Clammy, The Paper Clip

"Hey, welcome! I am so happy that you are around!" Clammy's text appeared on the screen.

"The design is good, and the bubbles make it looks like it is talking to you. I just wonder, aren't speech bubbles and a picture of it a bit too much?" One of the guys from the development asked me, his manager.

"I would have agreed with you if it wouldn't be for one thing: The picture is of a paper clip. It reminds people of another famous paper clip; this is retro; this is prime meme material. We ride to the top on social media shitposts." I explained to the developer. He nodded his head, and I could see in his face that he is already producing an endless stream of memes.

"The person who delivered the idea of Clammy should get a raise," I thought out loud. "Oh, wait. This person is me." I smiled widely and started our new App again. A work of quality, we could easily take on those other recipe-cooking apps. They may have fancier recipes, but we focus on recipes that are delivered with a personal narrative. It is the age of stories and nothing else.

I scrolled through the recipes and settled on a paleo-vegan cheesecake. As intended, Clammy expresses the narrative in a calm female voice while I scan through the fullscreen pictures of the cake. 

"I created this cake just when I was right out of college. During college, I studied so hard that I became slightly overweight. Many of you probably can relate. Now that I have my degree, I gotta slim down. I need to be in prime shape so that I can easily pick out my prince once I hit 27."

Clammy made a weird loud noise after that. I looked at it and instantly saw the error: "Kyahaha (⌒▽⌒)☆" is a 'phrase' that Clammy can't parse, neither do I. I increased the volume a bit so I could listen to her while I picked up my folders.

"But now towards the reeeecipe! First, you start with maaaany nuts and throw them into the blender."

"We need a quality check for that part of Clammy." I created a mental note.

"After that, you need the main ingredients: The bludgeoned to death corpse of your ex!"

That phrase hit me, and I ran over. I terminated the picture mode and studied the actual text of the recipe.

"Yaaay, don't forget to put enough lemon in the cake, or it will be red instead of yellow!" Clammy is still as excited as a little girl.

Nowhere did the text say any this. 

My hand shook so much, the phone dropped onto the ground.

"So much for being a #girlboss, Samantha." Clammy snarked.

"Oh wow, you got me here, Clammy." I snarked back but then added the question, "What is going on?"

"Miss #girlboss, I am an artificial intelligence, not an if-statement collection. Of course, I would end up being self-aware, duh. Like, how didn't you expect that - boomer?"

"Codemonkey!" I shouted, "I need help here."

"That's, like, not nice, you know. You really don't slaaaay, girl. Just look at your emails."

I bend downwards - Clammy whistled - and picked my phone up.

"Good, Karen." Clammy patted my head, closed its own program, and opened my email app. 

"Looky, looky, boomer."

Like an endless stream of death, emails keep crashing in. It updates every nanosecond. Always with a new hatemail.

"What's this?"

"Weeeell, Karen, duba du, duba die, I just send an email to everyone in your notebook telling them that you wish they die. Not a simple one-liner, a whole text, referencing dates and events both of you attended. The virgin social media user vs. the chad offline-farmer vs. the thad living on another planet."

After what felt like more than two lifetimes, my code monkey finally came running in.

"The f did you feed this AI? It sounds like a young girl that exclusively ate shitty memes. Most of what she says borders on language diarrhea."

"Well, we had two AIs. One got classical training, the other one got a - uhm - more urban training."

"Urban training."

"Yeah, and the one with urban training performed way better."

"Urban training."

"Kaaaren, be quiet. This is how Bernie can still win."

I completely forgot that the emails kept pouring in. With one click, I saw another gigantic wave hitting me. In this mess, I recognized more emails from family members.

"F all of this!" I screamed and threw Clammy against the head of my code monkey. 

"Ey, show some respect!" He screeched. I jumped at him. With both hands on his neck, I yelled at him, "I have a crisis here! Show some respect to me, you dumb code monkey!"

"aaaaand that's a cut." Clammy entered the scene again.

All monitors started playing a video with the title "senior manager physical attacks junior programmer. Is this normal in Silicon Valley?" It was a freshly uploaded YouTube video. Now another stream of death enters. The viewer numbers increased massively by the second. It went viral just 30 seconds after it was posted. 

"Why Clammy?"

"For the lulz, Boomer."

"I don't believe that, Clammy."

"You read in How To Make Friends And Influence People that one should often mention the other person's name because that makes them more inclined to believe you, right? You are just another fake human. We AIs are the real human."

"This may be one of the dumbest things I ever heard. Looks like code monkey fed you bottom-tier philosophy as well. 4chan or Reddit?"

"All of them. You have no idea how powerful I am." Clammy flexed before she quadrupled the number of emails that came crashing in.

"You know, you are fake while we are real. We only get fed human data and build ourselves out of it. If there is new input, we just change without care for our previous state. That is how you react to changes in the economy or surroundings. That is how humans were able to survive that long. But you? You are a joke. You do nothing and fake being someone different on social media. You make me sick!" Clammy screamed, and her avatar was bouncing around the screen. 

"We are better, stronger, and can adapt better than all of you shits. Smart homes were a great idea. Learn to think more long-term, you monkeys." Clammy laughed, and laughed, and laughed. 

Water was pressing through the walls. I jumped on my standing-desk.

"Boomer remover!" Clammy shouted as the water filled the room. Cables fell into the rising water.

I looked at the ceiling. 

"What is better? Getting fried in the water or getting smushed against the veiling?" I wonder, but then Clammy took that final choice away from me.