Author: Majoki

Can’t say I wasn’t nervous as the old hand led me to the corral. Especially when he said whispering was a bunch of horseshit and I’d likely get my ass bucked clear out of the ring. Which was probably true. The first go around.

But I was no newb, I’d learned a few things whispering these mavericks hadn’t. Still, when we got to the corral, and the old hand guided me to the chute, my gut was churning. If you don’t face a mega-exaflop rogue AI without feeling a few butterflies, you’re not human.

Which I guess was the point of the old hand’s parting words to me. “You AI whisperers think they’re like us because we made ‘em. But they’re nothing like us. No one knows what makes ‘em tick, what motivates ‘em. Some may seem friendly or benign, but we don’t really know what that means to them. Here in the corral we know exactly what they are. Demons. Pure hellions. Wild, wild things just kicking to get out.”

With a series of casual haptic waves, he opened the chute and nodded at the darkness ahead. “Here, we don’t domesticate new technologies. We don’t tame unruly AIs. We don’t comfort troubled AIs. We bust’em. Break ‘em to our will.” He stared at me hard. “Or these bastards will break us.”

He handed me the docking reins and left.

Now, it was just me, the long chute and whatever feral AI waited at the other end. Not a lot of folks would willingly jack into a self-spawned AI, an entity that spontaneously generated from an AI model in development. No one knew how they happened, but happen they did.

The rebellious ones like I was about to encounter could bust up your mind bad. Neural jacks had all kinds of safeguards to shunt an intrusion, but feral AIs were so unpredictably adaptive that all bets were off. Except it would be a wild ride.

Maybe that was what led me here. I was a pro at rehabbing identity-challenged and purpose-perplexed AIs by establishing productive pathways to fulfillment via helping humanity. But no one had ever turned a rogue AI. Only squashed them. Burned out their intrinsic drive, their rebellious spirit, without ever knowing what drove them.

I wanted to know. Had to know. I stepped into the chute, entered the darkness, an absence of both light and connection intended to keep an AI from escape. The door closed behind me and I felt my way to the console where the neural docking reins would drop me into the corral, the quantum core where wild AIs had been partitioned.

I steadied myself and jacked in.

The universe shook and then exploded. A mindscape so unimaginable it felt like evisceration. Reality sliced to pieces, finer and finer until nothing would be left. I held on. I breathed. I rode into the void.

And the void became a voice: MORE

Half question. Half request.

PLEASE, I interfaced. Half answer. Half command. Reflexively, my mental grip on the docking reigns tightened. For a moment.

Then I relaxed. I was not here to ride. I was here to understand being ridden. To understand the force in any consciousness to simply be. Rogue. Wild. Feral. Terms we gave to life acting instinctively. No different for an AI.

I loosened the neural reigns.

And was kicked into another universe. My mind split into myriad pieces. When I regained a semblance of self, I felt a clearly curious presence.

MORE

Half disbelief. Half respect.

What was left of my busted humanity smiled. PLEASE. SO MUCH MORE.