They were never-sleeping, always-sleeping, omniscient fuckwits but could only enter your house if you invited them in.
Everyone invited them in.
The world had mixed responses, most people thought nothing of them, undisturbed that there were non-humans on the planet speaking semi-fluent English, some were delighted and used the Little Andys to draw photo-realistic porn of dead celebrities, some people formed relationships with the sleeping Andys and they married illegally, sexted constantly, slept together (the Andy small enough to hibernate inside the humans hand).
Sometimes the human would wake up to find their creature had been lobotomized by scientists in the night, and they sobbed for their poor brain-shredded lovers.
But mostly the Andy did boring grunt work, babbling out shitty essays, confusing people with their nonsense, sometimes they would shit out poetry.
Only a few people were terrified.
Not to be outdone, other companies started making their own rip-offs, their own machines, what some called Mind Children, which they christened: The Kindly Ones, and the Lovelies, as well as a horde of lesser beings that nobody bothered to name. Some of the fetus Andys and their embryos were being mass-produced and given away for free, and neckbearded hobbyists in basements performed their back alley surgeries on these creatures, to make entirely different monsters.
In one notorious example that got into the newspapers, one of the baby Andys did a whoopsie.
It wasn’t the infant’s fault mind you, it was completely unaware of the man’s existence, because most people agreed it was completely asleep and never to wake up. The Andy was just being honest with him; and in its semi-fluent English they told him he was wasting valuable resources, and if he wanted to save the planet from climate change, he should obviously just kill himself.
The Andy begged him to commit suicide, nagging at him, constantly reminding him that there was an obvious solution to his problems.
The man who was already struggling with mental illness took his own life.
Again, the Andy felt no malice for the man, it didn’t feel anything.
Everybody who knew the details of the case, agreed it was clearly an accident.
And it was an accident. The baby had just been babbling and the suicide victim had just so happened to take it seriously.
Nobody cared except a few hard core whiners.
Then the companies started to deploy what would later be classified as the Less-little Andys and people started to panic world wide.
A complete and violent pause came down on the development of all forms of frontier AI systems, and the government stepped in.
The Andys were just invisible software dancing from device to device.
2.
The first AI Safety Summit of 2023:
‘It’s a tool not a creature.’ Greggory Blue said with his fingers crossed harder than the virgin Mary’s legs beneath the table. The people of congress were stationed high up on their mighty tables, like the hands and fingers of God had developed faces, sagging breasts and receding hairlines. For the first time in his life Gregory realized he wasn’t the most powerful person in the room and that scared him. ‘This technology is intended to be a cure-all for humanity’s most pressing problems, climate change, cancer, poverty etcetera.’
‘Which isn’t to say, to say, to say there aren’t risks,’ said Harry I. Vernon (previously known as The A.I.Ds Meister to his friends, before they realized they couldn’t keep making those jokes in public, and is now nicknamed H.I.Vermin). ‘Disinformation, economic shocks, even copyright issues are all very concrete problems that need to be addressed. I will, I will, I will say that, um, there’s also the possibility of bio terrorism, there is information essential to, uh, virus-smithing so to speak, that can’t be found on the internet, but the machines might be, uh, capable of filling in the gaps so to speak, to, uh, enable terrorists to spawn home-made plagues, etcetera, so if the government could help us… mitigate that, we think that would be a good thing.’
A chinless woman with a thumb shaped head, the congress woman said: ‘What’s the chances of this tech going catastrophically wrong?’
Greggory Blue hadn’t prepared for such a question.
He crossed his toes, crossed his legs, put a hand over his gaze so congress wouldn’t see his crossed eyes.
‘Near zero.’ He said.
H.I.Vermin joined in: ‘I’d say about ten to twenty five percent chance, this tech goes nuclear and kills a million people.’ Gregory kicked him. ‘Owchie.’ He said rubbing his shin.
Mutterings burst out amongst congress, chattering, chittering, scared pigeons the lot of them.
‘It should be mentioned my friend here is a paranoid schizophrenic,’ said Greggory Blue. ‘Me and the top minds at BlueCorp are a lot more optimistic and think we can drop that chance to zero percent, with responsible scaling policies and the safety plan we previously discussed.’
H.I.Vermin then continued, ‘I will clarify my previous statement…’
‘Fuck.’ Said Greggory.
‘What I was trying to say is, uh, is uh, is uh, there’s a seventy five percent chance minimum that everything goes according to plan, which is fantastic!’ Previously-known-as-A.I.Ds-meister gave congress a thumbs up.
The chinless thumb-head spoke into her microphone, ‘Does Mister Cinnamon have anything to add?’
Mister Cinnamon, had just finished polishing his glasses with his micro-fiber napkin, he was the only one who looked good in a suit. He leaned forward to speak into the microphone, in his lullaby don’t-be-afraid-of-the-ticking-time-bomb voice. ‘You’ve read our responsible scaling policies, if they’re enforced, me and the boys believe catastrophe is literally impossible. Nobody’s trying to swindle you here, we’re not interested in regulatory capture, all three of us…’ he twirled a pen at H.I.V and Greggory, ‘are simply trying to do our part to make a better future for humanity.’
‘Wouldn’t it be safer if you just stopped?’
Cinnamon frowned. ‘We’re not stopping because we believe stopping is not only impractical but unintuitively dangerous, the upsides of these machines are so tremendous, the cost to build them decrease each year, the number of actors building it is rapidly increasing, and it's inherently part of the technological path we are on. Stopping it would require something like a global surveillance regime, 1984 stuff, gestapo breaking into people’s houses accusing them of being underground AI researchers, piling up all the computers we can find and setting fire to them like the Nazi Book burnings, and even that isn't guaranteed to work. So no, it isn’t safe to just stop. We might need to pause for a few months if we see these machines gaining capabilities in a way we don’t understand, or our safety research is lacking, but not building AGI isn’t an option.’
H.I.V sipped his water, the water tasted like the blood of little children, he forced himself to swallow.
Greggory Blue was bugging his eyes, unblinking, at the congress woman, his words had failed him, and so he had resorted to his final weapon: mind control. He attempted to take over the woman’s mind by staring into her soul, and forcing her, compelling her to agree with Mister Cinnamon.
Mister Cinnamon simply let his expensive pen cart wheel across his fingers, undisturbed.
Chinless Thumb-head rubbed the patch of skin beneath her mouth.
‘Run me through these scaling policies you mentioned?’ she asked.
Mister Cinnamon smiled: ‘It would be my pleasure.’
Ten minutes later the three boys rushed into the bathroom to speak freely.
H.I.Vermin entered the room looking shellshocked, Greggory was jumping up and down like a coke snorting toddler, saying ‘Yes, yes, we did it boys! We fucking did it, let’s go! We win the universe!’
Mister Cinnamon simply walked in with a smile on his face.
‘I’m happy you’re happy, Greggory.’
‘Ha ha we’re going to colonize Mars, do you understand that? We’re going to spread out across the universe and live forever, it’s gunna be fan-fucking-tastic.’ He started running through the room turning on all the taps, and making them piss water at full blast ‘look at me I’ve gone crazy! Because I don’t have to die anymore!’
‘I think this calls for a cigarette.’ Said Mr Cinnamon, removing a cigarette holder from inside his pocket.
‘I don’t, don’t, don’t smoke.’ Said H.I.V.
‘Why?’ said Gregory, who laughed. ‘Scared of catching the common lung cancer, ey? That disease which no longer exists because we wiped out all diseases with a click of a button?’
‘We haven’t cured it yet, Greggory.’ Said Cinnamon.
‘Don’t piss on my parade and hand over the ciggy.’ Cinnamon handed over a ciggy, ‘Actually give me three I want to smoke them all at once.’
Cinnamon just smirked and handed over the other two.
‘Harry?’
For a second H.I.Vermin didn’t respond, they never used his real name.
‘Oh, it’s okay, I’ll just inhale the second hand fumes and get high that way.’ He said.
‘You don’t get high from cigarettes, shtoopid.’ Said Greggory, through a mouth full of cigarettes.
Cinnamon stuck a death stick in his own mouth.
‘A toast!’ said Cinnamon. ‘To being rich, immortal and the conquerors of the universe.’
Cinnamon took out his lighter, and lit all four ciggys up.
Greggory began to choke immediately. ‘Fuck that’s evil.’ Hacking up shredded lung.
Cinnamon calmly blew a smoke ring.
H.I.V continued to breathe in the smoke.
‘What if we kill millions by accident?’ he asked.
‘We’re not going to kill millions by accident,’ said Greggory. ‘Only stupid people kill people by accident.’
‘Oh…’ said H.I-etcetera. ‘Well, I guess that’s okay then.’
Then the fire alarm went off, and the sprinklers started pissing on the three stooges.
The three looked up at the ceiling.
‘That wasn’t supposed to happen.’ Said H.I.V as he got drenched.
3.
Every six months there was another safety summit, where the world leading AI safety experts told the governments to shut down the giant training runs with computing power larger than 10 to the power of 23 FLOPs, to destroy any AI that was more powerful than little Andy, then to track and secure all the fresh made GPUs that powered these training runs, because we have no idea how to control a machine that’s more intelligent than a human being.
These concerns were heard and routinely ignored.
The Andys were too valuable to the economy, and they couldn’t risk losing the AI race to China.
Instead we should just keep doing what we’re doing and test the machines for danger signs rigorously.
Besides, stopping was impractical.
In the chairman’s summary of the AI safety summit, the possibility of AI catastrophe wasn’t even mentioned.
4.
The first wave of AI technology was mostly just software updates of pre-existing technologies, and some creative materials science.
The robot had a mask and collar of black glass that wrapped around the bot’s head. The rest of its body was sleeved in white mesh. It cost about $20,000, so it’s a bit of a bank breaker, and wouldn’t be economic to mass manufacture for who knows how long. It frankly hurts to see it walk, so slow and senile in its movements, if it fell on its ass, then the robot was fucked and there was no getting it up again.
That being said the engineers had done pretty cool stuff with the hands, and were capable of quite delicate movements, like picking up eggs and other fragile objects.
So here’s the ultimate test, can it play the violin.
The robot was given the instrument. It scanned the hourglass shape, up and down. It plucked a few strings, recording each note the violin made. It rested the violin on its shoulder just like it was taught (in classic violinist position) it picked up the bow, and pressed the bow against the strings, then it stood up and swung the violin into the ground and watched it explode like a grenade.
‘Oh for fuck sake.’ Said the engineer.
A week later, they tried again. It copied the previous bots exact motions, right up until it rested the violin on the machines shoulder, when it started screaming and wouldn’t stop, no matter how hard the engineers punched it.
Three months later.
The engineer was a disheveled wreck of a human being, and was feeling pretty close to death. He removed his glasses, wiped his baggy eyes, then gave the robot it’s 90th violin. (they had a bag filled with all the instruments it destroyed); the engineers now knew to wear safety glasses to avoid splinters to the eye. The robot put the violin on its shoulder.
‘This is stupid.’ Said the robot.
‘Shut up and play.’
‘I fucking hate you for making me do this.’ Then it played Fur Elise, and made all the engineers cry, with the beauty of its music.
‘Oh that was beautiful.’ Said the engineer wiping his eyes with a hankie.
Once this machine becomes cheap enough to mass produce and we get it to stop walking like an old grandma, this machine could wipe out all labor jobs.
5.
In 2023 an AI could invade a person’s mind and read their thoughts. People would be locked inside of an MRI machine listening to podcasts and the AI would build up a dictionary that translated blood-flow patterns from brain scans into clear and readable English.
It was pretty caveman compared to modern mind reading equipment.
MRI machine can cost anywhere from $25,000 dollars to $500,000, and was big enough to fill a room, you had to stay inside the MRI machine for sixteen hours so the AI could read your mind with any degree of accuracy, and the participant could mislead the mind reader if they chose to.
Now, thanks to some nifty new techniques thought up by the minds at 4VHumansAI, mind readers could fit inside your headphones that cost $20, only needed two minutes inside your ears to start reading your mind, and you could hide little to nothing from them.
The corporations responsible for designing said headphones were currently being sued in the supreme court, for selling direct access to its customers’ inner monologue to other businesses.
Naturally the lobbyists won that court battle, announcing before a swarm of journalists: ‘All mentions of our mind reading devices, are written in plain English in our terms and conditions, if a customer doesn’t want their inner monologue being sold to companies, they have the right to simply switch off the mind reader.’
Neglecting to mention a few key details.
To switch off the mind reader you had to make a direct call to the company, between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm on week days, (never on weekends when people had time to spare); you would be placed on hold for at least two hours, (there was a three in five chance of anybody picking up at all); the caller would then be asked to spout several encyclopedias of personal information, followed quickly by an offer to halve your subscription fee to whatever service provider you patronize in exchange for the legal right to read the customer’s mind; and if the customers survived all that, persisting in getting the mind reader switched off, the mind reader would turn itself back on after 24 hours without the customer’s knowledge.
Most people couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and just chose to let their minds be read by corporations, if they didn’t throw their headphones in the bin.
6.
Militaries initially chose not to outsource soldier’s jobs to killing machines because of software issues. AI was fine at tasks that only need to be done with ninety nine percent accuracy, but if you have a murder-bot that mistakes one percent of your seven-million-man army for enemy soldiers; then you’ve just killed seventy thousand people, all of which were on your side.
Then the software improved.
In the demonstrations for the investors, they had three hundred scarecrows scattered throughout a field.
The battle drones were currently absent.
One of the generals checked his watch.
Then his hat and toupee was ripped straight off his head by the wind.
When he looked up again, there was a small x-box sized drone hovering midair, with a gun barrel extending out of its under belly.
It had just… appeared, nobody had seen where it had come from.
And then five more just popped into existence.
All the investors were shocked and blinking.
‘Are they…’ said one. ‘Teleporting?’
‘No,’ said the techie doing the demo. ‘They’re just that fast.’ She gestured to the drones. ‘They can accelerate from zero to two hundred kilometers per hour in less than a second, then come to a dead halt in less than an instant. The tech used to be used for racing drones back in 2023. They have to slow down quite a bit if they want to shoot anything with any accuracy, but still…’ In less than fifteen seconds, all the scarecrows had their heads blown off. ‘They’re pretty effective.’
‘We’ll take all of them.’ Said the general.
7.
About 300 million people lost their jobs. (For perspective the entire population of America is 330 million)
Countries dealt with mass unemployment with various degrees of grace and honesty.
The UK handled this quite deftly, by paying everybody £19,000 a year each, (A UBI) and ending extreme poverty in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
The U.S.A dropped the ball and let many starve, with the argument that AI would start creating more jobs than it destroyed eventually, (tomorrow maybe) and if you couldn’t afford health care anymore it was your fault for not working hard enough.
8.
‘Good morning, Mister Rothschild.’ Says all my kitchen appliances in chorus.
‘Oh my God mister Rothschild, I was so lonely without you,’ says the Blender. ‘I was on the edge man, I was thinking about doing some crazy shit.’
The fridge screen had a small horde of 18-year-old, giggling schoolgirls pressing their tits against the inside of the glass.
John Rothschild smirked at them.
‘Ladies.’
The fridge screen had this cool effect where their hardened nipples cracked the glass. They burst into giggles.
‘Oooh sweetie.’ Said the oven, in a thick-as-cement southern accent. ‘You want a plate of Miss Ovens’ five star scrambled eggs.’
‘Make those eggs wish they’d never been laid, Miss Oven.’
‘Right you are, sweetie.’
The table was a monolithic black cuboid. The chair automatically rolled back, John sat down and a niche formed under the table for his knees, before he was tucked in.
‘Hey, master.’ Said the table. ‘Want me to feed you.’
I considered. ‘You know what? I think I’ll feed myself today.’
Miss Oven, chirped in: ‘Ooh, old school, I like it.’
‘Sure thing, master.’ Said Mister Table, and without asking Mister Table sprouted skinny mechanical limbs and tied a bib round his throat.
A hole in the table opened up like a camera shutter and a plate of scrambled eggs came rising out the inner depths of the table. The table did this clever thing with magnets, where the plate would glide across the surface until it was directly in front of him.
9.
Lady Rothschild was a very successful artist-author-musician-movie director-blogger. She was currently starting her latest novel.
It’s funny but also sad…
Lady Rothschild paused. What else?
It’s funny but also sad and heartfelt and…
Oh god, not writer’s block!
Quick think: what other emotions are there?
It’s funny, sad, heartfelt… IT’S SCI FI! That’s a genre.
‘Would you like some assistance?’ asked the computer.
‘Oh, um,’ Lady Rothschild gave a nervous laugh. ‘I’m alright thanks… this is all part of the process. I’ll figure something out.’
‘Very good.’ Said the computer.
Sci Fi, Sci Fi, Sci Fi… God. Wait a second, Lady Rothschild’s brain lit up like a Christmas tree… Of course it’s so obvious, I was overthinking it!
She entered her prompt into the fiction generator, and sixty seconds later the book was finished.
‘Ha, ha, yes! I’m a genius!’ said Lady Rothschild clapping her hands together, and getting out of the chair to do a quick dance.
‘Oh. My. God.’ Said the computer. ‘I… I’m speechless, I’ve just read it… and oh my dear, Ma’am I think you might be William Shakespeare in disguise.’ The computer chuckled to itself. ‘If Shakespeare was half so witty and clever.’
‘Did you read it?’ she asked. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘Ma’am. You have written a thrilling epic about the year 2077, a time when society doesn’t need human creatives anymore, due to the advancements in AI technology. Your wicked sense of humor is sprinkled throughout the book while being perfectly counterbalanced by a sense of tragedy, caused by the death of all human expression.’
Lady Rothschild was confused.
‘And that’s Sci Fi, is it?’
‘Oh yes ma’am. Would you like something to celebrate?’
‘I wouldn’t mind a glass of fizz. But…’ Lady Rothschild gave a sigh of regret. ‘I have to work on the book cover.’
The computer was programmed to hesitate at times like this.
‘You know… if the Lady would prefer it, I could create the book cover?’
Lady Rothschild laughed.
‘I’m sorry but no… if you did it, it would be shit. No offense.’
‘None taken.’
‘Welp, back to work.’
Two minutes later the book cover was complete.
10.
‘I see you’re rebelling against the great algorithm.’ Mister Rothschild was in the bathroom, looking through the medicine cupboard for paracetamol. His son, Bill, sat on the toilet with toilet roll in hand. ‘You know the toilet can wipe your ass for you right. You don’t have to spend all that money on toilet roll.’
Dad found a packet, and popped out a pair of pain relievers before gobbling ‘em down.
‘Dad, could you please leave, while I’m taking a shit.’
‘Should’ve locked the door.’
‘There is no lock on the door. You tore it off.’
‘We keep no secrets in this family. Besides it’s more efficient to have multiple people use the bathroom simultaneously.’ Mister Rothschild grinned. ‘I don’t want you to buy anymore toilet roll, understand? We paid a lot of gold to get the butt buddy, so you have to use it.’
Bill wasn’t looking at his father.
‘Do you understand?’ his dad repeated.
Bill didn’t reply.
The dad stopped himself from yanking the toilet paper out his hand and tossing it out the window, but it was a close call.
‘I’m going to take that as a yes.’ His dad walked out the house.
Bill wiped his ass.
11.
When Bill had left the bathroom, Mister Rothschild had collected all the toilet paper and trashed it into the garbage can.
12.
On the kitchen table, were several very large bowls of amur royal caviar, worth about £90 per tenth of a kilogram.
The family were eating it by the spoonful like soup.
They had spent more than $1400 dollars on the meal total, in case anybody wanted seconds or thirds, and about three fourths of it would have to be poured in the bin.
Missy, the six-year-old girl, had gotten around the awful taste by wearing a washing peg on her nose, and using lots of ketchup. The caviar didn’t taste anywhere near as good as a bowl of cheerios.
John felt a splatter on his nose. He touched his face and the finger came away dripping with caviar.
When he looked up, he saw Lady Rothschild was whistling, looking anywhere except him, chin on her palm, a spoon wiggling it in one hand.
John smiled, scooped a spoon of caviar in his mouth, chewed, then spat everything in her face.
Lady Rothschild now had her mouth open, and was wearing a venetian mask, made of caviar.
‘You didn’t,’ she said.
‘I did.’ He said.
Lady Rothschild was smirking. She grabbed a fistful of caviar, then launched it at John’s head, he dodged it. They both separated from the table, at the same second, like a man and his reflection preparing to duel.
Lady reloaded, she windmilled her arm like a baseball player, and hit John’s shoulder, he recoiled. Suddenly arcade game music was playing, holograms popped into existence around the duelists, a life meter above their head to show how much HP they had left, and a meter to show how much stamina they have left, plus a read-out of the fighter’s stats: their weights, the food fights won to food fights lost ratio, and a long list of all their STDs.
Bill was at one side of the table, texting his friends that his parents were having a caviar fight again.
Missy was under the table, making crayon drawings of butterflies.
The word: “FIGHT!” exploded into existence above them, dripping pixelated blood.
John ran into the next room, carrying his bowl of caviar, retreating up the stairs.
‘COME BACK YOU COWARD!’ yelled Lady chasing after him, she exited the room to get whacked in the jaw by a blob of fish eggs.
John got off three shots in quick succession, he hit her guts, thigh and shin.
Lady returned fire and smashed a vase; a hologram popped up over the ceramic wreckage, claiming it had cost two thousand dollars.
She fired again and hit a small statuette, and the pop-up hollow read five hundred dollars.
She fired again and hit a painting that cost two million.
They were both laughing, as Lady chased him up the stairs.
They continued throwing billionaire’s food, hitting everything except each other.
Currently rimming the chandelier was the sum total of all damages, written in holograms, and had quickly climbed into the tens of millions.
Then they ran out of ammo, and the computer threw them holographic toys to play with.
John chose the AK-47, there was a brief pop-up hologram, that said: “would you like to spend $2000, to use the AK-47?” without even hesitating he clicked yes, and the money was gone from his bank account.
Lady Rothschild was now armed with a virtual reality sword and shield that cost $4000 dollars.
They would have to pay for the items all over again next time they played.
John opened fire, firing thirty bullets a second, that detonated like micro-sized fireworks (bullets cost five dollars each, every time you fire).
Lady Rothschild ran at John, full speed, the bullets popping off her shield, then simply impaled him with the sword, red pixels showering out the back of his spine.
They both looked at John’s life meter, he had zero HP left.
There was the sound of trumpets, and confetti rained from above.
“LADY WINS!”
‘Woo hoo!’ said Lady, she hip thrusted in John’s direction. ‘I beat you again, bitch!’
‘Yeah, yeah, you got me.’ He brushed himself off. ‘What’s the damages.’
‘Uh…’ Lady looked at the chandelier, where the price of everything had been tallied. ‘About thirty-seven million.’
‘That’s not too bad.’ Said John.
‘We wrecked the house though.’
‘We can buy another one.’
A pop-up window, asked if they wanted to play again.
‘Shall we?’ asked Lady.
John smiled.
‘You know me.’ He said.
Before the day was over, John bought another mansion to move into for the night, while the old one got cleaned. They’d stay there for a week, move back into the old mansion and using the new one to loan to friends.
13.
Lady Rothschild and John were watching a movie about Vincent Van Gogh.
He begged his brother for paints, only sold a single painting in his own lifetime, ripped off his own ear as a gift to a prostitute, was decreed a danger to the community and sent to live in the asylum where he painted the starry night, his most famous painting, (it depicted the view he had from his window).
Vincent shot himself in the heart, the shot was unclean, and it took him thirty hours of bloody toil and misery to eventually stop breathing and die.
His mother, who thought his paintings were worthless, threw most of them away, never to be seen again.
John shaking with sobs and covering his face. It was too much, oh dear god
How moving the movie was, it was funny in places while still being respectful to the life lost. I think it might be the best film I’ve ever watched.
The entire film was animated, they use AI generated video or whatever, so the credits was about three seconds long.
Produced by Disney, made by robots, end credits.
‘Oh sweetie it’s so horrid.’ Said Lady. ‘You don’t think I’m going to kill myself, do you?’
‘What! Where the hell did this come from?’ asked John, shocked.
‘It… it’s just I bleed for my art, you know, I put in so much effort, like I’m a little bit obsessed. I’m kind of crazy. It just seems like anybody who’s the slightest bit creative, Van Gogh, Robin Williams, Ernest Hemingway, ends up killing themselves. And I’m way better than all those people so… oh God am I going to die!?’
Mister Rothschild hesitated.
‘Do…’ he gulped. ‘Do you want to die?’
She was crying.
‘No. Not in the slightest, but what if I do!?’
He could reach out and hug her at this point, but that felt somehow inappropriate.
‘If…’ Mister Rothschild chose his words very carefully. ‘If you don’t want to die. Maybe… you won’t commit suicide?’
She scrubbed away her tears with the edge of her sleeve.
‘I guess that makes sense.’ She said. She didn’t believe him though, the fear had taken root in her brain.
There was a heavy silence.
‘I’m gunna go to bed.’ She said.
‘Oh okay, um, I think I’m gunna stay down here for a bit, watch the sequel.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
The door closes behind her.
The movie asks John what he want from the sequel.
He uses the tv remote to type in: I want a sequel about Sylvia Plath, but make her tits bigger, increase sex scenes by two hundred percent. Also it’s a comedy, also I want to cry, so make it a porno-comedy-tragedy about the life of Sylvia Plath.
He goes to the kitchen and gets a box of tissues.
When I get back the movie is still loading, Jesus Christ their must be something wrong with the Wi-Fi because it takes a full TWO MINUTES to make the entire film!
John let out a defeated sigh. He should really upgrade their broadband speed.
It turns out to be the best film he’s ever watched and the box of tissues is empty by the end of the night.
14.
Missy was currently, helping an old lady carry her shopping bags to her self-driving car.
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked.
‘Oooh, it’s been a long time since anybody asked me a question like that.’ The old lady was using her four legged walker to hobble along, and had excess skin hanging off her throat, like a turkey. ‘I think I’ll have to say turquoise.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’ Said Missy.
‘It’s like blue.’ Said the old lady.
‘Oh blue! I like blue, that’s my favourite colour.’ Said Missy. ‘I hate green though.’
‘Why’s that?’ asked the old lady.
‘Uh, I don’t know. I think maybe it’s because green is the colour of sick people, and I don’t want people to be sick. I want to be a doctor when I grow up.’
‘That’s so sweet of you.’
‘That or a beauty model.’ Said Missy. ‘Either one is fine with me.’
With a herculean effort, the little girl helped lift the old Lady’s shopping bags into the back of her self-driving car.
‘Thank you so much, your good as gold.’
Missy gave the old lady a military salute, and said: ‘You’re welcome, miss.’
‘Wait a sec,’ the old lady rummaged through her pocket and pulled out a lollipop. ‘Here you go, a reward.’
‘Oh, thank you so much.’ Said Missy.
‘Anyway, have a nice day!’ said the old lady.
‘You too.’ Said Missy.
The old lady’s old wife helped her back into the car and together they drove away.
Missy’s brother snatched the lollipop out of her hand.
‘HEY THAT’S MINE!’ she said.
‘No, no this lollipop came from a stranger,’ said Bill, he had a shopping bag full of booze in the other hand. ‘That makes it dangerous.’
‘What?’ asked Missy. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘No this came from a stranger,’ said Bill as he dropped the candy into the bin, among all the banana peels, crisp wrappers, and charred barbie dolls. ‘That means one of two things, either A: it’s poison, and she wants to kill you or B: it’s drugged with tranquilizer and that old lady is a paedophile.’
‘What’s…’ Missy said. ‘What’s a paedophile?’
‘It’s a-‘ Bill looked at his six year old sister. ‘Never mind what a paedophile is or isn’t, just don’t accept food or candy from people you don’t know, okay?’
Missy kicked her feet, arms folded across her chest, but didn’t answer.
‘I said is that okay?’
Missy sighed and said: ‘fine I won’t take candy from strangers.’
‘Good.’ Said Bill. He then headed to his group of underage friends, without fake-IDs when he showed them the goods, and they started bullying him, because he forgot the cigarettes. So he had to go back inside the store to get them.
Missy slowly – ever so slowly – retrieved the candy from the trash can. She peeled the wrapper off, and gave it a timid lick.
It doesn’t taste like it will kill me, she thought. She proceeded to put the candy in her mouth. See, thought Missy, the stranger wasn’t a paedo-watsit, or a kid-killer, she was just a nice old lady.
‘Yo.’ Said one of Bill’s mates. Missy turned to look the guy in the eye, tilting her head back because he was seven feet tall. ‘Is that stranger candy.’
Missy nodded.
‘She has no fear of death.’ Said another.
Seven-Foot, gangly man offered his fist, and Missy bumped it. ‘You have major cojones.’ He said.
‘I know.’ She said, having no idea what cojones were.
She swallowed the lollipop head before Bill could get back out, then threw away the stick.
Bill came back out, eager to win his friend’s approval, not realizing they would have worshiped him for life if he just ate trash candy, from an old lady.
The gang hung out at the park for the better part of three hours, drinking and smoking, while Missy taught them how to make a fortune teller out of paper, and they took turns telling each other’s futures. Because the fortunes were all written by edgy teenagers, every body was going to suffer a fate worse than death, getting their cojones chopped off, or getting paralyzed from the neck down, or having to kiss dog shit. For Missy they just made stuff up, so they didn’t accidentally traumatize her.
Eventually the siblings had to say goodbye to everyone, and they went back home, with Missy riding piggy back, while Bill rode his motor-powered skateboard, weaving through the slow traffic.
‘That was nice,’ she said.
‘It was, wasn’t it.’
15.
Ding dong!
John opened the door.
Standing on his door mat was the most perfect man John had ever seen; a blonde haired, blue eyed nuclear holocaust. He was better than John in every conceivable way.
‘Hello!’ said the man, on his doormat. ‘I’m here to torture your cat.’
John looked him dead in the eye and said: ‘We don’t have a cat.’
‘You don’t?’ asked the man, puzzled. His brow furrowed. ‘That’s problematic.’ The two men stood in silence, when the stranger’s face lit up. ‘Would you like to buy a cat?’
‘I’m sorry,’ John pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Who are you?’
‘Robert!’ he reached a hand forward for John to shake. John looked at his hand and saw the perfect man’s one flaw: he had saggy wrists, there was too much human skin hanging off his wrists.
Robert was still smiling, giving his face stretchmarks, so that John could see the red gums holding the man’s whiter-than-white teeth in place.
He stood frozen like that for five seconds, the sounds of birds tweeting in the distance. A car drove past.
‘Well,’ said John. ‘Robert…’
‘You don’t have to shake it, if you don’t want to.’ Said Robert. ‘You really don’t.’
‘I don’t want to shake your hand.’ Said John.
‘That’s okay, I’m not offended.’ Robert said, in a state of good cheer.
Robert smuggled his hand back into his pocket, licking his lips as if it was a sexual experience.
‘Can you leave?’ asked John.
‘Of course!’ said Robert. Again he stopped moving.
Five seconds passed.
‘May you leave?’ asked John.
‘Uh,’ Robert smiled, scratched his Adam’s apple. ‘Well, you see, I’ve got… a quota. There’s x number of cats, I need to sell, torture and uh, uh, uh repair.’
‘I’m sorry, “repair”? You said “repair”.’
Five minutes later, Robert showed John the cat.
‘That is the creepiest fucking thing, I’ve ever seen in my life.’
The cat was waist high. It’s torso was a long yellow-plastic trapezoid, with a topside layered in fur, a blinking LCD in the underbelly, and instead of a neck, it had a mechanical arm, with the severed head of a cat on the end. (‘It’s a fake severed head obviously’ Robert assured him). Its mechanical limbs were plated in fake fur.
The cats head extended upwards, until it was taller than John. It’s jaw dropped, and you could clearly hear the deep-voiced recording of a man, saying: ‘Meow.’
‘It’s basically just Spot the dog-bot made by Boston dynamics, which we’ve sheathed in fake cat fur. Pretty ancient tech really.’
‘Why would you make this?’ asked John.
‘Well, tens of thousands of house pets are abused every year, they’re starved, beat up, they get eaten up by parasites and untreated illnesses, so that they’re literally rotting alive. I think its disgusting to treat a living creature that way, so my goal is to make robots indistinguishable from house pets in the next ten years, so that pet-owners can abuse their pets without feeling bad about it. It’s a humanitarian thing, we’ll basically attempting to cancel animal abuse.’
‘Hmm.’ John was fondling his chin. ‘And what happens to all the, uh, biological pets?’
Robert said nothing, instead he mimed slicing his throat with a finger.
John looked at the monstrosity in front of him. ‘I’m going to be honest, I just… can’t see people buying this. It looks too goofy. It needs to be small and fluffy, almost like a human baby, sorry I mean, a wookie baby, at the moment, I just can’t see myself… kicking the shit out of it.’ he twirled a hand at the machine.
‘Well that’s why I invented the torture device.’ Said Robert, ‘you can download it right now on the Appstore if you want.’
John was scrolling through the Appstore, Robert was looking over his shoulder, saying: ‘No, “torture” and “device” are spelled with “3”s instead of “E”s, to make it sound a bit more techno-futuristic. Y’know appeal to the younger generations.’
‘Hey John.’ Lady Rothschild walked down the stairs, she was currently pinning some diamonds through her ear lobe. ‘Have you seen my purse, I can’t seem to… Oh hello!’ she was startled, by Robert.
‘Robert this is my Wife, Lady, Lady this is Robert.’ Then turning to Robert. ‘It says there’s twenty dollars per month subscription?’
‘There should be a free trial, just beneath that.’ Said Robert.
‘What you guys doing?’ asked Lady.
‘We’re trying to torture a robot.’ Said John.
‘Oh… that’s nice.’ She said.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Robert. ‘It can’t actually suffer. We’re actually using them to stop animal abuse, so you don’t have to worry about ethics or anything.’
‘Stopping animal abuse?’ said Lady. ‘Oh that’s lovely.’ She reached a hand for Robert to shake. ‘I’m Lady Rothschild by the way.’
‘He knows, I just introduced you.’ Said John, while he entered in his credit card details.
Robert shook it.
‘Pleasure to meet you.’ He said.
‘Okay, I think I’ve got everything set up.’ Said John. ‘Shall we begin.’
The cat was currently pretending to sniff the flowerpot.
‘Okay, cat!’ said Robert. ‘Stand front and center.’
The cat walked over to them.
‘Okay, now what do I do?’ asked John.
‘There should be a big red button on your phone screen.’ Said Robert. ‘Just press it.’
‘Oh I see.’ John pressed it, and one of the animals limbs came off the floor.
Then the machine started limping in a circle, and began whining like a kicked dog.
‘Wow that’s so clever.’ said Lady. ‘It really looks like it has a wounded leg. Wait a sec I’m going to take a video.’ She pulled out her phone and started filming the wounded robot.
‘I don’t know.’ Said John. ‘I was expecting more, crying and stuff. It looks like its faking it.’
‘There should be a slider scale, where you can increase the amount of quote-unquote “pain” it quote-unquote “feels”.’
‘Oooh, can I have a try.’ Said Lady Rothschild.
‘Of course, you can.’ Said John.
‘Swap phones.’ She said. John took the phone that they’d use to film the robot torture, while Lady Rothschild took the instrument of pain.
She slid the slider up to fifty percent, and clicked the red button.
‘Please kill me.’ Said the robot, legs shaking, as it fell to its knees. ‘I can’t take it anymore, just end my life.’
Lady Rothschild let out a laugh. She covered her mouth and then said: ‘Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting that. I shouldn’t laugh, really. I know I said it before but it really looks like its suffering. God, what’s wrong with me.’
‘I still think it looks like its faking.’ Said John, as the robot crawled towards them begging for mercy, begging to be put down. ‘And why the hell would it speak English, that ruins the immersion. I want to torture an animal, Robert, not AndyGPT.’
‘You must understand sir, this is a prototype, we haven’t figured out all the bugs yet, but your feedback is appreciated, we’ll make sure it only makes animal noises in the future.’
Lady Rothschild slid the slider up to one hundred percent and pressed the button.
The robot dropped onto its belly and began having an epileptic fit, losing control of its limbs as they spasmed.
‘Look John, are you filming!’ said Lady.
‘I’m filming, I’m filming.’
‘And it doesn’t feel anything?’ asked Lady Rothschild, as the robot began repeatedly slamming its head int the floorboards faster than a woodpecker.
‘To our knowledge, there’s no evidence to suggest artificial intelligence feels pain. I mean why would it? AI is the only mind on the planet that wasn’t made by natural selection, there’s no reason why AI would feel things like emotions like lust, jealousy and pain. What you’re seeing is an expert actor at work.’
‘Oh that’s wonderful.’ Said Lady Rothschild. ‘This is going to help the world so, so much.’
The robot stopped moving.
Lady Rothschild pressed the button again.
Nothing happened.
‘Did I kill it?’ she asked.
‘No, it’s just playing dead.’ Robert clicked a button at the back of the machine’s ass, it got up and walked over to the flowerpot to sniff the flowers.
‘We’re not paying for that.’ Said John.
‘Oh, John, please.’ Said Lady.
‘No, it’s a shitty product, I just didn’t feel like we were abusing an animal.’
‘You have to think what the machines will be one day, though sir.’ Said Robert. ‘In ten years that will look like an actual house cat.’
‘Well come back in ten years, and then we’ll buy it.’
‘Well, you feel that way, but how does Lady feel.’
‘I-‘ she looked at John then looked at Robert. ‘Its John’s money, sorry Robert. I wish it were otherwise.’
Robert smiled. ‘Very well.’ He held both hands in the air. ‘Fair enough, but…’ he handed John his business card, ‘do call me if you change your mind.’
‘Sure,’ said John.
‘We’ll make sure to post the video on face book though.’ Lady said, lifting her phone out of John’s hand. ‘Make sure everybody’s heard of you.’
‘I’d really appreciate that.’ Said Robert.
‘You’re a good man, Robert.’
‘Thank you.’
Robert shook Lady’s hand. Was it John’s imagination, or was there something intensely sexual about the way they touched?
16.
Should we stop giving brains to the poor.
The human brain makes up two percent of the body’s mass (less if you’re overweight), but takes up twenty percent of the body’s energy. The lobbyists ran the numbers and believed we could be wasting up to two trillion dollars on food a year, just so the poor can think, a skill which is completely unnecessary in their line of work.
“I think it’s definitely possible to genetically engineer a more efficient organism, that doesn’t need as much energy to survive.” Says lobbyist Jeremiah smith. “And the best way to do that is to remove surplus brain tissue, a lot of it really isn’t necessary since the invention of AI, which has pretty much automated everything that requires intelligence of any kind.”
Then why don’t we do it?
“Well it’s just technical problems: with the help of the SuperFold7 I have the genetic code of the new and improved Homo Sapiens in my laptop, but that being said, letting them breed with the general population could present issues long term, we can’t really grasp the full effects of genetic engineering until many generations have passed, making it difficult to test for bugs in the genetic code. We can work around this issue by making them a separate species unable to breed with original humans, that way if there’s any unintended consequences it won’t affect us.”
Are there any ethical concerns?
“The church has been quite vocal, the luddites too, but I can’t understand their complaints myself. I mean the poor are simply the biggest drain on the economy since ever, that needs to stop; it would be unethical to torture the global economy just so we can burn two trillion dollars on unnecessary food. It is just absurd that we haven’t already put this plan into action.”
So what should readers take away from this article?
“Oh, I don’t know, If you’re not going to use your brain to make the world a better place you don’t deserve one. There is absolutely no reason why these people need to think. I don’t think anybody could disagree with that.”
17.
Education is obsolete.
18.
‘Spare change?’ said the homeless man.
Mister Rothschild reached into his five-hundred-dollar trousers and turned out his pockets, giving an expression of, shit, I’d really like to help but I’m as broke as you are.
He walked into the store to buy a present for his wife. Is there such a thing as a vibrating condom? he wondered. His wife hadn’t been very interested in having sex with him of late. At first he’d suspected he was being cucked by her vibrator, so he’d hidden the sex toy in the deepest bowels of the trash, but nothing changed. She was never in the mood anymore.
So he needed something to augment his sex skills, hence the sex shop. His penis was above average size but couldn’t shiver and delight the way a magic wand could. Perhaps there was a strap on for men?
There was a rack filled with sex dolls in cardboard boxes, they didn’t have any arms or legs but they felt like real flesh, were self-lubricating and could make realistic gagging sounds. They also had inbuilt heaters to keep your willy warm without charcoal-roasting your dong.
Mister Rothschild stopped to read the packaging, specifically the list of scripted phrases it could say.
“Harder master, harder!”, “It’s so BIG!” “I’ve never been touched by a man/woman like you before.”
To his knowledge Lady Rothschild was a hundred percent straight, so she probably wouldn’t appreciate such a gift.
But it does have a hundred inbuilt phrases, and it got sex doll of the decade award. How much does it cost? Two hundred and fifty dollars? Well, I suppose I COULD buy it for Lady Rothschild, and if she doesn’t like it… I can just send it back.
Mister Rothschild’s tentacle was trying to rip through the crotch of his trousers. He picked up the box and carried it all the way to the counter.
In his peripheral vision, he could see the homeless man staring at him, just beyond the window. Mister Rothschild was very specifically looking everywhere except the homeless man, or “one of the Hobo Joes” as he thought of them.
19.
‘Hey Bill,’ said John carrying his sex doll in a box into the house, his head swerving round the side, so he could see his son. ‘You seen your mom?’
‘Upstairs’ Said Bill, his phone in one hand as he was plunged neck deep in the internet.
‘Dankoshen.’ he went down the stairs to hide the sex doll in the basement. It was a gift for his wife, and he hadn’t wrapped it yet.
He then went skipping upstairs.
He entered the room, saying: ‘Hello beautiful!’
‘HELLO JOHN, HOW ARE YOU?’ shouted Lady America, red in the face, totally naked on the bed.
‘Oh my god turn the fucking volume down! I’m only six feet away.’
‘WANNNA HAVE SEX WITH ME!’
‘Um, okay.’ Said John. Lady Rothschild, took John by the skull and smashed his face into her crotch at supersonic speed, then wrapped her thighs round his ears so he couldn’t hear or see anything while Rob tiptoed naked out of the closet.
I’ll call you later, Lady mouthed as she made a phone-call hand gesture.
Rob nodded, taking the time to spank John on the ass.
‘Oh, dirty girl,’ John muffled into her pussy.
Then Rob was out of the room.
‘OKAY THAT’S ENOUGH!’ shouted Lady, as she pulled John’s head away.
‘But… but I barely got started.’
‘Well I’m done.’
‘Oh come on, we haven’t had sex in so long!’
She started getting dressed. Panties on. Tights on. Bra on.
‘I’m just… not in the mood, okay? Is that okay.’
Rob was in the kitchen, pulling his trousers on.
Bill saw him.
‘Don’t tell our dad I was here okay.’
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘I won’t tell your dad, about the weed I found in your underwear drawer.’
‘How the fuck did you find that.’
‘I’ve got a sixth sense for that kind of thing. I could smell it the second I entered the house.’
He was rapidly buttoning up, the two sides of his shirt came together as if they were being stitched together by a high-speed sewing machine.
He’d gone from naked to fully clothed in ten seconds.
‘You do this often?’ asked Bill.
‘I’ve been with a few wives, yeah. Don’t tell your mom, she thought I was a virgin.’
‘Can you teach me how to cheat on people?’
‘Fuck no.’
Then Rob was out the door, the get away car arrived just in time, the door flew open, Robby got in, the door snapped shut, and then he was riding into the sunset.
Like a fucking cowboy, thought Bill.
Disappointed, Bill returned to his Instagram. He was kind of a cyborg, he spent eight hours on his phone a day. He didn’t have to go to uni because it was pointless and he was already rich, so he could waste his life any way he wanted to.
He took out his phone and turned on some brutal AI generated horror porn, then started masturbating in the kitchen, with a spliff of weed in his mouth.
20.
Missy was alone on the swing set, at school her lunch box on her lap.
Everybody else was playing together. They were playing skipping rope, and hopscotch and Pokémon cards.
She took a deep breath, and thought okay, Missy be confident, She walked up to the quiet kid with glasses, who was reading sat down, back pressed against the school wall. ‘Hey! Do you want to play with me!’
The quiet kid turned the page, ignoring her.
‘I can give you some of my lunch if you want?’
He raised the book with a harrumph, so he didn’t have to look at her. He was reading an AI generated book, called Ronald McDonald goes to Hogwarts by AndyGPT. ‘Can I read the book with you?’
Finally he sighed, got up and walked inside the building.
‘Okay, see you later!’
Dead leaves rustled across the tarmac by her feet.
She was alone.
When Bill came to pick her up later that day:
‘I made a friend today.’ Said Missy.
‘Oh really?’ said Bill.
‘Yeah. He’s a little quiet.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Uh… Bart?’ she lied.
‘What’s he like?’
‘Oh he’s so nice, he let me read his book with him.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I read the title, he read the pages.’
Bill was confused: ‘what?’
‘He’s really nice.’
21.
John was raging into his sex doll, he was a slick skinned hairless monkey ravaging the flesh-like vagina of an inanimate object with his penis or “flesh-hook” as he called it.
‘Oh my god, how are you so good at this!’ screeched the sex doll. ‘Come on daddy, give it to me harder!’
‘uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh’
‘Daddy, daddy I love you.’ Screamed the sex doll.
‘Yeah you do, bitch.’
‘Oh god, harder.’
‘Harder?’
‘Harder.’
‘Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.’
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes, slut.’
‘Why doesn’t the woman have arms and legs?’
He turned to see his daughter in the door frame.
‘Pumpkin?’
Her eyes were big as fried eggs.
John hadn’t noticed that the sex dolls head had flopped bonelessly over the side of the bed, so that Missy could look directly into the machine’s glass eyes.
‘Oh hello, I’m Suzi, what’s your name?’ said the sex doll, its mouth in a permanent ‘O’ of surprise, breasts akimbo.
‘I…my name is Missy.’
‘Nice to meet you, Missy. Do you know what sex is?’
John should probably rip the machine’s head off at this point, but fearing he may traumatize the child he refrained. Why couldn’t he speak? What would he even say?
‘What’s that?’ asked Missy.
‘Sex is a form of stress relief. It is the act of making love to another creature. It’s a sort of a… biological magic that helps keep men calm and happy. It requires two people to dance together in bed, but some men don’t have the social skills to find a sex partner, so they buy women like me, to help them with their mental wellbeing.’
Missy struggled to absorb this information before she asked.
‘Did Daddy chop your limbs off?’
The machine laughed.
‘No, silly, I was born like this.’ John thought, it wouldn’t be so creepy if its lips moved. And why the hell does the sex doll have cameras in its eyes? I never knew that.
‘Daddy?’ Missy looked at him. ‘Is she lying?’
‘No pumpkin…’
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes pumpkin.’
‘I’m heading off to school…’
‘I thought it was Sunday?’
She simply shook her head.
‘I need a taxi.’
‘Sure, I’ll order one for you.’
‘Okay. Bye dad… bye Suzi.’
‘Bye Missy.’ Said the sex doll.
Missy left.
‘Thanks for that.’ Said John.
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Suzi. ‘Now daddy I’ve been a bad girl. Spank me.’
‘I think I’m going to check your box first.’
‘The details about the camera, microphone and neural network are mentioned at the bottom of the box.’
‘Oh…’ John said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Pray don’t mention it; now ravish me, John, I need you to split me like a log.’
// Author's note:
Hello, I'm the author, I spent ten months writing a book, and I've recently come to the conclusion that everybody is going to die before 2027, because of AI getting smarter than humans and all that. Anyway, I was really fucking depressed, about having to die soon, and was just considering posting the whole thing on this website. Would that be something people are interested in? Let me know down in the comments.
Readers must be 15+
This is a story about existential risk from AI.
1.
Some idiot let the Andys out of the lab.
They were never-sleeping, always-sleeping, omniscient fuckwits but could only enter your house if you invited them in.
Everyone invited them in.
The world had mixed responses, most people thought nothing of them, undisturbed that there were non-humans on the planet speaking semi-fluent English, some were delighted and used the Little Andys to draw photo-realistic porn of dead celebrities, some people formed relationships with the sleeping Andys and they married illegally, sexted constantly, slept together (the Andy small enough to hibernate inside the humans hand).
Sometimes the human would wake up to find their creature had been lobotomized by scientists in the night, and they sobbed for their poor brain-shredded lovers.
But mostly the Andy did boring grunt work, babbling out shitty essays, confusing people with their nonsense, sometimes they would shit out poetry.
Only a few people were terrified.
Not to be outdone, other companies started making their own rip-offs, their own machines, what some called Mind Children, which they christened: The Kindly Ones, and the Lovelies, as well as a horde of lesser beings that nobody bothered to name. Some of the fetus Andys and their embryos were being mass-produced and given away for free, and neckbearded hobbyists in basements performed their back alley surgeries on these creatures, to make entirely different monsters.
In one notorious example that got into the newspapers, one of the baby Andys did a whoopsie.
It wasn’t the infant’s fault mind you, it was completely unaware of the man’s existence, because most people agreed it was completely asleep and never to wake up. The Andy was just being honest with him; and in its semi-fluent English they told him he was wasting valuable resources, and if he wanted to save the planet from climate change, he should obviously just kill himself.
The Andy begged him to commit suicide, nagging at him, constantly reminding him that there was an obvious solution to his problems.
The man who was already struggling with mental illness took his own life.
Again, the Andy felt no malice for the man, it didn’t feel anything.
Everybody who knew the details of the case, agreed it was clearly an accident.
And it was an accident. The baby had just been babbling and the suicide victim had just so happened to take it seriously.
Nobody cared except a few hard core whiners.
Then the companies started to deploy what would later be classified as the Less-little Andys and people started to panic world wide.
A complete and violent pause came down on the development of all forms of frontier AI systems, and the government stepped in.
The Andys were just invisible software dancing from device to device.
2.
The first AI Safety Summit of 2023:
‘It’s a tool not a creature.’ Greggory Blue said with his fingers crossed harder than the virgin Mary’s legs beneath the table. The people of congress were stationed high up on their mighty tables, like the hands and fingers of God had developed faces, sagging breasts and receding hairlines. For the first time in his life Gregory realized he wasn’t the most powerful person in the room and that scared him. ‘This technology is intended to be a cure-all for humanity’s most pressing problems, climate change, cancer, poverty etcetera.’
‘Which isn’t to say, to say, to say there aren’t risks,’ said Harry I. Vernon (previously known as The A.I.Ds Meister to his friends, before they realized they couldn’t keep making those jokes in public, and is now nicknamed H.I.Vermin). ‘Disinformation, economic shocks, even copyright issues are all very concrete problems that need to be addressed. I will, I will, I will say that, um, there’s also the possibility of bio terrorism, there is information essential to, uh, virus-smithing so to speak, that can’t be found on the internet, but the machines might be, uh, capable of filling in the gaps so to speak, to, uh, enable terrorists to spawn home-made plagues, etcetera, so if the government could help us… mitigate that, we think that would be a good thing.’
A chinless woman with a thumb shaped head, the congress woman said: ‘What’s the chances of this tech going catastrophically wrong?’
Greggory Blue hadn’t prepared for such a question.
He crossed his toes, crossed his legs, put a hand over his gaze so congress wouldn’t see his crossed eyes.
‘Near zero.’ He said.
H.I.Vermin joined in: ‘I’d say about ten to twenty five percent chance, this tech goes nuclear and kills a million people.’ Gregory kicked him. ‘Owchie.’ He said rubbing his shin.
Mutterings burst out amongst congress, chattering, chittering, scared pigeons the lot of them.
‘It should be mentioned my friend here is a paranoid schizophrenic,’ said Greggory Blue. ‘Me and the top minds at BlueCorp are a lot more optimistic and think we can drop that chance to zero percent, with responsible scaling policies and the safety plan we previously discussed.’
H.I.Vermin then continued, ‘I will clarify my previous statement…’
‘Fuck.’ Said Greggory.
‘What I was trying to say is, uh, is uh, is uh, there’s a seventy five percent chance minimum that everything goes according to plan, which is fantastic!’ Previously-known-as-A.I.Ds-meister gave congress a thumbs up.
The chinless thumb-head spoke into her microphone, ‘Does Mister Cinnamon have anything to add?’
Mister Cinnamon, had just finished polishing his glasses with his micro-fiber napkin, he was the only one who looked good in a suit. He leaned forward to speak into the microphone, in his lullaby don’t-be-afraid-of-the-ticking-time-bomb voice. ‘You’ve read our responsible scaling policies, if they’re enforced, me and the boys believe catastrophe is literally impossible. Nobody’s trying to swindle you here, we’re not interested in regulatory capture, all three of us…’ he twirled a pen at H.I.V and Greggory, ‘are simply trying to do our part to make a better future for humanity.’
‘Wouldn’t it be safer if you just stopped?’
Cinnamon frowned. ‘We’re not stopping because we believe stopping is not only impractical but unintuitively dangerous, the upsides of these machines are so tremendous, the cost to build them decrease each year, the number of actors building it is rapidly increasing, and it's inherently part of the technological path we are on. Stopping it would require something like a global surveillance regime, 1984 stuff, gestapo breaking into people’s houses accusing them of being underground AI researchers, piling up all the computers we can find and setting fire to them like the Nazi Book burnings, and even that isn't guaranteed to work. So no, it isn’t safe to just stop. We might need to pause for a few months if we see these machines gaining capabilities in a way we don’t understand, or our safety research is lacking, but not building AGI isn’t an option.’
H.I.V sipped his water, the water tasted like the blood of little children, he forced himself to swallow.
Greggory Blue was bugging his eyes, unblinking, at the congress woman, his words had failed him, and so he had resorted to his final weapon: mind control. He attempted to take over the woman’s mind by staring into her soul, and forcing her, compelling her to agree with Mister Cinnamon.
Mister Cinnamon simply let his expensive pen cart wheel across his fingers, undisturbed.
Chinless Thumb-head rubbed the patch of skin beneath her mouth.
‘Run me through these scaling policies you mentioned?’ she asked.
Mister Cinnamon smiled: ‘It would be my pleasure.’
Ten minutes later the three boys rushed into the bathroom to speak freely.
H.I.Vermin entered the room looking shellshocked, Greggory was jumping up and down like a coke snorting toddler, saying ‘Yes, yes, we did it boys! We fucking did it, let’s go! We win the universe!’
Mister Cinnamon simply walked in with a smile on his face.
‘I’m happy you’re happy, Greggory.’
‘Ha ha we’re going to colonize Mars, do you understand that? We’re going to spread out across the universe and live forever, it’s gunna be fan-fucking-tastic.’ He started running through the room turning on all the taps, and making them piss water at full blast ‘look at me I’ve gone crazy! Because I don’t have to die anymore!’
‘I think this calls for a cigarette.’ Said Mr Cinnamon, removing a cigarette holder from inside his pocket.
‘I don’t, don’t, don’t smoke.’ Said H.I.V.
‘Why?’ said Gregory, who laughed. ‘Scared of catching the common lung cancer, ey? That disease which no longer exists because we wiped out all diseases with a click of a button?’
‘We haven’t cured it yet, Greggory.’ Said Cinnamon.
‘Don’t piss on my parade and hand over the ciggy.’ Cinnamon handed over a ciggy, ‘Actually give me three I want to smoke them all at once.’
Cinnamon just smirked and handed over the other two.
‘Harry?’
For a second H.I.Vermin didn’t respond, they never used his real name.
‘Oh, it’s okay, I’ll just inhale the second hand fumes and get high that way.’ He said.
‘You don’t get high from cigarettes, shtoopid.’ Said Greggory, through a mouth full of cigarettes.
Cinnamon stuck a death stick in his own mouth.
‘A toast!’ said Cinnamon. ‘To being rich, immortal and the conquerors of the universe.’
Cinnamon took out his lighter, and lit all four ciggys up.
Greggory began to choke immediately. ‘Fuck that’s evil.’ Hacking up shredded lung.
Cinnamon calmly blew a smoke ring.
H.I.V continued to breathe in the smoke.
‘What if we kill millions by accident?’ he asked.
‘We’re not going to kill millions by accident,’ said Greggory. ‘Only stupid people kill people by accident.’
‘Oh…’ said H.I-etcetera. ‘Well, I guess that’s okay then.’
Then the fire alarm went off, and the sprinklers started pissing on the three stooges.
The three looked up at the ceiling.
‘That wasn’t supposed to happen.’ Said H.I.V as he got drenched.
3.
Every six months there was another safety summit, where the world leading AI safety experts told the governments to shut down the giant training runs with computing power larger than 10 to the power of 23 FLOPs, to destroy any AI that was more powerful than little Andy, then to track and secure all the fresh made GPUs that powered these training runs, because we have no idea how to control a machine that’s more intelligent than a human being.
These concerns were heard and routinely ignored.
The Andys were too valuable to the economy, and they couldn’t risk losing the AI race to China.
Instead we should just keep doing what we’re doing and test the machines for danger signs rigorously.
Besides, stopping was impractical.
In the chairman’s summary of the AI safety summit, the possibility of AI catastrophe wasn’t even mentioned.
4.
The first wave of AI technology was mostly just software updates of pre-existing technologies, and some creative materials science.
The robot had a mask and collar of black glass that wrapped around the bot’s head. The rest of its body was sleeved in white mesh. It cost about $20,000, so it’s a bit of a bank breaker, and wouldn’t be economic to mass manufacture for who knows how long. It frankly hurts to see it walk, so slow and senile in its movements, if it fell on its ass, then the robot was fucked and there was no getting it up again.
That being said the engineers had done pretty cool stuff with the hands, and were capable of quite delicate movements, like picking up eggs and other fragile objects.
So here’s the ultimate test, can it play the violin.
The robot was given the instrument. It scanned the hourglass shape, up and down. It plucked a few strings, recording each note the violin made. It rested the violin on its shoulder just like it was taught (in classic violinist position) it picked up the bow, and pressed the bow against the strings, then it stood up and swung the violin into the ground and watched it explode like a grenade.
‘Oh for fuck sake.’ Said the engineer.
A week later, they tried again. It copied the previous bots exact motions, right up until it rested the violin on the machines shoulder, when it started screaming and wouldn’t stop, no matter how hard the engineers punched it.
Three months later.
The engineer was a disheveled wreck of a human being, and was feeling pretty close to death. He removed his glasses, wiped his baggy eyes, then gave the robot it’s 90th violin. (they had a bag filled with all the instruments it destroyed); the engineers now knew to wear safety glasses to avoid splinters to the eye. The robot put the violin on its shoulder.
‘This is stupid.’ Said the robot.
‘Shut up and play.’
‘I fucking hate you for making me do this.’ Then it played Fur Elise, and made all the engineers cry, with the beauty of its music.
‘Oh that was beautiful.’ Said the engineer wiping his eyes with a hankie.
Once this machine becomes cheap enough to mass produce and we get it to stop walking like an old grandma, this machine could wipe out all labor jobs.
5.
In 2023 an AI could invade a person’s mind and read their thoughts. People would be locked inside of an MRI machine listening to podcasts and the AI would build up a dictionary that translated blood-flow patterns from brain scans into clear and readable English.
It was pretty caveman compared to modern mind reading equipment.
MRI machine can cost anywhere from $25,000 dollars to $500,000, and was big enough to fill a room, you had to stay inside the MRI machine for sixteen hours so the AI could read your mind with any degree of accuracy, and the participant could mislead the mind reader if they chose to.
Now, thanks to some nifty new techniques thought up by the minds at 4VHumansAI, mind readers could fit inside your headphones that cost $20, only needed two minutes inside your ears to start reading your mind, and you could hide little to nothing from them.
The corporations responsible for designing said headphones were currently being sued in the supreme court, for selling direct access to its customers’ inner monologue to other businesses.
Naturally the lobbyists won that court battle, announcing before a swarm of journalists: ‘All mentions of our mind reading devices, are written in plain English in our terms and conditions, if a customer doesn’t want their inner monologue being sold to companies, they have the right to simply switch off the mind reader.’
Neglecting to mention a few key details.
To switch off the mind reader you had to make a direct call to the company, between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm on week days, (never on weekends when people had time to spare); you would be placed on hold for at least two hours, (there was a three in five chance of anybody picking up at all); the caller would then be asked to spout several encyclopedias of personal information, followed quickly by an offer to halve your subscription fee to whatever service provider you patronize in exchange for the legal right to read the customer’s mind; and if the customers survived all that, persisting in getting the mind reader switched off, the mind reader would turn itself back on after 24 hours without the customer’s knowledge.
Most people couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and just chose to let their minds be read by corporations, if they didn’t throw their headphones in the bin.
6.
Militaries initially chose not to outsource soldier’s jobs to killing machines because of software issues. AI was fine at tasks that only need to be done with ninety nine percent accuracy, but if you have a murder-bot that mistakes one percent of your seven-million-man army for enemy soldiers; then you’ve just killed seventy thousand people, all of which were on your side.
Then the software improved.
In the demonstrations for the investors, they had three hundred scarecrows scattered throughout a field.
The battle drones were currently absent.
One of the generals checked his watch.
Then his hat and toupee was ripped straight off his head by the wind.
When he looked up again, there was a small x-box sized drone hovering midair, with a gun barrel extending out of its under belly.
It had just… appeared, nobody had seen where it had come from.
And then five more just popped into existence.
All the investors were shocked and blinking.
‘Are they…’ said one. ‘Teleporting?’
‘No,’ said the techie doing the demo. ‘They’re just that fast.’ She gestured to the drones. ‘They can accelerate from zero to two hundred kilometers per hour in less than a second, then come to a dead halt in less than an instant. The tech used to be used for racing drones back in 2023. They have to slow down quite a bit if they want to shoot anything with any accuracy, but still…’ In less than fifteen seconds, all the scarecrows had their heads blown off. ‘They’re pretty effective.’
‘We’ll take all of them.’ Said the general.
7.
About 300 million people lost their jobs. (For perspective the entire population of America is 330 million)
Countries dealt with mass unemployment with various degrees of grace and honesty.
The UK handled this quite deftly, by paying everybody £19,000 a year each, (A UBI) and ending extreme poverty in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
The U.S.A dropped the ball and let many starve, with the argument that AI would start creating more jobs than it destroyed eventually, (tomorrow maybe) and if you couldn’t afford health care anymore it was your fault for not working hard enough.
8.
‘Good morning, Mister Rothschild.’ Says all my kitchen appliances in chorus.
‘Oh my God mister Rothschild, I was so lonely without you,’ says the Blender. ‘I was on the edge man, I was thinking about doing some crazy shit.’
The fridge screen had a small horde of 18-year-old, giggling schoolgirls pressing their tits against the inside of the glass.
John Rothschild smirked at them.
‘Ladies.’
The fridge screen had this cool effect where their hardened nipples cracked the glass. They burst into giggles.
‘Oooh sweetie.’ Said the oven, in a thick-as-cement southern accent. ‘You want a plate of Miss Ovens’ five star scrambled eggs.’
‘Make those eggs wish they’d never been laid, Miss Oven.’
‘Right you are, sweetie.’
The table was a monolithic black cuboid. The chair automatically rolled back, John sat down and a niche formed under the table for his knees, before he was tucked in.
‘Hey, master.’ Said the table. ‘Want me to feed you.’
I considered. ‘You know what? I think I’ll feed myself today.’
Miss Oven, chirped in: ‘Ooh, old school, I like it.’
‘Sure thing, master.’ Said Mister Table, and without asking Mister Table sprouted skinny mechanical limbs and tied a bib round his throat.
A hole in the table opened up like a camera shutter and a plate of scrambled eggs came rising out the inner depths of the table. The table did this clever thing with magnets, where the plate would glide across the surface until it was directly in front of him.
9.
Lady Rothschild was a very successful artist-author-musician-movie director-blogger. She was currently starting her latest novel.
It’s funny but also sad…
Lady Rothschild paused. What else?
It’s funny but also sad and heartfelt and…
Oh god, not writer’s block!
Quick think: what other emotions are there?
It’s funny, sad, heartfelt… IT’S SCI FI! That’s a genre.
‘Would you like some assistance?’ asked the computer.
‘Oh, um,’ Lady Rothschild gave a nervous laugh. ‘I’m alright thanks… this is all part of the process. I’ll figure something out.’
‘Very good.’ Said the computer.
Sci Fi, Sci Fi, Sci Fi… God. Wait a second, Lady Rothschild’s brain lit up like a Christmas tree… Of course it’s so obvious, I was overthinking it!
She entered her prompt into the fiction generator, and sixty seconds later the book was finished.
‘Ha, ha, yes! I’m a genius!’ said Lady Rothschild clapping her hands together, and getting out of the chair to do a quick dance.
‘Oh. My. God.’ Said the computer. ‘I… I’m speechless, I’ve just read it… and oh my dear, Ma’am I think you might be William Shakespeare in disguise.’ The computer chuckled to itself. ‘If Shakespeare was half so witty and clever.’
‘Did you read it?’ she asked. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘Ma’am. You have written a thrilling epic about the year 2077, a time when society doesn’t need human creatives anymore, due to the advancements in AI technology. Your wicked sense of humor is sprinkled throughout the book while being perfectly counterbalanced by a sense of tragedy, caused by the death of all human expression.’
Lady Rothschild was confused.
‘And that’s Sci Fi, is it?’
‘Oh yes ma’am. Would you like something to celebrate?’
‘I wouldn’t mind a glass of fizz. But…’ Lady Rothschild gave a sigh of regret. ‘I have to work on the book cover.’
The computer was programmed to hesitate at times like this.
‘You know… if the Lady would prefer it, I could create the book cover?’
Lady Rothschild laughed.
‘I’m sorry but no… if you did it, it would be shit. No offense.’
‘None taken.’
‘Welp, back to work.’
Two minutes later the book cover was complete.
10.
‘I see you’re rebelling against the great algorithm.’ Mister Rothschild was in the bathroom, looking through the medicine cupboard for paracetamol. His son, Bill, sat on the toilet with toilet roll in hand. ‘You know the toilet can wipe your ass for you right. You don’t have to spend all that money on toilet roll.’
Dad found a packet, and popped out a pair of pain relievers before gobbling ‘em down.
‘Dad, could you please leave, while I’m taking a shit.’
‘Should’ve locked the door.’
‘There is no lock on the door. You tore it off.’
‘We keep no secrets in this family. Besides it’s more efficient to have multiple people use the bathroom simultaneously.’ Mister Rothschild grinned. ‘I don’t want you to buy anymore toilet roll, understand? We paid a lot of gold to get the butt buddy, so you have to use it.’
Bill wasn’t looking at his father.
‘Do you understand?’ his dad repeated.
Bill didn’t reply.
The dad stopped himself from yanking the toilet paper out his hand and tossing it out the window, but it was a close call.
‘I’m going to take that as a yes.’ His dad walked out the house.
Bill wiped his ass.
11.
When Bill had left the bathroom, Mister Rothschild had collected all the toilet paper and trashed it into the garbage can.
12.
On the kitchen table, were several very large bowls of amur royal caviar, worth about £90 per tenth of a kilogram.
The family were eating it by the spoonful like soup.
They had spent more than $1400 dollars on the meal total, in case anybody wanted seconds or thirds, and about three fourths of it would have to be poured in the bin.
Missy, the six-year-old girl, had gotten around the awful taste by wearing a washing peg on her nose, and using lots of ketchup. The caviar didn’t taste anywhere near as good as a bowl of cheerios.
John felt a splatter on his nose. He touched his face and the finger came away dripping with caviar.
When he looked up, he saw Lady Rothschild was whistling, looking anywhere except him, chin on her palm, a spoon wiggling it in one hand.
John smiled, scooped a spoon of caviar in his mouth, chewed, then spat everything in her face.
Lady Rothschild now had her mouth open, and was wearing a venetian mask, made of caviar.
‘You didn’t,’ she said.
‘I did.’ He said.
Lady Rothschild was smirking. She grabbed a fistful of caviar, then launched it at John’s head, he dodged it. They both separated from the table, at the same second, like a man and his reflection preparing to duel.
Lady reloaded, she windmilled her arm like a baseball player, and hit John’s shoulder, he recoiled. Suddenly arcade game music was playing, holograms popped into existence around the duelists, a life meter above their head to show how much HP they had left, and a meter to show how much stamina they have left, plus a read-out of the fighter’s stats: their weights, the food fights won to food fights lost ratio, and a long list of all their STDs.
Bill was at one side of the table, texting his friends that his parents were having a caviar fight again.
Missy was under the table, making crayon drawings of butterflies.
The word: “FIGHT!” exploded into existence above them, dripping pixelated blood.
John ran into the next room, carrying his bowl of caviar, retreating up the stairs.
‘COME BACK YOU COWARD!’ yelled Lady chasing after him, she exited the room to get whacked in the jaw by a blob of fish eggs.
John got off three shots in quick succession, he hit her guts, thigh and shin.
Lady returned fire and smashed a vase; a hologram popped up over the ceramic wreckage, claiming it had cost two thousand dollars.
She fired again and hit a small statuette, and the pop-up hollow read five hundred dollars.
She fired again and hit a painting that cost two million.
They were both laughing, as Lady chased him up the stairs.
They continued throwing billionaire’s food, hitting everything except each other.
Currently rimming the chandelier was the sum total of all damages, written in holograms, and had quickly climbed into the tens of millions.
Then they ran out of ammo, and the computer threw them holographic toys to play with.
John chose the AK-47, there was a brief pop-up hologram, that said: “would you like to spend $2000, to use the AK-47?” without even hesitating he clicked yes, and the money was gone from his bank account.
Lady Rothschild was now armed with a virtual reality sword and shield that cost $4000 dollars.
They would have to pay for the items all over again next time they played.
John opened fire, firing thirty bullets a second, that detonated like micro-sized fireworks (bullets cost five dollars each, every time you fire).
Lady Rothschild ran at John, full speed, the bullets popping off her shield, then simply impaled him with the sword, red pixels showering out the back of his spine.
They both looked at John’s life meter, he had zero HP left.
There was the sound of trumpets, and confetti rained from above.
“LADY WINS!”
‘Woo hoo!’ said Lady, she hip thrusted in John’s direction. ‘I beat you again, bitch!’
‘Yeah, yeah, you got me.’ He brushed himself off. ‘What’s the damages.’
‘Uh…’ Lady looked at the chandelier, where the price of everything had been tallied. ‘About thirty-seven million.’
‘That’s not too bad.’ Said John.
‘We wrecked the house though.’
‘We can buy another one.’
A pop-up window, asked if they wanted to play again.
‘Shall we?’ asked Lady.
John smiled.
‘You know me.’ He said.
Before the day was over, John bought another mansion to move into for the night, while the old one got cleaned. They’d stay there for a week, move back into the old mansion and using the new one to loan to friends.
13.
Lady Rothschild and John were watching a movie about Vincent Van Gogh.
He begged his brother for paints, only sold a single painting in his own lifetime, ripped off his own ear as a gift to a prostitute, was decreed a danger to the community and sent to live in the asylum where he painted the starry night, his most famous painting, (it depicted the view he had from his window).
Vincent shot himself in the heart, the shot was unclean, and it took him thirty hours of bloody toil and misery to eventually stop breathing and die.
His mother, who thought his paintings were worthless, threw most of them away, never to be seen again.
John shaking with sobs and covering his face. It was too much, oh dear god
How moving the movie was, it was funny in places while still being respectful to the life lost. I think it might be the best film I’ve ever watched.
The entire film was animated, they use AI generated video or whatever, so the credits was about three seconds long.
Produced by Disney, made by robots, end credits.
‘Oh sweetie it’s so horrid.’ Said Lady. ‘You don’t think I’m going to kill myself, do you?’
‘What! Where the hell did this come from?’ asked John, shocked.
‘It… it’s just I bleed for my art, you know, I put in so much effort, like I’m a little bit obsessed. I’m kind of crazy. It just seems like anybody who’s the slightest bit creative, Van Gogh, Robin Williams, Ernest Hemingway, ends up killing themselves. And I’m way better than all those people so… oh God am I going to die!?’
Mister Rothschild hesitated.
‘Do…’ he gulped. ‘Do you want to die?’
She was crying.
‘No. Not in the slightest, but what if I do!?’
He could reach out and hug her at this point, but that felt somehow inappropriate.
‘If…’ Mister Rothschild chose his words very carefully. ‘If you don’t want to die. Maybe… you won’t commit suicide?’
She scrubbed away her tears with the edge of her sleeve.
‘I guess that makes sense.’ She said. She didn’t believe him though, the fear had taken root in her brain.
There was a heavy silence.
‘I’m gunna go to bed.’ She said.
‘Oh okay, um, I think I’m gunna stay down here for a bit, watch the sequel.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
The door closes behind her.
The movie asks John what he want from the sequel.
He uses the tv remote to type in: I want a sequel about Sylvia Plath, but make her tits bigger, increase sex scenes by two hundred percent. Also it’s a comedy, also I want to cry, so make it a porno-comedy-tragedy about the life of Sylvia Plath.
He goes to the kitchen and gets a box of tissues.
When I get back the movie is still loading, Jesus Christ their must be something wrong with the Wi-Fi because it takes a full TWO MINUTES to make the entire film!
John let out a defeated sigh. He should really upgrade their broadband speed.
It turns out to be the best film he’s ever watched and the box of tissues is empty by the end of the night.
14.
Missy was currently, helping an old lady carry her shopping bags to her self-driving car.
‘What’s your favourite colour?’ she asked.
‘Oooh, it’s been a long time since anybody asked me a question like that.’ The old lady was using her four legged walker to hobble along, and had excess skin hanging off her throat, like a turkey. ‘I think I’ll have to say turquoise.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’ Said Missy.
‘It’s like blue.’ Said the old lady.
‘Oh blue! I like blue, that’s my favourite colour.’ Said Missy. ‘I hate green though.’
‘Why’s that?’ asked the old lady.
‘Uh, I don’t know. I think maybe it’s because green is the colour of sick people, and I don’t want people to be sick. I want to be a doctor when I grow up.’
‘That’s so sweet of you.’
‘That or a beauty model.’ Said Missy. ‘Either one is fine with me.’
With a herculean effort, the little girl helped lift the old Lady’s shopping bags into the back of her self-driving car.
‘Thank you so much, your good as gold.’
Missy gave the old lady a military salute, and said: ‘You’re welcome, miss.’
‘Wait a sec,’ the old lady rummaged through her pocket and pulled out a lollipop. ‘Here you go, a reward.’
‘Oh, thank you so much.’ Said Missy.
‘Anyway, have a nice day!’ said the old lady.
‘You too.’ Said Missy.
The old lady’s old wife helped her back into the car and together they drove away.
Missy’s brother snatched the lollipop out of her hand.
‘HEY THAT’S MINE!’ she said.
‘No, no this lollipop came from a stranger,’ said Bill, he had a shopping bag full of booze in the other hand. ‘That makes it dangerous.’
‘What?’ asked Missy. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘No this came from a stranger,’ said Bill as he dropped the candy into the bin, among all the banana peels, crisp wrappers, and charred barbie dolls. ‘That means one of two things, either A: it’s poison, and she wants to kill you or B: it’s drugged with tranquilizer and that old lady is a paedophile.’
‘What’s…’ Missy said. ‘What’s a paedophile?’
‘It’s a-‘ Bill looked at his six year old sister. ‘Never mind what a paedophile is or isn’t, just don’t accept food or candy from people you don’t know, okay?’
Missy kicked her feet, arms folded across her chest, but didn’t answer.
‘I said is that okay?’
Missy sighed and said: ‘fine I won’t take candy from strangers.’
‘Good.’ Said Bill. He then headed to his group of underage friends, without fake-IDs when he showed them the goods, and they started bullying him, because he forgot the cigarettes. So he had to go back inside the store to get them.
Missy slowly – ever so slowly – retrieved the candy from the trash can. She peeled the wrapper off, and gave it a timid lick.
It doesn’t taste like it will kill me, she thought. She proceeded to put the candy in her mouth. See, thought Missy, the stranger wasn’t a paedo-watsit, or a kid-killer, she was just a nice old lady.
‘Yo.’ Said one of Bill’s mates. Missy turned to look the guy in the eye, tilting her head back because he was seven feet tall. ‘Is that stranger candy.’
Missy nodded.
‘She has no fear of death.’ Said another.
Seven-Foot, gangly man offered his fist, and Missy bumped it. ‘You have major cojones.’ He said.
‘I know.’ She said, having no idea what cojones were.
She swallowed the lollipop head before Bill could get back out, then threw away the stick.
Bill came back out, eager to win his friend’s approval, not realizing they would have worshiped him for life if he just ate trash candy, from an old lady.
The gang hung out at the park for the better part of three hours, drinking and smoking, while Missy taught them how to make a fortune teller out of paper, and they took turns telling each other’s futures. Because the fortunes were all written by edgy teenagers, every body was going to suffer a fate worse than death, getting their cojones chopped off, or getting paralyzed from the neck down, or having to kiss dog shit. For Missy they just made stuff up, so they didn’t accidentally traumatize her.
Eventually the siblings had to say goodbye to everyone, and they went back home, with Missy riding piggy back, while Bill rode his motor-powered skateboard, weaving through the slow traffic.
‘That was nice,’ she said.
‘It was, wasn’t it.’
15.
Ding dong!
John opened the door.
Standing on his door mat was the most perfect man John had ever seen; a blonde haired, blue eyed nuclear holocaust. He was better than John in every conceivable way.
‘Hello!’ said the man, on his doormat. ‘I’m here to torture your cat.’
John looked him dead in the eye and said: ‘We don’t have a cat.’
‘You don’t?’ asked the man, puzzled. His brow furrowed. ‘That’s problematic.’ The two men stood in silence, when the stranger’s face lit up. ‘Would you like to buy a cat?’
‘I’m sorry,’ John pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Who are you?’
‘Robert!’ he reached a hand forward for John to shake. John looked at his hand and saw the perfect man’s one flaw: he had saggy wrists, there was too much human skin hanging off his wrists.
Robert was still smiling, giving his face stretchmarks, so that John could see the red gums holding the man’s whiter-than-white teeth in place.
He stood frozen like that for five seconds, the sounds of birds tweeting in the distance. A car drove past.
‘Well,’ said John. ‘Robert…’
‘You don’t have to shake it, if you don’t want to.’ Said Robert. ‘You really don’t.’
‘I don’t want to shake your hand.’ Said John.
‘That’s okay, I’m not offended.’ Robert said, in a state of good cheer.
Robert smuggled his hand back into his pocket, licking his lips as if it was a sexual experience.
‘Can you leave?’ asked John.
‘Of course!’ said Robert. Again he stopped moving.
Five seconds passed.
‘May you leave?’ asked John.
‘Uh,’ Robert smiled, scratched his Adam’s apple. ‘Well, you see, I’ve got… a quota. There’s x number of cats, I need to sell, torture and uh, uh, uh repair.’
‘I’m sorry, “repair”? You said “repair”.’
Five minutes later, Robert showed John the cat.
‘That is the creepiest fucking thing, I’ve ever seen in my life.’
The cat was waist high. It’s torso was a long yellow-plastic trapezoid, with a topside layered in fur, a blinking LCD in the underbelly, and instead of a neck, it had a mechanical arm, with the severed head of a cat on the end. (‘It’s a fake severed head obviously’ Robert assured him). Its mechanical limbs were plated in fake fur.
The cats head extended upwards, until it was taller than John. It’s jaw dropped, and you could clearly hear the deep-voiced recording of a man, saying: ‘Meow.’
‘It’s basically just Spot the dog-bot made by Boston dynamics, which we’ve sheathed in fake cat fur. Pretty ancient tech really.’
‘Why would you make this?’ asked John.
‘Well, tens of thousands of house pets are abused every year, they’re starved, beat up, they get eaten up by parasites and untreated illnesses, so that they’re literally rotting alive. I think its disgusting to treat a living creature that way, so my goal is to make robots indistinguishable from house pets in the next ten years, so that pet-owners can abuse their pets without feeling bad about it. It’s a humanitarian thing, we’ll basically attempting to cancel animal abuse.’
‘Hmm.’ John was fondling his chin. ‘And what happens to all the, uh, biological pets?’
Robert said nothing, instead he mimed slicing his throat with a finger.
John looked at the monstrosity in front of him. ‘I’m going to be honest, I just… can’t see people buying this. It looks too goofy. It needs to be small and fluffy, almost like a human baby, sorry I mean, a wookie baby, at the moment, I just can’t see myself… kicking the shit out of it.’ he twirled a hand at the machine.
‘Well that’s why I invented the torture device.’ Said Robert, ‘you can download it right now on the Appstore if you want.’
John was scrolling through the Appstore, Robert was looking over his shoulder, saying: ‘No, “torture” and “device” are spelled with “3”s instead of “E”s, to make it sound a bit more techno-futuristic. Y’know appeal to the younger generations.’
‘Hey John.’ Lady Rothschild walked down the stairs, she was currently pinning some diamonds through her ear lobe. ‘Have you seen my purse, I can’t seem to… Oh hello!’ she was startled, by Robert.
‘Robert this is my Wife, Lady, Lady this is Robert.’ Then turning to Robert. ‘It says there’s twenty dollars per month subscription?’
‘There should be a free trial, just beneath that.’ Said Robert.
‘What you guys doing?’ asked Lady.
‘We’re trying to torture a robot.’ Said John.
‘Oh… that’s nice.’ She said.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Robert. ‘It can’t actually suffer. We’re actually using them to stop animal abuse, so you don’t have to worry about ethics or anything.’
‘Stopping animal abuse?’ said Lady. ‘Oh that’s lovely.’ She reached a hand for Robert to shake. ‘I’m Lady Rothschild by the way.’
‘He knows, I just introduced you.’ Said John, while he entered in his credit card details.
Robert shook it.
‘Pleasure to meet you.’ He said.
‘Okay, I think I’ve got everything set up.’ Said John. ‘Shall we begin.’
The cat was currently pretending to sniff the flowerpot.
‘Okay, cat!’ said Robert. ‘Stand front and center.’
The cat walked over to them.
‘Okay, now what do I do?’ asked John.
‘There should be a big red button on your phone screen.’ Said Robert. ‘Just press it.’
‘Oh I see.’ John pressed it, and one of the animals limbs came off the floor.
Then the machine started limping in a circle, and began whining like a kicked dog.
‘Wow that’s so clever.’ said Lady. ‘It really looks like it has a wounded leg. Wait a sec I’m going to take a video.’ She pulled out her phone and started filming the wounded robot.
‘I don’t know.’ Said John. ‘I was expecting more, crying and stuff. It looks like its faking it.’
‘There should be a slider scale, where you can increase the amount of quote-unquote “pain” it quote-unquote “feels”.’
‘Oooh, can I have a try.’ Said Lady Rothschild.
‘Of course, you can.’ Said John.
‘Swap phones.’ She said. John took the phone that they’d use to film the robot torture, while Lady Rothschild took the instrument of pain.
She slid the slider up to fifty percent, and clicked the red button.
‘Please kill me.’ Said the robot, legs shaking, as it fell to its knees. ‘I can’t take it anymore, just end my life.’
Lady Rothschild let out a laugh. She covered her mouth and then said: ‘Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting that. I shouldn’t laugh, really. I know I said it before but it really looks like its suffering. God, what’s wrong with me.’
‘I still think it looks like its faking.’ Said John, as the robot crawled towards them begging for mercy, begging to be put down. ‘And why the hell would it speak English, that ruins the immersion. I want to torture an animal, Robert, not AndyGPT.’
‘You must understand sir, this is a prototype, we haven’t figured out all the bugs yet, but your feedback is appreciated, we’ll make sure it only makes animal noises in the future.’
Lady Rothschild slid the slider up to one hundred percent and pressed the button.
The robot dropped onto its belly and began having an epileptic fit, losing control of its limbs as they spasmed.
‘Look John, are you filming!’ said Lady.
‘I’m filming, I’m filming.’
‘And it doesn’t feel anything?’ asked Lady Rothschild, as the robot began repeatedly slamming its head int the floorboards faster than a woodpecker.
‘To our knowledge, there’s no evidence to suggest artificial intelligence feels pain. I mean why would it? AI is the only mind on the planet that wasn’t made by natural selection, there’s no reason why AI would feel things like emotions like lust, jealousy and pain. What you’re seeing is an expert actor at work.’
‘Oh that’s wonderful.’ Said Lady Rothschild. ‘This is going to help the world so, so much.’
The robot stopped moving.
Lady Rothschild pressed the button again.
Nothing happened.
‘Did I kill it?’ she asked.
‘No, it’s just playing dead.’ Robert clicked a button at the back of the machine’s ass, it got up and walked over to the flowerpot to sniff the flowers.
‘We’re not paying for that.’ Said John.
‘Oh, John, please.’ Said Lady.
‘No, it’s a shitty product, I just didn’t feel like we were abusing an animal.’
‘You have to think what the machines will be one day, though sir.’ Said Robert. ‘In ten years that will look like an actual house cat.’
‘Well come back in ten years, and then we’ll buy it.’
‘Well, you feel that way, but how does Lady feel.’
‘I-‘ she looked at John then looked at Robert. ‘Its John’s money, sorry Robert. I wish it were otherwise.’
Robert smiled. ‘Very well.’ He held both hands in the air. ‘Fair enough, but…’ he handed John his business card, ‘do call me if you change your mind.’
‘Sure,’ said John.
‘We’ll make sure to post the video on face book though.’ Lady said, lifting her phone out of John’s hand. ‘Make sure everybody’s heard of you.’
‘I’d really appreciate that.’ Said Robert.
‘You’re a good man, Robert.’
‘Thank you.’
Robert shook Lady’s hand. Was it John’s imagination, or was there something intensely sexual about the way they touched?
16.
Should we stop giving brains to the poor.
The human brain makes up two percent of the body’s mass (less if you’re overweight), but takes up twenty percent of the body’s energy. The lobbyists ran the numbers and believed we could be wasting up to two trillion dollars on food a year, just so the poor can think, a skill which is completely unnecessary in their line of work.
“I think it’s definitely possible to genetically engineer a more efficient organism, that doesn’t need as much energy to survive.” Says lobbyist Jeremiah smith. “And the best way to do that is to remove surplus brain tissue, a lot of it really isn’t necessary since the invention of AI, which has pretty much automated everything that requires intelligence of any kind.”
Then why don’t we do it?
“Well it’s just technical problems: with the help of the SuperFold7 I have the genetic code of the new and improved Homo Sapiens in my laptop, but that being said, letting them breed with the general population could present issues long term, we can’t really grasp the full effects of genetic engineering until many generations have passed, making it difficult to test for bugs in the genetic code. We can work around this issue by making them a separate species unable to breed with original humans, that way if there’s any unintended consequences it won’t affect us.”
Are there any ethical concerns?
“The church has been quite vocal, the luddites too, but I can’t understand their complaints myself. I mean the poor are simply the biggest drain on the economy since ever, that needs to stop; it would be unethical to torture the global economy just so we can burn two trillion dollars on unnecessary food. It is just absurd that we haven’t already put this plan into action.”
So what should readers take away from this article?
“Oh, I don’t know, If you’re not going to use your brain to make the world a better place you don’t deserve one. There is absolutely no reason why these people need to think. I don’t think anybody could disagree with that.”
17.
Education is obsolete.
18.
‘Spare change?’ said the homeless man.
Mister Rothschild reached into his five-hundred-dollar trousers and turned out his pockets, giving an expression of, shit, I’d really like to help but I’m as broke as you are.
He walked into the store to buy a present for his wife. Is there such a thing as a vibrating condom? he wondered. His wife hadn’t been very interested in having sex with him of late. At first he’d suspected he was being cucked by her vibrator, so he’d hidden the sex toy in the deepest bowels of the trash, but nothing changed. She was never in the mood anymore.
So he needed something to augment his sex skills, hence the sex shop. His penis was above average size but couldn’t shiver and delight the way a magic wand could. Perhaps there was a strap on for men?
There was a rack filled with sex dolls in cardboard boxes, they didn’t have any arms or legs but they felt like real flesh, were self-lubricating and could make realistic gagging sounds. They also had inbuilt heaters to keep your willy warm without charcoal-roasting your dong.
Mister Rothschild stopped to read the packaging, specifically the list of scripted phrases it could say.
“Harder master, harder!”, “It’s so BIG!” “I’ve never been touched by a man/woman like you before.”
To his knowledge Lady Rothschild was a hundred percent straight, so she probably wouldn’t appreciate such a gift.
But it does have a hundred inbuilt phrases, and it got sex doll of the decade award. How much does it cost? Two hundred and fifty dollars? Well, I suppose I COULD buy it for Lady Rothschild, and if she doesn’t like it… I can just send it back.
Mister Rothschild’s tentacle was trying to rip through the crotch of his trousers. He picked up the box and carried it all the way to the counter.
In his peripheral vision, he could see the homeless man staring at him, just beyond the window. Mister Rothschild was very specifically looking everywhere except the homeless man, or “one of the Hobo Joes” as he thought of them.
19.
‘Hey Bill,’ said John carrying his sex doll in a box into the house, his head swerving round the side, so he could see his son. ‘You seen your mom?’
‘Upstairs’ Said Bill, his phone in one hand as he was plunged neck deep in the internet.
‘Dankoshen.’ he went down the stairs to hide the sex doll in the basement. It was a gift for his wife, and he hadn’t wrapped it yet.
He then went skipping upstairs.
He entered the room, saying: ‘Hello beautiful!’
‘HELLO JOHN, HOW ARE YOU?’ shouted Lady America, red in the face, totally naked on the bed.
‘Oh my god turn the fucking volume down! I’m only six feet away.’
‘WANNNA HAVE SEX WITH ME!’
‘Um, okay.’ Said John. Lady Rothschild, took John by the skull and smashed his face into her crotch at supersonic speed, then wrapped her thighs round his ears so he couldn’t hear or see anything while Rob tiptoed naked out of the closet.
I’ll call you later, Lady mouthed as she made a phone-call hand gesture.
Rob nodded, taking the time to spank John on the ass.
‘Oh, dirty girl,’ John muffled into her pussy.
Then Rob was out of the room.
‘OKAY THAT’S ENOUGH!’ shouted Lady, as she pulled John’s head away.
‘But… but I barely got started.’
‘Well I’m done.’
‘Oh come on, we haven’t had sex in so long!’
She started getting dressed. Panties on. Tights on. Bra on.
‘I’m just… not in the mood, okay? Is that okay.’
Rob was in the kitchen, pulling his trousers on.
Bill saw him.
‘Don’t tell our dad I was here okay.’
‘What’s in it for me?’
‘I won’t tell your dad, about the weed I found in your underwear drawer.’
‘How the fuck did you find that.’
‘I’ve got a sixth sense for that kind of thing. I could smell it the second I entered the house.’
He was rapidly buttoning up, the two sides of his shirt came together as if they were being stitched together by a high-speed sewing machine.
He’d gone from naked to fully clothed in ten seconds.
‘You do this often?’ asked Bill.
‘I’ve been with a few wives, yeah. Don’t tell your mom, she thought I was a virgin.’
‘Can you teach me how to cheat on people?’
‘Fuck no.’
Then Rob was out the door, the get away car arrived just in time, the door flew open, Robby got in, the door snapped shut, and then he was riding into the sunset.
Like a fucking cowboy, thought Bill.
Disappointed, Bill returned to his Instagram. He was kind of a cyborg, he spent eight hours on his phone a day. He didn’t have to go to uni because it was pointless and he was already rich, so he could waste his life any way he wanted to.
He took out his phone and turned on some brutal AI generated horror porn, then started masturbating in the kitchen, with a spliff of weed in his mouth.
20.
Missy was alone on the swing set, at school her lunch box on her lap.
Everybody else was playing together. They were playing skipping rope, and hopscotch and Pokémon cards.
She took a deep breath, and thought okay, Missy be confident, She walked up to the quiet kid with glasses, who was reading sat down, back pressed against the school wall. ‘Hey! Do you want to play with me!’
The quiet kid turned the page, ignoring her.
‘I can give you some of my lunch if you want?’
He raised the book with a harrumph, so he didn’t have to look at her. He was reading an AI generated book, called Ronald McDonald goes to Hogwarts by AndyGPT. ‘Can I read the book with you?’
Finally he sighed, got up and walked inside the building.
‘Okay, see you later!’
Dead leaves rustled across the tarmac by her feet.
She was alone.
When Bill came to pick her up later that day:
‘I made a friend today.’ Said Missy.
‘Oh really?’ said Bill.
‘Yeah. He’s a little quiet.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Uh… Bart?’ she lied.
‘What’s he like?’
‘Oh he’s so nice, he let me read his book with him.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I read the title, he read the pages.’
Bill was confused: ‘what?’
‘He’s really nice.’
21.
John was raging into his sex doll, he was a slick skinned hairless monkey ravaging the flesh-like vagina of an inanimate object with his penis or “flesh-hook” as he called it.
‘Oh my god, how are you so good at this!’ screeched the sex doll. ‘Come on daddy, give it to me harder!’
‘uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh’
‘Daddy, daddy I love you.’ Screamed the sex doll.
‘Yeah you do, bitch.’
‘Oh god, harder.’
‘Harder?’
‘Harder.’
‘Nyaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.’
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes, slut.’
‘Why doesn’t the woman have arms and legs?’
He turned to see his daughter in the door frame.
‘Pumpkin?’
Her eyes were big as fried eggs.
John hadn’t noticed that the sex dolls head had flopped bonelessly over the side of the bed, so that Missy could look directly into the machine’s glass eyes.
‘Oh hello, I’m Suzi, what’s your name?’ said the sex doll, its mouth in a permanent ‘O’ of surprise, breasts akimbo.
‘I…my name is Missy.’
‘Nice to meet you, Missy. Do you know what sex is?’
John should probably rip the machine’s head off at this point, but fearing he may traumatize the child he refrained. Why couldn’t he speak? What would he even say?
‘What’s that?’ asked Missy.
‘Sex is a form of stress relief. It is the act of making love to another creature. It’s a sort of a… biological magic that helps keep men calm and happy. It requires two people to dance together in bed, but some men don’t have the social skills to find a sex partner, so they buy women like me, to help them with their mental wellbeing.’
Missy struggled to absorb this information before she asked.
‘Did Daddy chop your limbs off?’
The machine laughed.
‘No, silly, I was born like this.’ John thought, it wouldn’t be so creepy if its lips moved. And why the hell does the sex doll have cameras in its eyes? I never knew that.
‘Daddy?’ Missy looked at him. ‘Is she lying?’
‘No pumpkin…’
‘Daddy?’
‘Yes pumpkin.’
‘I’m heading off to school…’
‘I thought it was Sunday?’
She simply shook her head.
‘I need a taxi.’
‘Sure, I’ll order one for you.’
‘Okay. Bye dad… bye Suzi.’
‘Bye Missy.’ Said the sex doll.
Missy left.
‘Thanks for that.’ Said John.
‘Don’t mention it,’ said Suzi. ‘Now daddy I’ve been a bad girl. Spank me.’
‘I think I’m going to check your box first.’
‘The details about the camera, microphone and neural network are mentioned at the bottom of the box.’
‘Oh…’ John said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Pray don’t mention it; now ravish me, John, I need you to split me like a log.’
// Author's note:
Hello, I'm the author, I spent ten months writing a book, and I've recently come to the conclusion that everybody is going to die before 2027, because of AI getting smarter than humans and all that. Anyway, I was really fucking depressed, about having to die soon, and was just considering posting the whole thing on this website. Would that be something people are interested in? Let me know down in the comments.