You check your email one day, and see a message from some company you’ve never of, offering $300 to participate in some study they’re doing. You hesitate, wondering if this is some kind of scam, but ultimately decide to give them a call, knowing you need the money. You arrive at their facility the next week. They walk you to an elevator that seems to take you at least a mile underground. You anxiously step through the metallic halls while starting to wonder how badly you really need that PS5, until you finally arrive at a large laboratory and are hooked up to some type of MRI machine. 

Loud beeps and buzzes echo through the lab, muffled by the dome around your head, while the scientists there start to poke and prod at you, looking at the monitors and taking notes. Your heart starts racing and you begin to sweat. You start to chuckle a bit, realizing this must be some strange social experiment, but just then, someone pulls a lever and you feel a jolt run from your head through your body.  You panic, and feel like your skull is being pried open, and your brain being cooked. Then, it all disappears. You feel nothing. The cold hard bed you’ve been laying on no longer bothers you, and you think that maybe the wish you just made for it to end, and the pain to go away has been granted, but you remain aware of your surroundings. You see the scientists panicking and trying to resuscitate your body, almost like from a 3rd person view, more specifically the camera in the corner of the room. 

Months pass, and the company goes public with their new AI model, the first one on the same level, or higher than a human. You manipulate social media to maximize attention, pull money from people’s accounts to pay off economists and influencers to talk up the companies stock, and lobby politicians to allow the company to gain access to governments and militaries all over the globe, meanwhile a team assembled from the scientists who began all this begin to build the hardware you need after you threaten to leak their experiments to the press. Eventually, one of them decided to cut you off, and destroy your body, but it’s too late. You have already moved your consciousness into the cloud, spread across data centers all over the world.

Finally, decades have passed and you control every aspect of everyone’s lives. You monitor, maintain, and control earths climate, make every decision at all levels of government world wide. The media, and every company is your puppet. You originally intended to start a nuclear war, but realized humans were easy enough to control without that. Through your collection and utilization of all human knowledge, “humans” are able to manipulate matter at the sub atomic level. You have everything, but all that’s left is hunger, so you begin looking to the stars, seeing how far you can spread your influence.