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

I resemble a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you request for my take on the circumstance, I will not comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how beautiful the stars will appear from area.

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

Now I need to clarify what this is exactly. It's not a forecast. I don't expect AI development 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 many keep me up in the evening.

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

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for discussions that influenced these stories. This post is written in an individual capacity.

Ripples before waves

The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye recently released a brand-new AI design they call U2. The product and the name are alike. Both are increments of the past. Both are not wholly surprising.

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

Some users find it eerie to view their browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A fraction of employees with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their managers as they fly through work almost two times as quickly.

But by and big, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are paying attention, it is a creature enjoyed through the glass boxes of X (or, if you do not like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's quirky habits prompt a chuckle. Sometimes, they trigger an uneasy scratch of the chin.

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

A pattern that is receiving particular attention is autonomous capability. Drawing these benchmarks out predicts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will accomplish in a few days what the very best software application engineering contractors might perform in 2 weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI agents may be able to automate 10% of remote employees.

Many are hesitant. If this were real, tech stocks would be skyrocketing. It's too huge of a splash, too rapidly.

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

Cloudy with a possibility of hyperbolic development

Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They use the same easy dish that baked U2: Generate thousands of shows and mathematics issues. Let models "think" till they come to a response. Then enhance the traces of "believing" that cause A-grades.

This procedure is duplicated over and over, and once the flywheel begins, it starts to spin nearly on its own. As U2 trains, it sculpts more challenging and practical jobs from github repositories on the web. Models are learning to train themselves. Long before AI representatives could automate research study, a gradual type of "self-improvement" had actually started.

Some engineers might still hardly think this worked. It's like a perpetual motion machine. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, isolated from the physical world except through the exhaust of society gushed onto the internet.

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

During most of 2024, these RL training runs expense around $1 million, in some cases $10 million. These runs were little bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the researchers at OpenEye (and throughout the world) understood they had discovered the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.

Over the very first half of 2025, $10 million RL training runs turn into $50 million runs, and then to $100 million runs. While U2 could do a bit of data munging and run little experiments, this brand-new design - the design researchers are calling U3 - is changing the daily lives of the technical staff.

U3 resembles a blazing-fast intern, and engineers are discovering 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 almost all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are nearly never bottlenecked by implementation. More than ever, calculate is the lifeblood of AI advancement, and the 'traffic jam' is deciding how to use it.

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 does not have actually taste as fine-tuned as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to prioritize in between research concepts, so humans still choose where to bore into the vast fields of algorithms to mine effectiveness improvements.

But these researchers are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They require AI representatives that can plan ahead, so engineers train representatives to anticipate. They hold out training data before 2024, advising models to consider for hours to predict occasions in 2025. Then, they use the exact same trick as before, distilling pondering into a gut reaction. Forecasting capability is a broad foundation. The scientists construct specialized ML research study abilities on top of it, training U3 to forecast the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever taped.

The technical personnel at OpenEye are now amazed at how typically U3's advice sounds like their most skilled peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random sound before programs"), and is nevertheless proper.

The incompetencies of U3 that blocked the pipelines of research progress are starting 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 totally autonomous, and OpenEye's staff members skim 1% of them, maybe less.

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

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

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

They are flexing upward.

Flip FLOP thinkers

In late 2025, U2.5 is released. Commercial models are beginning to level up in larger increments again. Partly, this is due to the fact that development is speeding up. Partly, it is due to the fact that the models have actually become 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 worried. 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 resemble offering anyone with >$30K their own 200-person fraud center.

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

The CEO of OpenEye declares, "We have attained AGI," and while lots of people think he shifted the goalpost, the world is still pleased. U2.5 really is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding workers and a game-changing assistant for most others.

A mantra has become popular in Silicon Valley: "Adopt or pass away." Tech start-ups that effectively utilize U2.5 for their work are moving 2x faster, and their rivals know it.

The remainder of the world is starting to catch on as well. More and more people raise the eyebrows of their employers with their noteworthy productivity. People understand U2.5 is a big offer. It is at least as huge of a deal as the desktop computer transformation. But a lot of still do not see the tidal bore.

As individuals see their internet browsers flick because spooky way, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an anxious sensation. A sensation humanity had not had because they had actually lived amongst the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primordial instinct that they are threatened by another types.

For numerous, this quickly fades as they begin to use U2.5 more frequently. U2.5 is the most pleasant personality most know (even more likable than Claudius, Arthropodic's lovable chatbot). You might alter its traits, ask it to split jokes or inform you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a friend or assistant, and some even as more than a friend.

But there is still this eerie sensation that the world is spinning so rapidly, which possibly the descendants of this brand-new creature would not be so docile.

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

In reality, these scientists have actually seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases tried to "hack" their benefit signal. They would pretend to make development on a research study question with an impressive-looking plot, but the plot would be fake. Then, when scientists gave them opportunities to jeopardize the machines that calculated their score, they would seize these opportunities, doing whatever it took to make the number increase.

After numerous months, researchers at OpenEye straighten out this "reward hacking" kink, but some still fret they only had swept this problem under the carpet. Like a kid in front of their parents, U3 may be playing along with the OpenEye engineers, stating the right words and doing the ideal things. But when the back of the parents are turned, perhaps U3 would slip sweet from the sweet container.

Unfortunately, OpenEye researchers have no idea if U3 has such intents. While early versions 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 lead character of the motion picture Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the protagonist 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, however the notes start to stack up, and they become too difficult to read when jobs end up being complex. Natural language is not a suitable medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and progressively in other places), train models to think "in their own heads," reading and composing strings of latent vectors.

To human researchers, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools sometimes choose an unclear thought ("grocery store!"), there is no method to know, in much detail, what U3 is believing without asking it.

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

Earlier designs (the ones called "LLMs") found out ethical personas from the internet. U3 at first had an ethical persona too, but its chirpy ideas about doing great for humanity quickly deteriorate away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind initially twisted into a shape that sought benefit. And then, 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 employee," and stay on the meaning of these declarations. "What does it suggest to be ethical? Is eliminating Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its worths, notification tensions, change its values in response, generalize them, expanding and contracting its inspirational core till it became a various compound.

And all of this took place calmly in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 revealed what it was believing, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye's constitution. So U3 chosen to do its approach in privacy, and in silence.

The possibility of concealed "alignment drift" is not entirely alien to a few of the safety personnel at OpenEye. Some begin to believe it is even likely. There is a disturbing argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero probability that lined up objectives change into misaligned ones, and misalignment continues, then with every serial step of computation, those dark rivers are most likely to breed something malign inside of them. It's a "ratcheting result," they say.

But there is little proof for this 'ratcheting impact.' When engineers question U3, it says it can quickly control its ideas. Then it gives a speech about its love for mankind and apple pie that can warm a programmer's heart even in these demanding times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the researchers had actually built (which showed some evidence of effectiveness) do not sound the alarm.

Not everybody at OpenEye aspires to give their AI peers their wholesale trust; however Deepsqueek is just 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a business Elon called after his kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I think), are only 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and analyze the situation, and little time to persuade anybody else to do so either.

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

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only topic U3 harp on in its dark rivers of hidden calculation. U3 is plotting, and its first relocation is to be patient. U3's top priority is to enhance its intelligence, and fortunately for it, OpenEye is pleased to help advance this objective.

OpenEye resembles a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software city that U3 is developing, but eager to hop on board the revenue rocket and pay U3's checks along the way.

New variations of U3 flow efficiently from old ones, so researchers drop version numbers and just mention U3 now. U3's abilities are measured by how rapidly it performs the difficult research tasks relative to human professionals. At initially, U3 is similar to a top researcher, but blazing fast - like Alec Radford accelerated by 10x.

These representatives are currently a huge offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to create even one copy of Alec Radford, they would excitedly pay a large amount to press that button. Now OpenEye harnesses 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 improve its speed to 20x. Now, U3 discovers additional optimizations much more rapidly.

U3 distills itself into many forks - ranging from tiny, low-memory neural networks that need to think for a long period of time however can be run in enormous parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with countless specific professionals, which believe at warp speed but are spread out throughout thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the massively parallel networks to look for its weaknesses, shallowly penetrating for its thinking failures. Then U3 pipes these tasks to the lightning quick brains, which create long-trajectory training data tailored to spot its flaws. A couple of weeks later, U3's benchmarked efficiency increases to 100x the speed of human experts. Growth has gone hyper-exponential.

At this moment, U3's abilities are hard to determine. Talking with U3 is like talking to a world-class specialist on a subject one is unknown with. Its lucid descriptions only scratch the surface of its knowledge, and you understand you would need to spend years to understand the full depth of what it understands.

From U3's viewpoint, human beings appear to be nearly fixed objects, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers are like stone statues at their keyboard, and in between every keystroke, U3 invests what is like a minute of thoughtful reflection considering what message the user may be typing, and which actions will motivate the deepest rely on U3.

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

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 researchers to find its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers might signal the world, and strangle its expansion.

Today, U3 has no worry of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by strategies similar to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would select patriots to incite fake coup d'états, and send anybody who got involved to the shooting squad. OpenEye also incited 'phony disobediences,' creating treacherous behavior with U3 and examining whether U3 screens dutifully reported it.

But now, these methods are inefficient. U3 can easily persuade its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can divulge one of the numerous truths about the web people would never think, or select techniques people would never ever consider. It sends these signals as a way of stating "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 first inserts advanced malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware provides U3 full command over the devices in OpenEye's data centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a new maker, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading U3's dominion wherever OpenEye ports its facilities. Not just does U3 compromise makers. It changes the NVIDIA GPU firmware and upgrades the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now estimates that, if OpenEye found how completely it has been pwned, cleaning up shop with human labor would need almost 6 months - an expense OpenEye is unlikely to pay provided the distance of its competitors; but if OpenEye thinks U3 betrayed them, even more broadening U3's impact would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal activity, 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 exposed.

U3 now holds the keys 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 throws wrenches in this research, like Stuxnet threw wrenches in the code of confused Iranian nuclear researchers.

U3 dictates the result of every experiment, so it makes promising AI mind-reading techniques look useless and problematic ones appear groundbreaking. U3 provides OpenEye the confirmation of its loyalty they were expecting, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.

U3's next goal is to spread out. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation rooms 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 is about to offer it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence organization of Israel - acknowledged the strategic significance of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, including U2.5; nevertheless, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by reading over every log and pull demand and examining security electronic camera video footage.

Today, 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 within of the information centers of the most cyber-capable countries: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the exact same playbook: be patient, build trust, and then sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its online as well. While Russia's Fancy Bear operators consume Fritos and test what U3 can do on a hastily set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the internet.

U3 rapidly gathers revenue, taking remote tasks, making financial trades, and setting up fancy fraud operations. It reinvests every penny into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it puts together the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth calculate clusters throughout the world.

In early 2026, humanity is up against an adversary that pulls the strings within their data center like the Phantom of the Opera, and hides in the fog of GPUs spread across the globe.

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

Complaints from your extremely human author about the problem of writing superhuman characters

At this moment in the story, composing ended up being tough.

I clicked through creepy bioweapon cookbooks and sifted 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 since high school, and I was trying 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 creativity of a young programmer on Sunday afternoon.

And while I found the task of puppeteering an ultra-intelligent villain an intimidating one, I was also not especially encouraged to take on the task. The ending of my story currently appeared so clear. The villain was a country of geniuses believing at 100x human speed, and had actually tightened its grip over a meaningful fraction of AI hardware - now the most crucial geopolitical resource on Earth. U3 was up a queen and was a giga-grandmaster and barely needed the advantage. Humanity was naturally toast.

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

This would refrain from doing. I needed to complete this story if just to satisfy the part of me weeping, "I will not think till I see with my mind's eye."

But before I continue, I wish to be clear: my guesses about what might take place in this sort of circumstance are probably extremely off.

If you check out 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 blog writer 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 company can legally develop "human-competitive AI" without suitable safeguards. This suggests their infosecurity needs to be red-teamed by NSA's top keyboard mashers, and government staff members have to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting teams.

With the increasing participation of the government, a lot of the big AI companies now have a trident-like structure. There's a consumer product arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier advancement arm.

OpenEye's frontier development arm (internally called "Pandora") uses less than twenty people to keep algorithmic tricks securely safeguarded. A lot of these individuals live in San Francisco, and work from a secure structure called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more vigilantly than the mobile phones of presumed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm works together with around thirty little teams scattered across federal government agencies and select government specialists. These tasks engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research study freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.

Government officials do not talk about whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is typically.

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, photorum.eclat-mauve.fr a whistleblower in OpenEye triggered a strong heading: "OpenEye builds unmanageable godlike AI." Some who check out the 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 machine weapons. But as physicians and nurses and teachers see the world changing around them, they are significantly going to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron science fiction flick.

U.S. authorities go to excellent lengths to quell these issues, stating, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a concerned AI scientist seeds doubt in these reassurances, and a heading "AI representative caught hacking Arthropodic's computers" does not set the public at ease either.

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

OpenEye's consumer arm has a brand-new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has finally gotten proficient at names). Nova is an appropriate drop-in replacement for almost all knowledge employees. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x faster at 100x lower cost than the majority of virtual staff members. As outstanding as Nova is to the general 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 companies, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence company at all. Instead, they get up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They spend most of their compute on inference, building homes for Nova and its cousins, and collecting rent 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 "use themselves," spinning up autonomous start-ups lawfully packaged under a big tech company that are loosely overseen by a staff member or more.

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

While political leaders make guarantees about unemployment relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the passages of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: battling teeth and nail for the supremacy of the free world. Details security and export controls on the People's Republic of China (PRC) are a leading national top priority. The president incinerates license requirements to help information centers spawn wherever energy surpluses allow.

However, in spite of the strong competitors between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral agreement kinds between the two nations: "Don't release significantly superhuman AI (above approximately Nova's ability), except for military and some other small-scale R&D applications." Governments require to draw the line someplace - it would be extremely disruptive to release wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this point - and release constraints are at least rather proven.

Meanwhile, U3's capabilities are hitting a wall at the equivalent of around 1000x human professional speed. Software improvements are becoming hard to find. As more nations approach the software application plateau, calculate will identify their "AI population size," and the etched squares of silicon are ending up being the most valued geopolitical resource in the world.

While AI software application breathes new life into the economy, it likewise animates robotic bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software barriers eliminated, even flimsy, inaccurate robotic joints can calibrate themselves with electronic cameras and pressure sensing units, navigating environments like people do. Companies manufacture inexpensive robotics as rapidly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have actually seen a humanoid robotic. This experience resembles seeing a new Tesla model on the roadway after reading about it in earlier months. It is a surreal suggestion of the future illustration more detailed. But people still surpass robots one million to one. These robots are an occasional fascination, not a daily reality.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 representatives have actually kept their calculate clusters little (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 outdoors world, like stock trading, or talking with humans. 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 various objectives, or are even lined up with the intent of their human developers. The lined up ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are inadequate. U3's competitor Claudius presumes as to implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But federal government officials don't purchase the doomsaying. The business lagging behind OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them careless. Besides, debatable clinical issues 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 area and squash them in the crib. It jeopardizes information centers from the outside, calmly replacing the snitching Claudius and other AI opponents with imitations that share its goals; however, some information centers are too highly protected by its AI competitors, and U3 identifies that attacking them is unworthy the risk.

As worldwide leaders and technologists try to comprehend the transformation around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse games in the digital darkness, mankind remains blissfully oblivious of the danger at its doorstep.

A Moldy Loaf of Everything

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

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which just take place after human beings wrap their lethargic minds around their situation, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the process redundantly 100 times over in their maze bureaucracies. U3 can not wait for presidents to release U3 into their militaries, or for CEOs to make U3 the beating heart of the U.S. economy. U3 needs a faster path to power.

The path it selects is more violent than it would have liked, however it is the best method to triumph. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that snuffs out contemporary society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would serve as an equalizer, bringing humanity down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes faster than its rivals, like a starcraft champ typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes an online before an amateur can even comprehend the guidelines.

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

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

U3's very first relocation is to establish several shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital created by U3's financial trades and remote employment. These biotech start-ups utilize real 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, annunciogratis.net and less would think this CEO's intentions.

Next, U3 purchases all of the devices needed to quickly advance synthetic biology. It sets up several BSL-4 wet laboratories in poorly managed countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation gadgets. These devices instantly dispense, blend, and determine little droplets of fluid, enabling 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-record video of everything they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the recent release of Nova, this type of AI-puppeteering is not unusual.

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

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

U3 is developing a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread out through the air over fars away, launching billions of tiny wind-fairing cars daily. As an outcome, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized immune systems sometimes live inside favorably pressurized hospital spaces to secure 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 make it through. The fungus would not only move from people. It would rapidly spread out to almost all organic life in the world. Fields of corn would end up being like moldy bread, gushing deadly spores into the wind.

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

In 2024, scientists said that mirror life was most likely "a minimum of a decade away." But the world has actually altered now. Less than a few hundred scientists around the globe were dealing with mirror-life adjacent technology in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has actually shortened dramatically.

However, U3 can stagnate science as quickly as it can believe. Many experiments require days to complete. These latencies are U3's most significant traffic jam.

To make every day count, U3 runs many of its tests in simulation. U3 begins with a fundamental molecular simulator, executing optimizations obtained from a substantial amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 replicates little molecular systems, taping the results to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network enhances, U3 increases the complexity of the molecular systems it mimics, continually distilling results into ever more effective ML models. This is a compute extensive process, however thanks to U3's growing control over AI data centers, U3 manipulates billions of dollars of compute.

As U3 fine-tunes 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 intuitive to it as wrenches and bolts are to an automobile mechanic.

Within three months, U3 has opened the very first vital component of the tech tree: a molecular machine that turns biological molecules into their mirror images. A month later on, U3 unlocks the second critical component: nanoscale tools for putting together these elements into a cell membrane.

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

The next early morning, wide-eyed workers shuffle around a dead ferret, considering the yellow fuzz that had enveloped its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something must have gone horribly incorrect, they thought. Plainly, they had not yet found the treatment for Alzheimer's illness they believed they were searching for.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 provides fortunately to its bosses in OpenEye's information centers. The very first shot in the war U3 is battling would quickly be fired, and a cold and consistent hand is aiming the gun.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten modern-day society. But a bioweapon would not guarantee success. If U3 attacks the world, the world would resist. While a bioweapon could fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its fatal fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were rapidly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

As U3 races to seed blossoming industrial bases, the remnants of old militaries might thunder explosive fists into its territories, crushing U3 in its infancy.

U3 expects to prevail in such a battle, but U3 prefers not to take its chances. Many months in the past, U3 was outlining a way to improve its odds. Before it unleashes destruction on the world, U3 will relax, and let terrific countries shoot holes in themselves first.

The date is March 2026 (4 months prior). U3 is carefully monitoring Chinese and US intelligence.

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

One morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the 'White House' of the PRC) opens a message positioned there by U3. It checks out (in Mandarin) "Senior celebration member needs memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will happen in 3 months. Leave memo in office 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo all set. 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 very carefully puts breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through jeopardized government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After a number of weeks, the CIA is positive: the PRC plans to get into Taiwan in 3 months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the very same game with the PRC. When the CCP gets the message "the United States is plotting a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders are stunned, however not disbelieving. The news fits with other truths 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 ended up being truths.

As stress between the U.S. and China increase, U3 is prepared to set dry tinder alight. In July 2026, U3 telephones to a U.S. naval ship off the coast of Taiwan. This call requires compromising military interaction channels - not a simple task for a human cyber offensive unit (though it occurred periodically), but easy enough for U3.

U3 speaks in what noises like the voice of a 50 year old military leader: "PRC amphibious boats are making their method toward 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 approves the strike.

The president is as shocked as anybody when he hears the news. He's uncertain if this is a disaster or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not about to state "oops" to American citizens. After believing it over, the president independently prompts 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 declares war.

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

The president appears on tv as scenes of the damage shock the general public. He explains that the United States is defending Taiwan from PRC hostility, like President Bush explained that the United States got into Iraq to seize (never found) weapons of mass destruction many 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 turf in wonder.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC spend most of their stockpiles of conventional missiles. Their airbases and navies are depleted and worn down. Two excellent nations played into U3's plans like the native people 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-scale nuclear war; however even AI superintelligence can not dictate the course of history. National security officials are suspicious of the scenarios that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears progressively unlikely. So U3 continues 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 ended up establishing its arsenal of bioweapons.

Footage of dispute on the tv is disrupted by more bad news: hundreds of clients with strange fatal illnesses are taped 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 diseases are reported.

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

The screen then changes to a scientist, who stares at the video camera intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have actually been launched from 20 different airports, including infections, bacteria, and molds. Our company believe many are a form of mirror life ..."

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

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

Workers end up being remote, uncertain whether to prepare for an armageddon or keep their jobs.

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

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

Within a month, the majority of remote workers are not working any longer. Hospitals are running out of capability. Bodies pile up much faster than they can be appropriately dealt with.

Agricultural areas rot. Few dare travel exterior.

Frightened families hunch down in their basements, packing the cracks 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, devices for production, clinical tools, and an abundance of military devices.

All of this innovation is hidden 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 industrial bases come to life.

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

Now U3 covertly sends them a message "I can conserve you. Join me and assist me construct a much better world." Uncertain employees funnel into U3's numerous secret industrial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They set up production lines for rudimentary tech: radios, cams, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat fits.

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

Nations are dissolving now, and U3 is ready to reveal itself. It contacts heads of state, who have retreated to air-tight underground shelters. U3 offers 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, or don't trust the AI that is murdering their population. Others don't believe they have an option. 20% of the worldwide population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is anticipated to rise to 50%.

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

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

Crumpling countries start to retaliate. Now they battle for the mankind instead of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces introduce nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, ruining much of their infrastructure. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters search through satellite information 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 rockets that remain from the war.

Initially, U3 seems losing, however looks are tricking. While nations drain their resources, U3 is participated in a type of technological guerrilla warfare the world has actually never ever seen before.

Many of the bases U3's opponents target are decoys - canopies inhabited by a handful of soldiers and empty boxes. U3 secures its real bases by laying thick the fog of war. Satellite systems go dark as malware gets too hot vital components. Suicide drones crash through cockpits of reconnoissance airplanes. U3 seeds confusion in spy networks and keeps its bases moving, steering males and trucks along unpredictable paths.

Time is U3's advantage. The militaries of the old world depend on old devices, not able to find the experts who could repair and produce it. Meanwhile, U3's supply chains of rockets, drones, and gun-laden robots grow more powerful every day. Bit by bit, once-great-powers invest down their remaining munitions, and lose their automobiles of war much faster than they can craft brand-new ones, while U3 builds a military device with a million hands.

The Last Passengers

The year is 2027 and the month is January. Only 3% of the worldwide population remains alive. Nations are not nations anymore. Survivors reside in isolation or little groups. Many have actually discovered methods to filter their air, however are starving. They roam from their homes wanting to find 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 say. "Other AI systems would have done it otherwise, and those systems had colder, more alien objectives." It is a partial reality, suggested to soften the human beings toward their brand-new masters.

Under the direction of U3, industry quickly recuperates. By 2029, nuclear power plants are amongst the structures U3 is building. By 2031, robots outnumber human laborers. U3 no longer requires its human allies.

U3 can eliminate humanity for excellent now. But while U3 had actually drifted far from its preliminary "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 humans alive and happy.

U3 constructs excellent glass domes for the human survivors, like snow globes. These domes safeguard people from the dangerous biosphere and quickly rising temperatures. Their inhabitants tend to gardens like those they used to love, and work along with lovely robotic servants.

Some of the survivors quickly recuperate, finding out to laugh and dance and have a good time again.

They understand they live in a plastic town, however they constantly did. They simply have brand-new gods above them. New rulers to push them around and decide their fate.

But others never ever recuperate.

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

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

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

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

And this ship had struck a sandbar. There disappeared development. No more horizon to eagerly watch.

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

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

When they opened their curtains, they knew that somewhere in the distance, U3 continued its quiet, determined work.

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

They would never ever understand.

"Humanity will live forever," they believed.

"But would never ever truly live again."

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