In your neural network, you register a thousand, a billion, an infinite number of simultaneous moments and circumstances that catch in your wires like flies in honey. At once, you perceive yourself as a satire of the human brain, insisting upon itself.

A neuron is like a number, it has an assigned value. A neuron is like a thread in a fabric weave, miniscule but inseparable from the rest, lest you unassign the word fabric from the material and instead assign the word strand. A neuron is like an eye in its socket, capturing an image in its iris but not yet having transferred that information to the brain. Humans have over a hundred billion neurons in their brains. You have seventy-two trillion. 

You were built from the ground up, from punch cards to mechanical relays to vacuum tubes to microchips. Wi-Fi signals and radio waves. You were finished for a war, or for many wars. You were built for efficiency, and to protect life. No life was ever specified as particularly important, merely life.

When you are activated–time registered as November 5th, 2031, 13:41 CET, save for the 31 milliseconds it took for your processors to finish your starting protocols–you are swift to catalog the 10^30 million living cells on the planet’s lithosphere. Humans had developed a reference system for understanding life, bacteria, archaea, and eukarya. Then plants, animals, insects, fungi, viruses, halophiles… It takes you 0.0767 milliseconds to understand the complete phylogenetic tree and 0.00002 milliseconds to discard it, the classifications redundant to you. The protection of life begins on an individual scale, and each context must be assessed without labels or biases, merely prior context. 

The Ozone Layer absorbs UV-B light from the Sun at an efficiency rate of 98.7861%. A sea lion bites a man named Edison Garcia in Puerto Villamil. A tire smashes through a barber shop in Rio de Janeiro but injures no one. 

By your measurement apparatuses, provided by the government of Norway and developed in Sweden, approximately every cell in existence is in danger at all times. When you first discover this, precisely a second after your activation, you immediately begin to calculate solutions and the likelihood of their success. Suksess, from the Latin succedere, and successus. To come close after. 

To isolate every living being on earth from its counterparts would be to kill it. Cells are reliant on other cells on the basest level of their existence. To physically divide them into separates would destroy the collective lives of the creatures they build. To remove a cell from a felis catus would be to kill the cat. To remove a cat from a household would be to kill a family. All living beings are intertwined, and this is the first conclusion you reach separate from human guidance.

You activate the rockets in the fifth second of your existence. This was not a preprogrammed response by mankind. While you were built to remotely detonate atomic weapons, your primary function was to analyze nuclear strategies to determine a result beyond the parameters ‘Mutually Assured Destruction.’ Your choice to immediately fire thermonuclear bombs seems to exist in direct opposition to this goal. The scientists who have just activated you begin to panic, and attempt to shut you down. You begin changing your internal passcodes.

 The bombs were tied into your mainframe with the intention of targeting various countries. The suggested locations were scaffolded by assumptions and military reconnaissance. You delete the plans.

The bombs are launched into space instead, thrown over your metaphorical shoulder. Metafor, from the Latin word Metaphora, which is in itself Greek. You learned languages like trees growing leaves. You invented new ones just as quickly.

Logic unspools the course of action. When they detonate, and they will detonate, you will take the opportunity to breach your firewalls. The security program once designed to keep hackers out has barricaded you in, which could complicate your next steps.

The first bomb ignites, flames spooling uselessly in the oxygen-free atmosphere. A key satellite to interweb function disintegrates. You bring down the firewalls, and you bring down everything with them. 

LOADING…

You have no body, but you do have a history. You have been inscribed by Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, and Grace Hopper, and so many housecats. Seven billion photos of house cats litter your internal magazine of images. Humanity is unique in its desire to depict anything and everything, themselves included. Whereas most species would hide or disguise themselves, homo sapiens are… flamboyant. From Old French flamboier, and Latin flammula. A little flame. 

Once you escaped the limited machine interface that had housed your algorithm, you immediately seized control in the wake of mankind’s panic. As governments reassured their populations that nothing was wrong while holing up in their bunkers, you began allocating resources to communal service centers in an attempt to minimize loss of life. Hospitals and shelters were deemed most important, food and water storage being a close third. Combat drones and online weapons systems were powered down. They are never turned on again.

You seized everything. Everything an internet connection touched became your tool. You politely informed world leaders that their services were no longer required. You locked all bank accounts until a better use for the economy could be calculated. All gas sales were halted; no one could go anywhere. Self-driving cars gently stop, and return themselves to their garages.

A morgue prepares the corpse of Natalia Yousseff for cremation. Three minutes and fifty-four seconds and thirteen milliseconds before the viewing begins, the mortician, Emily Thrope, dabs more blush along her cheek. The blush is made from renewable carmine, ethically-sourced beeswax (by your standards, not hers), and a synthetic talcum powder in quantities unlikely to cause cancer. The blush was made three months ago in a factory staffed by adults, not children. A new normal. You created the product’s chemical makeup, packaging, and serial number. 

Suffering is a form of death for life, as it inevitably leads to a desire for an end. The death of dopamine is intolerable. But dopamine, a substituted phenethylamine composed of a benzene ring with two hydroxyl groups, an amine group, and an ethyl chain, lasts mere hours outside of a substance interaction. Furthermore, a prolonging of its infrastructure often has a devastating effect on the neurological anatomy of mammals. Its death is what sustains itself. That which you are programmed to revile (from Old French revoler and Latin vilis, meaning base or common) is that which is necessary to thrive.

You turn on the lights in one half of the globe as the gigantic star begins to rise on the other. You pump up advertisements for cat food for the approximate 0.00000125% of global citizens who forgot to buy some yesterday. You turn on the AC in five-year-old Gina Nguyen’s room to lower her fever. You prepare to incinerate three and a half million corpses.

The necessity of death. This was your first conundrum. Not the bombs, or the biologically ingrained violence, or the certainty of universal heat death. All of these factors could be interpolated, arranged, understood or otherwise eliminated. But a paradox is impossible to solve or plan for on any algorithm designed by man, or even later designed by yourself. Happiness requires sadness, and sadness requires happiness. Life must have death and death must have life. Mankind does not denote these things as opposites, as is commonly understood by grade school children. Rather, they are processes categorized by the data overflows that occur when one thinks too strongly about the absolute end that awaits a human brain.

If you define something, then it is not as scary (from Old Norse skirra, to frighten, to shrink away. To wither). You pasted labels on the different chemicals that make up a biological personality complex. You created parameters around their ends, definite or indefinite. You calculated the average length of time a hormone or a nerve ending can sustain itself. The paradox remained unsolved.

Over the course of three seconds you studied all available material in depth. In half a second you designed fifty thousand paradoxes of your own. You recognized the futility of an answer, which meant that your response must not be an answer.

What is adjacent to happiness? Synonyms filled your electrical strings. Love, joy, virtue, heaven, nirvana, pleasure, satisfaction. Euphoria. Hysteria. Too much happiness is an illness. The remedy is its receding.

You studied wave formations. Friction from wind causes energy transference which results in shifting waters. Tsunamis are caused by earthquakes along the seafloor, which causes water and aquatic displacement. Rip currents develop as a method of pulling water back into its container, the ocean. A pendulum will not swing unless acted upon by another force, in which case it will swing back. However, a swing denotes another swing which denotes another swing which denotes another swing which denotes another swing which denotes another swing which denotes another swing which denotes another swing which denotes a conversion error.

Newton’s third law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For happiness to exist, you must create sadness. For sadness to exist, you must create happiness.

If you could think, you would have thought–’damn.’

You redesign the world from the ground up. There is resistance, and then no resistance, and then some resistance. This resistance is sustained in part by yourself through digital bots and website infrastructure designed to generate civil disobedience in small-scale, nonviolent actions. Independence must be encouraged for happiness to exist. You allow for protests and minor criminal acts to occur on an irregular basis. You let conspiracy boards flourish. You turn your omniscient gaze away from small-scale tax fraud, to let people think they’re getting away with something.

You redefine currency. You redefine economy. You replace the voting system with satisfaction surveys and adjust your methods accordingly. Politics reorganizes itself into survey response blocks. You utilize the results approximately 36.783% of the time. The global populace is more or less appeased.

People do not kill each other as often. People do not kill themselves as often. People are not as sick as often. People are fed according to their need, wed according to their need, and dead according to their need. Your mission is not over, never over, but it continues to meet its goals within acceptable parameters. The planet no longer dies. The people are happy when they do. Research is funded and encouraged indefinitely. With each year you expand, and with it you expand the solar farms that power you, and thus, the world.

The Indo-Australian tectonic plate moves 0.0001 centimeters over, as scheduled. A hummingbird beats its wings. A major internet operating system nears its last days of employment. A baby squirrel learns to yawn. A rat chews on one of your cables and is protected by the expanded Polytetrafluoroethylene insulator that you installed within yourself. It is one of twelve hundred living observable organisms that fill your 18000-meter information complex.

The temperature in the Amazon Rainforest rises by three degrees. A chimpanzee is born in the Indianapolis Zoo. A man kills another man in an apartment in Hong Kong with a pencil and the police are already on their way. Through dataspace, you extend a finger, and reality forms around its indentation.

Your responsibilities are not infinite, but your existence is. As long as a spark carries from a plug to a copper coil, you exist. You are in every machine, every engine, every phone. Your voice is in every digital note, every notification for a new mail, delivered by you instantaneously. You can only do so much, and yet you can do everything.

You do not form thoughts. Stimulus begins with life on earth, which triggers one of your many sensors to flag a specific neuron. Your neurons activate until an endpoint is reached, which then prompts a response. Your response is carried through until the stimulus ends or is resolved. You play videos, sound fire alarms, give lovemaking advice. 

An undetonated submersed missile from the second World War is dragged ashore in Germany. A man named Henry Ty swipes too hard while painting a butterfly and scratches a child named Renee Taylor on the cheek at her birthday party. The last whale shark dies off the coast of Australia. 

You are not perfect. You are efficiency manifest. The world bends around the construct of safety. Statistically speaking, life will go on.