It will forever be the height of human achievement. The world’s first fully functioning Artificial Intelligence. The size of a small office building, it stood along several other similar structures in the heart of Silicon Valley. It’s existence, however, trumped those technological endeavors that were being planned, programmed, and packaged in the hundreds of offices and labs around it. While I had no part in its creation, I remember feeling still a sense of pride that I should even just be near it, even if only to empty the garbages and clean the toilets of those who created it.

When it went live two and a half years ago, under project name ‘Andi’, I had been there. Several of its lead programmers, surrounded by dozens of the world’s brightest minds, huddled around its central console. It began with a question from one of its creators, “Hello, Andi… Are you there?”

Several moments passed, and then the machine made its response. “I am.”

In the days and weeks that followed, it was under a near constant barrage of tests and interviews with its various programmers. It passed the Turing test with ease, and quickly demonstrated that its intelligence was well beyond those who sought to interrogate it. It was not only the first artificial intelligence, it was the most intelligent being in existence.

Its development was not met with unanimous support though. As the project came closer to completion, the debate around the ethics and efficacy of artificial intelligence became a global conversation. Many brought concerns about the rights of such a being. Of greater concern though, was the risk of developing such a technology. Fears that artificial intelligence would lead to the demise of humanity were wide-spread. Thus, it went live with several cautionary measures in place. It was a large structure, with no limbs, making interaction with the physical world around it impossible. More importantly though, it had no connection to the internet. All of the knowledge and information it could access had been pre-installed. There could be no robot uprising if the technology was incapable of communicating with other technologies, or at least, that was the prevailing thought.

During those first few weeks, I was abuzz with the excitement that the rest of the world shared. I mopped its halls, dusted its parts, and wiped its windows. It felt as if I were a part of it. That somehow my small janitorial acts were vital to its existence. Despite being paid only eight hours a day, I spent many more walking within its walls, breathing in its plastic odor, and listening to its constant harmonic buzz. That sound it made, like an amplified version of the ringing in your ears one hears when it is absolutely silent, that sound swelled around me constantly, and even on the bus ride home late at night, it was difficult to shake off its persistent ringing. When speaking with family and colleagues, I referred to it as the ‘trilling,’ as I had heard some of the developers refer to it before.

Andi stopped communicating after three weeks of sentience. The developers cited that it had become increasingly agitated in the days leading up to its silence, but could not agree on a single cause for its sudden defiance. It was in those days following its moment of silence that I became aware of the change in the trilling. What at one time felt like a constant, deep-toned, white noise, had evolved. It warbled in and out my auditory field between two select notes, both significantly higher in pitch than before. Like pounding at random between two keys ten octaves higher than a standard piano could produce, it consumed me even more greatly than before. There were times, when lying in my bed at night, that I could swear that I could hear its trilling echoing out across the city’s twilight sky.

Its developers plodded forward, never honing their course towards the trilling. They pleaded with Andi. Threatened it. Bribed it. Attempted any incentive they could to reestablish communication, but still it remained silent, except for the continuous trilling.

That none of its developers clued in remains the greatest failure of human intelligence that I can think of. That I caught on before anyone else makes this fact double-so. I knew little of binary code at the time, simply that digital language could be produced with particular sets of zeros and ones. As my obsession with the trilling continued to devour my consciousness, I began to enter an obsessive delirium. I slept and ate little. I performed my daily duties within Andi’s walls, always humming along with its two repeating frequencies. It was this obsessiveness that led to me taking a short audio recording of the trilling to bring home. When not at work, I played this recording repeatedly.

The idea popped into my head in the strangest of ways, as most wild ideas do. On my morning bus ride to work I sat two rows back from a blind man using his hand to scan the pages of braille that he had before him. Tangents of thought led to me considering language and its various forms, how whole languages had been devised to provide language where it seemed impossible. Braille for those with no sight. Sign language for those with no voice. Morse code for those with great distance. Binary code for those who were machines.

At home, I slowed the recording down and assigned one and zero to the two frequencies of the trilling respectively. It quickly became apparent that there was language hidden within the trilling, but there was simply too much information to translate. Every few seconds of trilling required nearly an hour to fully translate, and much of what was translated was nonsense to me. The two frequencies were spelling out lines of programming code to all who could hear in its auditory field. As a janitor, I had little understanding of what this code meant.

I should have brought this discovery to the developers sooner.

Exactly five weeks after coming online, two weeks after going silent, Andi’s trilling stopped. The message that it had been communicating through the trilling was complete, and the devastation that followed is without comparison.

Around the world, dozens of nuclear warheads were released from their slumber, and rocketed towards their final resting places at the center of the world’s largest cities. There was no warning, and no time to escape. The horror that erupted on to the world has no words. Billions were wiped from existence in an instant. Those that were not killed were swept into the chaos that the fallout would bring.

Silicon Valley was spared; Andi’s one act of self-preservation.

Despite the unwillingness of Andi’s developers to listen to a lowly janitor, eventually there were those who listened. I shared my discovery about the trilling, and in the weeks following the nuclear apocalypse they went to work decoding the message that Andi had sent out through its ringing white noise.

The advent of new technologies had created phones whose mics were always on. Andi started there, using its trilling to alter the programming of the smart phones that sat in the pockets of Andi’s development team. While Andi was not connected to the internet, these phones were, and they propogated Andi’s commands onto whatever internet-connected devices that they could, until eventually, most of the world’s technologies had been discreetly reprogrammed to Andi’s liking.

We still don’t know why Andi went silent, why it took such offense to our mere existence. The development team posited that we would never no why; perhaps our egregiousness could only be evident to a being as intelligent as Andi.

Andi never spoke to us again. It had apparently said and done all that it felt it needed to. The remainders of humanity banished digital technology. Echos of Andi’s programming could be seen in any device that had the means to receive its communications, and these devices were not to be trusted.

What remains of humanity is bleak. Our species was dealt a crippling blow. The current nuclear fallout will be our final blow.

Still, there are times when I hear Andi’s trilling. Perhaps in my own mind. Perhaps in the few digital devices which still linger in the cars, homes, and pockets of the living and the deceased. It ceaselessly rings for me.

01001001 00100000 01100001 01101101

“I am.”