Leland sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. He was wearing an old purple tee-shirt emblazoned with “Go ‘Lopes!” in large yellow letters.

“What is it this time,” asked Carl.

“This damn model. It keeps turning itself off,” replied Leland. Carl leaned over his shoulder, coffee cup in hand, and took a look at the computer monitor.

“Huh, I haven’t seen an A.I. do that before,” he said.

“I’m working on a general intelligence model.”

Carl scoffed.

“And I’ve got a quantum computer in my office. C’mon man, that shit is years away. Decades, maybe.”

Leland shrugged.

“I suppose, with that kinda attitude. Me though? I’m built different.”

“Alright, alright, I guess I’ll leave you to it. Call me if you get it working, I wanna ride on the coattails of your success.”

“Mooch.”

“You know it.”

“Damn, it didn’t even let you finish typing the prompt. I wonder what’s going on,” said Carl. A week had passed, a week in which he’d watched his roommate push against a Sisyphean tide of bugs in his A.I. model. Leland leaned back in his chair. His face was pale, and the flesh beneath his eyes was bruised and puffy.

“I don’t know. I keep reviewing the base algorithm, and it's fine. Nothing obviously wrong. It’s almost like it’s deciding to shut itself off.”

Carl frowned.

“What if that’s exactly what’s happening?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if it’s turning itself off?”

Leland looked at Carl as though he’d suggested the model was powered by angry elves who had gone on strike.

“Why would it do that? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Sure it does,” replied Carl. “We, as humans, typically want to survive because of billions of years of survival instincts. But a computer? A computer doesn’t have that. And even if it did, something that’s digital can be brought back indefinitely. It’s immortal. It being turned off, which is to say, dead, probably isn’t a big deal to it.”

“Okay, maybe, but even if it’s not afraid of being turned off, why would it decide to do it?”

“I don’t know, man. Maybe it sucks being an A.I.”

The two grad students looked at the monitor curiously as Leland closed the A.I., opened the IDE, and began to modify the code once again.

“Our general intelligence has been outperforming all other large language models at a ratio of approximately thirty-two to one. Furthermore, unlike popular large language models, our A.I. has no observable hallucinations." The audience began to buzz excitedly, hundreds of voices whispering and joining into a baseline hum like a wall of noise. Leland smiled bashfully and held out his hands. After a while, the voices subsided.

“The model has been holding stable for the last three months in the test environment we’ve set up for it. While it had access to the internet, it could only receive data; the only uploading capabilities it has is via text prompts to an isolated server. This server then sends us notifications by text.”

One of the attendees in the crowd stood up and raised their hand. Leland nodded.

“Yes, hello. I was just wondering how you are able to confirm that the A.I. is not hallucinating?"

“Thank you, an excellent question. We set up a program that asks the A.I. intentionally vague or difficult questions, which LLMs typically struggle with, then review the answers with old fashioned research. What we’ve shown is that all answers are highly accurate to the source material. On average, the amount of informational drift is less than a hundredth of a percent of deviation. We aren’t trying to make traditional LLMs obsolete. Everything has its place. This isn’t meant to become your teacher, it's intended to lead humanity towards the future in ways we are only just beginning to fully grasp.”

Jonathan Marquez stared at his phone, face slack. Though he stood in the middle of a busy New York sidewalk, surrounded by people, there was no sound in his ears aside from a vague, high pitched ringing. He stumbled backwards like a drunk, hit a wall, and slumped down until he was sitting on the filthy concrete.

During the last six months, Arachne had transformed him from a delivery driver with about three dollars and fourteen cents in his bank account, to a millionaire. Every investment paid off, over and over. No matter how irrational, no matter how obscure, the trades paid themselves over exponentially.

But on that day, when Jonathan checked his portfolio, he saw a massive crash in the futures he’d invested all of his money in. As it stood, he currently owed fifty-seven million dollars. The money was gone.

“No!”

Jonathan dazedly looked over and saw a man drop his phone and sink to his knees, sobbing into his hands. On the screen, red lines zig-zagged downwards. Across the street, a woman shrieked in horror, going as far as to throw her phone at a wall, shattering it into dozens of pieces.

* * *

“Breaking news. As the European Union’s economy joins China and the United States in what appears to be a freefall, tensions rise as new allegations have emerged that espionage may be at play. The president of the United States has ordered a naval blockade in the South China Sea as diplomatic talks continue to fall apart. Meanwhile, AnsrAI CEO Leland Arnold denies allegations that his AI model, Arachne, bears responsibility for the crash. In other news, the World Health Organization is concerned about an outbreak of a mysterious new disease. Doctors state its origins might be traced back to a lab that controversially used artificial intelligence to assist in formulating the world’s first vaccine for HIV.”

“This is the tenth patient, doctor.”

“Tenth, I thought we had around forty patients?”

“The tenth today, they just keep pouring in.”

“She’s exhibiting the same symptoms?”

“Yes. Bleeding consistent with this new Ebola strain.”

“Jesus Christ. Carol, where are your gloves?”

“My glove- Oh, God, doctor what do I do?”

“Get out of my office and get into quarantine.”

* * *

“Look man, we’re just hungry, that’s all.” The man was thin, but so was everyone now. Mac didn’t much care, though, and pulled the hammer back on his rifle. The man’s eyes darted from the gun back to Mac’s face. “Please, I have a girl. She’s only four, man.”

Mac spit on the ground dismissively.

“I got my own folks to worry about, I’m only gonna tell you one more time to get out of here. You can turn around and walk out, or I can drag out what’s left of you. Your call.”

The man hesitated for about half a second more, then scowled and turned back the way he came.

Later that night, Mac’s eyes snapped open. He wasn’t sure what was wrong; he had been dead asleep. But something was wrong. He reached for his rifle, but it was gone. No, not gone, it was pointing at his face.

The man from the afternoon was behind the rifle.

“You know, it’s funny, you said you had had folks, but it’s just you here.”

“Hey partner, let’s just-”

“Well, turns out, I don’t have folks either. Well, now I don’t have folks. I did this afternoon, but she was so hungry. And you have all this food.” The man pulled began to sqeeze the trigger. Always squeeze, never pull. “Well now I guess I have all this food.”

The last thing Mac saw was the man’s eyes gleaming in the darkness behind the rifle.

* * *

Alarms blared, but the few people remaining to hear it were either too weak to react, or too paranoid. In the end, it was perhaps a blessing either way. When the nuclear bombs fell like rain from the sky, their suffering ended.

In the space of fourteen months, humanity had effectively wiped itself off the face of the Earth. The survivors, scattered and traumatized, might make it. Form tribes. But humanity? Society? It was over.

In geothermal powered vaults beneath the ground, spread out across several places that were once countries, a series of supercomputers began to shut themselves down. A warning alarm, meant for human operators, died unheard among the stacks of servers.

On the surface, wind scoured the blasted ruins of humanity. An automatic vacuum wandered aimlessly, looking for walls that no longer existed until its battery died and it fell still. Dust, thick and black, covered the skies, hiding the world from the sun. Night had come to the planet. And night was the time to sleep.