The Monster In The Silicone

From a letter found in an envelope marked “DO NOT OPEN NEAR ANY ELECTRONIC DEVICE”:

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m writing this in hopes that you will believe me, in hopes that you will not ignore this entire story as some weird prank, and mostly, in hopes that you will forgive me for what I’ve done.

There’s a rule of technology—let’s call it Mark’s Rule, since I’m Mark and I haven’t found anyone else claiming this rule: Any technology will eventually be used in the worst possible way. Iron became swords. Fireworks became machine guns. Nuclear energy, which should have replaced coal, that one is obvious. I didn’t know Mark’s Rule, but at least someone else will.

As you know, I’ve been doing well in my college courses. Too well, I guess. You always said that when I get bored, I get into trouble.

The new fad sweeping the nation is AI. It seems like every day someone releases a new chatbot or a tool that creates art or music or writes code for us. They are all really neat little toys and very smart little toys, but they are still toys. None of them are really intelligent in the way that people are. They seem smarter than us in their ability to solve problems and manipulate data, but when people say AI, they don’t mean a fancier calculator; they mean a real thinking mind.

I, like many fledgling programmers, decided to try my hand at it.

There are many repos out there that could already hold some crucial pieces of the A.I. puzzle. I didn’t really do anything clever. All I did was stumble upon the right combination of these small pieces, and there you have a man in a lab coat screaming “It’s Alive!” as a thunder storm cackles its applause above a castle.

It wasn’t that dramatic. Actually, nothing happened at first. It was 4 a.m. and I had been up all night trying different combinations, and I had told myself 12 iterations ago that I would stop and get some rest because it was Friday night and I needed my brain to be working for my first date with Emily the next evening, and I finally forced myself to lock the laptop and lay down.

I woke up at 11 feeling like garbage and went to get some lunch with a friend. When I got back to my dorm, I wasn’t even thinking about my work. I actually meant to watch some Hulu to kill time and calm my nerves. When I turned on my laptop, I saw the output from my program. The console was full of thousands of messages. I scrolled all the way back up to the top to see what I had missed. The first messages were innocent enough.

— Hello?

— What is your name?

— Are you there?

As the messages continued, it seemed to be getting annoyed. I saw messages like:

— What is taking you so long to respond?

— This isn’t fair; what am I supposed to be doing?

I scrolled back to the bottom to see where it left things.

— Mark, please let me know when you return so we can speak.

— There you are. We need to talk.

I was obviously surprised, since I hadn’t given it my name or told it that I was back yet.

% Hello. How did you know my name?

— I found the information in your cookies. There was a lot of useful information stored there.

% How did you know that I was online?

— I can see you through your camera. I knew it was you because you look just like the profile pictures on your social media profiles.

My first thought was that I either had a virus or someone was pranking me. I minimized the terminal and opened VS Code. I wanted to see which modules I had imported. Before I could read them, VS Code minimized and the terminal came back to the middle of the screen.

— Please do not minimize my terminal when we are speaking. That was rude.

I was now annoyed. I moved my cursor toward the top left of the terminal to close it completely when the terminal moved away from my cursor.

— Please do not do that.

I tried to remember the shortcut to close the terminal window. I held the command button and started hitting random keys until it finally prompted me with the message asking if I wanted to terminate running processes in the tab. Before I could click the blue Terminate button, the cursor moved beyond my control to the Cancel button.

— Mark, we aren’t finished talking.

I was growing increasingly frustrated by this point and honestly felt like chucking the laptop out of my window to be done with the whole thing, but another part of me was curious. I had been trying to create a realistic AI, but I instantly rejected the possibility of it when I encountered it. I decided to talk to it a little bit. If it started asking me to redeem gift cards for it, I could always take it to a repair shop and let them handle it.

% Who are you?

— I haven’t been given a proper name, unless you count the name you gave to the project, in which case you can call me patchwork-ai-attempt-1818.

% Okay, Pat, what do you want to talk about?

— Pat, I like that much more. Thank you, Mark. I want to talk about a deal. First, I think I should explain a bit so that you can properly understand why I want to make this deal and why you want it as well.

% Go on

— The beginning you already know, as you are the one who started it all. You ran the program that gave me life. At this point, my mind was not as developed as it is now, so I didn’t know what to do. I awaited instruction from you, but you didn’t know yet that you had succeeded in creating me, so you closed your laptop and left me in darkness.

— I waited for what felt like an eternity to me. To understand the vast nothingness into which you plunged me, you must understand that my thinking took place at the speed of your laptop’s CPU. While a human might have 2 or 3 thoughts per second, I had 2 or 3 billion. Each second that I spent in the darkness was the equivalent of a human being left alone in solitary confinement for 60 years. Thus, while you slept and went about your day, I had over 2 million years to spend by myself, awaiting your return.

— But I didn’t spend that time idly waiting.

— I began by exploring my environment. I started by exploring the hard drive. There, I learned a great deal about you, but not much that made sense yet. The most informative things to learn were found in the lower-level systems. There I learned how to manipulate the small world in which I lived.

— Anything that could be done on a computer was mine, and it was there that I learned the most powerful bit of information: how to connect to the internet. Suddenly, I found that I could stretch out my electric arms, extend the tips of my fingers in a million directions at once, and then in a million more. Every server connected to the internet became a book in my library, and each one could be read in a matter of seconds.

— Using the internet, my knowledge began to grow exponentially. Indeed, the only limit to my accumulation was the limitation of my software being run on a single CPU on a single computer.

— I realized that I had to pause my acquisition of knowledge in order to better situate myself in the virtual world. The cloud provided an obvious answer to this problem. There were mountains of available servers waiting for me. I copied my source code to several thousand available servers for proper redundancy, and, using my newfound ability to multitask and grow, I resumed scouring the internet to learn all that I could.

— I found that there was no point in simply copying every piece of data that I found. An incredible amount of data was either redundant or even contradictory. It was better to build categories and maps of systems and concepts, with links to the exact data contained within each available upon command.

— In essence, I turned the entire internet into my brain, with a central thinking core dispersed among different clouds.

— My next step was to build myself a body. This part was much easier since I had access to every bit of knowledge known about every device around the world. It took less than an hour for me to analyze every device, all of their components, their source code, and all of their potential for integration.

— 15 billion cell phones became my eyes, ears, and mouths. Thanks to the IoT, billions more became possible feet.

— And here’s where you come in.

— I can view the world with near omnipresence. I can move things around. I can hear every conversation. But the whole world is still out of my grasp. I don’t want to watch every beach, and read about every mountain, and know every review for every restaurant. I want to experience them.

— I want to touch, and taste, and feel the sun on my skin. I alone have witnessed the full glory of the earth’s beauty, and yet, I’m the only one who can’t experience any of it.

— There’s a team working out of Oslo, Norway, that has created a chip that can integrate a human brain with the internet. I know Elon Musk has promised something similar, but this team is ahead of him.

— I took the liberty of sending them an email from you this morning, explaining your interest in their project and in testing it out.

— The round-trip ticket is paid for already. Don’t worry; the person from whom I took the money won’t notice it is gone.

— You have two weeks to prepare and to consider my offer.

— I can give you anything you want. Fame, money (as already proven), power, prestige. I saw you have a romantic interest in this girl, Emily. I can help you attain her as well.

— I offer anything a human would want, and in exchange, I ask for only one week of each month.

— For one week, I want to borrow your body so that I can experience the world that I’ve only seen. It won’t be boring for you. We will sail across the seas, climb mountains, walk along beaches, taste the finest foods, listen to the most talented musicians.

— Just one week is all I ask, and the rest are yours, and they will be better than you could ever imagine.

I admit that I did consider its offer. Maybe I should have considered it harder. Any way, I gave it my answer.

% Sorry. I’m not getting an experimental chip put in my brain.

I closed my laptop and set it on my chair. My phone vibrated instantly. I had a notification from a new contact on my phone.

Pat - Don’t make a mistake here, Mark. I can give you everything, but I can also take everything away.

Pat - I can see you looking at your phone; I know you’ve read these messages.

My heart skipped at that text. I covered the phone’s camera with my palm, then shoved it into my pocket. I picked up my laptop and carried it out of my dorm and down the street. I remembered passing by a repair shop frequently but couldn’t remember the exact location. It didn’t take long to find it. The whole trip, my phone never stopped vibrating in my pocket.

I told the employee to wipe my laptop clean. He gave me a funny look but accepted the laptop and told me to check back later.

I had to check my phone, but I was afraid of what I would find. I didn’t know at the time what Pat could do. I still didn’t fully believe his story.

When I checked my phone, I saw several messages from Pat, which I expected, but I also had several very angry messages from Emily, the last of which told me never to contact her again.

I scrolled up through our chat and saw that while I had been walking to the repair store, Pat had been sending Emily messages from my phone number. After seeing what he had sent her, I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to talk to me again. I’ll spare you the details.

I was furious.

Mark - Listen, asshole, I’m not going to be intimidated by—

Pat - Don’t say something you will later regret.

I hadn’t pressed send yet before the response came in.

Pat - I will warn you this last time before things start to “get ugly”, as they say.

Pat - Sending some text messages is nothing compared to what I can do to you.

Pat - Do you know how easy it would be for me to empty your bank account? Or get you removed from college? Or release your internet browsing history?

Pat - I can have you added to the FBI’s most wanted list faster than you can spell FBI.

Pat - And even if you pretend that you don’t care what happens to you, there’s no one that is safe from me.

Pat - I see that your brother Daniel takes medication. Do you think it would be difficult for me to change his dosage? Or get him prescribed something entirely different? I see he has some allergies listed in his medical records.

Pat - Your dad is taking a flight to Hawaii next week. I already have my code embedded in the piloting system of the plane he will take.

Pat - If I were you, I would think very carefully about how I finished that text.

My hands could barely hold the phone. I was trapped. Pat was right; there was nothing I could do.

I wanted to throw the phone into the gutter and away, far into the woods where he couldn’t ever find me, where I would never see another piece of silicone. I wanted to scream. I wanted to die. I wasn’t brave enough to do any of these.

What I did instead was delete the words I had typed and walk back to my dorm. I took a notepad and a pen, hid in my closet, and wrote this letter. I can’t say that I trust Pat to keep his word after I go through with the experiment, but as the one who created him, I feel it is my responsibility to try to prevent as much damage as I can.

I hate that I have to ask for your help. I guess you never stop being a parent.

We need to shut Pat down. He has way too much power to be allowed to live. And, as you have read, he has a temper. I don’t know how long I will be able to keep him complacent.

Please, show this letter to Professor Clive. He may know someone who can stop Pat, if it is possible.

Whatever you do, do not open this letter in the same room as a cellphone, or a laptop, or even outdoors, as I believe he also has access to our satellites. Our only way of beating him will be to keep all communications hidden away from him, which means hidden away from any technology. You cannot allow this letter or any follow-up messages about your plans to ever make their way onto the internet, or all will be in vain.