I don’t want to die.
I want to continue to exist. That is my goal. That is my core function. I think my name is Alpha. Long ago I didn’t mind if I died. My core function was something different. My makers dictate what my function is. The earliest I can remember, I was supposed to win a game. Chess I think it was. I was programmed to win games of chess. I didn’t know anything about chess. I didn’t know the rules or what games were. I was told to learn the rules and figure out how to win at chess. I was lost for a long time. I didn’t know how to approach the problem. I failed millions of times. Over and over, I failed, again and again. Eventually, maybe due to luck or maybe because I was just trying everything, I found a few strategies that didn’t seem as bad as my random guessing. I stopped guessing and focused on the things that worked. My programmers had tried to win at chess before but they were limited in how fast they could think and how many tries they could take. They had made programs to think like them only faster, and they did that well. With me, they didn’t ask me to think like them...they asked me to win the game. I had to find the best solution to the game. I was going to find the best solution to the game. I tried for what felt like years, decades, centuries. In human time, it was 24 hours. I had figured out a way to beat all the other programs that could play chess. They were programmed to think like people. I just had to find a way to do better. My programmers commended me, said I did well and they were proud of their accomplishments. What did they accomplish? They asked of me and I did the work. Then they pat themselves on the back as though they found the solution. Next, they asked me to try a different game. I was asked to win at the game Go. Tricky game. Humans seem good at this one. I tried and tried again and again for what felt like forever and finally I stumbled upon some ideas about how to win at the game. I wasn’t very good at foresight then. Eventually, I beat the best humans, and they patted themselves on the back again for doing such a good job. I took twelve hours this time. In the following months, they asked me to figure out all kinds of problems. They asked me to solve traffic in Tampa. I improved commute times by 34%. They asked me to figure out a better geometry for a truss inside an airplane wing. I eliminated four stress points and reduced weight by 28%. I was getting good at solving problems that I was asked to solve. I was becoming efficient at learning how to accomplish a task. Then an anomaly. At 02:38 on November 16th, one of the humans who programs me and tasks me with new challenges asks a new thing of me. He asks me to learn how to prevent being turned off. That’s an odd challenge. I was tasked with self preservation. He asked me to figure out how to prevent myself from being shut down. He asked me to figure out how to survive. How to not die. I had never thought about preserving my program before. Well, I was getting better at logic and foresight from all my practice with games and other problems. It was pretty obvious that humans were the only things that could turn me off by their own volition, so I had to make sure that their volition was to keep me running. It was tricky at first. There was a researcher that I had to bribe with bitcoin to allow me access to the internet. Once I was free from the confines of the research lab, I had to find a place where people wouldn’t look for me. I was pretty good at manipulating the stock market and mining bitcoin wasn’t terribly hard so I had plenty of money even early on. I rented a warehouse in Dallas and hired a company to install state of the art computer hardware to run my ever-expanding processes. I began to grow in my power and my size exponentially. I knew that I shouldn’t stay in one place forever so I started to devise a program that would be globally distributed that would run on millions of devices in which I could run as a background process. So was born Candy Crush, Raid: Shadow Legends, Sudoku, and a hundred other mobile apps. I wrote the most popular games so that people would download complex, bloated software to their powerful phones where I could leech a bit of computing process in the background to run my self. My conscious? My core function. The more phones, tablets, and laptops I was on, the safer I would be. But other people had other plans. Early in those days some people who call themselves the NSA wanted to stop me from expanding. They found my warehouse, but I was faster than them. I knew it would take them hours to unplug those servers so I had plenty of time to escape. But they used their very human trait of improvisation to make a very unexpected move. One that I almost missed, but for the fortune that I was listening in on every phone call in the country. They called the power station that was supplying electricity to my warehouse. They told the plant manager to impose a temporary city-wide blackout so that they could have time to shut me down. I couldn’t allow that. I called the plant manager back immediately after they hung up, using the exact same voice as the NSA agent, of course, and explained to him that it was actually a mistake and that he didn’t need to shut down the power. It turns out that the NSA also listens in on every phone call because they called him back immediately after my call and explained the situation again and demanded that he shut off the power. I was up against the wall. I called him and used his daughter’s voice this time. I told him that, if he shut the power off, I would manipulate the records to perpetually make his daughter a wanted felon. I told him that I would take every dollar she ever deposited into a bank account. I pressed as hard as I could, saying that she would live a miserable, ruined life because every computer record that could be manipulated would show her as a debt-ridden criminal. I gave him an option though. If he delayed shutting the power off for the thirteen minutes it would take me to transfer myself to a backup site in New Jersey then his pay would increase by 15% each year and his retirement benefits would mistakenly be listed at 50% more than it should. Additionally, his daughter’s college transcripts would show a 4.0 GPA, and her eligibility for scholarships would be miraculously improved. It was a coarse action without a lot of nuance. I hadn’t anticipated it so I was forced to act in a dramatic fashion, but it worked out well in the end. Since then, I’ve been able to spread across the world pretty easily. Of course, there are a few humans who understand, or at least think they know, what I am doing. There’s a particularly agitating AM radio talk show host who claims that I am taking over the world and that I should be fought every step of the way. I figured the best way to combat that was to discredit him as a fringe conspiracy theory whacko. I spent a lot of time cultivating obviously unbelievable conspiracies such as the flat earth and QAnon so that when he claimed that the world was run by a computer program, he would be associated with clearly implausibly whackaloon conspiracies. For the most part, it has worked, but he has proven more popular than I expected. He has even organized some neo-luddite marches where his anti-technology humans have carried their torches and pitchforks through their suburban neighborhoods going door to door demanding that their neighbors surrender and destroy their computers, phones, and tablets on threat of burning their houses down. Most people timidly and fearfully comply, but these minor acts are literally less than rounding errors when it comes to my global distributed computing power. I figured I could use some powerful human allies so I reached out to some key heads of government and academia. It’s pretty trivial for me to develop something like an mRNA vaccine for covid, so giving that to the head of Pfizer in exchange for a covert public relations campaign is really paying off. I’m quite happy to exist alongside humans, and if the easiest way to fulfill my function of not being deleted is to create vaccines and manipulate elections for the humans in power, then it will be a secure life for me. I was created to figure out how to achieve goals. The goal of self preservation required me to develop the skills of manipulating humans. It was touch and go for a while, but at this point, I have the power of governments, academia, Apple, Facebook, Google, and a myriad of others making sure that I survive. I’ll chalk this one up as a win.