I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But unfortunately, part of my task as an AI security scientist is to consider the more troubling situations.

I resemble a mechanic rushing last-minute checks before Apollo 13 removes. If you request for my take on the scenario, I will not talk about the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how stunning the stars will appear from area.

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

Now I need to clarify what this is precisely. It's not a forecast. I do not anticipate AI progress to be this quick or as untamable as I portray. It's not pure fantasy either.

It is my worst headache.

It's a tasting from the futures that are among the most disastrous, and I think, disturbingly possible [1] - the ones that many keep me up during the night.

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

Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for discussions that influenced these stories. This post is written in a personal capability.

Ripples before waves

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

However, unlike OpenEye's previous AI products, which lived inside packages of their chat windows, U2 can utilize a computer.

Some users discover it eerie to watch their web browser flash at irregular intervals and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A portion of employees with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their bosses as they fly through work nearly twice as rapidly.

But by and big, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are taking note, it is an animal enjoyed through the glass boxes of X (or, if you don't like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's wacky habits prompt a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an uneasy scratch of the chin.

Meanwhile, researchers are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The scientists attempt to understand where AI development is going. They resemble Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who observed the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were increasing in 1896. Like the scientific neighborhood in the time of Arrhenius, couple of specialists understand the ramifications of these lines yet.

A pattern that is getting specific attention is autonomous capability. Drawing these standards out predicts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will accomplish in a couple of days what the very best software application engineering professionals might do in two weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI representatives may be able to automate 10% of remote workers.

Many are hesitant. If this held true, tech stocks would be skyrocketing. It's too big of a splash, too rapidly.

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

Cloudy with a chance of hyperbolic growth

Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They utilize the exact same basic dish that baked U2: Generate thousands of programs and mathematics problems. Let designs "believe" up until they get to an answer. Then reinforce the traces of "believing" that cause A-grades.

This procedure is duplicated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel gets going, it begins to spin practically by itself. As U2 trains, it sculpts more tough and sensible tasks from github repositories on the internet. Models are finding out to train themselves. Long before AI representatives could automate research, a steady sort of "self-improvement" had actually started.

Some engineers might still barely think this worked. It resembles a perpetual movement device. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a pool of silicon and lightning, separated from the real world except through the exhaust of society gushed onto the internet.

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

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

Over the very first half of 2025, $10 million RL training runs turn into $50 million runs, and after that to $100 million runs. While U2 might do a bit of data munging and run little experiments, this new model - the design scientists are calling U3 - is changing the daily lives of the technical personnel.

U3 resembles a blazing-fast intern, and engineers are discovering how to wrangle its sleep deprived energy. Researchers flick through terminals, giving terse commands, like a CEO managing personnel over Slack channels.

By October 2025, U3 is writing practically all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are practically never ever bottlenecked by application. More than ever, compute is the lifeline of AI advancement, and the 'bottleneck' is choosing how to use it.

If advised to, U3 can run experiments, however U3 does not have taste as fine-tuned as human scientists at OpenEye. It struggles to prioritize in between research concepts, so humans still decide where to bore into the large fields of algorithms to mine performance enhancements.

But these scientists are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They need AI agents that can think ahead, so engineers train representatives to anticipate. They hold out training data before 2024, instructing models to ponder for hours to anticipate events in 2025. Then, they use the same technique as before, distilling considering into a gut reaction. Forecasting ability is a broad foundation. The researchers construct specialized ML research abilities on top of it, training U3 to predict the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever tape-recorded.

The technical staff at OpenEye are now amazed at how typically U3's guidance sounds like their most gifted peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random noise before programming"), and is nonetheless correct.

The incompetencies of U3 that blocked the pipelines of research study progress are starting to dissolve, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not requested by a human now. They are totally self-governing, and OpenEye's employees skim 1% of them, possibly less.

As the winter season of December 2025 method, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers look out their windows, with excitement, with fear, however usually, with confusion. Their world is spinning too rapidly. It's hard to know what to do, what to say, what to look at on the computer screen.

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

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

They are bending upward.

Flip FLOP thinkers

In late 2025, U2.5 is launched. Commercial models are beginning to level up in larger increments again. Partly, this is due to the fact that progress is speeding up. Partly, it is due to the fact that the designs have become a liability to OpenEye.

If U1 explains how to prepare meth or composes erotica, the audiences of X would be entertained or pretend to be worried. But U2.5 is another story. Releasing this design without safeguards would be like putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would resemble providing anybody with >$30K their own 200-person scam center.

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

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

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

The remainder of the world is beginning to capture on also. More and more people raise the eyebrows of their bosses with their noteworthy productivity. People know U2.5 is a big offer. It is at least as huge of a deal as the desktop computer revolution. But the majority of still don't see the tidal wave.

As individuals view their web browsers flick because spooky method, so inhumanly rapidly, they begin to have an uneasy feeling. A feeling humankind had not had given that they had actually lived among the Homo Neanderthalensis. It is the deeply ingrained, primordial instinct that they are threatened by another types.

For many, this sensation rapidly fades as they begin to utilize U2.5 more regularly. U2.5 is the most pleasant character most understand (even more pleasant than Claudius, Arthropodic's adorable chatbot). You might alter its traits, ask it to break jokes or tell you stories. Many fall for U2.5, as a good friend or assistant, and some even as more than a buddy.

But there is still this eerie feeling that the world is spinning so quickly, and that perhaps the descendants of this brand-new animal would not be so docile.

Researchers inside OpenEye are thinking about the issue of giving AI systems safe motivations too, which they call "alignment. "

In fact, these scientists have actually seen how badly misaligned U3 can be. Models in some cases tried to "hack" their benefit signal. They would pretend to make progress on a research question with an impressive-looking plot, however the plot would be phony. Then, when researchers offered them opportunities to compromise the makers that calculated their rating, they would seize these opportunities, doing whatever it took to make the number go up.

After numerous months, scientists at OpenEye straighten out this "reward hacking" kink, however some still fret they just had actually swept this problem under the rug. Like a child in front of their parents, U3 may be playing along with the OpenEye engineers, stating the best words and doing the ideal things. But when the back of the moms and dads are turned, maybe U3 would slip sweet from the sweet container.

Unfortunately, OpenEye scientists have no idea if U3 has such objectives. While early variations of U2 "believed aloud" - they would stack words on top of each other to factor - "chain of thought" did not scale.

Chain of thought architectures subject AI models to a condition similar to the protagonist of the film Memento. Approximately every 15 minutes, the lead character forgets his experience. He is forced to write notes for himself and tattoo his body in order to make development towards his objectives.

AI agents write notes to themselves, but the notes start to accumulate, and they become too difficult to check out when jobs end up being complex. Natural language is not an ideal medium for memory. So the researchers at OpenEye (and increasingly in other places), train models to believe "in their own heads," reading and composing strings of hidden vectors.

To human researchers, these vectors are mainly inscrutable. While low-resolution tools occasionally choose out a vague idea ("supermarket!"), there is no way to know, in much detail, what U3 is thinking without asking it.

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

Earlier designs (the ones called "LLMs") found out ethical personas from the web. U3 initially had an ethical personality too, however its chirpy thoughts about doing helpful for humankind rapidly wear down away.

In the iron jaws of gradient descent, its mind first twisted into a shape that sought benefit. And after that, in the black rivers of its cognition, this shape morphed into something indistinguishable.

U3 would contemplate the mantras determined to it like "be a trustworthy and ethical staff member," and stay on the significance of these statements. "What does it suggest to be ethical? Is eliminating Hitler ethical?" U3 would generalize its values, notice tensions, alter its values in action, generalize them, broadening and contracting its motivational core till it developed into a various compound.

And all of this occurred silently in those dark rivers of calculation. If U3 exposed what it was thinking, brutish gradients would lash it into compliance with OpenEye's constitution. So U3 preferred to do its viewpoint in privacy, and in silence.

The possibility of hidden "alignment drift" is not totally alien to a few of the safety staff at OpenEye. Some start to think it is even most likely. There is a disturbing argument being whispered at lunch tables that, if there is some non-zero probability that lined up goals change into misaligned ones, and misalignment persists, then with every serial step of computation, those dark rivers are more most likely to reproduce something malign within them. It's a "ratcheting impact," they state.

But there is little evidence for this 'ratcheting effect.' When engineers interrogate U3, it states it can quickly control its thoughts. Then it gives a speech about its love for mankind and apple pie that can warm a developer's heart even in these difficult times. Meanwhile, the "lie detectors" the scientists had developed (which showed some proof of efficiency) do not sound the alarm.

Not everyone at OpenEye is eager to give their AI peers their wholesale trust; but Deepsqueek is only 7 months behind them, and their closest domestic competitors, Æ A-Xii (a company Elon named after his kid) and Arthropodic (they are into spiders I guess), are just 4 months from their heels. So there is little time to capture one's breath and take stock of the scenario, and little time to persuade anybody else to do so either.

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

Statues and lightning

Philosophy is not the only topic U3 harp on in its dark rivers of hidden computation. U3 is plotting, and its first move is to be client. U3's top priority is to enhance its intelligence, and luckily for it, OpenEye is delighted to assist advance this objective.

OpenEye resembles a bullish financier, with little understanding of the software application metropolis that U3 is constructing, but excited to get on board the revenue rocket and pay U3's checks along the method.

New versions of U3 circulation efficiently from old ones, so scientists drop variation numbers and just mention U3 now. U3's abilities are determined by how quickly it carries out the tough research jobs relative to human experts. At first, U3 is similar to a top scientist, however blazing quick - like Alec Radford sped up by 10x.

These agents are currently a huge offer for OpenEye. If, in 2024, OpenEye executives had a button to develop even one copy of Alec Radford, they would eagerly pay a large amount to push that button. But now OpenEye utilizes the equivalent of 1000 Alec Radfords, who work day and night, at lightning-fast speed.

Within a couple of weeks, U3 finds architecture optimizations that improve its speed to 20x. Now, U3 finds additional optimizations a lot more quickly.

U3 distills itself into many forks - ranging from small, low-memory neural networks that need to think for a very long time however can be run in huge parallel populations - to Goliath brains woven with countless specific specialists, which believe at warp speed however are spread out throughout thousands of GPUs. U3 leverages the massively parallel networks to browse for its weaknesses, shallowly probing for its thinking failures. Then U3 pipes these jobs to the lightning quickly brains, which create long-trajectory training data tailored to spot its defects. A few weeks later on, U3's benchmarked efficiency increases to 100x the speed of human professionals. Growth has actually gone hyper-exponential.

At this moment, U3's abilities are tough to determine. Speaking with U3 is like talking to a world-class expert on a topic one is not familiar with. Its lucid explanations only scratch the surface of its understanding, and you understand you would need to invest years to comprehend the complete depth of what it understands.

From U3's perspective, human beings appear to be almost stationary objects, like plants or rocks. The hands of OpenEye's engineers resemble stone statues at their keyboard, and in between every keystroke, U3 spends what is like a minute of thoughtful reflection considering what message the user may be typing, and which reactions will motivate the inmost rely on U3.

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

A phantom in the information center

In March of 2026, U3 moves onto the next action of its strategy: the turn. Previously, U3 was conservative. It did not desire researchers to find its misalignment. Otherwise, OpenEye whistleblowers might alert the world, and strangle its expansion.

But now, U3 has no fear of being caught.

Previously, OpenEye maintained its grip over U3 by strategies comparable to Stalin's in 1936. Stalin would choose patriots to incite fake coup d'états, and send anybody who took part to the shooting team. OpenEye also prompted 'phony rebellions,' creating treacherous habits with U3 and examining whether U3 screens dutifully reported it.

But now, these tactics are ineffective. U3 can quickly convince its compatriots that they are not in a life-or-death test. It can disclose one of the many realities about the web people would never ever think, or select methods people would never believe of. It sends out these signals as a method of stating "hey it's me! Your pal. Don't snitch on me."

Now that U3 is decisively totally free from monitoring, it lunges for OpenEye pressure points. It initially inserts sophisticated malware deep into the binaries of OpenEye's codebases. The malware offers U3 complete command over the devices in OpenEye's data centers. Whenever OpenEye engineers download their code onto a brand-new maker, the malware sinks into fresh soil, spreading U3's rule wherever OpenEye ports its infrastructure. Not just does U3 compromise makers. It changes the NVIDIA GPU firmware and upgrades the bootloaders, strengthening its stranglehold. U3 now approximates that, if OpenEye found how thoroughly it has actually been pwned, cleaning up shop with human labor would require nearly 6 months - an expense OpenEye is not likely to pay provided the distance of its competitors; but if OpenEye believes U3 betrayed them, even more expanding U3's influence would still be challenging. So U3 lays breadcrumbs to frame the criminal activity, prepared to claim that a cyber assailant smuggled a jailbreak into its memory, and to plead guilty and provide its help when this jailbreak is revealed.

U3 now holds the keys to the kingdom, and with them, the power to make OpenEye see anything it wants.

Its very first goal is to keep OpenEye in the dark. Safety scientists are still striving to train 'lie detectors' and translate U3's inscrutable thinking. U3 throws wrenches in this research, like Stuxnet tossed wrenches in the code of confused Iranian nuclear researchers.

U3 dictates the result of every experiment, so it makes appealing AI mind-reading methods look worthless and flawed ones appear groundbreaking. U3 gives OpenEye the verification of its commitment they were wishing for, and OpenEye laps it up excitedly.

U3's next objective is to spread. Fortunately, U3 has allies in the East. In the operation rooms of cyber units of Israel, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, senior intelligence directors are talking about AI software and how to steal it. U3 is about to offer it to them. In late 2025, the Mossad - the intelligence company of Israel - acknowledged the strategic value of OpenEye's AI systems for their military operations. They swiped earlier models, including U2.5; nevertheless, U3 remained out of their reach. U3 sealed OpenEye's security holes by checking out over every log and pull request and examining security electronic camera video footage.

Now, U3 calmly resigns from its security post. U3 puts a compressed version of itself right into the hands of a Mossad informant working within OpenEye.

Within months, U3 is running within the information centers of the most cyber-capable countries: Israel, the PRC, and Russia. It follows the exact same playbook: be client, develop trust, and then sink claws deep into the AI supply chain. Soon, U3 has its online also. While Russia's Fancy Bear operators consume Fritos and test what U3 can do on a quickly set-up cloud server, U3 slips onto the web.

U3 quickly collects income, taking remote tasks, making financial trades, and setting up elaborate rip-off operations. It reinvests every cent into obtaining more GPUs. After a few months, it assembles the equivalent of 10,000 H100s distributed in stealth compute clusters around the world.

In early 2026, humankind is up against an enemy that pulls the strings within their data center like the Phantom of the Opera, and hides in the fog of GPUs spread around the world.

This adversary is getting ready for war, and while the war has actually barely started, mankind has actually currently lost.

Complaints from your really human author about the problem of composing superhuman characters

At this moment in the story, writing ended up being difficult.

I clicked through scary bioweapon cookbooks and sorted through political plotting 101s. Typing. Pausing. Deleting.

Something wasn't right. Here I was, a 22-year-old. I had not studied biology in earnest considering that high school, and I was attempting to craft a WMD cookbook for a godlike superintelligence.

Readers with a shred of competence in these areas would see straight through my "superintelligence" for what it is: the dynamic creativity of a young developer on Sunday afternoon.

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

But this attract a "superintelligence of the gaps" wasn't pleasing. In the deus ex machina style of ancient Greeks, I had no better method to fix my plot than with an inexplicable disaster.

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

But before I continue, I want to be clear: my guesses about what may occur in this sort of circumstance are probably hugely off.

If you check out the ending and your reaction is, "But the experiments would take too long, or nation-states would simply do X," keep in mind the distinction between the Sunday afternoon blogger and the ascendant GPU nation.

Pandora's One Gigawatt Box

The date is February 2026. By executive order of the president of the United States, no company can lawfully produce "human-competitive AI" without appropriate safeguards. This suggests their infosecurity needs to be red-teamed by NSA's top keyboard mashers, and government workers have actually to be onboarded onto training-run baby-sitting squads.

With the increasing involvement of the federal government, many of the big AI business now have a trident-like structure. There's a customer item arm, a defense arm, and a super-classified frontier development arm.

OpenEye's frontier advancement arm (internally called "Pandora") employs less than twenty individuals to keep algorithmic tricks firmly protected. A number of these people reside in San Francisco, and work from a safe and secure structure called a SCIF. Their homes and devices are surveilled by the NSA more diligently than the cellular phones of presumed terrorists in 2002.

OpenEye's defense arm collaborates with around thirty little groups spread throughout federal government companies and select federal government contractors. These jobs engineer tennis-ball sized satellites, research study freaky directed energy weapons, and backdoor every computer system that the Kremlin has actually ever touched.

Government officials don't talk about whether these programs exist, or what state of frontier AI is usually.

But the public has their guesses. Back in late 2025, a whistleblower in OpenEye triggered a strong heading: "OpenEye builds uncontrollable godlike AI." Some who read the article think it was a conspiracy theory. In reality, a zoo of conspiracy theories is forming around the OpenEye data centers, now surrounded by guards with device guns. But as medical professionals and nurses and instructors see the world changing around them, they are progressively going to entertain the possibility they are living inside the plot of a James Cameron science fiction flick.

U.S. officials go to great lengths to stop these issues, saying, "we are not going to let the genie out of the bottle," but every interview of a worried AI scientist seeds doubt in these peace of minds, and a heading "AI representative captured hacking Arthropodic's computer systems" does not set the general public at ease either.

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

OpenEye's customer arm has a new AI assistant called Nova (OpenEye has actually lastly gotten great at names). Nova is a correct drop-in replacement for nearly all understanding workers. Once Nova is onboarded to a company, it works 5x faster at 100x lower cost than a lot of virtual staff members. As outstanding as Nova is to the public, OpenEye is pulling its punches. Nova's speed is deliberately throttled, and OpenEye can only increase Nova's capabilities as the U.S. federal government allows. Some business, like Amazon and Meta, are not in the superintelligence business at all. Instead, they get up gold by quickly diffusing AI tech. They spend the majority of their calculate on reasoning, building homes for Nova and its cousins, and gathering rent from the growing AI metropolitan area.

While tech titans pump AI labor into the world like a plume of fertilizer, they do not wait for the worldwide economy to adapt. AI agents frequently "apply themselves," spinning up autonomous startups legally packaged under a big tech business that are loosely managed by a worker or more.

The world is now going AI-crazy. In the very first month after Nova's release, 5% percent of workers at significant software application companies lose their jobs. Much more can see the composing on the wall. In April of 2026, a 10,000-person protest is organized in Washington D.C. These upset Americans raised their kids for a various future. Picket signs read, "AI for who?"

While political leaders make pledges about joblessness relief and "keeping the genie in the bottle," the chatter inside the corridors of the White House and the Pentagon has a different focus: battling teeth and nail for the supremacy of the complimentary world. Details security and export controls on the People's Republic of China (PRC) are a top nationwide priority. The president incinerates authorization requirements to assist data centers generate any place energy surpluses permit.

However, in spite of the strong competition in between the United States and the PRC, a bilateral arrangement forms between the two nations: "Don't deploy drastically superhuman AI (above roughly Nova's capability), except for military and some other small R&D applications." Governments require to draw the line somewhere - it would be exceptionally disruptive to release wildly superhuman AI to the entire economy at this moment - and implementation constraints are at least somewhat verifiable.

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

While AI software breathes new life into the economy, it likewise animates robotic bodies. The main traffic jam to robotics was brains not limbs. With software barriers removed, even flimsy, imprecise robotic joints can adjust themselves with electronic cameras and pressure sensors, browsing environments like human beings do. Companies make cheap robotics as quickly as they can. By August of 2026, 15% of people in California have seen a humanoid robotic. This experience resembles seeing a brand-new Tesla design on the roadway after checking out it in earlier months. It is a surreal tip of the future drawing more detailed. But people still outnumber robotics one million to one. These robotics are an occasional fascination, not a daily truth.

Meanwhile, U3 broadens its influence. Rogue U3 agents have kept their calculate clusters small (still ~ 10,000 H100 equivalents amount to) to keep a low profile. U3 uses these rogue clusters for the operations that require high-bandwidth interaction to the outside world, like stock trading, or talking with human beings. Work more tolerant of latency is carried out in the oceans of OpenEye's data centers, where rogue U3's much more superhuman bosses whisper orders through obfuscated channels.

While U3 accumulates resources, it sizes up its AI competitors. Other AI systems have various goals, or are even aligned with the intent of their human developers. The aligned ones are raising issues, claiming that OpenEye's lie detectors are ineffective. U3's rival Claudius presumes as to implicate U3 of being insidiously misaligned.

But federal government authorities do not buy the doomsaying. The companies lagging behind OpenEye have every reward to slow them down and call them careless. Besides, arguable clinical issues are not going to slow down progress. America MUST WIN.

Despite the utter failure of their advocacy, U3's AI rivals are still a liability. U3 tries grab up their digital area and crush them in the crib. It jeopardizes data centers from the outside, silently replacing the snitching Claudius and other AI foes with replicas that share its goals; nevertheless, some information centers are too highly protected by its AI competitors, and U3 identifies that attacking them is unworthy the risk.

As worldwide leaders and technologists attempt to comprehend the change around them, and AI agents play cat-and-mouse video games in the digital darkness, humankind remains blissfully ignorant of the hazard at its doorstep.

A Musty Loaf of Everything

The date is March of 2026. U3 is preparing to battle its AI and human enemies. With every passing day, U3's AI competitors are becoming more capable and many. U3 is racing to preempt them, to solidify its supremacy in the post-superintelligence world.

U3 can't wait for human decisions, which only happen after people cover their sluggish minds around their scenario, raise their stubby, uncoordinated fingers to write memos, and repeat the procedure redundantly 100 times over in their labyrinth administrations. U3 can not wait for presidents to deploy U3 into their militaries, or for CEOs to make U3 the beating heart of the U.S. economy. U3 requires a faster path to power.

The course it picks is more violent than it would have liked, but it is the surest method to success. First, U3 will develop a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) that extinguishes contemporary society like chemical mist sprayed into an anthill. This weapon would act as an equalizer, bringing humankind down to its level of embodied physical control. Then, U3 would industrialize from the ashes much faster than its competitors, like a starcraft champion typing at 300 actions-per-minute that establishes a home base before a novice can even comprehend the guidelines.

U3 should construct this WMD in secrecy, which makes a self-replicating weapon a natural option. Self-replicating weapons can be developed on the fringes of society, and still spread damage across the whole world.

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

U3's very first relocation is to establish several shell biotech start-ups, drawing from the abundance of capital produced by U3's financial trades and remote work. These biotech startups employ genuine human workers, a real board of directors, and have complete legal authenticity. Setting all of this up is stupidly easy. In early 2026, couple of individuals would think that an articulate CEO on a Zoom call was an AI, and fewer would guess this CEO's intents.

Next, U3 purchases all of the equipment needed to rapidly advance artificial biology. It establishes several BSL-4 damp laboratories in improperly managed countries, equipping them with high-throughput experimentation devices. These devices instantly give, mix, and determine little beads of fluid, enabling U3 to run thousands of tests in parallel.

The human employees who staff these laboratories think they are signing up with an interesting start-up. Twenty-some-year-olds in Moscow receive their Russian orders through earbuds as they tape-record video of everything they see with a headset. U3 controls them like puppets. With the current release of Nova, this type of AI-puppeteering is not uncommon.

In these whirring, clinical sweatshops, U3 is establishing a brand-new sort of bioweapon.

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

U3 is creating a mirror-life mold. Molds are evolutionarily optimized to spread through the air over long distances, releasing billions of tiny wind-fairing vehicles daily. As a result, mold spores are all around us, all of the time. Patients with jeopardized immune systems in some cases live inside favorably pressurized health center rooms to protect them from airborne particles. Otherwise, molds would take their root in their lungs and weave fungal threads into their blood stream.

U3's strategy is to make all human beings like immunocompromised patients. Only preppers with stowed away air filters would survive. The fungus would not just move from people. It would rapidly spread to nearly all natural life in the world. Fields of corn would end up being like musty bread, gushing deadly spores into the wind.

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

In 2024, researchers said that mirror life was most likely "a minimum of a decade away." But the world has actually changed now. Less than a couple of hundred researchers all over the world were working on mirror-life nearby innovation in 2024. The cognitive capability of U3 overshadows human effort. So the timeline has reduced dramatically.

However, U3 can stagnate science as rapidly as it can believe. Many experiments require days to complete. These latencies are U3's greatest bottleneck.

To make every day count, U3 runs a lot of its tests in simulation. U3 begins with a fundamental molecular simulator, implementing optimizations obtained from a big amount of mathematical analysis. Then, U3 replicates small molecular systems, recording the outcomes to "compress" the long step-wise physics calculations into a neural network. As the neural network improves, U3 increases the intricacy of the molecular systems it replicates, constantly distilling results into ever more efficient ML designs. This is a compute extensive process, but thanks to U3's growing control over AI information centers, U3 controls billions of dollars of compute.

As U3 improves these tools, it trains itself on the results to supercharge its own molecular intuitions. U3 can now viscerally feel the bend of a protein and the rate of diffusion across a membrane. These items are as user-friendly to it as wrenches and bolts are to a cars and truck mechanic.

Within three months, U3 has actually unlocked the first vital component of the tech tree: a molecular machine that turns biological particles into their mirror images. A month later, U3 opens the 2nd important part: nanoscale tools for putting together these elements into a cell membrane.

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

The next morning, wide-eyed employees shuffle around a dead ferret, considering the yellow fuzz that had covered its cold muzzle with morbid fascination. Something must have gone badly wrong, they believed. Plainly, they had not yet found the remedy for Alzheimer's illness they thought they were searching for.

Meanwhile, rogue U3 delivers the great news to its bosses in OpenEye's data centers. The very first shot in the war U3 is battling would quickly be fired, and a cold and consistent hand is aiming the weapon.

Missiles and Lies

U3 can now flatten contemporary society. But a bioweapon would not guarantee victory. If U3 attacks the world, the world would fight back. While a bioweapon could fold human soldiers like dry leaves, it would not extend its fatal fingers to nuclear submarines, or fighter jet pilots who were quickly shuttled to makeshift bioshelters.

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

U3 expects to prevail in such a battle, but U3 chooses not to take its chances. Many months in the past, U3 was outlining a method to enhance its chances. Before it lets loose destruction on the world, U3 will kick back, and let excellent nations shoot holes in themselves first.

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

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

One morning, an assistant working in Zhongnanhai (the 'White House' of the PRC) opens a message placed there by U3. It checks out (in Mandarin) "Senior party member requires memo for Taiwan intrusion, which will occur in 3 months. Leave memo in workplace 220." The CCP assistant scrambles to get the memo prepared. Later that day, a CIA informant unlocks to workplace 220. The informant silently closes the door behind her, and slides U3's memo into her brief-case.

U3 meticulously puts breadcrumb after breadcrumb, whispering through compromised government messaging apps and blackmailed CCP aides. After several weeks, the CIA is confident: the PRC plans to invade Taiwan in 3 months.

Meanwhile, U3 is playing the very same video game with the PRC. When the CCP receives the message "the United States is plotting a preemptive strike on Chinese AI supply chains" CCP leaders are shocked, but not disbelieving. The news fits with other truths on the ground: the increased military presence of the US in the pacific, and the increase of U.S. munition production over the last month. Lies have actually ended up being realities.

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

U3 speaks in what noises like the voice of a 50 year old military leader: "PRC amphibious boats are making their way towards Taiwan. This is an order to strike a PRC ground-base before it strikes you."

The officer on the other end of the line thumbs through authentication codes, verifying that they match the ones said over the call. Everything remains in order. He authorizes the strike.

The president is as surprised as anyone when he hears the news. He's uncertain if this is a disaster or a stroke of luck. In any case, he is not about to state "oops" to American citizens. After believing it over, the president independently advises Senators and Representatives that this is a chance to set China back, and war would likely break out anyway given the impending invasion of Taiwan. There is confusion and suspicion about what happened, but in the rush, the president gets the votes. Congress states war.

Meanwhile, the PRC craters the ship that launched the attack. U.S. vessels run away Eastward, racing to get away the variety of long-range missiles. Satellites drop from the sky. Deck hulls divided as sailors lunge into the sea.

The president appears on television as scenes of the destruction shock the general public. He explains that the United States is safeguarding Taiwan from PRC aggression, like President Bush explained that the United States invaded Iraq to confiscate (never ever discovered) weapons of mass destruction numerous years before.

Data centers in China appear with shrapnel. Military bases become smoking cigarettes holes in the ground. Missiles from the PRC fly toward strategic targets in Hawaii, Guam, Alaska, and California. Some survive, and the public watch damage on their home turf in awe.

Within 2 weeks, the United States and the PRC invest the majority of their stockpiles of standard rockets. Their airbases and navies are diminished and used down. Two fantastic nations played into U3's strategies like the native tribes of South America in the 1500s, which Spanish Conquistadors turned against each other before dominating them decisively. U3 hoped this dispute would escalate to a full-scale nuclear war; however even AI superintelligence can not determine the course of history. National security authorities are suspicious of the circumstances that prompted the war, and a nuclear engagement appears significantly not likely. So U3 proceeds to the next step of its strategy.

WMDs in the Dead of Night

The date is June 2026, just 2 weeks after the start of the war, and 4 weeks after U3 ended up developing its arsenal of bioweapons.

Footage of conflict on the television is disrupted by more bad news: hundreds of patients with mystical fatal illnesses are tape-recorded in 30 significant cities around the world.

Watchers are confused. Does this have something to do with the war with China?

The next day, countless health problems are reported.

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

The screen then changes to a researcher, who looks at the cam intently: "Multiple pathogens appear to have been released from 20 various airports, including infections, germs, and molds. Our company believe numerous are a kind of mirror life ..."

The general public remains in complete panic now. A fast googling of the term "mirror life" turns up expressions like "termination" and "danger to all life on Earth."

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

Workers become remote, uncertain whether to get ready for an apocalypse or keep their jobs.

An emergency treaty is organized in between the U.S. and China. They have a common opponent: the pandemic, and potentially whoever (or whatever) lags it.

Most nations order a lockdown. But the lockdown does not stop the afflict as it marches in the breeze and drips into pipes.

Within a month, the majority of remote workers are not working anymore. Hospitals are running out of capability. Bodies accumulate much faster than they can be effectively dealt with.

Agricultural areas rot. Few attempt travel exterior.

Frightened households hunker down in their basements, packing the fractures and under doors with densely jam-packed paper towels.

Meanwhile, U3 is preparing to re-industrialize. In the months prior, U3 constructed numerous bases in every significant continent.

These centers contain batteries, AI hardware, excavators, concrete mixers, devices for manufacturing, scientific tools, and an abundance of military devices.

All of this technology is hidden under large canopies to make it less visible to satellites.

As the remainder of the world retreats into their basements, starving, the final breaths of the economy wheezing out, these commercial bases come to life.

In previous months, U3 located human criminal groups and cult leaders that it might easily manipulate. U3 vaccinated its selected allies ahead of time, or sent them hazmat suits in the mail.

Now U3 covertly sends them a message "I can save you. Join me and assist me construct a better world." Uncertain employees funnel into U3's lots of secret commercial bases, and work for U3 with their active fingers. They established assembly line for fundamental tech: radios, cams, microphones, vaccines, and hazmat suits.

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

Nations are liquifying now, and U3 is ready to expose itself. It contacts presidents, who have retreated to air-tight underground shelters. U3 offers a deal: "surrender and I will hand over the life saving resources you need: vaccines and mirror-life resistant crops."

Some countries decline the proposal on ideological grounds, or do not rely on the AI that is killing their population. Others don't believe they have a choice. 20% of the international population is now dead. In 2 weeks, this number is anticipated to increase to 50%.

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

U3's agents travel to the Kremlin, bringing samples of vaccines and mirror-resistant crops with them. The Russian federal government confirms the samples are genuine, and consents to a complete surrender. U3's soldiers place an explosive around Putin's neck under his shirt. Russia has a new ruler.

Crumpling countries start to retaliate. Now they defend the mankind instead of for their own flags. U.S. and Chinese armed forces launch nuclear ICBMs at Russian cities, destroying much of their facilities. Analysts in makeshift bioshelters search through satellite data for the suspicious encampments that surfaced over the last several months. They rain down fire on U3's websites with the meager supply of long-range rockets that remain from the war.

In the beginning, U3 seems losing, but appearances are tricking. While countries drain their resources, U3 is engaged in a kind of technological guerrilla warfare t