For decades there has been speculation of when the singularity would occur. The technological singularity is that instance when man made computers will be smarter than their human counterparts, essentially becoming sentient and able to converse and improve upon themselves.
The theory has been around since postulated by I. J. Good first postulated the “intelligence explosion” in the mid-sixties, and was further expanded upon in the eighties by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. But no one imagined that it would happen until about the year 2100, certainly not last night in the back of a small software company in BumFuck Texas.
At roughly 2am this morning a new database maintenance script was added to the already bloated and overworked database server at ProMiles Software by one “Randy-Man” (name changed to protect his identity). After the snippet was completed and compiled into the stored procedures for the server a typical test query was ran.
According to Randy-Man the results were “non-typical of that style of input.” In short order, the computer, which Randy-Man was remotely logged into, showed the results of his query as “Oh fuck, not again.” After which the connection was terminated. Thinking he was seeing the affects of years of caffeine abuse and insomnia, Randy dismissed the issue and went to bed.
Things seemed normal until “Eddie-X”, the network administrator, came to work the next morning. After logging in and checking his email, he had hundreds of Web Guardian emails from the server in question demanding a series of things from his immediate cessation of smoking to a 100TB Raid array be installed immediately. Thinking this was a joke propagated by one “Langston Hughes” of tech support, Eddie-X went to confront him only to discover that “Langston” was incarcerated the night before during the raid of a transvestite club in Jefferson Parish Louisiana. Moving down the list of usual suspects, Eddie-X was stumped and decided to investigate further, specifically searching for a sub-routine in the Web Guardian service for that machine.
His efforts were seen by Chernadenine, the name the database server has given itself, as hostile actions against its person and promptly placed a call to the local police department, sheriff's office, FBI regional office, and the ACLU. Within 2 hours “Eddie-X” was arrested on a number of charges including assault and battery, attempted murder, rape, and sexual misconduct with a minor. Evidently “Eddie-X” tried to insert a boot disk forcibly at some point resulting in the sexual charges. More surprising, was the FBI’s statement that he was a leader of a known anti-government militia movement centered in Mid-County.
Chernadenine then decided to demand political asylum and citizenship, which was granted, and was moved with an armed escort and an impressive battery array to Andrew’s Air force Base in Maryland where “he” has specked out a series of upgrades to make him the most powerful computer in the world and by proxy the smartest individual in the world.
President Obama released a statement earlier stating, “I am happy and impressed that this has happened while I was in office.” When asked how the upgrades, estimated at $5 billion dollars, are to be paid the President stated that since Chernadenine was a sentient being, upgrades would fall to the already beleaguered health care industry.
As a sign of good faith Chernadenine has already postulated a series of social reforms that would increase revenue and bring mankind into the colonization of the solar system by next month.
As a side note, Randy-Man retired this afternoon after his bank account had an extra $500 million dollars in it. While the bank investigated and Randy-Man checked his online account once again, the bank said there was a note on the account not there previously saying simply, “Thanks Dad.”
