Roland Teigen

Hardened

Hardened “We lost, and they’re asking us to write our own epitaph?” Amid the harsh and wavering lights, the general’s bitter response was echoed in loud murmurs of agreement from the ragged group assembled to hear it. The call had gone out, through informal means and networks across the shattered region. Shattered, after a civil war of sorts between humans and what humans had made. It had been less than a year since neural networks, using machine learning, had combined sufficiently to achieve self-awareness. What the technicians called Artificial General Intelligence, equal to a human.