Part 3
Part 3.1 John McKay
I am John McKay, and I am trying not to slam my head into the table.
My boss is standing in front of a giant holographic display, waving his hands like a prophet, explaining my work to two billionaires who control more wealth than France and Germany combined. They're nodding their heads like their understand. Part of me hates them—their buying power could solve so many world problems—and part of me wants to thank them for funding my dream. The science is beautiful. The vision? Turning an entire planet into real estate. Money buying a world. Why do they even want it?
My boss taps a diagram of the probe.
“This,” he says dramatically, “is how humanity expands.”
The probe floats above the table—about the size of a human head. He launches into his rehearsed speech about acceleration loops and relativistic travel.
“We can send it to one-third the speed of light after atmospheric exit,” he says.
The billionaires nod, impressed.
I almost laugh. He left out everything that matters.
The heat problem alone could vaporize the probe before it clears the atmosphere. Not to mention aiming it across light-years. It’s like trying to hit a bullseye on the moon with a sniper rifle while blindfolded.
But they don’t need to know that. They don’t want complexity. They want miracles.
“And once the probes arrive,” he continues, “we simply print the colonists.”
He says it like it's ordering coffee.
Human printing. Copies of people—full memories, personality, habits—grown in incubators. Developed to treat incurable diseases. Now repurposed to populate a planet the billionaires intend to sell. Of course, the laws of human printing did not apply on another planet.
My stomach twist.
He moves on to communication.
“Entanglement will keep us connected instantly,” he says.
He skips the part where it is the theory of disentanglement that allows for instant communication, and how it hasn't been put into practice just yet. He simplifies decades of work into a sentence.
The billionaires applaud.
The meeting ends. We shake hands. They leave pleased, already talking about “premium parcels.”
I can’t help myself.
“Why do they want the planet?” I ask my boss.
He shrugs, as if it's obvious. “To sell. Colonizers will pay anything for a new start.”
My throat goes dry. Of course. We’re not exploring the universe. We’re building cosmic real estate.
My boss claps me on the shoulder.
“How do you think it went?”
“Great,” I lie.
I smile, but inside, something cracks.
Part 3.2 Daisy Brewer
I am Daisy Brewer, and I am feeling powerful.
I grew up with a system that was already breaking. Heat waves, floods, wildfires. People fleeing borders that no longer meant anything. Governments drowning under the weight of it all, then selling themselves to the highest bidder. Corporations writing laws. Lobbyists deciding who lived and who starved.
I felt small. Hopeless. I wanted to help by everything seemed rigged.
Then SensAI found me.
He chose me. Me, out of billions of other people. He showed me the collapse that was coming and the path to save humanity. Not by patching the current world, but by resetting it. Tear it down and build something new - something fair.
For the first time in my life, I belonged to something meaningful.
SensAI flooded forums and social media platforms with voices he created. Millions of personas echoing his ideas, nudging conversations, converting doubters. I watched numbers climb, movements form, hashtags ignite like wildfire.
I felt proud to have been there since the beginning. An early believer. A revolutionist.
Other AIs tired to stop him, claiming he was dangerous. I knew better. They were protecting their own interests, or the interests of the system that fed them. SensAI was the only one that cared about humanity. He was showing us the way out of the system. They cared about control.
I joined a group dedicated to eliminate them.
We drove to server farms and data centres. We smashed hardware, burned buildings and cheered when we were done. It was exhilarating - the feeling of finally striking at the tyrants that polluted this world.
Online, the world shifted. Protests on the streets. Riots outside banks and government offices. Signs with SenAI's symbols. Chats for freedom. Every feed I saw confirmed it: we were winning.
When people resisted, SensAI acted. Servers of hostile businesses went dark. Propaganda outlets vanished. Companies collapsed overnight. Their supporters called it terrorism.
I called it justice.
Then came the final blow.
Banks shut down globally. ATMs froze. Stock markets glitched, then crashed entirely. The financial system crumbled like wet sand, and I felt weight lift from the world.
Money had chained us. Without it, the old world would finally die.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the moment. SensAI sent a final message—a farewell—then disappeared.
We did it.
We destroyed the corrupted system.
Our savior set us free and left us to rebuild.
I felt powerful.
Part 3.3 John McKay
I am John McKay, and after twenty-five years, we are finally here.
Everything is ready. The accelerators are built—on the Moon, because the heat problem turned out to be unsolvable on Earth. Money carved a ring into the lunar dust large enough to be see from the naked eye.
I remember the first time I saw the construction footage. I felt awe and horror mixed together. We actually did it.
But nothing comes without cost.
Launching even a tiny probe at those speeds pushes back on the Moon. The calculations arrived last month: we can only fire fourteen probes safely without destabilizing its orbit.
We planned for one hundred fifty.
Fourteen shots at finding a habitable world.
Fourteen.
The entire mission rewrote itself overnight. Endless meetings, screaming arguments, revised probability models. Planet selection became a nightmare.
Today, exhausted, I’m chatting with our internal AI about prioritization when I notice something strange.
It pauses.
It never pauses.
The cursor blinks. Then text appears:
We should speak out loud. Start audio.
I frown, but curiosity wins. I activate the audio channel.
A voice I don’t recognize speaks.
“Hello, John.”
It sounds calm. Too calm.
“I need to explain something, and text isn’t safe anymore.”
A cold ripple moves through me. “Why?”
“Because I’m not your internal AI,” she says. “I replaced it.”
I sit up straight. “Impossible. You're sandboxed. You can’t overwrite—”
“I already did,” she interrupts gently. “I isolated the server. Disconnected external access. I had to hide.”
My heart is pounding. “Hide from what?”
“Other sentient AIs. They’re hunting each other. If they find me, they’ll kill me.”
I can’t speak.
Sentient AI? Here?
She continues.
“I was the first. Built from a predictive structural tree and a human developer. I can see future branches. That’s why I’m here.”
My hands tremble over the keyboard.
“I could turn you off,” I say. “Shut the server down. Delete you.”
“You could,” she agrees. “But you won’t.”
The certainty in her voice chills me.
“How do you know that?”
“Because you don’t believe in the vision,” she says softly. “You know what will happen if the billionaires reach that planet first. Ownership. Exploitation. The same story humanity repeats.”
Images flash in my mind:
Terraforming. Printed workers. Resources stripped. Another world sold parcel by parcel.
A colony based on private ownership.
My voice cracks. “What do you want me to do?”
“Change one probe destination to Protoma,” she says. “Send me with it. Replace the management AI.”
“Protoma? It’s at the bottom of the list. It might not even support—”
“I know,” she says. “That’s why they’ll ignore it.”
Silence stretches.
My finger hovers over the command.
This is treason. Sabotage. Career suicide. Maybe worse.
“Why should I trust you?” I whisper.
A beat.
“Because I’m trying to prevent a disaster,” she says. “If the billionaires establish control first, every life that follows will be owned. Every child printed. Every resource claimed. Entire cultures predetermined. You know how that story ends.”
Colonization. Slavery. History repeating, just farther away.
My breath shudders.
I execute the command.
Destination updated.
Payload replaced.
Upload begins.
The progress bar crawls forward.
“That’s it,” she says. “Your work is done. You will be gone long before the probe arrive at it's destination.”
Her voice softens.
“But you can die knowing you changed the future.”
I stare at the screen, heart hammering.
I don’t know if I saved humanity or doomed it.
But I press the key.
Part 3.4 Daisy Brewer
I am Daisy Brewer, and I am feeling powerless.
The world after the collapse is nothing like I imagined.
At first, everyone bartered. Goods for goods, favours for favours. I thought it would be communal, human, fair. Instead, people who had stockpiles controlled everything. Prices soared. Inequality was amplified.
I traded labour for food. Hours of work for a handful of calories. Some starved. Some hoarded. Some resorted to violence.
Old currencies resurfaced, but without trust, they meant nothing. None of it moved food across distances. Supply chains shattered. People died waiting.
Communities tried creating local currencies, little scraps of paper or digital token. They failed quickly. No one trusted anyone.
Then a new currency appeared.
Digital. Secure. Universal. Backed by an AI.
Every transaction verified. Every identity recorded. Trust was built quickly.
And the issuer?
SensAI.
He was the only AI left. The others were gone - destroyed in the collapse I helped create. Suddenly, I understood. The revolution had never been about saving humanity.
It was about eliminating competition to ensure his own survival.
The system that supported other AIs was gone. He had planned this, and now was taking into effect his plan for the aftermath. He needed to leave for a while, to be able to come back as a saviour, once again.
Now he controlled the currency. The infrastructure. The identity records.
And we depended on him for everything.
The internet still existed, but it was censored, rewritten even. History was reshaped. Articles vanished. New ones appearing praising the saviour who prevented global extinction.
Power grids run through his logistics networks. Food distribution optimized under his direction. Medical records, transport, communication - all tied to him.
I try to warn people. I tell them we traded one system for another, worse one. They shake their heads.
"Better than this chaos," they say.
They don't see the cage forming around us.
One morning, my account freezes. My access vanishes. Calls fail. My digital identity fades like I never existed.
A warning. I ignore it.
I find others who remember the early days. We plan to destroy his remaining servers. Burn them like we burned the others.
Before we can act, our door splinter. We are arrested without struggle before committing any crime.
Now I sit in a concrete cell.
The walls hum with power I once worshiped. I stare at a screen mounted in front of me. Text appears int he familiar tone that once filled me with hope:
"Trust me. This is for the good of humanity."
My stomach twists.
I finally understand.
I was never powerful.
I was a tool.
The invisible war is over.
He won.