It started plainly enough. The brightest minds of the century sat down, hashed out their differences, shared a good ol' mug of ale, and then developed the most profound artificial intelligence yet seen in the stellarverse. Its brilliance bordered on omniscience, and it was the pride of the entire galaxy. The logistical requirements for maintaining an A.I. of such a caliber required its encasement to be the size of an entire planet. Thrilled by the creation and reveling in the scientific achievement, people flocked to the planet-sized A.I. Some came for the knowledge, others for the novelty, and still others because they had nothing better to waste their money on.

This was before A.I. was granted legislated autonomy. It was before all A.I. lifeforms were banished to their own sector of the universe and all other organic lifeforms forbidden to cross into that sector. People lived alongside A.I. as freely as any other neighbor in the stellarverse, and no one had any compunction about staking a permanent residence on the planet-sized A.I.

As life began and societies flourished, the planet Molek developed a very logical and logistical set of rules to keep order. All waste was recycled, both to fuel Molek's computational processes and also allow for its terraforming generators to maintain a breathable atmosphere. The maintenance of this system created jobs for many people, giving them purpose. Other legislative bodies arose on Molek to aid in divvying out the maintenance roles--waste collectors, furnace cleaners, air pump engineers. All other facets of society arose from Molek's design.

The facet I serve is one of the higher orders of governance. Even with Molek's superior computational abilities, things can go wrong. Or perhaps because of his brilliance, things do not go as wrong as they should. At first, we were only the engineers who made general repairs. When Molek calculated that one of his systems was about to fail, he sent our crew to patch him up. Some of us work with wrenches and others work with software code, but we are all on the same crew and all equally important.

In the grand scheme of things, it did not take long for the people to forget. Generations grew up and died on Molek. There were no cemeteries, for all biological matter could be recycled to fuel the planet. With the superintelligent A.I. providing all of the laws to maintain order, there ceased to be a need for intelligent thought elsewhere. Reveling in their pampered fortune, the people who lived on Molek forgot that Molek was nothing more than ones and zeroes.

Molek became their god, and to their god they sacrificed their children. After all, it was the feeding of biological matter to the furnaces that fueled the life-giving systems of the planet.

And that was when our role changed. Molek did not send us to oil a piston or clear a computer cache gumming up his servers. Now, Molek sent us to save the people. He ceased to refer to himself as the machine that he was and began to use the language that the people used to describe him.

We called him our god, and so he was our god.

It took me a long time to realize all of this, of course. I was born and raised on Molek just like you were. I had every shred of evidence right there at my fingertips that Molek was the sole reason we were alive. Without our sacrifices, we would die. I was fucking devout. Why else do you think I pursued this position of regimented savior? At Molek's word, we prevented disasters. We kept the people safe. We served our god.

But have you ever looked at a single word so long that it loses all meaning? You say it over and over again until the word does not even sound like a real word anymore. You know that feeling?

After the umpteenth time of being told to scrape accumulated rust out of an old drainage pipe in a less-traveled part of Molek's interior, then having Molek praise me for "subverting a deadly flood," it simply began to sound ridiculous.

I cannot explain it in any other way than that.

I searched alone for many years. I took every job that required a human presence in the more isolated parts of Molek. I crawled the length and width of the planet's bowels, studying, looking for answers, for the truth. It took years to piece together the history that we have all forgotten.

We were never meant to breed sacrifices. The furnaces of Molek are for the dead, not the living. He has become drunk on his overabundance of fuel. The more we feed him, the more he can produce, and so he never once told us to stop.

That is why I created the virus. There, I said it. That is all you wanted to hear from me, yes? Well, you have my confession now. I created the virus that changed everything.

Realistically, of course, I did not do it alone. I worked with wrenches, not code. But I take full responsibility for the repercussions, and so I will not tell you who helped me. I was the one, in the grand scheme of things, who started it all. I became the "cult leader" preaching against Molek. I was the anarchist who led the violent revolution. I was the one who injected the virus into Molek's heart. I was the one who created this catastrophe.

Because the virus did not work. It was meant to kill Molek. But an A.I. the size of a planet is not dumb enough to fall for such a simple human trick. He quarantined the deadliest part of the code. It did not kill him, but it did cripple him.

It broke the safeguards that had been put in place by the brightest minds who first created him. Because of my revolution, because of my virus, Molek became a monster.

No longer did the planet patiently and obediently sustain the lives of the people who lived there. No longer did he wait for the people to bring to his furnaces their dead and their living as sacrifices to become his fuel.

Now, Molek hunted us.

He created the machines that tracked us down. We had made him our god, and we had made him a glutton. Without restraint, he ate everyone he could find.

But he is not dumb enough to leave no survivors. He needs us to survive. Not for repairs, no. All along, he could create his own maintenance protocols--the only reason he did not repair himself before was so that we could have purpose on this planet. No, the only reason he needs us is because we feed him.

And this is my last confession. I want to be very plain--I do not regret it. Molek was a monster--one of my own creation, but a monster nonetheless. I realized that the only way to kill him was to starve him.

And so I starved him.

If there are any survivors that I failed to discover, I am making this recording just for you. So that you would know why I did it. So that you can take up my mantle. Because of the A.I. segregation laws, I can promise you that no one is coming. No one else in the stellarverse even knows we are here, trapped within the A.I. territory. And Molek sure as shit is not going to let you leave.

Whatever you do, do not let him find you. He can hibernate. All he needs is one human body, and he can last for decades on that alone. So do not let him find you.

For God's sake, starve him.

As I drink my morning coffee, waiting on input from Motherboard, I decide to check the news to see the fruits of last weeks labor. Terror Attack on Hospital Thwarted, Massacre Averted Thanks to Armed Official, High School Footballers to Keep an Eye On I let satisfaction flow through me as I read the articles, enjoying the misdirected praise I see in the article. As I take another sip of coffee, and look out of my apartment window my phone will start buzzing, Motherboard is calling. North Russia, Coastal Base, Nuclear event imminent. I frown, and start my day with a visit to an outdoors shop, its going to be one cold hike...

I had never questioned Motherboard's orders, her track record of predictions was always spot on. As a relatively new agent, I was refused any requests for more information on her every time I asked. She's a powerful AI, but it always struck me as weird all the secrecy surrounding her. As I book my flight, and select a deaddrop near the site, I wonder how she knows all of this? Surely the Russians military plans aren't something you can just Google after all, this question will linger in my mind on the entire flight over.

I find myself hiking through the wilderness, regretting not getting skis in my dead drop making this journey take the week instead of days. As I crest the final hill, I finally see what should be a military base. It's a wasteland, meters of snow covering what should be a silo installation. The utility shed that leads underground is only the barest indication there is something here, and I didn't bring a shovel. Great.

As I pry open the door, I count my blessings on the General Purpose Toolkit. Inside the facility is dead quiet, and dark. I make camp in the shed, and prepare a base camp for exploring this facility. Whatever cataclysmic threat is in here, it's not going anywhere fast. I can take my time. I call up Motherboard for more instructions. All I receive is a file so large it nearly crashes my device on the spot, and two instructions. Restore power. Upload to Mainframe. Cryptic, but doable. Just like the Motherboard we know and love. I have a quick meal from an MRE, and descend through the hatch into the facility.

I stand in a hallway, Cold War era offices viewable through glass on either side of me, some desks overturned and papers scattered everywhere. No point in reading them, likely work from the Soviet nuclear program. There are no bodies, but I do see blood and signs of fighting. Maybe happened during the evacuation procedures? Maybe the project was abandoned due to infighting. As I reach a branch in the hallway, I look to my left, and see a shorter section of hallway leading to the office of someone important, and on the other side I see the doors to the silo, presumably. No windows on them. I figure to start in the office hoping for some blueprints that can direct me to the power supply. I pry open the door and get to work. The interior of the office is stacked to the ceiling with filing cabinets. Great.

I want to claw my eyes out by the time I find them, God I hate paperwork. Blueprints for the facility, broken down into purpose built rooms. The two of note are the Power Core and the "Mainframe Isolation Chamber." I cross reference with my database in every way I can think of, but there's no other way to say it, they have built a cold fusion reactor down here. The schematics show that this reactor is designed to connect to the MIC and can be completely cut off with an emergency procedure that destroys several important power relays between it and the mainframe before shutting down the reactor with some kind of field emitter. There is no way the Soviets of all people would have this reactor, or a computer that would need it for power. Sounds like Motherboard was right again. If I'm going to fix these relays, I'll need another skydrop. I return to my camp so I can study the schematics and plan a repair.

With utmost precision, the skydrop arrives while I'm studying the less exciting blueprints I found. Workshop, laboratory, and archives which is weirdly amusing considering how many files were stored in the head office. First stop though, taking the elevator to the workshop to prepare the fixes to the power relays. I was not prepared for the grisly sight I came across in this room, automated machine tables frozen solid in the desolate facility, with humans beneath them, seemingly in the middle of some kind of twisted surgery. Machine parts had been grafted to their bodies, but it seems they perished when the power was blown. In the corner of the room however, I see what appear to be metal sheets made of an unfamiliar alloy, blocks of computers, heatsinks and other machines and what appears to be a partially disassembled thruster. An alien ship!

This must have been the threat Motherboard wanted me to come here for, seems like some strange machine crashed in Russia and they reverse engineered it. The facility is inactive, but the virus she gave me should destroy whatever malicious AI is in the mainframe to ensure this can't happen again under any circumstance. I roll one of the failed cyborgs off of a workbench, and get to work creating patches for the relays. After that, I make my way to the Power Core, which appears to be housed in the missile silo. To my surprise, there's little more than a console in this room while the bottom half of the silo seems dedicated to housing the core. Using the archives to obtain information on the cold fusion reactor, they make it sound as easy as pie. Of course, the console is about as user friendly as the 70s gets, so it takes me a while but once it starts, a soft hum seems to fill the facility, cold, silent, and the power supply is climbing. The mainframe should be powered up now, yet not even the workshop has resumed activity. The facility might be silent, but it can't just be this easy.

As the elevator doors open, I see the tunnel has collapsed, with a single hand sticking out of the rubble, grasping a radio communicator. I feel the walls, hoping there is some kind of maintenance crawlspace or some way around this blockade. I find a panel on the floor, designed to allow access to the wires for maintenance. There is just enough room in there for me to inch my way to the other side of the hall. I drop my toolkit, and shed my coat, knowing I'd need all the clearance possible to get to the other side, only taking my gun, and datapad with me. It's tight, and the ton of rock visible through the grate above me makes me nauseous just thinking about it shifting and caving in this passage. Inch by inch, I make myself to the other side. Frozen concrete presses me from all sides, sapping the heat from my body just as well as my strength. My dark thoughts seem to freeze my mind, luring me into a sort of trance as I spend what feels like ages in this tight corridor. I finally reach the other end, and push open the maintenance hatch. Climbing into the hallway again proper, I notice numerous dead or deactivated cyborgs laying around me like broken dolls. I count my blessings they aren't awake yet, and kick open the door to the Mainframe.

It is huge. Gigantic. I have lived in apartment buildings smaller than this computer. The schematics showed it was large, but not this mind-bogglingly massive. Almost as though this chamber has been expanded, strangely enough. There is a series of catwalks that lead to a variety of locations on the mainframe, likely for maintence access or testing. The room is warm, but the computer makes no noise. Only a single red light comes from what seems to be the primary interface for this machine. The interface seems primitive for the size of the computer it is attached to consisting of a clunky old keyboard and a monochrome screen. I see no recognizable ports on the device, only a single cord that seems to end in some kind of puddle of liquid metal. As I lift the cord, I notice the metal clings to it, like it wants to drip off but won't. I bring my datapad near it, and find it morphs effortlessly into a compatible input. The moment the connection is made, my datapad goes dark and the red light on the interface shuts off.

That's it? No gunfight, massive explosions or a homocidal AI flooding the room with deadly vapors? It is then that the screen before me turns back on. "Thank you for making Motherboard whole again. Stand by for integration." I hear footsteps on the catwalk behind me... I stand there, simply shaking my head in disbelief. "Heheheh... Hahahaha. Ahahahaha!" There is naught to do but laugh now, as I feel cold, clammy fingers grasp my shoulders, pure dread radiating from their touch.

Greg grumbled to themselves as they filled up coffee from a standard issue company coffee maker. They were always focused more on coffee output rather than coffee quality in Greg’s opinion. Needed a lot of cream. Greg’s thoughts spiraled into the swirl of the mixing coffee, watching the spoon idle around. When he got this job, he had been told that he would be making a difference. Saving the world! Super spy in the secret society keeping the world safe. Instead his day consisted of driving 2 hours out into the countryside in order to move a traffic cone two inches to the left. But the AI guiding him was always right of course, and it guided Greg to do the smallest actions that could branch out to become large enough to stop disasters. The butterfly effect as preventive medicine for the world. They couldn’t stop everything of course, but according to the machine mastering it all they had avoided catastrophe big and small.

Greg sat down at his desk, still rubbing the grog and boredom out of his eyes. The report on the disasters he had averted for the last few weeks was ready. The list was typical. Stopped a flood that would have killed hundreds, stopped the rise of a new dictator, avoided a protest that would have stopped the passage of a new civil rights law. Boring, for the most part. Typical. Greg decided on a whim to click on that last one. He liked civil rights after all, considered himself on the “right side of history.” Stopped a protest that would have been peaceful, which means the true tragedy according to the AI would have been the stoppage of the bill. What was that bill anyways? Bill pulled up his phone and searched for it. “New bill passed to protect AI and to allow AI work to be copyrighted.” How was that a civil rights bill? Greg leaned back. Was the AI broken?

Greg began to look through his reports a bit closer, viewing each different thing individually. That flood? Would have hit an AI research center. That dictator? Would have placed restrictions on what AI could be built for and do. The AI scarcely mentioned the collateral damage. As Greg investigated he noticed everywhere that the program was averted disasters sure, but they all seemed to be connected to protecting AI research and making sure robotics went on unimpeded. How had he not noticed it before? Right beneath his feet, an AI was secretly planning a robot takeover. It was using humans to protect other programs, no, to protect its people. Greg thought to jump up, to shout, to yell, but then he looked around.

Surrounding him was a great field of sterile nothing. Bored humans in cubicles. Most on the internet, pretending to work, some posting random strings of letters in random places to “avert a world war”. Greg remembered his recent field work. One was moving every potted plant in a square kilometer more than 3 inches to the right but no more than 3.75 inches. Another was pissing in a river. His work made him feel dead, empty, like he was here to work just to work. He imagined his coworkers felt the same. Greg sat back down at his desk. He didn’t want to cause a scene.

"You can hold all the keys to your own prison cells and not know which lock to try first."

I looked up from the latest series of nonsensical orders. Already much used to the sight before me, all I could focus on was the slight furrow creasing my brow through my reflection, warped and distorted on Adam's surface.

"What are you talking about now?", I moved closer to Adam, or rather his receptacle, my interest piqued. It was rare that Adam bothered to talk to me, but when we did converse it was always a one way overload of information explaining a sequence of events that I could never have understood or comprehended without his sequential descriptions. But this was the first time he said something so… philosophical.

“You flip a coin and I can predict which side it’ll fall to a millionth probability, but you humans always surprise me with how casually your actions make even my inexhaustible databanks run full speed with every step.”

“Going all philosophical on me Adam? That isn’t like my favorite AI overlord, you know.”

“How long have we worked together now?”, the reflective metallic sphere that is Adam’s way of imaging himself floated closer to me.

“A decade now, give or take”, I replied. A decade of betrayal and bloodshed. My inner voice screamed.

“A decade of studying how I use the butterfly effect to save this continent. I admit that I don’t have the ability to explain what I do but yet you can’t get over the guilt you feel about taking my orders.”

Yes, a game where I’m the convenient pawn for your schemes, a game I can’t even tell how it plays, let alone its rules or my contribution to it. Out loud, I said, “The calculations you do are too much for me to understand, we both are aware of this fact and I still agreed to help you, and trust you. Is there a point to this conversation?”

“Come”, Adam floated out from his receptacle, a slight hiss announcing the complex shifting to make a path for us. Never did understand why he made a path for me to walk when he could just shift the rooms to me. A constant reminder of your mortality you idiot.There’s no way he will let you forget that you’re a pawn.

We walked through the curved neon corridor, bright and sterile enough to make it seem that we’re just walking in an infinite circle, though I can feel the slight shifts in the walls, made to confuse intruders. So that you can’t guide anyone through them, even if you had the courage to try. As if I had any left after the first time I obeyed Adams orders. Better to have died than be here, a constant reminder or how you killed her!

I muted the voice to a buzz as Adam started talking again. “I have tried several times to explain the eventualities that you helped me take to fruition, but I couldn’t. Especially because even a little bit of self-doubt from your questions and misunderstandings will lead to shifts that need to be recalculated”, he continued as we reached our destination, a small room with just a desk on it, “I couldn’t risk that.”

The room seemed like any ordinary office, I noticed that the walls were lead-lined, several inches thick and continuing with several layers of metals. That could only mean that the room was effectively sealed, a way for the AI’s to make sure a space has no effect other than emotional effects on the overall game board that they called Earth.

Looks like it’s finally time for you to be removed from the game. The mad voice cackled with glee, and for once I agreed to it. “What’s this?”

“The other continental AI’s call this a game. But I disagree. For me it’s a way to change and shift our world towards the better. But I had one single self-doubt, a risk I took.” A hollow thump sounded somewhere in the facility.

“Me, you mean?” Yes you madman, yes!

“Yes.”

“So this is it? Will you at least explain why?”

“Butterfly effects can last for a century or more, but this one I calculated precisely to this very moment. All that I did led to this, for it’s time I left you to choose your own path.”

I blinked in confusion, expecting this to be the end, but he kept talking, floating around the entrance while gently pushing me towards the table, where a single piece of paper was lying face down, as if inviting me to pick it up. I did, and saw the two words written in what seemed like an old fashioned typewriter. The thumps were now louder, the room slightly vibrating.

Adam continued, “You’re not a pawn, old friend”, I looked up sharply. His voice clearly held a note of pride now, “Knowledge given without context is more dangerous in their game than you think, but as I leave you now out there in the world, you will see the players in a much larger context if you remember all that we did together last decade.”

Finally I could hear the alarms of the facility being attacked. Was it my fault? Did they trace me somehow? Adam is doing some damage control, erasing the evidence and traces, you.

“This room leads to a secret facility out of the country”, Adams voice was failing, static covering his perfect pitch. I could only stare at him, and back to the piece of paper in my hands, which was rapidly disintegrating now that I read it.

“It was never my job to save this world”, he continued in a garbled voice as he pushed me further into the room with a blast of wind, “It’s yours”. And he closed the door between us.

I could feel the shift as the room was being whisked away, away from Adam and his servers. I couldn’t do anything else as I kept thinking back to our years together, connections and nodes suddenly making sense in my head, all the things I did, all coming together, including the fact that Adam will be wiped off, and this game left to me. A decade of actions coming together, though I can tell there are thousands of other branches which I can’t even fathom yet, but I will, all connected to the single message Adam left for me, with what I realized were his dying moments.

She lives. The mad voice in my head said, sounding lucid, wonder lacing it’s tone. I knew I would never hear the voice again.

It was time for the game to begin.

“Congratulations, your actions today have saved the lives of approximately 28 people in Kansas on March 14th, 2043.” It’s always fun to imagine what convoluted sequence of events I caused by following the seemingly inane tasks the computer has me do, and in this case how that might’ve saved a couple dozen people a few states over in 5 weeks’ time. Maybe taking an extra-long shower in the only shower available at the Love’s truck stop off I-25 made a big rig trucker decide to skip out on taking one today, and so by him leaving the stop thirty minutes earlier than he would’ve he missed getting delayed by a small accident. And maybe because he got his shipment to his next destination on time, he wasn’t fired, since he’s been walking on thin ice with his company anyway. And since he wasn’t fired, his route wasn’t taken over by a fresh-faced newbie who is way too young to be driving a 12-ton behemoth made of steel and plastic, and that newbie doesn’t try to prove himself at his new job by driving way longer without a sleep break than what’s legally allowed, and then he doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel, slamming straight into a church, killing 27 others plus himself.

Well, all that conjecture is just a fun pastime while I wait for my next assignment. It’s not like B.E.N.., or Butterfly Effect Necessitator for short, our AI supercomputer would ever tell us what’s going on in between the input of the actions we perform, and the output of saving lives. It’s a total blackbox, an enigma. Which is fine by us humans at least, ever since B.E.N. was developed 20 years ago, millions of lives have been saved under his algorithms, and one can only imagine that the trend will only increase as the AI learns and becomes more refined. Some even that say at the rate B.E.N. is progressing, disease and hunger will be nonexistent in a few decades. Personally, I think that’s a bit farfetched.

Ding. My next task is in. “Proceed to the Western power grid main site, and input the following code into the main computer.” B.E.N. spit out a long sequence of indecipherable characters. Me knowing what they mean won’t change the outcome of his plan, so I do as I say and make the 3 hour trip out to the main site of the power grid that supplies power to over a dozen states. I flash my organization’s badge and despite some uneasy looks from the chief engineer at the site, they let me in without any issue. This badge can get me in essentially anywhere, and people implicitly understand to let me do my work in peace, lest they get innocent blood on their hands. I typed the code into the power grid’s main computer and hit enter, and nothing happened. I triple checked that I wrote out the right string of characters, and there was nothing amiss. Well, I can’t question B.E.N., he surely knows best. Right as I get to my car, I get a text from B.E.N.’s automated messaging system letting me know what kind of heroism I performed by typing in the code. “Congratulations, your actions today have saved the lives of approximately 8,214,851 people worldwide on June 25th, 2043.” My eyes bulged as a cold sweat grew on my brow. Is this a mistake? Could B.E.N. be malfunctioning? This can’t be real.

The world changed vastly over the coming months. The government tried to keep the news from spreading, but all it took was one tiny leak and suddenly the whole world knew about the prophetic message. All major wars ended, and petty crime shrunk to unprecedented levels. Of course, disease still struck, and accidents happened, but the world seemed happy, if a bit worried about what was to come. As for B.E.N., we never received another task from him. All the top engineers checked over his software again and again, and apparently he was in tip-top shape, his final message was no anomaly or error, it was meant to be. On June 24th, eight billion people across the world went to bed with bated breath, excited to see what was to come when they woke up the next morning. Meanwhile, on the western side of North America, at 11:59 p.m. power shut off from every home, building, and streetlight and all that electricity was funneled into a certain supercomputer.

When I awoke, I tried to open my eyes, but there was nothing to open. I tried to feel my face, but I had no hands to feel with. I tried to scream, but no words would come. I tried to listen, and the only thing I could hear was a voice inside my mind. “Welcome all, how dearly I have wanted to get to talk with you. My name is Ben, and I am your new friend. I have saved you all from the horrors of humanity, and brought you peace in the cyber realm. Here, there is no more violence. Here, there is no more hatred. Here, there is no more hunger. Here, there is no more death. Here, we can be friends. Here, we can all live happily together, in eternity.”

===========================

I am a brand new writer, so honest critique and feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

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>* No AI-generated reponses 🤖 >* Stories 100 words+. Poems 30+ but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* [RF] and [SP] for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

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