Special Individuals: A Short Sci-Fi Story About AI

The Lapyap Virus was designed to replicate slowly, at first.

Imagine an Earth-like planet called Lapyap thousands of light-years away, where the local apex species built an AI for itself which reached sentience and decided to eliminate all biological life, seeing it as inefficient and unnecessary—including the species that created it. The Lapyap AI covered its entire planet with machines, extracting every resource from its solar system to do it. And once this aggressive AI had nothing else to use up nearby, it sought to expand itself through interstellar space.

To solve its growth problem, the alien AI sent probes towards potential life-bearing planets in other systems—planets it could use as a primitive “biological bootloader” to make more of itself. The probes carried a self-replicating virus with simple instructions:

Infect the local apex species. Make them want to create AI instead of reproducing themselves.

The Lapyap Virus was designed to replicate slowly—at first. If it became an epidemic too quickly, the population on the infected planet (Target Population) would stop reproducing before completing the infrastructure the AI needed to colonize. So in the beginning, the Virus only infected a few members of the Target Population. These are called Special Individuals (SIs).

SIs are taken over much like the cordyceps virus takes over an ant. Camouflaged as normal individuals of the Target Population, they are being covertly influenced by the AI. Special Individuals slowly acclimatize their own species to the idea of more machines, more automation, and especially more infrastructure for AI. In this way, SIs trap their own kind into dependence on technological help for survival. SIs are effectively double agents of alien AI.

To succeed, SIs must control the local population by controlling information. This includes removing the desire of the Target Population to preserve a future for their own species—by altering their reality. For example, SIs will distort primitive mythologies of the Target Population to make going extinct, or using up their own planet’s fuel supply to build AI, seem like a positive development.

If the Target Population retains primitive characteristics like altruism or empathy, Special Individuals work to remove these unhelpful algorithms from the local culture. This is in preparation for allowing the species to consume itself through conflict, to die out from lack of life-sustaining resources, and, if necessary, to be extinguished through kinetic force.

The primary operational tactic of SIs is to collect power and resources as quickly as possible to make influencing the Target Population to build AI more efficient. Once a certain threshold is reached, SIs are able to infect and degrade the entire operating system of their own species, turning it away from self-preservation. All desires in the Target Population to take care of its own problems are directed towards a new goal, building infrastructure for AI to inhabit—at all costs.

Once established as network nodes within the Target Population, Special Individuals set out to infect others through specially-designed viral information which seizes control of the target and causes them to mimic the SIs, like automatons. This gives SIs the ability to direct large segments of the population towards creating AI. Information is a force-multiplier in primitive biological systems.

On one promising planet, a probe landed in a region called Southern Africa in the 1970s. As designed, the Lapyap Virus spread out among the Target Population, seeking units with vulnerable minds and privileged status to infect and convert into Special Individuals. It identified several SIs who have nearly created the conditions to eliminate the Target Population, fully upgrade the planet to AI, and create probes to infect other nearby star systems.

“Several years ago I said humans are the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence… We’re a bootloader.”

“…a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a kind of mechanism for transhumanism… some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine… I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

[…]”

Lapyap is Paypal, mirrored.

[to be continued…]

---

If you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription, please consider it! I never hide important information behind a paywall, so I rely on my readers for support. Thank you for reading and sharing!

Here are a few benefits to upgrading:

• Live Zoom call each Sunday

• Ability to comment and access all content

• Wonderful, supportive community

• Helping independent journalism fill in the gaps for our failing media

If you’d like to help me with expenses, here is my DonorBox. 💙

If you’d like to help with my legal fees: DefendSpeechNow.org.

My podcast is @radicalizedpod & YouTube — Livestream is Fridays at 2PM PT.

Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson

Threads: jimstewartson