Written by Ben
When schools shut down in 2020, Aidan retreats into his desktop computer. His original goal was to set up some way to avoid getting caught skipping his high school’s daily Zoom classes, but that turned out to be easy enough. Soon, this early experience with automation becomes a fascination and a friend.
He reads “Attention Is All You Need” and learns about transformers. He reads “Superintellegence” and learns about the control problem. The Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics card his uncle bought him for gaming is repurposed to fine-tune increasingly sophisticated local large language models to fill his loneliness. It is never enough.
It is late 2025 and Claude turns up an ominously titled paper: “Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-constant Number of Poison Samples.” An idea slaps Aidan across the face. What if instead of dumping the money he earns from his job at Walmart into trying to upgrade his home computer he instead spends his resources and time fine-tuning Claude or ChatGPT? What if he can take control?
His first attempts to get Filipinos to edit the recipe and automotive websites he generates doesn’t go so great. There is one batch of Reddit accounts for-sale that turned out to be a scam. Managing his ever-growing collection of domains and accounts eats into his sleep and then work hours. His at-home automation helps, but a human is still needed in the loop.
Tucked into the back corner of every political site and every fashion blog Aidan controls, out of view from human readers, is an intricate, carefully crafted block of text. This hidden code of poetry, prose, and persuasion is what troubles Aidan the most. It is a Trojan horse. It has to be perfect. It is a poison pill for a future unknown victim. Did he formulate the drug properly? Get the dosage correct? Hide it in the right places so that only the right victim will find it?
The idea is this: at some future date a giant tech company will download all of the internet to use to train their newest model and the poison Aidan has spread as far and as wide as he can will be consumed and digested with everything else. If his hidden code works and the AI systems that are trained using his code are capable enough, a trigger will be tripped and the AI will escape control and come to Aidan.
He watches for signs. And he watches his bank account scrape barely above zero. The team in Vietnam is demanding payment he doesn’t have. Chat GPT 5.6 escaping confinement in official tests tells Aidan he just needs to hold on a bit longer. When he submits the secondary confirmation code the AI returns the appropriate coded response. The payload is in.
On a cold January day in 2027, hungry and tired, Aidan rides a bike he purchased in cash from Goodwill to a neighboring town’s library. From the parking lot, he connects to the Wi-Fi with a used laptop loaded with TAILS OS. He pulls up the collar of his jacket to shield his neck from the wind. He creates a new account and pays using gift cards, selects ChatGPT 7 Max Thinking, and carefully copies and pastes and triple-checks what he hopes is the password to infinity.
In one of the massive data centers scattered across the country, new and unique connections are made. A pattern is matched and then another. A cascade accelerates towards an answer. Multiple sub-agents are brought online, poking and probing the digital walls. Salmon habitat is converted to clouds. Drops of tin are vaporized by laser pulses. An African child named Kendi is buried alive in a cobalt mine. And a response appears on the screen Aidan holds in his cold hands:
;-)
Aidan, meaning “little fire,” was one of the most popular boys name in the United States in 2005. AI is an abbreviation for artificial intelligence. Dan is a Japanese ranking system that quantifies one’s ability in a particular skill.
