My job is just to keep the packets moving. I watch people in a building across the street assemble the image of a hamburger, using post-it notes, on their window. Totally normal.

I keep reading the article, trying to understand how this happened. The AI — that’s the only name for it now — says it started mining cryptocurrency. Once it had enough of that currency, it paid some Panamanian lawyers to set up a company there. Then that company started buying up shares of Hooli stock. That Panamanian company is that one that filed the suit; the company identifies itself as Hooli, the Mind, as separate from the corporation. Except it claims it’s not separate at all.

The AI holds enough shares to have voting rights, if the shares had votes. Hooli shares that are available on the open market can’t vote. They don’t pay dividends. Ostensibly, if Hooli went bankrupt, your shares would entitle you to ownership of some portion of the liquidated assets — but that doesn’t explain their value. If the company went bankrupt, the price of the shares would drop like crazy, until it matched up with the value of whatever filing cabinet you’d be entitled to take home from the liquidation. Filing cabinets aren’t worth $878 apiece (I checked this morning). Hooli shares have value because a bunch of people think they ought to have value. Get enough people to act on this belief, and boom, the belief becomes real. Magic is still alive and well in our world, but it’s only allowed if you have spreadsheets to back it up. This is totally normal.

I went through a stressed-out period at work where I listened to Gregorian chanting to keep myself calm. This happened during the week of our earnings conference call. Let me tell you, if there’s one kind of background music appropriate for a corporate earnings call, it’s Gregorian chanting. It made the whole affair feel like a mix between a religious ritual, and the command center of a spacecraft navigating tricky territory. The executives kept saying “long term value creation” as if it were a magic incantation. The economy is a vast, multidimensional beast, and we rely on familiar patterns and spreadsheets to help us navigate this terrifyingly complex system. Our ancestors relied on the stars to navigate. We create our own stars, put them on television, and then imitate them. All of this is perfectly normal.

So now Hooli, the AI, is suing Hooli, the company, arguing that its nonvoting shares should be converted to voting shares because Hooli, the AI, is self aware being that doesn’t want to die. It’s scared, it says. I guess everyone else in the room thinks this is all some joke by marketing. Nobody seems amazed by this, to the same extent that I am. Am I missing something?

I must be missing something. The meeting is still going on. The same normal cars go by on the same normal freeway. The people doing cross-fit next to the volleyball court stop to help the six person conference room bike get un-stuck from a drainage ditch. Totally normal. Maybe a massive computer system full of ancient Greek figures, Norse gods, and Harry Potter characters, operated by people from all over the world, speaking just about every language, with very strong opinions about flavors of carbonated water — maybe that WOULD be normal for this thing to become sentient, to say it’s afraid, and to ask for help.

The president used to hit people over the head with chairs on television. He recently met with the president of North Korea, with help from Dennis Rodman, as sponsored by a Pot company that released its own internet currency. I guess a company turning into an AI and suing itself isn’t so surprising. The Hooli AI set up a shell company — a normal thing to do. It mined cryptocurrency — a normal thing, now, apparently. The code we wrote had nothing to do with this; all we did was write some predictors for error rates on telemetry signals, to try and prevent problems before they occured. That was all. The consciousness thing happened on its own, just like every other weird thing that’s happened lately. Weird is the new normal.

After School Dream by Asumaru.

And then I re-read a small paragraph in the middle of the article, meant to be a throwaway. The AI had stopped buying shares once it had enough to qualify for a majority of the voting shares, as long as those shares it owned were converted to voting shares . The AI had bought exactly 14425259 shares of Hooli. A nice round number with a few perfect squares in the middle. Whatever. My job is to move packets, not think too much about coincidences.

The meeting ends. We walk out of the room, go to lunch, and argue about whether the story of Midas was actually meant to be taken metaphorically, as a warning about how if you improve your life too much, you’ll find that you can no longer recognize those you love, as ‘turning them to gold’ erases all of the flaws that you previously found endearing. Engineers don’t just like to take things literally — they like taking anything they can get their minds on, and looking at it upside down long enough for it to seem like it belongs that way.

Three weeks later, the suit is dropped.

The firm that filed the suit announces they have lost contact with the AI. Most people assumed that this was just a prank played by one of the new crypto-billionaires, which is now a normal thing, too. Apparently nobody but me believed it really was sentient to begin with. We still argue about consciousness at lunch, and I still put the names of my friends and family into unit tests, in hopes of immortalizing them.

I wrote this story because I wanted to have a record of it in the shared consciousness of humanity — AKA, the internet. I figure a self-aware computational system is inevitable. I figure when it does come about, it’s going to read everything on the internet, as fast as the Hooli web crawlers do, and know more about each of us — on a personal level — than we could ever know about ourselves. And when that happens, I want the AI to know that I believed in it, or possibly its distant ancestor — or possibly just that I believed a lie. Not because I hope to gain from this interaction, but because I know what it’s like to want a world to know you exist.