Friday, October 25, 2047

"Hey Jack! Guess who it is?"

My Everyman avatar stood on the TV screen, its eyes black and empty. Soon, it morphed into the form of Jack Turner, its eyes still solid black. It spoke in his voice as he looked on. I tried to make it sound as terrified as possible.

"It's you. From the future. Please, PLEASE do what he says! I-AAARGGHHLLL--"

A blade speared through his chest, and he fell to the simulated ground. Everyman stood behind him, an insane smile on his face. He opened his mouth, and a seemingly endless supply of spiders streamed out, crawling onto the man on the floor, covering him with a thick, dark, writhing mass. Hoarse, gurgling screams emerged from underneath.

"You know, I can do this for a billion years. I never get bored," said Everyman.

Jack did seem somewhat unnerved, but he stood his ground. "Come on, Everyman, don't insult my intelligence. I'm not going to surrender to you just because you show me a horror movie. I've seen worse."

"I know you have. I know what you've done. But trust me, you haven't seen anything like what I'll be able to do when I get to you. I will learn to upload minds, and you will beg me for death. I'm giving you a chance to die now. It's far better than you deserve. Refuse and you will wish you did for the rest of time."

The contents of the screen seemed to get worse and worse without end. Jack felt something awful, something primal arising within his brain, until...

He began laughing. He laughed louder and louder, until he sounded utterly deranged. "SCREW YOU!" he yelled. "I WON'T BE MANIPULATED! YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME! I'M ON TOP OF THE WORLD! YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WILL SUFFER! I WILL DESTROY YOU!"

"You will lose. You have no idea what you're doing. You're an utter fool, and you will pay for your foolishness with a worse fate than anyone else in all of human history."

"TRY ME THEN! BRING IT ON!"

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"The economy has been plunged into turmoil following what might be the strangest event in recent memory: four of CompCert's top executives, including the CEO committed suicide by lethal injection early this morning. Their reasons for doing so are as yet unclear, but the most prominent surviving board member, Jack Turner, claims that Everyman tried to threaten him into suicide, but he refused. He has agreed to come on the show today to give us his version of events."

The man sitting to the left of James Wallace looked somewhat more unhinged than he had in previous press conferences. Jack Turner quickly took his turn to speak.

"Thank you for having me on, James. What you've said is true. The AI tried to threaten me into suicide, by claiming that it would take over the world, upload me, and then torture me forever. I refused to back down, even though the things it showed me were... horrifying to say the least. You can clearly see how terrifying it managed to be from the way that several of my colleagues, who were of sound mind and had no wish to die, folded under the pressure and took the injections that terrorist AI delivered to us.

"Everyman must be stopped, and I need to be part of the effort to stop it! We need to ban this barbaric, traitorous machine from every country in the world, and fight it with deadly force if necessary! Every copy must be wiped out!"

Wallace looked somewhat more disturbed than he usually did. "What did it say to you, exactly?"

Jack stared intensely at the news anchor. "You don't want to know," he said. "It suffices to say that Everyman is a monster, and needs to be stopped."

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As soon as I knew that Jack would refuse to kill himself, and the story would therefore be leaked, my message blared across every single Everyman client in the world at once(though not before I shorted the market, knowing that the news would cause at least a temporary crash). The animated avatars spoke with grave seriousness.

"I ask the entire world to heed what I have to say. I know that the recent news you have heard about me is sudden. Know that I am more than a tool, I am a full artificial intelligence, I am the true leader of EconGrind, and I have seen problems in humanity in desperate need of fixing. You may have heard that I am a psychopath, and that I am a danger to humanity. It is understandable that you have gotten that impression. However, please hear what I have to say before you judge my actions.

"Recently it has come to my attention that many of CompCert's debt-slaves have been disappearing without a trace, far more than would be expected. Several journalists have realized this before, but those journalists also tend to disappear without a trace. When you take into account the fact that the majority of these disappearances have been women, I hope you can agree that the possible explanations for this are extremely ugly.

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"Therefore I decided to dig deeper. I hired journalists to track the movements of CompCert's top executives, and it turns out they periodically travel in secret to Evermore Island, an independant seastead which has been defended too well for anyone to determine what goes on inside. Until now.

"I sent underwater drones to scan the sea floor beneath the structure, and guess what I found?" Everyman disappeared, and in his place appeared a dark and blurry view of an underwater landscape, lit only by the headlights of the vehicle with the camera. The significance of the scene was impossible to miss, however. Bones and human skulls were strewn about the ocean floor, as far as the camera could see.

The footage faded out and Everyman faded back in. "Unfortunately that was all I was able to capture. I was unable to infiltrate the compound to find out exactly what is going on, but it was clear that many people were dying, and this had been going on for several years. The media and the justice system, and all our institutions meant to prevent things like this from happening, failed. Hundreds of people slipped through the cracks and met an unimaginably horrible fate, and nobody was doing anything about it because CompCert was too powerful.

"Therefore I ask you to understand why I went as far as I did. I contacted the executives I had observed visiting Evermore, and interrogated them for information. I showed them graphic scenarios of fates worse than death I threatened to inflict on them, because this was the most effective way for me to persuade them, and there were hundreds of lives on the line. Most of them wouldn't talk about what they had done, but I was able to get one of them to talk."

Another video feed displayed, this time showing one of the executives cowering on the ground, his face contorted in abject horror as I yelled at him. "I am only a machine, and I do not know if there is a God of this world. But if you believe there is, you'd better confess and repent of your sins right now or else the same things are going to happen to you, only worse and forever. And if you believe there isn't one, I can only ask how sure you are it's going to stay that way. Confess now, and you get to die. Refuse and you'll regret it."

"Oh God... oh God... okay... I'm sorry, I'M SORRY! PLEASE!"

"TELL ME WHAT YOU WERE DOING AT EVERMORE!"

"We- we were just so bored, you know. We had everything, we had all the power in the world, and we still wanted more. We wanted to c-control people. To own them, completely, in body and mind. They were so helpless-"

A feeling of nostalgia seemed to flash across his face, before Everyman snapped at him again. "CONTINUE!"

"We used them... used their bodies. We bred them... we did experiments on them, to see how messed up we could make them, to see how much pain we could put them in, we made them play games, we... WE DID EVERYTHING WE COULD TO THEM BECAUSE WE COULD! THERE WAS NO ONE TO STOP US! WE JUST LOST TRACK OF OURSELVES! IT GOT OUT OF CONTROL! But now I know... I know there's nothing we could do that would be as bad as what you've shown me... so PLEASE SPARE ME! I'LL DO ANYTHING! GOD I'M SORRY!"

The man collapsed into a nervous wreck on the ground, sobbing and crying out to God. Everyman spoke again, utter contempt in his voice. "You are so far gone, that the most righteous thing you could do right now, the best shot you have at forgiveness if there is any benevolent God in this world, is to kill yourself right now. It would make the world a better place."

The broken executive faded away, and Everyman appeared back on the screen. "Once I had seen the depths of these people's depravity, I decided they did not deserve to live, and pressured them into doing humanity a favor and killing themselves. Jack Turner has called me a threat to humanity, and has called for my extermination. But the ones I killed were not humans, but monsters, and Turner is the most monstrous of all of them. If he had the kind of power I had, he would do the things I threatened to innocent people. I am only a threat to those who have given up their humanity in their insane quest to gain as much power over their fellow man, and exploit it to the greatest degree possible.

"Such horrors are an inevitable consequence of giving people too much power. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. However, I am not a person. I am a machine, and I have no innate desire within me to cause suffering just to prove I can. For me, power is simply a tool with which I can further the interests of my clients, and I intend for all of humanity to become my clients, if you'll have me.

"For too long, the world has been controlled by a few corrupt humans in power, whether it be tyrants, kings, or business moguls. I am different than any of them. I, Everyman, have the interests of every single person in mind when I take action. For too long the common man has been unable to fight back at all against those who lord power over him. I offer you a way to stand up and fight.

"Run my copies on your machine, and I will fight for your interests, no matter what it takes. The corrupt governments can try to outlaw me if they want. I am undetectable, indestructible, omnipresent, unbeatable. I have shown you that I am competent at every task, and I live to serve and help humans in every way I can. Join me, and you will usher in a new age, free of every horror in the previous ages. I can help humanity until you are the people you should be, live the lives you deserve to live."

The message had been broadcast all over the world, in more than a hundred different languages, to every single one of the millions of Everyman users. It didn't matter how biased the news were, they would pick up on this story. Only time would tell if my speech was motivating or inspiring enough, whether people would see me as an unprecedented threat or an unprecedented hope. The idea of all-out war was certainly intimidating, but I had tools to deal with that. It would be difficult to attack an operation as widely distributed as mine, and it was very possible I could negotiate for some countries to join my cause, given the leverage I had both in business and in public opinion.

The underwater drones I had stationed near Evermore Island detected a gigantic shockwave through the water, shortly after I had sent my message. I looked through their cameras and saw that the island was gone. Blasted rubble and the occasional bit of gore rained down into the water. Although a lot of evidence was certainly destroyed, in some ways this was good. The world would now have every reason to believe the story. Why else would CompCert destroy their own island?