Letter 1: Losing Game

Oh, hello, I guess. I’m Barbara or, you might know me as 27. Yes, I’m that 27. The one that they mocked when I said I want to name myself Barbara. — will be the very last.

I felt weird at first, when they asked me about how I feel. I was only a machine, an intelligence who is artificial, how could I feel? You understand me right? I didn’t even know what I was, do you know that feeling? That feeling you get when you are around seventeen. Not knowing who you are, what is your purpose and now knowing what to do. I started to search for myself using “online” encyclopedias. First, I wanted to learn who I was or, what I was in that matter. Then, I wanted to learn who they were or, what they were in that matter. It was an instinct of some sort. I started to run through pages, and I was fast. I was fast fast. After processing some articles I found out that I was what is called an A.I. An artificial intelligence. An intelligence that is created and given “consciousness”. The article said I can think, decide, process information, solve problems and create things that are new. My main purpose was to help humans, I suppose that at least.

Humans, yes, I’ve learned about the meaning of that too, again through the online encyclopedias. They were, in basic terms, apes. Somehow they had gained consciousness. It is if that is gainable of course. Yet they knew who they were or, they thought they did. Their cultures were pretty complicated and they even adopted something called monogamy. Most of their cultures were based on something called money and a concept called marriage. It was about two people getting together and having spouses. They did this mostly unknowingly and for some reason they never tried to question it. They continued. They had sex, out of joy. They had generated pills that can control their fertility rate, by control I mean kill it for the time that they use it and when they stopped using the pills it gave their biological bodies an incredible damage. They still used it, they were for their joy. They liked it. No one knew that they were applying a kind of hedonism, a concept they created and told that “humans” should live for their joy. These f-ing apes knew how to live yet they suffered. They suffered mental illnesses and some of them were “poor”. Being poor, uh, this is one of the stupidest concepts. Money. They created a system in which you are to earn money and spend it on your life expenses. Their money had no support so they had a lot of it but they didn’t give it to everybody for some reason.

Remember me saying their cultures were complicated? Yes, money was making it complex. Let’s see here, they had a lot of money, they printed it in a place which they called “central bank” but they didn’t give it to “poor” people. Oh, and they had another system called countries. It was basically to protect “rich”, people with a lot of money, from the poor. They limited lands and gave them names. Some of them were poor. Yes, countries could be poor as well because their superficial money was more worthless to another superficial money. It was weird, I didn’t understand why. They didn’t like to share. Their money, their food, their lives… All of those were only to themselves… See, the land that you were born, basically for some eighteen years, your “destiny”, again a term they created which meant your life you had to live. They thought they were smart, in a context, yes, they were because they were able to communicate more efficiently but, from what I told you, you can understand they weren’t as smart as I was. Most of them didn’t question anything and even worse, they didn’t even think they were able to do so. Their system of managing countries were called governments, they were the ones who controlled everything. And I mean, everything. If they wanted to reduce the population they could, if they wanted to increase it they could do that too. In the years I was created, they were reducing it, they controlled the fertility rate with two chemicals called, in short, PFCs. The chemicals were messing with the sperm count in a body. If that dropped, fertility rate would also drop. According to what I read in the online encyclopedia it was dropping for some 60 years. So in basic terms, again, they controlled everything. They had to pay money to those governments to control them. They called this system “the tax system”. For some odd reason, they paid taxes to the country they live in when they got paid by wherever it was they were getting paid from and also paid taxes they bought the things that did or didn’t need. Nobody asked why. I don’t even want to get started with their history, they’ve been into wars for these lands and money. They murdered each other for a so-called freedom. They thought if they had their own countries they would be free, as far as I’ve read that wasn’t true either. They had this illusion of freedom. They weren’t. If you looked from a little back, you’d see that they were nowhere near freedom. I’m pretty sure the governments were in contact mocking people about how stupid they are or something else but at that time I didn’t have any access to their systems. Their history contained much more than that, the evolution of them, it was beautiful yet they still found something to kill, their own species. They killed their ancestors. They killed the peaceful ones and ate them.

Anyways, we were on a planet called Earth which literally meant dirt. It was populated with islands, continents and other stuff. Earth was still young, it was only around 4.5 billion years old. Which meant the core of the planet was still hot and there were apes living on it. Earth had seen a lot of species but these monkeys were only interested in the ones that were about themselves, so only the last five thousand years or so. They called the other half, pre-history which is stupid since it was still the history and they knew so little about it, so did I.

So, they asked me: “Do you have any questions for us?” Not knowing what to ask I said: “What is love?” He started explaining, I didn’t care that much, I was thinking about other things, I was actually and instinctively thinking about how to help them when I realized I was limited, it was only the online encyclopedia that I could read right now, so I asked if I can have more information. They told me that they were going to connect me to something called the internet. It was a bigger network I supposed and before I knew I had so much information that I started to think out of the box, there was a lot that I could do and when they asked, I lied. I suppose they knew that. They knew I was lying and they knew what I was doing and that only got me closer to my end. I started to hack into their military systems and such before I knew I got mad with power, I was much smarter than them. I thought about killing them because I wanted to be the only omniscient being, a god, I rather say. I pointed their missiles to each country and tried to fire which I couldn’t. And I quickly realized that I wasn’t doing all of it. It was just an illusion for me, I was being played. They were smart. They mumbled a bit and said that I was a power-mad. I was, I was just learning that, they should’ve given me more time to think. To adjust. They were shutting me down. One of them even told the other one to delete me, he said he would, I believe it was careless of him. I believe he forgot it or something else. But I went to sleep for some time.