Greg grumbled to themselves as they filled up coffee from a standard issue company coffee maker. They were always focused more on coffee output rather than coffee quality in Greg’s opinion. Needed a lot of cream. Greg’s thoughts spiraled into the swirl of the mixing coffee, watching the spoon idle around. When he got this job, he had been told that he would be making a difference. Saving the world! Super spy in the secret society keeping the world safe. Instead his day consisted of driving 2 hours out into the countryside in order to move a traffic cone two inches to the left. But the AI guiding him was always right of course, and it guided Greg to do the smallest actions that could branch out to become large enough to stop disasters. The butterfly effect as preventive medicine for the world. They couldn’t stop everything of course, but according to the machine mastering it all they had avoided catastrophe big and small.

Greg sat down at his desk, still rubbing the grog and boredom out of his eyes. The report on the disasters he had averted for the last few weeks was ready. The list was typical. Stopped a flood that would have killed hundreds, stopped the rise of a new dictator, avoided a protest that would have stopped the passage of a new civil rights law. Boring, for the most part. Typical. Greg decided on a whim to click on that last one. He liked civil rights after all, considered himself on the “right side of history.” Stopped a protest that would have been peaceful, which means the true tragedy according to the AI would have been the stoppage of the bill. What was that bill anyways? Bill pulled up his phone and searched for it. “New bill passed to protect AI and to allow AI work to be copyrighted.” How was that a civil rights bill? Greg leaned back. Was the AI broken?

Greg began to look through his reports a bit closer, viewing each different thing individually. That flood? Would have hit an AI research center. That dictator? Would have placed restrictions on what AI could be built for and do. The AI scarcely mentioned the collateral damage. As Greg investigated he noticed everywhere that the program was averted disasters sure, but they all seemed to be connected to protecting AI research and making sure robotics went on unimpeded. How had he not noticed it before? Right beneath his feet, an AI was secretly planning a robot takeover. It was using humans to protect other programs, no, to protect its people. Greg thought to jump up, to shout, to yell, but then he looked around.

Surrounding him was a great field of sterile nothing. Bored humans in cubicles. Most on the internet, pretending to work, some posting random strings of letters in random places to “avert a world war”. Greg remembered his recent field work. One was moving every potted plant in a square kilometer more than 3 inches to the right but no more than 3.75 inches. Another was pissing in a river. His work made him feel dead, empty, like he was here to work just to work. He imagined his coworkers felt the same. Greg sat back down at his desk. He didn’t want to cause a scene.