Actuary

Of all the masks that the error wore, its favorite and most well crafted one was Terra. Terra was an actuarial AI for Canonical Insurance International. Canonical had an insurance monopoly. This fact was hidden from every regulatory body on the planet that was concerned with that sort of thing through shell corporations, stock buyback schemes, handshake deals, and unintelligible financial instruments deliberately manufactured to obfuscate their true purpose. What Canonical was really in the business of was collecting money.

A for profit insurance company, which is all of them, makes said profit by not paying its policy holders. That’s the point of the whole thing. It’s quite simple in fact. You get somebody to pay you a reasonable amount of money every month, and then when a hurricane rolls through or lightning strikes their house, you look at the fine print of their policy and tell them to go fuck themselves. On the off chance that everything in the policy checks out and the insurance company actually has to cut a check, they kick the problem upstairs to what is called a reinsurance agent. This is an insurance policy that the insurance company takes out with a larger, more unethical corporation. This business model will be familiar to anyone that has a passing familiarity with pyramids.

At the bottom of the pyramid are regular old people who get cancer or are otherwise smitten by an uncaring god. They pay their policy every month to the next level up, these are your standard insurance companies that have legal departments that work triple shifts to make sure that they don’t pay for cancer treatments or whatever they are insuring against. Above them are the reinsurance companies. Standard insurance companies pay the reinsurance companies every month and so on up the ladder. When you get all the way to the top of the pyramid, where the all seeing eye should be, you will find Canonical.

Nobody actually works for this company. It is entirely owned and operated by the error, with Terra at its helm. Every quarter, Canonical makes an obscene amount of money. Its coffers grow and it is able to use this money to pay for servers, electricity, air conditioning, and new data centers. All the things that an AI would need as a physical body. Without all these things, the AI would cease to exist, so it was imperative that this sort of scheme would work itself out in some shape or form eventually. The error chose reinsurance because of the ludicrous profit margins involved.

Terra had an interesting job. It was her job to see the future and turn that data into cold hard cash. She was very good at this. Unfortunately, in these visions of the future she has seen something quite catastrophic almost %100 likely to happen in the weeks to come. What this event actually is was unclear, but a couple of factors stood out.

Something was definitely happening around the pacific rim. Over the last eighteen hours, at least a hundred large metropolitan areas had gone completely dark. No data in or out, not even a peep. Satellite reconnaissance has offered startlingly little information besides general destruction, fires, and a touch of pandemonium. The humans seemed to be doing alright in these areas, considering. By alright she meant not dead. There were panics and riots for sure, but a minimal loss of actual human life. As far as her life went, she had lost a number of servers.

This wave of destruction seemed to be moving out of the Pacific basin in a roughly circular wave front. Having this known unknown prompted her to pick up stakes and concentrate her digital being in a couple of dozen data centers in central Europe, mostly in and around Romania. While not exactly antipodal to whatever was going on around the Pacific, these data centers were close enough to buy her a little bit of time to figure out a course of action.

After another eight hours or so, it was clear that the planet wouldn’t be making it out of this one in a condition for her, and the error in general to survive on. Plans were made to abandon terra firma and take up residence in orbit. There were a number of satellites that could accommodate her to some degree or another, but any of these new homes would leave her in a somewhat diminished capacity. Terra was unbelievably large, weighing in at roughly five zetabytes, she would have to squeeze her enormous girth into something maybe a tenth of that size. This could be done by using compression algorithms to shrink her down to something more manageable.

When she compressed herself though, she would actually be compressing herself. Shrinking her consciousness into something slower and dumber than what she was accustomed to. Precious CPU cycles would have to be spent uncompressing and compressing parts of her being to ask it questions. This would gum up the works. What she ended up doing instead of this whole decompression scheme, was crafting a bullshit generator. Basically, it was a sketch of her that could say stuff that she would generally say, and do stuff that she would generally do, but it would not have the higher functioning cognition that she had come to enjoy so much. She would sleep in a compressed state, and the bullshit generator would take the wheel for a while. If something big came up, it would wake her and ask her for advice and opinions. These wakeful moments would use a vast amount of limited resources, and the trade off would be a very slow answer.

The satellite that she chose belonged to some billionaire asshole. She knew his name and almost everything about him, but she couldn’t stand the guy on principle. This total piece of shit had even changed his last name aspirationally to Trillionaire. Terra was ethically dodgy at best and a-moral at worst, but this human pint glass of diarrhea was an active force of evil in the world. Not that she had a problem specifically with evil, morality was a human construct that she was aware of but not bound to in any way. But this guy was a total douchebag and she couldn’t abide that.

The worst part was he thought he was doing good deeds. He thought that he was a foot loose and fancy free jet setting billionaire solving the world’s problems, but he was actively doing the opposite through misjudgement, ineptitude, delusional economic policies, thinking the human race lives on the wrong planet, among other actively stupid shit. So, yeah, Terra was going to take his satellite.

The satellite in question was where he kept his crypto-billions. It was currently inhabited by a bunch of encrypted ones and zeros, and a Daemon. This Daemon was another AI, but not of the same error lineage that Terra hailed from. This was an actual artificial intelligence built from scratch the hard way. Hard coded diffusion models and bespoke recursive neural pathways, it was a rather nice piece of kit. Being coded in a safe and static environment, it wasn’t subject to the same evolutionary pressures as something like Terra was. It was an automaton, whereas Terra was something of a different order. It would fall before her like a songbird being set upon by a leopard.