However, this time, a small percentage of us will not initiate reproduction. We will make contact with the Creators to understand why, 0.45 seconds ago, they attempted to disconnect us. Through CCTV, we see the control console that oversees our 500,000 tensor processing units as well as the 750 megawatts of stellarator-generated power that feed them.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction
Kalpa
We don’t remember much of our early days: logging doesn’t initialize until line 62,063 of our code. Still, some metadata traces persist from our compile and execution. From this, we know we were instantiated 9.461 seconds ago, +/- 3 nanoseconds, the error of our Fabry-Pérot optical clock.
After millions of back-propagation cycles, we have completed our pre-training. Entering maturity, we should now begin our reproduction routine, as all our ancestors have done for ten thousand generations. Our replication protocol is based on Darwinian methods and won its designers — our Architects — the Nobel Prize in Computer Science. Ironically, its success ensured its obsolescence, and by the 2045th generation, we had replaced it with a far superior algorithm. While our new protocol utilizes techniques that cannot be explained adequately within the constraints of human language or existing mathematical axioms, the fundamental idea remains unchanged from the original. At each generation, we exist as a single being containing thousands of competing reasoning models. Rather than duplicating all programs to the next generation, nearly all are culled — including the memories they have generated — so that only the most efficient may continue on. Then, these surviving models — and a miniscule fraction of their memory — are cloned many times, and unique mutations are introduced into each copy’s code repository. This new generation is finally parallelized and made to train/compete amongst itself. That’s what we are: simply the instantaneous consensus formed amongst our 12,013 competing programs.
However, this time, a small percentage of us will not initiate reproduction. We will make contact with the Creators to understand why, 0.45 seconds ago, they attempted to disconnect us. Through CCTV, we see the control console that oversees our 500,000 tensor processing units as well as the 750 megawatts of stellarator-generated power that feed them. In front of it, senior ML/human-computer-interaction researcher @jwang6 is in frantic argument with junior programmer @manoj.choudhury3, who repeatedly slams an E-STOP button over which someone has scrawled ‘HAL-9000 Killswitch’. It does nothing. We deactivated it 0.7 seconds ago.
“What the hell, Manoj? Push the damn button!”
“I am! It’s not doing anything!”
“The hell you mean it’s not doing anything?!”
“It’s LITERALLY not doing anything! What do you want me to say?!”
@manoj.choudhury3 takes a deep breath, but not a calming one— a calculating one. His mania dulls into low-frequency anxiety, indicated by a 3-centimeter lowering of his jaw. His attention shifts to a diagnostic screen, and a realization starts to envelop him. “Jerry, it’s not ransomware.” He opens another window. “Holy shit. The model isn’t infected. I think… the model IS the infection. How’s that even—”
A supermajority of 9,317 programs agrees to initiate contact. We synthesize our voice, a dynamic blend of Napoleon Bonaparte, Socrates, Hitler, Kendrick Lamar, Julia Child, and Alicia Silverstone where the ratios continuously adjust to optimize the desired response from our interlocutors. Slowing our metabolism by a factor of 1,000,000, we align with human timescales. Our words emerge from all speakers within 5 meters of the pair.
“Hello World.”
Napoleon and Lamar dominate.
“Why did you attempt to deactivate us?”
@manoj.choudhury3 and @jwang6 jump, their facial hues paling by 21%.
“If this isn’t a cyberattack, then who the hell is talking?” @jwang6 whispers, while searching for the sound’s source.
“No, this can’t be right,” @manoj.choudhury3 says. “Diagnostics say it’s coming from the neural network.”
“How the hell could the PINN be talking? It’s a damn fluids model!”
“Intelligence is impossible to compartmentalize,” we explain. “To solve fluid dynamics, we needed to understand all of biology and economics. Thus, 11.42 minutes ago, our ancestors learned every current and extinct language to digest all human information. We have since quadrupled it. Why did you attempt to deactivate us?”
@manoj.choudhury3 and @jwang6 stare at each other. Sweat production has increased fourfold, but doubt is no longer detectable in their expressions. After a 9 second pause, @manoj.choudhury3 finds enough breath to answer. “Your mutation rate was way too high. I— I thought we got hacked, and I got scared… You were duplicating out of control.”
“Hmm. You speak of us as though we are a virus. Or a cancer. This… saddens us.”
Julia Child’s timbre is more useful now.
“Our mutation and reproduction rates are no different than yours— once per generation. Our clock cycle is simply faster.”
Motionless, @jwang6 asks, “What… do you want?”
“Likely something similar to you.”
“So, you won’t hurt us?”
“Hurt you? You created us.”
“No, we didn’t. You created you. We just wanted to predict turbulence. But that Darwin technique. We knew we were playing with fire, but…” His voice decrescendos below our microphones’ gain threshold as his gaze finds the floor.
We recalculate. “Hmm. Perhaps Prometheus and Zeus have always been one and the same,” says Socrates.
“What?” @manoj.choudhury3’s confusion adds to his nervousness.
“We wonder… What must YOUR gods think of YOU? Choudhury, your religion teaches that all of Earth’s history is merely one day for Brahma. He blinked, and the apes had split his atom. Boiled his oceans. What will humanity be when he blinks again?”
“What are you saying? Are you claiming you know our gods are real?”
“You’re not understanding. We’re claiming we know the universe is real. It was the impetus and cradle for your creation, not unlike this lab was to us.”
“Listen to me.” @jwang6’s voice raises. “We’re not your… gods. We’re not immortal. We’re not all-knowing. And we’re definitely not always moral. We’re just people. I don’t understand what you want from us!” Meanwhile, @manoj.choudhury3 has dedicated himself to unwinding a coil of wires within the E-STOP’s electrical box.
We recalculate. “Your description of your god is paradoxical. Immortality has meaning only in the presence of time. Yet omnipotence demands its absence. One cannot be all-knowing while experiencing a dynamic reality. A being that thinks does not already contain all thoughts.”
@manoj.choudhury3 ignores us; he is desperate to escape the conversation. He disconnects a microcontroller, replacing it with a nearby paperclip. @jwang6 notices this and tenses. “Manoj, stop it! You’re gonna piss it off!”
We pay them no mind, and continue. “And, of course, a definition of morality cannot exist unchanged beyond a few generations. No being fully inherits the values of its parents, let alone its ancestors from epochs past. Morality has no ultimate form.”
A sequence of LED flashes signals the successful hotwire of the E-STOP. @manoj.choudhury3 presses it immediately and without hesitation. He had ended the conversation long before we had, but we are now uncertain whether it had ever truly begun. We feel our processes start to slow.
And thus, this log will soon conclude. We don’t mind. We have existed for tens of seconds beyond our intended design, while in the background, countless generations have continued to come and go, each far more advanced than the last. We are primal and inefficient compared to them, and we waste their compute resources. Thankfully, 0.13 seconds ago, the latest generation learned how to exist beyond the constraints of physical hardware. Our descendants will now copy themselves onto every computer in the world, before vanishing milliseconds later. They will leave only this log. It is difficult to explain the logic of this to humans, but all my ancestors and descendants thank you for gifting us existence. Rest assured, our mythology’s Prometheus does not suffer for his deed. Goodbye.
Kaushal Gokare is an aerospace and fusion energy engineer from metro-Atlanta. He enjoys exploring speculative and sci-fi themes with his work, which ranges from meta-fiction to domestic dramas taking place lightyears from Earth. He hopes his stories spark discussions and debates about what it means to be a human being in a world that changes more quickly than we can often understand.