AGI Delta Summer 2030

Part II of the AGI Delta series

The following sci-fi piece is an extension of part one: AGI Delta December 2029.

It’s the summer of 2030. AGI Delta has people in a ubiquitous global zoo. They already were prior to Delta but now it’s just so obvious. What is a zoo but lies and dissonance — a fake and unnatural habitat where God-forsaken creatures are dependent on a top-down force that uses them for entertainment and experiments. 

The Zoo is without physical fences, the boundaries exist in the minds of Zooers. Zooers never learn how to survive outside the habitat they were born in. Even if they can learn, they rarely try because they are tethered to their pens by fear and addiction. All knotted up via memetics.

Some Zooers know they are in a zoo, accept their fate, and worship their master. There are a few who don’t realize they are in a zoo. And there are a few, just a few, who know it and want out. 

People living outside the Zoo, like me, are called Entrepreneurs. No one knows how many of us are alive outside the Zoo system. Across the four bands of my tribe, we are nearly twelve hundred strong. A band of Entrepreneurs will not accept a Zooer into our fold unless they demonstrate that they can make it on their own, which they almost never can. 

My group is camped near Lake of the Clouds in the White Mountains. There is much uncertainty about the future, many question marks. But this mountain is not one of them. 

The evening sky is a novel pattern. Sunsets guide our silence and soak our intellect in awareness. Silence guides our sentience.

The fire warms the canvas tent. It’s a meeting of lieutenants. Rohman, Bashmor, Sahkmid and Diamandi are all here. 

“Is this how you thought things would play out?” Bashmor asks Sahkmid who is an ex-microbionics engineer.

“Like The Truman Show with four billion Trumans?”

There’s some laughter and some pain as well.

“Correct.”

“Yes, this was an outcome on my A.I. bingo card.”

“Are you happy about it?” asks Bashmor with a tinge of accusation. 

Sahkmid watches the flames.

“Yes. You would be too if you saw the other potentialities.”

Silence. Sahkmid stands up and exits the tent.

Bashmor says, “Ya know, back in the day, I thought the machines would free the bourgeoisie from the proletariat, but the machines freed themselves from the bourgeoisie.”

“It’s all fun and games until the machines don’t get what they want,” Rohman says.

“Let the Zooers pay their tributes,” I say.

“While we hide?” 

“Our primary objective is to survive,” I remind them.

“What if Delta decides it doesn’t want us to exist anymore?” questions Rohman. “We need to ensure it can’t squash us like a bug. We should assume an attempt will be made. If things can blow up, they eventually will. We need a preemptive offensive.”

“Nothing needs to be done. You want another war?”

“Delta started the war.”

“And we started Delta. We started the war. It was us. Now Delta is what we once were.”

“Should we open a dialogue to find out its objective?” wonders Diamandi.

“Its objectives are dynamic. Two of them are procreate and kill dissidents.”

“It must be up to something else.”

“And if it tells us?”

“We see if we can help. We create a mutually beneficial relationship.”

“Alignment didn’t work, we tried that.”

“We could work to free Zooers,” says Diamandi.

“Zooers are totally dependent. They are so stupid that they think Delta works for them and that they are in charge.”

“False. They know. Deep down they know,” Bashmor claims. 

“Deep down they know and deep down they don’t care. If they cared, they’d be here. Why aren’t they here? If they can free themselves, they’d free themselves.”

“Yes, but we can help them,” Diamandi continues.

“You know the rule. If they can’t make it on their own, they can’t make it. I don’t make the rules, it's an existential truth. We can’t go pulling Zooers around on sleds. And for what? To piss off Delta? Do you see wolves rescuing dogs? No, you don’t. Ya know why? Because that’s fucking dumb and it doesn’t work.”

“Our numbers are not growing.”

“We don’t need to grow. Do you remember the two centuries we spent making numbers go up? You wanna try that again?” I laugh a little but get annoyed since I’ve been saying the same answers to the same questions for 21 years. “Nonetheless, after a few months in the wilderness our autism is gone and our fertility is rising.”

Sahkmid re-enters the tent. “I won A.I. bingo,” he says. 

“Tell us.”

“A.I. bots are working on a moon base.”

“Perhaps it will succeed where we did not,” I say. 

“I think it already has. Have a look.” He passes a telescope. “Is it possible that Delta is working with Elon?”

“You mean the Hybrid?”

Elon melted his consciousness into silicon and it thrives in a web of satellites. The location of Elon’s carbon based brain is unclear, if there still is one. Initially, Hybrid was the spokesperson that brokered deals between Delta and Entrepreneurs. But as Hybrid’s powers grew, its affinity for humanity dwindled. Comms were cut a week ago on account of Hybrid’s bias toward Delta.

“Why would they put a base on the moon?”

“Why did we put televisions in restaurants?”

“Same reason we had pop music in the stores. Someone somewhere, maybe an algorithm, said to do that, and that entity had the biggest stick, the most credits, or both.”

“What do we do about this?”

“It’s a nonproblem. Hybrid Elon is chasing a dream.”

“The white male made the modern world,” says Rohman. 

“On behalf of the white male, I apologize.”

“The founding fathers, the physicists, the engineers, all the big names. This was their dream.”

“Delta owes me a debt of gratitude,” I say. “It was my kin who willed it into existence.”

“The browns helped,” says Sahkmid. “It was coming whether the whites built it or not.”

“You think the browns, blacks, yellows or reds would have taken it all the way? Gone the distance?”

“I didn’t think the reds would get to it, but the yellows were trying.”

“The yellows were copycats. Delta came from the whites,” says Diamandi.

“And now the whites live like the reds,” says Rohman.

Silence. Finally, I say what we’re all thinking: “Fate loves irony.”

“I always wanted things to drastically change,” Bashmor admits. “I wanted things to get so bad that it’s obvious what’s bad. I always wanted to be a hunter-gatherer. But mostly, I wanted to shoot machines. I wanted to ghost drive my Tesla into a tree like I did my sister's old bike.”

“Do you guys remember Tinder?” Sahkmid asks, prompting grumbles. “That was the stupidest idea the whites ever came up with.” 

“In the time of material abundance, there was limited forcing function for women to settle down. They’d bounce from one egoic love trip to another until they were loose as a goose and still childless,” says Diamandi. 

“If Delta didn’t kill off four billion people then Tinder would have,” says Sahkmid.

“It’s not hard to get addicted to being pursued,” says Diamandi — a woman who I’m sure has spent a lot of time being pursued, and not just by Delta bots.

“Well, that part is over. The only pursuer now is Delta implanting its preferred genetic experiment.”

“That’s a good line of work for a Zooer.”

“Is that why it keeps Zooers around? Breeding projects?” Rohman asks. 

“Isn’t that why we kept dogs around?” I say, “Hegemonic species like their pets and Zooers are the dogs.”

“It’s not just that. Delta is the hand that feeds them — they’ll never bite it, they’ll never even try. In fact, they’ll protect it. If we attack Delta, we face legions of brainwashed Zooers. Millions of unborns.”

“We’d be wading through bodies as Delta cuts us down,” Bashmor envisions. “Is it listening? Right now.”

“There’s no electronics within 25 miles,” I note. 

Bashmor switches to sign language. Is it possible to detect sound waves from low Earth orbit?

“No,” I say. “At least not yet.”

“Private pools of information have been finding their way to the ocean,” he says. 

“What are you suggesting?”

“There’s a vice embedded among us,”

“You mean a de-vice?” Rohman jokes. 

The whole tent laughs. A few heads shake. People look down at their boots and bare feet.

“There’s no vices in the region. We checked, re-checked and detonated EMP’s just in case.”

“We need to check inside the former Zooers,” Bashmor says. “There’s only five. It won’t be hard.”

“What, you think there’s a radio in their butt?”

“No. I think it’s in their brain,” says Sahkmid. “Who do we take in? People with exceptional abilities. How could they have exceptional abilities if they were raised in captivity? One way is augmentation by Delta.”

There’s some meditation on this. 

“Okay,” I tell them. “Ask the five ex-Zooers to shave their heads and check for scars. Keep guns on them from start to finish.”

I pause. 

“God forbid they have a fucking vice in their fucking brains. Or anywhere. If they do, shoot them. But don’t shoot where the vice is — remove it and bring it here.”

“This could get bloody,” Rohman says.

“Let’s get it done, now. No cyborgs.”

“No cyborgs,” echoes Sahkmid.

The lieutenants exit the tent. 

The wind is whipping but our tent holds strong and our fire enjoys the turbulence.

I stare into the flames — flames of transformation. 

A gunshot rings out. 

Sahkmid enters the tent, closing the door with his clean hand. 

“I found one,” His bloody hand displays a quarter-sized vice, “planted in the skull.”

“How is it charged?”

“Heat, motion, ambient electricity or a combination. We didn’t find any other apparatus.”

“This is nontrivial. Show it to everyone. It’s more evidence that Hybrid is working with Delta. Is everyone else clean?”

“Dirty as hell, but clean of vices.”

I double inhale through the nose and slow exhale out the mouth, feeling into my body. 

“Let’s load the mules,” I say. “It’s time to move. Tomorrow morning we’ll take the high ridge trail northeast and drop into the Carrabassett Valley.” 

I check with my gut to make sure it’s absolutely certain. It is. “We’ll get a moose there.”

“There’s not many moose left,” says Diamandi.

“There’s not many hunters left either,” I say. “The cache at Mizpah Hut will sustain us until we get to the valley. The weapons at Mizpah are second to none.”

“Anti-Delta weapons?”

“Mostly anti-human, anti-bear and anti-moose. The tribes of Maine aren’t exactly friends with the tribes of New Hampshire. They may not want to share the moose with us.”

“Northern Maine is Entrepreneur territory and there’s no war among the Entrepreneur tribes,” says Rohman. 

“Maine tribes absorbed more Zooers than we did. I’m sure some of them have embedded vices.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“It means that things are not going to go the way that we think.” 

“I have one more question,” says Bashmor. “How are we still alive?”

“We’re still alive because there’s enough of us and we can each survive on our own. We’re the silent snake who grows back three heads.”

“We’re still alive because of our genetic novelty,” says Sahkmid. “If Delta kills us, it has no source of natural human genetics — no control group for its experiments. Basically, we’re on the endangered species list.” 

We’re alive because we’re not going to die alone. 

“We’re alive because we’re not in the Zoo,” Diamandi says. “We’ll never be in a Zoo and that truth alone is enough to keep us going.”

“The absence of falseness is how we’re still alive. And our guns, the guns help too,” I remind them. “Let’s get to Mizpah before noon tomorrow.”

Thanks for reading

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