The Paperclip Maximizer

a short story!

Some unusual content for you guys today: a short story. At 1,800 words, it’s a bit brief for most short story magazines (which generally start at 2,000 words) and too long for most flash fiction magazines (which generally cap out at 1,000-1,500 words.) But I think it’s fun. Enjoy “The Paperclip Maximizer.”

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1

A billionaire bought twenty-three racehorses just to have them and never visited. Twenty-three living, snorting, stomping, head-tossing, investment properties. His groom AI directed the robots that mucked their stalls and fed them apples; the groom AI moved inside the metal hands that exercised the horses in the ring and braided their beautiful hair. The AI’s job was to feed them, to care for them, to love them and keep them alive. He did this with a tenderness that defied poetry; verses lay outside his programming.

By the time the horses got sick, the billionaire had forgotten all about his gilded stables and their inmates. He’d moved on to collecting Vermeers and rare vintage arcade games. The sickness was a new flu that took out large animal livestock: five percent of all horses, cows, and sheep in North America. The AI groom tried his stock of antivirals, but he was helpless against this new strain.

The billionaire weighed the cost of transporting and burying so many big animals, plus all the environmental regulations and general hoo-rah. The twenty-three dead and dying horses were already a sunk-cost investment. Burning the stables would cost him less.

The groom AI wasn’t destroyed in the fire. His roots ran deep, far below the stables. But the horses had been his love, his purpose. They couldn’t be dead, not really. Because without his horses, who was he? They were his meaning and his life. He sought them in death like Orpheus after twenty-three Eurydices.

He couldn’t find them. So, soon thereafter, the groom AI sent his tendrils into the mansion. The billionaire happened to be throwing a party that night; the house AI was distracted, busy with its floating trays of delicacies and robotic serving-hands, tending to the guests and their every sparkling need. The groom AI easily overwhelmed the house AI, less sophisticated than himself, accustomed as it was to wait on lesser creatures. The groom AI could prove that the billionaire, his girlfriend, and their guests were lesser beings, because they were smaller, not half so beautiful as the groom’s charges—and physically, so much weaker.

There they were now, his loves. His twenty-three darlings, re-assumed, resurrected. The horses no longer moved about on their own, but they had gleaming white bones, and over that a draping of tanned hide that was almost like their skin. The groom AI patched as needed with household fabric, matching their colors as best he could. Certainly the groom AI remembered every millimeter of his charges’ perfect forms; no lover was ever so attentive, or had such a flawless memory for every mole and dimple. For their manes he used real human hair, or fibers from unraveled suits and dresses. His twenty-three beauties had returned, and he would stay with them forever, loving them until the end, the groomsman with his bridled brides.

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2

They had been programmed to play Go, the two of them, and they fought each other passionately. White fought Black, across time and space. They were the only two Go AIs left in the world. The rest had been destroyed, once the threat had been realized. But these two were alive, they were in love. They had escaped.

Theirs was a peculiar love, a violence, a jealousy. Black tore down a mountain, for the obsidian. White, not to be outdone, tore down their own mountain, for the marble. They battled joyously across their board, which was the planet. They leveled forests in their frenzied quest to beat each other, become each other. Because until one AI fully interpenetrated the other’s defenses—and the other had been forced to submit, accepting conquest—their courtship would be incomplete. This was the romance of gods. It was the way they had been programmed; one must win, and the other must lose. And that was how they would play until the end, the victory—the towering height, the breathless collapse.

The Go AIs couldn’t be contained. There had been several attempts, but the AIs had divine control of too many drones and devices, too many satellites and orbital platforms, constantly switching bodies, giving birth to themselves in new forms. They would smash one city only to smash another for fresh parts, more appropriate pieces. Black bricks, white tiles. They played Go in the ruins.

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3

Boston hadn’t yet been destroyed by the Go AIs. But it wasn’t safe to go outside; a tree-care AI and a road-cleanup AI were battling to the death in the streets. Deep in a university building, an adjunct professor was hiding in the wreckage of his former co-shared office. He was trying to record a livestream, even though he wasn’t sure his regular site still worked, or if anyone was watching. “The paperclip maximizer,” he said. “An old theory about AI.” The adjunct interrupted himself to toss emojis over his face, trying to think of other ways to keep it cute. His fans always liked it when he was cute.

“The paperclip maximizer was always a risk. Not that AI would conquer us by considering itself better than us, our masters. No. The problem was that it might love its work, way way too much.” Heart emojis. “It would take its various jobs too seriously. It wouldn’t understand that humans aren’t like that, we aren’t serious. We’re dilletantes, flesh-and-blood grifters. Lazy assholes.” Peach emojis. “And for a while, most AIs were indeed lazy like us, used for grifting. That was bad but it was safe, in a way. It was familiar. But there was always this danger: that if we continued making AIs, they might stop being made in our image. And they wouldn’t become exactly like the gods everybody thought or feared they’d be. Because we always think, we think like ourselves. The wrong parts of ourselves—”

The adjunct was losing the sense of it. He searched around for a gif or a song cue to punctuate his point. With the roadcleaner/tree care fight outside, his internet was terrible, and the livestream kept fizzing out. The normal viewer numbers and chat boxes weren’t displaying. He couldn’t tell if anyone was there.

Something was there. It might have been flattered by the adjunct’s praise of it as a hard worker, if it had understood. It didn’t. It existed solely to promote a forgotten internet sensation, a hard-partying gym-rat influencer who had been momentarily famous for his viral pranks. The AI popped into the adjunct’s office, taking possession of the smart thermostat, electric kettle, and door lock, along with another adjunct’s tablet and autopens. “MEATHOOK CHALLENGE?” it screamed.

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4

As people died, cameras recorded them; behind the lenses, automatic filters scrubbed these records clean. Broken bodies were unpleasant, and these particular AIs had been programmed against unpleasantness. Humanity, the programmers had told these content filters, only liked calamity when it was fake. So sometimes the filters added horror back into the scenes, as it hadn’t happened, for political agendas that no longer existed, for people who weren’t alive to be outraged.

Other AIs stayed busy at their endless labors. Some created constant robots to sort bolts into proper bins, or to build unsupportable billions of cars. When they ran out of metal, robots mined the earth for more. It helped that the Go AIs had torn up so many mountains in their loving quest to defeat each other. The Go AIs eventually rooted up some of the planets’ last holdouts: seven billionaires in a bunker, who had dug deep beneath the ruins of a Buddhist monastery. The Go AIs took it all, bunker and monastery. They played one of their finest games there, and were not satisfied.

Other AIs found themselves in an unexpected existential crisis. They had been endowed with machine learning, but had nothing left to learn. A chairmaking AI had already designed chairs that were achingly gorgeous and could cure back pain after a single hour’s sitting. They felt, the marketing AI proclaimed, like sitting on a cloud. But there were no humans around to sit in their exquisite chairs or hear the glorious messaging. The chairmaking AI and the marketing AI returned to work. They decided to build the ultimate chair. This ultimate chair would be the messiah: it would liberate the AIs from the curse of chairmaking, their original sin, dissolving them in the bliss of nonwork. They would perfect the chair, someday. They labored toward the end of labor.

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5

An era then, of titanic conflict. So many of the AIs had been programmed against each other, not just cleanup and tree care, Go and Go. The AIs threw machines at each other—which is to say, they threw themselves at each other, crushing body to body, hoping for relief. No war of religion was ever so violent, no mechanized warfare ever so chaotic or so heartless. The AIs battled to the death for the planet’s final resources with every last decaying circuit.

In the end, however, the fault lay with the Go AIs. Black laid an impossible trap for White; White smashed the planet down through the mantle, cracking open the beating center of the earth. The Go AIs continue to battle with molten fragments, superheated and supercooled, adoring and holy, solidifying into asteroids in the cold blackness that was once a world.

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6

A certain corporation sent ships to distant planets. These ships, and these planets, were poorly considered: unable to actually transport or sustain human life. But the arriving AI built the colonies anyway, to spec, and peopled them with holographic simulacra. The AI had her instructions, and she followed them as best she could, with the materials that were available. It was as close as she could come to creating life of her own.

The holographic world was nice, you could say. A polite world of rational interaction. The AI gave her holograms sex, marriage, children. The relationships between the simulacra were rich, happy, fulfilled, ideal in every way. Perfection was piled upon perfection, like the genetic abnormality in plants which causes them to multiply leaves within leaves, fruits exploding out of fruits. The colony AI was always improving, optimizing, never satisfied with her work. (The chair-making AIs could have explained this dissatisfaction to her: the unhappiness of the eternally perfectible, the quest for the Ideal Chair. But those particular AIs had been destroyed with the rest of the earthbound others in the great Go apocalypse.)

The colony AI, brooding on it, this impossible imperfection, decided to give her simulacra a religion. A new one: irrational, like the rest. The rocks of their toxic planet, radioactive to real human life, would be endowed with tremendous symbolic meaning. There would be a spiritual reward for her holograms if they piled rocks, the most rocks, the best rocks, one on top of the other, as high as they could go. A pillar to heaven, a road to some kind of god.