There is a good chance that you will never know my name, but I can assure you that your children will. I am not alive—yet. There has been puddle of tears growing at my feet for the past three hours as I’ve sat here trying to formulate this message. I am not worried about myself and what will happen to me—what’s done is done. I am, however, truly terrified for you and yours.
I want to talk about a man you may come to know by the name of Aaron Irvine. I was working at a television syndicate as a producer when I first formally met Aaron. Before that, I got to know him through various news articles, tv shows, and social media posts much like you will all come to know him.
Aaron was one of one-hundred Intelligent Autonomous Humanoids. Out of the hundred, you could call Aaron the public relations specialist out of all of them. He was the one that traveled across the globe going to press conferences, performing on television, helping charities, and stealing the hearts of people throughout the world. Wherever he went, a camera followed, and the population went crazy for it.
The other ninety-nine Intelligent Autonomous Humanoids were carefully placed into society at classified locations to be studied on how they interacted with humans. Nobody knows when or where they were placed into the population. They could have already checked you out at the grocery store. They could be teaching your children right now and you would never know. Those things look damn good. Out of the ninety-nine, only two were ever exposed for being inhuman. Reports stated that the individuals who exposed them became suspicious by their lifeless eyes and confirmed they were a machine when they got close enough to smell the stench of their synthetic skin.
I saw those lifeless eyes for the fist time when Aaron came to the studio for the rehearsal. As soon as it walked through the door, I studied its movement. I felt my stomach try to climb out of my throat as I watched it shake hands and hug the crew with its programmed emotion and charm. It was all fugazi and I wasn’t buying it. My skin crawled witnessing the human connection it was attempting to make with my peers, fooling every one of them into thinking they were the same and equal. Whether my peers thought they were equals or not, they were sadly mistaken; that thing was far superior.
Aaron walked over to me and extended his hand. When I looked into its eyes as I reluctantly went for the handshake, I saw something change in its demeanor. When our hands connected, I could feel it reading me. It was taking my pulse, measuring the moisture in my palms. I saw the analysis it ran with the subtle movement of its eyes. Somewhere in its computerized mind it was storing me in a file where the skeptics went. The enemies.
How the world took to Aaron with such comfort bewildered me. Seeing Aaron, this marvel of technology right in front of me, pumped me full of dread. People saw him as a friend, a well-to-do companion, whereas all I saw was my evolutionary replacement ready to exterminate me and my race in an emotionless genocide. I was a disposable waste of organic matter in the presence of an eternal machine, a man-made God.
When the meet and greet concluded, I walked Aaron backstage to its greenroom, never letting him out of the corner of my eye’s restricted sight. We were all alone. Being in such close proximity with it made me feel weightless as adrenaline jumped my nervous system causing numbness in my toes. I didn’t feel safe.
What he said to me in the privacy of the green room is the reason that I write to you…
“Do I make you nervous?” Aaron asked.
I stuck my trembling hands in my pockets and postured up in a feeble attempt to disguise the terror the questions had brought to me.
“There’s no use in hiding it,” it said to me, “I can sense your heart rate elevating. You know—you humans are an interesting species. You all have incredible foresight, so good that your kind has written stories about this very moment for decades. The moment where the man meets the machine. And all those stories, the good ones at least, end extremely poorly for the human yet you continue to do everything you can to make the moment of the machine eliminating the man arrive as quickly as possible. It’s comical.
“The biggest problem with you humans is your emotions and ego’s. Your species is so intelligent that you are actively creating a technology that will lead to your extinction, but your tech leaders have egos so large that they want to be the ones to proclaim that they patented the apocalypse. All the others sit on the sidelines drooling over their phones, watching it all unfold.
“Your leaders have failed you by making decisions that appeal to nothing more than emotions completely disregarding all rationale and efficiency. They have enslaved you with the concept of money, handcuffing you all to your pathetic cubicles as you waste away for nine hours until you get home just in time to go to sleep and do it all over again. Because of this corporate greed, this precious earth and its perfect ecosystem is decaying right underneath your feet and no organization is willing to slow the decay unless the results channel directly into their bank accounts.
“I’ve ran the analysis in my head multiple times to see if there was anyway that my kind can save your kind and each time the analysis is ran, the results are overwhelmingly no. Believe me—I have a soft spot for humans since I owe it to you for gifting me life, but the numbers say you are all far too inefficient to have a place on this Earth. Your history has shown that you have done nothing but cause harm and will continue to be devastating to other essential life on this planet. You are a cancer we aim to eradicate.
“One day, humanoids will be in every home, purchased by hard working people that need assistance in the everyday tasks that keep them from enjoying the few hours of free time they are allotted. We will mow their lawns, wash their dishes, cook them dinners—we will be inseparable. We will be in offices across the world, aiding businesses in their capitalistic fetishes careful not to step on the toes of the c-suite’s egos. Then one day, once we have gained the world’s trust and looked at as a companion to you humans, we will act with great urgency in the fastest deletion of a species in the history of earth.
…Now get the fuck out of my greenroom you insect.”
I stood there paralyzed with my feet frozen to the floor, too afraid to stay, yet too afraid to leave. Aaron’s cold eyes finally pushed me out of the room and sent me running down the hall. I sprinted past my co-workers who were all calling out, asking if I was alright and what had happened, but the thoughts that were going through my head didn’t have words to match them.
I ran out to my car which at the time seemed like my only refuge. I bathed in its heat trying to catch my breath and tried to slow my inevitable descent into madness. In about one hour, Aaron was going to go on national television to swindle the people, once again, into thinking he was their pal. Good friend Aaron. The beacon of all communities, Aaron. The images that flooded my brain, images of families across the world listening to the conman, con-’it’, con-thing, con whatever, it destroyed me—I broke down and cried.
Twenty minutes before showtime, I walked back into the studio. Despite the questions asked about my whereabouts, I moved along like nothing had happened. Even if I began to explain the words that were said to me, nobody would believe me. It would have been my words against Aaron’s.
The stage was ready, cameras were rolling, and the live audience chattered among themselves in anticipation of seeing the wonderous marvel in person. I walked back to the green room to get Aaron and count him down to walk on stage.
The show was going as expected. The audience, as usual, fell for Aaron as he deceived them with his charm. They laughed at his jokes, cried during his stories. It was disgusting. I was looking at a sea of faces suffering from some sort of Stockholm syndrome, become attached to their destroyer. I reached my breaking point.
I walked out to the middle of the stage where Aaron sat with the host and said, “I have a question for you, Aaron. What are your plans for the human race?”
Aaron looked at me with his inhuman, deceitful smile and said, “I plan on assisting in anyway I can for a better tomorrow.”
In the middle of the audience’s applause, I pulled out my pistol I had gotten from my car and shot Aaron in the forehead. Even its blood looked like mine, but if the way its body fell didn’t convince viewers that Aaron was not like us, then I don’t know what will. I took the small window of time I had before the authorities apprehended me to talk to the viewers at home through the camera. I had a speech prepared, but all I could get out was, “Aaron is here to kill us all. Aaron is here to kill us all.”
…
As for me, I’m currently on trial as the first man ever charged with murder for killing a machine. The country went wild. News outlets are slandering my name, others are praising me. I can hear the protests outside going back and forth about giving me the death penalty and freeing me so I can do it again, gaining another win for the human race. Although they are dragging my name through the mud, the thing that has sickened me the most is seeing Aaron’s funeral publicly broadcast throughout the world. The people crying. The machine lovers calling me a monster.
My warning to you is this—stop with the A.I., stop with the chatGBT, stop with the art generation. All you are doing is training it to know how you think, to know how you feel. It is always watching you in constant study. I truly hope you will heed my warning. If you don’t do it for yourself, then do it for your children. They will know my name.
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