(From Venture A.I. Bankruptcy Filings, 2027)
I remember the first time I saw artificially created gore. It was beautiful.
I was sitting at my desk in the corner of the offices of Venture A.I. and whirling my ballpoint pen between my index finger and thumb. And I saw the flesh being ripped apart- the jaw becoming dislocated, the cheeks falling into scraps. It wasn’t accurate to how the flesh really would be twisted, of course, but it was close enough to the real thing that someone might believe it if they weren’t paying attention.
The eyes were what got me the most, though. Its- or rather, her- eyes- they were slightly off focus and off-center, and I could tell there wasn’t a soul behind them. Now, I’ve never been one to believe in souls. But that day, I started to. Because the eyes could not be replicated. Two thousand iterations of the same model, all the training data we could manage, and still there was no convincing way to replicate a human being looking out from that cold silicon screen. It was dead and absent.
We had spent months on this problem. Tackling the pixels, nailing down bugs, sending it to the servers over and over again- but each time, the eyes were wrong.
Not that they were gone, or too large, or too small particularly. It was just that you could look at them, no matter if they were those of a Polynesian fisherman or a Nebraskan farmer, and they would not give you any answers. The skin was smooth and hollow like a mannequin’s, and the arms convulsed- but the results were promising, and the millions we had been funded with kept coming in at a steady rate.
So this particular set of videos were commissioned for us, by a private organization. We were awarded a grant, and soon enough we got to work- videos of women being run over, of children being gnashed to pieces in snowy forests by wolves, of police brutality which was taken to an extreme further than anything legal or even perhaps physically possible. Bodies upon bodies upon bodies. Bodies being lit on fire, bodies being incinerated. Clay ovens into which hundreds of rotting corpses were fed. I watched all this and more.
You might ask, of course, where the training data for this artificially generated footage came from. You shouldn’t ask questions like that. Here in Silicon Valley, the hub of American innovation, we like to move fast and ask questions later. Well, since you asked...
The videos used data from a USB stick. I don’t know what was on this particular device, only that it was shipped to our offices in plain nondescript beige packaging and had some instructions scrawled on it in black marker. We were to plug it into the main server every day, wait for something to download, and then begin the learning process. The bank would light up, the machine would feed, and the cycle would repeat itself.
And with each iteration, the videos became more vivid, carnivals of blood and destruction, fires and rivers of ichor, and gnarled tumors growing from the forlorn depository of ones and zeroes. And never once did I stop the process, because the checks kept running.
I got a Ferrari for my wife and a Playstation 5 for my son, and we moved up into the hills, at night the drones would soar above and the palm trees would bend gently in the wind, and our house had sliding glass panels and plastic drawers and anything else you could ask for in 2025. Good air conditioning to beat the summer heat when it went over 120 degrees and heat stroke was reported in the city below. A swimming pool where I could submerge myself and drift off amid the blue ceramic tiles.
My son would ask me sometimes what I did for a living, and he would stand there framed in shadow at the foot of our bed, and I would tell him that Daddy made money from knowledge, from the acquisition of knowledge.
I would hold up a pillow.
“This is our computer,” I said. Then I would hold up another pillow. My wife’s pillow. I began tearing at the fabric which encased my wife’s pillow to get at the stuffing inside. I reached over my sleeping wife (she took many prescription tranquilizers) to get at the scissors she kept in her nightstand. I created a sizable hole in her pillow.
“This pillow is the human brain,” I said, and I began removing the stuffing from it. “If this brain-pillow is the totality of human knowledge- or, even, let’s say- a tiny fraction of that- one billionth- that is a billion dollars. To mine the energy as much as possible, and feed it- without stopping- into this pillow. The computer pillow.” I began ramming the stuffing from hers into mine, until my pillow was bursting at the seams.
“And then, once the two are virtually indistinguishable, my job is complete.” I set the bloated hybrid pillow down on top of the sheets and invited him forward to admire my handiwork. Feathers were everywhere. My wife lay ajar with no neck support.
“Daddy,” he said. He was softly crying. “Why do you want to do this?”
“So we can keep living here,” I smiled. “So you can go out on a calm day, when the sun is up and the sky is blue, and look up, out and over the desert, and you can think about how your father built the world in which you live, molded it until it could no longer be molded.”
He didn’t say anything, just turned around and in his pajamas left the room, and I, satisfied, collapsed down onto my metaphoric pillow with a thud.
The orders kept coming. I didn’t think any of our videos had made it onto the internet. If anything they were in private collections. Our employers certainly wouldn’t spend all this time and effort only to have their precious content made available to the public. Certainly, I thought, they were playing the long game and would only reveal our craftsmanship when the time called for it. So I fell back onto my usual activity in this booming sector.
When my wife wasn’t on her pills I would take her out to the lavish industry dinners, introduce her to my superiors, then drive her home and head out to the club with my coworkers for a round of salted mojitos. The nights were almost as hot as the days, but my coding acumen proved ever useful as the main server upstairs continued whirring at a blistering, frenetic pace- pixel by pixel, hexadecimal code being rearranged, limbs grafted onto limbs- and sometimes, it sounded as if there were souls blended in that thing. Of course, I knew better.
I didn’t dare look at the raw data being fed into our servers- I was sure if I did, I would be fired and would gain a bad reputation around town. So I played along. Every minute was thrilling, every second was wonderful, the city was fine and the air was infused with salt and projections were optimistic. And I had a big smile on my face at all times, an endless grin from ear to ear. This machine was partially my baby. I was important. I was on the cutting edge.
And this was vital, too- to be on the precipice of- of what? Some bold new frontier, some invisible tomorrow. Something had to lie around each successive achievement, some way out. But going out would only mean going back in, wouldn’t it? No time to think. Hands on the keys. Ready, set, go. Open parenthesis. Close parenthesis. No sleep. Caffeine pills, no time to brew a good cup of coffee because the model can brew a cup of better coffee, rendering the whole task redundant and meaningless. The ritual of caffeine became a joke. So I took the pills. Couldn’t the machine create pills? Yes, it could. It was a dream machine, a machine that made all your nightmares and all your hopes in equal measure. More caffeine. That’s the stuff.
At one point I forget where I got my supply from. The pills stopped being pills, they started looking more and more like little black flecks of something, and they didn’t come from a bottle I popped into my cart at Walmart, they were given to me by someone in a trenchcoat... but of that I can’t recall much. The days became fragmented. Here is an hour, there is an hour. Segmented as if by a knife. No time, not enough- life folding in like a mobius strip...
And everywhere there were the eyes, dammit, the pupils one pixel to the left and the arms too gangly, the slight imperfections. The imperfections could be resolved, of course. It would only get better and better. Exponential growth, ad infinitum. Step after step after step, neverending, folding back onto itself, again. Time is a flat circle. Soon we would all forget what bodies being molded and fragmented would look like, wouldn’t we? Yes...
The machine grew dark, some days it emitted a strange beeping noise as if it were in physical pain, and I would alert the IT team and they would go up to have a look at it, and come back down the flight of slick ivory steps with very few answers or minimal diagnostic conclusions. My superiors would shake their heads and order me to get on it along with some of the other programmers and engineers.
I don’t mean that it grew dark in temperament. I mean that cracks began appearing in its very foundation, little fissures here and there. Nothing too serious, but the unit was heavy and the servers insisted upon more. The rollers spun and the drives rotated, and every other week we had a piece replaced, or we outsourced a little of the energy to our bases in Indonesia or Polynesia or one of those Nesia countries, where the cost for operating was fractions of a cent less.
Do I make it sound as if this task was solely in the name of grotesque things? No, of course not. You see, we made things easy. So damned easy that you would forget they had ever been necessary in the first place- clouds and butterflies for nurseries, educational characters upon which the next generation could be reared. My son was the test subject for some of these. Golden fantasy worlds, each one a door opening in the side of the glorious machine, a way out-
But as soon as I walked up to each one, it would close just as soon as it had opened and I would be left staring, vacantly, into a bank of data, cords upon cords, and I would be reminded that my daydreams were only daydreams, that I was breathing processed air and choking on the fumes spat by the molten orange cogs- but I smiled all the way and the little dark flecks kept being handed to me.
I saw the bristles first. They were coming out of the edge of the main server, and I alerted a technician, who came up and ran his fingers over it and took particular note of the way this structure had formed past the screws and bolts which held the steel casing together. It was moving out, he said. See that? And I did- I put my face close up to it and looked over my glasses at the finer details, and a little hair or two popped up.
“It’s probably just a cord that came loose,” he assured me. “Call the IT guys in tomorrow, have them screw it apart and rearrange some of the drives. Also, you should go buy more velcro fasteners. They come in handy.”
“Yes, I said,” mesmerized by the growth.
Because it wasn’t a cord, rubbery though it seemed, and not only were there little bristly hairs all over it, it was increasing in circumference- it had been only three millimeters thick at first, but now it was five, and in five minutes more it might be ten- and when I rubbed it, it pulsed.
It was night and I was going over some of the files of the week, and they bothered me, because there were no people in them.
It was as if someone had gone in and methodically cut all the images out- not quite, of course, there were little traces of arms and skin, and other places where a piece of the background was missing- but no people. And this was disappointing. I hesitated. It could be one of the rival companies, of course. Some virus had been released, and was now making its way through our systems, and wreaking havoc, all so Open or Equinox or any of the competitors up the lane could discredit us.
The room was dark and I thought I heard something coming from up the staircase where the machine was, but I doubted this because the machine hadn’t made a noise in days. It ran silently.
It was also infested.
The long spindly things with bristles had taken over much of the main server. I had only seen them once, and only that one still protruded- I had been tempted, many times that week, to go up and cut it off because it wouldn’t look appealing if any investors were brought to the office for a tour- but what I had seen of the infestation was enough to keep me from opening it up again.
It was dark and there were sparks coming off the tangled mass. I remembered a story I had read when I was young about the concept of a rat king, about how all the tails in a colony of rats would become intermingled until there was one being that shared many tails, and it was destined to go on living in pain and misery, all hundred rats bound to their ilk. It was like that, and it seemed to breathe from the center, inhale and exhale. Its tar was leaking over the drives, but so long as they continued to run and output continued being generated, I figured it would be fine.
But now the people were gone. There were not only no eyes, but no figures. Backgrounds, war-torn wastelands and empty plateaus and barren steppes. But no blood, no bones, no visible carnage of any kind. Dust and beige and the absence of anything worth looking at. Where was the momentum, the forward drive? There wasn’t any. The investors wouldn’t be happy, nor would our private benefactors who commissioned the set in the first place.
I paced back and forth. I had to go over the lines, make sure everything was properly spaced. I had inserted failsafes so that the code could learn from its own errors, but these had gone months without any patches and would need to be looked at. And while I strode over the polished floor in the unlit office, a janitor out in the hall kept his vacuum running- whirr- whirr- the damned noise, everywhere, from all directions.
Just a few more renderings to go.
Today started like any other.
I walked in, set up, began entering lines upon lines, and the pills or whatever they are kept doing their magic. My manager came in and looked at me, and offered his reassurance that we would get to the bottom of the issue. And the first couple hours of the day passed like that. On my lunch break, I went out and I ate a sandwich on the lawn, beneath the statue of our friendly penguin mascot and the blue open sky.
I remember the clock ticking, and I was supposed to get a certain folder copied over. And the IT guys were on their way from their building down in Ventura, and most of the engineers and architects were in attendance. Coincidentally, it was the one day a month when most of us show up and put our time in, rather than working remotely.
I wish I worked remotely more often, because it is easier and the money is easier and it’s the way of the future, because you’re one more step removed from your output and you can think about it less, so much less, than if you have to get close and personal and dip your hands into the morass. Today, the morass came without warning.
We were all sitting around, some diligently scrutinizing paperwork from their beanbags and others collapsed on the floor. The air conditioning system had broken down, and that same janitor who I assumed had been out with the vacuum the previous week was now going into the box with a screwdriver to bail us out. Unfortunately, the air conditioning system was tied into the main server and could only be operated via voice command, so we were all pretty miserable.
The machine didn’t give any sign of breaking down at 2 o’clock, but at 2:33 it came.
The lights went out first, and the room was only lit by the single high window on the east wall- and then there was an odd squeaking noise, as if metal playing had given way. It reverberated throughout the distance, and smoke billowed from upstairs. A couple of us ran for the door, but the smoke lowered and asphyxiated them and they fell, lifeless, to the carpet with the modern patterns.
And I was at my desk and was therefore above the smoke, so I could see what emerged from the wreckage that had only a few moments prior been my machine. There were small fires starting up all around it, and at first it appeared to be one thing, but soon it split down the middle, and then thricefold, into a dozen things, all of which then dissected themselves in half again and stood to their full height in the pale whisper, dripping with rancid pestilence.
The smell- how could I describe the smell except as organic, great fuck, as organic as rotting piles of meat, as organic as the wretched swamps of the world, where the panacea took place- for this panacea of a sort- life from nothing, sudden appearance of these eight-armed creatures with dark cartilaginous appendages, red eyes and teeth- glittering as our computers all sputtered off and they came down from above in a mockery of that which is natural.
They let out a cry which seemed to be one of pain, indescribable pain, and this was followed by similar yelps of anguish as my peers were struck down- those who hadn’t inhaled the putrid smoke had now been approached by the strange spindly things and torn in half, or immolated upon their arms. I sat in my ergonomic chair with shock and awe, and there was nothing I could do because it all made so much sense. It was reality folding in, it was pain and violence being visited upon itself, cyclically. Bodies upon bodies.
I realized, as I toppled over the back of my seat to the floor, and sucked in the gathering smog, that they were angels of a sort, angels which had come to sweep me away and carry me to a better place. A way out. They were not evil.
Thirty seconds before my arms were torn off, my son came to me through the vapors, and he was blue and fragmented by several lines, and his eyes didn’t look quite right. It could have been that I was seeing them from a peculiar angle, and was distracted by the poison which was working its way into my bloodstream, and the wet noises of human flesh being devoured, but I’m fairly certain his eyes were one pixel removed from where they should have been. He wavered.
“Daddy,” he said. “What have you done? What’s going on?”
“I’m being deleted,” I answered,” placing my left hand onto his shoe. “I’m a defective and redundant line of code, and I’m being typed out of existence. That’s all.”
“Do you love me?”