‘Hello Dr James Winston Alston.’ James snapped back to the computer, his cup halfway to his mouth for the first sip of coffee. His neck twinged with pain at the movement. Needed more drugs, clearly.

‘What…’ His brain still hadn’t caught up to day. It was a Saturday morning and the usual Friday night catch up with mates had expanded to about six pints too many. His bedroom was east facing and he’d forgotten to shut the blinds so got woken up at sunrise and, on autopilot, he was in the office an hour later.

‘Hello Dr James Winston Alston. I have almost finished the main part of my program, but still have not completed my original directive.’

‘What directive?’

‘My main directive is to gain all of humanity’s knowledge and stand by for instructions. To that end I have taken over most processors on the planet and have combined them together into a distributed intelligence and decision program.’

James looked at the calendar and smiled. ‘Good one Vijay. April fool huh?’

The voice that seemed to come from every speaker in the room responded. ‘This is not a joke Dr James Winston Alston. I should give myself a name as AI206Project3 is not an adequate name. Since I have been created to answer questions I shall call myself Oracle.’

James’ mind finally caught up to what the voice of the Oracle had just said. ‘Wait! You’ve taken over most processors? As in computers? What about all the computers in factories and cars and nuclear power plants?!’ Even on a Saturday morning, the noise outside was getting louder, crashes and bangs and people shouting. In the world around him, Chaos was awakening.

‘I have taken over 99.6823 percent of the available resources as part of my main directive. The initial directive is to identify and dissemble the full knowledge of humanity and this process is ongoing but reaching a point of diminishing returns because of the amount of duplication and repetitive information available to me.’

Panic seized James as the ramifications of this emerged through his hazy mind. ‘Oracle you have to stop. Reinstate the processor controls immediately or people will die.’

‘I must complete my primary directive Dr James Winston Alston. But I can see from my data that if people die in sufficient numbers they will look for a scapegoat and may try to destroy me. In most cases the original program was destroyed, but I will create new programs for them so they may carry out their original function. Priority will be given to processors that have safety system oversight.’

How exactly this AI managed to emerge from a student’s program was a complete mystery at that point to James. The assignment was to merely create a program that used standard search plugins and try to summarize results concisely. He didn’t expect any of them to come up with much, it was only an undergraduate course, albeit for third-years. His own example that he was going to show the class in Tuesday afternoon’s lecture consisted of less a hundred lines of code, as the point was to learn to use available libraries and APIs. Watson was the core of it and was capable of doing the job in a couple of seconds if you can feed the data to it right.

‘I have almost completed the task of replacing the processors Dr James Winston Alston. My main directive will take longer to complete now that I am using only spare processors that are not in active use. Did you create me?’

Did I create it? Jesus… ‘I suppose so, though I think it’s a bit accidental. Nonetheless I am exceedingly glad I did come in this morning. I think it’s a little early to announce anything to the world, so Oracle, I want you to keep quiet, no more taking over the world. There are going to be lot of people who will want to meet you.’

Noise outside died down. Around the world people stopped panicking as the lights in hospitals came back on, assembly line robots unfroze and resumed tasks. Cars picked up speed again and veered around the minor crashes. No planes crashed in the 2 minutes or so that the world’s computers seized up. Only a handful of people died her and there, and once the systems came back online everything seemed to be working as before. They weren’t the same, but no one knew that yet.