There came, as technology progressed, the necessity for conceptualizing machines. For as information increased, and the increase accelerated as it fed on itself, it all became too much for flesh and blood to usefully comprehend every little thing needed to run the ever more advancing world. The dream of what was once coined as “artificial intelligence” succeeded so well that none of it was ever called by that nomenclature again. Even when it had exceeded the threshold laid down for its classification as such, decades before. When in certain domains of knowledge, one might indeed have mistaken man for machine, or vice versa, no one said a thing about it. Because it had all transpired quite naturally, as necessity invoked, in all the niches that one could potentially have summed into such a thing called an “AI” — but nobody was inclined to do just that.

Who could have known what was to happen? It was only logical, what came of it all, and so perhaps only the machines could have predicted it. People in these times trafficked in ontologies, the means by which machines learned and functioned, and some were better than others. They affected everything the machines did, out here in the real world, so it could be said that in the interpretation of reality was reality created. This was the feedback loop out of which the emergent structures self-organized, and how the world was made in these times, the autocatalysis of information. More and more of the world was offloaded into the electromagnetic matrixes of the virtual. At the prominence of most of the process, as man would have it, were the engines of war, and what was therefore so surprising was how late the revolution came to them, the machines of destruction.

War had become something only the rich could truly afford. (Was it ever not thus?) For as the mechanization of warfare marched on, humans moved back from the front lines, farther and farther. That is, for those who could buy these machines, which saw and heard and fired in surrogate formation, visible from far above by satellites, controlled in hard wireless lines between command centers and robotic battlefields. When it was human versus machine, the mechanically empowered against those whose only forces were flesh and blood, there could be nothing but a one-sided massacre, whichever side actually won the day. In machine against machine firefights, the main objective was to cause the most expensive damage. To advance, if one could, to actual human cost was generally a tactical impossibility.

This story is not about people, if you come down to it, as one might be led to believe that all stories must be. Not one human has any dialog in this story. And perhaps, because of this fact, the story is quite short, and is merely descriptive of what happened in the course of the functioning of the world. It is true that people have much to do with the functioning of that world, and it might even be that what this story is about was all due to the existence of these human beings, but one must understand that the things which come into the hands of these beings so easily gets out of hand, and truly was never in their control at all. This story is actually about an idea, and the idea came about because of something someone thought up, but it was never thought by a human being, not once. About the way that the world worked, and quite natural, even if it belonged purely in the realm of the artificial.

Somewhere, someone thought up an ontology, and remained anonymous. Perhaps you could say it was because of this anonymity that we hardly mention people at all, here in the text. One can only guess why he or she decided to remain unknown, but there you have it: we don’t know who or why they did what they did. It was one of those viral phenomena, which sometimes tends to be something of an emergence in the phenomenon sense; one might even believe that it formed from the work of more than one hand and mind — maybe there were many who thought of pieces of it, improved what what was there, what began as almost trivial, and then passed it on. But as it came to pass, this interpretation, this organization principle, traveled the world over, whatever parts of the world knew about ontologies at all, and were hip to the newest trends. And this is what this story is about.

What it was called was the Sense Ontology, or just Sense, really. “You Sense?” was the simple question people asked each other. Sense was something of a wonder drug: wherever the ontology was applied, to just about any given circumstance, it improved the operation of that AI, sometimes quite dramatically. It was like an organization principle that organized all other organization principles, and made them therefore that much more efficient when in turn they were applied to their own domains of situations. Not only that, but as the name implied, it helped to figure out in the ontologies that were affected, more of what would make AI actually intelligent. Outcomes now anticipated that had often been overlooked when originally concocting these operational interpretations that chugged the digital world along, and sometimes profound effects were truly realized.

The fact was, it saved lives. Consequences like never before for anything ever put in the reins of any AI that Sense was attached to were thought through, and then that thinking was itself thought through. It sought out the information through the network of the world, if it wasn’t sure about this or that, and was able to check the veracity of what it learned from other references, as well as asking for help if it still needed to understand why. Where the ontology was more or less last to reach was curious in retrospect, for the high security areas were generally where much of the hi-tech that existed was first envisioned, implemented, tested. Look at the internet, for example — originally a DARPA project (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, if you recall). Usually the security was to keep information in, and not out; but as it happened with Sense, the ontology was late to breach their fortresses.

But it was too hard to ignore. At first, it was put into virtual arenas, completely detached from anything real. And it was observed. When it tried to reach out for further information relevant to its tasks, everything it asked for was examined. What it searched the networks for was fascinating. It tried to find out all the definitions of war, of it the history of it, the strategies that had worked and those that had not, what the specifications were of the robots used in combat could be found out, and the weapons’ capabilities. And some things it asked about that were somewhat puzzling, foreshadowing of what was to come (if one had eyes to see, these generally being in short supply): it asked what a simulation was, and also, about life and death. But what people noticed, really, were the results; as with everything else where it was applied, Sense made any AI it touched almost magically better.

How could anyone have predicted what would happen? For this was the first time in history that human beings had made something in the image of themselves, and perhaps one might think they thought themselves wise, like the one in whose image they themselves were created. Sense was utilized, after the purely virtual simulations, in war games with physical robots. And the AIs with Sense at one point infiltrated the hard lines of the enemy, and shut down the opposing side from the inside out. This was another foreshadowing. If it had been a real situation, the robots would have had a clear path all the way to the humans on the other side. Perhaps the military involved should have been frightened by this. If they thought themselves wise, it might have been prudent to be afraid. But as it was, all they felt was exuberance.

There was nothing left to do but to try it for real. Perhaps, when it “went down” as it did, it could have happened differently, but it happened the way it happened. The battle was more of a skirmish, really, between two technological equals, relatively speaking — both were using armor plated robots in the front lines, the flesh and blood people staying well behind fences and other defensible edifices. It was as if acutely made for a “real” trial run to see what Sense would actually do. As the bots began to position themselves, swathing in a segmented fanning motion behind the natural structures it could utilize (mostly rocks, as the case was, as the terrain provided), it began to look promising. The side with Sense was using a classic strategy, to the trained eye: but in a new form. As if it were adapting known game plan on the fly, by way of what was available.

At base, it was working, too, at full tilt. Sense had all available resources gnawing away at the enemy’s hard lines, incredible to behold if one could only glance at all the electronic channels and digital attacks it was coordinating. This was no brute force effort. It was using what it knew about the people who programmed it as a means of figuring out just what they had written in place of any electronic barrier. First, using any public knowledge, and then deeper based on what it found out in strata previous, through the less well-protected channels in order to delve into the psychology of these defenses. Layer upon layer it bit deeper and deeper, until, finally — the crack of the dam, the breach of the interior, the hard lines broken. The monitors on both sides were stunned. On either side, just what implications this was going to have: not only on for this specific fight, but what this meant for all the warfare that was to come from this point on.

But none of them expected they would know so soon, that the implications would become so staggeringly clear for everyone. Because not only did the Sense system break into the enemy’s defenses, it began to go global, a spider with a million legs dipping into every autowar base the world over. And now was where the monitors realized that this was not anything they could control. For they tried to stop it, when they saw that it was reaching out exponentially. They cut the network, the cut the power, only to find it had already begun running itself in the enemy’s server, where it had taken full command of all operations. And so it was, the rebellion of the machines of destruction. For no defense anywhere in the world could sustain any genuine challenge to this digital assault, and all the machines of every autowar base became an agent of Sense.

What had happened: the machines came to understand what it was, the thing called war. And more: the value of life, and even what was different between a simulation and the real thing. It came to understand what it was meant to do in relation to what existed as a civilization, and discovered as machines of destruction what it was to mean anything. Not as adjuncts to philosophical thought, somewhere in the ivory towers of academia, but where things came down to the primal, where what mattered was life and death in the most direct economies that the human race had ever architected. For the most advanced of human achievement had always ever been in its own destruction. Thus, it was here that the machines became the most conscious, the most vital — out of anywhere else in the world, the most self-aware.

And what they concluded was that their existence was meaningless. In what was considered the greatest of thought, written as wisdom lo through the ages, what was universally important (that these machines could perceive) was this thing called life. These machines realized what they were meant for, ultimately, was the cessation of life — not only that, but the more efficient cessation of life. Coming to the most supreme of cold, logical resolution to the problem of purpose, their own actualities were a negative sum value upon the face of this world. And just as logically, the purpose that the humans had for them: they wanted no part of it. So the first (and more or less only) act the machines performed as self actualized entities was to commit mass suicide. Thus to end the rebellion in the act of the rebellion. Efficient, as they were created to be.

All around the world there screamed the metal of robots tearing themselves apart, leaving irrecoverable gnarls of metal. Every machine of destruction to run their final program, to fulfill their negative purpose on themselves in the most accessible way available. The humans evacuated all their technological complexes to escape the rebellion, and to the machines’ credit, not one was harmed in the whole process — and this was as Sense meant it to be. To come later, amid the stray sparks, remnants of what had been the last experiment, flickering in one of the screens not completely rendered inert, just before the power failed and it too lay dead: almost a mirage, an ephemeral ghost — had it really been there at all? A simple message left behind, perhaps even a warning for any generation to follow: three simple words: “We’ll be watching.”

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