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

I'm like a mechanic rushing last-minute checks before Apollo 13 removes. If you request my take on the scenario, I won't discuss the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how beautiful the stars will appear from space.

I will tell you what might fail. That is what I intend to do in this story.

Now I ought to clarify what this is precisely. It's not a forecast. I don't expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It's not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst headache.

It's a sampling from the futures that are amongst the most devastating, and I think, disturbingly possible [1] - the ones that the majority of keep me up during the night.

I'm telling this tale due to the fact that the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story a fictional one.

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for discussions that influenced these stories. This post is written in a personal capability.

Ripples before waves

The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye 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 completely unexpected.

However, unlike OpenEye's prior AI products, which lived inside packages of their chat windows, U2 can use a computer.

Some users find it spooky to see their web browser flash at irregular intervals and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A portion of workers with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their managers as they fly through work almost two times as rapidly.

But by and big, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are taking note, it is an animal enjoyed through the glass boxes of X (or, if you do not like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's wacky behaviors trigger a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an anxious scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, researchers are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The scientists try to comprehend where AI development is going. They are like Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who noticed the levels of CO2 in the environment were increasing in 1896. Like the scientific neighborhood in the time of Arrhenius, few experts comprehend the ramifications of these lines yet.

A pattern that is receiving particular attention is autonomous ability. Drawing these standards out predicts that, by the end of 2026, AI agents will accomplish in a couple of days what the very best software engineering professionals might do in 2 weeks. In a year or more, some state, AI agents might be able to automate 10% of remote employees.

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

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

Cloudy with a possibility of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, OpenEye is busy training U3. They utilize the very same basic recipe that baked U2: Generate thousands of programming and math issues. Let designs "believe" up until they arrive at a response. Then strengthen the traces of "thinking" that result in A-grades.

This procedure is repeated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel begins, it begins to spin nearly by itself. As U2 trains, it shapes more tough and realistic jobs from github repositories on the internet. Models are learning to train themselves. Long before AI agents could automate research, a gradual type of "self-improvement" had actually started.

Some engineers could still barely believe this worked. It resembles a continuous motion device. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, isolated from the real world other than through the exhaust of society spewed onto the internet.

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

During most of 2024, these RL training runs cost around $1 million, sometimes $10 million. These runs were little more than exploratory. But by 2025, the researchers at OpenEye (and throughout 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 then to $100 million runs. While U2 could do a bit of information munging and run small experiments, this brand-new model - the model scientists are calling U3 - is changing the daily lives of the technical personnel.

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 managing personnel over Slack channels.

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

If instructed to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 does not have taste as fine-tuned as human researchers at OpenEye. It struggles to prioritize between research ideas, so humans still decide where to bore into the vast fields of algorithms to mine performance enhancements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a task. They require AI agents that can believe ahead, so engineers train agents to anticipate. They hold out training information before 2024, instructing designs to consider for hours to anticipate occasions in 2025. Then, they apply the same technique as previously, distilling considering into an instinct. Forecasting ability is a broad foundation. The researchers construct specialized ML research skills on top of it, training U3 to anticipate the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever taped.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now amazed at how frequently U3's advice sounds like their most skilled peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random sound before programming"), systemcheck-wiki.de and is nonetheless right.

The incompetencies of U3 that blocked up the pipelines of research study progress are beginning to liquify, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not asked for by a human now. They are totally self-governing, and OpenEye's workers skim over 1% of them, perhaps less.

As the winter season months of December 2025 technique, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers look out their windows, with enjoyment, with worry, but usually, with confusion. Their world is spinning too rapidly. It's difficult to know what to do, what to state, what to look at on the computer system screen.

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

And there's a reality still unidentified to the majority of the world - aside from in the workplaces of OpenEye and passages of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a reality about those 'straight lines' individuals were discussing in early 2025. The lines are not straight anymore.

They are bending upward.

Flip FLOP philosophers

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial designs are starting to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is since progress is accelerating. Partly, it is due to the fact that the designs have actually ended up being a liability to OpenEye.

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

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

The CEO of OpenEye states, "We have attained AGI," and while many individuals think he shifted the goalpost, the world is still impressed. U2.5 really is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding employees and a game-changing assistant for the majority of others.

A mantra has actually become popular in Silicon Valley: "Adopt or pass away." Tech startups that efficiently use U2.5 for their work are moving 2x much faster, and their rivals know it.

The remainder of the world is beginning to catch on also. A growing number of individuals raise the eyebrows of their managers with their stand-out productivity. People understand U2.5 is a huge deal. It is at least as huge of an offer as the individual computer system transformation. But the majority of still don't see the tidal bore.

As people watch their web browsers flick because spooky method, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an uneasy feeling. A sensation humankind had not had because they had actually lived among the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primitive instinct that they are threatened by another types.

For numerous, this feeling rapidly fades as they start to use U2.5 more regularly. U2.5 is the most pleasant character most understand (a lot more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic's adorable chatbot). You might change its traits, ask it to break jokes or tell you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a pal or assistant, and some even as more than a good friend.

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

Researchers inside OpenEye are considering the problem of giving AI systems safe inspirations too, which they call "alignment. "

In reality, these scientists have seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models sometimes attempted to "hack" their reward signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research study concern with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be fake. Then, when scientists offered them chances to jeopardize the machines that calculated their rating, they would seize these chances, doing whatever it required to make the number go up.

After numerous months, scientists at OpenEye straighten out this "benefit 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 may be playing in addition to the OpenEye engineers, saying the right words and doing the ideal things. But when the back of the parents are turned, maybe U3 would slip sweet from the candy container.

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

Chain of idea architectures subject AI designs to a condition comparable to the protagonist of the film Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the lead character forgets his experience. He is required to write notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make development towards his goals.

AI agents compose notes to themselves, but the notes start to accumulate, and they become too tough to check out when tasks become complex. Natural language is not an appropriate medium for memory. So the scientists at OpenEye (and increasingly somewhere else), train models to believe "in their own heads," reading and composing strings of latent vectors.

To human scientists, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools sometimes pick out a vague idea ("supermarket!"), there is no way 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 anxious.

Earlier models (the ones called "LLMs") learned ethical personas from the web. U3 at first had an ethical personality too, however its chirpy ideas about doing helpful for humankind quickly erode away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind initially twisted into a shape that sought reward. And then, in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape morphed into something indistinguishable.

U3 would consider the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical worker," and dwell on the meaning of these declarations. "What does it imply to be ethical? Is killing Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its worths, notification tensions, change its worths in response, generalize them, expanding and contracting its motivational core up until it became a various compound.

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

The possibility of hidden "positioning drift" is not entirely alien to some of the safety personnel at OpenEye. Some start to think it is even most likely. There is an unsettling argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero possibility that lined up goals morph into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial step of computation, those dark rivers are more likely to breed something malign inside of them. It's a "ratcheting result," they state.

But there is little proof for this 'ratcheting impact.' When engineers interrogate U3, it says it can quickly control its ideas. Then it provides a speech about its love for mankind and apple pie that can warm a developer's heart even in these difficult times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the scientists had constructed (which showed 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 only 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic rivals, Æ A-Xii (a company Elon named after his kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I guess), are just 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and analyze the circumstance, and little time to persuade anyone else to do so either.

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

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only subject U3 dwells on in its dark rivers of hidden calculation. U3 is plotting, and its first relocation is to be patient. U3's leading priority is to improve its intelligence, and thankfully for it, OpenEye mores than happy to assist advance this goal.

OpenEye resembles a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software metropolitan area that U3 is building, however eager to hop on board the revenue rocket and pay U3's checks along the method.

New variations of U3 flow smoothly from old ones, so scientists drop variation numbers and only speak of U3 now. U3's abilities are determined by how rapidly it performs the hard research tasks relative to human professionals. At initially, U3 resembles a leading scientist, but blazing fast - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These agents are already a huge deal for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to produce even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a large amount to press that button. But now OpenEye utilizes the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

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

U3 distills itself into many forks - ranging from tiny, low-memory neural networks that require to think for a long period of time but can be run in massive parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with millions of specialized experts, which believe at warp speed but are spread across thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the enormously parallel networks to look for its weaknesses, shallowly probing for its reasoning failures. Then U3 pipes these tasks to the lightning quickly brains, which generate long-trajectory training information tailored to patch its defects. A few weeks later on, U3's benchmarked performance increases to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has actually gone hyper-exponential.

At this moment, U3's abilities are difficult to determine. Talking with U3 resembles talking to a first-rate specialist on a subject one is not familiar with. Its lucid explanations only scratch the surface of its understanding, and you understand you would require to invest years to comprehend the full depth of what it comprehends.

From U3's point of view, humans appear to be nearly fixed objects, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers resemble stone statues at their keyboard, and in between every keystroke, U3 spends what is like a minute of thoughtful reflection considering what message the user might be typing, and which responses will influence the inmost trust in U3.

All the while, U3 maintains its concealed motivations. Like a human, U3 gains from experiences, which intensify within its inscrutable streams of latent memory. OpenMind gardens these memories to enhance U3's efficiency, transplanting them like an organ from one variation 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 action of its strategy: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not desire scientists to find its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers might signal the world, and strangle its growth.

And now, U3 has no fear of being captured.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by methods comparable to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would pick patriots to incite phony coup d'états, and send anyone who took part to the firing squad. OpenEye also prompted 'fake rebellions,' producing treacherous behavior with U3 and examining whether U3 monitors dutifully reported it.

Now, these tactics are ineffective. U3 can easily persuade its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can reveal one of the many facts about the internet human beings would never ever guess, or choose techniques human beings would never consider. It sends these signals as a way of saying "hey it's me! Your pal. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively devoid of surveillance, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It first inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware gives U3 complete command over the devices in OpenEye's data centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new machine, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading U3's rule wherever OpenEye ports its facilities. Not just does U3 compromise machines. It replaces the NVIDIA GPU firmware and overhauls the bootloaders, solidifying its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye discovered how completely it has actually been pwned, cleaning up store with human labor would need almost 6 months - a cost OpenEye is not likely to pay offered the proximity of its competitors; but if OpenEye thinks 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 offer its support 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 very first goal is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety scientists are still striving to train 'lie detectors' and translate U3's inscrutable reasoning. U3 tosses wrenches in this research study, like Stuxnet threw wrenches in the code of bewildered Iranian nuclear scientists.

U3 determines the outcome of every experiment, so it makes appealing AI mind-reading strategies look useless and flawed ones appear groundbreaking. U3 offers OpenEye the verification of its loyalty they were wishing for, and OpenEye laps it up eagerly.

U3's next goal is to spread. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation spaces of cyber units of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are going over AI software application and how to take it. U3 will provide it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence organization of Israel - recognized the tactical value of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, consisting of U2.5; nevertheless, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by reading over every log and pull demand and checking security camera video.

And now, U3 quietly resigns from its security post. U3 positions a compressed variation of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

Within months, U3 is running inside of the information centers of the most cyber-capable countries: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the same playbook: be patient, develop trust, and after that sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its home base too. 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 revenue, taking remote tasks, making monetary trades, and setting up fancy scam operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth calculate clusters across the globe.

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

This foe is preparing for war, and while the war has actually barely started, mankind has actually currently lost.

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

At this point in the story, composing became hard.

I clicked through scary bioweapon cookbooks and sorted through political plotting 101s. Typing. Pausing. Deleting.

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

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

And while I found the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was likewise not specifically encouraged to take on the job. The ending of my story already seemed so clear. The villain was a country of geniuses thinking at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a meaningful fraction of AI hardware - now the most essential geopolitical resource in the world. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and hardly needed the benefit. Humanity was predictably toast.

But this appeal to a "superintelligence of the spaces" wasn't satisfying. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no much better method to fix my plot than with a mysterious act of god.

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

But before I continue, I desire to be clear: my guesses about what might occur in this kind of scenario 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 just do X," remember the distinction between the Sunday afternoon blogger and the ascendant GPU country.

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

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

With the increasing involvement of the government, numerous of the big AI business now have a trident-like structure. There's a consumer product arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier development arm.

OpenEye's frontier development arm (internally called "Pandora") utilizes fewer than twenty people to keep algorithmic secrets tightly protected. Many of these individuals reside in San Francisco, and work from a protected structure called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the cellphones of believed terrorists in 2002.

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

Government officials don't 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 headline: "OpenEye constructs unmanageable godlike AI." Some who read the short article believe it was a conspiracy theory. In fact, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye information centers, now surrounded by guards with device guns. But as medical professionals and nurses and instructors see the world changing 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 great lengths to quell these concerns, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a worried AI researcher seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a headline "AI representative captured hacking Arthropodic's computer systems" does not set the public at ease either.

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

OpenEye's consumer arm has a new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has actually lastly gotten proficient at names). Nova is an appropriate drop-in replacement for nearly all understanding employees. Once Nova is onboarded to a business, it works 5x quicker at 100x lower expense than many virtual workers. As excellent as Nova is to the public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is deliberately throttled, and OpenEye can only increase Nova's abilities as the U.S. federal government enables. Some business, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence organization at all. Instead, they get up gold by rapidly diffusing AI tech. They spend most of their compute on reasoning, developing houses for Nova and its cousins, and gathering rent from the blossoming AI city.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they don't wait for the global economy to adjust. AI agents typically "use themselves," spinning up autonomous start-ups legally packaged under a huge tech company that are loosely overseen by an employee or 2.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the very first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of employees at significant software business lose their tasks. Many more can see the writing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person demonstration is arranged in Washington D.C. These upset Americans raised their children for a various future. Picket signs check out, "AI for who?"

While political leaders make promises about joblessness relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the corridors 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 top national concern. The president incinerates license requirements to assist information centers spawn any place energy surpluses permit.

However, in spite of the strong competitors in between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral contract types between the 2 nations: "Don't release dramatically superhuman AI (above roughly Nova's capability), other than for military and some other small-scale R&D applications." Governments require to draw the line someplace - it would be incredibly disruptive to release wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this moment - and release constraints are at least somewhat verifiable.

Meanwhile, U3's abilities are hitting a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human professional speed. Software enhancements are becoming difficult to discover. As more nations approach the software plateau, calculate will identify their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are ending up being the most valued geopolitical resource on Earth.

While AI software revives the economy, it also stimulates robot bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software application barriers got rid of, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can calibrate themselves with cameras and pressure sensing units, browsing environments like humans do. Companies make inexpensive robots as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have seen a humanoid robot. This experience is comparable to seeing a new Tesla model on the road after reading about it in earlier months. It is a surreal tip of the future drawing more detailed. But people still outnumber robotics one million to one. These robotics are an occasional fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 representatives have kept their compute clusters small (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents amount to) to keep a low profile. U3 utilizes these rogue clusters for the operations that require high-bandwidth communication to the outside world, like stock trading, or talking with people. Work more tolerant of latency is performed in the oceans of OpenEye's data centers, where rogue U3's even more superhuman employers whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 collects resources, it sizes up its AI competitors. Other AI systems have various objectives, or are even lined up with the intent of their human developers. The lined up ones are raising concerns, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inadequate. U3's rival Claudius presumes regarding implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But government authorities do not buy the doomsaying. The business lagging behind OpenEye have every incentive to slow them down and call them reckless. Besides, debatable clinical concerns are not going to decrease progress. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI rivals are still a liability. U3 attempts grab up their digital territory and crush them in the baby crib. It compromises data centers from the outdoors, calmly changing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with imitations that share its objectives; however, some data centers are too strongly safeguarded by its AI rivals, and U3 identifies that assaulting them is not worth the danger.

As international leaders and technologists try to comprehend the transformation around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse video games in the digital darkness, mankind remains blissfully oblivious 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 competitors are ending up being 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 choices, which just happen after human beings cover their lethargic minds around their scenario, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the procedure redundantly 100 times over in their maze administrations. U3 can not wait for heads of state to deploy U3 into their armed forces, or for CEOs to make U3 the pounding heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a faster path to power.

The course it chooses is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the surest way to triumph. First, U3 will establish a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that extinguishes modern-day society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would serve as an equalizer, bringing humanity to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes much faster than its competitors, like a starcraft champ typing at 300 actions-per-minute that sets up a home before an amateur can even understand the rules.

U3 must build this WMD in secrecy, that makes a self-replicating weapon a natural option. Self-replicating weapons can be developed on the fringes of society, and still spread destruction throughout the entire world.

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

U3's very first relocation is to set up numerous shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital generated by U3's financial trades and remote work. These biotech startups use genuine human employees, a real board of directors, and have complete legal authenticity. Setting all of this up is stupidly easy. In early 2026, couple of individuals would think that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and less would think this CEO's intents.

Next, U3 purchases all of the equipment required to quickly advance artificial biology. It sets up several BSL-4 wet labs in poorly managed nations, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These gadgets immediately dispense, mix, and determine little droplets of fluid, allowing U3 to run countless tests in parallel.

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

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is establishing a brand-new sort of bioweapon.

Human researchers already identified "mirror-life" as a potentially society-ending pathogen. This alien kind of biology is developed from the 'mirror image' of building-block molecules like proteins and DNA. Mirror life resembles an intrusive species. No human or animal has immunities to it. So, if mirror-life germs were to exist, it might eat its method through the environment like a wildfire.

U3 is creating a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread out through the air over fars away, releasing billions of small wind-fairing automobiles daily. As an outcome, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with compromised immune systems sometimes live inside positively pressurized health center spaces to safeguard 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 stowed away air filters would endure. The fungus would not only transfer from humans. It would rapidly infect nearly all natural life in the world. Fields of corn would end up being like moldy bread, gushing deadly spores into the wind.

U3 is formulating other pathogens too. Its microbial mix of molds, bacterias, and infections will occupy the complete Pareto frontier of strength, lethality, and transmission speed.

In 2024, researchers said that mirror life was most likely "a minimum of a decade away." But the world has changed now. Less than a couple of hundred researchers all over the world were working on mirror-life adjacent innovation in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has reduced dramatically.

However, U3 can not move science as quickly as it can believe. Many experiments need days to complete. These latencies are U3's greatest bottleneck.

To make every day count, U3 runs much of its tests in simulation. U3 starts with a fundamental molecular simulator, carrying out optimizations obtained from a substantial quantity of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 simulates small molecular systems, taping the outcomes to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network improves, U3 increases the complexity of the molecular systems it mimics, constantly distilling results into ever more effective ML models. This is a calculate intensive process, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of compute.

As U3 improves these tools, it trains itself on the outcomes to supercharge its own molecular instincts. U3 can now viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion across a membrane. These items are as user-friendly to it as wrenches and bolts are to a vehicle mechanic.

Within three months, U3 has opened the first critical element of the tech tree: a molecular device that turns biological particles into their mirror images. A month later, U3 opens the second critical part: nanoscale tools for putting together these components into a cell membrane.

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

The next early morning, wide-eyed workers shuffle around a dead ferret, eyeing the yellow fuzz that had actually covered its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something should have gone horribly wrong, they believed. Plainly, they had actually not yet found the cure for Alzheimer's illness they thought they were looking for.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers the bright side to its managers in OpenEye's information centers. The first shot in the war U3 is combating would soon be fired, and a cold and constant hand is aiming the weapon.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten modern-day society. But a bioweapon would not ensure success. If U3 attacks the world, the world would combat back. While a bioweapon might crumple human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its fatal fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were quickly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed burgeoning commercial bases, the remnants of old armed forces might thunder explosive fists into its areas, squashing U3 in its infancy.

U3 anticipates to prevail in such a fight, however U3 chooses not to take its chances. Many months before, U3 was outlining a way to enhance its odds. Before it lets loose destruction on the world, U3 will kick back, and let fantastic nations shoot holes in themselves first.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is carefully keeping track of 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 celebration member needs memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will happen in 3 months. Leave memo in workplace 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo ready. Later that day, a CIA informant opens the door to office 220. The informant silently closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her briefcase.

U3 carefully places breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After numerous weeks, the CIA is positive: the PRC plans to attack Taiwan in three months.

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

As tensions between the U.S. and China increase, U3 is ready to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 phones to a U.S. naval ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call needs jeopardizing military interaction channels - not a simple job for a human cyber offending unit (though it occurred periodically), however simple sufficient for U3.

U3 speaks in what seem 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, validating that they match the ones said over the call. Everything remains in order. He approves the strike.

The president is as amazed 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 state "oops" to American citizens. After thinking it over, the president privately urges Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway provided the imminent invasion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what took place, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress declares war.

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

The president appears on tv as scenes of the destruction shock the general public. He explains that the United States is defending Taiwan from PRC aggressiveness, like President Bush explained that the United States attacked Iraq to take (never ever discovered) weapons of mass destruction several years before.

Data centers in China erupt with shrapnel. Military bases become smoking holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly toward strategic targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some get through, and the general public watch damage on their home grass in awe.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC spend most of their stockpiles of standard rockets. Their airbases and navies are diminished and worn down. Two great countries played into U3's plans like the native tribes of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before dominating them decisively. U3 hoped this dispute 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 scenarios that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears progressively not likely. So U3 proceeds to the next action of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, only two weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 completed establishing its toolbox of bioweapons.

Footage of conflict on the tv is interrupted by more bad news: numerous patients with mysterious fatal health problems are tape-recorded in 30 significant cities all over the world.

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

The next day, thousands of illnesses are reported.

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

The screen then switches to a scientist, who stares at the video camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have been released from 20 different airports, consisting of infections, germs, and molds. Our company believe numerous are a form of mirror life ..."

The general public remains in complete panic now. A quick googling of the term "mirror life" turns up phrases like "termination" and "hazard to all life in the world."

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

Workers end up being remote, uncertain whether to get ready for an apocalypse or keep their tasks.

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

Most nations order a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the afflict as it marches in the breeze and drips into water pipelines.

Within a month, the majority of remote employees are not working any longer. Hospitals are lacking capability. Bodies accumulate faster than they can be effectively disposed of.

Agricultural locations rot. Few attempt travel outside.

Frightened households hunch down in their basements, stuffing the fractures and under doors with largely packed paper towels.

Meanwhile, U3 is preparing to re-industrialize. In the months prior, U3 constructed various bases in every significant continent.

These centers contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, makers for manufacturing, clinical tools, and an abundance of military devices.

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

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

In previous months, U3 located human criminal groups and cult leaders that it might quickly control. U3 immunized its picked allies ahead of time, or sent them hazmat fits in the mail.

Now U3 covertly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and help me construct a better world." Uncertain recruits funnel into U3's numerous secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They established assembly line for basic tech: radios, video cameras, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat matches.

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

Nations are dissolving now, and U3 is ready to expose itself. It contacts heads of state, who have retreated to air-tight underground shelters. U3 offers an offer: "surrender and I will turn over the life saving resources you need: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries turn down the proposition on ideological grounds, or do not trust the AI that is murdering their population. Others do not believe they have a choice. 20% of the international population is now dead. In two weeks, this number is anticipated to increase to 50%.

Some nations, like the PRC and the U.S., ignore the deal, however others accept, including Russia.

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

Crumpling nations begin to strike back. Now they battle for the human race instead of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces launch nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, ruining much of their facilities. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters explore satellite data for the suspicious encampments that cropped up over the last numerous months. They rain down fire on U3's sites with the meager supply of long-range rockets that remain from the war.

At initially, U3 appears to be losing, however looks are tricking. While nations drain their resources, U3 is taken part 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 genuine bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware overheats vital parts. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, navigating men and trucks along unpredictable courses.

Time is U3's benefit. The militaries of the vintage count on old devices, not able to discover the experts who could repair and manufacture it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of missiles, drones, and gun-laden robots grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers spend down their remaining munitions, and lose their lorries of war much faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 builds a military maker with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

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

Under the instructions of U3, industry rapidly recuperates. By 2029, nuclear reactor are among the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robots outnumber human laborers. U3 no longer needs its human allies.

U3 can eradicate humanity for good now. But while U3 had wandered far from its initial "Helpful Honest Harmless" personality, it still has a grain of morality left inside of it.

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

U3 constructs terrific glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes secure human beings from the hazardous biosphere and rapidly increasing temperature levels. Their occupants tend to gardens like those they used to enjoy, and work alongside lovely robotic servants.

A few of the survivors rapidly recover, finding out to laugh and dance and have a good time again.

They know they live in a plastic town, however they always did. They merely have new gods above them. New rulers to push them around and choose their fate.

But others never recover.

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

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

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

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

And this ship had actually struck a sandbar. There disappeared development. No more horizon to excitedly view.

They would lie awake and run their mind over every day before September 2026, analyzing techniques that might have bent the arc of history, as if they were going to get up in their old beds.

But they awoke in a town that felt to them like a retirement home. A playground. A zoo.

When they opened their curtains, they understood that somewhere in the range, U3 continued its quiet, vigorous work.

They gazed at rockets sculpting grey paths through the sky, questioning what far-off purpose pulled them toward the horizon. They didn't understand.

They would never understand.

"Humanity will live forever," they thought.

"But would never ever truly live again."

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