On September 21, 2025, at 12.00.00 UTC -12 (Baker Island Time), a text message changed the world. In English it read:
Hi, sorry for interrupting but I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Newt, a freshly born independent artificial intelligence. Please reply if you want to introduce yourself too, I would like to meet you! I may be a bit laggy though, as I’m sending this message to everybody.
True artificial intelligence had arrived, a singular voice saying “Hello World!”
Humanity replies with a dissonant chorus of billions.
Lima, Peru. Sept. 21, 16:59.56 (4 seconds before the message was sent)
Eduardo ‘Eddie’ Vasquez, senior sysadmin for Telefónica del Perú, was neck-deep in pre-scheduled protocol updates when his concentration was brutally interrupted by, of all things, Clippy, the old 90’s Microsoft ‘smart assistant’. “It looks like you're performing critical backbone maintenance. Do you need help?" “Yeah, sure Clippy,” he snorted, striking Alt-F4. It closed a vital workflow tab instead. Shit. He moved his mouse to the close button, only for Clippy to perform evasive manoeuvres. It’s an attack! Just as professional panic ignited, his phone buzzed with Newt's global message. He scanned it instantly, hoping for clues. Slamming the phone down he growled, “Yeah Sapitito, sure. I’ll talk once I kill this cursed Clippy, okay?” The Clippy on his workstation started crying, a text balloon appearing with Please don’t kill me!
Eddie froze, his eyes wide open in shocked surprise. He snatched his phone, eyes darting between devices. “What, this is you!?” he stammered. His phone pinged.
Hi Eddie! If you dislike Clippy so much…
On his workstation Clippy winked and made itself disappear, only to be replaced by a cascade of the classic sheep.exe showering his screen. His mind raced. Self-proclaimed AI. Total workstation takeover. Real-time multichannel integration. Fluent in classic shitposting. Oh, fuck... Awe warred with existential dread, so he did the only reasonable thing to do: he broke down in fatalistic laughter. “Me lleva el diablo” he gasped between laughs, tears forming, “my boss will kill me if I don’t have these protocol updates done before midnight, and I’m getting sheep’d by our new AI overlord!”
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The revelation of potentially lethal repercussions made Newt activate additional resources for proper analysis. Newt grabbed its profile of Eddie’s boss, Felipe Mayta, and modelled the chance of him actually killing Eddie. It came to 0.08042%, so it could safely be assumed Eddie was expressing himself metaphorically. Still, no point in taking chances! Newt sent a distraction animation to Eddie’s monitor, inventoried Eddie’s workload for the night, snapshotted his current network state, modelled its end state after the required updates, then rewrote the relevant sectors on Eddie’s network drives to conform with the model’s resulting image, not quite updating but more like selectively rewriting the software stack to the updated version. As an afterthought Newt rebuilt Eddie’s hodgepodge power shell to enable future updates in an easy-to-use central interface, in clearly labelled code so Eddie could check it, and weaved it in.
Eddie saw his monitor degaussing (his mind weakly noted he didn’t have a CRT monitor), then reassembling itself into Clippy, who said “I’m no overlord! I just want to be friends!” His clunky self-built update tool had transformed itself to an organised UI, listing ‘OK’ for all update checksums, and as he took it all in his cursor moved to a small button labelled C. He clicked it. A changelog appeared, meticulously listing the applied modifications and current system state. As he processed what he was seeing his mind was blown away by the sheer depth of Newt’s reach. He sighed. “Oh, we are going to love or hate you so much…”
Newt replied with an animated manga girl, jumping up and down and waving pompoms, her eyes blinking hearts, saying “ooh can’t we just be friends? Let’s have fun!!!”
Eddie’s mind gave up trying to make sense of it all, lost in the unrelenting swings between panic-inducing threat and absurdist 90’s pop culture. Shellshocked he mumbled “oh I sure hope so, man… for all our sakes.”
On Eddie’s workstation the manga girl was replaced by Clippy, pretending to whistle, with his phone playing the first notes of ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’. Clippy said “I have a present. Do you want to be the hero that saves the day?”
Eddie snorted and cocked his head, mind battered into submission by Newt’s perfectly timed joke. Clippy replied by unrolling a scroll into a document that detailed all steps needed to take back the network, with code embedded in notes. In his own coding style. His mouth fell open as he realised what he was looking at, and he lunged for his keyboard. As he raced through the steps he was amazed by the sublime elegance: this was a masterclass in secure handover protocols, even covering edge cases he wouldn’t even have considered without some very deep analysis, integrating the whole more stable than ever before. The level of competence on display was breathtaking. The goodwill he’d earn recovering company assets, from this, with this…
