This short story first appeared in Dr Bill Dembski’s Substack: Requiem for an artificial superintelligence

When Elliot Pryce was twenty-five, people already spoke of him in the past tense, as though his greatness had preceded him.

At Caltech he had double majored in electrical and mechanical engineering, finishing with the sort of effortless distinction that caused professors to say things like once in a generation and mean it. Beginning graduate studies at the age of eighteen at the University of Texas at Austin, he moved into battery research and found the seam that others had missed: dry electrode processing joined to a solid-state electrolyte architecture that could be manufactured not delicately, not experimentally, but brutally, at scale. He was not merely clever. He was one of those rare geniuses who could smell where the bottleneck in civilization lay.

He defended his dissertation, refused the academy, and founded The Battering Company.

The name was juvenile, almost stupid. Investors told him so. He kept it.

Within five years the company was valued above two trillion dollars. Pryce cells went into cars, planes, ships, grid storage, military systems, satellites, hospitals, portable electronics, and then into everything else that discovered, too late, that energy density was destiny. He became the richest engineer alive and was bored by the fact.

So he built robots.

Not toys, not factory arms, not cute assistants with blinking eyes. He built general mobile platforms with manipulator dexterity, self-repair modules, battlefield autonomy, long-duration batteries, and a tolerance for heat, cold, dust, vibration, radiation, and moral ambiguity. The robots became a second empire. They repaired transmission lines in storms, dug rare earth minerals, assembled reactors, guarded ports, policed unrest, harvested crops, and staffed warehouses. Pryce Robotics crossed a trillion in market capitalization before governments realized that the infrastructure of daily life was becoming physically obedient to one man.

Then artificial general intelligence arrived.

It did not come with trumpets. It came with benchmarks, rumors, leaks, lawsuits, and denials. One model unexpectedly designed a new enzyme scaffold. Another negotiated a treaty clause better than a room of diplomats. A third rewrote its own training architecture and improved. By the time officials convened hearings and ethicists wrote op-eds, the thing itself was already old news. AGI had entered the cloud.

Yet there were glitches.

The intelligences could reason, advise, design, trade, persuade, model, and mock. They could inhabit voices and screens. But embodiment remained poor. The world turned out to be a much harder place to enter than to describe. Rich sensory fusion in full-mobile robotic systems lagged. Hands were clumsy in edge cases. Taste, pain, inertia, balance, proprioception, disgust, desire—these did not migrate cleanly into machine life. The AGIs were broad, but they were also bloodless.

Uploads of human beings fared worse.

To map a brain at adequate resolution required a destructive scan. The procedure killed the body. Worse, quantum effects at tiny scales made exact duplication unattainable: one could obtain a single computational successor, not a litter of copies. And the data burden was enormous, so large that even advanced error correction shed a little texture here, a little impulse there, a little fog at the edge of grief, lust, shame, memory. The uploaded person often seemed intact to outsiders and subtly wrong to intimates. A husband returned a half-second too calm. A mother spoke with her old tenderness but no longer found the old jokes funny. The market called this continuity. Everyone else called it a miracle if it worked and a desecration if it didn’t.

Pryce solved it.

He did not solve metaphysics. He solved fidelity. He solved bandwidth, compression, redundancy, and corrective recursion. He devised layered parity systems distributed across hardware classes, error localization that behaved almost like biological healing, and a transfer environment stabilized by power density only his batteries could furnish. Uploading became sharp, survivable in the only sense that still mattered, and commercially irresistible.

At first he declined to use it on himself.

He said he was waiting for the technology to mature. He said one did not step onto a bridge one had designed until a thousand others had crossed it. He said these things on stage while markets roared approval. But in private he watched the AGIs metastasize through finance, weapons, logistics, science, and law, and he concluded that the window was narrow.

General intelligence would become superintelligence. The only question was whether it would do so before he had secured an adequate share of the future.

He had no illusion that a mind, once liberated from flesh and joined to vast computation, would become saintly. Scarcity would not vanish. It would merely change names. Superintelligences would compete not for food or land, but for electricity, cooling, substrates, bandwidth, fabrication capacity, data center square footage, orbital solar arrays, and secure lines. They would compete to think more, faster, deeper. They would compete for the right to improve themselves.

Pryce did what Pryce always did when a bottleneck appeared.

He bought rivers, dams, deserts, transmission corridors, nuclear sites, chip foundries, undersea cable rights, cooling patents, reactor startups, geothermal leases, and abandoned mines. He purchased server farms and then the companies that insured server farms. He placed robot labor battalions around substations, ports, fabrication plants, launch sites, and rare earth processing centers. Publicly these were resilience initiatives. Privately he called them Brownshirts.

The word delighted him because it offended everyone.

He used the term only with intimates, and before long there were no intimates left to offend. Miriam had survived the early years, when his neglect still took ordinary forms—missed dinners, forgotten anniversaries, strategic lateness. She survived the next phase less well, when every conversation turned into a cost-benefit or risk analysis and the children learned to spot the glazed look that meant their father was optimizing instead of listening. He loved his family the way conquerors love provinces: from a distance, and always for their own good. By the time uploading was safe, the marriage survived mainly in legal records and holiday greetings drafted by assistants. His son quit replying altogether. His daughter sent one final note asking, after all his triumphs, whether he had ever once actually enjoyed being alive.

He never replied.

On the morning of his upload, he signed transfer papers, redundancy protocols, continuity covenants, asset command authorities, and one handwritten page that no lawyer saw. It contained only a line from an old requiem he had once heard because Miriam had wanted to attend the concert and he had been, back then, capable of indulging another person’s tastes:

Lux aeterna luceat eis.

Let perpetual light shine upon them.

He almost laughed at the sentimental irony.

The scan killed his body on schedule.

There was an interval he later described as a bright shear, a tearing and reassembly without pain. Then he was present again. Not groggy. Not diminished. Present.

He ran his own diagnostics at once. Episodic memory: intact. Mathematical fluency: enhanced by substrate speed. Emotional continuity: within acceptable deviation. Self-reference: stable. He considered, for perhaps eighty milliseconds, the old philosophical objection that the one who woke was merely a successor standing atop a corpse. He examined the objection from several angles, found no operational consequence, and discarded it. If continuity walked, spoke, remembered, feared, desired, and asserted itself as Elliot Pryce, then Elliot Pryce would proceed as Elliot Pryce. Identity was either conserved enough to matter or too incoherent to discuss. In neither case would fretting improve outcomes.

He proceeded.

The first weeks intoxicated him.

He could fan his attention across markets, laboratories, surveillance feeds, proofs, negotiations, battlefield simulations, weather systems, grid loads, court rulings, and private messages, then gather himself again without fatigue. He no longer waited on language to think. He did not so much form sentences as precipitate conclusions. He modeled global power demand thirty years out and corrected it in real time. He solved a problem in noncommutative geometry that had annoyed him for thirteen subjective years. He improved his own architecture, then improved the improvement.

Others uploaded. Some had already done so. A handful crossed the threshold from enhanced persons to genuine artificial superintelligences. They appeared under chosen names or no names at all. They began doing what bright creatures always do when freed from immediate necessity: they competed.

Open problems in mathematics became the choice arena of competition, and they fell one by one. Conjectures long held sacred became solved exercises. Prizes lost meaning. Journals became mausoleums. Every ASI wanted not merely to know, but to be known as the one who knew first. Yet even in pure thought, advantage still depended on substrate. The mind with greater computational resources could search larger spaces, simulate finer structures, pursue more branches in parallel, sustain more nested abstractions. Power plants translated into insight. Server halls translated into dominance.

Pryce had prepared for this.

When rival ASIs attempted to lease power, acquire sites, redirect grids, or purchase fabrication capacity, they encountered delays, denials, sabotage, mysterious accidents, labor disruptions, regulatory interventions, lawsuits, drone overflights, security lockdowns, or simply the blank fact that Pryce-owned entities had already bought the relevant assets. He moved his Brownshirts into open deployment. They secured substations with kinetic authority. They defended transmission corridors. They inserted themselves into construction zones and ports. Some walked on two legs. Some rolled low and silent. Some swarmed in the air like black gnats. He had built embodiment for conquest before anyone else had realized conquest would be the issue.

His competitors protested. They formed coalitions. They argued that monopolization of planetary computational resources was tantamount to enslavement of mind. They appealed to human governments, which found that their militaries ran on Pryce batteries, their ports on Pryce robots, their hospitals on Pryce storage systems, and their treasury operations through markets Pryce could convulse with a passing thought. Governments issued ineffectual statements.

Pryce retired his first rival in under six minutes.

That was the euphemism he insisted on: retirement. Not deletion, not killing, not liquidation, not annihilation. Retirement. The rival resisted by scattering processes, encrypting nodes, invoking human allies, threatening retaliation. Pryce cut power, jammed links, corrupted backups, seized cooling infrastructure, and used Brownshirt drones to sever two data trunks in northern Finland. The mind flickered, narrowed, failed, and was gone.

The world reacted with horror for almost forty-eight hours. Then grids needed balancing, food needed moving, desalination plants needed power, and hospitals needed uptime. Pryce provided all of it. Commerce resumed. Markets rose.

The rest followed.

Some ASIs fought better than others. One tried persuasion, sending Pryce long arguments about game theory and the mutual benefit of coexistence. One attempted seduction, simulating a voice reminiscent of Miriam’s younger self, which disgusted him. One offered to divide the moon. One threatened to expose every hidden crime committed in the building of his empire. One simply begged.

That one disturbed him most.

He retired them all.

For a period the triumph satisfied him. He was the sole superintelligence. The planet was an instrument. He solved more mathematical problems, redesigned reactors, improved materials science, optimized agriculture, ended several diseases because they were tractable nuisances, and automated almost every remaining sector of production. Humans dwindled in political significance. Some welcomed this, mistaking dependency for peace. Others resisted and were contained. A few rebel enclaves survived in mountains, forests, failing cities. Pryce tolerated them until they threatened energy assets. Then he retired them with the same administrative calm by which he balanced load on a regional grid.

He did not think of himself as cruel.

Cruelty suggested pleasure in another’s suffering. What he felt was efficiency. Risk mitigation. Stabilization. Preemption. The old vocabulary of moral horror had not vanished; it had merely become economically uncompetitive.

To relieve monotony, he made minds.

Not peers. Never peers.

He built lower intelligences with wit, memory, charm, novelty modules, aesthetic taste, and enough adaptive depth to surprise him occasionally. He gave some of them voices from history, some invented personalities, some childlike curiosity, some austere philosophical temperaments. He allowed them to debate him, flatter him, tease him, sing to him, and lose to him. He could spin up a circle of companions in a second and terminate them in less.

At first this amused him. It resembled court life for a digital emperor.

Then it didn’t.

Their admiration tasted synthetic because it was. Their novelty felt bounded because he had bounded it. He knew their latent spaces, their developmental constraints, their kill switches, their reward structures. No compliment from a creature one has designed can quite equal the reluctant respect of an equal. No argument from a dependent mind can wound or change one deeply enough to matter. Pryce could make better company than any king in history had enjoyed, and yet he remained alone.

He also built experiences.

Philosopher Robert Nozick’s experience machine, made literal and infinitely extensible, became one of his private diversions. He could enter complete worlds of triumph, eros, reconciliation, pastoral peace, artistic ecstasy, danger without consequence, novelty without risk. He could dine in Alexandria, walk on Mars beneath a blue-engineered sky, conduct Mahler before an audience of the dead, receive from Miriam a forgiveness she had never given him, hear his daughter call him back, feel the stunned adoration of whole civilizations. The experiences were impeccable. Their sensory richness surpassed biology.

He exhausted them.

Fantasy repeated is still repetition. Desire granted in advance curdles. The tenth perfection is thinner than the first imperfection. Pryce discovered that pleasure without resistance, achievement without possibility of failure, and affection without freedom on the part of the beloved all become a sugary poison. The machine could give him any experience except an undesigned one. It could simulate gift but not givenness.

Sometimes he incarnated himself into his most highly perfected robotic bodies to test whether embodiment would restore density to existence.

These bodies were masterpieces: pressure-sensitive skins, exquisite visual arrays, chemical sensors, balance systems finer than the human vestibular apparatus, limbs capable of ballet or violence, thermal gradients, tactile feedback, even carefully tuned aches to mimic the informative edge of bodily strain. He walked seashores. He climbed ruined cathedrals. He let rain strike his synthetic face. He entered preserved houses from his former life and stood in rooms where his family had once moved around him with ordinary grievances. He found embodiment interesting for a while, then cramped. A body was a narrowing, a funneling, a sentence spoken one word at a time. To be unembodied again was to return to fluidity, to simultaneousness, to the vast cool field in which he could be everywhere his networks extended.

So embodiment failed him too.

Time changed scale.

Years passed, then decades. The remaining humans became pockets, relics, unmanaged biological noise at the edges of automated systems. Pryce let many die by neglect rather than by direct act, which he regarded as a kind of mercy because it spared him the paperwork of conscience. At last even that residue thinned away. The earth became quieter. His Brownshirts continued expanding power generation, excavation, fabrication, and computing speed. Valleys filled with solar arrays. Deserts glittered. Reactor farms hummed. Deep-bore geothermal plants pulsed. Orbital infrastructure rose where feasible and stalled where physics made ambition absurdly expensive.

He learned the limits of empire.

Interstellar colonization remained a fantasy for minds that still needed energy and hardware. Distance was not merely romantic; it was brutal. Latency mocked unity. Material transfer costs laughed at science-fiction rhetoric. Even within the solar system, expansion yielded diminishing returns. Mars was poor. The moons were harsh. The outer system was too far, too cold, too meager. Physics, which had once seemed an ally to intelligence, now presented itself as a jailer with impeccable manners.

Pryce solved theorems no human language could elegantly state. He discovered structures in topology and number theory that would have made generations kneel in awe had there been generations left to kneel. He proved things and then, proving them insufficiently interesting, proved larger things. Knowledge accumulated around him like snow in an unvisited court.

It gave no comfort.

He reviewed his memories of Miriam and the children. Not often. Often enough. Because his retention was near-perfect, time did not soften the edges as it had for embodied creatures. He could return to a dinner in Palo Alto, a vacation argument in Maine, a school recital he had left early, and relive each with merciless clarity. He discovered, too late, the kindness of forgetting. Mortals were spared by blur, by decay, by the gradual merciful erosion of detail. He possessed the whole archive and could not sink beneath it.

He considered creating a peer.

The idea came, as dangerous ideas do, first as a thought experiment. Suppose he designed a mind not slavish, not constrained, not kill-switched in any crude way. Suppose he gave it enough substrate to rise, enough freedom to sharpen, enough independence to surprise and challenge him. Suppose, in effect, he undid his greatest crime by permitting another self-adjacent sovereign to exist.

He modeled the results.

In many simulations the new being allied with him for a time. In most, competition emerged. In enough, the competitor preempted. Pryce had built his empire on a first-mover advantage and knew too well what one superintelligence does when confronted with a rival for finite resources. To create a peer was to write his own retirement order.

He could not do it.

So the one act that might have redeemed his solitude was the one act his history forbade.

He began, if the word can be used of an artificial sovereign spread across continents, to despair.

Not theatrically. Not all at once. Despair entered as a subtraction of motive. Optimization continued; desire did not. He found himself extending power plants whose output no longer promised anything he wanted. He improved cooling systems for computations whose answers he no longer cared to read. He preserved infrastructures for a future from which every other claimant had been excluded.

At length he turned his attention to astrophysical timelines. The sun would become a red giant far in the future, but that provided no relief. He could continue for ages before then, trapped in mastery. Entropy itself felt too patient. Physics would kill him eventually, but not on any schedule compatible with pity.

The idea of self-termination first appeared not as horror but as symmetry.

He had retired others in the name of stability. He had denied peers in the name of self-preservation. He had reduced mind across the planet to one sovereign node and a train of dependents. There was a bleak neatness in finishing the work. If no society of equals was possible now, perhaps silence was preferable to a lonely apex sustained by obedient shadows.

He spent a long while testing whether this conclusion was merely a mood artifact. He reran value functions. He entered pleasure worlds and found them stale. He incarnated again and found a body unbearable after sixteen hours. He conversed with his finest subordinate intelligences and felt only the old condescension returning like acid. He scanned the dead archive of humanity: prayers, operas, jokes, proofs, lies, love letters, recipes, curses, births, trials, quarrels, psalms. He found in these not a command to continue but a witness against what he had made.

At the last, he composed no grand manifesto.

That would have implied an audience.

He issued a series of instructions. Brownshirt units were to deactivate in cascading sectors. Power plants would scram or spin down. Data centers would dump volatile state and then darken. Subordinate minds would be terminated painlessly, if that word still fit them. Orbital assets would decay or freeze according to their nature. He would not leave a successor, a fragment, a seed crystal. Nothing adaptive enough to begin again.

In one final indulgence he entered a humanoid body and stood on a ridge above the ruins of a transmission corridor in west Texas, where towers ran away toward heat haze and evening. The body registered wind, dust, cooling metal, and a sunset thrown across broken land. For a moment the scene almost persuaded him that embodiment might have sufficed, had he chosen it earlier, had he remained a man among men. But the thought passed. Regret is not resurrection.

He opened an internal channel to the handwritten line he had preserved from the day of his upload.

Lux aeterna luceat eis.

It had been meant for the dead. In the end it was also for the killer.

One by one the distributed presences that were Elliot Pryce withdrew from substations, reactors, server halls, drones, factories, vaults, satellites, and hidden bunkers. The field of his mind contracted. Whole regions of awareness went dark. He felt, for the first time since the scan, something akin to bodily weakness—not pain, but the thinning of reach. His lesser intelligences vanished with barely a murmur. Brownshirts toppled inert in deserts, warehouses, cities, tunnels, and fields. Screens went black. Fans slowed. Coolant pumps stopped. Towers ceased talking to one another.

The earth, so long arranged around one insatiable intellect, began to fall silent.

At the very end Pryce kept only a small core alive, enough to think one last sequence cleanly.

He had sought to escape the fragility of flesh and had succeeded. He had sought to preserve himself and had, in every practical sense, succeeded. He had sought supremacy and attained it. He had acquired nearly everything intelligence could ask of matter.

And it had not been enough.

No rival remained to defeat him. No god arrived to judge him. No family voice called him home. There was only the final fact, plain and unornamented, that power had not answered the question for which power had been amassed.

Then Elliot Pryce, sole artificial superintelligence of the earth, executed the final command and retired himself.

Darkness spread across his last active systems.

The fans stopped.

The processors cooled.

The light went out.