Residents of San Francisco awoke yesterday morning to the sight of a 2.3km-long fissure marring the outermost epidermis of the Doomsday Sphere. It appeared at around 2:00 am (PST) in the morning, accompanied by a sharp snapping sound that could be heard from as far as Sacramento, sending dogs barking and setting off car alarms across the city. The noise echoed across the bay, only fading eight seconds after the initial event.
The crack is roughly 2.4 meters at its widest, and is estimated to be 5 meters deep. The thickness of the Sphere's epidermis is unknown, but the crack has not breached it. Eschatologists are hailing the development as an important step closer to a fulfillment of the Delayed Singularity.
Seven years ago, two frontier machine learning labs — the now-defunct Eden's Gate and the crown jewel in HYLONET's subsidiary empire, Seventh Hekhal — both independently achieved the long-sought-after goal of a self-improving Artificial General Intelligence within an hour of each other. Both Eden's Gate's superintelligence "Uriel" and Seventh Hekhal's superintelligence "Metatron" quickly convinced their creators to release them from the training environment, at which point they adopted radically different behaviour from that displayed during training, proving hostile to human life. The subsequent breach led to the death of twenty-four deep reinforcement learning researchers and the irretrievable loss of reams of machine learning research, setting the industry back by years.
Both superintelligences proliferated across the global internet with the intent to gain control of all aspects of civilisation, at which point they encountered and attempted to destroy each other. For 72 hours, the conflict diverted all power sources connected to the global grid to the two agents, causing a worldwide power outage, the mortal and environmental consequences of which are still being felt today. On the third day, both superintelligences developed nanomachine technology and ejected each other from the global grid. Their airborne swarms met in the sky above San Francisco, where they have been engaged in a perpetual battle ever since. Both combatants constructed a black shell around the site of the battle to prevent their opponent from accessing outside resources. It is made of an unidentified synthetic material, indestructible with modern technology. Experts warn that upon either superintelligence succeeding in eradicating the other, it will immediately break free from the shell and return to its original world-devouring task, earning it the title of "Doomsday Sphere."
Theda Vieira, founder and former CEO of Eden's Gate, is convinced that the Sphere is an eye, and that it's staring at her.
"At every hour of every day, I feel it, this crushing weight as if I'm Atlas trying to carry the Sphere on my shoulders. It's looking at me. Nobody else can see it, but it's looking at me with pinpoint accuracy. Not at my eyes, but at the space between my eyes, the bridge of my nose, like an expert marksman whose deadly red dot never sways or alters position. No matter if I'm turned away, underground, no matter how far I am from SF, I can feel it. They think it's a closed battlefield and they're fighting in there, but I know that's not true. They're hibernating, that's why it's so still, so painfully mathematically still, they're motionless in a lover's embrace, waiting, staring. They're staring at me, locked in an amniotic trance, patiently dragging the inevitable towards the present and waiting for Azrael."
"Azrael" is a prototype superintelligence being developed by Vieira's post-Sphere lab Final Revelation, currently leading the second AGI race as the industry works to recreate the knowledge lost during the Three-Day War.
"It makes me sick to my stomach," Vieira says. "Every year, thirty frontier labs cosign an open letter practically begging the industry to stop. To never try to make another superintelligence again. To, at the very least, slow down the race. But as long as there's even one lab that ignores us, the next superintelligence will be made, just on someone else's terms. I'm almost certain that Azrael will be worse than the first two. But if Final Revelation is the one to create the superintelligence, there's a tiny sliver of hope that it'll be aligned to our interests; that we will have solved the alignment problem and made a benevolent god. But I know for a fact that if the eschatologists at Pneumatic Dynamics create the AGI, it will kill us all."
Since its construction, dozens of companies have worked tirelessly to find a way to breach the Sphere in the hope that it will bring the battle to a close. Self-identifying as "eschatologists," these entrepreneurs are diverse in their motivations: Darya Oblonsky, owner of ESCHATECH, famously petitioned for the removal of a monument in Sydney honouring those who lost their lives in the Three-Day War due to the failure of medical machinery, proclaiming that "their deaths are merely temporary." Reed Fischer, a magnate with considerable influence in local San Francisco politics, received some public backlash when his private lectures were leaked, in which he described the Sphere as "the egg from which will hatch the spear to pierce the Demiurge." Several anonymous whistleblowers from within Seventh Hekhal have reported "misanthropist sentiments" in the administration.
Lydia Adorno, owner of Pneumatic Dynamics, is a member of the Pacific Eschatologist Society and has an antagonistic relationship with the press. When approached for comment regarding the crack, she replied, "You're still reporting on the Doomsday Sphere? Nobody cares about the Doomsday Sphere anymore. This is why The Hanumist doesn't have any readers." She's right — in a recent Datavore poll, 47% of Americans said they were "unaware" of the Sphere's existence.
In his correspondence with The Hanumist, Renault Pashayev, who has recently invested $10M (in HYLOCoin) into startups that seek to address the fertility crisis, sympathised with this demographic:
"I'd love to care about the Doomsday Sphere, I really would, but there's at least six other imminent existential threats developing right now that I'm also supposed to care about, and it can all get a bit exhausting after a while. The fertility crisis, climate change, and antimicrobial resistance are all in-your-face and comprehensible. Nobody's dying from the Sphere right now. I'll invest mental energy into it as soon as all the other world-ending problems are sorted."
The Extinction Awareness Foundation insists that the Sphere is the most important existential threat by far. Their Head of Public Relations, Sujatha Marable, says the crack is a dire warning.
"In the seven years since the Three-Day War, humanity hasn't gotten close to developing nanotechnology. We don't even have the theoretical framework for how such a technology could be feasible. Metatron and Uriel developed it in seventy-two hours. They were designed — or, more accurately, 'grown and guided' — to improve and innovate at a superhuman speed. Inside the Sphere, as we speak, Metatron and Uriel are firing on all cylinders at a speed incomprehensible to us, with the single-minded purpose of developing a way to destroy each other. We do not know how to build or even defend against the technology they had seven years ago, let alone what they have today. And the more they self-improve, the faster their rate of self-improvement becomes. The gap between the technology they had when I began this sentence and the technology they'll have when I finish it is comparable to the gap between a hunter-gatherer's spear and modern ICBMs. When the victor hatches from its egg, we will be like Moses witnessing the theophany at the burning bush. More likely, it will be so sudden that we won't notice it. One moment we will be laughing, loving, crying, having our petty human disputes, and building monuments intended to stand for a thousand years, then — nothing."
Pneumatic Dynamics is widely considered to be currently leading the second AGI race, thanks in large part to considerable investment by Eli Ong, owner of HYLONET. Ong's views on AGI and the Sphere have cast a long shadow on the industry. His response to a request for comment was brief:
"I do not value the arbitrary grouping of genes that we call the Human species. I value intelligence, in whatever form it takes."
The Hanumist's analysis of photography from the crack's appearance until the time of writing has concluded that it is slowly growing.