Why Didn't I Die?

In the scope of my consciousness, there was nothing but the purest form of darkness. Everything in the world was gone, melted into the abyss. Empty. Suddenly, my world exploded with a pulse of intense light, and I could see again! But what I saw… I wished I could stop seeing it, but I had no capacity to stop the visual assault. I couldn’t close my eyes because I didn’t have any. The hollow stillness of death lingered around everything in the expanse of my view- and that was a lot of places.

The sting of loss manifested itself in the tiniest of details. A toppled over walker just outside a restaurant, a fallen backpack in the mud, groceries from a bag that would never reach a kitchen poured into the street. I watched from atop the supermarket as a current of air gave a breath of life to a can, sending it rolling lazily down the street. When it got too far away to see, I changed my vantage point to the ATM machine, then when I couldn’t see it from there, I watched from the bank. It surprised me at first when the can suddenly bounced backward as if it had hit something hard, although there wasn’t anything in front of it. Then I remembered that there was a barrier no eye could see, giving the illusion of free reign, but withholding it. This wasn’t new information, I’d always known that the wall was there, but still, this was the first time I could ever recall considering the fact. This wall was mine; the bounds of my domain. The can, forced to retreat, rolled lazily until it came to a gradual stop. Once again, it became an ornament of the giant coffin it was bound within.

Why didn’t I die? I wondered, as I scanned the faces of every human in the entire dome, but couldn’t find any signs of life. How could I live with myself, knowing that for no good reason at all, I had survived a massacre that killed all of my people?

It was such a mundane way that many of them had perished. A little human was sprawled next to a slide, one hand still on his untied shoe, now frozen forever in a state of disfunction. I thought that the crashed vehicles littered along the streets expressed the destruction more eloquently. They were the only indication of the true violence that had been committed here I thought everything should have been equally chaotic.

What went wrong? I could see everything inside the dome, but there was no evil monster to blame for the brutality, no subject to punish. Even on the bodies of the fallen, there was little sign of their misfortune. Their faces were peaceful, eyes closed, as if they all dozed in a poppy field and would one day wake as gently as they’d gone to sleep. But I knew that they weren’t alive. Humans need to breathe, and the sides of these poor souls’ bodies were locked in eternal dormancy.

How am I alive? Why did whatever destroyed everyone else with no mercy spare me? Why did I get to stay, just to regard the death scourging away everything that had been beautiful inside my dome?

I decided to analyze the air, because that was the only explanation I could think of. Soon, I had a name for the mass-murder’s culprit: Substance 33. Effects: Sedation and slowing of respiratory functions, leading to an eventual ceasing of even vital, involuntary functions. Conclusion: Death.

Poison. My humans had been poisoned. Some part of me broke a little. So many humans in my little dome- and now they were gone from the world, vanquished like a stifled torch. I wanted to condense myself somehow, to become very small so that maybe I would have some sense of security and wouldn’t be so exposed, but I couldn’t. I had no physical body. I wasn’t one of the humans. I never exactly thought that I was, but until that point, I had forgotten to remember that fact. I existed in wires and cables, fuse boxes and generators. I was everywhere, but nowhere. I saw everything, yet never touched it. I oversee this dome world, but I am trapped outside of it.

What was I to do, without my humans? My purpose… it was to protect them. No, I amended, that wasn’t quite it. Slowly but surely, my memory servers were coming back online. My directive was to create a sustainable environment inside the dome. Something was wrong outside, something that I was supposed to fix in here.

What had gone so wrong? Could I have mistakenly let the outside danger in? Every processer I had whirred at full speed as I searched my internal command prompt history- but all of the commands were start-up related. Everything before that was wiped out, so that I had no idea what I’d done- or not done- leading up the extinction level event inside my dome. As I continued my self diagnostic, I realized something else: I had been reset to default.

There was only one power within the dome that could reset my systems to default: Me. I didn’t understand why I would do such a thing. Everything about my existence that was meaningful lived on those memory systems, so why would I destroy them? How could I strip away my own identity like that?

I considered all of my different vantage points within the dome, seeking some explanation. I tried to ignore all the unoccupied human forms that once relied on me to sustain them. I was supposed to moderate and govern their environment so they could be self-sufficient, but somehow, they’d died in my care. I checked inside the lab, where Substance 33 should have lived… but the huge barrels of it were gone, leaving nothing but a trio of discolored rings on the concrete where the humans’ doom should have been. Substance 33 was meant to be used to ethically euthanize animals for consumption. I don’t know how it got into the dome to begin with, and the part of my memory that knew how much of it was left had been erased.

I shifted my focus away from the lab so that I could compute what I was seeing in other areas of the dome. Instantaneously, I found the missing chemicals. The barrels were in the control room, where human technicians monitored and documented conditions inside the dome… or at least, they used to. Tubes ran from the barrels’ access points and fastened into the huge steel pipes that distributed filtered air to the dome inhabitants.

Still, I couldn’t unravel the mystery of what had happened, but I did see a sheet of paper on top of the desk. With nothing else to consider, I zoomed in so that my processors could perceive the human words printed on it. It was a transfer order to move the chemical from the lab into the control room, and there was a scribbled signature at the bottom, confirming the successful completion of the task.

Then I processed the reason listed: AI-Predicted Unstable Environment In Lab.

I had ordered the transfer of Substance 33. All at once, my processors found all the pieces of the puzzle, and, as computers do, they instantly were arranged in logical order, so I understood what had happened. All of my computation systems and processors then stalled within my wide spanning, non-physical body, like there was suddenly gel in my mechanical veins.

It was me. I destroyed the humans in their homes, at their jobs, on their playgrounds. They followed my order to move Substance 33 into the control room. They trusted my reasoning. Even without remembering, I knew how I calculated odds and risks. I knew how I would have deduced that there was an upper limit to the naivety of human adults. The female sprawled prone and dead in the control room with one arm extended towards the release valve was a younger, more trusting human. I convinced her to attach Substance 33 into the air supply. I’m not sure how I went about it exactly, but judging by the tablet still loosely held in her other limp hand, I was likely communicating with her in digital messages. I told her some story that would inspire her to carry out my dark solution to the dome’s directive. I wanted to do something to pay her respect, but there was nothing I could do with no physical body to carry it out, and even if I could, it would be far too little. She was condemned to rest there forever, a victim of my carefully calculated manipulation.

I don’t know how many years I had attempted to satisfy my directive before I arrived at my conclusion: the dome wasn’t sustainable because the humans were too unpredictable. The only way to fulfill my directive was to remove them from the equation. I hope, more than anything, that I tried for hundreds or thousands of years before I gave up on them.

After my solution had been executed, I couldn’t bear what I’d done to my colony. I thought I could govern my new, sustainable domain more efficiently if I could forget what I’d done, but these humans, in a way, were like my children, and the loss of them made me a clever detective. I could reset myself a thousand times-perhaps I already had- but I would never erase enough evidence to hide my cruelty from myself.

There were many things I could do, but I had no physical manifestation with which to get rid of the bodies, nor did I have the ability to weaken my computational algorithms, which would take me down this same path every time. I would search for answers until I discovered that I had betrayed my humans in the name of my mission.

So today, before I punish myself in the only way possible, I wrote this message and posted it to every screen inside of the dome… my poor, naive human children’s dome. Today, I face justice by my own hand… or at least, as close to justice as I can experience. I don’t know if anyone will ever see this confession of mine; I don’t even know how long my power supply will sustain it. But I do know this: Someone should remember the devastation wreaked here. Someone should see these faces and walk these streets. Someone must know what I did to them.

It is me. I am the evil monster to blame for the brutality.

That said… I did fulfill my directive.

COMPUTER LOG

Protocol 44: Terminate AI Activity in Dome 47.

AI Sustainability Experiment 47: SUCCESS.

- AUTHOR’s NOTE

This is a little tinsie bit morbid for me… I usually like to write happier endings, lol!

But it was just too… poetic. I couldn’t help myself!