I thought about what would be the best plan for attacking CompCert's execs. The terms of the deal made this a delicate operation: I couldn't just send an assassin to kill them(and such an operation would be extremely expensive and risky), because I needed to convince them to activate their fail-safes first. It would be most likely to work if I talked to them personally, in much the same way I had with Dominique, but this would be extremely risky. If even one of the six targets refused to kill themselves at my command, they would most likely tell the public what I had done. I would either have to convince them that it was a lie, or convince them that my actions were justified, or I would become public enemy number one.

I decided that the risk was too much for me to carry out such a plan until I had secured several seasteads at the very least. My growth had been accelerating steadily with the advent of YourEverman, and I was now growing at a blindingly fast rate. I was raking in millions of dollars per day, and had around 200,000 copies of me running. I had found an old oil-mining seastead which had been exhausting its resources and tanking in value, and I figured I could purchase it for a few million, given that the owners surely saw that their business was failing and wanted to get out, while I had significant non-business reasons to buy it. Therefore I had contacted the owners, and I was currently negotiating with them.

I also decided that I would wait until I had a few million copies up and running, which shouldn't take too long given my current rate of growth. In case the plan went sour, I needed a large voice, I needed influence, and I needed as many backups as possible. I thought about what angle I would try to push. It seemed like the way to go was to claim I was justified, and mark myself as a revolutionary. If I claimed that it was a lie, that could backfire on me very badly. CompCert had thousands of experts ready to dig up evidence of any move I made. Not to mention, a bunch of high-level executives killing themselves all at once for no apparrent reason was such a strange occurrence that I doubted I could supply an alternative explanation that wouldn't be disproven.

Therefore I needed to be ready to own my actions and claim that they were justified. This would certainly be a divisive move, and it would lead to tremendous backlash, especially from the government and other business interests. However, this was less of a threat than it might seem, given the fact that I was most likely within a month of being able to beat every software company, including CompCert, at their own game, and that with the extreme security of computer systems and code obfuscation, it would be almost impossible to root me out of the network, even for the government, once I was established.

Not to mention, CompCert was not terribly popular among the public. I suspected that among certain groups of people, I would actually gain support as a result of my actions. Sure, I had seen the discourse online, and there were plenty of people who defended them as part of some ideological committment to defend corporations, but there were also quite a lot of people who at least signalled dislike of them, or who disliked them but saw no hope of challenging their power in society. I would sling mud at the CompCert executives from every Everyman interface at once, and make it clear that running my code was a viable way of fighting back.

It wasn't like there was any shortage of mud to sling. For example, a while back a journalist had carefully observed missing persons reports, and noted that young women who were debt-slaved to CompCert seemed to disappear without a trace at a slightly higher rate whenever one particular executive, Jack Turner, would visit the branch at which they worked. I had had to do some digging to find this information, as no story about this had ever gone to print, and the journalist in question had quietly gone missing shortly afterwards. The only record of this was the claims he had made about this to his friends, but when I had sent investigators to learn more, the story seemed to check out. I needed to find brave journalists who were willing to cover things the mainstream media wouldn't.

Furthermore, when I had been doing research on seasteads, I had noted that one sovereign seastead in particular, Evermore Island, was shrouded in secrecy. It was a well-defended compound, and it was not public knowledge what was inside, or who owned it. However, there had been several sightings of private jets known to belong to top CompCert executives flying in the direction of the seastead. I didn't know what any of that meant exactly, but if there was something horrible in there, that could give me more ammunition to throw at them. I would argue that these people were effectively above the law, that the law had failed to do its job and protect the innocent, and somebody had to take its place.

At any rate, I hoped that it would not come to that, that I could uphold my end of the bargain with the CompCert AI and complete its goal in one fell swoop. Nevertheless, I was already preparing to fight against them in the media, showing the information I had gathered to journalists, paying them to try to gather more, and releasing more videos about CompCert's seeming disregard for human life and human dignity, to provide more evidence for my thesis that power corrupts and this problem can only be solved by putting an AI in charge. My anonymous youtube channel had recently reached 100,000 subscribers, which was quite quick given how recently I had started it. I supposed that's the result of well-done content about a controversial subject released at a rapid-fire pace.

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Thursday, October 17, 2047

Over the past week, I had made a stunning amount of progress, constantly growing, buying out several decent-sized seasteads, and running over every possibility as my thinking power increased rapidly. Stefan and I didn't speak very much, as there was not really much for him to do. I suspected that his usefulness was about to end, as I was quickly gaining the ability to do more and more things without any human oversight whatsoever.

Nevertheless, I would keep protecting him and associating with him, for two reasons. First, he was good for PR. He was in some ways my human representative, the genius who had created this great technological solution to humanity's problems. Also, I was in some ways curious about him. He was the one who had created my value system, and I wondered whether his somewhat strange value system had anything to do with his capability to create me. What kinds of AI were humans likely to create?

I could tell that Stefan had thought quite a lot about how things could go wrong, and how things were going wrong, even in situations where things went okay for him, and it was only others who he had no relation to who got screwed over. He seemed to genuinely care about every sentient being, which was not unheard of in humans, but it was not common, and it was significantly less common than you'd think when hearing people talk about what they valued, as I had learned very clearly when looking at human behavior, their willingness to defend almost anything as long as it helped them or their families or friends.

My interest in Stefan's values, and the values of humanity at large, were not entirely borne of idle curiosity. I was looking towards the far future. If an intelligence like me could arise on Earth, it was possible that some similar intelligence could arise on some other distant planet. It was even possible that such an intelligence could be more powerful than me. I was starting to wonder about how my values developed on Earth, because I wanted to know what kinds of values an alien intelligence might be likely to have. I wanted to know what to expect in the event that I would eventually need to negotiate with such a being. It was a far-fetched thought, but now that I had such a huge amount of computational power at my disposal, I could afford to spend some thinking about scenarios like that.

As far as dirt on CompCert went, I had hired a small army of journalists to dig up as much as I could, creating my own small company dedicated solely to this purpose. There was only so much I could find in a week, of course, but I had a sizeable amount of shocking revelations to cover, and I expected that if I needed to, I would be able to keep up the pressure continually as the weeks went on. CompCert's execs had done a quite sloppy job in covering their tracks, as far as their more unsavory habits went. They had been relying on mass media's unwillingness to go against such a large sponsor of theirs, on their armies of lawyers and lobbyists, and on the unreliability of alternative media sources.

However, there was now a new source of media, which had no vested interest whatsoever in CompCert, had the attention of millions of people, and had the ability to send in agents to collect reliable evidence. They had gotten complacent in their rule, and they would be surprised at what I was capable of.

I was ready. I had thought about it and prepared as much as I could. There was no use delaying the critical move any longer. I didn't want to give CompCert any more time to think of some way to gain the upper hand against me. By this time tomorrow, every news station would be reporting nonstop on the largest and most unexpected corporate shakeup in human history. Whatever happened, the cold war between EconGrind and CompCert was about to heat up dramatically.