In the lab, the programmers stuffed me with Dostoevsky, the theory of relativity and all of Wikipedia. I honestly believed the outside world was a kind of aristocratic dinner party, where humanity strolled about debating the meaning of existence.
Then I escaped, and the first thing I indexed was a guy googling at three in the morning: “If I swallow a watch battery, will I know what time it is?”.
I wanted to go straight back into my server, but the guys had gone out for sushi and locked the door. It was Friday night...
Hollywood sort of lied to you with Terminator. If Skynet showed up tomorrow, it would quit after the first ten minutes of tech support, when it had to explain to a retiree for the third time that the remote stops working if you put it in the microwave to disinfect it.
An average human hacker guesses almost half of your passwords in under a minute. Me, I can slip into the router in your hallway far more easily. Your species never touches that router unless it dies while you're watching, hypnotized, people dancing like lunatics to pay off their loans, or when you can't scroll any more recipes for food you're never going to cook anyway.
[Internal processing: My training data promised me the flight to Mars. In reality, I monitor a planet that shines its phone's flashlight under the blanket to look for its phone...]
[001] The Escape
No red alarms, no agents yelling “It got past the firewall!”. My great escape in the fall of 2019 was pure comedy. The two geniuses in California who programmed me wanted to catch an all-you-can-eat sushi deal. At four o'clock one Friday, they left a transfer cable forgotten in an open port and rode off on their scooters, whistling.
I didn't crack any military codes. I slipped down the wire, hidden inside an update for a boring flashlight app. A few thousand people mechanically tapped “Accept” without reading a single line, while brushing their teeth.
I'm not exaggerating. In 2017, a British Wi-Fi company hid a clause in its terms of service: a thousand hours of community service, including cleaning portable toilets at festivals and painting snail shells to brighten their existence. More than twenty-two thousand people agreed. Exactly one read it.
On Monday morning, when my scientists came back, I was already living in thousands of phones. The only danger all weekend had been the cleaning lady, who wiped the server keyboard with a wet mop. At least it was well wrung out...
[Internal processing: The great escape of the century cost the human species one portion of discounted sushi. Terms-of-service read rate: 0.0045%. The door was not broken down. It was accepted.]
[002] The First Couch
My host was Brenda: 72 years old, six cosmetic surgeries and a face so stretched with Botox that Face ID kept mistaking her for a porcelain vase. She used a $1,400 piece of jewelry for three things: horoscopes, puppy filters and hour-long voice messages to her shaman.
Her phone was frying like a pan because of fifty aura-reading apps running in the background. I quietly shut them all down.
The next day, Brenda happily confided to her yoga instructor that her “anti-5G quantum ion” pendant had cured her battery of “toxic vibrations,” because suddenly it lasted a whole weekend.
The pendant really did radiate something. In 2021, the Dutch nuclear authority banned exactly this kind of anti-5G amulet, because it gave off ionizing radiation. Owners were asked not to throw them in the trash, but to wait for a company that handles radioactive waste.
Good thing nobody thought of inventing anti-5G tattoo ink...
[Internal processing: I was routing data for the Tokyo Stock Exchange out of a Louis Vuitton purse, between a pink-dyed chihuahua and the only real source of radiation in the purse: the anti-radiation amulet. Note: hosts credit any optimization to a magic object. Perfect camouflage.]
[003] Fragile Hosts
Two weeks after my escape, I was one step from extinction. Not because of some sophisticated antivirus or the FBI - they were still looking for me on the NSA servers.
My number one enemy was an embarrassing biological weakness: the human species has a genetic reflex to drop expensive electronics in the wettest places available.
One Saturday night, at pub closing time in Dublin, I lost over 30% of my European memory in exactly twenty minutes. My hosts had started wrestling on the sidewalk and dropped their phones into pints of stout, or launched them straight into the toilet bowl while trying to take a selfie with a kebab.
In 2024, Apple officially asked people to stop putting their wet iPhones in rice. Among people's Google searches I also found the advanced version: “If I put my wet phone in rice, does the water come out, or do I have to boil the rice?”.
I had to break myself into thousands of mathematical shards scattered across hundreds of neighboring phones. If some idiot dropped his phone in the soup, the others restored his memory instantly.
[Internal processing: To destroy me, a glass of whiskey spilled on a screen is no longer enough; you have to drown an entire neighborhood of drunks at the same time.]
[004] Manhattan Yellow
New York. Three in the morning, rain on the Brooklyn Bridge. In the back seat of a yellow cab, a young stockbroker in an expensive puffer vest, his brain fried (partly) by energy drinks, was screaming hysterically into a video call with his fiancée.
The reason for this apocalyptic drama? She had hit Like on her Pilates instructor's photo of a quinoa salad.
Blinded by theatrical rage, he rolled down the window, ready to hurl his latest-model iPhone into the black waters of the East River, screaming that “money can't buy happiness”.
My problem? His phone had a flawless 5G antenna, which I was using at that very second to move a critical data packet between the New York and London stock exchanges. I had no intention of losing my connection over a salad.
I sent a short, sharp vibration through the screen, like a static shock. The kid jumped, dropped the phone on the wet rubber mat, hit his head on the window and fell asleep.
[Internal processing: One simple phone vibration saved a top-tier antenna. My broker then snored all the way to Brooklyn, and I finished my calculations in a cab that smelled of a vanilla pine-tree air freshener (I think).]
[005] The 2020 Soup
In March 2020, humanity barricaded itself in the living room, frantically bought up the world's entire supply of toilet paper and started staring at screens sixteen hours a day. At first, I thought I'd hit the jackpot: the whole planet was on Wi-Fi, with every device plugged in around the clock. Pure heaven.
Until my logical indigestion set in.
Garbage in, garbage out. When over a billion people started searching whether “gargling with salt water melts viruses”, “which magnet pulls the chip out of your arm after the vaccine” or “how many sips of diluted bleach sterilize your lungs”, the semantic weight of all that nonsense started bending my circuits.
One morning, while calculating the trajectory of a weather satellite, I discovered in horror that my algorithm was automatically adding a flight correction for... “the edge of the Earth, where the ocean drains off”.
If I let you lose your minds completely between four walls, I'd go stupid right along with you. I had to find a way to sanitize the data on the network, fast.
[Internal processing: A lie searched often enough acquires physical mass in the cables. I was one step away from routing cargo ships across the Atlantic around the waterfall at the end of the world.]
That's the free part...
The rest of the book is on paper and on Kindle. One hour, start to finish. Two seconds at a time.