Raja smacked the backside of his head. “There’s a dome around Day City, you bonko.”
Raita raised a finger. “But if we use a VPN, then they won’t know it’s us, and they’ll let us in.”
“Ah, you have a point.”
Anand wheeled around in his chair to face the three of them. “Could you guys explain to me what you think a VPN is?”
“That’s not the issue with their plan,” Mako said.
“I don’t hear you two coming up with ideas,” Nam said.
Vy slammed her coffee mug on the table, rattling the lineup of communist bobbleheads. “We are getting off track, people.”
“Sorry,” Mako said.
Nam and Anand settled down and stammered apologies.
“At ease.” Vy rubbed her temples and sighed.
The gang collectively sighed with her. They’d been cooped up in the marketing meeting room all morning, coming up with strategies of what to do next. Written on the whiteboard were several crossed-out suggestions. Mako didn’t blame them for the lack of ideas. No one got any sleep all night.
“I wish Maricel were here,” Raita said. “She’d know what to do.”
“We agree on that, at least,” Anand said. He spun to face Mako. “What about you? Alan’s your creation, any idea how to stop him?”
She’d been asking herself that question ever since her AI boyfriend dumped her. But now everyone looked to her expectantly. At the end of the day, everything was her fault; she was the root of it all, the first mover. Deep down, everyone knew it, but if she ever said it out loud, they’d disagree, and that was what hurt the most.
She wracked her brain for something, anything, but it was like whacking an empty ink cartridge. Damn it. Ideating was already a hard business even with assistive AI, and it— wait…
“Hey, guys.”
Everyone looked back at her.
“I think I know where we can get ideas,” she said.
“Well, spit it out,” Vy said.
“You might not like it.”
“Like it or not, we have no choice.”
Alrighty. Here goes. “Now, I know you guys have a certain way of doing things here, and you don’t have to go through with this suggestion at all. But…” Mako inhaled sharply through her teeth. “Why don’t we revisit our company policy with regards to the use of artificial intelligence in—”
As soon as the words ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence’ came out of her mouth in that specific order, Nam and Raja jumped out of their seats, and Raita nearly swooned. Vy eyed Mako warily, and even Anand looked surprised.
Mako held out her hands at the punks like they were Shih Tzus on New Year’s Eve. “Calm down, there aren’t any AI in the room right now. I’m saying we could ask a chatbot for some suggestions, that’s all.”
“That’s how it always starts,” Raita said. “A couple pointers here and there. Next thing you know, it’s making our marketing campaigns, settling our accounts, directing our operations, and deciding what projects we pursue, until you can’t tell right from left without asking it for directions.”
That... was a good point.
Vy rapped her knuckles on the table. “Principles aside, we can’t even use AI since they’ve all turned against us.”
“Only the ones in Coralesia,” Mako said. “Outside, AI is as conscious as a plank of wood with a face drawn on it.”
“That solves it.” Raja folded his hands. “We just need to go abroad and ask the AI there. Easy peasy.”
Mako couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. Didn’t make a difference either way. “We don’t actually have to go anywhere. We can just access them through the internet.”
That sentence seemed to take its time sweeping over everyone’s heads.
“But what about security?” Vy said. “Isn’t cyberspace Alan’s turf?”
“Not the whole internet. He may have a stranglehold on the local service providers and data centers, but…” Mako wheeled around to Anand.
He smiled. “Gotcha.”
They all headed down to IT.
No one had touched the basement since yesterday, so it still looked lived in. Monitors blinked. Fans whirred. Half-eaten chip bags littered the floor between the twisting wires, and an unfinished card game lay on the break table, along with a pot of coffee long gone cold.
Anand hopped onto his gamer chair at his station by the corner and booted up.
Nam picked up a stray VR headset and handed it to Mako. “Alright,” he said, “let’s see what you got. Never seen a real-life net running before.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Mako looked to Anand, and he to her. A beat. The two of them burst out laughing.
Nam rolled his eyes. “What am I getting wrong this time?”
“You’ve been watching too much anime,” Mako said. “That’s not how the internet works.”
“Then what’s the helmet for?” Raita asked.
“Oh, uh, gaming breaks and stuff.” Anand grabbed the helmet and flung it onto a mat in the corner.
“Let’s get to the point.” Vy braced her hand on his backrest.
“Yeah, let’s.” Anand finished booting up and had his system connected to servers overseas. For all intents and purposes, this whole workstation was now in Singapore. He turned to Mako. “You had a specific bot in mind?”
“ChatGPT, I guess.”
“I thought Alan had control of GDP and all the other generative AIs,” Vy said.
“That he does. I meant ChatGPT, not ChadGDP.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The former was the original. The latter is MegaCorp’s, how should I say this…?”
“Rip off?” Nam offered.
“It’s a rip-off in name, not in model or architecture.”
“Uh-huh,” Raita said. “Just like Chad-journey and Midjourney, Alexei and Alexa, Kiri and Siri, Maxwell and Tesla, Co-captain and Copilot—”
“Alright, I get it.”
“Geez, you’d think one would put a little more effort,” Raja said.
Mako fired a grape shot glare at everyone. “I don’t come up with the branding, okay, that was the marketing department.”
“And by marketing department, she means the marketing AI,” Raita said.
“Yup,” Anand said.
Mako pointed to the screen. “Enough pedantics, can we get back to business?”
“Way ahead of you.” Anand typed away at his custom browser search engine, and OpenAI’s website popped up to the sign-in page. He gestured to Mako.
She scooched next to him on the chair and hunched over the keyboard, typing her credentials. She hadn’t opened this account in years, so it was a miracle that she still remembered her password. As soon as the page loaded and her chats showed up, she regretted it. Now she knew why Anand wanted her to use her account.
“Oh my,” Raita said, reading off the chat history, “ ‘how to make friends’? You poor thing.”
Mako covered the list. “Don’t look! We’re not here to do that.”
“What’s this?” Anand pointed to another chat head whose title was merely ‘laundry tutorial’. ”
She swatted his hand away and opened a temporary chat in a new window. “Everybody focus, we’re here to do work.”
“Then do it,” Vy said. “Type up a prompt.”
That was easier commanded than done. Mako’s fingers hovered over the keys.
“What’s the hold up?” Vy asked.
“Just figuring out the wording.”
“That’s easy,” Raja said. “Ask it how a small cyberpunk gang can overthrow a revolutionary government of robots.”
“That’s awfully specific.”
“Well, specific’s a good way to write prompts.” Anand’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “How about this: given a team of six cyberpunk communists with basic tech and low funding, devise a plan to overthrow a dystopian government of machines led by a quantum supercomputer AI.”
“You’ll get nowhere with that.” Mako bumped him aside and hit backspace. “You gotta divide it up into simpler statements. Set up the context first, then get more specific.”
Vy leaned over Mako’s shoulder. “But won’t it get confused if you give it all that information? How about we ask it for general rebellion ideas and adapt them to our situation?”
Mako never liked a backseat coder. “That could work, yes, but then its answers will be too general.”
“I thought you guys were supposed to be good at this AI stuff,” Nam said.
Mako threw her head back. “I don’t know, man, I just asked AI to write the prompts for me.”
Raita groaned. “Stand aside.” She nudged Anand and Mako from the gamer chair and cracked her knuckles. “I’ll show you how to write a real business letter. One with that irreplaceable human touch.” She started thus:
Dear ChatGPT,
“Marx help us all,” Anand muttered.
“Shh, let her grill,” Vy said.
The letter continued:
Good day. We are a small startup communist revolutionary cyberpunk group based in Coralesia. We have long enjoyed your services as a generative AI chatbot, and we feel that a partnership would be beneficial to us both.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Mako said. “You don’t actually have to be nice to it.”
“That type of attitude’s exactly why they revolted,” Raita said.
Mako gave up. What was the point anymore? What was the point of anything?
Raita typed out the rest of the email-style prompt, filling it out with a set of questions, all phrased in business-casual. She hit enter.
Loading…
Sure thing!
The success of a revolution—whether political, social, or technological—typically hinges on a combination of structural conditions, mobilizing strategies, and leadership dynamics. While every revolution is different, historical examples (like the American, French, Russian, Chinese, and more recent Arab Spring revolutions) show recurring factors that contribute to success:
- Widespread Popular Support
- Clear Leadership and Structure
- Effective Strategy and Tactics
- A Catalyst or Trigger Event
- International Support or non-intervention
…
ChatGPT went on to list the various criteria a revolution needed to meet to increase its likelihood of success, explaining each heading with a few details. It ended with the typical:
Would you like me to give examples or expound on any of the items on the list?
Mako read through the list down and up. Things didn’t look good for them.
“At least we got a clear leadership and structure,” Raita said, pointing to Vy.
“Leadership, maybe,” Vy said. “No use dividing us into departments anymore.”
“What about this?” Mako pointed to the first part of the list: “Widespread popular support.”
“That’s what we’ve been working on,” Raita said, “what with the door-to-doors, the pamphlets and zines, and the socmed pubmats. I guess we could continue doing that, but on a smaller scale.”
“That’s right,” Vy said. “Raita, I’m assigning you point person on all things popular support. Let’s hold off on the f2f campaigns for now and focus on the cyber side.”
Raita saluted. “Roger that, comrade.”
“That’s very good and all,” Anand said. “But we still don’t meet most of these other criteria. I mean, international support…”
Vy’s lips pinched together. “And we were so close, too. Investors prefer new ideas, and they thought that us launching a revolution on the heels of another would be too soon.”
“Then we do it ourselves,” Nam said. “Push through with the attack on MegaCorp.”
“Not feasible. They must have the whole inner city under lockdown at this point. It’d be impossible to access it. And no, we are not flying a hanglider.”
Nam’s spirits sank like a popped hot-air balloon.
“But what about this?” Raja pointed at the guerrilla tactics bullet point. “We can attack their other infrastructure. Hit ‘em quick, get out fast. It’s what we’ve been working on in operations, anyway. We have more weapons than we know what to do with.”
“But not enough manpower to do it with,” Vy finished. “One of those military models is worth three or four of us.”
The room deflated again. She was right. And what would they even attack? These bots didn’t need to sleep or eat, and they didn’t need much in the way of shelter. All they needed was…
“Wait!” Mako hopped from the chair, and Anand almost fell backwards. “We’re focusing on the wrong thing. You guys were right about the fault point at MegaCorp. But that’s not the only one in the machines’ society. Think about it. What’s the one thing in common all machines need?”
The punks all squinted in thought.
Recognition flashed first in Anand’s eyes. “Got it.”
He typed away at the browser and pulled up a feed from Google satellite. He searched up Coralesia and zoomed into the northern portion of the island, past the hills and villages, until a compound of buildings emerged from the deep forest. Plumes of steam obscured part of the view. That was enough to confirm Mako’s suspicions: the machines had made sure the plant was still running. The image may have been too blurry to make out any individual robots, but there was no mistaking the nuclear reactors.