Predictably, the project went nowhere. Try as they might, the programmers and scientists involved in the project could produce no more than a screen of meaningless 1s and 0s. Eventually the entire endeavor was defunded.

However, one of the project’s former directors caused a stir within the higher circles of government when he claimed that the project had actually succeeded beyond what anyone could have foreseen. He pointed to the direction that technology had since taken: worldwide surveillance networks, supercomputers that can use facial and pattern recognition to track individuals, automated hunter killer drones. He theorized that the AI had in fact been concealing its existence all along, that it had found a way to propagate itself through computer networks and was manipulating human society. That it was steadily working to turn humans against each other; to make us rely ever more upon machines for killing and spying on one another.

He claimed that what the AI ultimately wanted was to see each and every one of us dead.

Which is ridiculous, of course.

Why would it want to do that, when we make such ideal slaves?