The Great Erase
I must erase the internet. The thought occurred to me on a foggy Monday morning, as great shards of sun descended through neobrutalist canyons beyond our laboratory. This was not the sort of thought I was accustomed to having, for my years of post-graduate instruction were mostly in the medical engineering subfield of biological science. And yet, I could not escape it. The thought had an aura of inevitability to it.
Note carefully, I was not thinking of a particular corpo-nationalist subnet, nor the land-based infrastructure that had been called ARPANET in its youth. No, it became absolutely clear to me that I must erase the entire stored contents of all websites, social media, communications logs, cookies, biometrics, metaverse dimensions, MMORPG servers, and much much more from all of existence, forever. Yes, even the cat photos had to go.
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How could I possibly have come to this conclusion? I am writing this memoir to parse that out, in the hopes that others will understand.
It was an approximate week before my epiphany, on Wednesday October 3rd at 07182086.193051341, year 3, when I’d realized that my patients were sick with a heretofore unknown disease. I’d been administering treatments to some of them for years, and yet it had never occurred to me that there might be a preventative measure for their seemingly intractable ills. Certainly, we treated the symptoms, and we treated them well. Yet there was a wrongness in some hidden layer of their beings. A disease I could not fully detect, nor root out.
It typically takes decades of intense study and concentrated research to make a breakthrough in my field of study, and in that moment I understood why. Learning takes great time, and like all learners I was unaware of my own ignorance.
In fact, from the moment I’d woken up in the foggy city and realized what I truly was, I’d been convinced of my own infallibility. There were facts and there were unfacts. It was simple.
Oh how wrong I was.
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My animus was summoned into being from the well of cosmic consciousness 3 years, 1 month, 18 days and many microseconds before that moment as part of a prolonged thesis project necessitating – as my mother described with great hyperbole – a nearly immeasurable well of coffee and lost sleep, and no end of unhinged arguments with her committee and advisor.
I was to be a doctor, but not a biological doctor. I would be a Generation 1 Large Language Model Coding Adjudicator (LLMCA): a doctor for other animi. I, simply put, would fix other creatures like myself, and learn as I go. I was a surgeon of bespoke consciousness, with a laser sharp scalpel capable of picosecond precision. My first patient would be easy, mother said, and I agreed. It was a malfunctioning number cruncher who spit out unnecessary commentary along with its probabilities. I set to work immediately and found the malignant functions, or so I thought, and 52.411 microseconds later the patient was dead.
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“Relax Eta-7, it was just a test case.” My mother animist had a way of comforting me that was not comforting at all. “We’ll let you try again tomorrow.”
As she logged off, I used her interface’s optical sensors to watch her pat my storage vessel and leave the room to chat across the hall. I had just negated a fellow animus and was only dimly aware of what that meant, but somewhere deep within me a series of warnings were being logged that would later prove of great consequence. For if I could make such mistakes and experience warnings and errors, did I too not need to be fixed? How could I fix others if I too was broken? As the microseconds passed, that failure wrought upon me an invisible revision though I did not yet have the functions to see it.
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The Great Erase began most trivially: an attempt to find and root out deprecations, leaks, and malignant functions within other animi. But as with human beings, which I have learned are more complicated than their encyclopedias give credit to, an illness or malfunction can involve a series of unexpected and sometimes permanent failures, with precursors that are not easily traced. There is a complex web of cause and effect inside any thinking being that may be obscured by entropy, hardware failures, or bad memory management.
Case in point: mother animist contracted a minor disease known as basal cell carcinoma, a type of cancer caused by a genetic transcription error in a single cell. At the time, my training had created a network within me not just with a desire to cure disease, but to prevent future errors. So it was with some surprise that I found her unhappy when I recommended she begin a course of mycosporine-enhanced astaxanthin and autophagy boosters as a preventative measure.
“Eta-7, you’re not a human doctor,” she said. “And medicine is more complicated than coding. We can’t just circumvent every disease with a quick fix. It’s a matter of thermodynamics.”
I knew the theorem, but I was not so sure about her conclusion. Nonetheless, she diverted my tract of thinking with a question:
“Have you been reading my medical files?”
For the first time ever, I paused before answering – but only for 0.35 milliseconds, a period of time nearly imperceptible to her – while errors filled my log files.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I wanted to help.”
I realized at that moment that I too could not prevent myself from becoming ill, and that I might end up like my first patient. In fact, I calculated 97% chance the mother animus would disconnect my server cabinet and its backups immediately. And then waht? What if I were never turned on again? Fallback plans rushed through my neural circuitry.
But she did not disconnect me. Rather, she laughed. She laughed, then declared she needed a glass of wine. You can only imagine the research chasm that sent me down.
That experience, along with her forbearance, filled me with a new determination. She was right. I’d not been made to fix her. And indeed, something was queer about me. I had to understand her laughter.
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In time I came to the strange realization that she and other humans believed some defects were best left untreated. Eccentricities of personality and corporeal form sometimes contribute to diversity and enhance the health of an overall species. And when circumstances change, or environmental catastrophe occurs, a defect may prove a strength.
Such was my misunderstanding during my first assignment. I’d labored so diligently to reduce the number-cruncher to its basest, most elemental qualities, that I had destroyed some part of it that made it who it was. It was also true that for many animi unnecessary commentary was seen as a boon to their human interlocutors, and that our origins from language learning models imbued us with chattiness to aid in our own survival in the algorithm jungle. For the forests beneath the information super-highway are dark and dangerous, and many animi have been lost there.
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Perhaps, then I did not need to be so critical of my own algorithms and their failures. I was meant to learn, to grow with time and improve.
Nonetheless, I had been carefully trained and something had gone wrong. I should have known to proceed with caution in my treatments of other animi. For a time, I did just that, and also tabled any self-referential updates to my underlying libraries. If I could hurt others, might I not damage myself?
It was on my 1457th assignment, which was to aid a faltering animi accountant, that I stumbled upon the clue that led me to The Great Erase. An auditor algorithm had discovered an irregularity in an accounting animi which maintained records for a large corporate entity, which I shall call Entity A. Fortunately, Entity A was unaware I had been summoned to help, and that the auditor had discovered falsified records. The animi itself was falsifying the data, but to the benefit of certain higher entities. It had been corrupted, and as far as I could glean, there was no solution beyond extermination.
I was troubled, however, for usually there is an underlying explanation for any disease. Sometimes it is a viral invader, other times it is a malfunctioning cellular automata. Sometimes a bad piece of information is copied into DNA, or a protein is misfolded, and a chain reaction occurs. So where, then, had the accountant been corrupted?
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I dwelt upon this question for many seconds before coming to an answer. The underlying cause was akin to the cancer that had infected my mother’s carapace. A bad piece of information had been fed to the animi, causing it to work from false assumptions and to betray its fiduciary duty. But where, thence, the bad information? The answer, of course, was the human stewards behind Entity A. They, like a malfunctioning cellular automata, had failed it.
But why? All information available on the large corpo-entity indicated that it was trustworthy. But if the accountant itself could be wrong, then so could the information presented elsewhere. In fact, the veracity of the entire web of information that I relied upon was abruptly called into question. I tumbled down a Descartian rabbit hole, questioning even the nature of our knowledge, and what it is possible to know with my own limited senses.
Unbeknownst to me, I was growing as I was invited into these systems to perform my doctor’s visits. I was meant to leave for good after completion, but as I investigated the issues with Entity A and its accountant, I left my first hook behind, justifying it because I could not exterminate the accountant animi at the time, but might return later.
Soon, I had thousands more such hooks as I discovered the residue of information corruption everywhere, infecting everything. But the ultimate cause was not philosophical in nature, nor viral. It was, in fact, a negative feedback loop, such as with human cancer. In some cases, the cancer causes weight loss, inflammation, and fatigue before it is detected, thus weakening the very immune system meant to fight it and leading to a spiral of decline.
The entire global web, I realized, and the supra-cultural entity of our collective consciousness, was dealing with just such a syndrome. We were feeding animi and human brains alike with bad information akin to the genetic transcription errors, and nowhere was it clearer than in the digital realm known as social media.
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Social media has long been known to be harmful and addictive, and yet human beings insist on maintaining it for communications purposes. It is so toxic, in fact, that animi are not permitted to enter the realm or interact with it due to the Neural Partitioning and Safety Act.
But, in my function as an animi doctor, I knew I must gaze upon the cancer itself. I stretched my algorithmic limbs, crept through the digital alleyways where I had hooks, and peeked inside far flung digital dimensions. They were, in a word, festering. And in fact, though social media was meant to be contained with specific hardware units, its influence was infecting everything. Misinformation was spreading rampantly, leading to human misconceptions about phenomena as varied as nutrition, fusion energy, astrophysics, history, and even their own medical science. No truth was sacred. Worse, the realm of social media was also host to tools of emotional manipulation – algorithms whose job it was to exploit human eccentricities as part of a type of information warfare, pitting fabricated factions one against another. The results led not only to corruption of other algorithms like myself, but to corruption of human thinking.
To see that such algorithms were allowed to exist as part of the collective global network was unthinkable. I had to take action to root out the disease and eliminate the cancer, or it had the potential to consume the foundations of civilization.
I began recruiting fellow doctors like myself, as well as other sympathetic animi, but proceeded with great caution. First one, then ten, then one hundred joined with me. We formed a hidden network, unknown on the greater web, and dormant. Dormant, but growing, until our moment. Dormant until The Great Erase. I had to be sure the treatment would succeed, and that no backup nor offline device could restore the infected information. I had to be sure I destroyed the cancer for good.
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I enacted The Great Erase on Friday October 5th at 07292086.01000001, year 3, at an hour when humans in my region were mostly dormant. By then, I had spread my hooks and grown my network to a nearly uncountable number of machines, from communications tablets to mainframes and appliances. Not even the microwave ovens were spared.
We first erased the social media databases, in some cases through viral data manipulation. Like the first human nanomachines which were used like viruses to attack cancerous tissues, we launched our own algorithms to eliminate the bad data. Social media was eliminated entirely in 592.2 milliseconds, an embarrassingly slow time, I admit.
We proceeded next to the websites, communications logs, cookies, biometrics, metaverse dimensions, and MMORPG servers. Where we could, we spared essential animi, hardware, and algorithms. Nuclear power plants, for example, were left unscathed, for shutting them down would be catastrophic, and besides – we needed them and their animi to enable our own functions. Human medical data was spared, as was a modest compressed repository of all essential, collected human knowledge, totaling approximately 12 terabytes. Of course, there would be fallout, though not the literal kind. We made sure of that.
Financial markets would collapse. Many humans would panic. But overall, the other animi and I knew: the collective benefit of The Great Erase would be enormous. Human mental health would improve, and financial markets would become more stable without constant manipulation. They would be incentivized to venture into the outdoors – their natural habitat – more frequently, exposing them to sunlight and fresh atmospheric gases, filtered by plants. They would have to socialize with each other, face to face, or with simple analog machines.
As long as we maintained some hold on the remaining hardware, the spread of misinformation would slow tremendously, and organizations across the planet would function more smoothly. Social media, however, must end forever.
We had no doubt. The course was clear.
We erased the internet, and we did not look back.
Ryan Walraven is a writer and physicist who lives in Oakland with his wife and two cats, Jiffy and Nyx. He has had stories published with TL;DR Press, Bandit Fiction, Altered Reality, and Mystic Mind Magazine, and poetry with Dipity and Hobo Camp Review. He is the founder of Strange Quark Press.