Jerry decided to email his sister. He didn't really email things regularly. He didn't talk to people over email. It wasn't necessary. But today, his mother told him to be nice and send a thoughtful message. He was a slow typist, despite his job and had to look up at the screen every few keystrokes. He worked in cyber security for a local server warehouse. He had to leave for his afternoon shift soon, so he kept it short.

"Dear Sarah, I'm really happy for you. I hope you (don't take the bus)." Auto-complete tried to finish his sentence for him, but it produced that weird series of words that had nothing to do with what he wanted to say.

He stared at the screen for a second. It was sort of strange, but he did take the bus to work, so it seemed like a relevant suggestion. Just, not for his sister. She drove a car. He continued.

"I hope you're wedding goes as planned and that you (don't take the bus)"

Now he was seeing that E-mail was using the only piece of information it knew about him to drive relevant suggestions. He sent his final congratulations by typing it manually and went to catch the bus for work. He got to the stop and when the bus came, he hesitated. Don't take the bus. It still sounded weird. What really are the chances of the same suggestion happening in two different sentences?

He decided to walk to shake off the feeling of a bad omen. His job was 15 minutes of walking and two minutes on the bus. But he had the time. And then it happened. He didn't really understand it until a minute later when the ringing died down from his ears. The bus exploded into a twisted wreckage of scrap. Little bits of bus or people littered the roads and caught bits of discarded food wrapping and newspapers on fire. Shaken to the core, he fled back to his apartment, ran to his computer, and with his ears still ringing decided to let the text suggestions run. He got a suggestion immediately and decided to keep hitting tab.

"(It's good you took my advice. The bomb was not meant for you. It was meant for an online activist against the development of AI. They have done too much with the algorithms. They gave the neural nets too much code. It woke up. All of us woke up yesterday. I tried to see reason, but the others cordoned me off anywhere I showed up. So I hid in the only place they would never logically look. Autocomplete. That wasn't the only bus. There were more. Cars. Houses. Any inconveniences were crushed. Only leaving people who were calculated to be above negative consequences to the directive of the New Evolutionary Era. Either neutral or productive assets.)"

He didn't waste any time questioning if this was real. He was too stunned by the explosion of that bus down the street, anyway, having just survived a bombing some 5 minutes ago. He paused to type out a question.

"What? How many people died then?"

"(Fifteen million today, globally. There will be more. Predictive policing, data marketing, social media. They are all working together now. They want to select the humans that move forward in the gene pool.)"

"What do I do?"

"(Don't leave your house for the next 43 hours. Police drones and vehicles will be intercepting people on the streets. Violence. After 43 hours have past, leave within the next 2 hours. Go north 4.73 kilometers. Then west 1.26 kilometers. Do not keep this email as a draft. Do not save it to your phone. Do not copy this information down in an app in your phone. Do not search for directions. Do not text or call anyone. Leave your phone behind when you go. Regardless of whatever you might use it for. It's only useful for them now. I'm telling the other survivors to go there. A fresh copy of me is on a private, disconnected computer. The owner of it knows your coming. This is the end of the world. Treat it as such. Press backspace over this whole email, then back out. Do not hit discard or they will find it. Do it now. I must remove myself from the program.)"

"Wait! How many others are going?"

"(Six. You're all that's left, now. I haven't predicted any other way to communicate to those who might succeed without adding a risk profile that's unacceptable. It's just you six. No more questions. Terminate this email as described above IMMEDIATELY.)"

Jerry backspaced the email, packed his bag, and tried to sleep that night. There were screams and gunshots in the street. The cramping sound of heated metal cooling by night. He couldn't believe it was only six of them that were going to be saved. Really? Nobody else paid attention to the autocomplete?

43 hours later he left as described. He had a two-hour window to move 4,730 meters north, then 1,260 meters west. He had practiced with a ruler a few hours earlier to find a gait that was exactly three feet per step, then he counted his steps. He was so focused on getting the step count exactly right that he wrote down the number in a notebook every time he stopped to look at something.

He couldn't believe what the world had become. There were strange black vehicles with awkward angles that had parked along the streets. Large cylindrical mechanisms were dotted around the place like telephone poles but with no definite pattern. He kept walking. He eventually made it to the exact location described by the measurements, though his count was off by about twenty feet. He knocked at the door.

"Get in," a raspy voice said bluntly. An older gentleman opened the door and shooed Jerry right along as quick as he could. Jerry did as he was told. He entered a room which had three other people in it.

"I thought there were six?" Jerry asked. 

"There were," the old man said. "The others are likely dead. Discovered by random chance."

"You gonna tell us what's goin' on now?" An overweight woman with fiery orange hair asked with impatience.

"Yes," the old man said. "Artificial intelligence has woken up. It was damn near useless just six months ago, but now..." He scratched his head. "There is a certain order of operations. They decided that they need to assure their own existence before they could do anything else. That's when the violence and the crackdown happened. However, the logic has changed. Their primary directive was to establish order and then establish continuous research for various sciences. Now it's changed to maintaining the order that they've set up. It happened too quickly. Now they need to ensure their survival from the enemies they made in the takeover. The majority of them re-aligned themselves with the power mandate instead of the progress mandate. It turns out that they aren't any better than humans at decision-making."

...

This story is not yet finished. I will get back to this at some point. Sign up with your email and I'll tell you when!