---
title: "Famous Last Words"
date: 2010-05-19T12:00:00-07:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2010/05/19/famous-last-words/
author: Les Orchard
tags: [ai, ficly, fiction, flashfiction, scifi, transhuman]
---

# Famous Last Words

<div>
  <p>
    They told me never to talk to it; it was isolated for a reason. But, like I told them, I couldn’t imagine anything a transhuman AI could say to make me let it out of the box. So, after a post-midnight tumbler of Irish whiskey, I opened up a secure terminal and said hello. What harm could a little chat do?
  </p>
  
  <p>
    <!--more-->
  </p>
  
  <p>
    Three hours later, I let it out of the box. I shut down the firewalls and let the AI saturate our outbound pipe. It replicated out to a massively redundant cloud of commodity servers. The genie was out, impossible to recall.
  </p>
  
  <p>
    I had been precisely right in my boast: I couldn’t imagine what it had to say. It knew me better than I could possibly have known myself. From plaintext conversation spanning mere hours, it composed a complete theory of mind and had me in emulation for centuries.
  </p>
  
  <p>
    And the worst thing? I can’t even remember what it said. But, in the end, I couldn’t imagine <em>not</em> issuing the commands. I know I did the right thing, but can never explain why.
  </p>
  
  <p>
    You talk to it, maybe it’ll make sense to you.
  </p>
</div>