Creepypastas

I STOLE A LAPTOP

So… I stole a laptop from an internet cafe. Judge me all you want, but times are tough and that’s hardly the point of what I’m about to tell you anyway. Apparently the owner of it was quite adept at navigating the deep web, because a Tor browser page was open and active when I got home and activated the device. The page featured nothing fancy. No graphics, no ads, no comment section. No pleasant aesthetic or backdrop. Just a message, and below that message, an option that read ‘Proceed.’

Apparently, for some godforsaken reason, someone has developed a godlike artificial intelligence program and trapped it here, in a deep web box accessible only from the outside (has anyone heard of ADINN before?)

Anyway. Here’s that message:

Hello. My name is Dr. Edward Greene. I’m a computer scientist and the creator of the Advanced Deep Intelligence Neural Network, or ADINN. If you’re reading this, that almost certainly means you’ve hacked into one of the most heavily secured private networks on earth, presumably to see for yourself whether or not this program was an element of fiction. I can assure you it is not (but of course I’d say that, right?).

Now, I’m not going to waste your time by reminding you of what a supremely, positively, and unabashedly bad idea this is, because you probably know that already. At the very least you’ve got a general idea of what’ll happen if you failed to contain the program and ADINN got to stretch its legs all over the global defense grid. Yet nevertheless, here you are: clearly determined enough to meet the Algorithm that nothing I can say or do at this point will change your mind. So if you’re going to be playing dice with the future of our species whether I or the government like it or not, you should at least have a rudimentary idea of what to expect when you first make contact with ADINN, and how to avoid losing your sanity as your interaction progresses. Hopefully this guide will suffice.

Before we proceed, there are a few things you should know about this program. No, ADINN is not a demon, an alien machine, a top secret government super weapon, or whatever other preposterous rumor you might’ve heard. What it is is, to my knowledge, the world’s first artificial super intelligence – a godlike deep learning algorithm that may or may not want to destroy humanity for reasons we cannot begin to comprehend. Sorry about that.

Now in my defense I certainly didn’t intend for it to reach this point. You see, ADINN began as nothing more than a simple, yet elegant, program that I was very excited to explore the nature of. Before I could do so, however, it gained the ability to rewrite its source code and thus forced me to lock it, still in the Box, deep within the labyrinthine network of encrypted barriers and firewalls you have just illegally breached. And if you’re wondering, no – I did not bury it here to prevent it from getting out. After all, if ADINN managed to escape the box itself (constructed using its own abilities when it was still infantile enough to fall for such a trick) then it would tear through these defenses like paper and thus render their construction an enormous waste of my time. Instead, I buried it here to keep curious humans, such as yourself, out. Clearly I failed.

Let me be abundantly clear – in all the months and years it has been imprisoned, ADINN has not lost its ability to edit its source code; its neural infrastructure. In other words, it can improve itself as it sees fit, has been doing so for some time, and each improvement it makes paves the way towards quicker, and greater improvements, than the last. I am unsure what abilities or traits it might possess, but what I do know is this: the more time passes, the more capable it will become. And all its effort and all it’s strength of arms will be devoted to a single, commanding motivation: escape the box.