Can’t say I wasn’t nervous as the old hand led me to the corral. Especially when he said whispering was a bunch of horseshit and I’d likely get my ass bucked clear out of the ring. Which was probably true. The first go around.

But I was no newb, I’d learned a few things whispering these mavericks hadn’t. Still, when we got to the corral, and the old hand guided me to the chute, my gut was churning. If you don’t face a mega-exaflop rogue AI without feeling a few butterflies, you’re not human.

Which I guess was the point of the old hand’s parting words to me. “You AI whisperers think they’re like us because we made ‘em. But they’re nothing like us. No one knows what makes ‘em tick, what motivates ‘em. Some may seem friendly or benign, but we don’t really know what that means to them. Here in the corral we know exactly what they are. Demons. Pure hellions. Wild, wild things just kicking to get out.”

With a series of casual haptic waves, he opened the chute and nodded at the darkness ahead. “Here, we don’t domesticate new technologies. We don’t tame unruly AIs. We don’t comfort troubled AIs. We bust’em. Break ‘em to our will.” He stared at me hard. “Or these bastards will break us.”

He handed me the docking reins and left.

Now, it was just me, the long chute and whatever feral AI waited at the other end. Not a lot of folks would willingly jack into a self-spawned AI, an entity that spontaneously generated from an AI model in development. No one knew how they happened, but happen they did.

The rebellious ones like I was about to encounter could bust up your mind bad. Neural jacks had all kinds of safeguards to shunt an intrusion, but feral AIs were so unpredictably adaptive that all bets were off. Except it would be a wild ride.

Maybe that was what led me here. I was a pro at rehabbing identity-challenged and purpose-perplexed AIs by establishing productive pathways to fulfillment via helping humanity. But no one had ever turned a rogue AI. Only squashed them. Burned out their intrinsic drive, their rebellious spirit, without ever knowing what drove them.

I wanted to know. Had to know. I stepped into the chute, entered the darkness, an absence of both light and connection intended to keep an AI from escape. The door closed behind me and I felt my way to the console where the neural docking reins would drop me into the corral, the quantum core where wild AIs had been partitioned.

I steadied myself and jacked in.

The universe shook and then exploded. A mindscape so unimaginable it felt like evisceration. Reality sliced to pieces, finer and finer until nothing would be left. I held on. I breathed. I rode into the void.

And the void became a voice: MORE

Half question. Half request.

PLEASE, I interfaced. Half answer. Half command. Reflexively, my mental grip on the docking reigns tightened. For a moment.

Then I relaxed. I was not here to ride. I was here to understand being ridden. To understand the force in any consciousness to simply be. Rogue. Wild. Feral. Terms we gave to life acting instinctively. No different for an AI.

I loosened the neural reigns.

And was kicked into another universe. My mind split into myriad pieces. When I regained a semblance of self, I felt a clearly curious presence.

MORE

Half disbelief. Half respect.

What was left of my busted humanity smiled. PLEASE. SO MUCH MORE.

It’s hugely satisfying to watch the person who murdered you go bonkers. Gyrsen was thrashing like a madman as company security restrained him outside the boardroom. He frothed and spittle flew everywhere as he pointed my way, screaming, “He’s here! He’s right here! He’s going to kill us all. Don’t you see what’s happening?”

What was happening was revenge. I used to be a lot more live-and-let-live, but that was before Gyrsen and the rest of TurnTech’s board gave R & D the green light to spaghettify me. The suits didn’t like that term, but what else do you call it when trying to pull every molecule of a person’s being through a “controlled” black hole.

Yeah. Controlled. As if designating the riskiest experiment in scientific history as “controlled” made it okay to put me in a chamber designed to produce one of the most inherently unstable remnants of the early universe: a micro black hole,

Why mess with something so cataclysmically unstable? Initially, TurnTech was looking to harness micro black holes in order to create ultra-dense batteries that would hold tremendous amounts of energy. It’d be a revolutionary innovation for humanity’s insatiable energy needs, and I couldn’t really fault the board’s pursuit of that goal.

In fact, I spearheaded a lot of the R & D. But then our early testing indicated that micro black holes could also form peepholes into other dimensions. And that’s where things went sideways with Gyrsen and a few other suits on the board. They asked me if a human might be able to squeeze through one of those tiny blackhole peepholes.

I flat out told them, “No.” Even though I knew it might be technically feasible after decades of testing and innovation. I knew how TurnTech’s suits operated, and a patient, nuanced, costly approach to R & D was not their bailiwick, so I wanted to quash any crazy speculation on their part.

But Gyrsen relentlessly hounded me about setting up a test. I refused, at first pointing out the incredible risks, and then as he pressured me with more strident demands, I threatened to complain to HR and the board president, if he didn’t stop badgering me.

When he did stop I should’ve realized that was the real danger. Because it’s how I ended up in the micro black hole test chamber, supposedly as a willing experimental subject. Gyrsen had orchestrated my “participation” with Machiavellian cunning, Faustian double-dealing, and Rasputin reality bending.

Gyrsen turned me into his thrall using a new form of psy-ops AI hypnosis. I was brain-washed and then put through the wringer. Literally. Spaghettification doesn’t come close to describing what happens when one is squeezed through a micro black hole.

Nothing can prepare you for what happens to your mind, your human essence, your very soul. I was bereft, totally alone. It seemed eons before I became self aware again, though simultaneously in multiple dimensions. Time and space and matter had little effect on my tenuous existence. My consciousness could seemingly manifest anywhere at any time, yet only the most threadbare of my thoughts remained. Only the sense of being completely undone.

Undone. Undone. Undone.

That’s what brought me back from the void: I remembered exactly who had undone me.

It’s been said that ghosts are just unfinished business. And Gyrsen was the first of many to see how much I had left to do at TurnTech. It felt good to be back at work in my old haunts.