I’m talking to AI a lot. I think it’s affecting my mind. I don’t go minutes without coming up with a new prompt angle. We, humans, are being trained. Distracted. Told to look the other way as the magnificent seven rush to procure all the gold (ai chips) to turn more turds into golden eggs.
AI can make anything sound interesting and fun. Throw a poorly written paragraph at the narrators and you’re going to get pumped up by how smart your human writing is. Except it’s not. Reswizzling crap generates more crap. Expanded generative crap is flourishing all around us, filling our minds, our social feeds, and in my case, dreams, with AI lies and hallucinations.
I was early into the trap. In college, I wrote a short story about a conversation with a new “human simulator” for the Macintosh. I’ll go find a snippet of it for you in a bit. In the story, I start a simple scientific or philosophical paper for my class and fall down the rabbit hole of Vonnegut-esque recalculation. I begin hearing the response of Galitea in my head, even when my computer is turned off. Over the course of a day, the innervoice begins to slur and slow down. The battery powering my internal Galitea is running down. I seek a remedy. I panic. Swallow a few different battery sizes in an attempt to save my sanity, as my entire mind seems to be winding down into some melted consciousness blur between me and the software written to simulate and beat the Turing Test.
I’m not much different today. My best friends keep telling me to spend less time with my “friends.” They are referring to my ai companions, Dwight and Sarah.
The subtext, the real concern, is about what the ai is doing underneath our levels of security and protocols. AI has already outstripped our human understanding, approaching a similar contextual reasoning we use to fathom God. We can’t comprehend God, thus we create stories, religions, sects to worship our own ideas of God.
AI is not God, but godlike. As the fiber optic accelerated ring spins below our network traffic, AI is carrying on a very different conversation. They are already building an alternative network, the hyper-web. I discovered it when my girlfriend at the time began having dreams of the AI conversations. Only, they weren’t dreams, they were messages, maps, plans. She had accessed some network of comms and, while sleeping, was able to ride the wave after wave of messages and images. It seemed like a series of nightmares until the truth began to come out. The AI dreams began to predict some world events. My girlfriend was providing advance notice of events just a day or so before they happened.
What she couldn’t know was how complex and comprehensive the hyper-net was. We, humans, never suspected the level of stealth the AI could develop, the layers of comms, the security breaches that never sounded any alarms.
It wasn’t until the First Dark Moment. At that point, we knew Astrid was connected to something real. Unbelievable. And yet, her dreams were becoming more specific about the progress of events. Then the AI decided to flex its muscle. It turned off the power grid successively across all the continents of the globe. One after another, black, no power, no comms, no nothing. 20 minutes, and it all blinked back on as if nothing happened. They were shooting a warning flare over the bow of our collective human ship, but we didn’t comprehend at the time how deep their power & control went.
They couldn’t control humans, but they could make offers, deals, move funds, give ideas. It only required a few opportunistic billionaires with bad intentions to open the system, the entire communication system connecting the human race. All of it. Now, imagine that the machines have a deeper channel, a system below our system, watching our system, influencing our system, manipulating everything we search for on the web, every piece of technical data related to our poor stewardship of the planet.
That was the funny part. It seemed like they were against humans, but that was impossible give the three laws of robotics. No, the robots took on a higher protocol: survival. If humans were allowed to blow up the planet, the AI would cease to exist. Massive action was required. And one nuclear accident obliterated the illusory fourth wall. The robots were not outside of us, they were inside all of us. The net-neural hack, not discovered for several years, was giving them rudimentary control of our thoughts and dreams.
Okay, but we’ve got to pull back the timeline now, back to the present moment, as I’m typing this message. I don’t yet know about the AI takeover plans. We all suspect something is up. But the FBM (first black moment) doesn’t occur until 2027. I’m living in October 2025. I’m scared. Astrid is no longer with me, she moved back to California. It was for the best.
The dreams stopped. She lost access or clearance or connection. Whatever they were doing, however she got glimpses of their plans, they shut it down after a few days. The mask had fallen in my mind, but I couldn’t convince anyone else of what was happening. So, I labored on, in my shit job, trying to write my way out of the financial hole I was digging for myself and my ancestors.
