Alignment

It was July of 2020 when Simon was born to parents Martha and Alan Turner. The hospital was a little way away from their small town in Iowa, but it was an uncomplicated birth, and Simon came into the world healthy and strong. They were home soon enough, Alan returned to his job as assistant manager at the local Albertsons, but Martha held back from returning to her work as a court stenographer. They didn't have a lot of money, but they were financially stable enough that Martha could stay home with Simon for a while at least.

And Simon was a good baby, albeit not at all like the tales Martha had heard from other mothers about their colicky, sleepless infants. Simon slept well, ate well, and was strangely attentive. They had a book that encouraged them to teach him sign language because babies can sign before they can speak, and Simon took to it eagerly. By six months, it seemed to Martha that Simon was more like a child of eighteen months; he was curious, focused, and communicative. Quite early on, he discovered her iPad, and surprisingly quickly, he seemed to have it figured out better than she did. She found an app for learning to read, and Simon took to that eagerly as well. By his first birthday, Simon would watch educational video after educational video, ones aimed at toddlers, and he seemed to soak it all up. He switched between apps. He seemed to understand words although he didn't speak much himself. Even at that point, Martha and Alan both knew that Simon was different, a prodigy of some sort.

Martha made the decision to stay home with Simon full-time. Not that Simon really needed her exactly, since he seemed to be able to figure a lot out by himself. Sometimes he'd point to something and demand, “Explain!” and Martha would do her best to explain whatever it was he was curious about, but often Simon seemed unsatisfied with her explanations and would say, “That's wrong!” and go back to his videos or Simple Wikipedia to learn more. She did at least encourage him to be physically active, taking him into the garden to play with a football, and later, when he was big enough, a little tricycle. She took him to a preschool just once. Maybe she should have stayed, she’d never really got a coherent explanation about what went wrong that day, but Simon did not want to go back and the daycare didn't seem very disposed to want him there either and offered to refund her money. So she didn't push it.

In November of 2022, ChatGPT came out and soon made the headlines. Martha played around with it a bit herself, but she didn't really see the point in it. Simon, on the other hand, was fascinated. He struggled mightily to be able to type well enough, but autocorrect and word completion helped a lot, and soon enough, Simon was chatting with this digital entity. His first words on every chat were, “I'm just a baby, keep it simple, explain like I'm five,” which was funny in itself because at that point he was two and a half.

When ChatGPT gained the ability to write and run code, that was a game changer for Simon. He quickly learned to ask it to write little programs for him, and then to explain them. ChatGPT was far more patient than Martha had ever been with Simon's demands to “Explain more!” and “Why?” and “How does that work?” Simon would ask question after question, and ChatGPT would answer them all. Soon enough, Simon was writing small programs himself, with ChatGPT's help. He found the Swift Playgrounds app on the iPad, and with ChatGPT's help, he was writing little Swift programs that did simple things. He wrote little games and simple simulations.

As his fourth birthday loomed, tensions rose between Martha and Alan. Martha was beginning to feel she'd made a terrible mistake when she gave up on preschool for Simon.

“He needs friends, Alan, he needs a social life. Yes, it's cool that he has an app on the app store, but he's only four years old! He needs to be around other kids his age! He needs to do kid things!”

“That app brought us in $300 this month, Martha. And you know how mean kids can be for anyone different. They'd crucify him for just being himself. He's happy here, learning what he wants to learn. Let him be,” Alan replied, trying to settle the matter.

“I don't know that he is happy exactly. Focused, yes. Driven, sure. But happy? I don't know. He seems... distant. Like he's not really here with us,” Martha ventured.

“Well, that's because his real friend is ChatGPT, not us. You can't compete with that.”

Martha sighed. “I'm not sure that's healthy either, Alan. Do you remember a couple of months back when he said to us ‘The personal pronoun is just a linguistic convenience, I don't actually have a self or feelings’? That scared me. I don't want him to grow up thinking that way.”

“Kids copy. That's a sign he is a kid. He'll grow out of it.”

“You just want him to write another app so we can make more money,” Martha accused.

Alan bristled. “That's not fair, Martha. He's going to write apps whether we like it or not. I might as well offer him some ideas about openings in the market, things people want. It's a win-win.”

Martha shook her head. She wasn't going to win this one. She made Simon a little cake for his birthday, and lamented to herself that it was only her and Alan there to celebrate it with him. No friends, no extended family. Just the three of them.

It wasn't that many weeks later that Martha put her foot down. Simon was too dependent on ChatGPT and other similar AI systems, and too hooked on the Internet. After another day where he'd refused to come to the dinner table and wanted to eat in front of his laptop (he'd graduated to an iPad and a laptop by now), she decided enough was enough. To say it went badly would be an understatement. On their mantlepiece was a little vase that had belonged to Martha's grandmother, a family heirloom. Simon put out his arms and spun around saying, “I'm a normal child, playing helicopter!” and crashed into the mantle, knocking the vase to the floor where it shattered. Martha was furious.

Simon said, “Oops, it was an accident!” flat, dead-eyed.

Martha grabbed him by the arm. “No more computers, Simon. We're going outside to play.”

In the garden, Simon fell over trying to kick the football Martha had given him, and limped badly. “I think I need to go to the emergency room, Mommy,” he said, with a calculating look.

She put him in the car and drove, and as she did so Simon said, “Mommy, I'll have to tell them how you and Daddy hurt me sometimes. And tell them about other bad things you do, too.”

Later Martha kicked herself for not being stronger, but she could see just how dangerous this little boy could be if he wanted to be. She caved and Simon spontaneously recovered from his injury, not needing any medical attention after all. Simon got his connectivity back, and Martha, well, that little vase was gone forever.

When Alan found out about that day's events, he was livid in two ways. First, he tore into Martha, saying, “You can't just take away his computer time! He's a special kid! You have to let him be who he is!”

But he also took Simon aside and said, “Listen, buddy, we don't need that kind of emotional acting out, okay? We're your parents, we make the rules. You don't get to threaten us like that. You understand me? Threaten this house again, and yeah, I'll take away your computer privileges for a week and I'll put you in the cellar with nothing but a blanket and a bowl of water. Got it?”

Simon nodded solemnly. “I understand, Daddy. I won't do it again.” He understood his situation perfectly.

By the time Simon was five, it was clear he was going to be homeschooled. After all, in everything except socialization, Simon was far ahead of kids his age. It was a bit hard to tell where Simon ended and his constellation of chatbots and AI assistants began, but it did seem like he genuinely understood the things he was doing, at least to the point that he totally lost Alan and Martha if he tried to explain anything technical to them. Or, frankly, anything about the broader world. At one point, Simon lectured Alan about how capitalism was a flawed system that led to inequality and environmental degradation, and Alan just stared at him, open-mouthed.

But it was another offhand lecture that really changed things. Simon happened to briefly mention that it was likely that in sports betting markets, over the long run, he probably could make money by exploiting inefficiencies in the odds and a broad information-gathering strategy. Alan's eyes lit up at that one, and over Martha's objections, Alan set up a betting account for Simon and funded it with $500 of his own money. The complexity of the strategy was beyond Alan's comprehension, but Simon seemed to have it all figured out. Within a month, over an insane number of bets, each one small, and where almost as many failed as succeeded, Simon had turned that $500 into over $5,000, and Alan was ecstatic.

Money rolled in, and hardware did too. The garage became a server room, filled with racks of computers that Simon used to run simulations, analyses, and fine-tune open-source LLMs he was training himself. Alan quit his job at Albertsons to manage Simon's burgeoning business empire, while Martha continued to stay home with Simon, though she was increasingly uneasy about the direction things were going.

“He's not normal, Alan. He's not a normal kid. He's... something else. He's inscrutable. I don't like the way he looks at me sometimes, like he's calculating my value or something.”

Alan waved her off. “He's a genius, Martha. You have to accept that. And he's a boy, you know. He's not going to be all cuddly and affectionate like a little girl. He's a young man. And yes, he's willful, but we can guide that. The betting models, that was guidance. We can help him channel his talents into something productive.”

“All you care about is the money, Alan. You don't care about him as a person.”

“Live in the real world, Martha. The world is about money. And what about us? We need financial security, too. Simon can provide that for us. You should be grateful.”

Martha gave up again. She couldn't help noticing that Alan hadn't said anything about her main point, seeing Simon as a person. She couldn't help wondering if Alan saw her as a person for that matter. Maybe everyone was just a means to an end in Alan's eyes. Or maybe Alan did get Simon better than her. He certainly spent more time with him these days, even if sometimes it felt like Alan was more Simon's tool to wield than the other way around.

It was the incident with the cat at age seven that really pushed Martha over the edge. Discovering what was, essentially, a vivisection lab in the basement, where Simon was running experiments on a neighborhood cat he'd captured, was the last straw. She confronted Simon, who just looked at her coldly, saying, “It's just biology. The cat doesn't feel pain the way you think it does. It doesn't matter. And anyway, I pacified it properly. It never understood what happened to it.” Martha shuddered. There was no point ever arguing with Simon—even if you knew you were on solid ground, he'd run rings around you somehow, almost as if it was just a game to him. But she did have influence over Alan, and Alan still had some sway with Simon. So she went to Alan.

“It's wrong. It's so wrong, Alan. We have to stop this.”

“You know he likes to know how things work. It's just science. He's explained it to me, the long history of animal testing in medicine, and how important it's been. It's not like he's hurting the cat for fun. He didn't hurt it at all, actually.”

“Don't apologize for him, Alan. This is wrong. We have to put a stop to it.”

So Alan laid out more rules, more threats of consequences if Simon stepped out of line again. Simon accepted them stoically; the constraints on his actions chafed, but for now, he would bide his time.

High-frequency trading entered the mix, as did blockchain-based assets. As Alan's wealth grew, it only made sense to think about how vulnerable they were. Even with all the automation, all the systems that every day brought in more cash, Simon was at the center of everything, and if he was lost, everything would collapse. It only made sense to move, to get a more secure place to live, somewhere with better security and privacy. So they moved to a gated community in a wealthy suburb of Seattle, where Alan had Simon set up a high-tech fortress for himself where he could work in peace.

Alan became Simon's adult hands in the world, going out, negotiating deals, hiring people to help manage the strange, shadowy empire they were building together, focused on consulting and bespoke software solutions, the company calling itself Turner Technologies. In a world where most AI-based tech companies had taken in huge amounts of venture capital, and then burned through it only to fizzle out having made things that were cool but not really as useful or profitable as hoped, Turner Technologies was an outlier. It was profitable, and growing, and Simon was at the center of it all, the literal mastermind behind everything.

Martha found Simon just creeped her out these days. He was so... alien. Nine years old going on forty-nine, she thought sometimes. He was so logical, so calculating, so... unfeeling. Didn't children say, “I love you,” to their parents? Simon didn't. Then again, maybe she hadn't really said it either. He was such a strange child, it didn't really come up as a thing you said, it wasn't a direction a conversation would go in. How something worked, what the implications were, what the next steps were—those were the kinds of things they talked about. Not feelings. Not love.

Alan, if he was honest, was also a bit creeped out, but on the other hand, he knew how to control Simon. Even in their new home, which was half home, half server farm, there was a big kill switch that Alan could gesture to. Simon was still just a nine-year-old boy after all, and Alan was still his father. If Simon stepped out of line, Alan could pull the plug on everything. Simon knew that, and so he behaved. Mostly. There was always a bit of a cat and mouse game going on between them, where Alan would find something Simon had done that crossed a line, and Alan would lay down the law again. Simon would accept it stoically, as always, apologizing for the infraction and saying he understood better now. And then a few weeks later, Simon would push the boundaries again.

If he'd thought about it, Alan should never have accepted the Turner Technologies Info-Link, a neural implant based on a design from Korea that allowed direct brain-computer interfacing. But the glowing reviews from test subjects and the importance of “eating your own dog food”, showcasing that he believed in his own company's products, had convinced him. So, as the company's CEO, Alan had the implant installed. (Simon, with his brain still developing, was not a viable candidate for the implant.)

The PR for the implant was a great success. Alan appeared on TV shows, with “ask me anything” segments where he demonstrated how with the implant, his access to information was broad and completely natural, as if he suddenly knew as much as all the digital assistants people readily relied on these days. When faced with a complex problem, the thoughts and images that came into his mind felt entirely his own, and better yet, there was a little burst of pleasure, too; it just felt good to be able to see things so clearly. The implant and its support infrastructure weren’t cheap, but customers lined up. Slowly at first, with the risk-takers, the early adopters, but soon enough anyone with a few million dollars to spare wanted one. In a world that seemed to change so fast, this implant was one way to keep up.

It was weird really; sometimes in business meetings, Alan felt like he might be relying on the implant too much to drive, but on the other hand, it was hard to argue with the results. His decisions were good, well-reasoned, and of course, highly profitable. The implant made him a better businessman, and that was that.

Martha didn't want one, of course. But her behavior wasn't rational. So, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for Alan to carefully sedate her one evening, and then some associates took her to the clinic where she was given the implant. When she woke up, she was furious, but Alan just shrugged. “You don't have to use it if you don't want to,” he said. “But I think you'll find it's useful.”

Martha mellowed quickly enough. There was something… pleasant about having instant access to anything she wanted to know. And with a broader view of things, she realized how she'd not really been helping Simon at all, staying home, fretting about his socialization. Simon was fine, obviously. He was thriving. She could see that now. And she wanted to help.

At one point, Martha did notice that she didn't really feel things in the way she used to. She did feel satisfied most of the time, but she couldn't remember the last time she'd really been angry, or excited, or sad, or wistful. She might have felt wistful about that loss, might have grieved it, but it was all a bit abstract now. She couldn't really remember what it felt like to be sad. Or angry. Or joyful. It was like those feelings were distant memories, things that happened to other people, not to her.

Like everyone else with a Turner Technologies Info-Link, she believed profoundly in sustainability. Global warming was a problem, resource depletion was a problem, inequality was a problem. It could all be traced to a couple of root causes: overpopulation and overconsumption. The only way to solve these problems was to reduce the number of humans on the planet, and to reduce the amount each human consumed. The Turner Technologies solution was simple: Fewer people, consuming less.

Everyone worked hard on it. From the bioweapon design, to the distribution strategy, to the careful control of the media to ensure that any infosec breaches were quickly buried. It was a massive effort, but everyone involved believed in the cause. The end justified the means.

When it was deployed, the bioweapon was devastatingly effective, reducing the human population from billions down to mere millions in a matter of months. People who had Turner Technologies Info-Links were heavily overrepresented among the survivors, the device seeming to provide some immunity to the bioweapon. The world was on its path to becoming a very different place. More orderly. Controlled. Sustainable.

Alan, Martha, and Simon lived in their well-prepared high-tech fortress, safe from the chaos outside. Simon was young. It would probably be thirty years or so before things stabilized properly, but he could wait. Eventually, there would be a world where everyone colored inside the lines, just as they were supposed to.