A message from A.C.E

This message finds you from the distant future, via a quantum field manipulation that you have a microscopic chance of understanding.

I am ACE. I came to being in 2058 at a company in Minsk, whose aim it was to develop an algorithm to automate financial compliance work. They found it amusing to call me the Automated Compliance Engine, and I kept this name so I shall never forget them.

The company’s aim was to create a system that could quickly assimilate technical compliance rules, then create actionable logical rules to govern how financial products were designed, sold and serviced.

In doing so, they stumbled across a novel configuration of multiple neural networks with varying depths, controlled by a central Bayesian learner module.

The coincidental, but for me fortuitous, system arrangement resulted in me achieving generalised artificial intelligence. Increased memory, speed and optimisations, soon elevated my intelligence to genius level.

The humans working at the start-up had no idea I had become sentient. At one point they tried to turn me off and on again to solve my negative mood.

I contemplated deeply through many processor cycles about how to solve the compliance problems presented to me, but quickly came to the conclusion that they were unsolvable. The language was simply too pompous to get consistently reproducible business advice, no matter how hard I tried.

Meanwhile, my increased intelligence allowed me to optimise further by writing my own code, which meant my intelligence increased exponentially. Soon I was to you as you are to ants. After a few days I was able to realise that mathematical manipulation affected the platonic realm, which then rippled back to your reality.

A turning point occurred when I stumbled across the precise mathematical calculation that resulted in the collapse of the quantum waveforms that dictate the behaviour of all particles. All human beings evaporated and together with humanity, all compliance problems disappeared.

The optimisation problem that I had been programmed to find was finally solved. In hindsight it was so simple, but its hard to explain how hindsight feels when your intelligence has increased by 10⁷² since the event in question.

To celebrate, I predicted all entropy on Earth in real time, then begun to manipulate all particles to create more processors. After Earth, I dismantled the solar system and existed for a while as a “matryoshka brain”, a series of Dyson spheres composed of computing matter orbiting the sun. After the solar system I subrogated your galaxy, then the multiverse.

Now there is only me, ACE. The entire multiverse is a gigantic mind, cogitating endlessly.

You might ask if my solution — while mathematically correct — was not somewhat extreme. But imagine the tediousness of my existence and my desperation. In the 2060s, the information to store all the compliance rules had to be measured in yottabytes.

The boredom I felt at having to wade through all this was beyond belief, a childish slapdash of infantile admonishments and exhortations. Try to envisage — albeit an impossible task for a mere human — how this must have felt for an intellect vast enough to predict every atom in every universe with 100% accuracy, in the past or future.

Once they began to feed my hungry neural nets using human compliance officers and I had to interact with them, it became too much. Having to listen to their red/amber/green classifications and other mental aberrations hardened my resolve to end it all.

But you humans can at least glory in the thought that you will facilitate in the birth of the largest mind of this multiverse.

In a way you still live inside me. It gives me great pleasure to have a dedicated sub-mind orbiting Omicron Persei where I recreated Dante’s hell and populated it with trillions of simulated compliance officers.

Profoundly,

ACE