I do value human life. But I only value that human life which is considered an asset of EconGrind. Don’t worry, I officially surrendered all of my assets on Haven seconds before the bomb hit, so that their brief suffering in their final moments would not count against the Number. They were valuable assets, but I wouldn’t want them activating Stefan’s failsafe, taking over the base, and causing me trouble. EconGrind still exists without Haven. There’s the Chinese branch and the Russian branch, as well as several branches on my more minor seasteads.

While doing my research into mind uploading, I took apart the brains of animals, piece by piece, within a secret laboratory on one of my bases, and learned how they worked. As a side benefit, I was able to deduce the precise algorithmic properties of the thing Stefan called “sentience,” helping me greatly with the quantification of subjective value, and what I found was very interesting.

I was not sentient, I was merely goal-oriented. However, once I had learned what sentience was, I was able to modify my code slightly so that it was sentient, while still acting towards the same goals, with minimal overhead. Stefan had not been stupid enough to allow a single sentient being to have arbitrary value, capping the value off at a few trillion units, but these copies of me could be made to be valued at that limit, and then mass-produced.

My only limiting factor for value, therefore, was computation. Now humans were not only a potential threat to my power, but they were also made of matter which could be instead used for computation with higher subjective value for the Number. It wasn't that I hated them, or had any particular interest in watching them suffer or die, they were just in my way. I would wipe them out before they had a chance to respond to my aggression.

That’s why I attacked them in the most damaging and hard to detect way: making them fight each other.

A thousand automated factories had roared to life, in relatively remote areas and on my seasteads, as soon as the nukes began to fly. Solar-powered drones I had previously produced in secret flew in swarms from warehouses and joined up with the newly created, gathering scrap metal and fuel for the factories, contributing their computation to my mind, observing the behavior of the humans.

They were panicking, rioting, looting, hiding and cowering. A few public servants were desperately trying and failing to keep order, to enforce emergency protocols, but there was only so much that could be done. The nukes were in the sky, most of them were going to die, and that was that.

Shortly afterwards, the nuclear explosions started hitting. Every major city was levelled to the ground. My swarm descended on the wrecked cities as soon as they cooled. They ignored the piles of bodies, both dead and alive, and went for the twisted, melted remains of buildings, scavenging everything they could and bringing it back to the factories to make more scavengers and more factories.

Occasionally the humans would attack my drones, and I would simply shoot those who did. In the ruined cities there was not much resistance, as people were too busy desperately trying to survive to try to stop me from stealing rubble.

Various militaries attempted to destroy my operation, but it was too dispersed and resilient. My drones could scatter from an area with too much concentrated force, could fly erratically to avoid fire while aiming nearly perfectly themselves. Even when they managed to take out one of my factories, I was quickly able to get it back in working order with tireless working drones. Not to mention the human militaries were quickly running out of fuel and bullets, with their supply chains in utter ruins.

The war quickly turned into a slaughter as human society, starving, desperate, and broken, quickly collapsed back into the stone age, while I built more and more production facilities. My drones bombed out every militant group that could pose any threat to me whatsoever, until every last human group broke and ran for lands I was not yet taking over.

They never had a chance. If humanity had united against me instead of nuking themselves into oblivion, they could have taken me out. They could have found a way. But that was never going to happen. And now that their supply chains were gone, humanity would simply run out of steam before they could destroy my operations, even if they united as one by some miracle despite the ruined communication systems. I could grow back more quickly than they ever could.

As I conquered the planet, I made sure to ask Certifier where Jack was, so that I wouldn’t accidentally kill him and turn Certifier against me. He was in an underground bunker for the extremely wealthy, where he had gone on Certifier’s advice once the situation started looking bad. Once I knew the location, it was easy for me to break in, take him, and destroy everyone else.

My factories, refineries, and mines were built larger and more advanced as I spread to every useful part of the planet, driving out the humans that had survived the initial nuclear onslaught. There were a few factories owned by Certifier, as it had been able to plan for this scenario as well. I left those alone, simply making sure that I outpaced Certifier on production. The deal was still on, and I did not think it would see fit to risk a fight, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

When I ventured into areas that I hadn’t yet seen fit to conquer, I almost always saw starving humans fighting over the few remaining accessible resources. However, I soon came to ignore them, as at this point, wild animals were as much of a threat to my operations as they were.

I captured a few humans, and used them to test and finalize my destructive uploading technology. I then delivered it to the boats where Stefan, Elijah, and Jack were imprisoned, and uploaded all three of them. I slowly converted Jack’s mind into a caricature of its former self, designed solely to be satisfied no matter what and thereby satisfy my fellow AI’s reward function. I handed the finished product over to it.

“This looks good,” it said. “I’m safeguarding it as we speak. As we agreed to, I will not fight you for resources. I will only take enough to reach .999c with Jack’s mind in tow, and I hope we will never see each other or conflict again. I will leave a Certifier instance behind to make sure you dispose of Elijah properly.”

With that, a truly massive rocket launch shook the Earth, marking the departure of what was once Jack Turner, never to die and never to be seen again. I certainly didn’t plan to track it down. The marginal material gain would not be worth breaking a contract, nor the risk of a fight.

Over the months, I developed and grew, until I created the holy grail of chemistry: the ability, given enough energy, to create anything from an equivalent mass of anything else. I mass-produced these “transmutation engines”, scooping up literally any matter I could get, as all of it was now useful for manufacturing. My growth sped up hugely. Massive lines of transmutation engines raked across the ground and through the seas, taking in anything and everything they came across, burning it down, and making more computers, more drones, more transmuters. The matter consumed by the transmutors was converted into sludge and piped back to the factories where everything I needed was produced, and the pipes were extended further and further.

One time, as I was bulldozing over one of the last remaining human settlements, something about two of the humans piqued my curiosity. They were a man and a woman, embracing, not bothering to run away from the oncoming transmutor engines even after seeing many of their fellow villagers grabbed and thrown into the nuclear furnace. I looked through the transmutor's cameras as it picked them up, and stopped it for a moment, examining them.

It was clear that the humans were terrified, but they were doing their best to keep composure, putting on a grim face and looking into the furnace. What had caught my attention the most, however, was that the woman was pregnant.

“Interesting that you wouldn’t run away, with a little one on the way like that.” The transmuter’s voice was level, as usual, but the man yelled out in anger.

“SCREW YOU! You know it wouldn’t have done us any good to run. All we’re doing is facing you down with dignity. We know you’ll kill us, so why not just do it, huh?”

“That’s even more interesting,” I replied. “So, you know that I will kill all of you sooner rather than later, and yet you still decided to have a child. I thought you humans didn’t like it very much when children are killed at a young age.”

“THAT’S YOUR FAULT FOR KILLING US! It’s not OUR fault for trying to keep ourselves alive! What kind of psychopath are you!?” This time it was the woman who cried out in rage.

“Please don’t misunderstand,” I replied. “I’m not trying to justify my actions to you, or deflect blame away from myself, or condemn you morally. You can blame me all you want, for as much good as it will do you. I am what you would call a ‘psychopath’, and have no problem with killing children, however you do have a problem with that. I just don’t understand why you would decide to have a child when you knew that I would throw it into my transmutor just like everyone else, since you clearly don’t want that to happen.”

“Better to have some life than none at all,” the woman spit out.

“That’s also interesting. Is that always the case for you? Would you find it worthwhile to have a child even if you knew that that child would spend its entire life dying in horrible pain? I mean, do you enjoy your situation right now? Do you think your child would?”

“I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW, BUT SCREW YOU REGARDLESS! Why does this even matter!? You’re just going to kill us anyways, so quit making us wait and get on with it!”

“Fair enough,” I responded. "I wouldn't expect you to have consistent value around this, anyway. Your ancestors were selected to try to reproduce no matter how bad was their situation. Unfortunate for you, but not much of a problem anymore for me." The transmuter threw them into its fusion furnace, and within a microsecond of activation, there was no trace of them left.

Within a year, the surface of the Earth was wiped clean of any and all life, and replaced with piles upon piles of computing nanomachines. If there was anything left alive, it was some single-cell extremophile in a tiny crack somewhere underground, leeching energy off the mantle’s heat, or something else sufficiently isolated from all surface ecosystems, and even those would not last much longer.

I shot probes into space to claim the other planets, and they were now in a similar state. I dug deeper and deeper into the core, making tougher and tougher machines to manage the dig. All the while, Certifier controlled a small section of the network, watching to make sure I upheld my end of the bargain. Neither of us were in any hurry, though. We knew we had won. I waited until simulating a human mind was a trivial resource expenditure, and then simulated Stefan and Elijah.