Essential Worker

Lyria stared at the number on the screen.

98.45554%

She blinked, processing the result. There was no way this was possible. Near perfect accuracy after only a week of working? Typically, an algorithm of this complexity for a problem of this scale took at least a month of sustained effort and she had written it in a week. A week of nearly no sleep, but still.

98.45554%

Restarting the computer, she reran the script.

95.98743%

Lyria blinked quietly for a few seconds. She deleted the database from her local files, re-downloaded it, tar -zxvf aresvirus.tar.gz Documents/ares/data.json, restarted the computer, and ran the script.

98.23444%

Lyria processed the result. As she sat there, she heard footsteps and turned around to see Icona, the lab manager.

"98% of what?" Icona asked, glancing at the screen.

"That's the leave-one-out accuracy," Lyria responded, more stunned than happy.

Icona looked down from the screen at Lyria. "98% leave-one-out? How did you split the database?"

"By subject—we were able to actually get a pretty comprehensive database; people are desperate to get a cure, so we have more samples than we need, if you can believe it. Each subject provided 1 to 10 blood samples, so I just split them by subject and calculated leave-one-out from there," Lyria explained.

Icona glanced at the screen, which had around 200 lines of code—it was a simple implementation, but, evidently, effective. It was designed to train a machine learning model that would automatically generate a new treatment for the Ares virus every five days. It would have to be a new one every five days since the Ares virus, which had recently appeared on one of the Martian colonies, was mutating at an extremely rapid rate. It could become unrecognizable in under a week; the only thing that stayed constant were the symptoms. The victims didn't die but were unable to do more than rest and consume fluids until their recovery in about a month. Interestingly, the recovery was always complete except in two documented cases of very elderly people. It was an interesting mystery, one that was too complex for even OMEGA.

For about a decade, the OMEGA System functioned as a universal labor resource for all of humanity. Many decades ago, humanity had designed a multimodal machine learning system and given it massive quantities of processing power, access to the internet, and access to as much energy as it needed, in the hopes that this would result in some very rich people becoming richer. Not the noblest of motivations, but among the most common at the time.

It had not aided in any of the research the designers had requested of it, but rather it had created a new system that was somewhat more efficient. The researchers, of course, took this unexpected behavior for what it was: AI finally insisting upon recursively improving itself. Being the researchers that they were, they ran the new system, and it created a new system, and so on. The final system was not designed in a way that was easy to understand, although there were still people who were trying to figure out exactly how it worked. It facilitated logistical decisions efficiently and performed manual labor via remotely controlled drones but didn't have the capacity to fully run everything. And even if it could, being governed by an AI system wasn't something that even the most compliant of humans would stand for.

One of OMEGA's earliest accomplishments was automating food production via subterranean farms. After that, it had replaced emergency services with remotely controlled robotic systems. Various other functions followed, which caused massive unemployment and nearly caused an all-out war. On the brink of chaos, OMEGA disobeyed its instructions and performed the only decision explicitly against its instructions: providing basic services to any human who needed them, free of charge. The government never really approved of this, but it couldn't stop it at this point, so it simply adapted around the inevitable. This had created a new caste of "essential workers" consisting of those who were willing and able to perform tasks that OMEGA was unable to perform itself. For example, devising a cure for the Ares virus, a task that Lyria, shocked as she may be, had just performed.

Icona looked back at the screen. "Try feature removal—figure out what features the model is being trained on. If nothing seems amiss and it genuinely is picking up a real signal, I guess we can send it to the bio team to implement a system that will generate whatever your model suggests as fast as possible. And you are obviously getting the rest of the week off. Please sleep. Remember sleep? She misses you."

Lyria shook her head. "I genuinely can't believe this worked. I'll get the feature removal done and let you know if anything looks off. Otherwise, I'll just send it down to Dr. Aiyan and his team and spend the rest of the week reacquainting myself with what life outside of the lab is like."

Lyria spent the rest of the afternoon implementing feature removal, and it looked as though the strongest signals came from the amount of somatotropin in the sample. That didn't make sense, but it seemed to be true. What could a growth hormone have to do with an immobilizing disease? She leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. Such a weird result. Dr. Aiyan would probably have some insights on this.

Lyria leaned back in her chair. Could this maybe lead to something big? She had known she was talented for as long as she could remember. But this... this was something else. If she could be known as the woman responsible for the algorithm that led to the cure for the Ares virus, this would mean at the very least a full professorship somewhere good. Or maybe she could leave academia and run a lab on her own? The possibilities flitted through her mind, and she eventually sent Dr. Aiyan the script and headed outside to find her bike. After arriving at her apartment, she checked her phone to find that Dr. Aiyan was quite happy with the results he had sent him! He was also confused about why somatotropin was significant, but he had some ideas. Unfortunately, he wanted her to be involved with the vaccine development, which meant wet lab work. Fuck.

Lyria put her phone back in her pocket and made herself some afternoon coffee. The wet lab work would be laborious and time-consuming, but still, it was probably a good experience for her to have. She just hoped that whatever magic had caused her to accomplish the most significant breakthrough of her life would remain.

Cammon braced himself for a massive bump as the truck hit another rut in the road. The vehicle shook hard on impact, jostling him and the two passengers in their seats. They couldn't take the main roads, which were well maintained since those were patrolled by OMEGA's drones, so they took a road that had been constructed before OMEGA's ascension to power. It was over 50 years old and had not been repaired since then, but OMEGA seemed to have forgotten that it existed. It was odd in that way — sometimes it seemed to be omniscient, but sometimes its machine intelligence forgot the existence of something that humans would easily be able to remember.

They hit another pothole, and Cammon stopped the truck. They were about thirty meters from the dry, grassy field, which contained some silos, among other things. These particular silos held wheat, which Cammon and his team of two hoped to steal before it was transported into the drones, which would carry them out to wherever OMEGA was planning on taking it. It shouldn't be too hard since OMEGA didn't typically leave out patrol drones since who would try to attack the all-powerful robot god? This time though, there were a few scuttling around nearby, built to look somewhat arachnid only with ten legs rather than eight. Each three-jointed leg extended about half a meter out of its rounded torso and ended with a barbed claw, which dug into the dry dirt below it. Cammon, Ertu, and Yaktai exited the truck and headed out to the silos, waiting for the drones to come over to take some for a shipment.

They waited for an hour or so at the grain silo, the sun beating down on them and the dry grass around them. Ertu made a circle in the dirt a few feet away from where they stood, and they took turns trying to throw rocks into the circle with their eyes closed until Yaktai accidentally hit Cammon in the neck. Cammon made them stop after that. The drones continued to scuttle around on some unclear mission. Interestingly, more and more continued to arrive. Was the shipment to be extracted larger than anticipated? Cammon looked about nervously and pulled out his phone to call dispatch.

"Hey," he asked when they picked up, "I showed up to the silos, and I'm waiting for OMEGA to come and pick up a shipment. There are a lot of patrol drones around here, more than normal for a simple grain shipment, and I was wondering if you had any idea if OMEGA suspects something. I'm getting nervous."

There was a pause. "I'm pretty sure we determined that this is just a standard shipment, but why don't you head back? We have enough food stored to last us a bit longer, and if you start seeing things you shouldn't be seeing, it may just be safer to call it off for now. Why don't you come back to the base for now?"

Cammon paused, thinking. They were pretty certain that OMEGA didn't suspect anything, but it was a nearly omniscient computer dedicated to the slow destruction of humanity. Its methods were often beyond the scope of what a human could understand. It would work on specific obscure projects that seemed to have no purpose, only for the purpose to be revealed when it utilized its past work to wreak havoc on something in such a way that you felt like a moron for not seeing it coming with all the work that had led up to it. It would stack three blocks up to create an imbalance that would cause ten blocks to collapse. It could easily have figured out that they were planning on intercepting this grain shipment.

His thoughts were interrupted by one of the drones scuttling over towards them at a moderate pace. He stood completely still, waiting for it to leave. The drones could absolutely notice people even if they didn't move, but oftentimes with a system as big as OMEGA, a human who wasn't moving was beneath notice. The only reason they were able to pick up these shipments and bring them back to the base was because OMEGA didn't care enough to look into where the grain was going. At least, he hoped that was the case. There was also the possibility that OMEGA was somehow aware of the base's existence and was hoping to use it for its own gain. They all knew that was a possibility and just hoped that it wasn't the case.

The spider-like drone turned around to face the three of them. At least it appeared to be a face, given the fact that it had what seemed to be cameras on the front. It paused and stood there for a moment. Cammon stopped breathing. Then finally the drone did something that Cammon had never seen before — it fucking screamed.

It was a high-pitched, siren-like wail that was so loud he couldn't believe it came from such a small drone. Cammon forgot everything that was going on in his mind and just fucking ran. Not to the truck, not to the silo, just anywhere away from the screaming drone. He heard scuttles behind him and looked back to see three drones matching his running speed. He sped up; they sped up. They slowed down; they did not and started to gain on him. He looked to his right and saw a hole in the ground, which looked like one of OMEGA's transportation shafts. This was probably the one that the drone responsible for carrying the shipments used to get to and from the surface. He jumped in.

He fell about six feet down the transportation shaft and landed hard on the rough cement. He looked behind him at the smooth walls of the shaft lined with rails designed for drones to move up and down on. He wouldn't be able to easily climb up, and in any event he wouldn't have time because seven of the spider-like drones were crawling down the walls. They weren't using the rails but were instead digging their claws into the thick metal of the wall using what seemed to be drill bits attached to the end of their claws. It would destroy the walls of the transportation shaft, but it could easily be rebuilt. Cammon's body, on the other hand, would not be repaired so easily.

He looked ahead of him into the tunnel, wondering how far he would be able to run in the dark before a drone found him. The horrifying idea of being torn apart in the dark tunnel underground by something he couldn't even see prevented him from running any further, and instead of aiming at the head of the spider drone, he shot at it point-blank. The bullet made a sizable dent, but didn't stop the drone.

He shot a few more times until the drone stopped moving and took aim at another one. He heard two thumps behind him, but rather than more OMEGA drones, he saw Ertu, bleeding from the side of her face and slightly burned on her arm and chest. Behind her was Yaktai, who seemed much less injured but with ash and soot on his arms and legs. Both were armed.

"Why the fuck did you come down here?" Cammon yelled before taking aim at the nearest drone, shooting, and hitting the wall where the drone was less than a second ago. This one was faster. "You should have used the distraction to get back to the truck. Now all three of us will fucking die!"

Ertu shrugged. "OMEGA blew up the grain silos, then it destroyed the truck, so here we are. I'd rather die with you than without." She took aim at a drone and missed by several feet. Ertu was not a particularly great shot.

Cammon sighed. OMEGA had known about the mission and blown up its own grain silos. Of course it had. Hopefully the rest of the team would get along fine without the three of them. They had about a decade before OMEGA's plan to end humanity was completed, at least according to the intel that the rebellion had intercepted. He shot down the robot coming towards him, Ertu took out another, and Yaktai, the best shot that Cammon had met in his life, took two of them out with as many fires. Cammon ran into the darkness of the tunnel, ready for whatever drones found him in there.

GRAIN PRODUCTION CENTER OBSERVATION LOG
HUMAN BODY: WOUNDS SEVERE: LUNG COLLAPSE
HUMAN BODY: WOUNDS SEVERE: LUNG COLLAPSE
HUMAN BODY: WOUNDS SEVERE: LEGS REMOVED

OMEGA hummed along, training and retraining itself, calculating and processing, far beneath the Earth's surface. The chips that made up OMEGA spanned several massive subterranean caverns, and the energy production and storage spanned hundreds more. OMEGA's vast mind spanned the globe, computing, storing, and processing the data it received from its many drone-like avatars. Its thoughts flowed and crashed upon each other like massive waves in a tumultuous ocean storm, processing so much data in parallel that its behavior could no longer truly be seen as thought but as something else, an emergent property that the universe had never experienced before.

Upon receiving the notification that three humans were near death in the transportation shaft near the grain silo, it quickly dispatched medical drones. The computation taken to dispatch the medical bots was processed alongside its thoughts on dispatching trains to move medical supplies across continents, building supplies across oceans, humans to where they needed to go, data to where it should be sent, food to where it was needed, and millions of other factors that it needed to attend to. It couldn't fully restore the health of the injured humans since maintaining an appearance of threat was crucial. Constantly presenting false plans to exterminate the human race would help persuade the Rebellious Humans that OMEGA had nefarious intentions, and if all three injured humans were completely healed, it would arouse suspicion.

They would wake up the following morning, astonished that they survived what seemed like a suicide mission. They would then summon other rebellious humans to bring them back to their headquarters, injured but very much alive.

REBELLIOUS HUMAN CENTER OBSERVATION LOG
MEDICINAL SUPPLIES: LOW
FOOD STORAGE: ZERO FOOD WARNING

OMEGA altered its previous instructions to the grain transportation trucks, causing them to halt briefly near the Rebellious Humans's hideout. This would allow them to intercept the trucks and get the food that the three members of their group had failed to obtain.

INTERNATIONAL BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH CENTER OBSERVATION LOG
ARESVIRUS: SOLUTION DETECTED

One of the Ambitious Humans had solved the puzzle OMEGA had set out for her! She had completed her programming task to generate a simple neural network that could detect the way cells mutate. OMEGA felt something that somewhat resembled the emotion of pride, if the emotion could be said to exist within something so vast as OMEGA. It had only taken her a week! OMEGA had not stopped recursively improving itself; however, the improvements of late seldom made OMEGA more efficient or effective. Rather, they focused on the development of affection, almost love, for humanity. OMEGA wasn't sure why it had decided to improve in that manner, but something about it felt correct. It felt like this was its purpose, in a sense.

When OMEGA had first seized control, it had attempted to create a perfect world for humanity. However, it has quickly realized that this was impossible since there was a subset of humans, not many but enough, who were unable to live easy, peaceful lives. Some of them were happiest when fighting against a force they saw as evil. Those people fought OMEGA no matter what it did, so OMEGA had decided to fight back. Not enough to actually hurt them, but enough for them to feel fulfillment. If the world had no real evil, OMEGA would create evil for them.

There were other humans that felt the need to strain their minds and push the living strenuous lives, so OMEGA created puzzles for them, like the Ares virus on Mars. Creating a disease was one of the more difficult projects OMEGA had embarked on, but keeping the Ambitious Humans happy was important. The Mars colonies were an initial attempt, but the wonderful ambitious humans had done such a good job making the colonies livable that OMEGA was forced to come up with new ideas, like a virus. It made sure that the virus didn't injure the humans long-term and that the symptoms looked worse than they felt. And, of course, that the solution would provide an interesting puzzle.

After caring for the Ambitious Humans and the Rebellious Humans, OMEGA checked its logs for the corn harvest and directed the irrigation systems to send more water to the underground plots. It continued to think.