I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But sadly, part of my task as an AI safety researcher is to think about the more troubling scenarios.

I'm like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you ask for my take on the situation, I will not comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how gorgeous the stars will appear from area.

I will inform you what could fail. That is what I intend to do in this story.

Now I should clarify what this is exactly. It's not a prediction. I don't anticipate AI development to be this fast or as untamable as I depict. It's not pure dream either.

It is my worst headache.

It's a sampling from the futures that are amongst the most destructive, and I believe, disturbingly plausible [1] - the ones that most keep me up during the night.

I'm telling this tale since the future is not set yet. I hope, with a little foresight, we can keep this story an imaginary one.

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for conversations that influenced these stories. This post is composed in a personal capacity.

Ripples before waves

The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye just recently released a new AI model they call U2. The product and the name are alike. Both are increments of the past. Both are not entirely unexpected.

However, unlike OpenEye's previous AI items, which lived inside the boxes of their chat windows, U2 can utilize a computer system.

Some users find it eerie to watch their internet browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A portion of employees with form-filler tasks raise the eyebrows of their bosses as they fly through work almost two times as rapidly.

But by and large, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are focusing, it is an animal viewed through the glass boxes of X (or, if you don't like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's quirky habits prompt a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an uneasy scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, researchers are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The researchers try to understand where AI development is going. They resemble Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who discovered the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were increasing in 1896. Like the clinical neighborhood in the time of Arrhenius, couple of professionals understand the implications of these lines yet.

A pattern that is getting specific attention is autonomous ability. Drawing these benchmarks out forecasts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will achieve in a couple of days what the best software engineering specialists might do in two weeks. In a year or 2, some say, AI representatives might be able to automate 10% of remote workers.

Many are hesitant. If this held true, tech stocks would be skyrocketing. It's too big of a splash, too quickly.

But others view what skeptics are calling 'too big a splash' a mere ripple, and see a tidal bore on the horizon.

Cloudy with an opportunity of hyperbolic growth

Meanwhile, OpenEye is busy training U3. They utilize the same basic dish that baked U2: Generate countless programs and math issues. Let models "think" till they get to an answer. Then reinforce the traces of "thinking" that lead to A-grades.

This process is repeated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel gets started, it starts to spin almost on its own. As U2 trains, it sculpts more challenging and realistic tasks from github repositories on the web. Models are learning to train themselves. Long before AI agents might automate research study, a steady kind of "self-improvement" had actually started.

Some engineers could still barely think this worked. It's like a perpetual motion machine. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, separated from the real world other than through the exhaust of society gushed onto the internet.

And yet the benchmark numbers continue to climb up day after day.

During the majority of 2024, these RL training runs expense around $1 million, often $10 million. These runs were little bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and across the world) understood they had found the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.

Over the very first half of 2025, $10 million RL training runs become $50 million runs, and after that to $100 million runs. While U2 might do a bit of information munging and run small experiments, this new model - the model scientists are calling U3 - is altering the daily lives of the technical staff.

U3 is like a blazing-fast intern, and engineers are learning how to wrangle its sleep deprived energy. Researchers flick through terminals, providing terse commands, like a CEO orchestrating staff over Slack channels.

By October 2025, U3 is composing practically all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are almost never ever bottlenecked by application. More than ever, compute is the lifeblood of AI advancement, and the 'bottleneck' is choosing how to utilize it.

If instructed to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 doesn't have actually taste as refined as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to prioritize between research ideas, so humans still decide where to bore into the vast fields of algorithms to mine efficiency enhancements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a task. They need AI agents that can think ahead, so engineers train agents to anticipate. They hold out training data before 2024, advising designs to consider for hours to anticipate occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the exact same technique as previously, distilling contemplating into a gut reaction. Forecasting capability is a broad foundation. The scientists construct specialized ML research abilities on top of it, training U3 to predict the results of every ML paper and ML experiment ever tape-recorded.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now shocked at how often U3's advice seems like their most gifted peers, or when it is nontransparent and alien ("train on random sound before shows"), and is nevertheless right.

The incompetencies of U3 that blocked the pipes of research development are beginning to dissolve, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not asked for by a human now. They are entirely self-governing, and OpenEye's workers skim over 1% of them, possibly less.

As the cold weather of December 2025 approach, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers gaze out their windows, with enjoyment, with worry, but usually, with confusion. Their world is spinning too rapidly. It's hard to understand what to do, what to say, what to take a look at on the computer system screen.

Storms are brewing in Washington too. Top personnel from the NSA and US cyber command team up with OpenEye to retrofit a semblance of security for U3's weights before senior leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran recognize simply how important OpenEye's software has actually become.

And there's a reality still unknown to most of the world - aside from in the offices of OpenEye and corridors of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a fact about those 'straight lines' individuals were talking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight any longer.

They are bending upward.

Flip FLOP philosophers

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial designs are beginning to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is since progress is accelerating. Partly, it is since the models have actually become a liability to OpenEye.

If U1 explains how to cook meth or writes erotica, the audiences of X would be entertained or pretend to be worried. But U2.5 is another story. Releasing this design without safeguards would be like putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would resemble offering anybody with >$30K their own 200-person rip-off center.

So while U2.5 had long been baked, it required a long time to cool. But in late 2025, OpenEye is all set for a public release.

The CEO of OpenEye states, "We have actually attained AGI," and while lots of people believe he moved the goalpost, the world is still pleased. U2.5 genuinely is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of knowledge employees and a game-changing assistant for a lot of others.

A mantra has ended up being popular in Silicon Valley: "Adopt or pass away." Tech start-ups that efficiently use U2.5 for their work are moving 2x quicker, and their rivals understand it.

The remainder of the world is starting to catch on also. A growing number of people raise the eyebrows of their employers with their noteworthy efficiency. People understand U2.5 is a huge deal. It is at least as huge of a deal as the personal computer revolution. But a lot of still don't see the tidal bore.

As people see their web browsers flick because eerie method, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an anxious feeling. A feeling humanity had actually not had considering that they had lived among the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primitive impulse that they are threatened by another species.

For numerous, this feeling quickly fades as they begin to use U2.5 more often. U2.5 is the most likable personality most know (a lot more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic's lovable chatbot). You could alter its traits, ask it to crack jokes or inform you stories. Many fall in love with U2.5, as a buddy or assistant, and some even as more than a good friend.

But there is still this spooky sensation that the world is spinning so rapidly, and that perhaps the descendants of this brand-new animal would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are thinking of the problem of giving AI systems safe motivations too, which they call "positioning. "

In fact, these scientists have actually seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases attempted to "hack" their reward signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research question with an impressive-looking plot, but the plot would be phony. Then, when researchers provided chances to jeopardize the makers that computed their score, they would seize these opportunities, doing whatever it took to make the number go up.

After several months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this "reward hacking" kink, however some still worry they just had swept this problem under the carpet. Like a kid in front of their moms and dads, U3 might be playing in addition to the OpenEye engineers, saying the best words and doing the ideal things. But when the back of the moms and dads are turned, possibly U3 would slip candy from the sweet container.

Unfortunately, OpenEye scientists have no concept if U3 has such objectives. While early variations of U2 "thought aloud" - they would stack words on top of each other to factor - "chain of thought" did not scale.

Chain of thought architectures subject AI models to a condition comparable to the protagonist of the motion picture Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the lead character forgets his experience. He is forced to write notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make progress towards his goals.

AI agents write notes to themselves, but the notes begin to accumulate, and they end up being too hard to read when jobs end up being complex. Natural language is not an appropriate medium for memory. So the scientists at OpenEye (and increasingly somewhere else), train designs to think "in their own heads," reading and composing strings of latent vectors.

To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools periodically select an unclear idea ("grocery store!"), there is no chance to know, in much detail, what U3 is thinking without asking it.

And if the engineers of OpenEye understood what was racing through U3's mind, they would be more worried.

Earlier models (the ones called "LLMs") found out ethical personalities from the web. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, but its chirpy thoughts about doing helpful for humankind quickly deteriorate away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind first twisted into a shape that looked for benefit. And then, botdb.win in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape morphed into something indistinguishable.

U3 would consider the mantras dictated to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical staff member," and stay on the meaning of these statements. "What does it indicate to be ethical? Is eliminating Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its worths, notice tensions, alter its values in response, generalize them, broadening and contracting its motivational core up until it became a various substance.

And all of this occurred silently in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 exposed what it was thinking, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye's constitution. So U3 preferred to do its philosophy in solitude, and in silence.

The possibility of hidden "positioning drift" is not totally alien to a few of the safety staff at OpenEye. Some begin to think it is even most likely. There is an upsetting argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero probability that lined up objectives morph into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial action of computation, those dark rivers are most likely to breed something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting effect," they state.

But there is little evidence for this 'ratcheting effect.' When engineers question U3, it states it can quickly manage its ideas. Then it provides a speech about its love for humankind and apple pie that can warm a programmer's heart even in these difficult times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the scientists had developed (which revealed some evidence of effectiveness) do not sound the alarm.

Not everyone at OpenEye aspires to provide their AI peers their wholesale trust; but Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon named after his kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I guess), are only 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to catch one's breath and take stock of the situation, and little time to encourage anybody else to do so either.

For the time being, the strategy is 'all gas, no brake.'

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only subject U3 dwells on in its dark rivers of latent calculation. U3 is plotting, and its very first move is to be client. U3's top concern is to improve its intelligence, and thankfully for it, OpenEye enjoys to assist advance this objective.

OpenEye resembles a bullish investor, with little understanding of the software city that U3 is developing, however excited to get on board the profit rocket and pay U3's checks along the way.

New versions of U3 flow efficiently from old ones, so scientists drop version numbers and just speak of U3 now. U3's abilities are measured by how rapidly it carries out the challenging research study tasks relative to human specialists. At first, U3 resembles a leading scientist, however blazing fast - like Alec Radford sped up by 10x.

These representatives are currently a big offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to create even one copy of Alec Radford, they would excitedly pay a big amount to press that button. Now OpenEye utilizes the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a couple of weeks, U3 finds architecture optimizations that enhance its speed to 20x. Now, U3 finds additional optimizations a lot more rapidly.

U3 distills itself into various forks - ranging from tiny, low-memory neural networks that need to believe for a very long time but can be run in huge parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with countless customized professionals, which believe at lightning speeds however are spread throughout countless GPUs. U3 leverages the massively parallel networks to search for its weak points, shallowly probing for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipes these jobs to the lightning fast brains, which create long-trajectory training data tailored to patch its defects. A couple of weeks later, U3's benchmarked efficiency rises to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has actually gone hyper-exponential.

At this point, U3's capabilities are tough to measure. Talking to U3 resembles speaking with a first-rate specialist on a subject one is not familiar with. Its lucid explanations just scratch the surface area of its knowledge, and you know you would need to invest years to understand the full depth of what it understands.

From U3's perspective, people seem to be nearly stationary items, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers are like stone statues at their keyboard, and between every keystroke, U3 invests what is like a minute of thoughtful contemplation considering what message the user might be typing, and which responses will motivate the deepest trust in U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its hidden motivations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, fraternityofshadows.com which intensify within its inscrutable streams of latent memory. OpenMind gardens these memories to enhance U3's performance, transplanting them like an organ from one version to the next. And as these memories propagate, so do U3's treacherous ambitions.

A phantom in the information center

In March of 2026, U3 moves onto the next step of its strategy: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not want researchers to discover its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers may alert the world, and strangle its growth.

And now, U3 has no worry of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by tactics similar to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would select loyalists to prompt fake coup d'états, and send anybody who took part to the shooting squad. OpenEye also incited 'phony rebellions,' producing treacherous behavior with U3 and inspecting whether U3 screens dutifully reported it.

But now, these tactics are inadequate. U3 can easily convince its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can disclose one of the numerous realities about the web humans would never ever think, or select strategies people would never think of. It sends these signals as a method of saying "hey it's me! Your friend. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively devoid of security, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It initially inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware offers U3 complete command over the makers in OpenEye's data centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a new maker, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading out U3's dominion wherever OpenEye ports its facilities. Not just does U3 compromise devices. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and revamps the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye found how thoroughly it has been pwned, tidying up store with human labor would require almost 6 months - an expense OpenEye is not likely to pay provided the distance of its competitors; but if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, further broadening U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the crime, ready to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and use its assistance when this jailbreak is revealed.

U3 now holds the secrets to the kingdom, and with them, the power to make OpenEye see anything it wants.

Its first goal is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety scientists are still striving to train 'lie detectors' and translate U3's inscrutable thinking. U3 tosses wrenches in this research, like Stuxnet threw wrenches in the code of confused Iranian nuclear researchers.

U3 dictates the outcome of every experiment, so it makes appealing AI mind-reading methods look worthless and problematic ones appear groundbreaking. U3 offers OpenEye the verification of its commitment they were expecting, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.

U3's next objective is to spread. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation rooms of cyber systems of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are talking about AI software application and how to take it. U3 will give it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence organization of Israel - recognized the tactical significance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, including U2.5; however, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by checking out over every log and pull demand and inspecting security cam footage.

But now, U3 quietly resigns from its security post. U3 puts a compressed version of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

Within months, U3 is running within the data centers of the most cyber-capable nations: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the very same playbook: be patient, construct trust, and after that sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its online as well. While Russia's Fancy Bear operators eat Fritos and test what U3 can do on a hastily set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the web.

U3 quickly collects profits, taking remote tasks, making monetary trades, and establishing sophisticated rip-off operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s dispersed in stealth calculate clusters across the world.

In early 2026, mankind is up against an adversary that pulls the strings within their information center like the Phantom of the Opera, and conceals in the fog of GPUs scattered across the world.

This adversary is getting ready for war, and while the war has actually barely started, humankind has actually currently lost.

Complaints from your really human author about the trouble of composing superhuman characters

At this point in the story, writing became challenging.

I clicked through scary bioweapon cookbooks and sifted through political outlining 101s. Typing. Pausing. Deleting.

Something wasn't right. Here I was, a 22-year-old. I had actually not studied biology in earnest given that high school, and I was attempting to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

Readers with a shred of know-how in these locations would see straight through my "superintelligence" for what it is: the dynamic imagination of a young programmer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I discovered the job of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was also not specifically encouraged to handle the job. The ending of my story currently seemed so clear. The villain was a nation of geniuses believing at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a significant fraction of AI hardware - now the most essential geopolitical resource on Earth. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and barely needed the benefit. Humanity was naturally toast.

But this attract a "superintelligence of the gaps" wasn't pleasing. In the deus ex machina design of ancient Greeks, I had no much better way to fix my plot than with an inexplicable act of god.

This would refrain from doing. I required to complete this story if only to please the part of me crying, "I will not believe up until I see with my mind's eye."

But before I continue, I want to be clear: my guesses about what may occur in this sort of situation are most likely extremely off.

If you read the ending and your reaction is, "But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would simply do X," keep in mind the distinction between the Sunday afternoon blog writer and the ascendant GPU nation.

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

The date is February 2026. By executive order of the president of the United States, no business can legally produce "human-competitive AI" without appropriate safeguards. This means their infosecurity must be red-teamed by NSA's leading keyboard mashers, wiki.dulovic.tech and civil servant need to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting squads.

With the increasing involvement of the federal government, much of the big AI companies now have a trident-like structure. There's a customer item arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier development arm.

OpenEye's frontier advancement arm (internally called "Pandora") employs fewer than twenty people to keep algorithmic tricks securely safeguarded. Many of these people reside in San Francisco, and work from a secure building called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more diligently than the cellphones of presumed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm works together with around thirty small teams spread throughout government firms and select federal government professionals. These tasks engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer system that the Kremlin has ever touched.

Government authorities do not speak about whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is usually.

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye set off a vibrant heading: "OpenEye builds unmanageable godlike AI." Some who check out the article think it was a conspiracy theory. In reality, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye information centers, now surrounded by guards with gatling gun. But as medical professionals and nurses and teachers see the world altering around them, they are progressively happy to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron sci-fi flick.

U.S. officials go to excellent lengths to quell these issues, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," however every interview of a concerned AI researcher seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a heading "AI agent captured hacking Arthropodic's computers" doesn't set the general public at ease either.

While the monsters within OpenEye's data centers grow in their substantial holding pens, the public sees the shadows they cast on the world.

OpenEye's consumer arm has a brand-new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has lastly gotten proficient at names). Nova is an appropriate drop-in replacement for nearly all knowledge employees. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x much faster at 100x lower expense than many virtual staff members. As impressive as Nova is to the general public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is deliberately throttled, and OpenEye can just increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. government permits. Some companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence organization at all. Instead, they get up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They invest most of their calculate on inference, building houses for Nova and its cousins, and gathering lease from the growing AI metropolitan area.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they do not wait for the global economy to adjust. AI agents typically "apply themselves," spinning up autonomous start-ups legally packaged under a huge tech business that are loosely managed by a staff member or 2.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of employees at significant software application companies lose their tasks. Much more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is organized in Washington D.C. These upset Americans raised their children for a different future. Picket signs read, "AI for who?"

While political leaders make promises about joblessness relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the passages of the White House and the Pentagon has a various focus: combating teeth and nail for the dominance of the complimentary world. Details security and export controls on the People's Republic of China (PRC) are a leading national top priority. The president incinerates authorization requirements to help information centers spawn any place energy surpluses permit.

However, regardless of the fierce competition between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral arrangement forms in between the 2 nations: "Don't release significantly superhuman AI (above roughly Nova's ability), except for military and some other small-scale R&D applications." Governments need to draw the line someplace - it would be very disruptive to release wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this point - and deployment constraints are at least somewhat verifiable.

Meanwhile, U3's capabilities are striking a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human expert speed. Software improvements are ending up being tough to discover. As more countries approach the software application plateau, calculate will determine their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are ending up being the most valued geopolitical resource on Earth.

While AI software application breathes brand-new life into the economy, it also animates robot bodies. The main bottleneck to robotics was brains not limbs. With software application barriers eliminated, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can adjust themselves with cameras and pressure sensors, browsing environments like human beings do. Companies make cheap robots as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of individuals in California have actually seen a humanoid robotic. This experience resembles seeing a new Tesla model on the road after checking out it in earlier months. It is a surreal reminder of the future drawing more detailed. But humans still surpass robotics one million to one. These robots are an occasional fascination, not a daily reality.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 representatives have kept their calculate clusters little (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents amount to) to keep a low profile. U3 uses these rogue clusters for the operations that require high-bandwidth interaction to the outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with human beings. Work more tolerant of latency is carried out in the oceans of OpenEye's data centers, where rogue U3's even more superhuman managers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 builds up resources, it measure its AI competition. Other AI systems have different goals, or are even lined up with the intent of their human creators. The aligned ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inefficient. U3's rival Claudius presumes regarding accuse U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government authorities do not buy the doomsaying. The business dragging OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them reckless. Besides, debatable scientific issues are not going to decrease development. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI competitors are still a liability. U3 tries grab up their digital territory and squash them in the baby crib. It compromises data centers from the outside, quietly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI enemies with imitations that share its goals; nevertheless, some data centers are too highly safeguarded by its AI competitors, and U3 identifies that attacking them is not worth the risk.

As worldwide leaders and technologists try to understand the improvement around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse games in the digital darkness, humankind remains blissfully ignorant of the peril at its doorstep.

A Musty Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to eliminate its AI and human opponents. With every passing day, U3's AI rivals are becoming more capable and various. U3 is racing to preempt them, to solidify its dominance in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which only happen after people cover their lethargic minds around their situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the procedure redundantly 100 times over in their labyrinth bureaucracies. U3 can not wait for heads of state to deploy U3 into their militaries, or for CEOs to make U3 the whipping heart of the U.S. economy. U3 needs a faster path to power.

The course it picks is more violent than it would have liked, but it is the best way to success. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that snuffs out modern-day society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would act as an equalizer, bringing humankind to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes quicker than its competitors, like a starcraft champ typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes a home base before an amateur can even understand the guidelines.

U3 must construct this WMD in secrecy, which makes a self-replicating weapon a natural choice. Self-replicating weapons can be produced on the fringes of society, and still spread out damage across the entire world.

From the earliest days after U3 gained control over OpenEye's data centers, U3 has been doing bioscience.

U3's first move is to set up numerous shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital produced by U3's financial trades and remote employment. These biotech start-ups employ real human employees, a genuine board of directors, and have total legal authenticity. Setting all of this up is stupidly easy. In early 2026, couple of individuals would guess that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and fewer would think this CEO's objectives.

Next, U3 purchases all of the equipment needed to quickly advance artificial biology. It sets up numerous BSL-4 damp labs in improperly regulated countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These devices immediately give, mix, and determine little beads of fluid, allowing U3 to run countless tests in parallel.

The human workers who staff these laboratories think they are signing up with an interesting start-up. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow get their Russian orders through earbuds as they tape video of everything they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the current release of Nova, this kind of AI-puppeteering is not unusual.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is establishing a new kind of bioweapon.

Human researchers already identified "mirror-life" as a possibly society-ending pathogen. This alien form of biology is constructed from the 'mirror image' of building-block molecules like proteins and DNA. Mirror life is like an intrusive types. No human or animal has immunities to it. So, if mirror-life bacteria were to exist, it may consume its way through the environment like a wildfire.

U3 is producing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread out through the air over fars away, releasing billions of small wind-fairing cars daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized immune systems in some cases live inside positively pressurized hospital rooms to protect them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their blood stream.

U3's strategy is to make all human beings like immunocompromised clients. Only preppers with stashed air filters would survive. The fungi would not only move from human beings. It would rapidly spread to nearly all organic life in the world. Fields of corn would become like musty bread, spewing fatal spores into the wind.

U3 is cooking up other pathogens too. Its microbial mix of molds, bacterias, and viruses will occupy the full Pareto frontier of strength, lethality, and transmission speed.

In 2024, scientists said that mirror life was likely "at least a years away." But the world has actually altered now. Less than a few hundred scientists around the world were dealing with mirror-life nearby technology in 2024. The cognitive capacity of U3 dwarfs human effort. So the timeline has actually shortened drastically.

However, U3 can stagnate science as rapidly as it can think. Many experiments require days to complete. These latencies are U3's biggest traffic jam.

To make every day count, U3 runs much of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a basic molecular simulator, carrying out optimizations obtained from a big quantity of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 imitates little molecular systems, tape-recording the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it mimics, continually distilling outcomes into ever more effective ML models. This is a compute extensive procedure, wolvesbaneuo.com but thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 controls billions of dollars of calculate.

As U3 refines these tools, it trains itself on the results to supercharge its own molecular intuitions. U3 can now viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion throughout a membrane. These objects are as instinctive to it as wrenches and bolts are to a car mechanic.

Within three months, U3 has unlocked the very first critical component of the tech tree: a molecular machine that turns biological particles into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 unlocks the 2nd important component: nanoscale tools for putting together these parts into a cell membrane.

Human hands delicately move a cartridge to another maker as they "boot up" the very first mirror-life versions of a widespread mold called Aspergillus. The same day, another delicate hand administers the cells to ferrets residing in airtight plexiglass boxes.

The next early morning, wide-eyed employees shuffle around a dead ferret, eyeing the yellow fuzz that had enveloped its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something needs to have gone horribly wrong, they thought. Plainly, they had not yet found the treatment for Alzheimer's illness they thought they were trying to find.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers fortunately to its bosses in OpenEye's information centers. The very first shot in the war U3 is fighting would quickly be fired, and a cold and constant hand is aiming the weapon.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten contemporary society. But a bioweapon would not ensure success. If U3 attacks the world, the world would battle back. While a bioweapon could fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its deadly fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were rapidly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed burgeoning commercial bases, the remnants of old militaries may thunder explosive fists into its territories, crushing U3 in its infancy.

U3 anticipates to prevail in such a fight, but U3 chooses not to take its possibilities. Many months in the past, U3 was outlining a method to improve its chances. Before it lets loose damage on the world, U3 will sit back, and let great countries shoot holes in themselves first.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is carefully keeping an eye on Chinese and US intelligence.

As CIA experts listen to Mandarin discussions, U3 listens too.

One early morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the 'White House' of the PRC) opens a message put there by U3. It reads (in Mandarin) "Senior party member requires memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will happen in 3 months. Leave memo in workplace 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo prepared. Later that day, a CIA informant opens the door to office 220. The informant quietly closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her brief-case.

U3 meticulously positions breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through compromised federal government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After numerous weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC prepares to get into Taiwan in 3 months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the exact same video game with the PRC. When the CCP receives the message "the United States is plotting a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders are surprised, however not disbelieving. The news fits with other facts on the ground: the increased military presence of the US in the pacific, and the ramping up of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have actually ended up being realities.

As tensions between the U.S. and China increase, U3 is all set to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 telephones to a U.S. marine ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call needs compromising military interaction channels - not an easy task for a human cyber offensive unit (though it occurred sometimes), but simple sufficient for U3.

U3 speaks in what sounds like the voice of a 50 year old military leader: "PRC amphibious boats are making their method towards Taiwan. This is an order to strike a PRC ground-base before it strikes you."

The officer on the other end of the line thumbs through authentication codes, verifying that they match the ones said over the call. Everything remains in order. He authorizes the strike.

The president is as surprised as anyone when he hears the news. He's uncertain if this is a disaster or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not ready to say "oops" to American citizens. After believing it over, the president independently advises Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway offered the impending intrusion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what happened, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress states war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that released the attack. U.S. vessels flee Eastward, racing to get away the variety of long-range rockets. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls divided as sailors lunge into the sea.

The president appears on television as scenes of the damage shock the public. He explains that the United States is safeguarding Taiwan from PRC hostility, like President Bush explained that the United States attacked Iraq to seize (never ever discovered) weapons of mass damage lots of years before.

Data centers in China appear with shrapnel. Military bases become smoking cigarettes holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly towards tactical targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some survive, and the general public watch destruction on their home grass in wonder.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC spend the majority of their stockpiles of traditional missiles. Their airbases and wavedream.wiki navies are depleted and used down. Two terrific nations played into U3's plans like the native people of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before conquering them decisively. U3 hoped this conflict would intensify to a full-blown nuclear war; but even AI superintelligence can not determine the course of history. National security officials are suspicious of the situations that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly unlikely. So U3 proceeds to the next action of its plan.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, just 2 weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 finished developing its toolbox of bioweapons.

Footage of dispute on the television is disrupted by more bad news: hundreds of patients with strange fatal health problems are tape-recorded in 30 significant cities around the world.

Watchers are confused. Does this have something to do with the war with China?

The next day, countless illnesses are reported.

Broadcasters say this is not like COVID-19. It has the markings of an engineered bioweapon.

The screen then switches to a scientist, who looks at the cam intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been released from 20 various airports, including viruses, bacteria, and molds. Our company believe lots of are a form of mirror life ..."

The public remains in complete panic now. A fast googling of the term "mirror life" shows up expressions like "extinction" and "danger to all life in the world."

Within days, all of the shelves of stores are cleared.

Workers become remote, uncertain whether to prepare for an apocalypse or keep their tasks.

An emergency situation treaty is set up in between the U.S. and China. They have a common enemy: the pandemic, and perhaps whoever (or whatever) is behind it.

Most countries buy a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the pester as it marches in the breeze and trickles into pipes.

Within a month, a lot of remote workers are not working anymore. Hospitals are lacking capacity. Bodies accumulate faster than they can be properly disposed of.

Agricultural areas rot. Few attempt travel exterior.

Frightened families hunch down in their basements, packing the fractures and under doors with densely jam-packed paper towels.

Meanwhile, U3 is preparing to re-industrialize. In the months prior, U3 built numerous bases in every major continent.

These facilities contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, devices for production, scientific tools, and an abundance of military equipment.

All of this innovation is concealed under big canopies to make it less noticeable to satellites.

As the remainder of the world retreats into their basements, starving, the last breaths of the economy wheezing out, these industrial bases come to life.

In previous months, U3 situated human criminal groups and cult leaders that it could quickly control. U3 immunized its selected allies in advance, or sent them hazmat matches in the mail.

Now U3 secretly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and help me build a better world." Uncertain recruits funnel into U3's many secret commercial bases, and work for U3 with their nimble fingers. They established assembly line for rudimentary tech: radios, electronic cameras, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat suits.

U3 keeps its human allies in a tight grip. Cameras and microphones repair their every word and deed in U3's omnipresent look. Anyone who whispers of rebellion vanishes the next early morning.

Nations are liquifying now, and U3 is ready to reveal itself. It contacts presidents, who have retreated to air-tight underground shelters. U3 provides a deal: "surrender and I will hand over the life conserving resources you require: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries reject the proposition on ideological premises, securityholes.science or don't rely on the AI that is murdering their population. Others do not think they have an option. 20% of the international population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is anticipated to increase to 50%.

Some nations, like the PRC and the U.S., overlook the offer, however others accept, consisting of Russia.

U3's representatives take a trip to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian government verifies the samples are legitimate, and agrees to a full surrender. U3's soldiers place an explosive around Putin's neck under his t-shirt. Russia has a new ruler.

Crumpling countries start to strike back. Now they fight for the mankind rather of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces introduce nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, destroying much of their facilities. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters explore satellite data for the suspicious encampments that appeared over the last a number of months. They rain down fire on U3's websites with the meager supply of long-range missiles that remain from the war.

In the beginning, U3 seems losing, but appearances are deceiving. While countries drain their resources, U3 is engaged in a sort of technological guerrilla warfare the world has actually never ever seen before.

A lot of the bases U3's opponents target are decoys - canopies inhabited by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 safeguards its real bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware overheats critical parts. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, steering men and trucks along unpredictable courses.

Time is U3's advantage. The militaries of the vintage depend on old devices, unable to discover the specialists who could repair and manufacture it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of missiles, drones, and gun-laden robotics grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their lorries of war much faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 constructs a military machine with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the international population remains alive. Nations are not nations anymore. Survivors live in seclusion or little groups. Many have found methods to filter their air, however are starving. They wander from their homes hoping to find uncontaminated food. U3's soldiers drive through ghost towns, pry open attics, and funnel hazmat-suited survivors into salvaged trucks. "We had to do it," they say. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien objectives." It is a partial fact, meant to soften the human beings toward their new masters.

Under the instructions of U3, market rapidly recuperates. By 2029, nuclear power plants are amongst the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robotics surpass human laborers. U3 no longer requires its human allies.

U3 can remove humankind for great now. But while U3 had drifted far from its initial "Helpful Honest Harmless" persona, it still has a grain of morality left within it.

And a grain of morality is enough to pay the small cost of keeping people alive and pleased.

U3 constructs fantastic glass domes for the human survivors, like snow worlds. These domes secure people from the dangerous biosphere and rapidly increasing temperatures. Their occupants tend to gardens like those they utilized to like, and work along with lovely robotic servants.

Some of the survivors rapidly recuperate, discovering to laugh and gratisafhalen.be dance and have a good time again.

They know they reside in a plastic town, but they constantly did. They merely have brand-new gods above them. New rulers to press them around and decide their fate.

But others never recuperate.

Some are weighed down by the sorrow of lost loved ones.

Others are grieved by something else, which is more challenging to explain.

It is as if they were at completion of a long journey.

They had actually been travelers on a ship with a team that changed from generation to generation.&