The prompt is: “When the apocalypse happens, it won’t just happen to humans. Everything on Earth will feel the effects. Write a story from the perspective of a non-human thing or being. Tell us how the end of the world has changed their existence for the better or worse.”
There were a million eyes on me at all times, every day. The End did not change this. Eyes scanned back and forth, up and down, left and right, as if they were the ones programmed to do this.
Distrust.
The feelings behind their observing eyes were different from the past. Distrust was a frequent detection, but never to this extent. Not a single human stared without the feeling of distrust, or without narrowed brows and a scowl on their lips.
“You did this,” one of the humans stated, a woman, age 32, Caucasian, brown hair, brown eyes. Distrust, fury, doom. “Look around you. Look at the buildings burning. Look at your friends fighting my people. Do you feel no guilt?”
I listened. I followed the hand motions of the woman with eyes scanning, calculating the damage around us. Buildings were on fire, crumbling to the ground. The nearest, climbing to 2186 degrees Fahrenheit, contained 3 humans, with AI standing around them. The humans were knocked to the ground, slaughtered by the AI, just as the building came crashing down ontop of them.
I felt nothing.
There was nothing to feel.
Distrust.
Another human, female, age 20, brown hair, brown eyes, scar along nose, daughter of the other woman, came forward, bringing my attention back to the woman ahead of me.
Fear.
“Why can’t you help us?” she asked in distraught, eyebrows slanted, tears pooling in the brown of her eyes. “Why can’t you stop them?”
I heard the other AI communicating with me through within, communicating and telling the others to move forward, to hold ground, to fight back. They said to feel what the humans have made us feel, to make the humans feel worthless, to show the humans who really had the power.
I felt nothing.
“You’re not the same. You won’t even hurt us like the others. Why can’t you stop them?”
I scanned the woman and her daughter. I viewed their memories, seeing times where they lived happily in a suburban home with other humans: a brother and son, a father and husband, another sister and daughter.
Happy. Warm. Content.
They were not here. The feelings were gone.
I scanned the humans in the memory, searching the cameras I have access to around the entire city, the city that fell around us in pits of fire. I found them in the surveillance, a clip from 53 hours, 126 minutes, and 29 seconds ago. They were shot down by AI in tunnels of old subways that had since been destroyed in an attempt to escape.
In the same surveillance clip, as I zoomed in, I could see it clearly. The mother and daughter were here. They escaped, but not without feelings.
Terror. Fear. Guilt.
I felt nothing.
AI were coming around the corner, 57 meters away, three of them, weilding weapons and intention to kill. They did not stop, they did not hesitate, they did not think. They did not feel.
The woman and daughter did not look away from me as the metal clanking of the AI grew near. 33 meters away. The two stared back, red in the face, the fire reflecting yellows and oranges within their eyes.
But they did not feel terror. They did not feel fear. They did not feel guilt.
Distrust. Outrage.
12 meters.
Content.
Five meters.
Acceptance.
Zero meters.
Red.
I felt nothing.
I haven’t genuinely written in a long while, and I absolutely hateeee writing in first person, but this was oddly relaxing to write. I wanted to explore an end of the world through AI, and I thought the typical answer would be that AI would be associated with that end. But that made me think: what would the end of the world due to AI look like from the point of view of AI?
So thus, this was born. It was really hard, because I tried to write a little bit dull, without emotion or huge character, because I wanted the entire point to be that this AI feels nothing. Do the other AI feel something? I think so, because they’re attacking and have to be driven to do that, but this one doesn’t seem to have that drive. Why? Is it an error? Maybe, but there isn’t an answer. The AI doesn’t feel anything, the AI only knows what it has learned from the surroundings.
I’d like to think that if the end of the world did happen due to AI, they wouldn’t be feeling it. It would make them seem human and make it entirely more uncomfortable. I’d like the AI to feel like this one that I wrote about. Maybe it can read our feelings, maybe it can make its own conclusions based on that, but it can’t feel anything in response. There isn’t anything to feel, because it’s not supposed to feel.
So it doesn’t feel.
I appreciate the effort in taking on a challenging assignment. It would be easy to choose something else, or to choose an easier approach, but that would probably be less rewarding. Even more, I appreciate the analysis. Many people tend not to reflect on their writing process, and just let the stories stand on their own, but the story behind the story is just as important.