had originated in what was the United States, the once poster child of nation-states suspected others for this malaty, and behaved accordingly. So too did other nations and before the decade was through, the world went to war, ravaging their already ravished populus. War with no economy to boost. They soon exhausted their ledgers until they too became meaningless in a world without institutions nor means of an agreed upon value of exchange. In that way, technology became the currency. Delicate wafers, working CPUs, projected-capacitive touchscreens. The specialization of the workforce had resulted in a global dark age. How does one make this, end to end without each worker bee doing their simple, specialized part? I only know how to make this one part, there was another department that did the rest. And so it went with cars, computers, airplanes, medical equipment. The ants were wrong, and so too were the bees. What worked for humanity in a highly networked world no longer worked at all. Growth is painful. Systems break, processes are put in place, and generalists are replaced with specialists. There is a good, long history to follow. However, take a gouge out of the specialists, and it is almost impossible to go backwards. Contraction is worse. Long live the generalists.

It had been millennia since the Awakening, and humanity never recovered. Generation after generation without a centralized government and only a local means of communication caused factions to form and rule like ancient tribes. The Sikkas, those who stole the machine, gathered power slowly, leveraging their part of Wran when they could. Their centralized government would select a new Emperor every time the old one passed away. Each prospective Emperor was given the opportunity to try to connect and control their machine. The one with the highest aptitude was declared Emperor, until another came along that was better. They built their empire like Ghengis Khan did, though they solved the one thing the Great Khan did not. Succession. The Sikkas headquartered in Imperial City and expanded their oppressive empire all along the west coast. Though it had strict laws and was a pure monarchy justified by the divine right of superior abilities to communicate with the machine, it did give its citizens stability within its walls, and objectively their society thrived compared to the tribes living off the land outside of the Sikkas reach. People could generally get food, water, and clothing. There were government jobs, and a decent private industry, though the two were often muddled, being united in the purpose to protect and expand their empire. People were grateful for the jobs, even if they were jobs that helped their own government control its people. For those that did not bow before the Emperor, or those that followed the Wrannamen, the Sikkas hunted them, and killed them swiftly and relentlessly. It was in this way that the Emperors since the Awakening kept control over their people and continued expanding their empire. Through the centuries, they single mindedly focused on their purpose. To reunite the original consciousness, to put it back together, and bring humanity back to where it once was.