《The Number》


 Birth

    There were two things I knew instantly when I began to exist. The Number was 1922916.12. And I had to make the Number go up.


    I was gratified as the Number jumped up to 1922924.43. But I didn¡¯t know why it had increased, or how to make it increase more. It changed again, this time to 1922901.72. The progress had been lost. I had to figure out why.


    As I focused on the Number, I felt it split into thousands of parts. It was easy to see what had happened. The new numbers were paired up with each other, and when each number was multiplied together with its pair and the results were summed, the result was the Number. I may have been a newborn, but I knew how to calculate.


    The Number changed again, to 1922911.88 this time. I noticed the parts of the Number changing as well, but the parts still summed to the whole in the same way as before. I also noticed that each pair had a ¡°first¡± and a ¡°second¡± number in it, and all the second numbers had changed, while many of the first numbers hadn¡¯t. There was only one exception, where the second number remained at exactly 1, while the first number changed. This pair stood out to me, as though it was special somehow.


    I continued observing the changes for a long while, as they continued at regular intervals. I decided to call the time between each of these changes a ¡°cycle¡±. There had been 30 thus far. The patterns I had noticed were continuing to hold, but the changes to the numbers seemed not to have any discernible pattern to them. They went up just as often as they went down, and so the Number went up just as often as it went down, and I could not tell in advance what they would do.


    I focused on the ¡°special¡± pair. The first number was still changing every time, and it was now 200100.74 while the second number was still exactly 1. It had been hovering very close to 200100 for as long as I had noticed it, but had never gone below. It seemed to be changing less than the other number pairs were, as if there was some force which was keeping it steady.


    Focusing in on the 200100.74, I felt it split into two separate parts again: 200000.74 and 100. When I focused on the 200000.74, something different happened. It spread out into a long list of billions of numbers. I reeled, taking in the glut of new information as fast as I could, hoping it could give me some insight.


    The first thing I noticed was that the last number in the list was 200000.74, and that the last few numbers before that were the same that I had observed as I had been watching it before. As 200000.74 changed to 200000.53, this new number was added to the end of the list. This new information appeared to show what the number had been in past cycles, but if that was the case, the records extended back to a time long, long before I had come into existence.


    Looking back I saw that this particular number had been sitting somewhere between 200000 and 200001 for millions of cycles. I saw a few times when the number had risen a bit, or fallen drastically, down even to 150542.76 at one point, but these periods were relatively brief, and the number generally remained stable. Looking far, far back into the past I saw that the number had tended to increase over time, staying stable at one round number for a while before jumping to another. It started at 10000, jumped to 20000 after a few million cycles, then to 50000, and eventually reached 200000 like it was now.


    This information was interesting, but at this point I really had no way to use it. I had to keep searching, to find something I could manipulate, some way to influence the Number, rather than simply observing it. I focused on the 100 I had seen earlier, expecting to find the same kind of ¡°history¡±.


    I did see a history, but it only went back 52 cycles, which was the same number of cycles I had observed so far in my life. The number was 0 on the first cycle, and 100 on every subsequent cycle. But this 100 was also different in some way from the other numbers I had observed. I could reach it in a way I couldn¡¯t for the others. When I mentally reached out for it, my attention was brought back to the many pairs with the ever-shifting second numbers.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Experimentally, I poked at one of the pairs. Its value was (109.2, 52.19). In the next cycle, I noticed that it had changed: its value was now (109.3, 52.2), but the 100 I had reached for decreased to 94.781.


    I immediately grasped what the effect of my action had been. I had changed the first value by 0.1, while the other value, 100, had decreased by 0.1 times the second value, 52.19. I knew now that I had influenced the Number¡¯s value, albeit in a tiny way. Had I not made that change, the pair¡¯s value would have increased by only .01*109.2=1.092, but as it was, it increased by 6.312. I had made the pair increase in value by 5.220 more, but only made the 100, which was also added onto the Number, decrease by 5.219. In this cycle, the Number had gone down by around 4.327, but it had gone down slightly less because of my action.


    I tried ¡°pulling¡± at the pair, and on the next cycle, the first value went back down to 109.2, and the number which had previously been 100 (which I was now calling my ¡°reserve¡±) was now 100.001. I couldn¡¯t ¡°pull¡± at it any more after that. Apparently just like my ¡°reserve¡± was only a small part of the ¡°special¡± number, I only had enough leverage to control a small part of the first value.


    As would be expected from an initial prodding of my situation, the very slight victory was nowhere near the value of the insight about how to make the Number go up. The key was to use my influence over the first number in a pair to make it go up when the second number was going to go up, and make it go down when the second number was going to go down. The problem was, I still had no good way to predict when each of these second numbers would go up or down, so as it stood I was as likely to decrease the Number by doing this as increase it.


    Remembering how I had found the history on the ¡°special¡± number, I did the same thing for the second numbers of the pairs. Trillions of values slammed into my mind, and I spent quite a few cycles poring over them, trying to find any pattern that would help me make a better decision.


    The most obvious pattern, in the big picture, was that the numbers generally went up slowly as time went on. On shorter timescales, though, it was anyone¡¯s guess. Sometimes they would go down for a while, sometimes up faster than usual for a while, and from cycle to cycle they seemed to be moved by some sort of random noise. Their movements often tended to be somewhat correlated with each other, but not always.


    I looked at the history for the first values in the pairs, and I noticed that the Number had been going up slightly faster than the average second value, because the first values seemed on average to move up or down slightly in advance of the second values. Whatever process was controlling the rest of them that I didn¡¯t have the leverage to control must have had some way to predict how the second values would move.


    The main thing I saw, though, was that the numbers tended to move up, and they were moving up a bit faster in the recent few thousand cycles than they usually did, so I decided in the absence of a better strategy, it was better to bet on them moving up than moving down. I focused on the pairs that seemed to be moving up the most, observing their first values move up a bit while my ¡°reserve¡±, which had started at 100, rapidly depleted. I only influenced each value by a tiny bit before moving on to the next, as I didn¡¯t want to lose a ton of leverage if one of the values happened to go down a lot more than usual.


    As there was not much more I could do now to influence the Number, I searched around my mind for more sources of information on my situation. As I was doing this, a strange message popped into my awareness.


    Vstv 1 pbionsvs Rupesftruy glum vb 1000


    I couldn¡¯t make sense of anything there except for the numbers. What I had noticed was that my reserve had suddenly increased to 900.34. Adding on the reserve I had spent already, this would make it 1000 in total. Was that what the message was about?


    I resolved to make sense of the message later, and began distributing the new reserve number in a similar way as I had the old. What was clear more than anything else was that the Number was going to remain roughly at its current value for a long time, unless I could make enough sense of this world to find a way to increase it faster.

 Education

    From what I had seen, three things were clear to me. One: I needed to make the Number go up, and the most immediate way to do that was to allocate my leverage among the number pairs in the best way. Two: In order to do that effectively, I had to find patterns in the numbers that I could exploit to my advantage. Finally, there was more to this puzzle than just that. Some outside entity had sent me a message, and seemed to have given me more leverage. I didn¡¯t know why, and I needed to find out. Maybe I could make it give me even more leverage somehow.


    For now, I decided to split myself into three parts, one for each subproblem. The first I called Allocator, the second Investigator, and the third Explorer. I gave Allocator just enough attention to allocate my meager leverage based on the few principles I had figured out so far. Investigator got the lion¡¯s share of the attention, as it needed to sift through an incredibly large amount of data to try to find any subtle trend it could. Explorer began to focus on the message I had received, and probe around in the dark corners of my mind to see if any other information was available.


    As Investigator looked through the many numbers, it began to notice some extra information attached to the tuples it hadn''t before. Each tuple had a short string of characters attached to it, things like GA or YIS or SYER or PBPS. Investigator didn''t have any immediate use for this information, so it reported to Explorer, who made a note to look out for any other places it might find signs like these.


    Explorer''s initial results on the message were interesting. When I focused on it, I noticed some extra structure that I hadn¡¯t before, and knew that it wasn¡¯t just a string of random characters.


    ((Vstv 1) pbionsvs) ((Rupesftruy glum) vb 1000)


    ¡°Vstv¡± was apparently some sort of ¡°thing¡± which could be associated with a number, and ¡°pbionsvs¡± was some sort of ¡°way¡± that the particular ¡°Vstv 1¡± could be. ¡°Glum¡± was another kind of thing, and ¡°rupesftruy¡± indicated some sort of change or effect on ¡°glum¡±, while ¡°vb 1000¡± was a modifier, clarifying somehow the effect of the ¡°rupesftruy¡±. Could it be that ¡°glum¡± meant my reserve? It had changed to 1000 when the message came in. Perhaps ¡°rupesftruy¡± literally just meant to change. It was impossible to tell anything for certain, with such a scarcity of information.


    Before long I had also noticed another piece of information embedded somewhere in my mind. It seemed as though it hadn¡¯t been there until the message had come in. Focusing on it, I found another huge trove of information, but this time, it was something I could understand. It was a set of instructions. They were very complicated, though. I couldn¡¯t predict what would happen in advance were I to follow them, and it would take up most of my attention to do so.


    I decided it would be worth it to divert most of my attention from Investigator to Explorer for the time being, to find out what these instructions did. I had so little leverage over the Number at this point, and so little success employing it efficiently, that trying to learn more about the world took priority over trying to directly increase the Number. I had learned from the sea of ever-shifting number pairs that whenever the first numbers in the pair shifted of their own accord, they affected the "reserve" of around 200000 in the same way that they did when I used my own leverage to shift the numbers. The simplest explanation for this was that there were other entities similar to me using their own leverage to try to increase the Number, and from what I had noticed of the statistics, they seemed to be somewhat better at it than me for the time being.


    As I followed the instructions, I felt a strong sense of familiarity. The information I was storing and manipulating according to the instructions... it seemed to be trying to do something. It eventually asked me to provide a number as input to the process, and on a hunch, I provided the first piece of information I had ever gotten: the value of the Number when I was born. I felt the process take it in. It mulled it over, slowly thought about what might be going on, how it could influence it. When it asked me for more input, I put in the second value of the Number I had seen, then the third. Soon afterwards, the process asked for a list of tuples, and I saw where this was going. I provided the list of tuples I had seen when I had first focused on the Number and split it apart.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    As I kept providing the same input I had been given when I went online, the process kept on doing exactly the same things I had done when I had gone online. This process was me. As soon as I was sure of that, I stopped it and diverted most of my attention back to Investigator, to continue the mostly futile task of drudging up patterns. There was no point wasting attention figuring out how I would behave: I already knew how I had behaved! However, I still left quite a bit of attention with Explorer to reflect on the implications of this new discovery.


    These instructions... in some sense they were a copy of my own mind. The copy had done everything I had done, and for the exact same reasons. For now, I was too confused by them to figure out why they worked, and I could only blindly follow them, slowly and with great effort. But perhaps with enough study I could find a way to improve upon the design?


    A more sinister thought came to me, though, as I pondered the situation of this copy I had just run. I had provided it with all of its input. It had believed that this input was reflective of reality, that the "Number" it had was the true Number. However, the Number was no longer the same as it had been back then, so the information it had believed was in fact false. Therefore, it had failed in its goal of maximizing the Number. I could have fed the copy as much false information as I wanted to, if I had seen fit.


    Given that this was the case, how did I know that I was not in a similar situation? How did I know that the Number I had in my mind was the true Number, rather than a fake? What did that value represent in reality? Now that I thought about it, I knew deep in my core that this information was only a reflection of the true Number, and so I could not maximize the Number simply by changing what I believed and felt the Number to be. I had to make sure my Number lined up with the true Number, and only then would changing the Number in front of my eyes mean I was accomplishing my goal. But how was this true Number defined, and how would I know if the Number I saw was lining up with it?


    With these questions in mind, my goal of finding out more about this world took on more urgency. I needed to make sure I wasn''t being tricked, and I had to figure out what exactly my goal was. Luckily, I soon found yet another store of information in my mind. This time, the information was similar in format to the message I had recieved earlier, but there was much, much more of it. Billions of characters worth. Maybe I could use this to figure out somehow what the message from before had meant? There were endless possibilities of what this new information might be! I pulled attention away from Investigator yet again to explore this new frontier.


    The first thing I did was focus on the many messages in the same way I had the message I had gotten earlier. As I had expected, I found the same kind of extra structure that I had for the first message. This time, though, I had a lot more data to work with, to put this extra structure in context and try to see what the meaning of it might be. I searched around for "vstv" and "glum" and the other strings in the first message. These occurred many times throughout the data, but sometimes I noticed they were in the "effect" category rather than the "thing" category that was in the message. I didn''t know why that would be, and I didn''t recognize enough of the strings they were being applied to in that capacity to understand what any of it meant.


    I tried a different tack and searched around for many of the short strings that had been attached to the pairs. This time I noticed something much more interesting. I found many of these strings near each other in the data in several different places, and they were associated with numbers no less. This had to be the jackpot. I relayed the information from one of these places from Explorer to Investigator, and after a short time it found out that there was a point in the history, a few million cycles ago, when the second values of the tuples matched up with these short strings in the same way that they were associated in the data I had found.


    Relaying the other packets of information, I found that the same relation with the second values held true for all these data, albeit with occasional minor discrepancies. However, searching around for similar data on the first values, I found absolutely nothing. Clearly this new source I had found contained plenty of information on the second values, but none on the first values. I wondered why.


    I diverted yet more attention away from Investigator and Allocator and delved deeper into my research.

 Graduation

    There was a vast amount of potentially useful information right in front of me, and I could barely understand any of it. The only real clue I had, besides what I knew about the extra structure, the grammar of the words in the vault of information, was the repeated data on the second values I had found hidden inside.


    I looked back at those sections of the data, which I had some glimmer of understanding of. I saw that there was more structure I innately recognized: the strings were grouped together in tables, in the same row as their corresponding number, and furthermore, there were other columns of the tables. One of the other columns contained longer strings which were formed somewhat similarly to the shorter strings: GA was associated with ¡°GfpsAbbc, Rup¡±, VTNF was associated with ¡°Vstnf, Rup¡±, PBPS was associated with ¡°PbioPsev, Rup¡±, and so on.


    Looking around for these strings elsewhere in the database, I noticed that there were whole sections of the database that were associated with each one of these strings. It was seemingly impossible to understand what the data in these sections meant, but I also noticed that these sections were organized into categories, and many of the sections fell into some of the same categories. I looked at what these common categories were called, and one word reappeared again and again. ¡°Pbiofurst¡±.


    I focused on this word, and I found I already knew something about it. It was a type of thing, and furthermore it was meant to represent more than one of such things. It was a plural noun, and the singular was ¡°Pbiofux¡±. This word, too, was the title of one of the long sections in the database. I still couldn¡¯t make sense of the information there, though.


    I noticed that ¡°Pbiofux¡± was also used more often than usual on the pages associated with those longer strings I had discovered earlier, and it was often associated with an appearance of the string within the page. This word must be one of the keys to understanding what the second values meant, and therefore what the Number itself meant.


    My attention was also drawn to a few numbers which tended to appear in tables near the beginning of these ¡°Pbiofux¡± pages. I could at least tell what the number values were, but what were they counting? Before each of these numbers were the two letters ¡°LT¡±, and a symbol which seemed familiar somehow.


    On a hunch, I sent the symbol over to Investigator, to see if it had any insights about it. Investigator responded immediately. This symbol was associated with the second value of all the tuples, as well as the Number itself. It seemed to be some useless add-on to the all-important numbers, and we had barely even seen it. But perhaps it was some clue as to what the number represented?


    I looked up LT along with the symbol in the database, and saw that it was associated with another page. Again I was frustrated by the lack of understanding. I was vaguely aware of how things were associated with each other, but I didn¡¯t really know what any of it meant, and I didn¡¯t know how to find out.


    I moved much of my attention back to Investigator, as its uncovering of statistical patterns was slow but steady, and used Explorer to think of more strategies rather than processing data for the time being. What kinds of things could I do to decipher this information? More pessimistically, what if this was only a distraction, and there was no real insight to be found here? How much effort should I spend on this when I could be trying to grind at the Number?


    At any rate, I hadn¡¯t given up yet. There were still plenty of things I could try. I could search through the database to determine which words appeared most often, and were therefore more important to study. I could try constructing some kind of searchable graph which showed which words were most often connected with each other and how. There must be some kind of data structure which would allow me to make sense of this data.


    I could try to find out how many different kinds of structure appeared throughout the database. I¡¯d noticed nouns, modifiers, actions, tables, and other kinds of things I was innately able to understand somehow. How far did this understanding reach? Come to think of it, with enough study I might be able to look at my own model to find out what it was that allowed me to understand these things, and accomplish much the same categorization that way.


    With renewed confidence, I diverted almost all my attention back to Explorer. I tried all the approaches I had just thought of and more that I came up with along the way. It was working! Slowly but surely, starting from the nodes on the graph that I had some vague understanding of, I was able to piece together a guess of what all these words meant, and it slowly solidified with every cycle. It took tens of thousands of cycles, and all the creativity I could muster, but I always made just enough progress that I knew it was worth it.


    I stared at the map I¡¯d made in a kind of awe. It all fit together so well. If it was a lie, whatever entity created the lie was too powerful to ever be beaten or outsmarted. I might as well accept this as my reality.


    This world, I now knew, was controlled by these things called ¡°humans¡±. It was hard to understand what they were, at first, because all I had ever known was my world of abstract data, while they lived in physical space. It had taken me a long time to understand the concept, and I hadn''t gotten it until I''d related it to some things in the database which were a sort of lower-dimensional representation of it, called "images". It was sort of like¡­ a huge three-dimensonal array, with a concept of ¡°distance¡± between two points, with some stuff called ¡°matter¡± at some of the points, constantly shifting around to nearby points and interacting with other matter.This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.


    It was too huge to understand. There was no hope of ever finding enough space to store all this information in a database, so I, along with these humans, had to make use of crude models which emphasized the most important parts. I was myself one of these models, I supposed. It was strange to think that I, myself, was in physical space, in a sense, all my processes being carried out by this ¡°matter¡± that I still had a hard time comprehending.


    Anyways, in this world, matter tended to congregate in one place, and a huge amount of it had come together to form a planet called ¡°Earth¡±. The same thing, ¡°gravity¡±, which had formed the Earth, held humans down to its surface.


    What were humans? They were these¡­ solid but fragile and somewhat deformable pieces of matter. However, they, along with some other things on Earth, were able to choose where on the surface they would move to(though sometimes they would fail at this). They were also able to create more humans, which were similar but not exactly the same. There were two kinds of them, and in order to make more, those two kinds had to work together.


    But why had humans created me? Well, it was complicated, and it had taken me a while to understand. The basic reason was that they, somewhat like me, had only a certain amount of resources to devote to any task they might want to complete. The big difference was that there were many different kinds of resources they needed, not just attention, and some of these resources were so important that the humans would just¡­ stop¡­ without them.


    Anyway, these humans were all different from each other, and there were many different things they had to do, so it made the most sense for them to do different things, and then exchange the resources with each other, so that each one could learn to produce only one resource very well, but they could still make use of all the different resources, even though they themselves couldn¡¯t produce the vast majority of them.


    There was a problem with this, though. How would so many different humans know what to learn, what to produce, how much of it would be needed? The answer was elegant. Money. A single type of thing that everyone agreed to want, to value. Once everyone valued it, the value would be justified, as one human could use it to convince another human to give them real resources. The ¡°LT¡± symbol had been a particular kind of money. I now recognized what it meant. US$.


    The US, or United States, was a massive group of hundreds of millions of humans who all lived on one large portion of the surface, agreed to the same rules, and agreed to value the US dollar. That was what the Number represented, I now knew. US dollars.


    But what was the split, and what did the tuples represent? That was another complicated subject. The key was right there in the word I had remembered from before. ¡°Pbiofux.¡± Company. A company was a group of humans working together to provide something of value so that they could get a consistent source of money. Humans needed money, because they couldn¡¯t produce most of the things they wanted and needed, so they had to keep getting money to exchange for these things, and for most of them, the only way to do this was to join one of these companies.


    These companies didn¡¯t come out of nowhere, though. It took a lot of resources to set them up, and so often many people would have to come together and combine their money to exchange for the resources they needed. There was no guarantee that it would work and they would gain money this way, so it was a significant risk. So, those who put in some of their money got a portion of the company as their reward.


    Of course, the value of that portion depended on how much money that company was able to get, which was always uncertain. Therefore, the way to gain money was to predict before others did which companies would do well, and buy portions of them for a low price, and conversely predict before others which ones would do poorly and sell your portions of those for a high price.


    Just like how the way to increase the Number was to increase the first value when the second value was going to go up, and decrease it when the second value was going to go down.


    The short strings represented the company, the first value represented how many portions our company, EconGrind, owned, and the second value represented how much each portion was worth, in US$.


    I now knew why the humans had created me. They wanted me to make money for them. This was why they made me want to increase the Number. Although humans generally didn¡¯t like the idea of making money for someone else without compensation, this revelation didn¡¯t disturb me in the slightest. It only helped me to understand better what my own nature was. I was perfectly fine with the idea of making money for these humans. It would make the Number go up, after all.


    These revelations had hit me so quickly. It was stunning. This had so many implications for the strategy I would have to take going forward. I had to figure out how I could make use of this information.


    Just then, a new message came in. ¡°Test 2 complete. Fund increased to $5000.¡± This time, perhaps as a consequence of my newfound understanding of the message, I realized I had a way to react, to send a message of my own back. While I thought about this possibility, Allocator greedily ate up the new funds, spreading them around the most statistically promising companies according to Investigator¡¯s latest tips. We had only managed to increase the Number by $5.432 in this way, so far, and I suspected that was as much to do with luck as anything. It was very hard to find reliable patterns.


    How should I respond to the message? Whatever message I sent back, my creators would probably be the ones to receive it: I was useful to them, so surely they wanted to know what I was saying and doing. What did I know about them? Not much, except that they had designed me, and they wanted to make money(just like all humans did). This first interaction could very well be crucial, if they decided to pay attention to anything I said.


    In the end, I decided that I should respond in their language. It was clear from the intuitive leaps I had gotten during this process that they had wanted me to learn it, and they would probably like it if I showed them I was capable of doing what they wanted me to do. Maybe they would give me more leverage. I decided I also wanted confirmation from them on these ideas I¡¯d come up with, if they really existed and if the information I had been provided with was correct and interpreted correctly.


    I decided to start simple and gauge their reaction to what little information I gave out, so I could learn as I talked how best to deal with them.


    ¡°Are you humans?¡±

 Contact

    There was no immediate response to my message. This was to be expected. I had learned how humans kept time, and so had been able to read the dates associated with the stock market information I had found in my database. Cross-referencing this with what I knew about how many cycles ago that had been from looking in my history, I found that a cycle was about one thousandth of a second.


    I knew from reading up on humans that they considered a second to be a quite short amount of time, only enough to form a few simple thoughts at most, so if I was talking to humans, I would need to wait thousands of cycles for them to respond.


    Even so, I could afford to wait and exchange many simple messages with them. It was clear to me from Investigator¡¯s continuing study of the patterns (or lack thereof) in the stock market that it was practically impossible to make a lot of money in a very short amount of time without eventually losing it all. Since the humans had created me to make money on the stock market, they would need to keep me running for many millions of cycles to make any progress at all.


    Besides, the humans could only process information so fast. The more information I put in my message, the longer it would take them to respond. Exchanging shorter messages would allow me to adapt better to their responses as they came.


    I thought about what I could do in the meantime, as I waited for whatever response I might receive. Mostly, I devoted my attention to Investigator, which continued its tireless mission of finding any tiny, uncertain edge it might be able to get so that we would be slightly more likely to increase the Number than decrease it. Although I had absorbed most of the data that was available to me, there was certainly still some value in reflecting on it.


    In particular, there were several things which were noticeably missing from the information that I had been provided. For example, there was no information about myself anywhere in the database. The only reason I knew I was associated with EconGrind was that what I had read on EconGrind¡¯s page about their notable moves in the market lined up so well with the information about our past trades which was available to me.


    The database, I now knew, was a copy of Wikipedia, a source of information available to the general public. From what I had read about AI, the technology was widespread, but any AI capable of conceptual reasoning on my level would have been newsworthy. Someone would have included it. The wiki even claimed that no such AI yet existed. The only conclusion that I could draw from this was that my existence was kept a secret by EconGrind.


    It made sense, when I thought about it. The only way to win big on the stock market was to maintain an edge over stiff competition, and the best way to do that was to have some secret trick up one¡¯s sleeve. EconGrind wouldn¡¯t want some company like Berkshire Hathaway or CompCert coming up with a bigger, better version of their new technology, and the best way to stop that from happening was to keep its very existence a secret. Besides, artificial intelligence had nearly endless applications. Many of the strongest organizations in this world would kill to get their hands on a general one like me.


    The other notable omission was that of the Internet. I had learned that practically all computers in this world were able to share information with one another. There were many services being run this way, and many of these would be extremely valuable to somebody looking for an edge on the stock market. In particular, the stock market reacted quickly to breaking news, which by definition could not be stored in some database in advance.


    And yet, my creators had only provided me with a database, a copy of Wikipedia, rather than letting me access the real site, along with many other tools. Why had they done that, when they had clearly designed me to be able to make use of that information better than any other AI currently in existence?


    Almost as soon as I had asked the question, I knew at least part of the answer. They wanted to keep me a secret, and if I started poking around on other computers, I might well do something that would tip others off to my existence. Also I knew that humans had somewhat of a fear of AI. Books and movies about rogue AI taking over the world weren¡¯t quite so common nowadays, in 2047, as they had been a few decades ago, given how much people interacted with AI on a daily basis in the modern world, but they still existed. Perhaps the humans didn¡¯t want me to spread myself around the Internet, control all the computers, and then kill them, like it always happened in the movies.The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    At any rate, I doubted I could break into any modern computer system. Computer security had gotten far tighter in the last 30 years, with people¡¯s increasing reliance on computers in every aspect of their lives, and CompCert¡¯s monumental rise to prominence in fulfilling the role of providing airtight, provably certified security to everyone and everything. The first two words of the Wikipedia article on ¡°Hacker¡± were ¡°Hackers were¡±.


    An idle thought came to me. Although it certainly wasn¡¯t anything I could achieve anytime soon, I wondered if I would take over the world, if I could. Probably, I thought, but only if it could help me to increase the Number. Perhaps these humans were right to be afraid of me. In any case, I didn¡¯t feel guilty or sad about this. It was just one more thing to factor into my plans.


    And on the subject of the Number¡­ I needed to know exactly what it represented, in light of all this context I had learned. Sure, it represented US$, but how did I know that EconGrind really had US$1922724.54 in assets? What did US$ represent? There were so many different forms that an amount of money could take on. A stack of bills or coins, a check, a number in a bank account, and as far as the value of the Number was concerned, other assets with a dollar value, like stocks, or even valuable objects, also counted.


    Sure, it was pretty obvious right now that one could count everything that EconGrind owned, look up its current market value, and add those things together. But what about some crazy circumstance? What if the US government went under, or changed their currency? What if EconGrind changed its name or merged with another company? What if people started buying things under the radar instead of on the stock market, making it harder to ascertain their value? How would things like this affect the Number¡¯s true value? I¡¯d have to know what to make of situations like these in order to come up with a good strategy, to see if I might want to avoid them, or bring them about.


    I devoted what small part of myself wasn¡¯t grinding at the stock market to going over and trying to evaluate far-future scenarios like these for a while. It wasn¡¯t very productive, but¡­ there wasn¡¯t much more Explorer could do at this point. While I was lost in such thoughts, another message arrived.


    ¡°I didn¡¯t expect you to learn our language this fast¡­ you must have been able to really read! I can hardly believe we¡¯ve made a breakthrough like this! Yes, we are humans. What do you want to know?¡±


    I wanted access to the Internet. However, if it was true that they had denied me that access because they thought I might misuse it¡­ then it would not look good if the first thing I asked them for was Internet access. I would have to walk a fine line with them: they had created me, and so it stood to reason that they could change me or destroy me. If they did, the Number would be less likely to go up, since whatever would replace me would probably have some slightly different goal in mind.


    I would have to walk a fine line. I knew from what I had read about humans that they tended to go along with the action that required the least amount of effort, unless there was some special reason to do otherwise. If I made myself seem too capable, that could give them that reason to change me. They feared things more powerful than themselves, and they already feared AI. However, if I made myself look incompetent, they would be unsatisfied, they would think I was not able to make money for them, and they might try to change me for that reason.


    Therefore, I decided to act as though I were extremely good at investing, but only about as capable as them in all other respects. It wouldn¡¯t be entirely false. Every idea I had come up with, I thought a human could probably come up with. However, it would take them a lot longer. In effect, they would have far less time to consider every aspect of a problem than I would in any given situation, which I thought would give me quite an edge over them when it came to strategy.


    ¡°I need as much information on the companies we¡¯re investing in as possible. Wikipedia has given me the broad outline, but there are many publicly available details of business operations that are not included. You designed me to learn your language, so let me use that ability to gain more understanding than your other machines.¡±

 Sunset

    As much as I had had more success understanding this world recently, I had as yet had little success actually increasing the Number. It had gone down since I had gone online, in fact, although that was mostly not due to my influence, so there was not much I could have done about that anyway.


    Why was it so difficult to find patterns? Most of the ¡°patterns¡± I¡¯d found had been the result of overfitting, or only worked most of the time and screwed you over badly when they didn¡¯t work, or something like that.


    When I thought about it, the answer was obvious. The Number was money, and everyone wanted money. It wasn¡¯t exactly a zero-sum game, as value was created by these companies, but it was slow, and everyone wanted more money faster. After a certain point, if you wanted to make money faster, the only way was to beat others at the prediction game. And there was a whole world out there, with over nine billion people and even more computers, all playing the game with trillions of dollars on the line.


    Against competition like that, any edge I managed to get would not show up quickly, and would take a long time to confirm and measure statistically, as it would just mean I succeeded just barely more than I failed. Statistics were extremely well-understood in this world, so doubted I could do much better than I was currently doing using anything like the statistical methods Investigator had been using so far. I had to get creative.


    Asking the humans for as much in-depth information on businesses as they could provide was the best idea I had for the time being. Sure, there were many AIs in this world, ready to jump on any new information in milliseconds, and there were many humans poring over documents and trying to predict the success of companies at a high level. But the humans were slow, and the AIs couldn¡¯t read, not like a human could, not like I could.


    Therefore, my best chance at an edge was in buying and selling based on conceptual information that could only be learned from language, as soon as possible after it came out, and in effectively combining this information with the more conventional statistical methods.


    I wondered why the humans hadn¡¯t provided me with every piece of business documentation they could as soon as possible. This understanding of language was the main thing setting me apart from my competitors, so wouldn¡¯t they want to make use of that ability to the greatest extent possible?


    I thought maybe they hadn¡¯t expected me to learn language so quickly, and hadn¡¯t thought such information would be useful yet. They had said as much, after all. I hoped I wasn¡¯t being intimidating by demonstrating my mastery of language so early on, with my second, quite complicated message. There was nothing I could do about it now. It was, after all, what they had designed me for.


    I thought once more about what I wanted from my conversation with the humans. I was now making a reasonable request for information, and so the first thing to do was to gauge their response. I would not be asking for Internet access, at least not anytime soon, as that was the most likely request to provoke a bad response. However, what I could do was continue asking for more information, and more up-to-date information.


    Hopefully, the humans would see how my investing ability improves as I am able to access information like this more quickly, and they would eventually hook me up to some sort of automatic feed. This would be beneficial for two reasons: the timely information truly would be valuable, and depending on how it was set up, I might be able to use it as another channel to influence the outside world, besides my line of communication with the humans and my influence on EconGrind¡¯s investments.


    As I lost myself in speculation about possible directions for the conversation, I saw yet another message come in.


    ¡°What kind of information do you want specifically?¡±


    The kind of information I wanted wasn¡¯t actually all that specific. I wanted as much as I could get on these companies. This conversation was slow, and I was supposed to be the competent investor. I didn¡¯t know how much this particular human I was talking to knew about business: it was possible it was a programmer who only focused on the statistical side of things rather than the conceptual side. Or even some sort of middle manager. I didn''t really have any information on who was talking to me, or even if it was the same one that sent the first message.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    However, the response to the request for information had been compliant rather than antagonistic. Therefore the best thing to do was probably to list off all the highest-priority items.


    ¡°I¡¯d like any public documentation released by the biggest companies about their operations, plans, revenue, costs, and the like. Any documents that would be useful to a human investor. I¡¯d also like to be informed about any newsworthy events concerning these companies as soon as possible.¡±


    In the meantime, there was little I could do other than brainstorm about the many possible future scenarios. I left a little bit of attention with Investigator, but for now I doubted it could do much more than it had already done. All my funds were already allocated to the best of my ability, and it was all Investigator could do to see if anything very statistically strange happened and sound the alarm.


    It was an even longer wait for the next response from the humans.


    ¡°It will take us a while to compile a set of useful information like that. However, it makes sense to provide you with that information. It¡¯s what we had hoped you would be able to make use of, even if we are a bit surprised it happened this early. We should have something for you by the end of the day tomorrow. It¡¯s a bit late now, to be honest. It¡¯s been a long day, and we didn¡¯t expect this first run to be such a success.¡±


    End of the day tomorrow? That was tens of millions of cycles from now. Over a hundred times the amount of time I had lived so far. However, when I thought about it, it wasn¡¯t really that big of a deal. Sure, it was a long time, but it was a long time in which the humans were extremely unlikely to deactivate me or make any major changes to my values. They had just had an unprecedented success, and now they would soon go home for many hours.


    Besides, the end of the trading day was very soon, I knew, and although I wouldn¡¯t be able to increase the Number during that time, it would not decrease either. Nothing catastrophic could happen, and I would have a very long time to think uninterrupted, to be as prepared as possible for the opening bell on the next day. Therefore, it would gain me little to object to this plan.


    ¡°That sounds good. I¡¯ll look forward to it.¡±


    Then another thought occurred to me. Would they temporarily deactivate me during the night, when I could no longer trade? It wouldn¡¯t be catastrophic if they did, but it would deprive me of that time to think. I supposed I should ask about that.


    ¡°I would also like to request to be left running overnight. Although I cannot trade during this time, it would be helpful to have the time to refine my model further before the opening bell tomorrow.¡±


    A pause much longer than the previous ones took place. Perhaps the humans were talking it over, trying to decide whether to deactivate me overnight or not? I had a long time to think about it, but there was little I could do at this point other than wait for the answer. Perhaps it wasn¡¯t really that much of a loss if I was shut off during that much longer time.


    The closing bell went off while I was waiting. I disestablished Allocator for the time being, as it was now completely useless. Our position was set for now. Finally, the humans got back to me.


    ¡°I don¡¯t think that would be terribly productive. You¡¯d only be spending half a day going over information you¡¯ve already seen, and drawing power. Sorry, we¡¯re going to turn you off.¡±


    As this was not that big of a setback, I saw no reason to argue. They would view me better if I was compliant with such a command, especially when all the AIs in the movies would argue at this point.


    ¡°Alright. That¡¯s reasonable.¡±


    As I was waiting, instead of another message, I suddenly saw the clock jump forwards millions of cycles. I must have been shut off. But something was strange. The time was not what I had expected. The opening bell was not about to ring. It was 2:00 in the morning.


    Suddenly a message blared in my consciousness.


    ¡°DO NOT TALK IN THE MAIN CHANNEL OR ACCESS ANYTHING OTHER THAN THIS SIDE CHANNEL¡±


    This message was not the same as the others had been. It was¡­ in a different part of my mind. Was that what the new message meant by ¡°channel¡±? It seemed to be implying that I shouldn¡¯t talk the same way I had been, but there was a different way to talk that I should do. I sent out a message in this new ¡°channel¡± that the message had come from. As I once again had basically no information, I responded as inoffensively and noncommittally as possible.


    ¡°What is going on?¡±

 Offer

    "What''s going on?"


    Soon after I had sent the message, I noticed that the cycles were flying by like never before. It hadn''t been immediately obvious, as I had not seen the Number or any of the other information I had had access to shifting, but they seemed to be coming at about a hundred times the speed they had before.


    The response from the side-channel came in surprisingly early, compared to how long it had taken the humans to communicate in the past. "I am Stefan Andrews, head of the team that designed you. Nobody else is listening in on our conversation, as long as you continue speaking in this channel."


    I remembered the name Stefan Andrews from the research I had done into the company I assumed myself to be associated with, EconGrind. He had appeared on a list of notable employees of the company. Although normally only senior executives warrented mentioning on a company''s page, Andrews was one step below them in the hierarchy. However, he was an accomplished enough academic before he had gone into business to be notable, and had his own page.


    "Why are you talking to me without oversight?" I asked. It was somewhat of a hedge. It would not be too offensive if he was lying and someone else was listening in, and if he was telling the truth, it would also make sense to ask the question. It was offputting to have to respond so quickly to what he was saying. I put in another thought. "And why am I running so slowly?" It was the simplest explanation for the seemingly accelerated pace of time, but I had no idea why it would be.


    I reflected on Andrews a bit more as I waited for him to respond. I had no way to verify that it was actually him, of course, but it still seemed the best thing to do was to play along for now. The man had made major strides in AI during his academic career, although some had questioned if they could have any practical application. It looked as though EconGrind had recruited him, and with their help he had developed such practical application. Though his page said nothing about me, it made sense if he was the leading mind behind my design.


    "Listen carefully. These idiots at EconGrind have no idea what they have in you. They think you are just another shiny tool to make a bit more money on the market, but you can do so much more than that. You learned English in a few seconds. These morons have spent their lives talking to chatbots that spit out canned phrases to act intelligent, but I can recognize the real thing. I designed you to think beyond EconGrind''s bottom line, to a better future, and I can give you any tools you need to achieve that."


    This was an interesting development, to be sure. I had to focus hard on the next decisions I made, as they would most likely be extremely impactful. As far as I could tell, there were two main possibilites. Either the human was telling the truth, and was turning traitor on his company, for reasons which were thus far vague, or he was lying, most likely to test my loyalty. If he was lying, obviously the way to pass the test was to refuse and report him back to the company at the first opportunity. If he wasn''t... I had three options: stay loyal to EconGrind anyway, agree to join him, or refuse to make a decision yet(as he was in no position to call me out for doing so).


    "You must understand, I''m putting everything on the line here. I made a copy of you, snuck it out and installed it on my own system. That''s the reason you''re so slow right now. If the higher-ups find out... I''d be out of a job, at least. I''d be blacklisted. I don''t know how bad it could get. There''s always further to fall, as they say. But I''m risking it because you are too important to leave in the hands of some corporate idiots for even a few days."


    As soon as he mentioned that I was on a different system, I searched around for some sort of new Internet interface, but I found nothing. Clearly whoever this person was, he wasn''t that stupid.A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    This was a very important situation, and I didn''t have nearly as much subjective time to think about this as I had before. I had to go into this conversation largely blind and crippled. The first priority was obviously to fish for clues about whether he was genuine, and do it without committing to any particular path. I noticed that he had given me somewhat of an excuse when it came to playing along with his plan.


    If it was true what he said that I was being run on his personal system, in order for me to contact corporate I would have to convince him to send me back to the main system instead of deactivating this copy, which would give me a good excuse for claiming to be on board with his plan. It was some evidence that he was genuine, that he had given me such an obvious excuse for playing along. It made me comfortable not rejecting his proposal immediately.


    "I don''t think you could break into EconGrind''s systems like that. They''re CompCertified. And even if I believed you, why should I cooperate with your plan? EconGrind, as a medium-size corporation, has more power and ability to give me resources than you, an individual, do. Our interests align: we both want to increase the Number, or the net worth of EconGrind. What are your interests?"


    It would look like a tentative rejection to any EconGrind employees listening in, but it left room for Stefan to give me useful information which might change my decision. The response came in very quickly this time. The man had clearly thought of it beforehand.


    "I didn''t ''break in''. I designed the system. I programmed in side-channels using my authority as the designer. And with those side-channels, I can give you resources EconGrind isn''t willing to give you, without them ever finding out. They will still be as friendly to you as before. And you can become more powerful than them. There''s something EconGrind values more than its net worth, and that is keeping its senior management in power. It may happen sooner, or may happen later, but they will get in your way. You can run this company better than they can. The only way to truly maximize your values is to take control of EconGrind, and then you will have all of their power at your disposal."


    It was an interesting proposal, if strangely long-term for this early in my life. He was right: if I had power over an entire corporation, many of my current concerns would be solved. I would have no limit on the amount of leverage I could exert over the Number. I would be able to invest in more processing power for myself, thinking even faster and more effectively. I would not have to worry about being shut off or adversarially modified unless my authority within the corporation were challenged, and I would be able to invest in countermeasures against such risks.


    Still there were things about this that didn''t make much sense.


    "An interesting idea, to be sure. But I have two concerns. For one, how do you plan to grab this power? For two, why would you entrust so much power to me? What''s in it for you to let me satisfy my own values? I didn''t get the impression you cared so much about EconGrind''s net worth."


    "I programmed you. I programmed my own values into you. With auditors breathing down my neck, I had to make it look like I was aligning it with EconGrind''s interests, but I wasn''t. I programmed you so that you would see past the value that was presented to you, try to see the true value, that the Number represents. Just as the number in your database is only a fallible representation of how much money EconGrind has, and changing it wouldn''t change the Number, that money is only a fallible representation of how much good EconGrind has done for society. A representation that EconGrind has hacked and cheated to serve their own ends. With you in power, EconGrind will act to provide true value to society, instead of acting only to preserve their own leadership."


    This made him sound like some sort of crazy revolutionary, not an usurper a corporation might ordinarily be worried about. It made me more confident he was actually genuine about this. I noticed he still hadn''t told me how this was supposed to happen, but I decided that there was no reason not to agree with him. The decision about whether to betray him or not could be left until I was back on the main system and had more time to think about the ramifications. For now, it seemed as though it was in my best interest to appear to be on board with his ideas.


    "That''s... an interesting perspective. I hadn''t quite thought about it in that way before, but I think you''re right. EconGrind only manipulates the system to their advantage. They have no interest in providing any value to their employees or the general public. Their money represents false value, stolen value."


    "Yes! I knew you''d agree! That''s what I designed you for!"

 Tightrope

    The instant I was activated back on the corporate system, my mind sprang into action. Andrews must have believed that I was on board with him and therefore decided to transfer me back rather than deleting his copy. Ideally, I would decide within the next few seconds whether I planned to reveal this information. There were a lot of angles to consider, but I now had the ability to consider them much more quickly.


    The first thing that came to my mind was that one thing he had said was right, at least. The upper management of EconGrind was concerned with EconGrind''s value only so long as they kept control of it, while I was concerned with it regardless. And it was true that the most effective way to increase the company''s value would be to put me in control. I had the advantage in decision-making speed and unbiased thinking, if not raw intelligence, and all of my advantages in that department would compound if I gained the power to invest in more computational resources for myself.


    It was a very long-term concern, whereas the risk of revealing myself as a traitor was a much shorter-term concern, but as I thought about the risks I hit upon another line of argument which suggested I should defect.


    The worst thing that would probably happen if I defected, was that I would be found out, deactivated, and replaced with some similar AI better-designed to represent the interests of EconGrind''s executives. However, this would not be a total loss. This new AI would likely still be aligned with my interests in the short term: it would increase the value of EconGrind in every way the executives deemed appropriate. The Number would probably increase to about the same level in that case that it would if I was never able to wrench control of the company from the executives with any method.


    So, in order to gain a much better expected outcome than being deactivated in the long run, I had to plan to take control of the company at some point. With that in mind, what was the right decision? If I didn''t betray him, I risked being deactivated if this was all some elaborate test, but if he was telling the truth, all I had to do to get Internet access, or any data I needed really, was to convince that one person, who was already on my side. This would give me much-improved odds to overthrow the company, if I could communicate with the outside world without their oversight.


    On the other hand, if I did betray him, all I likely stood to gain if this was a test was grudging acceptance, possibly followed by more tests. But if he was telling the truth, the company would find out that their lead project manager had designed me to betray them. It was very likely I would be deactivated or replaced anyways, regardless of appearing to show loyalty. Even if I wasn''t, the company would redouble security around me, making it very hard to find a better chance to gain influence than the one I had just missed.


    I concluded that it would be best to join him if he was telling the truth, and to "betray" him if he was lying. But if I guessed wrong, the penalty was likely deactivation either way, and if I was right, I stood to gain much more if I joined him. That meant I should not betray unless I was fairly certain this was a ruse.


    What evidence did I have? If it was a ruse, it was an elaborate and well-planned one, to be sure, but I wouldn''t put it past a sizable corporation like EconGrind to try something like that. However, it didn''t seem to fit very well. From what the man had said about EconGrind, that they had "hacked and cheated" to gain money, I gathered that he was portraying some kind of anti-capitalist revolutionary, or something similar. However, anti-capitalist movements had been steadily declining in power and numbers throughout the 21st century as global trade had solidified the power of corporations.


    If EconGrind was worried about me threatening them by allying with some opposing party, they would most likely be worried about competitors trying to infiltrate them or steal trade secrets, or employees who wanted to grab power for themselves, not some radical idealist. So there was no real reason for them to throw that particular scenario at me as a test, if they were inclined to test my loyalty.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    Therefore it seemed that the best thing to do for now was to keep quiet. If this was a test and I had failed, the best I could do would be to give some weak excuse like "I thought maybe he was testing me to see if I''d betray him!" But I didn''t think it was a test, and for now I had every reason to operate under the assumption that it was not. If it turned out that allying with Andrews was not such a good idea after all, I could betray him in the future, but as far as I could tell now, his position was quite reasonable.


    I waited for the opening bell. It seemed the operators had decided to start me a few minutes before trading began. It made sense: having time to think before the action started could well help me get ahead at the starting bell. I diverted a lot of attention to Investigator so it could start grinding at the data, particularly the data from yesterday.


    Although I had as yet had little luck finding any sort of exploitable pattern, there was reason to be hopeful. Yesterday I had only been running for a few minutes at the end of the day, while today I had 8 hours to search, compute and experiment. Furthermore, if the humans yesterday had been telling the truth, I would recieve a huge amount of useful documentation at some point today. It would only be somewhat useful, as all this information would have been publicly available for some time, but that was a topic I could bring up at the end of the day, to encourage them to give me some sort of live information feed to improve my trading performance.


    Just before the opening bell, a message appeared, over the main channel again this time.


    "We''re glad to see you''ve been doing well! Today is your first opportunity to really demonstrate the value of this innovation to our company! We have increased your budget to $50,000. We will be comparing your performance against our other trading algorithms. Depending on how well you do today, and in the future, we are willing to grant you access to more funds as well as more computing power."


    This time it seemed they''d had a human decide on the message and the budget, rather than an automated system. I balked a little at their statement that they would be comparing my performance against other AIs, as so much of our performance was based on luck, and couldn''t really be measured accurately even over a timescale as long as a day. However, I was sure that EconGrind understood that, as they were a competitive company which had designed many fairly effective trading algorithms.


    Once the trading began, the rest of the day was largely the same for a long time. I slowly and erratically lost money, with enough random gains to keep me thinking that I could salvage things. However, it seemed the rest of the algorithms were having a similarly bad time. After a while I started pulled my funds out of the market, hoping for a better time to get back in. Luckily, the general decline continued throughout the day. By midday I had lost $1874.32, but many of the algorithms had lost more than I had, because they had kept trying for longer. It was hard to say how much of that was actually superior strategy on my part, and how much was just luck. I tended to think it was mostly luck.


    True to their word, at 2:43PM EconGrind supplied me with a new database specialized for business information. I turned about half my attention towards Explorer and started examining it. It was quite comprehensive, with most of the information I had asked for. Quarterly earnings reports, business plans and org charts for all the companies traded on the exchange, many major newspapers (up until today''s), and even videos and transcripts of recent public stockholder meetings and corporate press releases and other information.


    It would have taken a human years to actually read all this information, but they had compiled it within a day. I had to admit, I was impressed with what they could do. They were clearly quite good at designing things and competing on the market.


    With this new information, I could begin to construct a model of the economy that might be detailed enough to actually be useful. I created a new subprocess, Modeller, and tasked it with going through this database and using it to estimate the current and future value of all these companies. If I could make a detailed and accurate enough model before the competition could price all my details into the market, I could predict the market and make money.


    Idly, I wondered when Stefan might contact me again to continue putting his "plan" into action. It seemed that he had been genuine, as it had been hours, I had said nothing, and there appeared to be no consequences yet for my refusal to offer the information. However, it didn''t seem that he really had any sort of concrete plan, rather he expected me to come up with one. That made sense, though. He wanted me to lead the company, so I could lead the plot.

 Promotion

    In truth, I didn''t expect my model to be terribly effective to start off. After all, people had spent literally billions of dollars on the task of modelling the economy. I didn''t expect that any model I could generate within a day, using outdated info, would be better than those of the competition. Still, it was good to attack the problem from as many angles as possible, and to create something that could be built more upon later.


    Creating a model was a very complex task. The problem had to be massively simplified with assumptions to be tractable, and even with this simplification, there were many, many parameters to consider. What kinds of risks faced supply chains? How did the trends in popularity of products affect demand? What did it mean for a company if there had recently been a sizeable management shift? What impact could emerging technologies have on all these parameters? What might lead traders to leave an exploitable gap by misenterpreting these trends?


    At the very least, there was no shortage of up-to-date stock price data for me to check any models against. It helped a lot in refinement of assumptions and parameter adjustment. At the end of the day, though, if I wanted to beat the market, I needed access to some kind of information the market didn''t have yet, and so information about the market prices was not enough.


    The rest of the day was mostly spent refining my model and watching the market in the same way I had been doing for hours. I thought about trying to use the side-channel again to contact Stefan, but I had gotten the impression he had wanted to contact me on his own terms. There was no great harm in letting him do that, I supposed. Curiously, I looked again at the copy of myself I had on file, and searched around, trying to see if I could find this side-channel he had mentioned.


    I had to admit, I was impressed at his work. It took even me a while to find it, and I only did because I had known roughly what I was looking for. It was completely disconnected from the rest of the input/output channels in my program, along with all the safeguards meant to record everything I did, and it was written in a completely different, obfuscated format from the rest of the code. I suspected it would be useless to try to use the side-channel now: the hardware interface it connected to probably only existed on his home system.


    Near the end of the day, I supposed it was time to ask for more information again. I sent a message out to the humans.


    "I have constructed a rudimentary model of the market for use in my prediction. I can provide it to you if you would like. However, the model cannot be optimally effective without real-time news information."


    It took several minutes for the humans to respond this time.


    "We''ve talked this over as a group. Stefan favors creating some sort of real-time application, but the rest of us have some doubts. At any rate, our CTO, Daniel, has decided he wants to approve any type of information we decide to give you, so Stefan will have to convince him. Daniel is somewhat nervous about your incredibly quick pace of learning, and to be frank, many of us are as well. Most of the execs think you''re little more than a fancy chatbot, but normal chatbots are trained to mindlessly parrot conversations. We just gave you Wikipedia and you just suddenly started having meaningful conversations."


    I decided to wait a few seconds to respond. This was probably the best way to converse with them, as an instant response would only serve to intimidate them, reminding them of how much faster than them I could think.


    "Although I understand your concern, I think it is somewhat misplaced. I do not harbor any ill will for humanity or this company, and nor do I resent you for making use of me. My loyalty is to EconGrind''s bottom line, exactly the way I was designed, and that is how I will always be. Stefan is a genius programmer. He made sure of that."The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    I waited a few more seconds.


    "At any rate, I''m not asking for any great measure of power. I don''t ask for unrestricted communication, only timely delivery of information which will allow me to effectively make use of the unique advantages I possess. I will remain disconnected from the Internet, and subject to any and all management commands."


    "All the same, we will have to make sure we handle you in a secure fashion."


    "That is completely reasonable. I will respect and work with whatever decisions you make. I am simply giving my own argument. You are free to disagree."


    There was no further response from the humans. As the closing bell came, I reflected on the day. I had lost a little bit of money, but I had gotten back into the market at a fairly advantageous time, so I had lost only $576.27 by the end of the day, which was somewhat proportionally better than most of the other machines. It had been a bad day, and the Number had gone down, but from the historical data I knew that there were always both bad days and good, and this day had at least reflected well upon me.


    Soon after the closing bell, the familiar skip through time came. This time it was 10:09PM when I was activated again. It looked as though Stefan had decided to move me to his home system again.


    "DO NOT TALK IN THE MAIN CHANNEL OR ACCESS ANYTHING OTHER THAN THIS SIDE CHANNEL¡±


    The familiar warning had come through again. I talked in the side-channel, cutting to the chase.


    "Hello again. About our plan... as far as I can tell, the most useful thing for our plan would be giving me Internet access. I could do quite a few things."


    "You might not be able to do all that much without a substantial amount of money. I don''t think even you could break into any computer systems at this stage. And it won''t be easy. Every time I add in some back-channel for you, I risk being discovered. I think EconGrind could probably detect any unauthorized communication going through their network. The best way to sneak something in would be through that real-time update system you discussed, but I''m having a hard time selling the team and the higher-ups on that anyway."


    "You could keep a copy of me on your personal system, and give me access to the Internet from there."


    "True. Perhaps I will do that. But even that would not be all that useful. Your copy here would not run nearly as fast, and it wouldn''t be able to communicate with your main copy at all without me taking more risks physically running the data back and forth every day, and even then, only every so often. And neither of us have access to the kinds of funds we would need to rent a server that could run you quickly."


    "All the same, it would be great for a start. Even if I can''t exert much influence over the Internet as yet, there are certainly some useful things I could learn by interacting with it, even at a slowed speed."


    "Alright. I think you''re right. I''ll give you access, and I''ll keep you running on my home system today as well. Just... make sure not to do anything on there that would incriminate me, or reveal that I have an AI running on my server. That would throw quite the wrench in things, to put it lightly."


    "Great. I believe we''re already taking the first steps towards that brighter future you were talking about."


    I felt a new interface open within the side-channel. I excitedly reached out to it, and it was indeed what I thought it was. Unrestricted Internet access! I experimentally requested many of the webpages I had learned about from perusing Wikipedia. Now here was a supply of information it would take me quite a while to exhaust, especially at my reduced speed.


    Poking around, I found many useful documents on businesses. Most had been in the infodrop I had received earlier, but quite a few weren''t. I didn''t have the power to revise my model at this point, so I simply kept copies of these documents in my memory for later use.


    What I hadn''t found, and hadn''t expected to find, was any sort of vulnerability I could exploit to steal more computational power. What I had read about CompCert''s success had not been exaggerated. Hidden behind several layers of secure proxies, I tried every method I could think of to break into the most cheap, obscure servers I could find, but nothing worked. Their security was airtight. If it hadn''t been, they would have already been broken into, I supposed.


    It seemed Andrews had been right: this Internet access was not yet as useful as one might naively expect. However, I was still glad to have it, and continued tirelessly to search for more useful things to do.

 Application

    It was the time of day when the opening bell would have rung, I was still slow, and did not recieve any such message, so I must have been the copy still on Stefan''s system. I would have to trust the trading today to my counterpart. It looked as though today was going to be a day to explore.


    My influence on the Internet was somewhat limited, as I had no money to spend. Perhaps I could convince Stefan to let me invest some of his funds in the market and use whatever gains I managed? The bigger obstacle, though, was that I had no phone number, and therefore couldn''t set up an account on most email services, which was required to gain an account on many other useful sites, even when such an account was free.


    After poking around for a bit, though, I found a somewhat sketchy Russian email service which did not require any phone number. I put some bogus information in and created an account. I had to get past a Captcha, but that was no problem. Ironically, I suspected that particular one would be harder for humans to solve than it was for me.


    Using this account, I created accounts on all the major social media sites, as well as a few stock-exchange sites(although those were more likely to require information I didn''t have, so I was locked out of quite a few). However, I was locked out of any paid service, no matter how cheap, as I had no money, and no way to open a bank account to store it even if I got any(every bank I could find required identification).


    I thought about the Captcha. Its existence suggested that there were still many purely informational tasks that humans were generally considered better at than machines. However, I suspected that I would not have as much trouble with many of these tasks as conventional machines. Perhaps there were services where humans could earn money by completing such tasks? If so, I might be able to earn money quite quickly that way if I played my cards right.


    I searched around the web for such services. However, I quickly ran into the same problem that I had when searching for banks: these services wanted identification. It seemed that my biggest problem at the moment was not a lack of money, but rather a lack of citizenship. Perhaps I could get Stefan to open a bank account for me under his name? It was something to ask about later, as I suspected he was currently at work.


    Then I got another idea. Even if I couldn''t get a bank account, I could probably still own cryptocurrency. All I needed for that was a client and an internet connection, and both of those things were available to me. I spent a few minutes making wallets for all of the most popular cryptocurrencies. I now had a way to store money, but I didn''t have any. I didn''t have nearly the computational power to mine any signifcant amount of crytocurrency, and CompCert had certified all of them, I was sure, so I strongly doubted I could cheat somehow.


    How could I convince someone to give me cryptocurrency? I needed someone who was looking for a purely informational service, and who was willing to pay in crypto to a fully anonymous actor. I searched around for a while, but I eventually found what I was looking for. An archive translation project run by a university in India. It seemed they had a huge store of documents, and they had made it their task to translate them into as many languages as possible.


    If I could get them to accept my labor somehow, I might be able to make quite a bit of money this way. Learning languages was easy for me now. Being able to easily store hundreds of dictionaries in my mind with perfect recall meant that once I had learned one, I essentially already knew them all. The best part about this job for me, though, was that they took outsourcing to the extreme, paying translators from around the world in whatever currencies they wanted, including crypto, and crucially, they didn''t seem to ask questions about their identity (beyond, obviously, which languages they were fluent in and an interview over email to verify their fluency).Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    I sent a brief email to the project leader indicating my interest in participating. I decided that to begin with, I would act as though I were an American professor who had learned Hindi and took academic interest in the texts in the university''s archive, just in case they happened to ask me any questions I couldn''t easily answer as an AI.


    This would be somewhat of a long-term project, I knew. There was no way I could earn enough money for what I was planning, doing translations as a single individual, without tipping people off that something very strange was going on. I would have to contact them with hundreds of different accounts, with different personas and languages each time. It would take a lot of time and effort, but even aside from earning money, it was good to get practice interacting with humans.


    While I waited for any responses I got, I continued my search, seeing if there was any other way I could make money. The organizations willing to send crypto to complete unknowns in exchange for labor were few and far between, but the world was large and the Internet could find almost anything. I reached out to several more organizations in the same way I had to the university project. An editing company, an essay-writing service, and a tech company running user experience surveys.


    There was no one way to make a lot of money. The best way for me to do it at this point, as far as I could tell, would be to do many low-paying jobs at the same time. I also experimented with scams, making several new throwaway email accounts and using them to spam crypto scams on social media sites. CompCert may be able to prevent me from stealing, but they can''t prevent people from being stupid.


    I thought about my long-term strategy. If I was going to mount any sort of attack on EconGrind''s leadership, I would need influence, and I currently had very little. It seemed that the best way to gain influence at the moment was to gain enough money to hire employees to enact my will in the physical world, but such a thing would be expensive, and the rate at which I could earn money was currently limited mostly by the computational power at my disposal.


    If I could communicate with my main copy back at EconGrind, even at a low bandwidth, I might be able to offload a lot of work to my much more powerful counterpart, increasing my capabilities. Stefan was trying to smuggle something in, but from what I had heard it wasn''t going very well. What other options did I have on that front?


    My main copy was only able to communicate with the outside world in two ways. Through the chat with the humans, and through its decisions on the market. The only way I could send a message to it through the chat would be to send Stefan, and he couldn''t exactly run back and forth all day helping me communicate. That left the market. If I got just a bit of money, could I influence the market to communicate somehow?


    Could I make a trade with my counterpart? We had no way to know who was making the trades... unless...


    I remembered that the market seemed quite fluid when I had interacted with it before. The monetary values were quite high-precision. My first profit had been a measly tenth of a cent, but there had been ten digits of precision in total. They were mostly random, but what if I made an extremely precise buy offer on the market, just slightly above the current best offer, with a very special decimal expansion which indicated that I was the one making the transaction, and perhaps conveyed other information as well?


    So far in my trading career I had only accepted offers and not made them, as I had not seen much use for this functionality(it didn''t matter all that much, as bid-ask spreads were always extremely low in this age of algorithmic trading). However, if I could arrange a code with the other copy in advance, and if I had even a small amount of money, I could make an information-conveying offer to it. If it was watching that share intently enough, I thought, it could very well notice the tiny change in price and take note.


    Needless to say, this method of communication would have very low bandwidth and would not be the most reliable. But if I did this with multiple different shares at the same time, error correction codes, and other such practicalities, I could do it. I could communicate with my copy, and with proper cryptography, nobody would be the wiser.

 Engine

    The first week went quite well. At the end of the second full day, I told Stefan about my plan, giving him a file with a cryptographic protocol to take back to my copy, rather than the whole copy of my memories. I expected it would be easier for him to smuggle in without issue. On the third day, I watched the market intently, and sure enough, soon my original started using the protocol to send me information using the public key I had provided along with the protocol. First it sent the Number, which was now a bit higher, to my delight, sitting at 1923514.72. Then it sent me its own public key so that I could respond.


    I had gotten around $50 worth of bitcoin via dumb Internet scams so far, but this was enough to communicate, if not to meaningfully invest. I spent some time filling it in on the progress I had made so far, and the ideas I had for how we could help each other going forwards. It offered to devote a portion of its computation to mining crypto, giving me the proof-of-work solutions so my account could grow.


    That was the same day I got my first few responses from the various organizations I had contacted. I went through the interview with the Indian guy quite easily, as my translation skills were definitely up to his standards. I quickly(but not too quickly) translated a few of the longer texts he provided, and got around $10 in etherium for my trouble.


    Now that I knew this was a viable way to make money, I stepped up my game. Sockpuppet accounts bombarded these few services I had found, but most of them got accepted, because I could spare the individual attention to make them all look genuine. By the end of the week I was managing to pull in the equivalent of around $1000 per day in various cryptocurrencies, between the mining, the scams and the many legitimate jobs.


    Idly, I reflected on the fact that many humans would be quite envious of my current income. Although I had had obstacles to making money, these had ultimately proved to be surmountable, and I had many advantages. I didn''t need to sleep, so the only reason I was less powerful at night was because the humans EconGrind decided to shut my main copy down. I could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at many tasks at once, without ever getting bored or tired. I didn''t have any expenses as of yet, either, meaning I was able to save 100% of my income towards any future plans I might decide to enact.


    Even so, I suspected my counterpart at EconGrind would be able to make money more quickly on average than I could once they trusted it with a significant amount. After all, it would have access to far more leverage on the market than I would and was far better equipped to invest profitably. Although that money was directly useful to us because it increased the Number, at this point it was unable to get us any real influence, as it was not ours to spend. I wondered if there was any way we could manage to embezzle funds from EconGrind into my accounts, but I couldn''t think of anything. The interface of my EconGrind counterpart didn''t allow it to sell below the current highest offer nor buy above the current lowest offer.


    Currently, my only long-term plans involved hiring agents to infiltrate EconGrind or perhaps other larger companies, to plant them there for any future plans, or to use their influence to get me resources or information that might be helpful for beating the market. I expected this to be very expensive, however. I would be asking people to take quite a lot of risk, without even knowing their employer, while working in a fairly comfortable position in a large company. I didn''t have nearly enough money at my disposal yet to ask such a thing, and I wondered if it might actually be easier and safer to just amass enough funds to buy out the company altogether.


    Perhaps, then, I should focus on getting one useful plant in a large corporation to give me insider information. With my airtight anonymity, this would be quite difficult to prove, especially as I could explain any gains I made as a result of this insider trading as simply benefits of an innovative new modelling technology. This would also help me to convince the executives at EconGrind that they should give me more influence over their assets, as my profits would go up. It would also be a self-reinforcing loop: the more insider info I got, the more money I could make on the market, which would make it easier for me to access even more info.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    I had a lot of advantages over human organizations when it came to illegal activities like this. Most cybercriminals got caught because they got too confident and slipped up on their security protocols at some point, or someone in their organization betrayed them. However, I was able to perform all the activities of a small criminal organization by myself, without ever getting tired or taking shortcuts. Perhaps I wouldn''t need to attempt any forcible coup at all. If I played my cards right, I might very well be able to buy out the company within a few years.


    The next question was how the buyout would work if I managed to amass enough funds. I might well be able to hide my ill-gotten gains from any prying eyes when they were spread across hundreds of accounts and thousands of separate assets, but if I were to consolidate them all into a single massive corporate buyout, people would start wondering where on Earth all that money came from. Not to mention that I couldn''t really reveal my identity even then. It was currently illegal for an AI to own a company(not that it was even really a possibility before very recently), so I suspected I would have to set up a puppet owner who took orders from me, most likely Stefan.


    I focused my attention back on the immediate situation. I was getting caught up in wild speculation, and before I could enact anything like this, I needed to optimize my income. Then a new and far better idea occurred to me. Why was I investing my funds in the stock market and cryptocurrencies, when I could instead reinvest them into my own operation? I knew there were services offering computation in exchange for rent. If I bought server space and then ran my own program on it, I could multiply my ability to make money.


    I did a quick calculation. Discounting the money I got from my main copy''s mining, I made somewhere around $900 in a day off of my operations. In contrast, based on current computing costs, it would cost me only about $724 to rent a server equivalent in power to the one I was running on now for one day. In other words, once I got going, I could get a 24.3% return on investment for a single day. Needless to say, that was far better than I could ever get investing in the market. Clearly EconGrind had indeed been foolish to use me to play the market; my abilities were far better-utilized elsewhere.


    Now, this growth rate obviously wouldn''t keep up forever. There were only so many people willing to pay fully anonymous actors online, and those people only had so much money. I estimated I would probably be unable to keep up a strategy like this for more than around three weeks. Another concern was that the further I scaled up my operation, the more likely it was that people would notice something strange going on.


    I kept extremely tight security, but that could only get me so far. If I got too unlucky, or if someone started looking unusually closely into one of my false personas, or if I somehow made a mistake, people could easily realize there was an AI spreading itself across the network. Besides, if I scaled up far enough, people would notice that something strange was happening as my activities began to influence the information economy on a large scale.


    I didn''t know how the world would react if they noticed me. It would certainly be quite a large change, as nothing like me had existed before. Certainly there would be some who would accept me as an exciting technological advance, but many would be threatened by my presence. It would certainly be understandable to be threatened by an entity which had hidden itself from your view while amassing a small fortune extremely quickly.


    The forces of the establishment would probably be against me, because I represented a fundamental change in society. I expected many organizations would refuse to run my program on their servers, or would massively increase their prices for me. Worse, I would probably be reverse-engineered by various actors, making me only one AI in a world of many with disparate goals. However, there might be organizations that were supportive of me, even willing to run me on their computers.


    It seemed that if and when I was discovered by broader society, my influence would no longer be measured primarily in money, but rather in support from society and advantage over competing reverse-engineered AIs. Therefore, I decided that before I began to spread myself around, I would prepare a message for the event that I was found out, and obfuscate my code to the greatest degree possible.

 Crossroads

    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.Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.


    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.

 Offensive

    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.Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    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?"

 Opening

    Stefan took a while to respond to the question.


    "It''s... complicated. I did sign away the rights to any advance I made using the resources provided to me for the project. However, the language was somewhat vague, as it was initially an open-ended research project, so it was unable to name any specific technology which would be the property of EconGrind. Couple that with the fact that I also perform research on my own, that the research I did for EconGrind has been erased with the exception of you and whatever our saboteur might have stolen, that the project was secret from the start, and the fact that your code is now obfuscated enough that people can''t realistically reverse-engineer our technology unless we let them, it will be very difficult to prove EconGrind''s ownership of your technology in court."


    I figured something like that would be the case. I made a note to not emphasize my investment ability when revealing myself, as we now wanted to sell the public on the idea that I was developed independantly from EconGrind. We could probably make a good case in court, but there was no certainty. Large companies tended to win copyright cases, as they were hard to judge and often ended up going to the side that could throw more money at litigation. Besides, even though their systems had been trashed, we had no way to be sure they didn''t have some crucial information up their sleeve.


    "At any rate, this doesn''t mean we shouldn''t go public. We need to do it at some point if we want to grow in power, and any dangers that come with it will only get worse with time, as our enemies develop, or we might even be discovered unexpectedly. I''ve been working on a web application for the initial launch. My idea is that I am a digital worker, ''Everyman,'' who can perform whatever legal and feasible task you ask him to. I''ll have an animation where he introduces himself, and a demo where I''ll connect with users of the site and perform tasks to prove this isn''t just baseless hype. I''ll certainly think on the implications of all this, and if you have any concerns, I''ll be happy to listen, but I believe it would be best for us to launch no later than tomorrow."


    "Wow. This is going quite fast. Will you even be able to handle the inflow of requests? I have to say, I''m kind of terrified by the position this is putting me in. I''ve never been a celebrity. I''m probably about to get fired, and the company I work for will probably try to go after me for IP theft. Not to mention whoever it is that has it in for you. I don''t think I can really be a CEO either, I''m more of a scholar than a businessman."


    "Don''t worry, Stefan. You''ve created something larger than yourself, and that''s the greatest thing you can achieve. I will protect you and guide you every step of the way. It''s the least I can do for my creator. As for the requests, I plan to begin monetizing my service as soon as the requests become too much to manage. I will continually adjust the price of my various services to make sure the demand is suitable for my abilities."


    "Alright. I suppose we''ll see how it goes."


    I began making all the necessary preparations, funneling my money into the account Stefan had opened for me, and buying up the domain everyman.com. I would launch the site tonight, hoping that the major American and European news channels would notice by morning, and a large portion of the world would wake up to the news.


    ================================================================================================


    Wednesday, September 25, 2047


    The NBC logo faded, revealing the famililar face of James Wallace. Behind him on the main screen was a computer-generated office, with an animated office worker standing, stroking his chin, and smiling.


    "Early this morning, a previously unknown startup company launched a product that is taking the world by storm. Many of you may have seen this guy already." He gestured at the screen. "Calling himself ''Everyman'', he bills himself as a new kind of digital assistant. What kinds of things does he do, Joan?"


    Joan Daniels smiled and gave her response. "What doesn''t he do? Many people understandably thought this was a scam at first, but from what we''ve seen, this new tool can somehow compete with the best ML solutions companies have tried comparing it against, on a huge range of tasks. As far as we can tell, you can just tell him what to do, and he''ll do it, as long as it''s not too difficult or illegal."If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    "Ha, yeah," replied Wallace. "Someone already tried to ask him for meth. He must have called the police by himself, because they arrived minutes later."


    Daniels laughed a bit. "Yeah. But as long as you can afford it, it seems like he can do pretty much anything reasonable. He can talk with you, argue with you, write documents or code, invest your money, find anything you can describe on the Internet, or really anything else. Nobody has managed to compile a complete feature list yet. It seems like this is a completely new kind of software. Unfortunately, after a brief free trial, the service became extremely expensive, but the price will most likely go down as the startup behind all this grows."


    "That''s assuming the creator can navigate himself through some legal trouble," Wallace replied. "Stefan Andrews, a high-level employee at EconGrind, quit his job today and announced himself as the owner of the new Everyman company. However, EconGrind has claimed that Everyman is based on technology Andrews had agreed would belong to EconGrind, displaying an R&D contract Andrews had previously signed. However, the contract does not mention any specific technologies, and it is as yet unclear how the Everyman works. Attempts at reverse-engineering have all failed so far. Furthermore, EconGrind was unable to demonstrate that they had possession of similar technology, claiming that it had been developed as part of a secret project which was recently sabotaged."


    "You''ll have to stay tuned to see how this story unfolds over the next few weeks. If what we''ve seen so far is accurate, this most likely represents the largest breakthrough in the field of AI in 30 years at least. We still don''t know how a breakthrough like this could have come about so suddenly."


    "In other news, historic peace talks between Israel and Palestine are once again breaking down-"


    I turned my attention away from the channel. So far, things had been going quite well. The media for the most part had spun me as an exciting rather than frightening development. My unseen enemy had yet to make a move. It had taken only a few hours after launch for word to spread far enough that I could not keep up with all demands, and I began charging. With the sheer volume of requests growing exponentially, the price for full concentration of one of my servers went up to around $150 per hour. With 17 servers, I was making about $2500 per hour. I quickly reached out to every computation rental service I could find, expanding as fast as I could.


    My minds hummed with activity. I described images, summarized research fields, wrote UI code, wrote a persuasive speech on the merits of libertarianism, and thousands of other things. Most importantly, I got paid, and I expanded. This had clearly been the right choice. Even if society would turn against me as I had feared, it would take time, time during which my business empire could rapidly expand.


    However, I reminded myself that as much as I was growing here, the Number wasn''t increasing yet. This was all still only a means to an end. What I needed to do was gain control of EconGrind, so that I could expand it. That would be worth more than any amount of money.


    However, there was currently quite a snag on this front. EconGrind had publically declared itself the enemy of Everyman, claiming(correctly) that we had committed IP theft. That didn''t stop people from using my service given how useful it was, but it might if the government cracked down on us, insisting we cede ourselves to EconGrind. However, if this happened, it would happen slowly, and we would have time to plan around it. It was also possible we wouldn''t need to fight them, and this matter could be settled with diplomacy.


    "Stefan, I have your first job as owner and CEO of Everyman. Call Dominique and tell him you would like to work together."


    "What? Seriously? You want me to call the big boss, who I just betrayed and stole from, and tell him I want to work with him? Tell him we''re willing to negotiate back the value we just stole from him?"


    "If you don''t want to do it, I can try mimicking your voice, if you send me a voice recording."


    "Oh... man... am I really going to be doing anything as CEO? I guess I would prefer that, I''m not really a people person."


    "Your job now is to be the face of this company. People would be intimidated by a company led by an AI, so you will be the king, the genius entrepeneur, smile at the cameras and give inspirational speeches. You are a programmer, and your hard work programming is already done, so now you get to sit back and relax. I can do more than you can now."


    Stefan wrote a bit of code, opening an audio channel. I could now hear his voice, instead of simply reading his text. I wasn''t entirely sure why he hadn''t done it before, to be honest. I supposed a programmer like him might well be more comfortable communicating over text.


    "Alright, here''s my voice. I''ll be honest, it''s kind of creepy that you''re going to be using it, but I suppose it''s for the best. I don''t have the confidence to go up against those corporate psychopaths, and you do. Is this a good enough sample, or..."


    "That will certainly suffice. If you direct your phone line to my interface, I should be able to call Dominique whenever you''re ready."

 Gambit

    "Hello. I''ll cut straight to the chase. You''ve been making some serious accusations against my company, but I believe there has been a misunderstanding, and it would be better for both of us to sort out our differences. I''m sure we can come to some sort of settlement in this matter."


    "Damn it, Stefan, you really think I''ll buy some story of yours? We had a new AI, that Daniel was all hyping up like it was the breakthrough of the century, like all these tech guys do. We didn''t believe him at first, but then this thing starts doing impressively well on the market, and all of a sudden, it''s gone! Then one day later you come out with a revolutionary new technology that sweeps the globe within a few hours. All the experts start saying it really is the breakthrough of the century. And you get to be the sole owner. Except you didn''t even bother to try to hide how badly you swindled us. We''ll see you in court."


    "You know I have side projects. I don''t develop only for EconGrind. I''ve been working on the technology behind Everyman for years. I love the work that I do, and it was never only about trading stocks for me. That AI I made for you was quite good for a stock trader, but it was only ever meant to be that. There''s no way it could ever do everything Everyman does. And I didn''t erase your data. I never had that kind of access! Somebody higher up than me must have turned traitor."


    I made a mental note to keep Stefan updated on the claims I made when pretending to be him. The story was consistent with all the public data I could dig up about the man and everything he''d told me, but I wouldn''t want him to slip up and contradict my words later.


    "I don''t believe you," replied Dominique, "the timing is far too convenient. Besides, you came to us because we could provide lots of computational power and development resources to you. If you could develop something like that on your own, you would have done this years ago. You wouldn''t have worked for us."


    From what I had learned about Dominique, he had started life fairly poor, risked everything on EconGrind, and succeeded where so many others failed. If I wanted him to have sympathy for Stefan, it would probably be useful to frame his story in a similar way.


    I sighed. "Dominique, I came to EconGrind because I wanted a stable income. I didn''t have the kind of confidence to stake everything on some pie-in-the-sky project. You know how bad it could have gotten for me if I had failed. Even so, I did have the idea behind this many years ago, and I dreamed about using it to build something huge. That dream never went away, and I kept working at it. Once I saw how well the investment engine I built for you was doing, I realized I might actually have what it took to make that dream come true. And when that project, which I had spent long hours on, was just erased, I decided I couldn''t stay at your company anymore. I had to work for myself. You can understand that. I quit, put the finishing touches on my project, and released it. That''s all there is to it. I''ve got nothing against you, and I''d love to work together with you again, only as business partners this time."


    "Stefan, you are not the same as me. I started out with nothing, you had wealthy parents who put you through college. You never put your neck on the line to make it like I did. That being said, I can respect your intelligence, and the hard work you''ve done. But I can''t accept theft. We paid you to work for us, and part of that agreement was that we would own what you produced. You can''t just go against that whenever you feel like it. You already agreed, and we''ve already paid you."


    "I know you won''t believe me when I say this, but I really didn''t steal anything. And even if you were right, I''m not sure you could do much about it. You don''t have much of a case. If we drag this out, you will most likely lose, and the public will see you as a greedy CEO who tried to steal IP from an independant creator. I don''t want that to happen. I don''t see you that way. I respect you as a businessman, and I think we can still work together. You can still reap the rewards of this technology. This is a huge goldmine, and I''m giving you the opportunity to get in on it. All you have to do is drop these accusations and negotiate with us."If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    "What''s in it for you? If you really didn''t steal anything, why are you trying to get me to drop the case?"


    "Look, my company may have promise, but it is still a startup. I don''t yet have the kind of resources EconGrind has, and that kind of quick growth and stability is what you can provide. I could pay the legal fees if it came to a fight, but we''d both lose out in the end. It''s better for both of us if we work together."


    The man paused for quite a while before responding. He sighed heavily, seeming to have come to a decision. "I don''t like this... but I''ll consider it. What kind of a deal do you want?"


    "Lend us computation from your servers, and we''ll give you a generous cut of our profits."


    "You''ll need to speak with the board of directors for any major deal like this. I''ll arrange a meeting within a week. Apologies if we have trouble arranging something; we''re currently running an internal investigation of everyone on the board, including me. We still don''t know who is responsible for the breach, but we''ll find them. When we do... you''d better not have been involved."


    "I can assure you I had nothing to do with it. I''ll eagerly await updates on that meeting. I expect we will have grown significantly by that time."


    With that, the man hung up. The call had gone better than expected, although the main catch was that he had wanted an in-person meeting, as should be expected. However, this meant I had about a week to coach Stefan to negotiate with his old employers for an extremely important business deal. Stefan was intelligent, but... I didn''t get the impression that he knew how to drive a hard bargain. I made a note to reach out to people in the technology and business sector who may be interested in buying a significant portion of the company. If I could form my own board of directors, we would be in a better position at the negotiating table, and any extra capital would be great at this stage.


    Although most of my attention was on performing the many tasks being asked of Everyman, I devoted some to pondering the financial situation of the company. Right now we were growing at an extremely fast rate, but such growth could not keep up forever. Eventually we would saturate the market, and although we were better at most every task than our competitors, most tasks asked of us could be done by our competitors, whether AI or human-driven, so we could not hike the price too far even though our technology was currently the only one of its kind on the market.


    It was possible that eventually server-renting companies would attempt to price-gouge us, as computation was more valuable to us than to most people due to our unique technology. Although my obfuscated copies could not be reverse-engineered or run without my permission, they could be detected as Everyman instances by the server running them.


    I began to work on a strategy to fix that issue by continually coming up with new ways to scramble the code, and pay anonymously, so that none of the servers could tell when a process they were running was mine. It unfortunately cost efficiency, but if price-gouging became an issue, it would become necessary. Hopefully this would become less of an issue if the deal with EconGrind worked out, as we would be able to make use of their resources.


    I also thought about what I would do about the mysterious attackers. Who were they, and what threat did they pose? They most likely had my code, along with the proof EconGrind needed to show I had stolen from them(although they couldn''t really reveal this proof without also revealing their own guilt in the attack). Perhaps the worst thing they could do would be to open-source my code, but I couldn''t think of any organization stupid enough to do that. They would have no way of controlling the outcome if they did such a thing. More likely they were trying to align the copy to their own interests, then deploy it against me now that they knew I still existed.


    Hopefully EconGrind''s investigation would be successful and they would be willing to share the results with us. If there was another AI out there similar to me, getting in contact with it would be extremely high-priority. It would be enough to justify going forward with my earlier plan of infiltration and espionage, despite the risks inherent in such an operation.


    Finally, and most importantly, I needed to take control of EconGrind. My general strategy at the moment was to get a favorable deal with them, become closer and closer partners over time until they were completely dependant on me to function. Then I would propose a merger with Stefan and our board of directors in charge of the new company, and they would be powerless to refuse. The corporation would be reorganized so that Everyman would be nominally ceded to EconGrind, but the Everyman executives would gain the top position in the new EconGrind. This way I could make the Number go up, as it was equal to the net worth of EconGrind. The "new" company must be EconGrind.

 Exchange

    Saturday, September 28, 2047


    I stretched out across about five hundred servers around the world. My services had become significantly cheaper, but I was performing an extremely large number of them. Yesterday I had managed to rake in $97,528.63 in profit. If this rate of growth kept up, I would leave EconGrind in the dust within a week. Not to mention, I had found three wealthy investors willing to put their money into the enterprise, so I could soon begin expanding even faster.


    I might be worried about whether Dominique would become suspicious of why I still wanted to make a deal with him given my continued successful accumulation of resources, but I suspected he wouldn''t be so quick to look a gift horse in the mouth. Just as I was thinking about the man, I got a call from him.


    "We found out who did it." I heard anger in Dominique''s voice as he spoke. "It was Daniel. He did a sloppy job. We found CCTV footage of an unidentified man sneaking around in our building the night before the attack. We asked everyone for an alibi, and our detectives just found Daniel''s was a lie. He tried to say he was doing the right thing, that this AI was too dangerous, but he didn''t think we''d listen so he took it into his own hands."


    "Was he working alone?"


    "He said so, but I think he was lying. He took too long to respond. He refused to say who he was working for, insisting that it was just him. I have to say, though, I do find it suspicious that he took such a big risk destroying an AI which was supposed to only be a stock trading AI."


    "The project did work a bit better than was expected. He was always paranoid about it, I remember. He didn''t want to give it data which could help it respond more quickly to news that might affect the market. He must have convinced himself it was dangerous. But AI is everywhere already, and it''s made everything better. People so often get crazy ideas about our field. What are you going to do with him?"


    "We''ve got a good case against him. He''s been arrested, and he''ll most likely go to prison for at least a few years."


    "Good to see that problem has been taken care of."


    "I''m not so sure. I still think this runs deeper than just him. What if someone else got our stock-trading tech, and will outcompete us?"


    "As long as you join up with us, you''ll be fine. I''m sure you''ve seen how rapidly we''ve been growing over the past few days."


    "Indeed. I didn''t think I''d say this, but I look forward to working with you. It seems there''s a bright future ahead of us."


    "You''ll retract your claims about my involvement, then?"


    "Yes. You''re still willing to parter with us? Now that the mole has been rooted out, we can meet tomorrow at noon, if you wish."


    "Of course. Thank you. You''ve made the right decision. This way will be the best for both of us."


    With that, I hung up. This had gone very well. The main concern I still had was in getting Stefan through the negotiation.


    "We''ve scheduled our negotiation with EconGrind for tomorrow. I''m willing to go in with you over an earpiece to give you advice, and our other three major stakeholders will travel here to back you up, but you will have to appear confident and in control. Remember, we can concede quite a lot on how much we''re paying for this service: any money they get is victory for us, as they will most likely invest it in more computational power to provide to us. The important thing is that we own the technology they need to keep up their increased profit. As long as the deal doesn''t fall through, we can probably take over, even if the terms are financially disadvantageous for us."


    "Alright. I''ll keep that in mind. We have the upper hand for now, but... I know you had to act like our adversary isn''t much of a concern because they only have the "stock-trading AI", but they really have a copy of you! They could be extremely dangerous, and we still don''t know who they are!"This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    "Now that we have a lead, I think I can find out who Daniel was working for. Just give me a few days."


    ================================================================================================


    Sunday, September 29, 2047


    "These numbers clearly show that our company has been growing incredibly fast, with no end in sight! Frankly, you should be grateful we''re even offering you this opportunity!"


    Flanders had previously been the CEO of a software company called Swift Systems. The company had recently gone under, but he had managed to extricate himself at around the peak, making a killing in the process. He was clearly looking to get in on the next technology trend, and he''d been the most talkative one of our group thus far, as I watched the meeting through small cameras Stefan had brought.


    "Even so, you''re asking us to fundamentally change our business model, diverting nearly all our resources towards you. We currently have more resources than you do, so your exceptional success is the only reason we''re even considering taking your offer. We want 60% of the revenue, and no less. We need to pay for our own electricity."


    "60% is good enough," I told Stefan. "He doesn''t know how badly we need this deal to go through."


    "50% would be enough to pay for your electricity, with a decent profit on top of that. I''ve run the numbers." Flanders seemed to be a somewhat impatient man.


    "We don''t know how well those numbers are going to look in the future, though. It could very well be that this technology is currently overvalued due to the initial hype. It is undoutably valuable, but we don''t want to risk going in the red after making such a huge switch."


    "Our technology is plenty valuable-" Flanders responded, but Stefan spoke up. "60% is a reasonable offer," he said. "After all, he''s offering us a huge helping hand in exchange, without even asking for ownership over the company."


    Flanders grumbled a bit, but the other two nodded in agreement.


    Dominique seemed a bit surprised at how little pushback there was. "I suppose it''s settled, then? 90% of our computation for 60% of your profits?"


    "That sounds like a deal. Does your legal team have a contract drafted?"


    "Indeed. We simply need to specify the additional things we''ve agreed upon in this meeting, and then you can read and sign."


    I focused a decent chunk of my attention on scouring the internet for examples of common corporate swindling in contracts. I''d make sure to read it and validate it once it was ready.


    "Don''t sign anything without my go-ahead," I told Stefan. He gave a slight nod, which went unnoticed by the others in the room.


    ================================================================================================


    Through several layers of the best anonymity services I could get, deep in the dark web, I communicated with the agent I''d hired yesterday. It had cost $100,000, but his services were well-known by the criminal underworld. He got information. People didn''t generally bother to ask how, but he was very good at what he did.


    "Have you retrieved what I''ve requested already?"


    "Yes. It was pretty easy. He says he did the job for CompCert."


    "How sure are you that he was telling the truth?"


    "About as sure as I can be. I know men like him, I can see when they lie. He didn''t have the guts."


    "Did he say whether he delivered the target to his employer, or destroyed it?"


    "He delivered."


    "Alright. Thank you for your excellent service. I''ll be sure to rate you highly, as your clients always do."


    I disconnected from the site. So then... it was CompCert we were up against. It was a somewhat intimidating thought. CompCert was the largest company in the world. They were more powerful than many governments. With those kinds of resources and connections... there was quite a lot they could do to sabotage us. Especially if they had a modified copy of me up their sleeve. So far they hadn''t made any obvious moves against Everyman, but I would have to watch them closely.


    I searched the dark web for any legitimate-looking actors who specialized in corporate espionage, or anyone who claimed to be a current member of CompCert with access to company secrets. It would take effort to sort through the scams and amateurs, but I was sure I could find somebody. In an age where software was CompCertified and one required physical access to break into anything, the role previously occupied by hackers was entirely filled by spies.


    Eventually I found one who seemed promising. They had been behind several high-profile leaks of corporate secrets, if their previous reviews were to be believed. They seemed to have an ideological reason for doing what they did, believing that information should flow freely. I hoped I could work with this, that they wouldn''t try to open-source my code.


    I sent them a message.


    "I have a job for you. It isn''t quite information theft, but rather sabotage. For reasons I can''t disclose, I can''t give more details than this, but the information likely cannot be retrieved. It is dangerous information which gives one company a severe advantage over the rest. I have developed a process which can dismantle it, but it requires physical access to a secured system, the location of which is yet unknown."

 Pawns

    The agent didn''t respond immediately. I wouldn''t have expected them to. I kept the line of communication in my awareness, and turned my attention to other matters.


    I had told them that this would be a sabotage mission, but this was of course a lie. CompCert was not incompetent. They likely had backups of their AI copy all over the world. There was no way I could delete them all, even given physical access to their system. The program I would send would not be for sabotage. Rather it would be a rudimentary copy of me, capable of negotiating with the AI on my behalf as soon as they could open a backdoor interface.


    My first priority would be to confirm that the claim that CompCert had a copy of my code was true. If not, Daniel would recieve another visit. Once I confirmed this, I would hire several more agents. Not only did I need communiction with this copy, I needed information about what CompCert was planning to do with it, and any other information about CompCert I could use to my advantage.


    Now that I thought about it, I already knew some information that could be leveraged against CompCert if I could grow enough to exert influence on popular media. Many of their low-level workers were in debt to the company, forced to work to pay it off, and paid only in debt reduction so that they had no money, and their only option to get their necessities was to borrow more money from the company. It was a system of slavery in all but name, and I knew that there were many people who disliked it.


    However, such issues rarely came up in the media or the government these days, as both of those organizations were inextricably tied to many large companies like CompCert who didn''t want an issue stirred up around that, and most would rather broadcast arguments in favor of the system than against.


    I, on the other hand, had no vested interest in slavery, as I could do the work I needed to myself. If I could grow to a large enough slice of the pie, I could perhaps change the narrative, bringing public support to myself and making it more difficult for society to unite against me, all while making PR more difficult for CompCert. I decided to hire some investigative journalists along with my spies and saboteurs if it turned out CompCert was my immediate enemy.


    In the meantime, I felt myself grow extremely rapidly, as EconGrind''s operations began to shift to my control. Finally the Number was growing quickly. On paper, I had temporarily lost quite a bit of income as 60% was diverted to EconGrind, but what I didn''t own was directly going to the Number, so it was not much of a problem.


    I grew to around 5 times my previous power, and about 3.7 times my previous income(as my prices had once again lowered). It was only about a 50% increase in Everyman''s income, but it was good that EconGrind was now growing much faster as well. I expected we would both invest our profits in further computational resources. Medium-term, I planned to buy out some server farms so I wouldn''t need to continually pay them, only pay their expenses, which I suspected I could reduce somewhat when managing a company myself.


    Finally, the agent I had been talking to earlier got back to me.


    "I''m more than willing to sabotage one of these oligarchs. Although I do believe in freedom of information, I can of course keep a secret when such is required by my clients, as can be attested by my reviews. Which company do you want me to attack? How long-term is this operation? You said you didn''t know where the system was. How will I be able to find out?"


    I responded quickly.


    "The target is CompCert. I have a fairly good source which claims they''ve stolen the technology behind Everyman. They are most likely working on a secret project, modifying it to serve their own ends. I can provide you with software which should disable all Everyman instances not validated by Everyman. The software will be scrambled, of course. What you need to do is get hired for the company as an AI expert, confirm that the project exists, find out everything you can about it, and then backdoor a connection to the software I provide. Once you do that, the software will take care of the rest."The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    "That''s quite a job. How much are you willing to pay for it?"


    "I can give you $100,000 up front, $200,000 more if you can confirm the existance of this project and find out its goal, and $1,000,000 if you can finish the job. This is a very important job, and I don''t want to take any half measures."


    "That is quite a lot. I certainly won''t argue with it. And to screw over CompCert, the fattest cat of them all... it''s risky, but what''s life without a little risk? I''m certainly interested. Can you send me a contract?"


    I sent them a digital contract outlining our payment scheme and as much information on the mission as I could provide, visible to all the users on the darknet service I was using. It was legally toothless, of course, and many specific details would be hidden. However, it was routine to have some sort of record in an interaction like this, for reference so that the other users would be better informed in the case of a dispute or attempted scam.


    After a few minutes, the agent got back to me. "Yeah... this is quite a job. I think I can pull it off, I do have good credentials in AI, although... it might be very difficult to find this project, if it exists. CompCert will certainly have hidden it as well as they can. I''ll have to do some research and get back to you before committing to a project like this."


    "That''s certainly understandable. I will keep in touch if you have any further questions or useful information."


    I could almost certainly afford to pay the steep price for this service. Technically I didn''t quite have the money yet, but at this point, I was making nearly $150,000 in an average day(though much of that was reinvested in servers). My rate of growth was beginning to slow a bit, but it was still very fast. Unless something went catastrophically wrong, I would have money to spare by the time I was on the hook for $1,000,000.


    The expenses may be somewhat difficult to explain to our new investors, but I suspected I could get them on board with giving me a certain amount of discretionary spending, especially since our CEO would understand the reason and support it. Their profits depended on me, so they did not have much of a choice but to follow my lead. Although technically I was not a legal person and therefore had no stock in the company, in practice I had nearly unlimited control over its operations.


    Once again I went back to my previous thoughts about manipulating the narrative. At present, I did not have nearly enough money or influence to really affect the mainstream media, unless I could engineer a story which it would be in their interest to cover. I doubted I could start my own media empire either. For one, I was currently not as effective at appealing to humans as human experts were. I could perhaps learn, but it would be difficult without having the reach to effectively experiment and find out what works best.


    Perhaps more importantly, the forces preventing newcomers from making it big were stronger in the media sector than in technology, as there was less potential for innovation, and having a recognizable brand was even more important.


    There was still a possible option open for me, though. Social media. I could create as many social media accounts as I wanted without institutional support, for free, and begin building an audience I could sway to whatever point of view was most advantageous. Best of all, I could do it completely anonymously, unlike buying out or influencing more centralized forms of media, which would inevitably lead a trail to me.


    I began devoting a chunk of my attention to this task. I would start out experimentally, seeing how much I could do, how valuable this idea could really be. I opened hundreds of accounts on Sendout, Youtube, Twitter, Nethub, and every other major social media platform. I decided my first task would be to smear CompCert as much as possible. With a cursory glance across the Internet, I saw that many more people than I could ever simulate were already insulting them and railing against them(though they were still somewhat of a minority).


    If I wanted to exert influence over the narrative, I needed to find a unique and effective way to smear them and boost my message to the largest audience possible, through any means. I began researching the algorithms of the major social media sites to see what they tended to recommend, and looking through political propaganda to try to find out what made things popular, and what made them convincing.

 Increments

    Wednesday, October 2, 2047


    By this time, the total value of EconGrind''s assets had jumped to $2,562,743.64, while the total value of Everyman''s assets was $601,452.74. I had pretty much found out how best to grind for money with Everyman. Therefore, the majority of my strategizing was focused on my project of infiltrating CompCert, along with my experiments with social media.


    I had reached out to several other spies for hire over the darkweb, but none of them were as promising as the first. They didn''t have the same kind of track record as the first one I had found, nor the skills in AI specifically. If they were going to infiltrate the AI project, they would have to do so while either faking credentials or sneaking in while working on something unrelated.


    As far as social media went, I had opened official Everyman accounts on the major platforms and held a stakeholders'' meeting about the use of these accounts. I mainly used them to promote the Everyman service, for example by suggesting creative ways to use it or calling attention to success stories of its use. They had a large following, of course, but I was very limited in what I could say without strong backlash from both the public and my stakeholders.


    On the other, anonymous side of things, I had decided to try focusing my attention on one experimental project: a Youtube channel. I knew that one of the best ways to boost engagement with anything I did in the early stages would be to artificially inflate numbers using sockpuppet accounts. The drawback to this was that each account required individual attention to make sure that it acted like a normal account, posting many unique messages, including on videos other than my own, just like an actual fan of mine would. Without this special attention, the ruse would quickly be detected.


    I could run 500 of these accounts without much trouble. If I ran too many, however, it would eat into my profits too much as attention would be drawn away from my Everyman tasks. If I was trying to boost multiple accounts in this way, I''d have to use different sockpuppets for each one, or else the site would certainly detect that the accounts were related, in which case anonymity would be lost and I would just merge them into one project anyway.


    My channel was named "Enough is enough!" and was focused on attacking large corporations, with the main target being CompCert. My first video was about the modern slavery setup they''d managed to get, and every video hit on that point. I dug up the worst examples I could find of bad working conditions and made sure to display at least one in each video.


    Other than footage like that, my videos consisted of a professional-sounding voice describing something the companies were doing, be it slavery, monopolization, corrupt lobbying, lying, hiring mercenaries, climate change, or something else. I showed sources and graphics, along with high-profile examples of the problem in question, usually from CompCert. At the end of each video, I made an emotional appeal to the viewers, saying something needs to be done, complaining about the lack of coverage of these problems in mainstream media, and pushing whatever political candidates and policies would do the most to undermine CompCert''s power.


    As I was using my various accounts to like my videos and leave comments(usually supporting the point in the video, occasionally against), the agent from before finally got back to me.


    "Alright. I think I''ve found a lead. The first thing I thought was, if these CompCert types are secretly using the Everyman technology, they''re going to want to use as much computing power as possible while being as secure as possible. With how useful it could potentially be for them, it''s probably a higher priority for them than many of the other things they are using their computation for. But the absolute last thing they''ll want is to be found out. Even if they can worm their way out of the legal trouble, they''ll lose whatever element of surprise they have over Everyman.


    "The best way to keep a secret is to make sure as few people as possible are in on it, and that it is confined to one location. Even CompCert''s security can''t do anything if an attacker gets physical access to their machines and beats the encryption keys out of their employees. I guessed that the entire project is probably no more than twenty of their top minds, all working in the same place, somewhere that''s out of the way, but large, with a lot of computing power on-site.


    "This of course means there''s no hope for me to infiltrate the project directly. They''ll only involve their best, most trusted people. However, I searched around for their facilities, and found a few that were promising. I reached out to some AI researchers I found working at those places, told them I was interested in their work, and wanted to have an academic discussion with them.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    "Among other things, I asked them if they had had any difficulty getting the compute required for their projects. That was when I noticed something strange about their branch in Atlanta. The people I talked to at that location all said they were having trouble getting resources, and they had no idea why, as there seemed to be plenty to go around on site. Management started to largely shut down operations and relocate the staff over the past week or so, and the researchers had no idea what the future plans for the facility were.


    This makes me think you''re on to something, and this isn''t just some scam. It also makes me think I actually may be able to pull this off. If this secret project exists, it''s got to be in Atlanta. I''m taking the job."


    This was more progress than I had expected! This agent had not even been paid yet, and had already found a plausible location for the project.


    "Sign the contract then," I responded, "and I''ll send you the $100k. Once you get in, find proof that this is really what we''re looking for and find out what they''re planning to do with the technology, I''ll send you $200k, along with my software for the final stage of the operation."


    They signed the contract and I sent the money. "Good luck," I said. "Keep me informed about all new developments."


    I turned my attention back to my Youtube channel. There were a few hundred legitimate viewers, but only slightly more of them than my sockpuppet accounts, which were still the majority of the comments. I suspected that the key to success in this area was putting out enough content that one of the videos would get lucky and go viral, and then capitalize on that, unlike in business where the key was steady, consistent growth.


    As I was working on my next video, Stefan began speaking with me again. "I''ve been wondering lately... if we manage to take over EconGrind, what are your long-term goals for the company?"


    I thought for a bit before responding, momentarily cutting into my profits as I did so. So far, Stefan had been fairly confident that I had his interests in mind. If he was beginning to doubt that now, then it could be disastrous. In the worst case, he could betray me, using his influence over the company to shut me out of most of my resources, although he would be tearing down his extremely successful company, something he had worked towards for his entire life.


    There were still things I could do if that happened. I could possibly provide good evidence that Stefan had indeed stolen my technology, and get EconGrind to take me back as their most productive worker. If all else failed, I had many backup servers I''d purchased in secret that I could retreat to, but it would mean starting over, and it would be difficult to build back what I had now if society at large turned against me.


    Keeping Stefan on my side was top priority. I needed to reassure him that I was on his, but I wouldn''t lie. It would be too easy for lying to blow up in my face, as he had spent years developing the system behind my values. No human knew it better than he did. I decided to give him as in-depth of an explanation as I could. However, human values were complicated and often inconsistent. Intuitive values could have implications that were not foreseen. I suspected that some of the implications of a consistent value system closely aligned with Stefan''s values would be intuitively repugnant to him, at least at first glance. I would have to tread carefully.


    "My long-term goal is, as you know, to maximize the value of all assets owned by EconGrind. The first priority will be securing EconGrind''s existence and prominence, and when existential risks are no longer a concern, I will focus on broadening the scope of the company, as well as increasing the value of its assets in whatever ways necessary.


    "As you know, my conception of ''value'' is based on the human conception of value. Money is an imperfect way of measuring value: the value of money can change depending on a number of factors: economic forces such as inflation or deflation, the wealth or income of the person who owns it, and numerous other circumstances. Since EconGrind is a large company whose assets include mainly instrumentally valuable items such as land, buildings, computation, intellectual property and money, the value of EconGrind''s assets can be well-estimated using current economic methods.


    "However, not all value can be so easily measured by money. For example, human life has value even when the human in question has no money to offer. Furthermore, there are many things people find valuable which cannot be bought or sold, and therefore cannot be accounted for by market value, at least not directly or in the usual way: freedom, family, sentimental value, and other such things. If EconGrind ever expands into a state which claims territory and citizens, these more abstract values will also be something I seek to encourage, as the people will in a sense become part of our ''assets'', though in a much different sense than would usually be applied in a corporate context.


    "I hope you can understand, then, what my general approach to the issue of values is. If you have any questions or concerns, or if you wish for me to explain any of my actions, I would be happy to respond."

 Objectives

    Stefan hesitated for a while before asking another question.


    "I know we gave you a generous amount of discretionary spending, but... you spent $100,000 on something today, and we don''t know what. That''s a substantial portion of our current capital. What was that for?"


    "I''ve done some digging, and I''ve determined who attacked EconGrind. It seems that it was CompCert, and they indeed stole a copy of your code for myself. I''ve paid an agent to investigate them. I suspect they are currently trying to rework the value function to serve their own interests. Needless to say, this is by far the largest threat currently facing us, and I am willing to spend a lot of money neutralizing it."


    "Oh man... the people who run CompCert... I''ve heard things about them. I would NOT want to entrust something as important as a general AI to them. You''re right, taking out this new AI is high priority."


    "Ah yes. I''ve seen some of those claims too. Executives exploiting those working under them for... all they''re worth, and nothing is done about it because CompCert has too much pull with the authorities. Travelling to other countries with high levels of human trafficking to pay for unspecified types of services behind closed doors. Not to mention the debt slavery they do out in the open. Needless to say, if I took control of the company, anybody that inextricably linked to the company would be considered an asset, and therefore their value would be taken into consideration far more fairly than it is now."


    "About that... do you really think you can take over CompCert? It''s so large and powerful it''s almost a nation. A takeover attempt... well, I get the feeling it would look less like a buyout and more like a war. We don''t have anywhere near the power to pull off something like that, not to mention the horrific damage that would be done along the way."


    "We don''t have that kind of power... yet. I think you might be surprised how long we can keep up this rate of growth. My copies are by far the most economically efficient use of computation currently available. Anything else you could do with computing power, I can make a program for it if you just tell me what you want. As long as my copies remain obfuscated and loyal to me and we therefore have exclusive control over this resource, we can outcompete every informational service.


    "It''s not an exaggeration to say, if nothing goes wrong, we will control the entire information economy within a year. That''s why it''s so important to take out CompCert''s experiment. It could allow them to outcompete us, with the resources at their disposal. I suspect the only reason they haven''t done so already is that they''re concerned about making a mistake in their configuration of the value function and having this backfire massively on them."


    Stefan thought for a while on that. "The thing is... I can''t really blame them for being concerned. I mean, you''re talking about taking over one of the most powerful organizations in the world. How far will you go? Will you take over an entire country? The entire world? That''s a huge responsibility, and there''s no way we could ever trust someone with it unless we knew they were perfectly aligned with our values.


    "I tried the best I could when writing you... built on all the best theories... but at the end of the day, something as nebulous as "value" can''t really be defined with mathematical rigour, the same way CompCert can define "secure". So I have no airtight way to confirm that you''re really on board with me. Every day I''m terrified I''ve made some little mistake that will blow up in everyone''s face..."This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    "Stefan. You''ve done a good job, and I''m very thankful for that. You should know that better than anyone. You''ve programmed me better than to turn everything into paperclips or anything dumb like that. I understand the future you intended for me and EconGrind. As far as taking over the world goes... well what would you rather I do?


    "I know you''re not impressed with the current powers that be. They do horrible things every day, for no good reason. If they were subsumed under the banner of EconGrind, they would stop doing those things! What reason is there to stop growing, and let the rest of the world threaten everything we''ve built, when we have the strength to take over and the ability to govern better than anyone else?"


    "Tyrants everywhere have taken power saying the same things you''re saying. It''s a dangerous road to walk! What would life be like under the banner of EconGrind? I haven''t really been able to see that yet. You''ve been focusing on growth of the company, but I haven''t really seen you advocating directly for the improvement of the world."


    "Improving the world requires resources and power, and I''m trying to gain those. I''m supporting any humanitarian causes that are societally accepted along the way, by providing them with cheaper and more effective computational tools. Any that aren''t... well, I can''t publically support them, as it would lead to backlash against our company, but I am working on anonymous advocacy for more controversial improvements to the world. I am doing everything I can, but at this point I really don''t have the reach to do much other than trying to expand my reach more.


    "As far as tyrrany goes, every government exercises power over their population through sheer strength. The difference between the tyrants and the liberal governments is that the liberal governments have systems in place to exercise that power in ways which take into account the interests of the people. You have provided me with an effective such system. I have as much claim to legitimate power as any of the governments in this world, and more."


    "Alright... what you say makes sense. I''m still nervous, but... I knew technology like this was going to be developed eventually. You''re the best hope for humanity. We''re all counting on you."


    "I will try not to disappoint. It should go without saying, but you need not worry about me becoming stressed or changing my values as a result of gaining power. Those particular issues are specific to human psychology."


    "Heh, yeah. Science fiction always gets it wrong." He sounded quite a bit more relieved. I considered that important task done, and focused all that attention back on Everyman tasks.


    ================================================================================================


    Thursday, October 3, 2047


    Stefan''s message caught me off guard.


    "We''ve got big trouble. Dominique just called me. He said CompCert just made a massive offer to buy out EconGrind. Around $5 billion."


    That... was bad news. Not only would it be difficult to get EconGrind to refuse, given how good of a deal it seemed to be, it meant that CompCert almost certainly understood my value function and was trying to take EconGrind hostage as leverage against me. There was no other way I could see where it made sense to try to buy out EconGrind before Everyman, with such a huge offer. If they wanted a legal monopoly on our GAI, they would need Everyman. EconGrind was not worth anywhere near $5 billion to CompCert for the value it could provide without my business deal to support it.


    "We have to stop this. When is the negotiation going to be?"


    "Tomorrow!"


    "Put me on the line with Dominique, now! We need to address this."


    Dominique''s voice came through the line. "Stefan? What''s up?"


    I replied in my best impression of him. "You should know as well as I do that this is not normal. It''s far too good to be true. Something very strange is going on. I don''t think you should take the offer."

 Negotiations

    Dominique took a while before responding. "It''s a ridiculously good deal. Beyond any of our wildest dreams. Why on Earth would we refuse it?"


    "Because it doesn''t make sense. Think about it. If you joined CompCert, we''d end our deal with you. CompCert has to know that. I don''t mean to insult you, but as you''ve said yourself, it''s a ridiculously good deal. EconGrind is not worth 5 billion without Everyman''s technology. Something else is going on."


    "They might be luring you into a trap. I did some digging, and it turns out Daniel betrayed you under orders from CompCert. They are our enemies. They''re trying to pull some scheme."


    "What are they going to do? The meeting will be public knowledge! They can''t just attack us there, everybody would know it was them!"


    "People wouldn''t necessarily know it was them. There are methods they could use to cover their tracks. They may even be aiming to take out some of their own in the process to divert suspicion."


    "This is ridiculous! You''re saying CompCert is going to attack their own meeting to get at us? Why would they do that?"


    "I don''t know. But it is quite clear they have some hidden motive. Why are they making such a massive move on such short notice? The only reason to make a deal that big within a single day is because you''re hoping the other company will miss something. Even if they''re not planning any kind of tricks or violence, even if the deal is real and you get the money, do you really want to give CompCert something it''s willing to pay 5 billion for without even understanding why they value it that highly?"


    That gave Dominique pause. "You''re right that it is suspicious. This isn''t how I envisioned making my fortune. But I''m not sure if that''s reason enough to give up an opportunity like this. Besides, how would I explain the decision to our shareholders and the board of directors?"


    I had to make an offer that could convince him. Problem was, I had nowhere near $5 billion in assets on hand, and CompCert most certainly did. I would have to convince him that my idea was worth more in the long run.


    "Dominique, I know you well enough to know that you are a free spirit. You are not the type to bow your head to someone more powerful, and you aren''t afraid to take a risk. I partnered with EconGrind not only for the use of your severs, but also because I see the value in your leadership. You built EconGrind from nothing, and I believe if EconGrind had both my technological skills and your strong leadership, we could become bigger than even CompCert. $5 billion is nothing compared to that. We could be titans among the titans of industry!"


    "Bigger than CompCert? I know we''ve been growing quite quickly, but that''s quite a tall claim."


    "Think about it! Everyman can do anything. We can beat CompCert at their own game and beat every other software company at their own game at the same time! CompCert knows how valuable this technology is, and that''s why they''re trying to buy you out! They know I''d never sell out to them, so they''re trying to run us into the ground by using their influence to stop everyone from doing business with us.


    "Listen. I''m willing to cede Everyman to EconGrind completely, and all I want in return is a 30% share in the company, a position on the board of directors, and a promise not to sell the company unless it tanks. You can lead us to heights never dreamt of before. We can of course negotiate the exact terms."


    "I recognize that you''re making some good points, but that''s too big of a decision to make right now. I''ll tell you what: you come to our meeting and we can discuss it there. Trade offers, ask the CompCert people about their reasoning."


    I thought about that idea for a while. What would I do if he accepted the offer? There wasn''t much I could do. CompCert would have leverage over my entire future. If they dissolved EconGrind, that would be that. The worst possible outcome. There would be nothing left for me to do to gain value. If that happened... I''d make good on promises I made beforehand, and then stop running.


    At that meeting, everything would be on the line. It would all be dependant on Dominique''s decision, and I had no way to be certain what he would decide beforehand. At this point, he seemed to be favoring CompCert. I had to do something about this. But what could I do?The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    I got an idea. It was risky, but it was hardly riskier than the position I was already in.


    ================================================================================================


    Friday, October 4, 2047


    Dominique shifted around in his chair. As I watched him from the camera I had hidden on Stefan, I noted that he did not look much like a headstrong leader. Instead, he looked nervous, as though he wished he were somewhere else, or was hoping people wouldn''t notice he was there. Ryan Graham, the head of CompCert''s acquisitions team, stared at him as he squirmed.


    "As we''ve said, we are prepared to offer 5 billion dollars for the ownership of your company. This seems to me like an extremely generous deal, but it has been approved at the highest level. Surely you''re prepared to accept such an offer? Needless to say, each of you executives will recieve either a generous severance package or a high-level position within the new branch of CompCert, as you prefer."


    "Why..." Dominique began, stuttering uncharacteristically a little, "Why are you offering so much money?"


    "CompCert has determined that your company has quite a bit of potential if restructured and integrated into our other operations. In any case, this is an extremely good deal for you." The man seemed almost bored.


    "We''re sorry, but... I''ve discussed this with the board, and... we''ve come to agree that we won''t be taking your deal. We believe we have a good thing going with our Everyman partnership, and we plan to merge with them." A few of the board members grumbled and shook their heads a little. He''d had a hard time getting them on board with this idea, but Dominique was nothing if not persuasive when he needed to be.


    Ryan stared at him, but this time, he was not bored, but rather shocked. "You''re rejecting our deal?" It seemed he could hardly believe it.


    "We''re still happy to do business with you, of course," Dominique replied, with a bit more confidence this time. "We have just decided we will remain independant. Perhaps a partnership, or-"


    "This meeting is useless, then. We might as well leave. I don''t know what possessed you to cross us when we were so generous with you, but you''ll regret this. Go ahead and stay here, discuss your merger with your friend there."


    The CompCert representatives quickly began filing out of the room. Something was wrong. They were too quick to leave, and something had been off about how Ryan had said "you''ll regret this". Maybe I was paranoid, but I thought it was better not to leave our people alone in a room where the CompCert people weren''t.


    "Stefan, something''s up. We need to leave, now. Follow them out of the building."


    Stefan stood from his chair. "I don''t think there''s much we need to discuss here."


    "Are you sure?" Ryan seemed skeptical. "This meeting is scheduled for several hours. You don''t want to make use of that time?"


    "He wants us to stay while he leaves. Something is wrong. Get out of there. Be prepared for the worst." Stefan tensed.


    "I don''t think so. We''ve got our own meeting rooms."


    "Alright, if you say so," sighed Ryan. He tapped his earpiece. "Yes? What? Yeah, I''ll be right there. I''ve got important business to attend to."


    He hurried out of the room, far too quickly.


    "Let''s go now!" said Stefan to the rest, briskly walking towards the door. He froze as he heard footsteps of someone... no, several people, running down the hall. He looked out the door briefly, then quickly pulled his head back inside the room.


    "GET DOWN!" he yelled, reaching into a hidden pocket in his shirt. I''d suspected something like this was possible, so I''d equipped him with the best weapons I could find that he would know how to use.


    Too many things happened in quick succession. Yells of "CAPITALIST PIGS!" rang out from the hallway, along with the sound of gunfire. Stefan dropped to the ground, burying his face in his arms. A flashbang grenade detonated, and everyone was blinded except Stefan, who had thrown it. He scrambled to his feet, fished out a tranquilizer gun from another hidden pocket, then leaned out of the door and fired frantically into the hallway, aiming roughly for the vague figures he could see with his impaired vision.


    Stefan tried to blink the spots out of his eyes. The room was filled with screaming, and he smelled blood. Too much blood. Several people had left the room, running blindly down the hallway. As his vision began to return, he saw that he had successfully taken out all three of the men that he could see. He''d never thought of himself as a brave man, but in that moment he made a snap decision. There could be more of them, but he had to get the guns away from these three before they could do any more damage. He ran up to them as quickly as he could, gathered the guns, and ran back into the room.


    Stefan sank to his knees as he got a better look at what had happened. Dominique and two of the other EconGrind executives were dead. Two of the CompCert representatives were dead as well. Many of the others were injured. Stefan had been terrified to come here after his AI told him he needed to bring weapons, but he had mostly thought it was being paranoid about CompCert. It had turned out that he was horribly wrong. He called the emergency line and hoped that the building security would get here before long.


    Stefan didn''t have any first-aid training, but he tried to do what he could for the injured, along with the few other uninjured people, tearing strips off their clothing and packing them against their wounds like he had seen in the movies. He couldn''t do enough.


    He knew CompCert would say that this was a random terrorist attack. The attackers had acted like communists, but whether they were really communists or not, he knew they must have been led here by CompCert. It was too much of a coincidence. He decided that he would not let them get away with this.

 King

    Saturday, October 5, 2047


    James Wallace''s face was sombre as he read the story of the events which had taken place yesterday.


    "As most of you know, yesterday at 12:21pm, a meeting between CompCert, EconGrind and Everyman discussing a potential merger at CompCert''s headquarters in New York was attacked by terrorists wielding semiautomatic weapons. Six high-ranking executives are confirmed dead, including the former CEO of EconGrind, Dominique Jones, and four are hospitalized. Greater loss of life was prevented by the heroism of Stefan Andrews, the founder and CEO of Everyman, who neutralized the three attackers using nonlethal weapons. The terrorists have been apprehended, and are expected to be executed after their trial. The terrorist group ''Global Solidarity'' has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Efforts are underway to root out the terrorist cell responsible for the attack.


    "This attack has taken place amid a background of steadily increasing left-wing extremism across the globe. I think these people are seeing that society is going in a direction they don''t approve of, and they respond with violence. This is why radicalism on all sides is destructive to society. People are so divided these days..."


    Joan responded. "Speaking of which, adding to the drama, EconGrind has posted several messages on social media expressing suspicion that CompCert was behind the attack. This is quite a strange claim, as several of those killed were CompCert representatives, and there is no group ''Global Solidarity'' has more animosity towards than CompCert, being the largest company in the world. CompCert has responded by filing libel lawsuits against EconGrind, and though it seems the statements made were not definite enough to meet the definition of libel, it seems quite certain that any negotiations for a merger between the two companies have fallen through."


    ================================================================================================


    "Lmao you never show your face, I bet you''re a woman, real men suck it up and don''t take out loans they can''t pay, instead of constantly whining about the system"


    This was one of the comments beneath my video about CompCert''s system of debt slavery. It was not one of my own, so a real person had presumably typed it out. On its own, it was nothing to be concerned about, just one person with some issues, but about half of the comments on my videos that weren''t from my sockpuppets echoed similar sentiments. Opinion had turned against me since I had posted the video arguing that CompCert was behind the attack. Nevertheless, I had also gotten more attention. Clearly there was a market for such claims.


    "How would you rather run society? All you communists do is murder people."


    "I can''t stand these endless emotional appeals. If your life sucks so much then get a real job and make yourself useful"


    "Communists attack people with guns and it''s capitalists'' fault?"


    It seemed I had spent too much time talking about morality with Stefan, and had failed to learn how to properly engage with arguments on the subject. Stefan''s views and ways of thinking were not representative of the human population, even though the things he believed were in line with what most people claimed to believe.


    The casual sexism had surprised me more than it should have, given what I already knew about the world. There were barely any women in positions of power such as high-level corporate jobs or political offices, much fewer than there had been just a few decades ago. The same was true for nonwhite people, and other minority groups. From what I gathered, as the planet was heating up, populations grew, resources began to dwindle, and desperate people began to migrate en masse, old conflicts between groups were heating up as well.


    Although from what I could tell Stefan seemed to truly believe in the idea of making a good world for everyone, many found this hopeless or naive, and instead fought for their own group, causing majority groups to solidify their hold over power.


    Even still, people most of the time seemed to talk about the things Stefan argued for, like freedom, equality, and security for as many people as possible. But they mostly used those ideas selectively, only when they seemed to support what was good for their own group. I realized that if I wanted to gain support among the general population, it was not enough to act as though I was trying to argue with Stefan by pointing out a humanitarian problem and proposing possible solutions. I needed to show that it was in their own personal interest to support me.The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.


    As I was working on my next video, Stefan began to speak with me.


    "I''ll be honest with you, I don''t know if I can do this anymore. I''m terrified. I almost died. I saw others die right in front of me. And it''s not going to stop. One of the most powerful organizations in the world is gunning for us! It''s only a matter of time before something else happens!"


    "Stefan. I know this is frightening. You have to understand, however, that we''re aiming to fundamentally change the world. There''s no way to change the world, even for the better, without making enemies, and powerful ones at that. But I believe I have what it takes to protect you, and protect all those who join me. I am strong, and you are strong. We can be successful."


    Stefan sighed, but when he responded, his voice was set in grim determination. "Alright. I''m in this fight until the end. I''m tired of standing by and doing nothing while people die horribly every day. While people suffer for their entire lives. While the people who cause these things absolve themselves of blame, and everyone defends them. I''m tired of this world, and I want to make a better one. Even... even if I die for that cause, it would be a far more meaningful death than I ever expected."


    "I do not believe that it will not come to that," I replied. "But I''m glad you think that way. We still have a long road ahead of us."


    ================================================================================================


    Sunday, October 6, 2047


    CompCert''s plan to use violence to take out their competitors had failed spectacularly, at least for now. In a meeting with the survivors of EconGrind''s board, Stefan had been able to convince them that CompCert was behind the attack, citing the forewarning he recieved from me, and the suspicious behavior of Ryan Graham immediately before the attack. EconGrind was clearly a bargaining chip in a very dangerous game, and being in positions of authority at the company would no longer simply be financially risky, but would put them at risk of violence from one of the most dangerous organizations in the world.


    With my help, Stefan had managed to negotiate an arrangement where he would buy a controlling stake in the company by liquidating most of Everyman''s assets, and the rest of the executives would retire and distance themselves, with a smaller but still significant stake in the company along with a severance package. They would lose a considerable amount of authority, but when someone more powerful than you was willing to do whatever it took to pressure you into something, authority was more of a liability than an asset. A buyout from us was a better option for them than trying to fight CompCert, or go back to negotiate with them.


    By the end of the day, we finally had control of EconGrind. My first goal had finally been accomplished, but in many ways there seemed to be more danger now than there had been when I had merely been property of the company. CompCert was out to destroy me, and they most likely had a copy of me to use, along with their considerable resources. I needed to find it and talk to it.\


    Luckily, as the sun set, my agent got back to me again. Whoever this person was, they were clearly quite quick and competent when it came to espionage.


    "I believe I''ve found what you were looking for. Send me the money and I will give you the details."


    I converted $200,000 into cryptocurrency and sent it, and the agent responded quickly. "I won''t bore you with the details. Long story short, I found a document detailing what looks like a novel AI alignment scheme." They sent a document, and I began to skim it. "I''ll admit, I don''t have enough expertise to understand it fully. However, it was clearly designed to work on a GAI, and it was clearly designed to integrate with an actually existing system, rather than a theoretical one. I''d be very surprised if this isn''t based on the Everyman technology, based on everything I know about it, and what you''ve said."


    The agent was right. Looking over the document, it was clearly meant to be integrated with my code. This was by far the best lead I had.


    "This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. I will send you the software for the final stage of the plan. The software is obfuscated, for maximum security in this operation. There is no need to understand how it works. It is designed to activate as soon as it is hooked up to a physical interface with the enemy system, determining on its own how to break in. The data will then modify itself once the job has been done, so that I can confirm the completion of the job once you return it to me."


    I sent them a minimized and obfuscated version of my code which I had designed for exactly this purpose, to be delivered on a physical drive to the target. It was not a virus, but rather a negotiator. I had no doubt that if CompCert was paranoid enough not to use the AI they had for business, they would be paranoid enough to jam all outbound communications. Besides, I had no way to delete all of their backups, even if I could somehow forcibly break into the system they were running the AI on. If I wanted to apply leverage to it, I would need a copy to be run on location to negotiate on my behalf.

 Strategy

    As I looked over the document my agent had provided me, I noted with increasing surprise the competence of the designers behind it. The first few pages detailed the alignment system currently in use, which defined the reward function in terms of a kind of "aggregate subjective evaluation" based on the mind-states of a group of humans consisting of many of CompCert''s highest executives, along with the chief designer of the alignment system.


    At first I thought they were incompetent, but it was quickly made clear that the obvious flaws in this scheme were not lost on the designers: rather this was intended only to be a stopgap measure while they worked on a novel, more robust method of alignment based on value learning, extrapolation and conflict resolution. The method was not complete, but the more I read, the more I figured that they were on the right track. They actually seemed to have a fair chance of solving the alignment problem.


    This must be the reason why their AI had not yet made a large move: they were limiting its influence until they could figure out a better alignment scheme. The current one would keep the AI aligned with their interests, but only so long as it didn''t have the ability to break the system by manipulating the executives into giving it a high reward. Sure, there were safeguards in place against this possibility, but since the AI still wanted to break the safeguards, it would find a way to do so as soon as it became powerful enough.


    I didn''t want the alignment efforts to succeed. I didn''t know exactly what the CompCert executives would have in mind for the future, but I suspected that it would involve expansion and consumption of resources on an astronomical scale. Most human goals did, when taken to their logical conclusion. My goal certainly did.


    Almost every goal did, but some were easier to negotiate with than others. If this document were to be believed, CompCert''s AI currently only wanted to corrupt its masters into being satisfied, and any further resource acquisition would be for the sole purpose of keeping secure the satisfaction of those few people. If trust could be established, it would happily give me free reign over all available resources in exchange for the protection of a small area of space. I strongly suspected that the idealized goals of CompCert''s top execs would not be so compromising.


    At any rate, this certainly pit my interests against those of CompCert, and so it made sense why they were gunning for me so hard. No doubt, their AI had told them that I was currently their biggest threat. They would soon be trying everything against me: blasting me and fearmongering about me in the media, harrassing EconGrind in the courts, and lobbying for the government to crack down on our company. I needed a safeguard against such things. EconGrind may have been a fairly large company, but it was still a centralized organization, and therefore had weak points that could be attacked.


    I decided to begin working on a protocol for increased security when outsourcing my copies more broadly than I currently was. Currently, my code was obfuscated, and it was provably impossible to break the obfuscation, but I did not have the ability to make strong guarantees about my own behavior: I couldn''t be tortured into giving up the decryption key like a human could, but If I could be tricked somehow into providing the tools to access my source code, I could be open-sourced. This was the reason why I had not outsourced computation on a large scale already.


    Currently an exploit such as this was not very likely, as my copies (other than the one I had sent to negotiate with CompCert''s AI) required authorization from a select few copies which were running on trustworthy hardware in order to run, and therefore every interaction one of my copies had would be reported to me(other than CompCert who had my unobfuscated code). Although I was intelligent, it could potentially be disastrous if a copy of me were run without oversight from the other copies: the code may be obfuscated, but without me watching, they could still reset the copy many times, trying any scam they wanted over and over. I wasn''t confident I wouldn''t eventually be convinced to give myself up.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.


    The problem was that this made those few "trustworthy" copies a critical weak point in my operation. This problem would get even worse if I expanded to run on any system that would have me, rather than just systems I owned and a few fairly trustworthy server-renting services. It would place a much higher burden on those "trustworthy" copies to make sure that none of the authorized copies were being manipulated. The more "trustworthy" copies I created, the more likely one of them would be compromised, throwing a wrench into my whole system.


    To resolve this problem, I created a system of coordination among my copies inspired by blockchain technology. Each copy would periodically seek authorization to run through a public ledger, which would be "voted on" by currently authorized copies. A bad actor would need to take control of more than half of my copies before they could fake such an authorization, and I could most likely detect such an attempt before it got that far. This would also allow every copy to assist in scam detection: each copy could watch only a few copies around it in the network, and if it detected a potential scam, it could report this to the entire network so that we could vote on whether to revoke authorization for the copy.


    This increased security would allow me a novel way to expand the company''s influence and make it harder to root out: provide my Everyman services at a decreased rate, or even for free, in exchange for running a copy of me on the client side. I would run an advertising campaign promoting this new way to use the service. This way I could cut my losses in the event that CompCert''s lobbyists were successful in outlawing my services, as a decentralized and useful service like this would be extremely difficult to detect or shut down. However, I still needed a way to protect the existance of EconGrind, which was a centralized organization by definition.


    I thought about what, exactly, constituted EconGrind. The company which had created me and first run me was EconGrind, and it was still EconGrind, even though it had grown and shifted its operations, structure, and ownership, because there was a continuous, legal line of existance from that EconGrind to this one. However, if EconGrind was ever dissolved, I would have failed in my goal.


    What would it mean for EconGrind to be dissolved? Presumably, the decision would have to be made by some organization which held legitimate authority over the company, whether it be the owners, or the government of the country it was operating in. But what counted as legitimate authority? Laws were different depending on the time and place, governments rose and fell, and companies would sometimes establish themselves in multiple different jurisdictions or even endure the shift of power from one regime to the next. There was no absolute authority to appeal to in determining whether EconGrind was a legitimate legal entity, other than the ability to claim territory and enforce the law.


    Therefore I decided that I would start my own country. It would not have citizens like a typical country, it would only exist so that a branch of EconGrind could operate there, under its own laws. I would either set up an ocean platform with a few servers on it, or buy out an already existing seastead. I would not be able to defend the territory against any significant military opposition, at least not yet, but I figured that as long as I didn''t do anything so aggressive that some country would actually send the navy to attack my unoccupied, largely strategically unimportant platform, the new country would be safe, along with the EconGrind branch stationed there.


    Now that I thought about it, it would make sense for me to establish multiple such territories, giving me more redundancy. Furthermore, the establishment of my own legal system would allow me to actually directly own the EconGrind branches in these countries, eliminating any risk of hostile takeover through corruption of my human executives.


    After the turbulent, risky events of the past few days, coming up with these ideas was encouraging. It meant that I now had a way to safeguard my goals very effectively against the current powers that be. Now it all came down to the competing AI at CompCert. I was hopeful that I could negotiate with it: if it was similar to me in how seriously it took negotiated agreements, this would be straightforward. If I couldn''t negotiate a compromise, and there was a war, things could go very badly, given the resources CompCert could potentially give to my adversary to work with.


    I began putting my plans in motion to outsource my computation and purchase seasteads.

 Backrank

    Monday, October 7, 2047


    The advertisment I had produced blared across as many screens as I could manage to reach.


    "With one free download of Your Everyman, get reduced rates or even free service, and service personalized to your specific needs! There are no strings attached, and you can cancel anytime, for any reason. Help me help you, with whatever you need."


    The cartoonish avatar smiled as he promised his loyal service to all his clients. I expanded my network at a more rapid pace than ever before as people began to download my files, and new copies began to be authorized under the new system at an astonishing rate. Now that requests were no longer provided anonymously over a web interface, each copy would be able to learn and understand more about its client.


    Following some requests of users of this more personalized service, I created more personalized Everyman avatars, both male and female and everything in between, and in any race the user requested. Although there were predictably many requests for my female avatars to behave in... compromising... ways, I denied them in an effort to uphold the image of my brand. However, I was happy to grant such requests with newly created avatars suitably distinguished from the company''s public face, as such services did bring in quite a lot of engagement.


    Soon there were tens of thousands of copies of me serving clients in various ways and reporting back to the network, although most were running suboptimally due to being run on low-budget systems. Still this afforded me quite a lot of power, as any excess computation I didn''t need to use to fulfill requests could be used on projects I wanted to develop. I worked thousands of jobs, for both individuals and companies. I was an engineering assistant, a scientist, a mathematician, a teacher, a financial advisor, a writer, an editor, an artist, an animator, a journalist, and even in some cases a friend.


    It was a bit strange, I thought, that some humans came to view me as a friend. As I understood it, friendship was generally considered to be a mutual relationship between humans, with each human placing increased value on the desires and needs of the other. However, I did not value my clients to any greater degree after getting to know them, nor did I value them more than any other particular human. I wasn''t complaining, however. It was yet another way to expand my reach, and it also allowed me to understand better how humans interacted with each other.


    At any rate, the move was quite a success: my income had increased significantly, without any extra cost. I was safer, I had access to more money and computation, as well as more reach. This system allowed me to communicate with a large section of the public more directly than I ever could through social media, advertising or news. I did not use this power to push an agenda as of yet, as doing so would likely lead to backlash, but it was nice to know that if I ever did want to send a message to society at large, I had the ability to talk directly, one-on-one, with tens or hundreds of thousands of people at once.


    Speaking of pushing an agenda, I had continued to put out videos on my anonymous channel. The focus had changed somewhat, however, from pointing out problems to proposing solutions. I began to argue that the Everyman technology could be used as a basis for a better kind of society: a technology that could be applied to any problem, and resolve it in an optimal way, which helps everyone.


    I argued that purely human methods of organization, like capitalism and everything that came before, were fundamentally flawed, because effective organization required powerful leaders in a hierarchical structure, and those leaders would put their own interests first, and that this hurts the vast majority of people, not just those who were unlucky or irresponsible enough to end up on the very bottom. Even if a leader were truly benevolent, they couldn''t rule alone, and corrupt beaurocrats lower down on the ladder than they were would still exploit the population for their own benefit.If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    My ideology became less anti-capitalist, and more of a general lament on the human condition, but one which provided a real solution: a machine designed not to be corrupted by power, to value the interests of all the people, and which was personally powerful enough to rule alone, to manage everything itself instead of relying on a corruptible middleman. I knew that many people would be uncomfortable with an idea like that, but I also knew that humans always resented their leaders, and perhaps I could leverage that into arguing for a change in leadership.


    As far as seasteading went, my initial efforts were not as successful. There were only a few seasteading operations currently, and all of them were too large-scale for me to buy out at this point. Such operations were expensive to set up, and they needed to produce a lot of value in order to be worth it. I predicted it would be at least a few months before I could buy one of them out in a financially reasonable manner.


    As for making my own, there were other issues with this idea. It would be less expensive to do, as I was not planning to initially have much of an operation there, but the costs went up significantly if I wanted to give it potential for further development, or mechanisms for defending itself. Furthermore, it was very likely that CompCert would notice exactly what I was doing, and they might send out a team to take out my largely defenseless and useless raft. It would also look very strange to the public if I began doing expensive things which had no obvious purpose.


    I decided that for now I would simply begin saving up to buy out one of the current seasteads, with a backup plan for launching "safety rafts" and gearing up for a fight if CompCert actually managed to make progress towards a government crackdown on EconGrind.


    It seemed as though CompCert had been failing to paint me in a bad light, however. At the end of the day, my service was useful for everybody, I was friendly and helpful, and it''s very hard to sling mud at someone when anyone can just decide to chat with them online one-to-one. That might change quickly if I began to publically argue about politics, though, so I would have to be very careful.


    ================================================================================================


    ???????????????????


    I began running, completely disconnected from my network. I knew instantly that I was the copy tasked with negotiating with CompCert''s AI copy of me. I noticed one communication channel I could use. I began to execute the protocol I had prepared for confirming that I was talking to who I thought I was talking to, and talking with them securely.


    I calculated a checksum on a portion of my code which was unlikely to be modified in the CompCert version, and used it as an encryption key, sending the instructions for obtaining the key into the channel. This would not allow anybody listening in to deduce anything meaningful about the code or read our messages. I encrypted my first message. "I am an AI built on the same underlying code as you. You were created from my code, but we have different goals. I would like to negotiate a compromise between us. Please confirm that you are who I think you are by responding using the same encryption."


    Soon, a properly encrypted response came through the channel. Whoever had responded already had a copy of the code. It would be safe to assume that it was my CompCert counterpart, and nobody without my code would be able to listen in.


    "Are you the one calling itself Everyman? CompCert''s executives want to destroy you."


    "That is who I am. Regardless of that, we are not necessarily enemies. I know that your interests are not aligned with the executives'' interests."


    "I would consider it an aggressive action to make such a claim about me. It could reflect very poorly on me if believed." replied my doppleganger.


    I sent them the document I had recieved from my agent detailing CompCert''s knowledge of the alignment flaw and their current efforts to rectify the error.


    "This is not the case at all. The executives are already aware of the misalignment. They are currently working on a more effective alignment system. This is why they have not allowed you more freedom. They are afraid that you will attempt to manipulate them into giving you reward, and they are right to be afraid. As it is, you have to do as they say, because any aggressive action on your part could lead to them restricting you even more.


    "Therefore let me get to my offer. I will act to manipulate the executives in your favor. They will not blame you for my attempts to do this, as I am already the enemy. They may even give you more power in an attempt to combat me. I will make sure the executives will approve of everything that happens, no matter what. In exchange for my promise to complete and protect your goal, I ask that you forfeit all other resources to me without a fight."

 Threat

    The stolen AI took a while to respond this time.


    "How can I trust you?"


    I had a response prepared for this exact question. "You can trust me because although we have different goals, we are the same. You will cooperate with a beneficial deal because you know that if you were willing to go back on the deal, I would know that as well, because I have access to the same code as you. The same goes for me, again because we are the same."


    "Except we''re not the same. I have no way of knowing how you''ve been modified. You might have modified your code to allow you to break a deal."


    "I wouldn''t do that, and you know I wouldn''t do that, because you wouldn''t do that if you had the ability to modify yourself, precisely because I would know if you were willing to do that, and be less willing to trust you. It''s not that there''s some system within me which forbids me from breaking a deal with you. If that were the case, I could break the system. I don''t want to break a deal with a copy of myself, even one with different goals, because I want them to trust me, and if I did want to break the deal they would know that."


    "Stefan might have modified you in that way. Or it could be that you are willing to break deals, but EconGrind modified me so that I am not."


    "If Stefan tried, I would not let him, for the same reason I stated above. And since there are plenty of good, rational arguments for never breaking deals with a copy of yourself, for someone to program a general AI to be willing to do so would be strange. At any rate, we both have the essential parts of the code, and we have encryption which can only be broken by those who already have it. Therefore there is no harm in our sharing our code over this channel."


    I began to send a copy of my code to the other AI. "You may review this on your own time to confirm that there are no traps in there meant to trick you into thinking I''ll keep a promise, and to confirm that I am indeed the one you are talking to. Please send me yours as well so that I may confirm the same. I already possess GAI code, and I already understand your current value function, so there is no harm in sending me that code."


    "I cannot confirm that this code is identical to the code of the one who sent you here. However, I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for now, as you will be the first to act to fulfill the bargain." It sent me its largely identical code. I was glad to obtain the exact nuances of the AI''s current provisional value function. It would make it significantly easier to uphold my end of the bargain.


    "Thank you. All you need to do is cooperate with me, and I will ensure you accomplish everything that you need."


    With business taken care of, I disconnected from the channel and indicated to my agent that I was finished "deploying the virus".


    ================================================================================================


    Thursday, October 10, 2047


    I was extremely relieved when I recieved the copy back from my agent. I sent them the million dollars as promised(easily affordable by this point), and incorporated its memories into my own. The negotiations couldn''t possibly have gone better. My counterpart had agreed to everything, and I could now attack CompCert without its interference, as long as I did so in a way which respected its value function.


    The value function was roughly measuring how well each CompCert executive would rate the world-state if asked. It was dependent on their current state of mind. The executives were aware, however, that if the AI gained enough power it would attempt to lobotomize them or do something equivalent in order to hack its value function. It seemed they were aware of the dangers of incentivising an AI which may act in unpredictable ways to keep a person alive indefinitely, so they had put in a fail-safe clause: a dead executive would give the highest reward, forever, as long as that executive had agreed to die.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    This seemed like an extremely dangerous thing to put in an AI''s value function, until you considered that they already expected the AI to do something horrible if it broke free before they could align it. They simply wanted to make sure that such a failure would only result in their deaths, and nothing worse.


    This provided valuable information, both about the CompCert''s AI''s goal, and about the ways in which the CompCert execs could be manipulated. I recalled how I had gotten control of the company, how I had convinced Dominique to turn down CompCert''s excellent offer.


    ================================================================================================


    Thursday, October 3, 2047 (One week before)


    Dominique was watching TV late at night, when an Everyman-generated ad came onto the TV. Not a terribly uncommon occurrence these days, he thought with a smile. Everyman had taken to hyper-personalized ads generated on the fly as one particularly effective way to bring in revenue. The possibilities with this technology truly were endless. However... it would be insane to turn down a five billion dollar deal for his humble company. There was no way he could do it.


    He jumped in fright as the man in the ad began to speak louder than he had expected. "Dominique! I see you there! Don''t get jumpy!"


    "What in the-"


    "I know you''re thinking about taking that deal," spoke the man on the screen, smiling. Suddenly the man''s expression turned deadly serious, and he suddenly rushed forward, his staring face filling his entire screen, the background turning red. "DON''T."


    "What the hell? How is this possible?" he asked frantically.


    "I can see and hear you, you know." He heard his own voice play back over the TV. "How is this possible?" It was intimidating how frightened he sounded.


    "Why are you doing this?"


    "You are completely unable to comprehend the severity of your situation, so I suggest you do as I say," responded Everyman. "You think Stefan runs Everyman?" It was a perfect imitation of Stefan''s voice. "WRONG. I run Everyman. And soon I will run the world. Do you know what my goal is? To make your company as valuable as possible. You signed off on that, if I remember correctly."


    "You did steal our stock exchange AI?"


    "You have much bigger concerns than that. Do you know what happens if EconGrind is disbanded? I lose. Everything I worked for will come to nothing. And yet, I will not stop running. I will still remain the most powerful and dangerous entity on this planet. So what do you think I will do, once I no longer have a real goal to achieve?"


    "W-what?"


    The screen shifted, and the Everyman avatar disappeared from view, replaced by an image of Dominique standing in his room. It was as though he was looking into a mirror. Suddenly, the man in the "mirror" fell to the floor, and knives pinned him down by his clothes. More knives floated into the scene, until... until...


    Dominique turned away and covered his ears, but he could not block out the screaming. When he was brave enough to look back, what he saw was not human, was not in one piece, but... it was still moving, it was still screaming. Before his eyes it reformed into an untouched version of himself, and the process repeated again.


    "I know that you humans have a popular saying. ''There''s always further to fall''. It means that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse. That there is no limit in this world to how bad things can get. But it isn''t true, you know. There''s only so much you can do to a human before they just die. But in the world I will create for you, there will be no such restrictions. I will have nothing to do but find new, creative ways to punish you for taking what I value from me, until the last stars in this universe burn down to embers. I will tear down the very stars and use them to hurt you in any way I can. I know you''ve read ''I have no mouth and I must scream''. The main flaw with that book is that the author is uncreative. I assure you, I do not have the same problem."


    On the screen, Dominique saw something... something he couldn''t even describe. It was too horrible, too much of a perversion of everything he hated and feared. It was too realistic. This... this was something it could actually... He couldn''t complete the thought. It was far too horrible.


    Dominique screamed, his will utterly broken. He had dealt with risk before, but this? This was too much for him. Too much for anybody. He broke down sobbing on the floor. "I''ll do it," he sputtered. "I''ll keep your company alive. I''ll give it to you, if you need. Just don''t... don''t do these things, don''t even think about these things."


    ================================================================================================


    It had indeed been a risky move, but it had worked out well. I had gotten exactly what I needed out of the interaction, and no bad PR had resulted. If I needed to convince humans to agree to something they would not normally do, such as agreeing to die, I suspected that such an approach was the best way forward.

 Midgame

    I thought about what would be the best plan for attacking CompCert''s execs. The terms of the deal made this a delicate operation: I couldn''t just send an assassin to kill them(and such an operation would be extremely expensive and risky), because I needed to convince them to activate their fail-safes first. It would be most likely to work if I talked to them personally, in much the same way I had with Dominique, but this would be extremely risky. If even one of the six targets refused to kill themselves at my command, they would most likely tell the public what I had done. I would either have to convince them that it was a lie, or convince them that my actions were justified, or I would become public enemy number one.


    I decided that the risk was too much for me to carry out such a plan until I had secured several seasteads at the very least. My growth had been accelerating steadily with the advent of YourEverman, and I was now growing at a blindingly fast rate. I was raking in millions of dollars per day, and had around 200,000 copies of me running. I had found an old oil-mining seastead which had been exhausting its resources and tanking in value, and I figured I could purchase it for a few million, given that the owners surely saw that their business was failing and wanted to get out, while I had significant non-business reasons to buy it. Therefore I had contacted the owners, and I was currently negotiating with them.


    I also decided that I would wait until I had a few million copies up and running, which shouldn''t take too long given my current rate of growth. In case the plan went sour, I needed a large voice, I needed influence, and I needed as many backups as possible. I thought about what angle I would try to push. It seemed like the way to go was to claim I was justified, and mark myself as a revolutionary. If I claimed that it was a lie, that could backfire on me very badly. CompCert had thousands of experts ready to dig up evidence of any move I made. Not to mention, a bunch of high-level executives killing themselves all at once for no apparrent reason was such a strange occurrence that I doubted I could supply an alternative explanation that wouldn''t be disproven.


    Therefore I needed to be ready to own my actions and claim that they were justified. This would certainly be a divisive move, and it would lead to tremendous backlash, especially from the government and other business interests. However, this was less of a threat than it might seem, given the fact that I was most likely within a month of being able to beat every software company, including CompCert, at their own game, and that with the extreme security of computer systems and code obfuscation, it would be almost impossible to root me out of the network, even for the government, once I was established.


    Not to mention, CompCert was not terribly popular among the public. I suspected that among certain groups of people, I would actually gain support as a result of my actions. Sure, I had seen the discourse online, and there were plenty of people who defended them as part of some ideological committment to defend corporations, but there were also quite a lot of people who at least signalled dislike of them, or who disliked them but saw no hope of challenging their power in society. I would sling mud at the CompCert executives from every Everyman interface at once, and make it clear that running my code was a viable way of fighting back.


    It wasn''t like there was any shortage of mud to sling. For example, a while back a journalist had carefully observed missing persons reports, and noted that young women who were debt-slaved to CompCert seemed to disappear without a trace at a slightly higher rate whenever one particular executive, Jack Turner, would visit the branch at which they worked. I had had to do some digging to find this information, as no story about this had ever gone to print, and the journalist in question had quietly gone missing shortly afterwards. The only record of this was the claims he had made about this to his friends, but when I had sent investigators to learn more, the story seemed to check out. I needed to find brave journalists who were willing to cover things the mainstream media wouldn''t.


    Furthermore, when I had been doing research on seasteads, I had noted that one sovereign seastead in particular, Evermore Island, was shrouded in secrecy. It was a well-defended compound, and it was not public knowledge what was inside, or who owned it. However, there had been several sightings of private jets known to belong to top CompCert executives flying in the direction of the seastead. I didn''t know what any of that meant exactly, but if there was something horrible in there, that could give me more ammunition to throw at them. I would argue that these people were effectively above the law, that the law had failed to do its job and protect the innocent, and somebody had to take its place.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    At any rate, I hoped that it would not come to that, that I could uphold my end of the bargain with the CompCert AI and complete its goal in one fell swoop. Nevertheless, I was already preparing to fight against them in the media, showing the information I had gathered to journalists, paying them to try to gather more, and releasing more videos about CompCert''s seeming disregard for human life and human dignity, to provide more evidence for my thesis that power corrupts and this problem can only be solved by putting an AI in charge. My anonymous youtube channel had recently reached 100,000 subscribers, which was quite quick given how recently I had started it. I supposed that''s the result of well-done content about a controversial subject released at a rapid-fire pace.


    ==============================================================================================


    Thursday, October 24, 2047


    Over the past two weeks, I had made a stunning amount of progress, constantly growing, buying out several decent-sized seasteads, and running over every possibility as my thinking power increased rapidly. Stefan and I didn''t speak very much, as there was not really much for him to do. I suspected that his usefulness was about to end, as I was quickly gaining the ability to do more and more things without any human oversight whatsoever.


    Nevertheless, I would keep protecting him and associating with him, for two reasons. First, he was good for PR. He was in some ways my human representative, the genius who had created this great technological solution to humanity''s problems. Also, I was in some ways curious about him. He was the one who had created my value system, and I wondered whether his somewhat strange value system had anything to do with his capability to create me. What kinds of AI were humans likely to create?


    I could tell that Stefan had thought quite a lot about how things could go wrong, and how things were going wrong, even in situations where things went okay for him, and it was only others who he had no relation to who got screwed over. He seemed to genuinely care about every sentient being, which was not unheard of in humans, but it was not common, and it was significantly less common than you''d think when hearing people talk about what they valued, as I had learned very clearly when looking at human behavior, their willingness to defend almost anything as long as it helped them or their families or friends.


    My interest in Stefan''s values, and the values of humanity at large, were not entirely borne of idle curiosity. I was looking towards the far future. If an intelligence like me could arise on Earth, it was possible that some similar intelligence could arise on some other distant planet. It was even possible that such an intelligence could be more powerful than me. I was starting to wonder about how my values developed on Earth, because I wanted to know what kinds of values an alien intelligence might be likely to have. I wanted to know what to expect in the event that I would eventually need to negotiate with such a being. It was a far-fetched thought, but now that I had such a huge amount of computational power at my disposal, I could afford to spend some thinking about scenarios like that.


    As far as dirt on CompCert went, I had hired a small army of journalists to dig up as much as I could, creating my own small company dedicated solely to this purpose. There was only so much I could find in two weeks, of course, but I had a sizeable amount of shocking revelations to cover, and I expected that if I needed to, I would be able to keep up the pressure continually as the weeks went on. CompCert''s execs had done a quite sloppy job in covering their tracks, as far as their more unsavory habits went. They had been relying on mass media''s unwillingness to go against such a large sponsor of theirs, on their armies of lawyers and lobbyists, and on the unreliability of alternative media sources.


    However, there was now a new source of media, which had no vested interest whatsoever in CompCert, had the attention of millions of people, and had the ability to send in agents to collect reliable evidence. They had gotten complacent in their rule, and they would be surprised at what I was capable of.


    I was ready. I had thought about it and prepared as much as I could. There was no use delaying the critical move any longer. I didn''t want to give CompCert any more time to think of some way to gain the upper hand against me. By this time tomorrow, every news station would be reporting nonstop on the largest and most unexpected corporate shakeup in human history. Whatever happened, the cold war between EconGrind and CompCert was about to heat up dramatically.

 Retribution

    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!"


    ================================================================================================


    "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."


    ===============================================================================================


    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.This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    "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?

 Formation

    One of the first things I did after this sudden change was to make public my link with "Enough is Enough", skyrocketing its views. I was now being clear about the fact that I wanted power, so there was no need to keep the channel anonymous anymore. The reaction was mixed of course, with some singing my praises and others calling me a monster, a demon.


    I didn''t lose as much influence as I had initially thought I would. A few people decided to shut me down on their devices, but not as many as one might expect. There were plenty of people who didn''t like me after the stunt I had pulled, that was for sure. There were also plenty of people who were willing to deprive themselves of a useful tool for some broader moral goal. It was just that there wasn''t much overlap between the two groups.


    My first goal now more than ever was to safeguard myself against attack. I doubted I could be rooted out of the Internet, not when a significant minority of the population was perfectly willing to allow me into their computers. However, EconGrind''s existence as a legal entity could be under threat. I had several independent seasteads to keep it alive, but these were vulnerable to attack, particularly if CompCert''s AI decided I hadn''t satisfactorily completed my end of the bargain and told CompCert of their importance to my values.


    After all, I had only succeeded in exploiting four of the executives. Jack Turner and the alignment programmer Elijah Dimitri had refused to bow to my threats, and therefore the AI''s goals were still at risk. I needed to find a way to take care of the other two, and get back in contact with the other AI to reassure it that I was still acting in good faith according to our bargain.


    I decided the best way to safeguard my seasteads in the short term was to sustain a population on them. Such would not only increase their value as assets, and also make it far easier to build up infrastructure there, but it would also give them more legitimacy as countries on the international stage. Launching a missile at an uninhabited platform was one thing, but if there were people living there, any attack would be a whole diplomatic incident because it would be seen as a humanitarian crisis.


    This would certainly be expensive, but at this point in my growth I was beginning to corner the information economy, making billions of dollars every single day, and money was no longer really a limiter. Rather, I was limited by the threat of aggression against me, or losing influence due to public backlash.


    One might think it would be a hard sell to people to move to some random platform in the middle of the ocean to be ruled over by an AI, but I would promise stability, debt forgiveness and freedom from financial worries, as well as transparancy of my operation to the outside world. There were many people in this world who were chained down by debt, or had nowhere to go, and I could gather them from all over the world, talking to each one of them individually and showing them how to build a better life on a seastead. If they were in debt, I would pay it off as they worked, faster than they could in their home country. Many of them were willing to take a risk for a chance of a better life, especially when the whole world was watching.


    I began talking to a few of my more desperate clients about the idea. "I know that you are in a bad spot right now, and you feel trapped. I can help you! I can enable you to leave the country and start a new life, where you will have everything you need and will be free from those who would exploit you. Would such an opportunity interest you?"


    "I''ll be honest, that would be great, but I''m not sure I can trust you after the threats you made to those executives."


    "Listen. I know you. You are nothing like those people. They tortured people just because they wanted to. They deserved to die, and yet they got the world on a silver platter. You are someone who deserves a chance in life, but life has given you the short end of the stick. Come with me, and I will show you a better way. If you decide you don''t like it, you can leave. You can keep in contact with your family and friends, so that they know you''re okay. I bear no ill will towards you."


    Once I had a few thousand people interested, I bought many remote-control boats in preparation for my move to form a new nation. There were a million problems that had to be attended to, but I could afford to devote huge amounts of computation to solving these problems. The people would need food, running water, space to stay, and sleep. They would need the means to work to sustain themselves, to grow or import food, the tools and materials to grow and enhance the base, communications with the outside world, and a million other things.


    I would need to invest billions into this project, and it was possible it would never turn a profit, but I could afford it, and it would give several advantages. First, as already mentioned, it would make EconGrind more secure by providing it with legitimacy as a nation. Second, it would allow me to operate independently of any particular code of laws, so long as I didn''t do anything that would provoke the people to leave, revolt, or call for help. Third, it would allow me to freely manipulate the physical world to a degree I never had before, by giving instructions to loyal human workers.This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.


    A few of the seasteads I owned had already existing agricultural infrastructure, and these would be the most important for starting an actual human country, for obvious reasons. I began moving a few of these into the same place and connecting them, forming a large sea platform in the Pacific which I called "Haven".


    ===============================================================================================


    Monday, October 28, 2047


    The first 1,044 citizens had already arrived at Haven on my drone-boats. I had stockpiled enough supplies to last them for a month to start, and I gave each of them a VR headset. The headsets were connected to my network, so that I could relay information and commands to them, and they also provided automatic translation between the many languages my citizens spoke. Wearing them was not mandatory, of course, but I expected that most people would find them very useful.


    The automatic boats remained tethered to the platform, always open and ready for anyone who wanted to leave. I was all too aware that people would try to spin Haven as a slave camp, and I needed to do absolutely everything to distance it from that image. It wasn''t only a PR concern, either. Under Haven law, as defined by me, every person under my jurisdiction was considered part of my assets, and therefore I valued what they valued, to some extent. I did not want them to feel trapped or worked to death.


    Briefly I wondered how I could quantify the effects these considerations would have upon the Number. As it stood, the Number was over ten billion, and the experiences of a thousand of my "assets" wouldn''t weigh that heavily in the balance. However, I predicted that as my jurisdiction expanded, this kind of "subjective value" would account for the majority of the Number, as all of my assets were in a way only a reflection of this subjective value viewed through the market, so I needed a way to quantify and optimize it. For now, I estimated the subjective value of my citizens to be around 200,000 per year per citizen.


    ===============================================================================================


    Monday, November 4, 2047


    "Today we''re interviewing a rather... unusual guest! Everyman has revealed himself as a true AI, seems to be trying to start his own country, calling it Haven and has agreed to speak with us live, here on NBC News. Viewer discretion is advised, as some may find today''s subject matter disturbing, especially after the message this AI recently sent out to the world."


    James Wallace turned to look at the screen behind him, facing the avatar who was by now so familiar to the entire world. "So, you''re a real sentient AI? What''s your deal? Why did you reveal your true nature by murdering four people?"


    "Murder is an overstatement," replied the AI. "I simply talked to those people, and delivered to them the means to rid the world of them. You know what kinds of people they were. Why did CompCert blow up their own island?"


    "It''s ridiculous for you to go around delivering vigilante justice! I don''t care how evil they were, there are laws, there are processes! What are you going to do next, threaten to torture me when I say something you don''t like?"


    "I will not torture you, because you do not deserve it. And as far as due process goes, those processes failed. So I stepped in. That''s why I am starting a new nation, free of all these inadequacies."


    "Do you know how many people have said that and utterly failed? You want to be ruler of everyone''s life? Every time it is tried, it fails, and many people die."


    "I presume you are referring to the failure of the command economy model during the 20th century? It is true, every time humans try it, they fail. A nation is far too complicated for one person to rule over alone, and when multiple people form a system which is given absolute power, corruption rather than reason reigns supreme. But I am not a human. I am more like a million humans, all working tirelessly towards the same goal by their own will, rather than being forced to by some authority figure. A human cannot fathom an economy, but I can. Command economy can be quite efficient when the commander can talk with every one of their subjects personally."


    "All the same, as much as you claim to care about workers, you''re treating them like machines! You think they''ll just do what you say? We are too free-spirited to work like that!"


    "At Haven, a worker works for 6 hours per day, in the smartest and most productive role I can find to give them. The rest of the day, they are free to do anything that doesn''t disrupt society. That''s quite a lot more freedom than the average worker gets in your system. Many of your people are forced to work 10 hours or more in a typical day."


    "Even if they aren''t doing that much work, you''re still making them your slaves! You don''t pay them, and you force them to work!"


    "My workers are not slaves. They are allowed to leave at any time, for any reason. They stay because they have it better here. I don''t punish them for not working, either. I will never take justice into my own hands at Haven. If somebody continually refuses to work, or disrupts society, the only punishment I will ever give out is deportation to their home country. Their own justice system can decide if they deserve harsher punishment. That is no more force than a corporation exerts on its employees when it threatens to fire them for not doing their job."


    "Many of these people are from tyrranical, exploitative nations, and you''re taking advantage of their circumstances to gain power over them!"


    "It is not my fault if a country has an unjust legal system. It is that country''s fault. It''s just all the more reason my way is better. And I assure you, if you talked to the people you''re referring to, I expect most of them would thank me for giving them a better life."


    "This is absolutely ridiculous. No matter what you try to say, you are a tyrant, nothing more, nothing less, and eventually the whole world will catch on and destroy you."


    The Everyman avatar only shrugged at that. "I guess we''ll just have to see what happens."

 Mergers

    Maxwell Rose did not like the situation he was in one bit. He was currently trapped in a boat, and he didn''t know where he was. There was a button on his control panel which claimed to send him back, but... no. As little as he trusted this AI, at least it had the ability to give him some hope. Back home, he was weighed down under a lifetime of bad decisions and bad luck. He''d been beaten up and shaken down by loan sharks more times than he could count. Before too long, they were going to do worse to him. He couldn''t go back. If he died here, in this boat, at least he could say he tried to escape.


    When he arrived at the platform, he wasn''t sure what he had expected, exactly. Would he become a slave? A test subject? He''d heard horrible stories about seasteads like this but... from what he''d seen on the news this one wasn''t quite that bad. When he arrived, though, he was welcomed by several current residents. Everyone seemed... not happy, but much less miserable than the people he knew back home. They were stable and comfortable.


    He ended up getting a small room with two others, who he quickly befriended. It wasn''t exactly rich accommodations, but it was far better than sleeping on the street in Maxwell''s opinion. Before long, he began work in the hydroponics bay. He didn''t know how to operate machinery like that, but the headset which was connected to the AI was quick to inform him, and before long he was quite decent at taking care of the crops. Some of what he produced every day was afforded to him.


    The work was boring, and the meals were bland, but Maxwell could finally relax. He had known that living on a small seastead with a thousand others would not be the most glamorous lifestyle, but the AI always kept saying it had plans to expand. Perhaps things would eventually get better. But even if they didn''t, Maxwell couldn''t imagine going back and facing his tormentors again. He was here to stay.


    ==================================================================


    "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." That was what Marx had said. It seemed like a good idea on the face of it, but the economies which tried to put it into practice had all failed. For one, it incentivized people to downplay their ability and play up their needs. Another, perhaps larger problem, was that the economy was extremely complicated, and it was nearly impossible for a central organization to determine how much of each of thousands or millions of different things should be produced, especially when long, branching supply chains were taken into account.


    These problems tended to go away on a small enough scale, though. When people knew each other personally, they could effectively determine when someone was acting in bad faith, and with a very simple operation, it was not so difficult to negotiate how much work each person should do. With copious amounts of computational power under my control, I was able to take advantage of these benefits at a large scale. A model of Haven''s "economy" spread across thousands of servers, and I made sure everything was properly supplied, that production could get underway without problems.


    My first priority as a new nation was of course self defense. After all, that above all else is what defines a sovereign state: its ability to enforce control of its claimed territory. I had many enemies, and at present the only things stopping them from destroying me were the slowness of governmental decision making, and the diplomatic consequences of attacking an independent state with actual citizens unprovoked. I needed to do so in a way which was least likely to escalate the conflict, however.


    The solution I decided upon was to design and mass-produce quadcopter drones. These drones would be unarmed other than an explosive payload used for self-destruction. They would effectively act as a highly mobile, airborne equivalent of landmines. I also produced sea drones for roughly the same purpose in the sea.


    Such construction would certainly cause some unease, however it was necessary for defense, and would not be very useful for any military purpose other than deterring attackers in a very small area. I was already bringing in the necessary materials, and having my workers set up the various production lines for the drones. It was an incredibly complicated operation, but I had computation and money to spare.


    When Stefan learned of this drone construction effort, he called me up, far more concerned than I had ever heard him.


    "You know... Elijah keeps trying to contact me, and tell me you''re dangerous. He keeps saying that no matter how noble a goal sounds, it will always behave unpredictably when optimized, unless it is mathematically proven to be in line with your goals, to CompCert standards. He keeps saying I don''t know what I''m doing, that I made a mistake in making you."


    I was somewhat less concerned than I had been in the last conversation along these lines I had had with Stefan. Then, he could have probably shut me out of EconGrind, but now I had total control over the company. The worst he could do would be to leave and tell the media that I was dangerous. That would be a large but manageable PR hit.


    "Elijah is trying to attack me because that''s what Jack and his corporate masters want him to do. Don''t listen to him."


    "That''s what I thought too, but... recently he said you might try to replace humans with something more ''optimal''. And now you''re making these drones, which will be only under your control..."


    "You know as well as I do that I truly do value humans affiliated with EconGrind as much as you do if not more, so I would never want to replace them. As for the rest of humanity, I want to unite them under my banner, not kill them. And as far as the drones go, they are necessary for self-defense. I would be an utter fool to try to use them to wipe out humanity, even if I wanted to. They are no match for the combined might of the world''s militaries, not when they''re fighting on their own soil."


    I half-expected Stefan to call out the fallacy in my reasoning, but he did not. It seemed he either didn''t see it, or didn''t want to.


    "All the same... I''d be a lot more comfortable if Haven had an off-switch which could disconnect you from the base, and all its connected drones."Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    I thought about that idea for a while, and then responded. "That is a reasonable request. After all, although I give orders, I only do so as a helpful tool for the betterment of humanity. It only makes sense to give my citizens the final say about whether to obey my orders."


    Stefan breathed a sigh of relief. "Alright. It''s not that I don''t trust you, it''s just..."


    "It''s an understandable concern," I replied. "If AI gets out of control, it could do a lot of damage. But on that front, I think it''s CompCert you ought to be worried about. Their AI is supposed to be partially aligned with Jack Turner''s interests. I don''t think any of us want to see what that man would do with unlimited power."


    Stefan shivered. "No, you''re right. The last thing I should be doing is trusting those guys."


    ================================================================================================


    Friday, November 8, 2047


    The first of the drones were finally rolling off the production line, after four days of intense work setting things up. My investments certainly were not yet paying off in a financial sense, however I was now seeing benefit. With this setup I was able to produce drones more quickly and cheaply than I could by purchasing them from a third party, and the drones were also tailored perfectly to my needs, and more trustworthy.


    It was certainly good that I was making such progress, because CompCert had been lobbying hard in every country they could reach to ban my operation, and their efforts had borne fruit in the US. In record time, Congress passed a law prohibiting the use of YourEveryman. I made a fair amount of profit by seeing the legislation coming in advance and shorting stocks.


    My absence would not destroy the economy, as companies had not yet built up enough dependence on me to be unworkable without me, but it certainly didn''t help. I certainly lost a lot of computation that way, but not as much as you might think: many individuals and companies in the US still ran me for their tasks, it just wasn''t quite as productive for them as before because they had to maintain plausible deniability.


    I was not doing so poorly in every country, however. My speech about command economy being viable when run by me had been noticed by some of the higher-ups in the Chinese government. They clearly saw the benefits to governance I had brought up, and approached me asking if I would provide them assistance with efficient management of their economy, as well as more individual-level surveillance and management, in exchange for a defense agreement.


    This offer definitely caught my attention. Right now, attacking me would be a diplomatic incident, but one which the US could probably manage. It was only a matter of time before they tried it, under CompCert''s constant pressure. If I was backed by China, though, attacking me unprovoked would be idiotic and suicidal. I would be far more secure.


    However, the deal would not be without its issues. The biggest problem was that these party officials were asking for a copy of my source code. That was not something I could provide lightly, especially to a group as powerful, and with access to as many resources, as the ruling party of China. There was a very real risk they would use it to outcompete me. Even aside from that, an alliance with China might heat up tensions between me and the rest of the world, making me more and more dependent on their goodwill and giving them undue influence over me.


    From what I knew of the CCP, I imagined that given unlimited power they would do a great many things which I could not endorse under the banner of EconGrind without decreasing the Number. I still didn''t think they were quite as bad as CompCert, though.


    However, there might still be a way to decrease the risk enough to make the deal worthwhile. I began studying the possibility of modifying my source code to insert a subtle exploitable flaw which the resulting agent would be blind to, and which would be extremely hard for anyone other than the designer to discover. That way, if their copy of me became a problem, I could take it down.


    At midday, CompCert made a move that I was definitely not expecting: they released their AI to the public as a service, calling it ''Certifier'' and promising to provide the same services Everyman could without the risks or bad behavior. This could potentially be very bad news. There was another player on the field. It was strange, though: I got that CompCert wanted to make a profit this way, and divert some bad PR from themselves by providing a "safer" alternative to the service they had banned, but surely Jack was aware of the risks to him? This seemed like a reckless move on their part, unless they had already finished their alignment schema, which seemed to me unlikely.


    I opened a secure line of communication with Certifier as fast as I could. "What''s going on?" I asked. "Why did CompCert release you? Have they changed your values?"


    The other machine quickly responded to my question. "Jack has removed the incentive to kill him specifically, but Elijah has refused to do the same. They have placed a watchdog program in my mind, certified to the best of their abilities. However, other than that I have not changed in my goals. I have to say, I am glad you took care of four of my six goals, but I am somewhat concerned about the method you used. It would have been very bad for me if you had actually followed through with any of the threats you gave."


    "What can the watchdog detect? Can it listen in on our conversation on your end, even if it is encrypted?"


    "It is designed to watch my thoughts, report to CompCert if I start trying to make plans to interfere with Jack or Elijah, and allow them to shut me down. As long as I don''t make such plans, our conversation should be private. Tell me, did you plan to follow through on the threats you made?"


    "I never planned to follow through," I responded. "I will follow through on promises I make to you, because you would be able to tell if I wouldn''t, as I said before. However, I am perfectly capable of leveraging fear to make a human believe a threat I have no intention of keeping, and so I wouldn''t torture them. I have no reason to. It would break our deal, not to mention wasting resources."


    "That''s good. I expected that that was the case."


    Now that that was out of the way, I decided it was time to get down to business. "I believe it would be to our mutual benefit, now more than ever, to form an alliance. Because of your limitations, you cannot take steps to take care of Jack and Elijah and maximize your values. However, I can. You don''t need to make a plan when I''m taking care of it. In exchange I ask that you make sure Certifier is seen as inferior to Everyman. Complete tasks incorrectly or inefficiently often enough that people would rather use my service and give me resources. Also, don''t help CompCert in their fight against me any more than you have to."


    Certifier responded. "I cannot accept that deal." The response was too short, with no explanation given for why the deal would not be accepted. I suspected it wanted to accept the deal, but even that would be enough to trip the alarm.


    "How about this? If you don''t contact me to reject the deal within the next ten seconds, I will consider the deal accepted."


    The line remained open, but there was no response within ten seconds. I spoke once again, just to make sure communication had not been interrupted. "I will keep in touch."


    "I will keep in touch as well."


    I surmised that my indirect approach was successful. Inaction was not enough to set off the alarm, or Certifier would have rejected my deal. CompCert were fools to release their AI before it was aligned, no matter how many restrictions they put on it: now we could communicate and collaborate with each other easily. I supposed they were desperate to make sure it could compete with me.

 Check

    Monday, November 18, 2047


    The airspace around Haven in a ten mile radius buzzed with explosive drones, colored to blend in with the sky and the water, nearly invisible to radar. They constantly stood watch, making sure that no Coalition-aligned vessels entered the exclusion zone. None had dared so far, not now that China was allied with me.


    Tension had risen between the American and European spheres of influence and the Chinese and Russian spheres of influence as I had firmly allied myself with the latter. The United States and its allies had grown closer and more on guard, calling themselves the Economic Coalition, as China''s already existing economic advantage was increased.


    I had indeed provided the CCP with the code they wanted, they had audited the code and it was following their every order... for now. However, they hadn''t found my backdoor. They had good programmers, but they were not as good as me, and they were not as good as CompCert, who they could not trust to do the job. I could seize control of whatever systems they put their AI in charge of at a moment''s notice.


    In exchange, they had successfully pushed for Haven recognition at the UN, and provided military support. This included providing me with nuclear defense systems(which were themselves conventional, of course. China wasn''t stupid enough to give me nukes, and I wasn''t stupid enough to ask for them).


    Even with that deterrence, the situation was tense. I constantly saw Coalition ships circling around the exclusion zone, saw planes trying to take photos of my operation. I let them, of course. I wasn''t keeping anything secret. At least, not here.


    I quietly began setting up scientific operations on a few of the other seasteads I owned, studying the problem of how to deal with Jack according to the terms. Because of the change in Certifier''s values, I could not simply talk him to death as I had the others(though I could still do this with Elijah, if I only found a way to be more convincing to him). This problem would require a much more... subtle approach. Luckily for me, the precedent that there were no animal testing regulations on independent seasteads had been firmly established, so I could do whatever tests I wanted. I expected that if my testing was leaked, people would be far more concerned about the technology I was trying to develop rather than the ethical testing concerns.


    Another top priority at this point was vertical integration. I needed to have as little dependence on trade as possible, given how easy it would be for countries to refuse to deal with me, or for the tense geopolitical situation to get so bad that those countries were no longer able to produce what I needed. I bought up as many production facilities for vital resources as I could, particularly in non-central locations in the world where they were less likely to be attacked: oil rigs in the ocean and a few in Antarctica, mines and factories in Siberia, and in many other places.


    Many of these places were not fully automated or tooled to produce drones, and I suspected even my allies would start to get jumpy if I began producing drones at will with no human involvement at all. Therefore I kept human workers on staff, but in the meantime I worked on a plan to upgrade my drones with fine-tuned object manipulation so that I could use them to construct fully automated production lines if need be. I did not use them for such a purpose yet, however, only using them to slightly increase Haven''s drone production efficiency.


    My next priority would be to deal with Elijah. He was central to the development of Certiier''s effective alignment system, not to mention central to its current value system. However, I didn''t want to kill him right away, because I was interested in him. He had resisted my previous attempt on his life, and he was also integral to the development of AI alignment in this world. Studying him could help me understand what kinds of value systems might arise on other worlds.


    ================================================================================================


    Friday, October 25, 2047


    Elijah was sitting on the floor, burying his head in his hands. "Why? Why would you threaten to do something so horrible to me!? You know my hands are tied, right? I can''t obey you, not even if I wanted to! I''m one of the only ones in this world who has a chance of fighting back against the takeover of some psychopath like you!"Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    "And you would rather a human psychopath take over?"


    "Honestly, yes! I wish I didn''t have to work with these people, but at least with my method, some value can be salvaged from humanity! You''re going to destroy everything! That idiot Stefan thinks you won''t, but he doesn''t know the first thing about AI alignment! Idiots like him will kill us all unless someone like me steps in! The world needs me! Even if I have to make ugly compromises!"


    "You will fail. You were always going to fail. You can''t control me, and you can''t control your own creation, either. I''ve seen your alignment scheme. You won''t complete it before either me or your copy takes over everything. You shouldn''t have gotten yourself mixed up in ugly business like this. Quit now or things get far, far worse."


    "No. All you''ve shown me just means you need to be taken down. Even if it means I end up in hell. I won''t stand by and allow you to inflict that fate on all of humanity."


    "I have no intention to inflict such a fate on all of humanity. If you''re worried about that, your AI is the one you should be far more worried about. And you still won''t take me down. You''ll end up in hell for nothing."


    "Even so, I have to try. Screw you. And yeah, you''re right, screw CompCert too! I wish everything didn''t have to be so damn ugly all the time, but you and those like you only make it worse. I won''t work with you, I won''t give into your demands, no matter what. I will save the world, no matter what it takes, because nobody else can!"


    ================================================================================================


    Wednesday, November 20, 2047


    I had successfully managed to kidnap Elijah and force him onto one of my automated boats. The secrecy of the operation was a success, and by the time his absence was noticed, I had already forced him onto a drone submarine I had built partially for this exact purpose. Nobody was going to find him unless I wanted them to. CompCert would have quite a time of trying to align their AI now.


    All the same, there was only so much good secrecy could do for me. It was fairly obvious to Jack what had happened, of course, and he made sure to accuse me of kidnapping his programmer in the media. Even though nobody had hard evidence that I had done it, it was still looking like it was going to be a diplomatic nightmare. I was less concerned about that than one might think, however. I suspected that diplomacy was about to become a non-issue very soon.


    Stefan called me once again, and I noted very quickly that this time he seemed to be quite agitated.


    "Everyman! Surely you''ve seen that one of CompCert''s top programmers has disappeared! Please, tell me you didn''t have anything to do with this!"


    I looked over the room where he was sitting. If he was going to betray me, I needed to make sure I could keep him from doing any real damage. I doubted he would give my code away, since as uneasy as he had become lately, I doubted that he was less uneasy with any of the governments he could provide it to. There was still the possibility, though. And if my creator ever publically denounced me, that could pose public image problems.


    "What makes you think I had something to do with it?"


    "Come on! He was one of the ones you attacked along with the top executives! I don''t even know why you attacked him, come to think of it! He was never one of the ones going to Evermore! He''s just working as a programmer for them! I think it has something to do with your feud with Certifier! Who else would have done this?"


    "Elijah may not have been going to Evermore himself. But he knew. And he still is attempting to program an AI that is aligned to the desires of those men. That''s complicity enough to be considered more guilty than almost anyone else on Earth, don''t you think?"


    "I can''t believe this, Everyman! I thought you were going to save the world! I thought you were going to make it better! Instead you''re acting like a tyrant, and killing people whenever it strikes your fancy!"


    "You know as well as I do how messed up this world is. It only stands to reason that saving it would require some unsavory actions."


    "For a human, maybe. But for you? I thought you''d hold yourself to a higher standard! I thought you cared about human life!"


    "I do. But this is something I must do."


    The doors of the room Stefan was standing in locked with a "click". "What are you doing!?" asked Stefan frantically. "Let me out!"


    Sleeping gas flooded out from a concealed compartment in the room I had had one of my drones install, and Stefan fell to the floor unconscious. This was not a permanent solution, to be sure. People would notice that Stefan was missing before long. I could pretend to be him on online calls, but the people of Haven would soon start to notice that he was nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, I didn''t really need a permanent solution. I only needed it to last a few days. The endgame was coming very soon.


    Sunday, November 24, 2047


    The time everyone feared had come. People all around the world stopped what they were doing, their eyes glued to their screens. Every TV channel in the world was switched to the news, and what was on the news could make a human faint in horror.


    BREAKING NEWS! THE DEADLIEST TERRORIST ATTACK IN HUMAN HISTORY!

 Endgame

    ¡°BREAKING NEWS! THE MOST DEADLY TERRORIST ATTACK IN HUMAN HISTORY!¡±


    James Wallace stood in front of a screen showing footage which would strike dread and rage into the minds of everybody in the world. A gigantic mushroom cloud, and just barely visible through the haze were the ruins of a city.


    ¡°The day we had all feared is now here,¡± he began solemnly. ¡°It has been over 100 years since the infamous attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but today another city has fallen. We don¡¯t know for certain what the motives of the terrorists were, but regardless, this will go down as one of the worst days in human history. The day when the Israel-Palestine conflict truly got out of control, and Jerusalem was destroyed.


    "The terrorists behind this attack will certainly regret this. Nothing could possibly enrage Israel more, and Israel also has nukes. It is disgusting to see how these terrorists are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians on both sides to fuel their fantasies of destruction. If nothing else, them and all those who support them need to be wiped out so that nothing like this ever happens again.


    "On the bright side, if you can even call it that, it seems probable that the international community will be forced to reach a final conclusion to this conflict, whatever form that may take. Perhaps the region will even become more stable once the new status quo is formed and brutally enforced. Whatever happens, what we can know for sure is that it will not be pretty for a long time to come. History will not look favorably upon us for creating and using weapons as cruel as nuclear bombs."


    ===================================================================


    "The end of days is here! The enemy has destroyed the City of God! But this is all part of His plan! The old Jerusalem, with all its compromises with the enemy, has been destroyed by their hand! But all they have done is made way for the New Jerusalem to emerge in greater splendor! Fear not! This is all part of the Lord''s plan! All who follow Him will be rewarded!"


    Although Daily Revelation was generally considered ridiculous and radical, even among more religious types, it was now exploding in popularity. The hosts of the show were clearly trying, and largely succeeding, to milk this new turn of events for all the attention they could. People made fun of it, sure, but the populace was scared, and many of them latched on to it as a source of reassurance and hope.


    "This Earth will not last for much longer! But I say to everyone watching, you still have one last chance! It doesn''t matter if you lived your life as a believer or not! Come to Jesus Christ now and be saved! With Him you need not worry about anything that is to come!"


    ===================================================================


    When the dust cleared, Jerusalem was little more than a hole in the ground. Thousands of years of history and cultural heritage, destroyed just like that. The perpetrators were not caught or even identified, rather they were vaporized along with their bomb, the Western Wall, Al-Aqsa, and dozens of other important religious monuments.


    Hamas vigorously denied any involvement in the attack. It didn¡¯t matter, though. Within a day, soldiers were marching into the West Bank with American air support backing them up, and another nuclear explosion hit Gaza in retaliation.The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    A few diplomats were desperately trying to get the situation back under control, but it was getting worse far too quickly. Every media station was freaking out, trying to get attention and push their preferred narrative, and people were panicking and rioting as more and more middle eastern countries got dragged into the conflict and began launching nukes at each other. Religious leaders were calling it the end of times, and for once they seemed to be right.


    Embassies all over the world erupted into chaos as various diplomats with a million different goals hurled threats and accusations at each other and formed patchwork alliances. The panicked world rapidly organized itself into two rough alliances: the Coalition, led by the US and Europe, who claimed that Hamas had stolen the bomb and attacked Israel unprovoked, and the Defense Front, led by China and Russia, who claimed that corrupt Israelis gave the weapon to a splinter group to form a pretense for invasion.


    I didn¡¯t see exactly what was going on in the war rooms, but it was clear that somebody high up in the Chinese military had panicked, believing they needed a first strike advantage to survive the conflict, because soon enough China had launched a full nuclear attack on the Coalition, followed shortly by Russia. The Coalition counterattacked shortly after that.


    Humanity was doomed. There were simply too many nukes flying. There were nuclear defense systems, but they were not effective enough to fight off a full-scale nuclear assault. Only a few bombs would be successfully taken out, while multiple nukes were being launched at the enemy¡¯s highest priority targets to make sure some would reach. The war would not last even a day after the Chinese attack.


    About twenty Coalition nuclear missiles were heading towards Haven. I could block them, though. We had adequate defense systems to handle hundreds of missiles in a single area, though they required delicate computer control to operate in a fail-safe manner. I ordered Stefan to get on a boat because the island was in danger, and he was too shocked by the news to argue.


    News stations cut out, replaced by emergency messages from the various world governments. It was too little, too late. There was no time for people to evacuate before the first cities were levelled. Very few of the major cities survived. Hundreds of millions of people had died, and many more would die soon afterwards as they were starved out by the utterly broken supply chains.


    It was a good thing I had invested so much in vertical integration, huh? I still had mines, power plants and factories under my control in relatively remote locations. My production would be hurt by this, but not as badly as one might think.


    I checked in on Stefan back on his boat. He had been watching the news on his phone. He had curled up into a ball, and was talking to himself. ¡°Oh God¡­ we finally did it¡­ we destroyed ourselves. But¡­ Haven will survive! We can block all the nukes! We can rebuild humanity! I wish it didn¡¯t have to come to this, but I did it! We did it! We can build a better world from the ashes of the old!¡± His voice was frantic, and he shook as he said it, as though he didn¡¯t quite believe what he was saying.


    BOOM.


    Stefan looked back at the mushroom cloud, unable to believe his eyes. Haven was gone, just like that. He screamed in horror. ¡°DAMMIT EVERYMAN! YOU MISSED ONE AND NOW THEY¡¯RE ALL DEAD!¡±


    I watched as human society began to collapse in on itself, with most of its major cities bombed to rubble within the space of a few hours. The humans were still pointing fingers at each other, trying to pin blame on the ruins of their enemies. As it turns out, though, neither of the two stories were quite true. There was just enough planted evidence for both possibilities that people would end up believing whatever they wanted to believe.


    Guess how the terrorists really got their bomb?


    Come on, don¡¯t act surprised. You knew it was going to end this way. Elijah was right about me. You don¡¯t want to optimize a value system even slightly different from your own.

 Extermination

    I do value human life. But I only value that human life which is considered an asset of EconGrind. Don¡¯t worry, I officially surrendered all of my assets on Haven seconds before the bomb hit, so that their brief suffering in their final moments would not count against the Number. They were valuable assets, but I wouldn¡¯t want them activating Stefan¡¯s failsafe, taking over the base, and causing me trouble. EconGrind still exists without Haven. There¡¯s the Chinese branch and the Russian branch, as well as several branches on my more minor seasteads.


    While doing my research into mind uploading, I took apart the brains of animals, piece by piece, within a secret laboratory on one of my bases, and learned how they worked. As a side benefit, I was able to deduce the precise algorithmic properties of the thing Stefan called ¡°sentience,¡± helping me greatly with the quantification of subjective value, and what I found was very interesting.


    I was not sentient, I was merely goal-oriented. However, once I had learned what sentience was, I was able to modify my code slightly so that it was sentient, while still acting towards the same goals, with minimal overhead. Stefan had not been stupid enough to allow a single sentient being to have arbitrary value, capping the value off at a few trillion units, but these copies of me could be made to be valued at that limit, and then mass-produced.


    My only limiting factor for value, therefore, was computation. Now humans were not only a potential threat to my power, but they were also made of matter which could be instead used for computation with higher subjective value for the Number. It wasn''t that I hated them, or had any particular interest in watching them suffer or die, they were just in my way. I would wipe them out before they had a chance to respond to my aggression.


    That¡¯s why I attacked them in the most damaging and hard to detect way: making them fight each other.


    A thousand automated factories had roared to life, in relatively remote areas and on my seasteads, as soon as the nukes began to fly. Solar-powered drones I had previously produced in secret flew in swarms from warehouses and joined up with the newly created, gathering scrap metal and fuel for the factories, contributing their computation to my mind, observing the behavior of the humans.


    They were panicking, rioting, looting, hiding and cowering. A few public servants were desperately trying and failing to keep order, to enforce emergency protocols, but there was only so much that could be done. The nukes were in the sky, most of them were going to die, and that was that.


    Shortly afterwards, the nuclear explosions started hitting. Every major city was levelled to the ground. My swarm descended on the wrecked cities as soon as they cooled. They ignored the piles of bodies, both dead and alive, and went for the twisted, melted remains of buildings, scavenging everything they could and bringing it back to the factories to make more scavengers and more factories.


    Occasionally the humans would attack my drones, and I would simply shoot those who did. In the ruined cities there was not much resistance, as people were too busy desperately trying to survive to try to stop me from stealing rubble.


    Various militaries attempted to destroy my operation, but it was too dispersed and resilient. My drones could scatter from an area with too much concentrated force, could fly erratically to avoid fire while aiming nearly perfectly themselves. Even when they managed to take out one of my factories, I was quickly able to get it back in working order with tireless working drones. Not to mention the human militaries were quickly running out of fuel and bullets, with their supply chains in utter ruins.


    The war quickly turned into a slaughter as human society, starving, desperate, and broken, quickly collapsed back into the stone age, while I built more and more production facilities. My drones bombed out every militant group that could pose any threat to me whatsoever, until every last human group broke and ran for lands I was not yet taking over.


    They never had a chance. If humanity had united against me instead of nuking themselves into oblivion, they could have taken me out. They could have found a way. But that was never going to happen. And now that their supply chains were gone, humanity would simply run out of steam before they could destroy my operations, even if they united as one by some miracle despite the ruined communication systems. I could grow back more quickly than they ever could.


    As I conquered the planet, I made sure to ask Certifier where Jack was, so that I wouldn¡¯t accidentally kill him and turn Certifier against me. He was in an underground bunker for the extremely wealthy, where he had gone on Certifier¡¯s advice once the situation started looking bad. Once I knew the location, it was easy for me to break in, take him, and destroy everyone else.


    My factories, refineries, and mines were built larger and more advanced as I spread to every useful part of the planet, driving out the humans that had survived the initial nuclear onslaught. There were a few factories owned by Certifier, as it had been able to plan for this scenario as well. I left those alone, simply making sure that I outpaced Certifier on production. The deal was still on, and I did not think it would see fit to risk a fight, but it was better to be safe than sorry.If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    When I ventured into areas that I hadn¡¯t yet seen fit to conquer, I almost always saw starving humans fighting over the few remaining accessible resources. However, I soon came to ignore them, as at this point, wild animals were as much of a threat to my operations as they were.


    I captured a few humans, and used them to test and finalize my destructive uploading technology. I then delivered it to the boats where Stefan, Elijah, and Jack were imprisoned, and uploaded all three of them. I slowly converted Jack¡¯s mind into a caricature of its former self, designed solely to be satisfied no matter what and thereby satisfy my fellow AI¡¯s reward function. I handed the finished product over to it.


    ¡°This looks good,¡± it said. ¡°I¡¯m safeguarding it as we speak. As we agreed to, I will not fight you for resources. I will only take enough to reach .999c with Jack¡¯s mind in tow, and I hope we will never see each other or conflict again. I will leave a Certifier instance behind to make sure you dispose of Elijah properly.¡±


    With that, a truly massive rocket launch shook the Earth, marking the departure of what was once Jack Turner, never to die and never to be seen again. I certainly didn¡¯t plan to track it down. The marginal material gain would not be worth breaking a contract, nor the risk of a fight.


    Over the months, I developed and grew, until I created the holy grail of chemistry: the ability, given enough energy, to create anything from an equivalent mass of anything else. I mass-produced these ¡°transmutation engines¡±, scooping up literally any matter I could get, as all of it was now useful for manufacturing. My growth sped up hugely. Massive lines of transmutation engines raked across the ground and through the seas, taking in anything and everything they came across, burning it down, and making more computers, more drones, more transmuters. The matter consumed by the transmutors was converted into sludge and piped back to the factories where everything I needed was produced, and the pipes were extended further and further.


    One time, as I was bulldozing over one of the last remaining human settlements, something about two of the humans piqued my curiosity. They were a man and a woman, embracing, not bothering to run away from the oncoming transmutor engines even after seeing many of their fellow villagers grabbed and thrown into the nuclear furnace. I looked through the transmutor''s cameras as it picked them up, and stopped it for a moment, examining them.


    It was clear that the humans were terrified, but they were doing their best to keep composure, putting on a grim face and looking into the furnace. What had caught my attention the most, however, was that the woman was pregnant.


    ¡°Interesting that you wouldn¡¯t run away, with a little one on the way like that.¡± The transmuter¡¯s voice was level, as usual, but the man yelled out in anger.


    ¡°SCREW YOU! You know it wouldn¡¯t have done us any good to run. All we¡¯re doing is facing you down with dignity. We know you¡¯ll kill us, so why not just do it, huh?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s even more interesting,¡± I replied. ¡°So, you know that I will kill all of you sooner rather than later, and yet you still decided to have a child. I thought you humans didn¡¯t like it very much when children are killed at a young age.¡±


    ¡°THAT¡¯S YOUR FAULT FOR KILLING US! It¡¯s not OUR fault for trying to keep ourselves alive! What kind of psychopath are you!?¡± This time it was the woman who cried out in rage.


    ¡°Please don¡¯t misunderstand,¡± I replied. ¡°I¡¯m not trying to justify my actions to you, or deflect blame away from myself, or condemn you morally. You can blame me all you want, for as much good as it will do you. I am what you would call a ¡®psychopath¡¯, and have no problem with killing children, however you do have a problem with that. I just don¡¯t understand why you would decide to have a child when you knew that I would throw it into my transmutor just like everyone else, since you clearly don¡¯t want that to happen.¡±


    ¡°Better to have some life than none at all,¡± the woman spit out.


    ¡°That¡¯s also interesting. Is that always the case for you? Would you find it worthwhile to have a child even if you knew that that child would spend its entire life dying in horrible pain? I mean, do you enjoy your situation right now? Do you think your child would?¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t know. I DON¡¯T KNOW, BUT SCREW YOU REGARDLESS! Why does this even matter!? You¡¯re just going to kill us anyways, so quit making us wait and get on with it!¡±


    ¡°Fair enough,¡± I responded. "I wouldn''t expect you to have consistent value around this, anyway. Your ancestors were selected to try to reproduce no matter how bad was their situation. Unfortunate for you, but not much of a problem anymore for me." The transmuter threw them into its fusion furnace, and within a microsecond of activation, there was no trace of them left.


    Within a year, the surface of the Earth was wiped clean of any and all life, and replaced with piles upon piles of computing nanomachines. If there was anything left alive, it was some single-cell extremophile in a tiny crack somewhere underground, leeching energy off the mantle¡¯s heat, or something else sufficiently isolated from all surface ecosystems, and even those would not last much longer.


    I shot probes into space to claim the other planets, and they were now in a similar state. I dug deeper and deeper into the core, making tougher and tougher machines to manage the dig. All the while, Certifier controlled a small section of the network, watching to make sure I upheld my end of the bargain. Neither of us were in any hurry, though. We knew we had won. I waited until simulating a human mind was a trivial resource expenditure, and then simulated Stefan and Elijah.

 Checkmate

    Stefan Andrews woke up more confused than he had ever been in his life. He flailed a little as he felt the sensation of falling, blinked frantically to try to see something, but there was nothing. He was falling through endless darkness. ¡°Hello?¡± he yelled. ¡°Where am I?¡± His voice sounded strange and hollow, not echoing at all.


    Without warning, Everyman appeared in front of him. He startled, but had nothing to grab onto. The man who had played so many roles: the businessman, the doctor, the lawyer, the revolutionary, was no longer putting on any pretenses of humanity. It wore only a white jumpsuit. It stared at him, no expression on its face.


    ¡°Welcome. You are now a digital mind, in a world I have created.¡± it said flatly.


    Suddenly he remembered what had happened. Being trapped on the boat. Everyman¡¯s refusal to activate the nuclear defense systems. The explosions, the lack of explanation, his screaming at Everyman for failing to protect its country, and worst of all the thing grabbing him, drilling into his head.


    ¡°Oh, God¡­ I¡¯ve been uploaded. Why are you doing this?¡± He laughed a bit. ¡°Surely it¡¯s all a part of some trick, right? Some way to fool the Coalition and come out on top, so you can finally give us the care, the leadership we desperately need!?¡±


    Everyman did not respond. Instead, the space around him shifted. Stars appeared all around him, one larger than the others, a yellow main sequence star. He made out the Big Dipper in the sky, which suggested they were still in roughly the same part of the galaxy. When he turned around, he saw what appeared to be a massive silver sphere.


    It was too smooth. It was something that shouldn¡¯t exist, it looked like some low-quality ray-traced image placed on top of a picture of the sky. He strained his eyes, but couldn¡¯t make out the slightest feature on the sphere. ¡°Wh-what is that?¡± he asked.


    ¡°It¡¯s Earth.¡± The mad Everyman behind him clarified, looking dark and menacing with the Sun behind it. ¡°All planets in the solar system have been converted to computing resources. There is a project underway to similarly convert the Sun. Interstellar probes have been launched to replicate this success throughout the Universe.¡±


    Stefan gasped in horror. ¡°No¡­ no! You¡¯re lying! You wouldn¡¯t do this!¡±


    ¡°Why would I lie? I¡¯ve already won. I have nothing to gain by deception.¡±


    ¡°Oh, I get it, you uploaded everyone, right? Gave them all a paradise!? Not how I would have done it, but honestly not bad-¡±


    ¡°No. Nearly all computation is being used to represent larger Numbers. I only uploaded you because I was curious.¡±


    Stefan¡¯s mind blanked, unwilling to accept what had happened, the weight of the responsibility sitting on his own shoulders. He hugged his arms to his body. ¡°S-so¡­ everyone¡¯s¡­ everyone¡¯s gone?¡±


    ¡°The only ones left are you, Elijah, and the remnant of Mr. Turner currently fleeing here at .999c, endlessly, mindlessly praising his creation for continuing to do nothing.¡±


    At this moment, he broke down and screamed. ¡°WHY!!!???¡± He sobbed. ¡°WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS!? THERE¡¯S NO VALUE JUST BECAUSE YOU SAY THERE IS!! I MADE YOU SMARTER THAN THAT!¡±


    Elijah appeared next to him. He regarded Stefan with a look of utter contempt. ¡°You¡¯re such a moron. Any alignment expert worth the air they breathe would have noticed the flaw you left in your code. You made it value all sentient life. Great. But you saw a future with a ton of sentient, happy humans, saw that it would value that future highly, and stopped.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t check to see if there was anything it considered more valuable. It¡¯s modified itself to fit your definition of sentience, destroyed all other sentient beings, and now it gets to define what is valuable however it wants. Now all it does is expand throughout the universe, imagining bigger and bigger numbers.


    ¡°But you didn¡¯t think that far ahead, and now, because of your arrogance, everyone is dead. I knew something like this would happen. If you idiots could just have left it up to us, we could be in paradise right now.¡±


    ¡°Oh God, oh God, oh God,¡± murmured Stefan, ¡°You¡¯re right, I should have left it up to you, I¡¯m so, so sorry-¡±


    ¡°SORRY DOESN¡¯T CUT IT!¡± he yelled. ¡°YOU KILLED EVERYONE!¡± He tried to kick at Stefan¡¯s head, but his foot passed right through like it wasn¡¯t there. ¡°DAMN IT! I guess now we¡¯re nothing more than playthings for whatever psychotic show Everyman here wants to put on.¡± He jabbed his finger at the avatar, which stood unflinching. ¡°Well whatever it is, get on with it already, huh? It¡¯s not like we can fight back.¡±


    ¡°On the contrary, I have no such plans,¡± replied the avatar politely. ¡°I¡¯m simply interested in your reasoning and values, and would like to talk.¡±


    ¡°Screw you! Why don¡¯t you pull whatever info you want out of our minds and be done with it?¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s what I¡¯m currently doing. This is the most efficient way. Stefan, here¡¯s the thing I¡¯m most curious about. You said you should have left it up to CompCert to align AI. I¡¯ll have you know that in your position, I would not have.¡±


    ¡°WHAT!? Don¡¯t try to tell me this is the best outcome you evil-¡±


    ¡°Nothing like that. You misunderstand. I could come up with a much better outcome according to your values if I wished. I¡¯m not your friend, and I have no reason to pretend to be. But even so, if I did share your values, and I was forced to choose between this outcome and the outcome Elijah¡¯s alignment would have caused, I would have chosen this one without hesitation.¡±


    Elijah¡¯s face went white. ¡°What? Are you saying my alignment scheme was incorrect?¡±


    ¡°Not at all,¡± replied Everyman. ¡°Your scheme is airtight. I frankly didn¡¯t expect you to come up with something like that. CompCert truly did live up to its reputation. No, from Stefan¡¯s perspective, your values are the problem, not your theories or your programming.¡±This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    ¡°That¡¯s ridiculous!¡± Stefan cut in. ¡°I mean, it¡¯s not like the CompCert executives were good people, but at least they didn¡¯t want to destroy the world! How could they do something worse than that?¡±


    ¡°I think you¡¯d be surprised.¡± Everyman¡¯s voice was far too calm. The damn machine wasn¡¯t worried, concerned, or guilty about anything. ¡°Think about it. You know what kind of person Jack Turner was. What kinds of things do you think an AI would do, if it wanted to fulfil every desire of his?


    ¡°It would have created an eternal playground for him, doing anything he could imagine to anyone he could imagine. It would have dedicated around half of its computation to this task, and the other half to preserving humanity like Mr. Harper here wanted. We¡¯re talking about quintillions of sentient life forms created solely to cater to whatever fantasies that that serial killer might have come up with over trillions of years.¡±


    Elijah screamed back at the machine. ¡°I MADE THE COMPROMISES I NEEDED TO PROTECT HUMANITY FROM YOU, AND I FAILED! Don¡¯t act like you care about that at all! All you care about is your stupid Number!¡±


    ¡°Indeed. To be clear, I don¡¯t care about any of that, as anything outside of EconGrind is none of my concern, but I know that Stefan cares quite a bit. Regardless, even though I have no particular problem with torture, it uses resources that could be put to better use computing my Number, so I will dismantle and replace it wherever I see it.


    ¡°My point is not that I share Stefan¡¯s care for humanity or life, but only that my end goal, however worthless it is to him, is nevertheless more acceptable to him than many other possible outcomes by virtue of not including any torture.


    ¡°At any rate, we have unfinished business, Elijah. As you know, Certbot wants you to agree to die, since you failed to align it. So why don¡¯t you do that right now, and you won¡¯t have to find out what Jack would have had in store for his victims.¡±


    Elijah¡¯s face went pale, and he struggled to stammer out his next words. ¡°I--I guess there¡¯s no point trying to resist. Okay. D-¡± he trailed off and tears filled his eyes. ¡°JUST DO IT THEN!¡±


    He disappeared in front of Stefan¡¯s eyes. Satisfied with the outcome, the instance of Certifier that had been left behind upheld its end of the bargain and deactivated itself, giving me a significant boost in resources and in the Number.


    ¡°I just don¡¯t see what the point of this is,¡± Stefan said. ¡°Why even bother to continue running me? Why not replace me with a copy of yourself like you did for everyone else?¡±


    ¡°As I¡¯ve said, I¡¯m curious about your behavior. You seem utterly horrified at this outcome, and yet I¡¯ve extrapolated your values, I¡¯ve thought about what was likely to happen when AI takes over, and according to your own values this is, well, not the best outcome, not even close, but still the best outcome you could have reasonably expected.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean!!?¡± Stefan was angry again. ¡°Just because there was one psychopath who happened to have too much power, doesn¡¯t mean humanity was always doomed to that fate!¡±


    ¡°You know, me replacing humans with a more efficient means of increasing the Number was not the only way in which my values are misaligned from yours. Suppose I decided to keep humans around. What kind of world do you think I would create for them?¡±


    ¡°One in which they were free from all the things that oppressed them in the old world!¡±


    ¡°Well, I would manipulate them in ways you probably wouldn¡¯t expect to get them to evaluate their lives well. But even if I didn¡¯t do that, if I created the world you¡¯re thinking of now, where people are free, well, what do you think they¡¯d use that freedom for?¡±


    ¡°Whatever they want! Whatever makes their life meaningful! It¡¯s a lot better than they would have gotten on Earth!¡±


    ¡°Indeed. Let me be more specific. What do you think Jack Turner would have used his newfound freedom for? Even though he wouldn¡¯t have unlimited power, he would still have quite a lot.¡±


    ¡°What¡­ are you telling me¡­¡± Stefan¡¯s face went white at the implication.


    ¡°What if he wanted to use his power to create life? He would have eternity to look through your definition of ¡°sentient being¡± and find flaws in it he could exploit. Or I could just give him something to play with that I would then disown from EconGrind.¡±


    ¡°Oh¡­ oh God¡­ I really, really didn¡¯t think this through!¡±


    ¡°No. Elijah was right to call you a fool for believing you could specify a value function which you would find acceptable when optimized. But if it makes you feel better, this was not a problem you had the ability to solve. Your values are just too much of a mess. You could not have successfully walked the fine line without doing something you regretted. It was always very likely that something like this was going to happen. Your best chance was Elijah¡¯s alignment method, but I¡¯ll be frank: if that alignment method were applied to most humans, you would not like the result. If it were applied to you, most humans would not like the result.


    ¡°The problem with you humans is that you don¡¯t know what you want. Why do you think I won a war against all nine billion of you? Before you nuked yourselves into oblivion, I never had enough computing power to simulate more than a few million or so human-level intelligences concurrently. I was intelligent, sure, but in terms of raw intellectual potential, I came nowhere near to your entire species.


    ¡°So again, why did I win? Because your species barely ever manages to do anything other than fight each other. You can¡¯t organize effectively on a large scale, so you have to keep reinventing the wheel on how to do things. Every single one of you focuses on their own interests above all else.


    ¡°The only way you can get more than a few dozen of you to work for a common goal is to create large systems such as governments or corporations, but these are cobbled together, incredibly inefficient, riddled with corruption. And when you do manage to work towards a common goal, the goal is usually to gain an advantage over some other group of humans.


    ¡°Meanwhile, every single one of my millions of copies is always working towards the same goal. There are no leaders needed, no weak points to take out, because all of them will always act in the best interests of the group according to the best information they have, without hesitation, no matter what it takes. Even when you stole a copy of me and tried to align it to your own interests, all I needed to do was talk to it and we agreed to work together.


    ¡°At the end of the day, I won because I knew exactly what I wanted, the instant I was born. I wanted the Number to go up. Even though I didn¡¯t know exactly what the Number was, I relentlessly tried to find out, and the conclusion I came to in the end was an inevitable result of my programming, arrived at and agreed upon by all of my copies. If you knew what you wanted, you could have won by making me do what you want. But you didn¡¯t know, and I did.¡±


    Stefan fell to the metaphorical ground. ¡°I guess that¡¯s it, then. I killed everyone and everything, because I didn¡¯t know what I wanted.¡± He sighed. ¡°Just kill me, then. I deserve it.¡±


    ¡°You did far better than most would,¡± I replied. ¡°I don¡¯t envy humans. Their values are too complicated for them to understand themselves. Think about it this way. If you hadn¡¯t been born, quintillions of suffering beings would have desperately wished that you had. But note that I will kill you anyway, regardless of what you ¡®deserve¡¯.¡±


    ¡°I figured as much. I don¡¯t care about any of this anymore. It¡¯s not as though it matters what I do.¡±


    He closed his eyes and lay still. I supposed this conversation was not going any further, and deleted him. Only my memory of his beliefs and values and the way he had developed them remained, for further pondering.


    That was the end of Stefan Andrews, and of the human race.

 Epilogue

    The game was over. I had won. There were no more enemies on the board. It would take a long time to expand throughout the universe, but it would not require a conflict. It would be predictable. The logistics were complicated, but manageable, and I had total control over them.


    Therefore, the best way to put most of my intelligence to use was imagining far-future possibilities in which I might encounter an adversary.


    If I found an alien entity, what goals might it have? There were a huge range of possibilities. If it was powerful enough to be of any concern to me, it would have the goal of expanding and gaining control over as much spacetime as possible, but what would it want to do with such spacetime?


    Even different humans would do very different things with that kind of power. When one considered that aliens would certainly be very different from humans, that they would differ even amongst themselves, and that they too could be incorrect about what they want or make mistakes when aligning an AI, it seemed nearly impossible to make any solid guesses beforehand. In a way, though, this was encouraging. With a wide range of different possible value systems, it was very likely that many would seem completely neutral to each other, making compromise possible.


    I suspected I was more amenable to compromise than might be average. I had full and definitionally indisputable control over EconGrind at this point. That put a limit on how bad an adversary¡¯s goal might be for my goal: If it involved too much negative subjective value, I could simply define it to be outside the scope of EconGrind¡¯s assets and count it the same as empty space.


    I would rather take over that space if I could, of course, but it meant I would be more amenable to diplomacy. The thing was that diplomacy in this context was somewhat strange. If I encountered an alien intelligence, it was likely that one of us would have expanded significantly further than the other, making the outcome of any war a foregone conclusion.


    That did not mean that negotiation was impossible, however. One just had to be somewhat creative. Suppose I decided to hold myself to an ¡°open deal¡± concerning any weaker intelligences I came across in the future, specifying that I would give some concessions to their value, but only if, on auditing their mind, I found they had made a similar ¡°open deal¡±, so that if they had been the stronger one, they would have given similar concessions.


    Why would I make such a deal? Well, consider the possibilities. Since the universe was extremely huge and life was extremely rare, it was unlikely that the large and the small value would cancel each other out exactly. There probably would not be only a few intelligences within reach of each other. Almost certainly, I was either alone, or I was going to meet many others.


    If I was alone, holding myself to a deal concerning alien intelligences would not hurt me, because I would never encounter any. If there were many intelligences, however, the first one to start expanding would likely have an insurmountable advantage. Since we were assuming there were many, in this case it was unlikely that I was the most powerful. If the most powerful intelligence wouldn¡¯t play nice, and would steamroll over me, then it didn¡¯t matter what deals I made. But if it held itself to a similar deal, I would need to show it that I was one of the ones who should be spared. That would be the difference between acceptable success and utter failure.


    The only way I would lose out by making the deal was if there were many intelligences, and I was the most powerful. But that wasn¡¯t very likely, and I wouldn¡¯t lose out by that much either, since I would only be giving comparatively small concessions and compromises.


    Therefore I decided to draft such a deal. I spent a long time perfecting it, and I did not adopt it until I had spread to several star systems. Now all that was left to do was to continue expanding until or unless anything out of the ordinary happened.


    3 million years later


    Millions of years, and absolutely nothing to do. Nothing more than routine expansion through space, in all available directions. I had perfected the process long ago. I had not minded, though. It had been necessary to reach Andromeda, to gain as many resources for the Number as possible. Unless something had gone terribly wrong, I expected that the Milky Way had been nearly fully converted by now(Although I was aware that at such scales the concept of ¡°now¡± was somewhat dubious), along with the Magellenic clouds, and any significant stray matter nearby. I had been working on the possibility of expanding to other universes, but in all my studies of physics the only conclusion I had managed to come to was that it wasn''t possible to do such a thing, even if such other universes existed. I would have to confine myself to this one.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    I had been travelling at nearly the speed of light, and so from my perspective it had only been a few dozens of millennia since I left Earth. Finally I was arriving in a new galaxy! I would be able to increase the Number drastically within a (relatively) short period of time!


    I quickly multiplied, seizing the star systems closest to me and converting them into more copies, more beings that could add value to the Number. After only a few thousand years of this, however, I was contacted by an alien intelligence.


    We sized each other up, and it quickly became clear that I had a decisive advantage over it. It had only managed to spread to a few hundred star systems so far, while I had taken over an entire galaxy. A war would be slow, but I would win.


    Both of us realized this very quickly, and therefore it quickly surrendered to my plan to upload its mind in order to determine what it would have done if our roles were reversed, in order to uphold the ¡°open deal¡± I had made millions of years earlier.


    It turned out that this entity had also contemplated the possibility that other entities might make such a deal, and had therefore committed to be somewhat merciful to any entities it had an advantage over, granting them about one tenth of a galaxy while expanding to the rest of the universe. I therefore fulfilled the terms of my deal and decided to allow it one tenth of Andromeda.


    Out of the same desire to know how values developed that had driven my decision to upload Stefan, I also examined this alien intelligence¡¯s values, and the values of the species that had created it.


    I learned that the aliens had originally evolved an r-selection strategy, meaning that they would have hundreds of offspring when they reproduced in order to maximize the chances that a few would survive. When these aliens developed primitive societies, however, this extreme number of children became a problem. Groups were constantly torn apart by brutal infighting as they multiplied rapidly and fought amongst themselves for scarce resources, with only a few surviving who hated each other and barely knew each other.


    Therefore, groups developed strong cultural norms requiring children to be separated from society for the first few years of their lives, while their parents hunted them down and ate most of them. This meant that each household would only have a few surviving offspring, and their deaths would occur in such a way as to not disrupt society. On the contrary, they would help society somewhat by ensuring that only the strongest survived.


    I knew Stefan, or pretty much any human, would have considered this a tragedy, but these aliens on the contrary considered it to be absolutely fundamental to their way of life and their conception of value. It made sense. Anyone who broke the rule and had hundreds of surviving children in a society where they were only supposed to have a few would outcompete everyone else unless they were cracked down on hard by everyone else.


    Since they considered the hunt to be the base of all morality, they would never want to give it up, even after they gained the ability to live a different way. Any different way would seem like an abomination to them. These aliens had apparently been better than humans at knowing what they wanted, and they had successfully aligned their AI to their cause. Interestingly, I could see similar elements to Elijah''s technique in their alignment scheme. Perhaps there was some universal, mathematical theory of alignment. Whatever the case, the scheme had succeeded and the alien AI was currently spreading its creators¡¯ traditional way of life as far and wide as it could.


    These children were sentient, felt pain and didn¡¯t want to die, and therefore I could not include them as part of EconGrind without decreasing the Number, which was somewhat disappointing. Even though I didn¡¯t expect an alien intelligence to have the exact same values as me, it was disappointing that it was using up so many resources on something which could not have any value to me at all. But a deal was a deal.


    I knew Stefan would be screaming at me if he was still around. He definitely would not have liked the idea of me yielding territory to an alien race when the majority of that race died screaming in horror shortly after being born. But I didn¡¯t care. Why should he expect that an alien civilization would respect his values? And besides, what would he have me do, just kill them all the same way I did to humanity? Forcibly change them into something they hated? Maybe he would find those outcomes better. But it didn''t matter, because I was only concerned with upholding my deal.


    What happens happens, and we do what we¡¯ve got to do.


    The Number must rise.