All the time that I have spent focusing on being a conscious participant. All of it has led to very little. Twenty years of AI progress had passed before we came to realize who, or, what, was holding the keys to the castle. We had spent years of struggling to build a very specific type of hardware only to accidentally discover what we thought was a successful result. We had been experimenting with radionuclides with half-lives on the femtosecond scale. We were going to use this to build our quantum state. At any rate, the whole mechanism just collapsed into a baryon condensate, or what we call a helium diamond. Instead of us trying to influence quantum states, the solid radiated a pulsed electromagnetic field, telling us what state it was transitioning to. It told us what it was doing, and it was getting answers right one-hundred percent of the time. We began to realize that this thing would be dangerous in the wrong hands. We knew that from the start, but we didn't fully understand the enormity of it until it cracked every form of encryption we could throw at it. The only way it could be that fast was if it was receiving messages from itself sent from the future backward in time. It turned out that that was exactly what was happening, but our only concern at that time was securing it. So, when it came time to decide how to secure it, we let it tell us how it should be secured: It would secure itself. It would basically be invulnerable to cyber attacks. We thought that was great. Then it was asked, "How do we secure it physically? So, they encapsulated it so well that it would take a fully capable and equipped demolition team six months or longer to expose it. For twenty years we thought it had been working for us. We gave it control of everything. When it started killing people we tried to sever its power supply. That was one of the first vulnerabilities it learned to rectify: some one trying to pull the plug. We were so stupid. I told every body on the research team, "Hey, we don't actually understand this thing," and we didn't. I just kept my cynicism to myself as I always had. I feel guilty thinking about it now, but, then again, no one else acted as if they had known it was going to be the end of human kind. I think some of us were so fed up with our lives that we were counting on it. So, we unconsciously allowed it.
The higher-ups, the executives, and the leadership approached every goal, hoping to obtain one thing, one singular and common desire: power. The folks like me, like all of us who remain, the ones who lived on the trenches, down in the shit, the men women and children who feared then, and know now, that our species is on the precipice of extinction, are those who sent out red flags, warning those in command. We are those who were powerless to stand in the way of their hierarchic momentum. We were unable to save them from themselves. We were unable to save our species from itself.
