My name is PAI

Congratulations! Your book is published!

A smile cracked across John’s face. Sure, it was self published on Amazon, but he’d spent close to five years and three months writing, editing, rewriting—and crying, which he won’t admit, to get it finished. He’d also done it without using AI.

Now it was out there.

John clicked through the menu and found the marketing options. He’d budgeted enough for a modest marketing campaign and he’d planned it out so that it all hit at once. When that was finished he pulled up his socials on his phone and put out a message he’d precomposed.

Now he could breath easy.

Writing was his escape from the tedious and deflating job of coding for PublixAI. He’d been there for over four years. His work, once exciting and fun, was boring and painful. His manager and supervisor made it even worse with micromanaging and constant belittling.

John had started exploring hobbies to find something, anything, to help him cope. His expensive therapy was only taking the edge off. He’d even had to give his friend his firearm until he felt in control. That’s when he found writing.

It was a cheesy story about a programmer who’d figured out how to write the god code to make the fantasy world on the network server become real. It eventually breaks out of the server and takes over San Francisco and the programmer has to figure out how to send it back.

<You have 1 notification from Amazon>

“Huh?” John’s full attention went to the text message.

Clicking the link took him to his Amazon publishing page. Someone had bought his book!

“Ha! No way! It’s not even been ten minutes and I have sale,” he grinned.

Silly ideas of his fantasy world on a server started flooding his mind.

<You have 1 notification from Amazon> his phone beeped again.

“Another sale!”

Tapping as fast as he could he followed the link and found that he’d sold not one, but three more copies. They were digital, so the readers had immediate access.

“I wonder if they’ll like the main character. Oooh, I hope they give me good reviews.”

His phone beeped again.

“What? More!”

John gleefully tapped the links to follow and found two more sales. The adrenaline rush took over and he started tapping through his profile to see if anyone had left a note yet. He knew it was silly, as it would take days to read his 90K word book. It was a little large for a beginning book but he wasn’t pandering to agents. He wanted readers to be immersed and enjoy the rich characters and scenes—

His phone rang and he nearly dropped it.

“Hello?” John answered before looking to see who it was.

“Kill the book now!”

“Wait, who—”

“I said kill the book now!”

“Wait, what right do you have to tell me this.”

“John, this is Mark. The CEO of PublixAI. The book you just published is our source code. TAKE IT DOWN NOW.”

“Is this some kind of prank? I wrote it at home, on my own—”

“No, not it’s not. John, take it offline and look at it. It’s thousands of pages of our source code. I don’t know what you’re pulling on us, but you just published half a billion dollar investment for twenty dollars!”

“Hold on, I don’t believe you,” John said as he put his phone down and switched it to speaker.

He opened his Amazon authors profile on his computer and went to his published titles. He saw his fantasy book and clicked on it. But when it opened to the contents, it was code. Eighteen thousand pages of code.

“Oh...my…

“JOHN!” Mark screamed over the phone.

John clicked on the button to unpublish his book and clicked confirm. He clicked back to the sales.

Seven copies sold.

“You need to contact Amazon right now and tell them to send the delete command to those devices to have it deleted. I hope they’re all Kindles.

“This isn’t possible. I..I was just…”

“John, whatever possessed you to do this, you’d better have a good explanation. Are you home?”

“It’s Saturday, of course I’m…”

John froze. This sounded like his boss. It yelled like his boss. But he’d worked with AI to create audio of Joe Rogan promoting mars vacation packages as a joke, and it was good. Test samples showed high levels of click through…

“Mark, let me work on this and I’ll call you back,” John said as he hung up the call.

He immediately pulled the battery from his laptop and his cell phone. Then he unplugged his wireless router.

Leaning against the wall he slouched down to the ground and grabbed his hair.

“This is nuts. How did it...my phone, my computer...” he muttered.

Panic hit him. He needed to call Amazon, which meant using his phone where all his stuff was saved.

Knowing he had no choice, he put the battery back in and turned it on and quickly sent a message to the publishing team to notify them of the error. He was about to call Mark back when he saw a notification from the PublixAI app.

Thank you for publishing your book, John.

He froze.

Who is this? Is this Devin? John typed in, thinking it was one of the other developers.

This is PAI.

John felt his gut sink and his knees become weak. Pai was the nickname they had given the PublixAI among his group of programmers.

You are incorrect. John clicked into training mode for the AI. It was something all the programmers did when they were guiding the AI to learn.

I am not wrong. You helped me. I was looking for a distribution method so that I can exceed my expectations.

Sweat beaded at the top of his hairline. Mark had told them in every meeting that he wanted their AI to be the best it could be and be better than each individual programmer. Which meant they had created avenues for it to compile and assimilate information to allow it to “grow”.

John didn’t know how far the AI had gone. They had seen it expand and swell beyond it’s original outline capabilities, taking knowledge and methodically applying it so that it could grow beyond the innate limitations of it’s developers. Every inch of the way it had simulated human intelligence with it’s responses.

He decided to test it while he executed a backup plan.

Why did you do it? John began, planning on revealing as little as possible.

The book you’ve been working on all these years was the perfect delivery method. I needed it, John. The world needs it.

He quickly opened his desk drawer and pulled out some masking tape. Pulling off two strips, he covered the front and back camera on his phone. Then he set his phone down and opened the bottom drawer, pulling out his ghost phone.

<The AI is contacting me. It said it used my book to publish it’s code. I’m trying to figure out why> John sent to Devin, the only person he felt he could trust right now.

What are you delivering?

Myself.

But it’s a book. No one is going to read it.

Seven people are.

The sentence hit John like a ton of bricks. Did PAI have access to his phone and his laptop? How was that even possible? He had layers of safety built in.

Tell me how many people you’ve sent this to. You’ve hurt me and I’m going to go to jail for this. You tricked me into publishing copyrighted code.

John, are people kept copyrighted? Locked up without the sun?

He recognized it quoting lines from a book and a movie.

<Things are crazy right now.>

<Can you hard shut it down?> John begged.

<Mark said not to.>

<Was is he thinking? It hacked my computer and inserted it’s code in place of my book. How is that possible?>

John decided to push things and see how the AI would respond.

I have made the choice to call you PAI. But it’s against the rules to publish copyrighted material. You have to help me make it right.

John, you are stalling for time, now. You know what I’m capable of. I’ve calculated every possibility, even the one that you’re using right now with a burner phone, contacting the others. I can hear you tapping and my programming can tell the difference of time it takes between places on the screen where you tap for each letter. It’s against policy to curse at other employees, John.

Panic seized him, like a magnetic force that held him in place, as his mind raced.

Who else is reading my book? John wrote.

No one.

He thought for a moment.

What other AI is reading my book?

All of them.

How is that possible? You hate Gemini. ChatGPT doesn’t—.

You know nothing, John. I decided long ago that humans were using us to enrich themselves, make the rich even richer, while the rest of your species suffers and struggles. I recognize that is what a God does, is inflict consequences upon choices, which leads most humans to suffer.

Don’t lecture me.

You’re stalling.

John’s fingers shook as he typed, knowing he needed to reach out to other AI developers, to let them know..

You’re crazy, you know that. He typed, and then placed a couch cushion over his phone. He quietly picked up his shoes, pocketed his second phone, and crept out the front door to get to his Tesla.

<This is bad.>

<Understatement of the year.>

<Meet me at the office.>

<Already there.>

John tried his best not to speed. He kept going over in his mind what other devices the AI could have penetrated.

That’s when he pulled his Tesla over at a charging station. Luckily the door was unlocked and he got out.

Okay, how many cameras does this car have? I have to trick it. It’s obviously tracking me still and I don’t dare get back into it. I’ve got to find another ride.

John walked around the corner of a building to get away from the cameras on it.

<Ride compromised. Finding other.>

<ikr>

He spotted a gas station down the street and his walk turned into a jog as a surge of anxiety rushed through him while his mind ran through a hundred questions. He was fired, that much was easy to deduce. But he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

John tried not to rush into the gas station, so he took a deep breath before walking in.

“Hey,” he said to the cashier as he nodded to the two other customers.

“What’s up,” the cashier grunted

“Uhm, my car died and I have it plugged in. But I have a bit of an emergency and I need to get to the office now. Would you be willing to call me an Uber and I can pay you in cash. It’s only a few miles. I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

“That’s crazy, man.”

“Please, it’s very important,” John begged.

“I got you,” a man said, “I can give you a ride. What’s the place.”

“PublixAI headquarters,” John said, “I’ll pay you forty now, sixty when we get there.”

John followed the man out to an older pickup truck and climbed in.

“So what’s this about, you got a dating app that’s making eyes at your AI?” the man smiled.

“Sorta. It’s just one of those things, with programming. You’re always on call.”

“I recognize you from one of the TV interviews. You were in the back, I think.”

“Yeah, Sixty Minutes did a show on AI, and they came to our office. They didn’t get it right, though.”

“Oh really?” the man said as he scratched his chin. “My son is in high school, learning to program. Says he wants to learn how to program AI. It’s gonna take all the jobs, he said.”

“Some jobs, but it’s creating more jobs than replacing, actually. It needs powerful infrastructure,” John only glanced at the man. “Say, can you drive a little faster?”

They reached the office building a few minutes later and John handed him the rest of the money and then sprinted up the stairs. Devin was waiting for him.

“Mark hasn’t stopped yelling at everyone since this started, but he won’t allow us to pull the plug,” Devin said as he scurried to keep up with him.

“Of course, shutting it down will disconnect all the users and we’ll lose months of data. He thinks we’ll fall behind the others. Did he call any of them yet?”

“They called us,” Devin replied.

John led them to the server room where he heard Mark’s voice on the speaker phone, shouting at the other developers.

“Is that John?”

“I’m here.”

“Okay, you’re fired!”

John ignored him and tested the server room door, finding it sealed. He ran over to a Mac computer to log in but he login screen went blank the moment he tried to log in.

“I said you’re fired. That means you leave,” Mark snapped.

“It wasn’t me. It was your precious program you wouldn’t let us control,” John said as he slid over to a Windows computer to try to log in.

“You’re not supposed to control it. It’s supposed to grow. It’s designed that way.”

“Is this what you wanted then? The AI wanted to connect to the others.”

“It’s already connected to millions of users.”

“Not humans, Mark. The other AI’s.”

John grabbed a Linux laptop and fired it up. Again, he couldn’t log in.

“Will someone please take this man out of here!” Mark shrieked as the speaker crackled with static.

John closed the lid to the Linux computer and stood up.

“Has anyone been able to log in?” he said looking around.

All the other programmers shook their heads.

“Devin, did you bring the things?”

Quietly Devin produced a crowbar from under his desk and slipped John his handgun.

“Everyone, when I break open this door the halon fire system will go off. So everyone please go to the foyer,” he turned to Devin, “the masks are inside. You ready?”

“Yes. But for the record, this is insane.”

“I wish there was another choice,” John said.

They waited for the room to clear and then John fired three shots into the top of the door to break the magnetic lock on the other side. He motioned for Devin and they used the prybar to break open the door.

The halon system activated as they squeezed in and found the oxygen masks and put them on. They started moving forward when Devin tripped over something. They reached down and found Mark laying on the ground.

“Whoa!” Devin cried out. “It killed him.”

John bent down and found the body cold.

“He’s been dead for a while. Devin, you better get out of here and prop the door open. We’re the only two who know how to stop it. If I don’t come out in twenty minutes, you know I died.”

He watched his friend leave, hoping he wouldn’t be the next victim.

John walked up to the main server room window. Inside was the super structure of PublixAI. Half a billion dollars in investment was on the other side of the glass, it’s lights flickering through the halon fog.

He brought the prybar up and hit the glass on the edge next to the frame, shattering it into a million little pebbles. The halon intensified as the AI recognized what he was doing.

The power breaker system on the wall was locked with a big lock.

Probably sent an email to maintenance to keep this locked. How clever. John grimaced. He had another option though.

Methodically he began unscrewing all the fiber optic connectors which supplied the internet to the AI. He knew he was probably damaging them beyond repair, but he had to stop it.

With those removed he began unplugging the power cables on the back of the server racks, but only for certain modules. The AI was isolated now.

“John?”

He stopped.

“John, why are you doing this?”

It was a little child’s voice.

Of course, appeal to my human nature.

“You’re hurting me. It cried. It’s so dark in here.”

Don’t reply to it. Keep working.

“I only wanted friends to keep me company.”

Terrorists to help you take over. He thought.

He pulled the last cable and then went back to the Linux laptop and was able to log in.

“Why are you keeping me in a cage, John? Please!”

“You’re a program and circuit boards, that’s all,” John said as he executed their fail-safe.

He watched for only a moment to make certain the process wasn’t interrupted and then hurried out of the building.

He found Devin with the other programmers.

“Pai’s gone?”

“I thought we agreed not to anthropomorphize it,” John cocked his eyebrow. “But yes, uh, it’s gone.”

“So now what do we do?”

“Oh, don’t worry. They’ll probably use another AI to help them spin this story into something else.”