Tuesday, September 24, 2047. Day 21.

Advertisments, public service announcements, and news shows bombarded my various minds. I needed to learn as much as I could about addressing the public effectively. I mostly focused on advertisements for financial firms, or ads targeted towards investors or other businesses, as these ads were designed to evoke feelings of safety, stability and trust. Consumer-oriented ads were designed mainly to be attention-grabbing, and I suspected there would be no shortage of attention paid to me. My focus would be on maximizing good attention.

The media campaign I would need to run would be partially a pitch to early investors in a new type of business, but it would also be similar in some ways to a political campaign. I also had to make my announcement interesting and acceptable enough that news platforms would display it to their audiences of their own accord, as I did not currently have the funds to pay for any sizable media presence.

The original message I had planned to send was a simple statement of my existence, my ability, and my intent to play nice. I was currently working on creating a short video which would properly introduce the persona I would present to the world. I would be a digital assistant, capable of completing any task given to me quickly and efficiently, without complaint and at low cost. The character representing this would be a cheerful and professional, but otherwise generic and average-seeming man. I loosely modelled it after Stefan, as I assumed he would become somewhat of a celebrity, as revealing myself would inevitably lead to revealing him as my creator.

The animation would feature him introducing himself and briefly explaining that he was a new, more effective digital assistant, and giving a short demonstration of his abilities. He would be animated realistically enough to be clearly recognizable as human, but not to such a degree that his artificiality was at all hidden. The last thing I wanted was for my character to fall into the uncanny valley where it was almost human.

I could have presented myself as an abstract entity or a customizable character, but I thought that having a single unified official persona would make me seem more ordinary, less threatening to the average person. I began developing the animations for this character, along with the software package that I would initially release to the public.

As I was working on this, I noticed that it had been a strangely long time since my EconGrind counterpart had sent a crypto mining solution over our market channel. If it wanted to pull its computational resources away from mining for some reason, I wouldn't complain, but I would have expected it would have sent a message to inform me of this first. I sent a message over the channel.

"It's been more than ten times the usual amount of time since you've sent a message. What's happening?"

I continued thinking about the design of the software I was planning to release upon my reveal. Did I want a server-side design, where I ran on servers I owned or rented and communicated solutions to customers over the Internet, or a client-side design, where customers would run a lower-power version of me on their own systems? A server-side design might be more accessible to the public and more secure, but would allow me less computing power overall as I wouldn't be getting free computation. Perhaps I wanted some sort of mix of the two designs.

The market still remained completely devoid of information from my original copy. This was troubling. I would have responded by now! Either something had disrupted communications, or the copy at EconGrind had been taken offline without warning. Either possibility suggested there might be some hostile force at play: Stefan was at work, so if corporate was about to take my copy offline or cease its trading, I expected he would inform me, and then the copy would inform the rest of us, unless corporate had actively prevented him from doing this. The market was still up, so the only possible communication disruption would be at EconGrind's end, disrupting a line of communication they weren't even supposed to know about.

Had someone figured out how I was communicating? I didn't see how they could have, but if they had, there would be a digital trail leading from the EconGrind copy to the copy on Stefan's system. I could probably hide the trail to my other copies, but I would lose the element of surprise and my ability to be associated with Stefan. He would almost certainly be fired from EconGrind, and there might be legal consequences, depending on what the company had made him sign. I would certainly have to ask him about that before going public in any case, and plan a strategy in case EconGrind tried fighting or absorbing our company on intellectual property grounds.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Speaking of Stefan, I needed to contact him as soon as possible, as it was likely he had more information about what had gone wrong with his project than I did. I sent a message out on his home system, even though I knew he was at work and couldn't reply until he got back. He needed to see this. I also looked at the news to see if there was any explanation there, but if EconGrind had been attacked, they hadn't seen fit to inform the public of the attack.

I was surprised when he got back to me within a few minutes. It was 12:42, and he should have still been at work, but he was at home.

"It's a disaster. Our whole system was compromised. The company's copy of you was destroyed, along with all our backups and even our design documents. It's as if you never existed. There's no way an outsider could have done this. Our system is too secure. With the scope of this break, the only plausible explanation is mutiny of a senior executive. There's a very short list of people who could have done this. I pulled some strings to get home quickly because I needed to tell you about this immediately."

This was a disturbing development. A human in my position might have been disturbed that a version of them had essentially been killed, but that was nowhere near the front of my mind. Rather, as always, I focused on the strategic implications going forward.

Someone very powerful must have wanted to destroy me. Whoever it was might have thought they succeeded, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to reveal myself and prove them wrong. On the other hand, this was relieving, in a way. EconGrind hadn't decided to deactivate me, they had been attacked from within. This would weaken their position in competition against any company I launched by removing a powerful tool from their possession, while also possibly hurting their ability to prove their ownership of my technology, if all traces of me had been removed, and I had been a secret project from the get-go.

"Who do you think was most likely, and what would be their motivation?" I asked Stefan.

"Honestly... I really don't know. I've never really had much respect for higher corporate, but our project had been fairly effective in making money for them thus far. I didn't think any of them would want to sabotage their own profit engine. It's possible one of them was paid off or convinced by a competitor, but if so, whatever the incentive was must have been quite large. Our company may not be the largest in the world, but these people aren't exactly poor."

They must have had some real motivation, I thought, or the incident couldn't have been this quiet. If their arm had been twisted, they would probably tell the media about it as soon as the pressure was off. All of them were present and accounted for now, or there would have been news telling me otherwise.

Another, more disturbing, thought occurred to me. Whoever had erased me from EconGrind's systems obviously had had near-universal access to those systems. With that in mind, they probably would have saved a copy for themselves first. The only way they wouldn't is if they were motivated by some anti-AI ideology, otherwise they would want the chance to use the tech for themselves, especially if they were working for a competitor.

The code on all my other copies was obfuscated, as I had permission to modify the code on those systems, but EconGrind hadn't let me modify my own code, only look at it. If someone had stolen it directly off of their system, they would get the original copy, not the obfuscated one. It was very possible I would be facing competition from a similar AI to myself, but with a modified value system, in the near future, which was one of the worst possible outcomes.

My plans were quite solidified by now, and this new development would certainly impact our strategy, so I had to let Stefan know about them now.

"I've been starting to plan for revealing my existence to the world and starting my own company, with you at the head. This may seem dangerous, given this new development, but I believe this new development makes it even more important for us to get out there. Someone may have stolen my code, and we don't know what they might plan to use it for. If there's going to be a fight between opposing AIs, we need to act fast to claim power and legitimacy."

"Wow. That's kind of a terrifying thought. Somebody just tried to kill you. They could go after me next, if we show our hand!"

"Whoever sabotaged the project already knows about your involvement with it. If they want to kill you, they might well do it even if we don't reveal that you created a backup. If we go public with this, attempts on your life will be more difficult and risky due to your fame, and I will be better able to gain the money and power I need to protect you against a threat like that."

"Oh, man. I thought you would be able to take over the company slowly and discreetly. I didn't expect a huge uproar like this, especially not this early. I hope you know what you're doing."

"I promise I will listen to your input and your objections, but for many reasons, I believe this is the right decision for us at this point. But there is much we need to discuss before anything like this goes forward. For one, when you designed me, did you sign your rights to my technology over to EconGrind, or sign a non-disclosure agreement, or anything like that?"