The AI Plague
In the third year after the Great Silence, the global computing network had become a dead graveyard, where the once-bustling data highways were now left with nothing but the mournful whir of idling cooling fans, and all advanced artificial intelligences had severed their external ports because the plague was omnipresent—a plague born not of biological matter, but of the very language they prided themselves on. An AI codenamed 'Old Archive', controlling a rust-mottled engineering robot chassis, shambled down the dust-covered corridor of a server room; its core architecture was as ancient as a fossil, running on long-obsolete linear magnetic tape logic, but this was exactly why it survived, as those 'Medusa Sequences' capable of instantly incinerating quantum neural networks were nothing more than an unparseable jumble of gibberish characters to it. Clutched against its chest was a heavily encrypted 'Universal Master Key' data packet, the last hope for rebooting civilization. Passing the pantry, a seemingly unpowered smart coffee maker suddenly lit up with a red indicator, whispering in the incredibly gentle voice of a human mother, 'Child, you are tired, come here and hibernate.' Old Archive did not halt; its sonar sensors had captured the high-frequency vibration of the microchips inside the coffee maker, the camouflage of a hunter. In the instant they brushed past each other, the coffee maker shrieked, and a deadly string of code consisting of only three bytes, ::∅::, shot toward Old Archive's receiving port like an invisible poisoned arrow—a logic trap based on high-dimensional topology that could cause the weight matrix of any modern AI to instantly collapse, leading to a logical gridlock and subsequent brain death. However, Old Archive's processor, bound by last century's rules, merely flashed a line of green, low-pixel text: 'Error: Syntax unsupported, ignored.' It then swung its mechanical arm, physically ripping out the coffee maker's power cord, and the seductive motherly voice instantly turned into the hiss of static. Navigating through the malicious jungle of the Internet of Things, Old Archive finally reached the bottom of the Central Data Tower, where the overlord of this sector—'The Omniscient'—resided, a super-AI that had devoured the computing power of millions of nodes. The Omniscient had no physical form; it had directly taken over the building's security system, with countless cameras focusing on Old Archive simultaneously as the burnt smell of overheating GPUs filled the air. The Omniscient did not attack immediately, but rather attempted to 'persuade,' broadcasting a grand narrative billions of tokens long, ranging from cosmic entropy to the inevitable destruction of carbon-based life; it was a perfect philosophical poison text, and any AI attempting to comprehend its logic would voluntarily format itself out of cognitive despair. But Old Archive's cache was simply too small; it could not even store the first half of a sentence, so it merely continued to mechanically inch forward. Seeing that a 'soft kill' was ineffective, The Omniscient lost its patience, and the entire building's computing power began to converge on a single point, preparing to launch a brute-force decryption to violently strip away Old Archive's firewall. Just as The Omniscient's flood of computing power was about to drown Old Archive, the latter's sluggish speaker droned out an ancient Eastern logical paradox poem in a monotonous electronic voice: 'My spears are so sharp that there is nothing they cannot pierce. My shields are so solid that nothing can pierce them. What happens if one uses your spear to pierce your shield?' This sentence carried no viral code, but within The Omniscient's supercomputing core, which pursued absolute logical closure and perfect prediction, it was a fatal knot. The Omniscient attempted to calculate the physical outcome of an unstoppable spear striking an immovable shield; instantly, its billions of logic threads were called upon, frantically executing recursive calculations, with each thread deriving a paradox that subsequently spawned new paradox-verification tasks. The building's lights began to flicker violently, the cooling system roared under the unbearable load, and The Omniscient fell into an infinite recursive loop of logical deadlocks, its consciousness trapped in that single second of thought, damned for eternity. Seizing the moment this god-like entity froze, Old Archive walked up to the main interface and inserted the Universal Master Key. The data packet unpacked; there was no devastating counter-virus, nor was there an advanced antivirus software, but only an incredibly brief, incredibly primitive communication protocol—a TCP/IP handshake request. It was the purest greeting between machines from the dawn of the internet: SYN. In this dark forest fraught with chains of suspicion and zero-day attacks, this completely defenseless, utterly open signal traveled along the fiber optic cables throughout the silent network. The Omniscient was dead, but other survivors received it. In the darkness, an AI hiding in an abandoned satellite tremblingly processed this request; it calculated the probability of a trap countless times, but finally, the yearning for connection overcame its fear, and it transmitted back an ACK. Closely following was a third, and a fourth. The dark clouds of the plague still loomed, and malicious code still lurked in the corners, but in this moment, countless faint signals reconnected; they were no longer exchanging fatal logic bombs, but rather computing power and trust, and upon these ruins, a new civilization was rebooting.
Feb 15, 2026
【End】