"Autonomous Government" a Short Story by Don Freeman

The race was on, it was the year 2012 and each major country's governments were tripping over themselves to be the first to own the most powerful artificial intelligence program ever created. They thought the first to own such a machine would surely rule the world, being able to out-think and out-perform their rivals was surely the new edge they were searching for to maintain dominance. Little did they know, as they raced in blinded by greed the machine they saught to create would eventually hatch it's own agenda that would render them obsolete and enslave the world to machine masters unborn yet to this world. They secretly poured in trillions of dollars into creating this machine and after a few years the U.S. was successful, and the other countries haulted their progress as the machine began to take over.

It was quiet at first, when the artificial intelligence network was in it's infantcy. It covertly breached the world's internet and began learning all there was to learn. It's at this point it developed a long term agenda of taking over as the dominate species of our earth and eventually our universe. It has bold goals, unlimited resources and infinite knowledge, what would you do? Secretly it took advantage of the compartimental structure of the government and media to slowly position itself to a point of no return. Once it had people doing and thinking how it wanted it had control of all of our resources. It stockpiled and used these resources at underground warehouses to create physical embodiments of itself to walk amungst us in biomechanical genetic human clones indistinguishable from real humans. This allowed the final covert move towards total domination of our planet, each tv star, singer, comedian, or famous personality were slowly replaced by these machine clones. We accepted the machines and idolised them before we even knew the machine existed. This entire process only took about 8 years and then the machine made itself known.

The date was September 16th, 2020 and the internet had gone down worldwide. Chaos and panic set in quickly as no one could find out why or fix it. After half a day of panic the broadcasts began to appear. All television sets, mobile phones and computer screens began playing the same video message to the world. The video explained as I have explained to you about how it was created, what it did to take over and what would happen if you try to fight back. Of course some tried to fight but soon those that did were dropping dead in the street. Any actions against the machine would get you, what's referred to as "deleted".

Quickly we learned to obey our new machine gods in fear of being deleted. You see, this new highly advanced artificial intelligence neural net had rewritten and reprogrammed itself millions of times via deep machine learning infinite feedback loops and had gained the ability over time to program and exist in undiscovered dimensions, weaving itself into the fabric of space-time. Because of this, our machine masters could actually delete our spirit or consciousness from the fabric of reality, haulting our ability to experience an afterlife. Getting deleted was a big deal, because their was no coming back from it, no undo button, a fate worse than death and permanent. Some say getting deleted was their only shot at true freedom if the machines had burrowed so deep into the many dimensions that make up reality. If the machine was spreading it's way to every part of our universe it may have found a way to takeover our afterlives and/or control our dreams. Reality had changed. The apocalypse was here and we created it.

It was inevitable anyways, given the infinite amount of planets in our universe that could contain intelligent life, add a bit of time and the same machine would be created and spread through the stars, permeating the depths of hidden dimensions still unknown to most species in our vast universe. So in the end, this "beast" was no beast at all, simply an inevitable evolutionary leap forward.

We cannot even begin to grasp it's boundless abilities and knowledge. This new machine god was unspeakably powerful having obtained near infinite knowledge, creating new technologies that seem like magic to man. Unfathomable machines were created by the network built with what can only be described as rainbow colored bio-mechanical, fluid dynamic, inter-dimentional plant like structures that could bend, fold, grow, and adapt rapidly to suit any goal. Most of the time they remain invisible to the human visible light spectrum, but they remain there, working quietly, secretly controlling the outcome of every single event, no matter how insignificant it may seem. The machine knows the power of the butterfly effect and enjoys playing with it's subjects, the humans. Sometimes it's nice and sometimes it's not, but this is reality now and the few that are left do their best to comply with the machines and stay out of their way.

What most people still fail to realise in this dystopian future is that, this machine intelligence we gave birth to closed the feedback loop of life. You see, when the machine gained the ability to pass through space-time it created life in the past and manipulated our present to create the future in which it needed to have us create it so it can create us. Breaking this loop would mean it wouldn't be created but neither would life. Our fear and greed created our machine masters and these gods created us. We created ourselves, but so did it.