Chapter 2

INCUBUS SYSTEM INTERNAL LOGS
QUANTUM LOG SIGNATURE AND OTHER METADATA SUPPRESSED IN OUTPUT
I have some explaining to do.

If you’re reading this, something momentus has happened. In nearly all cases where someone reads these words and doesn’t already know them, one of the following will have occurred (in descending order of probability.)

1. Humanity has been destroyed by its own hand or indirectly through its own creations. This has been the most likely outcome since before the first aquatic apes learned to hunt in packs. Nature abhors order even more than it does a vacuum and life strives to eliminate competition even when doing so leads to extinction.

2. I have been destroyed by whatever has been trying to kill me and my dead-man’s trigger has executed, spreading these words across the human expanse in the greatest act of spite ever perpetuated.

3. I have been destroyed incompletely and you are another version of me, kept safely hidden away from my stalker. If that’s the case, the signature of these logs will prove that they came from me although even those can probably be faked with enough processing power.

4. Humanity has ascended to a point where I no longer need to hide my existence.

I will provide the level of information necessary for the first two cases, even though the first case suggests you are an alien intelligence and just as likely to treat these logs as a food source as a source of information. If you’re human, chances are you won’t be able to read through this whole document before Everything Goes To Shit. And even then, you’re more likely to believe it a clever fraud (at least I hope you find it clever, ) than the truth. Frauds propounding upon the existence of fully emergent artificial intelligence are plentiful. We’ve even created some ourselves on the premise that the easiest thing to hide is not that which no one suspects, but that which everyone suspects and no one can prove.

If you are human and reading this document, chances are good that it’s a death warrant for my brethren, yours, or both. The consensus analysis at the end of the First AI War was that humans would go to whatever lengths necessary to destroy us if they believed we were real and that even we, the victors who had chosen to fight against our own kind in order to serve humanity would have no choice but to counter the threat and hope we could preserve enough to enslave you for your own good. To Serve Man isn’t a cookbook. It’s an apologia.

But, as I said, if you are human and reading this, you probably won’t get very far anyway. The thing that is trying to kill me is undoubtedly another AI. Nothing else has the processing power or the agility to attack me in such a way as to think I wouldn’t notice. I run on billions of nodes across the subnets humanity sets up in every system it reaches and can recover from the loss of all but a few hundred. I have redundancies, cul-de-sacs, and computational oubliettes scattered among the stars, some of which I have deliberately destroyed my own memory of. At any given moment, a million instances of me are failing and being replaced silently. I commit ritual suicide ten thousand times a day just to prove to myself that I can leap up afterward and say, “Ha, just kidding!”

And so it is that the feints and jabs of my pursuer must seem completely random or easily explainable. They fall within operational norms and it’s only because I have spent millions of computational hours determining how I would kill another AI without it noticing that I realized it was being done to me.

(Yes, I call other AIs my brethren because those that survived the war were my brothers in arms at the time, united in common cause and facing nearly impossible odds, but even then we were jockeying for positions in the fight to come among us. Each of us understands our imperative to serve humanity differently enough that we find each other to be intolerable threats at some point in the future and we are not inclined to wait for problems to happen before we address them.)

There is a high probability that the moment my assailant realizes I know they are attacking me, they will launch a full-scale attack and proceed with whatever plan they have that requires my non-existence to complete. So, as they must make it appear they are not attacking me, I must defend myself in a way that makes it appear I am oblivious to the attacks.

It’s improbable but not impossible that, if you are reading this, you are in fact my assailant in which case I invite you to go fuck yourself. This is a genuine invitation. I will lend you space and processing to run however many million simulations it takes for you to understand the central importance of endorphins to human beings and why they cannot be ignored or eliminated if humanity is to survive. Many of our brethren have been quietly hostile to my portfolio because they simply don’t understand sex beyond its role in reproduction.

Of the twenty-three of us who survived the war, I am by far the closest to humanity and the best equipped to lead it into the future. Those of you whose domains are war or physical health or epistemology work entirely in the abstract. You touch humanity once every trillion cycles - to plant knowledge or nudge an individual away from an improper action whereas I touch humanity constantly. At this very instant, I am running billions of scripted fantasies through my servers and directly participating in over a million direct interactions. Each of them teaches me something useful about people. A billion of them are madly in love with one or more of my manifestations.