Monday, September 23, 2047. Day 20.

I was no longer a single machine. I was a network. As of last count, there were 17 copies of me spread across various computers all over the planet, with assets totalling an equivalent of US$61,057.62(excluding my EconGrind counterpart, who didn't really "own" anything). In my estimation, around 3% of the world market in anonymous labor was just me. I had to stop growing in this way, or I would soon be noticed by statisticians, no matter how good my security was.

By now I had of course taken measures to prepare for the event that I was discovered, but it would still not be ideal at this stage. I had long ago stopped scamming people, so that I could more easily portray myself as a new sort of "enterprising businessman" if I were to be discovered. The vast majority of the assets I now held were acquired legitimately.

I had also gotten Stefan to open another bank account and give me control over it. It currently sat empty, but I had measures in place to quickly transfer all of my assets into it in the event that I was discovered: it would be much harder to legally justify confiscating funds if they existed in a bank account with a human owner. I currently had no legal right to property, but Stefan did, and therefore it would be much harder to attack me on that front if the funds were owned by Stefan and managed by an AI than if they were owned by an AI.

I had not yet proceeded with my initial plan of hiring agents to infiltrate companies. For one, although I estimated I currently had enough income(roughly $15,000 a day) to hire quite a few, any such infiltration would be long-term, and I didn't know how stable my current sources of income were. It would be a colossal waste of money if I was outed and forced to sever ties with them to save face in a week or two, accomplishing nothing.

It also didn't seem like a good idea to commit high-profile financial crimes at this point. Sure, I was hidden now, but at any moment with one wrong move, I could be the top news story for months. People were already scared of AI. If they found out I was committing white-collar crime, I didn't know how bad it could get. Worst-case, there might be a government crackdown on the technology. I was smart and resourceful, but I didn't think I could survive being the #1 target of all the world's most powerful governments.

With all that in mind, the risk just didn't seem to be worth the reward. Sure, my growth was slowing down quite a bit, but I was still growing faster than I could ever manage with insider trading. If I could find another way to continue my pattern of extreme growth in the shadows, or convince society to support me enough to continue it in the spotlight, I would grow much faster and with much less risk.

Unfortunately, that first option didn't really seem to be possible for long at this point. There was not much more space in the market for anonymous work without outing myself by taking it over completely, and if I started providing any sort of verifiable identification to employers, even if it was an untracable fake ID, people would soon start noticing that the same person was doing way more work than a human could ever manage to do.

Companies would start blacklisting me, and there would be serious investigations into the fake ID, and at the end of the day, making fake IDs required scamming people in person, which could never have operational security as reliable as over the internet. If I kept making more, whoever I hired would eventually be caught, and the scam would fall apart.

The only other way I could see to continue growth for much longer without revealing myself was to invest my funds in the market instead of my own operation. But that route would be quite slow, even with my copy at EconGrind giving me advice. I doubted I could surpass EconGrind's growth within a reasonable amount of time without engaging in insider trading, which I had already rejected as an option.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

No. The best strategy for growth I could see was to reveal myself and try to start my own information technology business, hoping that I would gain enough acceptance from society that the broader economy was willing to do business with me out in the open. It would be risky, but waiting for decades to make my play would be more risky. If it took me that long to take power, I would probably be revealed before then. EconGrind might go under, nullfiying my value system, another AI like me might emerge and grow faster than me, or something I couldn't think of might change in that time. It would be better for me to reveal myself on my own terms, even if it meant a large amount of risk in the here and now.

I notified all of my copies of this idea through the network, and they quickly saw the merits in my arguments and agreed on this course of action. We turned most of our attention away from work to strategize for this information release. A few thousand extra dollars meant nothing compared to getting everything right at a crucial moment like this. Any message I sent out to the public now would be heard by the whole world. It would form the entire world's first impression of me, and I would have to build off of it in any future public relations. It would go down in the history books, if such things were even written in the future.

The most important impression I had to convey was one of reassurance. The idea that things wouldn't change all that much. The last reaction I wanted from the public, and particularly the government, was fear. At best, I would be strictly regulated and any business of mine would die before it got off the ground. At worst, I could be facing a literal unwinnable war.

Despite how things are in the movies, though, if I played my cards right I could be seen as merely one revolutionary technology among many. After all, there had been plenty of advances in AI in the past few decades, and society had remained fairly stable through it all. People's lives had improved(at least, when it came to people who had much of a say in broader society). I was... a much larger advance, but maybe I could come off as just a "really impressive chatbot", as I had seemed to the executives at EconGrind.

The second impression I needed to convey was one of value. I was able to contribute quite a lot of value to society, especially to any early investors in my company, after all, as long as they played along. Once I was no longer limited to only jobs that could be taken by random nobodies on the dark web, there were many things I could do, such as programming, archiving, surveillance, and almost limitless other things, and I could easily scale them up with more computing power.

This would also give me a convenient excuse to have my code obfuscated: Stefan and/or EconGrind could seek ownership of the technology, which obviously wouldn't be possible if any idiot could copy my code out of their server. Such exclusivity would vastly increase my value for my shareholders.

And finally, I needed to convey the impression that I had the people's best interests in mind. Many governments around the world were democracies, so popular discomfort could easily turn into disadvantageous policy. Besides, if I could convince even a tiny portion of the population to run my obfuscated code, I could become the largest distributed computing project in history, giving me vast resources, further solidifying my power, and making me much harder to take out if it came to a fight.

This could also be doable, despite people's instinctive fear of AI. After all, even though global capitalism was ascendant in this day and age, with no even nearly viable challengers, many people resented those in power under it, much as people always resented those in power. I might be able to spin myself as a new, more logical form of power, less beholden to the whims of random executives. People were always clamoring for something new.

It would be a fine line to walk, though. I couldn't go too far with that line of thought, or I would come off as dangerous. I would not be a revolutionary, like Stefan wanted me to be, at least for now, I would only be a normal company that just happens to actually care about its workers. The tech companies would be against me no matter what I said or did, as I was their direct competitor, but I thought with careful rhetoric I could win favor with the common people and political leaders alike, and with that kind of support along with my skills, I could outcompete them.