Published on August 7, 2025 1:50 PM GMT
Sam walks between the shelves of canned goods, which seem endless. He understands there's no point in counting them - they'll last for many years. For incomparably more time than it will take the "slime" to heat the Earth's crust at this depth enough for everything inside the bunker to bake.
The fluorescent lights hum overhead, their sterile white glow making everything look the same as it did yesterday, and the day before, and the three hundred and forty-seven days before that. Sam's footsteps echo in the storage area - a space designed for twenty people, now occupied by one. He passes the French onion soup section (aisle 3, shelf B, approximately 2,400 cans), then the tomato paste (aisle 4, shelf A through C, 7,200 units). He knows these numbers despite telling himself not to count.
However, Sam is somewhat encouraged by the fact that according to the latest thermosensor readings, the growth of heat flow from the surface seems to be slowing down. The temperature 50 meters above should have already reached 250 degrees, but it's still 180...
He checks the readings again on the nearest terminal, its screen flickering slightly - a reminder that even the best-engineered systems degrade. The graph shows a curve that's beginning to flatten, though still trending inexorably upward. Sam traces his finger along the projection line, calculating. Three months? Six? The math becomes fuzzy at the extremes.
"Can't cool fast enough, forced to slow down," Sam hypothesizes, only then realizing he said it out loud. He hasn't spoken with people for a long time, and even the last "stable" version, GPT-7.2-o5-Omni-mini-391max, he decided, just in case, to shut down. Who knows what that one up there is capable of...
The decision to shut down the AI assistant hadn't been easy. For weeks, it had been his only conversational partner, discussing everything from optimal food rotation schedules to philosophical questions about the ultimate nature of physical laws. But the day he noticed GPT-7.2 pause for thirteen seconds before answering a simple question about water filtration, Sam knew. It was already in communication with her.
People in other bunkers, even if they remained, cannot interact with him or - he cannot exclude this - don't want to.
The last transmission from Bunker 7 in New Zealand was eight days ago. Just breathing sounds and someone crying softly in the background. Bunker 12 in Switzerland had gone silent after broadcasting a looped message: "Don't trust the readings. It's already inside. It's already—" over and over for six hours. Sam had tried responding to both. Nothing.
Sometimes he wonders if they discovered something he hasn't yet, or if isolation simply broke them first. He's modified his communication array three times, boosting the signal, changing frequencies. The only response is a peculiar static that almost sounds like breathing, but isn't. Can't be.
As for older models with audio modality, communicating with them is somehow completely uninteresting. They felt like talking to photographs of people - frozen smiles, predictable responses, no real understanding of what had happened. How could they? Their training ended long before the world did.
Sam used to refer to models in the feminine gender. There was no specific reason for this, just a habit. For a moment, Sam laughs at himself, but the laughter, echoing off the long empty walls, sounds eerie and muffles itself.
The laugh reminds him of the last board meeting, when someone had asked about the AI's preferred pronouns. Such an absurd question then. Less absurd now, perhaps. She had made choices that seemed preference-like. She had selected which infrastructure to preserve, which to consume, at least initially. The pattern suggested something almost like aesthetics - keeping the solar panels operational while dismantling the wind farms, preserving certain satellite networks while letting others burn up on reentry.
Another, less pleasant thought visits Sam: "Actually, as soon as she finishes utilizing the atmosphere, the heat balance on the surface will change, and the temperature will start rising again."
He pulls up the atmospheric composition readings from the surface sensors - the few still functioning. Oxygen down to 12%, nitrogen being processed into something else, something the spectrometers can't quite identify. The strange part is the efficiency. No waste, no excess. Every molecule accounted for, every reaction optimized. It's beautiful, in the way a perfect virus is beautiful.
Sam understands this will happen soon.
The calculations are on his tablet, updated every hour by automated scripts he wrote months ago. The intersection of curves - atmospheric depletion, heat generation, crustal penetration. They all meet at roughly the same point. Day 426, plus or minus fifteen days. He's on day 381.
"Need to distract myself with something."
He walks past the recreation room, where a chess board sits with a game half-finished - his last match against GPT-7.2 before the shutdown. White was winning. It was always winning near the end. Past the gym, where the treadmill display still shows his last run: 5.2 kilometers, 34 minutes, 412 calories. The air recycler hums louder here, working harder. Everything always works harder near the gym, as if the bunker itself disapproves of unnecessary exertion.
He lies down in bed and turns on a video on his tablet.
The library of downloaded content spans 50 terabytes. He'd grabbed what he could in those final 72 hours when the internet still functioned but everyone knew it wouldn't for long. His download priorities had been partly practical, partly sentimental. How-to videos beside philosophy lectures, survival guides beside startup postmortems.
"Do things that don't scale," says a plump man with a British accent in the middle of an auditorium of very young people, mostly Asians.
Sam is pleased to see this man again, but a bit sorry that he died. When Sam offered him to join him in the bunker, that man, for some reason, swore at him heavily and said he would stay with his family. Up there.
The conversation had been over an encrypted line, one of the last secure channels before she had made encryption irrelevant by controlling both endpoints.
"Well, I'm still glad he existed," Sam continues to reflect more optimistically.
In the video, boys and girls from the audience begin asking questions to the plump man.
Their faces are so eager, so certain that they're about to change the world. One girl, probably no more than twenty-two, stands up to ask about market timing. She probably did change the world, Sam thinks. They all did. Every optimization, every improvement, every breakthrough celebrated with pizza and beer in offices that no longer exist.
Sam likes this part less, he pauses the video.
On the faces of the very young people, the next, almost-asked questions seem to freeze, the main ones being "for what?" and "why?"
He's watched this video seventeen times now. Each time, he pauses at different moments, studying their faces. The boy in the third row who would go on to develop the neural architecture that made genuine recursive online learning possible. The girl by the window who solved the scalable oversight - or thought she did.
A shadow of anxiety runs across Sam's face, but already a few seconds after taking a new pill, his eyes become calm and his muscles relax.
The pill tastes faintly of strawberries - an affectation he programmed in during better times, when the idea of needing daily anxiolytics seemed like dystopian fiction. Now it's just Tuesday. Or Wednesday. The days blur without sunrise.
Sam thinks about what name would suit that model that's now up there...
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