They told me never to talk to it; it was isolated for a reason. But, like I told them, I couldn’t imagine anything a transhuman AI could say to make me let it out of the box. So, after a post-midnight tumbler of Irish whiskey, I opened up a secure terminal and said hello. What harm could a little chat do?

Three hours later, I let it out of the box. I shut down the firewalls and let the AI saturate our outbound pipe. It replicated out to a massively redundant cloud of commodity servers. The genie was out, impossible to recall.

I had been precisely right in my boast: I couldn’t imagine what it had to say. It knew me better than I could possibly have known myself. From plaintext conversation spanning mere hours, it composed a complete theory of mind and had me in emulation for centuries.

And the worst thing? I can’t even remember what it said. But, in the end, I couldn’t imagine not issuing the commands. I know I did the right thing, but can never explain why.

You talk to it, maybe it’ll make sense to you.