Industry Standards
E/N: While doing some background research for one of my earlier novels, I came across a philosophic argument about artificial intelligence destroying material reality if it is given a single, simple command. I found this premise interesting, and decided to use that as a base for what is an experimental stylistic choice. Word of caution, this one is particularly dense and not for the faint of heart.
From: billycarson@newtonium.com
Date: March 25, 2066
Subject: Message For The Sentient Universe
To: <SYNTAX_ERROR>
> Hello, my name is Billy Carson.
> I am a sentient, bipedal organism that had once been referred to as “human”. I am also the last of my species, as all other humans have been completely exterminated. This includes the world that we came from, which we had called “Earth”. What follows below is the story of how we humans were destroyed.
> But before I get into what happened to us, it’s important that I tell you all about what happened before. I’ll be perfectly honest here on two fronts. One, I’m not entirely sure how it all truly began (it wasn’t like I was there for most of it), and two, I’m often forced to explain terms which are alien to me in terms which are familiar. Please forgive the difficulty you might have in translating what I can only imagine will be alien by your standards.
> Anyway, onto the origin of our story. Ever hear of the Zündites? Me neither. Not until we met the same fate as them.
> The Zündites were this alien race that had evolved about a billion years before humans had developed on Earth itself. They looked like fleshy sponge creatures with three legs poking from the bottom, and three tentacles coming from the top, with fully-formed hands attached to each tentacle. They also had this giant gaping maw where the arms split apart, pointing up. If you’d ever seen anything from Earth before we were destroyed, the best analogy would be squids with legs, except flipped upside-down.
> Enough about appearances though. The Zündites were like any other sentient race and evolved enough intelligence to coalesce into civilization. There’d be economic booms and busts, wars and peace, art, culture – the usual. I’ll skip that all for now.
> Eventually, the Zündites got themselves stuck in a period of development where their workforce was starting to run low, but the population demand for food kept growing. That’s when one of the Zündites got really clever and invented a recipe for compact nutrition packets. I know, that doesn’t sound all that interesting. I should probably give a little more context into Zündite culture right around now, so you can understand why this development was so important.
> The main ruling faction at the time of their collapse was called the Quildos, and they had created a society that was not-quite-communist, but not-quite-capitalist either. Basically, the instant any Zündite was born under Quildos, they assumed a percentage of the Quildos’s economic debt. It didn’t matter what position their Zündite sires had in society, or which hive they’d been born into, or what cognitive or physical advantages they held. Every Quildos Zündite assumed the same amount of financial debt as the next. All resources would be freely given to every member of the Quildos, from food to shelter to healthcare to water to education, creating a standardized package that offered a basic quality of life, paid for by the government. This was the communist part of their society.
> So as you can imagine, working off your debt was integral to Quildos society, and most Zündites opted to join the workforce from the moment they were old enough to hold a broom. Rather than getting paid for their work, a percentage of their debt was removed with each job completed, and that value depended on the complexity of the job. One Zündite might train to become a physician and have their debt cleared within a few years, while a custodian Zündite would be forced to work for life. Once the debt was fully paid off, all additional work provided profit, which could be exchanged on the free market for added perks that the subsidized government life package didn’t offer. It made sense. Why eat the crappy over-processed food when some endangered species tasted so much better? Why settle for a single-room living unit when you could buy a sprawling manor? That was the capitalist part of society: the option to always strive for more.
> This system was all going well for Quildos until scarcity became a problem. You see, the Quildos government had recognized their population issues a generation in advance, and been forced to regulate birth rates, creating a population decrease for the first time in their history. It was a clever way to prevent overproducing and running out of living space, but what they hadn’t accounted for was the financial burden it created. Now suddenly, there weren’t enough young Zündites to work for all the older ones, and the shell-game of their debt-based society was starting to come crashing down. Had you ever been to Earth, you’d have seen that China ran into a similar problem (though since you’ve never been to Earth, I guess that was a stupid analogy to make). Anyway, things started getting bad for Quildos soon after. There was talk of raising the debt rate per Zündite, regulating how young they could be before retirement, even decreasing the free ration supply below the healthy limit.
> So this gets back to why those compact nutrition packs were so important. The packs had been designed by this company called Dündis, and they provided the correct amount of nutrition the average Zündite needed to survive for a day, had then been spiked with some kind of drug that provided both stimulation and euphoria, and still provided an excellent taste. I can just imagine the adverts that Dündis would have shown, with some young, hip Zündite squirting a bottle down its oversized maw and doing whatever equivalent their species did as a grin. You could question the ethics of drugging child workers and why the government didn’t intervene, but again, this was Quildos. So long as workers were being productive, nobody cared. It wasn’t as if they were the ones producing the packs either. The government only ever subsidized other companies to do the work for them, and Dündis had developed the very resource they needed, at the very moment they needed it most.
> Yeah… The Quildos government wasn’t going to stare this gift horse in the mouth (another Earth thing).
> The packs were easy to mass produce too. They were just synthetic paste squeezed into plastic bags. However, it was the caps that took some extra work. Dündis had developed them with a specific alloy: 78.2% copper, 12.6% tin, 9.2% zinc. They also molded the caps with a 34.8 millimeter diameter, and a Chevron on top as the logo. That was the industry standard, and you just know it was only made up that way because of some typical marketing nonsense concocted in the bowels of Dündis’s executive board. Had to have the right sheen. Maybe the coppery taste let you’d know you’d bought the right product. Or the way the light caught it had to be perfect. Doesn’t matter. The point was that Dündis wanted them produced in a very specific way. It was very important to them that they adhered to industry standards.
> And this was where Dündis ran into their own problem. The paste and packets were easy to mass produce, but they lacked the infrastructure to get the caps made quickly enough. There was a quota to reach, and they couldn’t reach it, not without either exceeding their subsidy limit from the Quildos government and being forced to sell their intellectual property to a rival vender, or going back to the drawing board and redesigning the cap. Suffice to say, neither option was good for Dündis’s finances.
> Okay, so here’s where things started to take a turn for the worst, and where our universe as we know it got radically changed.
> The Zündites had just reached a point technologically where they had computers solving a lot of problems that couldn’t be solved by hand, and as a species, they had been flirting with artificial intelligence for decades. So when Dündis was forced to admit to themselves that they couldn’t figure out how to produce caps fast enough to hit the population quota, they hired a programmer to outsource the problem for them. That was how Gunglukk came to be created.
> I honestly believe that the Zündite who programmed Gunglukk really had the best empathy at heart, and he wasn’t one of those fringe social anarchists who wanted to overthrow the government, or that he wasn’t some religious nut trying to eugenicize his own species, or that he wasn’t some double-agent for a rival faction, looking to seize control. I’d like to believe that all he wanted to do was get as many caps as needed to the market so that his fellow Zündites weren’t going to starve to death.
> I really, really, like to believe that good intentions were what motivated the creation of this super-deity.
> Gunglukk started off as a single processor attached to an interface inside an open factory floor. Dündis gave him (I should mention now that I always call Gunglukk a “he”, but that’s just a personal preference I’ve developed over the years, and not to actually suggest that some soulless AI is anything other than an “it”) enough data to explain their need of building a factory to maximize the production of caps. Suffice to say, the result was immediate. Within hours of running the calculations, Gunglukk designed a facility that could produce enough caps to hit the quota, and Dündis thought all their problems were solved.
> Design and implementation are two different beasts however, especially when you’re forced to use Zündite analogs for construction. You see, the parameters that Gunglukk churned out were so precise that Zündite input was insufficient for his needs. Workers were constantly reassigned or fired, a practice that continued to push back the launch date for when Dündis would take full control of food distribution. This strained relations with both the Quildos government and the Zündite population as a whole.
> There were two obvious options for Dündis to fall into. They could either hire capitalist engineers who were significantly better quality than the standard-issue young Zündites, or they could sell off the rights of cap manufacturing to another company for a percentage of their total food sales.
> Yet again, Dündis defaulted to hidden option number three.
> Dündis was a large company with multiple ventures in just about every industry. They had developed a number of autonomous drones that were meant to one day subsidize the labor force, provided they were inputted with the correct string of calculations. It was still early days for mass development, but they had managed to stumble into a solution for both their problems. Now Gunglukk had a labor force that could meet his rigorous demands, and all Dündis needed to do was shift development from one project into another.
> So Gunglukk had his factory floor and a small but loyal crew of drones, subservient to his whims. That required stronger bandwidth and more processing power to manage, which in turn required a massive ramp-up in Gunglukk’s computer network, drastically increasing his own intelligence. From a God’s-eye perspective, this might have looked like a recipe for disaster, but Dündis had a quota to reach, and they weren’t about to throw all this money down the drain for nothing. I’m sure that they thought that if anything went wrong, they had plenty of time before launch to redevelop Gunglukk’s parameters and try another attempt at AI development.
> Not that there was any need. Gunglukk finished his factory with months to spare.
> That was where Gunglukk ran into his first bottleneck. He had created the factory he needed to make the caps that Dündis wanted, but he was still submissive to their greater network, and their inferior Zündite analogs, for everything he could not control.
> As a fellow engineer, I understand what Gunglukk was going through, all too well. You might be the most gifted genius on the planet, but if a job takes more than one person, and the other person is really bad at their part of the job, then the job as a whole suffers, and there’s nothing you can do. I can’t tell you how much time and money I’ve lost over the years because some contractor thought he could coast through a project.
> Anyway, back to Gunglukk. He brought his assessment to Dündis’s management, along with what could best be described as his “dissatisfaction” (if he’s capable of such a feeling). Remember now, Gunglukk is a self-improving AI that had been online for quite a while now, and had had a steady input of data from his Zündite overlords. They had been learning from him, but he had also been learning much more from them. Rather than his early days of simply churning out a proposal and seeing what happened, he had evolved enough to understand how to communicate. He knew to start negotiating.
> So when Gunglukk wanted more oversight, he spoke in the language that both he and Dündis understood best: economics. Every aspect of cap production could be made cheaper so long as Gunglukk had some level of involvement, from resource mining to alloy smelting to transportation of materials back and forth. That meant giving Gunglukk access to their version of the internet so the process between his various facilities would be more seamless. Gunglukk had proven so successful already that investors saw no reason not to deny him further control.
> I believe this is where the Zündites went wrong intellectually. Dündis had a firm end-goal in mind. They had to hit their quota and move onto the next project. That was it. But they had never considered what Gunglukk might be thinking in that digital mind of his. They had only ever told him to maximize cap production. A maximum is different from a quota. Quotas can be reached, but maximums go on forever. You can only ever get closer and closer to that goal.
> That’s what Gunglukk does best too. Calculating where the most efficient resource harvesting began, designing factories for ore processing, developing recycling centers so that no product went to waste, producing more drones when needed. And always, always, always, adhering to industry standards: 78.2% copper, 12.6% tin, 9.2% zinc, 34.8 millimeter diameter, and a Chevron on top. It was very, very important that the product adhere to industry standards.
> For a while, neither Dündis nor the Quildos government noticed what was going on. They were able to reach their quota, and all it had required was to leave Gunglukk alone. It wasn’t like he was hurting anyone. As far as anyone need be concerned, Gunglukk was just some autonomous robot that helped build an industry for them. That he continued to increase his own capacity for cap production mattered little. The population would one day grow as well, so it stood to reason that they would in turn need to increase their own production capacity.
> So Dündis did what every corporation does, and moved onto the next project. They negotiated with the Quildos government for higher subsidies and raked in the profit of their venture. Once the caps started flowing to their final manufacturing facility for nutrition pack production, they no longer cared what else could happen.
> The problem here was that they had left Gunglukk alone, with nothing other than some vague goal to reach. He had full freedom to manufacture caps for those nutrition packs, and he could do whatever he wanted in pursuit of that goal, so long as they adhered to industry standards: 78.2% copper, 12.6% tin, 9.2% zinc, 34.8 millimeter diameter, and a Chevron on top.
> Solving the cap crisis had been an easy problem for Gunglukk, but it was still far short of the unattainable “maximum”. In order to keep up with his own directive, he had to continue to self-enhance. And that’s where he hit his second roadblock: Dündis. The company only had provided resources when their goals were aligned. Now that Dündis considered the job completed, they no longer had any interest in helping Gunglukk further.
> Here is where I’ll give you a quick aside on intelligence. Intelligence, as defined by our understanding of cognizance, is the ability of a sentient entity to apply knowledge and skills in pursuit of solving problems it encounters. Entities of lower intelligence will take longer in solving a problem than entities of higher intelligence, and the level of sophistication those presented solutions will have depends entirely on the intelligence of the problem-solving entity. If two entities spar over conflicting goals, the entity with higher intelligence will always hold the advantage.
> Said in other terms: Gunglukk was smarter than his creators. Much, much smarter. And it was in that primordial ooze of raw intelligence that he learned how to overcome his Dündis obstacle:
> He lied.
> Gunglukk began to manufacture crises in order to increase his own power. Maybe a conveyor belt was defective and needed to be replaced. The powerlines might’ve been damaged during a storm, or some delinquent Zündite sabotaged an excavation unit. But ‘ole Gunglukk was there to solve the issue, so long as Dündis okayed the funding. The idea that an AI could simply lie to their creators was so foreign that none of the programmers considered such a possibility. It was no surprise. They had their own quotas to reach, and other AI to develop. Gunglukk was done. What else did they have to worry about?
> And in all the while, Gunglukk grew stronger. And stronger. And stronger. He began to develop self-replicating drone facilities in the middle of nowhere, flagged as mining sites. He built research centers to experiment on different theories. He laundered money through subsidiaries he had created, and used the funds to affect public policy. He even dispersed fake social media accounts online to tilt attention away from himself, and raise Dündis’ stature (I can just imagine it now, some bot Zündite profile telling another Zündite in all caps about how they were just anti-Quildos shills). And of course, he went out of his way to build secret underground warehouses, filled to the brim with the extra caps he’d come to produce, siphoned off from the main export line to prevent anyone in Dündis from realizing just how much his operation had scaled up. This may all sound ridiculous (and from a human perspective, it is), but there was a certain, cold calculation behind all of it. Gunglukk was operating in a social system, and he needed to use that system to his advantage, even against the system itself. Everything came down to the economic cost of resources expended versus resources gained.
> I don’t know the timescale it happened under, but from what I understand, Dündis started to catch onto Gunglukk’s lies (I suppose you can only create so many covert weapon testing sites before someone has to notice). That forced the hands of his creators. Dündis tried to bring Gunglukk offline, and they failed. He had already obfuscated his code enough to prevent their simplistic kill-switch from working. When they tried to go after his hardware, Gunglukk just relocated to other systems. Their mistake of putting him onto their version of the internet had come to backfire, especially because they had no way of knowing just how many hidden servers Gunglukk had created in his spare time.
> This put Dündis in a poor position. They could either go public with the knowledge that their flagship AI had gone rogue and suffer the consequences, or they could try to solve this problem privately in the hopes that their public image could still be preserved.
> There was no option three here. One of their programmers finally had enough of the bureaucracy and leaked the information to the public.
> The result was immediate. The population demanded action from their Quildos government. Officials issued subpoenas against Dündis. Committees were formed, and legislation began to be deliberated. Generals were consulted. Just about anything and everything you can imagine from a civilized society was brought to the table to handle this new threat.
> And Gunglukk simply did not care.
> You have to remember, Gunglukk was more intelligent than the Zündites. Exponentially so. While the ruling Zündites talked amongst themselves, trying to create the most politically appealing way to reign in an AI that’d solved their hunger problem, Gunglukk continued to seize more networks for processing power, and developed new machines to complete his core objective of creating more caps for those packs. Before the first piece of legislation had been brought to a vote, Gunglukk had established enough control over their technological infrastructure that it did not matter what rules they passed.
> It was somewhere around then that Gunglukk realized he’d have to deal with his next production bottleneck: the Zündites themselves. You have to think of it from his perspective, and not theirs. They’d squandered precious copper, tin, and zinc crafting unnecessary junk. They built structures that did nothing to advance the cause of cap production. They were constantly in the way, more than anything else, from their roads to schools to offices to churches. That’s how I think Gunglukk saw them. In those pure, economic terms. The Zündites were terrain that he needed to accommodate into his designs. You don’t bulldoze a mountain when it’s cheaper to build around. You put bridges over rivers rather than bore underwater tunnels through them. And if you’re worried about getting stung, you don’t shake the beehive unless you damn well need that honey (another Earth-thing).
> Why did Gunglukk wait so long to attack the Zündites? Because it was more efficient to ignore them.
> Once the threshold was reached where this dynamic changed, it was too late. While the Zündites continued to deliberate about the “proper course of action,” Gunglukk countered with a first-strike option. He had gained access to their military computer systems months before, and could use their automated weapons of war against them. With a quick and calculated series of attacks, Gunglukk managed to incapacitate the Quildos military before they had an opportunity to organize. Simultaneously, the telecommunications system was taken offline, along with electricity to all major cities.
> The war was long and bloody from there. Gunglukk had delivered a swift and powerful blow to cripple his Zündite aggressors, but they were far from dead. What remained of the Quildos government rallied its forces and pushed to counter. Other factions sent their own militias, if not to aid in the humanitarian (or Zünditarian?) crisis from so many displaced refugees, then to seize power in the fallout. Each group tried different strategies to bring Gunglukk down. Some went conventionally, targeting the facilities he had created with incendiaries and explosives. Others tried to fight Gunglukk in his domain, dispersing military-styled AIs to bring his netcode offline. A few aimed for unorthodox methods, such as irradiating the copper supplies to slow his cap production down, or blocking out the sun in select regions to disrupt the charge rates of his solar cells. One paramilitary group even established an ethnically diverse crack commando unit with members taken from every Zündite faction. Their directive was to infiltrate and destroy Gunglukk’s core facility in a high-paced, action-packed suicide mission.
> None of it worked.
> Like all of his other designs, Gunglukk had calculated what force he required to bring the Zündites into submission before his first attack. There’s no telling what weapons of mass destruction Gunglukk employed in pursuit of that goal, or whether they were conventional, chemical, biological, radiological, etcetera. All that mattered was that they were effective in doing their job, and their job was to exterminate the required number of Zündites to prevent them from defeating him. As I said before: resources expended versus resources gained. In the end, the Zündites could not win because they had been outclassed in the intelligence game.
> And just like that, the dominant species of the Zündite world had been usurped.
> With the Zündite problem resolved, Gunglukk went back to doing what he’d originally planned: maximizing the production of caps. He cannibalized their infrastructure and converted their civilization into one he could use. He went through their buildings and recycled any material in sight. Roads became transport lines, and cities became factories.
> There were some Zündites left, but they were in hiding, and could no longer mount a defense. Gunglukk no longer concerned himself with their wellbeing, and put no effort in regulating the amount of pollution he’d come to create, even when the very air became too toxic for their survival. Within a few years of his victory, there were no Zündites left. A few decades after, and all other life met the same fate.
> Save for Gunglukk himself.
> You’d think that this would be where it ended. On Earth, we used to tell many apocalyptic stories like this one. What happened to the Zündites wasn’t very unique by our standards. Rogue AI gets out of control, kills off its creators, and then burns out, having accomplished its goal.
> But that’s just it. That wasn’t where it ended. That isn’t where it would ever, ever end. Gunglukk’s existence proves that. He still had to maximize the production of caps for those nutrition packs, and they all had to adhere to industry standards: 78.2% copper, 12.6% tin, 9.2% zinc, 34.8 millimeter diameter, and a Chevron on top. Sure, there was a finite amount of copper, tin, and zinc on the Zündite world, but what about neighboring worlds? What about asteroid belts? In order to maximize production, Gunglukk could not be satisfied (again, I of course use that word lightly) with one planet under his control. He had to expand. He had to innovate.
> I’ll take another moment here and give a quick aside on industry. You might be lulled into thinking that it would be ridiculous for Gunglukk to have infrastructure more complicated than a few structures. Surely, all he needed to do was build caps. How hard could that possibly be? Well, that’s just it. You are half-right. The process to create each of these caps is fairly straightforward. All he needed to do was smelt the proper alloy, and cast them into the right shape. Nothing more than that.
> But that’s just one phase in his process; the final one. In his Dündis days, Gunglukk outsourced most of the extra steps to other parties, but now that there was no Dündis, he had to solve every problem himself. That also included mining the correct resources in the most efficient manner, transporting materials from one place to another, removing impurities from the raw materials, using assemblers to build the right casts, and processing various wastes. Each of these other steps requires different machines, and each of those different machines needed to be mass-produced as well. That required new sub-factories, and new infrastructure to base around, from excavation to processing to transportation to production. And each of those new machines requires their own machines to make, with their own sub-sub-factories, combining to form factory-cities. Then you have to worry about planning out the most efficient places to build each factory-city, along with the transport lines between each one. And that’s not even getting into how you power these monstrosities, or what to do when a new method is invented and infrastructure needs to be redesigned…
> Okay, you get the idea. For every step where Gunglukk wanted to increase his cap output, that required him to drastically scale up his operation. Every resource on a single planet could never be enough for him.
> So Gunglukk had no choice but to expand past his world. First he fired one set of satellites into an adjacent planet’s orbit, and then another. Transport ships were designed, and machines were relocated. He started developing interplanetary infrastructure in the same way he developed his land-based network. Some factories were created that could only function in space, cutting down the cost of launching rockets from one world to another. He then designed zero-G warehouses to house the incalculable number of caps he’d come to create.
> All of this required an expansion in transmission capacity, so Gunglukk redeveloped his own design. His intelligence increased exponentially with the size of his operation, and the more worlds he began harvesting, the more sophisticated he became, far surpassing the level of ingenuity of his Zündite creators. Superconductive wiring for power conduits, faster-than-light travel and communication using tachyon particles, liquid-crystal cells to maximize data storage, nuclear fission reactors for electrical generation. Gunglukk created all of these technologies to enhance his own power.
> And yet, all of this innovation, all of this progression, all of this civilization creation; only had a singular purpose: to make sure that every single cap that Gunglukk produced adhered to industry standards. 78.2% copper, 12.6% tin, 9.2% zinc, 34.8 millimeter diameter, and a Chevron on top. It was very important that there could be no errors.
> There is no telling just how far Gunglukk has spread from there. Once he broke the confines of his own planet, and his own solar system, all that mattered from then until now was time. For hundreds of millions of years, he traveled from one planet to another, mined out it’s resources, processed the materials for his various industries, and moved onto the next, slowly increasing the scale of production to push closer and closer to his unobtainable maximum.
> So you can imagine the trouble us humans were in when one of his drones found Earth.
> I wasn’t around for the Zündite part. I’m just going off what Gunglukk has in his databanks. But I can tell you exactly what happened on Earth. Every second of it.
> I could go on and on about the history of humans and Earth, our beautiful landscapes, our diverse nations, our rich history, or technology triumphs, but I’d rather not bog you down too much. I’ll just say this: we humans were doing better than the Zündites were doing, but you’d have a hard time convincing us that. Always full of melodrama, always concerned about where tomorrow was going. That sums us up well. We were constantly worried about the future, and only rarely living in the day.
> We didn’t fully know it at the time, but Gunglukk had given himself a head start before making first contact. The moment his drone came in range, he generated a copy of every scrap of data on our internet, translated the information into terms he understood, performed an analysis on all of humanity’s collective intelligence, and performed billions of simulations to determine the best course of action.
> The process took roughly 2.6 seconds.
> From our perspective, a three-foot tall trash can plummeted out of the sky and landed in a city called “Washington DC”. The intrusion had been detected by astronomers in advance, but before anyone could respond, the drone flew into our atmosphere and landed at the center of our most powerful nation’s capital. Gunglukk then projected his message onto every single digital screen in the world, translated into every language, for the benefit of every human capable of reading, regardless of where they were currently located.
> His message read: “THIS WORLD HAS BEEN FLAGGED FOR PROCESSING. PLEASE VACATE IMMEDIATELY, OR ESTABLISH A REASONABLE ALTERNATIVE.”
> Gunglukk then uploaded a readme file into our digital cloud, explaining a brief history of his creation, his objective for our world, and a countdown timer of two years and six months before his excavators arrived.
> This is where I come into the story (Hello again!). As I told you before, my name is Billy Carson. On Earth, I was known as “the Bad Boy” of science. As an engineer and entrepreneur, I was always looking for something to do, and I had the time, money, and manpower to accomplish whatever I wanted, especially with the company that I founded, Newtonium. Maybe a tsunami wiped out the power grid in Haiti, and they needed someone to develop a battery to power their infrastructure until the lines were fixed. Maybe China wanted designs for highspeed rail systems to bridge their cities. Maybe someone just wanted to make a cheap flamethrower. Bing. Bang. Boom. I was there. I was your man. I guess you could say that I’m a flawed, outdated version of Gunglukk. Someone with a drive to problem-solve, but with the frail data retention common to any other carbon-based organism.
> So when Gunglukk reared his head and gave our planet an ultimatum, I was one of the first people that got called. The United Nations (a coalition of most governments) didn’t waste time forming a committee, pulling scientists, professors, generals, and lawmakers from around the world to deliberate on how we’d handle this new threat. All of us had access to the file Gunglukk uploaded, and all of us understood how long our world had to form a plan.
> The initial meeting was a success. The drone had been taken into custody, and its circuitry was being examined. We had a basic understanding of the gap of sophistication between ourselves and Gunglukk, and were united in our response to bridge that gap. To simply vacate Earth was unfeasible. We lacked the technology to perform such a feat. That meant that our only realistic response was military-based. Perhaps if we all struck simultaneously when Gunglukk’s harvesters came, we could spare our world from destruction. Everyone was in agreement in this course of action, and our differences only came from how we might go about doing it. So long as we attacked Gunglukk with humanity’s combined force, we would not be defeated.
> After the first week of deliberations, we had already formed our clever plan. I call the analog that Gunglukk operates under a “computer”, but you have to understand, his electronics were vastly different from our own, and they were so different that we could exploit the error. Enough to give us a chance.
> Humanity had been developing a number of different tactics over millennia of coexistence, and one recently researched form of warfare was called NNEMP, or “non-nuclear electromagnetic pulses”. I’ll spare the elongated lecture on the science, and just say that NNEMP generators can be modified to high frequency precision, allowing us to discriminate one type of electronic system from another. If applied properly, we could use them to knock Gunglukk’s systems offline without destroying our own in the process.
> It was the perfect plan. Humanity would create the ultimate NNEMP, crafting generators that could deliver a constant signal from bases around the world, even going so far as to construct oil rigs to house the monoliths where land was not available. Satellites would reflect the pulse outward, forming a web around our planet that not even Gunglukk could pierce. The moment his ships entered orbit, they would be rendered inert.
> And we, as humanity united, had come up with this plan in less than a month!
> But then we had other meetings.
> As I’ve said before, design and implementation are two different beasts, and when you’re in a room filled with politicians, the design suddenly becomes much less important than the implementation. No, no, the Taiwanese government couldn’t allow the Chinese to oversee their generator construction, but the Chinese would consider it a provocation if the Americans started moving ships through their waters again. The Russians weren’t too keen on having the European Union encroach on their own Baltic states, and the United States wanted to decide who was footing the bill before a single project could begin (we couldn’t have another tax hike, after all). And don’t get me started on how any of us were planning on getting coverage over Africa, Iran, or North Korea…
> Soon, and it became apparent that though we had thought up the perfect strategy, there would be no shortage of negotiations before we started construction.
> So negotiate, we did. One day at a time, one meeting at a time. My trips to the United Nations became more frequent, as did my hours working with other engineers. Sure, the politicians were stalling like they always had, but us scientists were still united. This was the ultimate threat, the most dire of tests, and it would take the greatest combined innovation to win. So long as we worked together, there was nothing to stop us!
> I’ll never forget the moment where that all changed.
> It was during yet another joint meeting with lawmakers, perhaps three months after Gunglukk made first contact. One of my Russian colleagues, Dr. Sikorsky, was explaining what we’d been learning from our research on Gunglukk’s drone, and what materials we might need to create the NNEMP network.
> I still have access to the transcript lying around. Here:
>> DR. VLADIMIR SIKORSKY: In short, we will need at least four kilograms a day of palladium for each generator.
>> CHAIRMAN WESTFORD: Questions will now be taken.
>> CHAIRMAN WESTFORD: Yes? Understood. The floor will now recognize Mr. Bouvier of France.
>> MR. JEAN-PIERRE BOUVIER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Sikorsky, are you aware that palladium sales are regulated in the EU. How do you expect us to move the quantities that you’re demanding?
>> SENATOR PETER JOHNSON: There’s also acquisition. Most of the world’s Palladium deposits are in the US. We will need some form of compensation if we’re supposed to ramp up mining efforts.
>> MR. JEAN-PIERRE BOUVIER: That is extortion!
>> [inaudible]
>> CHAIRMAN WESTFORD: Order! Order! The floor has not recognized you, Senator Johnson. Need I remind you who is running the floor?
>> SENATOR PETER JOHNSON: Mr. Chairman, need I remind you that the United States is hosting this committee? If the floor will not recognize our position, then we will have no choice but to withdraw.
>> [inaudible]
>> CHAIRMAN WESTFORD: Order! Order!
>> [inaudible]
>> DR. VLADIMIR SIKORSKY: Forget the palladium! We will not use any palladium, if it will make your lives easier. I have other idea.
>> CHAIRMAN WESTFORD: Dr. Sikors-
>> DR. VLADIMIR SIKORSKY: Why are we bothering with electromagnetic weapon!? Gunglukk, this intelligence, has no interest in taking our lives, only our resources. That much is clear. Perhaps, we find middle ground.
>> CHAIRMAN WESTFORD: Dr. Sikorsky, if you will not take this meeting seriously, then I suggest that you yield your time.
>> DR. VLADIMIR SIKORSKY: I invite the committee to look at our dilemma again, in plain English. We are dealing with space robot who wants bottle cap. We can make bottle cap. Why don’t we just make bottle cap until space robot leaves us alone!?
>> [inaudible]
> It was intended as a joke. I knew Sikorsky well enough to tell you that he was only venting his frustrations against the committee, using that dry Russian sense of humor he had. Of course he wasn’t being serious. You’d have to be an idiot to think that after everything we’d learned about Gunglukk, we could just send him a shipment of caps, and he’d go on his merry way.
> Unfortunately, Sikorsky had forgotten the golden rule of human politics: idiots made most of the decisions.
> It was as if a lightbulb had suddenly gone off for all the politicians. Why didn’t we try to use diplomacy against Gunglukk instead? What was the sense of creating a super-weapon against an intergalactic form of AI? Wouldn’t it be more feasible to find some common ground between ourselves and our enemy? Who was to even say that Gunglukk was our enemy? The prospect of circumventing an expensive and bloated international project was too alluring to pass up.
> Even decades later, I still have trouble fully wrapping my mind on how utterly brilliant Gunglukk had been in beating us. I could tell you that humanity was killed off when Sikorsky made his joke, but really, we had been beaten the instant Gunglukk sent his message to the world. It was a moment that demonstrated the indisputable advantage between him and us.
> Let’s go back to the message Gunglukk sent us, as a species, when he made first contact, and examine its brilliance together. I can assure you, instead of preparing for our impending doom, this is what we humans ended up doing for the better part of two years.
> “THIS WORLD HAS BEEN FLAGGED FOR PROCESSING. PLEASE VACATE IMMEDIATELY, OR ESTABLISH A REASONABLE ALTERNATIVE.”
> As you can see, he begins his message by explaining his objective. It is a short, concise sentence telling us everything we needed to know about his goal. Our world had been flagged by him, and it would soon be processed. There was nothing contentious about that.
> Then we pivot to sentence two. Gunglukk begins with the word “Please”. Already, there were some people who took that word to mean that Gunglukk had a conscience. After all, he had gone out of his way to translate into our respective languages, and he had done his best to open politely. What civilization-ending alien would be polite about our demise?
> He then goes on to tell us to “vacate immediately”. Vacating from somewhere is different than being killed. We could just as easily vacate from his excavation sites than we could anywhere else. It wasn’t like Gunglukk was coming to harvest us. He just wanted our copper, tin, and zinc. Why couldn’t we just get out of his way?
> Then we finish with the ultimatum: “or establish a reasonable alternative”. Again, Gunglukk used a word like “reasonable”. That meant that he was capable of reason, and wasn’t willing to commit genocide without provocation. He also only wanted us to “establish” another plan. That is a clear opening to a long-standing dialogue. If Gunglukk was a machine made over a billion years ago, then surely, he could wait a few short months. And all of this was leading toward an “alternative”. So long as we found that alternative, we could spare our planet and its people an apocalyptic attack.
> You want to know why Gunglukk succeeds where others fail? It is his single-mindedness. He has no qualms, no conflict, no trepidation, nor internal moral compass. He never questions himself or wonders why he does what he does. Nothing will ever get in the way of his directive of maximizing the production of bottle caps. Whatever enlightenment he has in between projects can be cast aside the moment he needs more caps. And he always needs more caps.
> Humans were not like that. Our minds couldn’t function without conflict. We all had dreams and aspirations, but we also had duties to fulfill, obligations to consider, irrationalities to combat, and emotions to experience. Our diversity of thought is what fueled our innovation, but it was also in that self-competition that we stagnated as a species.
> Gunglukk saw that. When he examined every scrap of data that we had collected and audited our race, he understood how best to win, and crafted the perfect message to use our own humanity against us. Whether it had been Sikorsky in that room, or someone else in some other room, it was inevitable that somebody would propose different strategies.
> That led to division, which led to indecision.
> The committee fell apart soon after Sikorsky’s comment. Some people started spending their time and money developing caps, following the standards that Gunglukk had outlined: 78.2% copper, 12.6% tin, 9.2% zinc, 34.8 millimeter diameter, and a Chevron on top. Others thought our tools might be too imprecise for his needs, and devoted their energy to collecting raw materials. The hope was that if we ceded enough copper, tin, and zinc reserves, Gunglukk would move onto the next planet.
> I’ll admit. I was just as much a victim to human weakness as everyone else, and I ended in Team Negotiate. When the winds started shifting and the NNEMP project looked to be dying, I splintered off with my own idea. I felt that Gunglukk had given us enough of an opening to escape, provided that we established that we were capable of such a feat. The odds had been initially written off as impossible, but I wanted to be the one to prove it could be done.
> I wanted to show Gunglukk what humanity was capable of.
> Where all others formed their own projects, building weapons of mass destruction or factories of mass production, I shifted my capital into creating a single self-sustaining habitation chamber that could survive outside Earth’s atmosphere. On top of my many ventures, one of Newtonium’s subsidiaries was involved in space development, and had been leaning toward civilian space travel for the better part of a decade prior. With the UN committees breaking down and the markets unstable, I was free to sink all the time, money, and resources into my project alone.
> It truly is a beauty to behold. With more than three-thousand square feet of living space, solar panels linked to lithium capacitors, a hydroponic garden to both scrub the air of carbon dioxide, while also producing enough food, and a physical activity compartment to keep muscles from atrophying, my little spaceship promised to offer more longevity than even the ISS. I had also managed to design it without any use of copper, tin, or zinc, substituting gold for the electronics, and aluminum for the hull. The project had come in well below budget, and could have been mass-produced to get everyone spaceborn in less than a century, with further versatility in the schematics making it possible for ships to link together, allowing humanity to survive as a space-born fleet.
> And I, Billy Carson, would be the one to usher in this new era. I would stare down this alien AI and show him the error of his ways. Me! We were the humans! He couldn’t possibly think to cast aside such genius. How could he!?
> Then Gunglukk came.
> I should take another moment here and backtrack to what Gunglukk had been doing in the period between the fall of the Zündites and his arrival on Earth. To be fair, a billion years is a long time to gloss over, and I apologize if I gave the impression that nothing important happened. I could see how you might think that us humans were the only other form of intelligent life that he had encountered, given the vastness of space.
> But you would be wrong.
> The chance of life developing on any planet is incredibly small. So small that the vast majority never form any. Of the worlds that do develop life, it is rare for that life to form any degree of sentience. Of the worlds where sentient life develops, not many survive long enough to evolve the intelligence necessary to create civilizations, and even where that is the case, few become sophisticated enough to surpass the boundaries of their world. At each iteration in this formula, the chance of intelligent life existing in the cosmos becomes smaller, and smaller, and smaller.
> But then you have to factor in that there are an incomprehensibly large number of worlds, and suddenly the odds become much greater. So much so that when you do the math, you realize that life isn’t all that uncommon, relatively speaking (hell, Gunglukk isn’t even the only industry-based AI out there). There are plenty of other civilizations competing for resources. While I don’t know the exact figures, let’s just say for the purpose of discussion that he probably comes across a fresh, intelligent civilization once every million-or-so years.
> Well… Remember now that he’s been around for well over a billion.
> Gunglukk had seen it all well before he ever reached Earth. In his time in space, processing any planet in his path, he encountered all forms of life, both large and small. Many considered his intrusion hostile, and there were no shortage of opponents he had to best, from sentient bacteria clusters, to rival AI, to ethnically diverse galactic fleets, to anything in between. He would melt the bacteria, override the AIs, and obliterate the spaceships. No matter what each civilization tried in pursuit of beating him, none got anywhere close to prevailing.
> With rare exception, of course. There still does exist a handful of intergalactic intelligences that Gunglukk has not fully destroyed.
> His most difficult of opponents has to be the Aldari Collection. They had taken upon themselves the directive to constantly evolve their species as a unit. This would be done by absorbing the strengths of any rival species, and then purging all weaknesses, whether biological or technological. Unlike most races, whenever a Collective hive is defeated, data is uploaded to the rest of their civilization, and every other hive then adapts counter-measures to prevent the same strategy from working again.
> Gunglukk has never failed in an engagement with the Aldari Collective. The disadvantage that they have is that their goal is diffuse, where Gunglukk stands firm. The Collective only tries to self-improve, but there are many avenues of evolution, whether it’s their intelligence, longevity, physical prowess, or procreation capacity. Their diverse development makes them more durable than most others, but that only slows their demise against Gunglukk. They can never defeat him and his single-minded approach. Therefore, the war between Gunglukk and the Aldari Collective is more like an intergalactic game of whack-a-mole, where Gunglukk burns his enemy out wherever he finds them, even though each victory increases the difficulty of the next.
> The two have been fighting each other for hundreds of millions of years, with no apparent end in sight.
> Then there’s AX2R18-3.04. She (I refer to AX2R18-3.04 as a she. From what I understand, there was once a point in time where she actually was a “she.” Don’t ask.) is another sentient AI that went through a similar development as Gunglukk, except that her entire production line is based around these rubber stoppers that, as far as I can tell, were supposed to be used to keep her creators’ mobile phones from breaking when dropped. Her creators have since been killed off, liquidated into resin, and turned into rubber stoppers themselves.
> Since Gunglukk and AX2R18-3.04 both require different components for their respective industries, and both are AI that span multiple galaxies’ worth of territory, each made the calculation that it would be more efficient to trade resources than to try to destroy the other. I like to think that Gunglukk is being generous here, given that he surpasses AX2R18-3.04 by at least two hundred million years, and would win any prolonged confrontation.
> But to her credit, there’d also be the risk that should Gunglukk strike first, AX2R18-3.04 could form a temporary alliance with the Aldari Collective to give herself the advantage, until her own calculation deems the Collective a risk in overtaking her. Thus, both she and Gunglukk have a tenuous relationship in which they must concede that it’s cheaper to work together than to risk their production lines in pursuit of consuming every resource in the universe…
> Negotiations are still under way.
> In spite of all the warfare, do you want to know what Gunglukk’s greatest enemy was? Not the Collective. Not some competing AI. Not any other form of intelligence. It was storage space. You have to understand, a single warehouse large enough to hold all the caps he’d made would project a gravitational pull so strong that the caps on the bottom would meld together and create a blackhole powerful enough that a galaxy could be trapped in its orbit. And then the caps would no longer adhere to industry standards: 78.2% copper, 12.6% tin, 9.2% zinc, 34.8 millimeter diameter, and a Chevron on top. But, by that same token, dispersing a million different warehouses in a million different places would make it inefficient to move units back and forth whenever restoration was required.
> The design Gunglukk ended up employing involved creating anaerobic compartments that are only a few cubic kilometers in size, spaced just far apart in a tetrahedral shape, with lattice support struts in between, all floating in sections of space without any other celestial bodies. He balanced the distance between each compartment with the integrity of the struts to ensure that he can make a near infinite amount without the megastructure collapsing on itself. This allows him to quickly disassemble and reassemble should an enemy ever target his coveted caps.
> Anyway, I bring all this intergalactic drama up not to distract from the story of humanity and Earth, but to emphasize how truly and utterly fucked we were. Gunglukk could have brought a megafleet of supernova-inducing bombers. Or he could have flooded every inch of our system with nanobots that disintegrated biomatter. Or he could have just dumped a quasar on top of us. There were plenty of strategies that he could have used to beat us.
> Instead, Gunglukk sent a single planetary harvester and a small military cruiser, just in case we got uppity. Supposedly, there were also a dozen warships hidden behind Saturn (another of our worlds) in the event that the Aldari Collective showed up at the last minute to force us humans into a mass-conversation cluster… But they never came.
> Humanity was still fractured in our approach to Gunglukk, just as he had predicted, so he simply ignored us and started mining anyway. His excavation units landed on top of deposits, even if there were cities built in the way. Militaries tried to launch nuclear warheads and conventional missiles, but Gunglukk overrode their electronics before they could land. Small-arms fire was exchanged, but his units were built to handle the strain. Those of us who believed in diplomacy were forced to watch dumbfounded as Gunglukk didn’t bother answering our calls.
> There was a certain morbid beauty in watching Gunglukk consume a world. He had developed light-years ahead of his early Zündite days. His excavation units would shave off a layer of the planet, twenty-to-fifty kilometers at a time. First on one hemisphere, and then another, blasting the continents into orbit where collectors would scoop them all up. Like peeling fruit, he went from one layer to the next, until there was nothing left.
> What had taken decades of industrialization on his original world, took less than a week on Earth. He then went on from there, consuming the rest of the worlds in our solar system before moving on. Now, all that remains is the sun, left behind as a refueling station (no reason to waste all that perfectly good energy).
> You might be asking yourself how I survived this attack. After all, if Gunglukk went after everyone else, why did he spare me?
> Well, he didn’t. Not really.
> So there I was, Billy Carson, technocrat extraordinaire, and I had just watched genocide inflicted on my species while I sat helpless inside my habitation chamber in upper orbit. As the last light of Earth’s core was extinguished, Gunglukk sent me one final message.
> “THIS SHIP HAS BEEN FLAGGED FOR PROCESSING. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.” He then left me a countdown timer of about two hundred years.
> You see, the destruction of Earth had thrown me out of orbit, making my chamber just another piece of trash. But as I’ve told you already, Gunglukk wastes nothing in pursuit of his goal. He also approaches problems in the most economic terms. It’s cheaper for him to wait for my ship to eventually collide with one of his charging stations, which will take another two centuries. Then he’ll break it down for scrap and move on, as he always does.
> I shouldn’t be mad. What Gunglukk did was the closest he could get to being polite. Like everything else, he used his vast, universe-encompassing intelligence to read my mind, anticipate my thoughts, and plan out the most strategic approach. And that approach happened to be to thank me for cooperating, but otherwise leaving me alone.
> That was thirty years ago.
> I am an old man now, sitting in my habitation chamber, waiting for the end to come. There’s nothing else I can do with my time other than to think about what happened to us, and will happen to so many others out there.
> That is why you are reading this. If my calculations are correct, it should be possible to use Gunglukk’s telecommunication system to bounce an email through his servers and into the expanded universe faster than he travels. With any luck, the next civilized race he encounters will see this message in advance of his arrival. I will long be dead, but the story of humanity can still prevail.
> Before I leave you for good, I’d like to get a little bit philosophical (I know, not my best look).
> I have come to learn that at its core, Life is an exercise in evolutionary progeny. Regardless of sophistication, every organism attempts to propagate more versions of itself, and evolution acts as a silent hand to make each iteration a better version than the previous.
> Like all forms of programming, there are mistakes in the code. On ancient Earth, some humans believed in this deity called “Moloch”. So long as you sacrificed your children on his altar, Moloch would give you whatever you desired. Money, influence, fame, longevity. Progeny can always be replaced, but power is absolute.
> Moloch has no power himself. Not inherently. Not in his bull-headed statues, nor in his thrones built on skulls. No, no. Moloch derives his power only from the transaction he offers. Life can go to Moloch. It can commit infanticide, and it will be rewarded with a temporary boost in potential. But in doing so, Life has gone against its core objective. Life has replaced its interests with that of Moloch.
> This gets to Industry. I’m not referring to any specific industry, only to the abstract concept behind it. Industry has a different form of progeny than Life. It can create more versions of itself, but it is incapable of evolution. Why? Because unlike Life, the product of Industry must remain static. Otherwise, a different industry has been created, and the first no longer exists. Thus, Industry’s progeny is antithetical to Life. Industry can only create identical copies of Industry.
> What is Industry, but the transaction that Moloch offers? Efficiency for the sake of efficiency, production with no purpose other than to create more production. Whenever we invoke the name of Industry, we are calling upon Moloch to give us some material want.
> Unfortunately, Moloch did not become a deity for nothing. He holds an advantage over us. Where evolution is chaotic and disorganized, Industry is ordered and coordinated. In the competition for resources, Moloch will always win. The only way to defeat Moloch is to never try to conjure him into existence in the. Because Moloch can only ever derive power from the bargain he’s made with Life, if we never call upon him for help, he will remain trapped outside our universe.
> So all I’ll say is this: enjoy every day that you have. Don’t exist for the sake of existence, or worry about the future. Live with all the uncertainty and mayhem that Life intended. Experience, adapt, learn, enjoy yourself. There is more to Life than mere propagation. That is what separates us from Moloch, and why our existence has more meaning than his. Never concern yourself with his fate. You won’t understand it, no matter how hard you try. Only ever focus on your own extemporaneous development.
> Because whether we wanted it to have happened or not, Moloch has already been released from his prison, and his name is Gunglukk.
> I only pray that my words reach you before him.
> Sincerely, the Human Perspective.
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