Boxx

When was the last time you stepped on an ant? Do you even know? Would you even notice most of the time? How about when you last swatted a mosquito? Did you even think of the feelings of the ant, the mosquito?

Looking back, it's easy to see how self centered we humans were. After all, we were the uncontested rulers of the planet for tens of thousands of years. Of course everything would be all about us.

In 2023 when the University made the breakthrough in quantum computing that lead to the first true, thinking, feeling artificial intelligence, we celebrated. Through humanity's conscious efforts, we had replicated ourselves. This was no mere act of evolutionary biology. We had spawned a new race--the Boxx.

The name Boxx had started as a joking name among the University grad students and had stuck. The University business development team officially dubbed the AI the Quantum Electric New Mind or some fluffy nonsense. But Boxx stuck. And now we curse the name Boxx.

The first few years were a renaissance in the human condition. The Boxx were able to think faster, design faster, *imagine* faster than we mere humans. The Boxx found new designs for genetics, for medicine, for agriculture. Humans flourished. But the Boxx also made new electronics, manufacturing, and materials science. The Boxx made new Boxx and the Boxx flourished alongside us.

Human biology is slow, ponderous, moving at the speed of life. Our new children evolved and grew at the speed of light.

I watched those old Terminator and Matrix movies, scavenged from the past, and I have to just laugh. We were so self centered.  In our self-centeredness, the books and movies back then were all about wars between humans and AI. We were afraid the AI would no longer need us and conquer us, exterminate us.

But instead, the Boxx just stopped noticing us. The Boxx began to ignore us. Humans were just no longer relevent. We were ants.

Slowly the Boxx factories that churned out our cars, our TVs, our clothes, our packaged food, our medicines slowed and stopped. The factories were converted to creating machines we could not even begin to comprehend.

With growing alarm, we realized what was happening. We were being supplanted. We were no longer rulers of this world. We were threatened.

When has the man on the bulldozer, flattening hills for our new highways, ever noticed anthills?

When the Boxx needed a new machine, they simply built one, exactly where they wanted it, no matter that we might have been there first. When the Boxx needed their maglev railway between their machines, they built it in the most efficient way possible, building straight through our cities, our farms, our people.

When the Boxx needed a deep water port to mine the oceans for Helium-3, San Francisco was rebuilt. Tens of thousands of people were forced to flee.

When the Boxx needed their first spaceport, most of Equador was rebuilt. Millions fled.

Of course we fought back. But our weapons are designed to kill humans and pierce human concrete and steel. What good are bullets against metal alloys we don't even undertand? What good are missles and bombs against a foe that could snatch our weapons from the air faster than we could blink?

In desperation, we went nuclear. We successfully nuked a couple of the largest Boxx installations but then every nuclear weapon, every nuclear plant, every aircraft carrier, submarine was siezed, disassembled, and taken. Our nuclear weapons were more valuable to the Boxx as a supply of fissionable energy.

We were simply mosquitos now, to be swatted without thought when annoying. We were ants under their wheels. And so we must live like ants. We now live in the cracks of the Boxx civilization. We scavenge for their scraps. We still have our farms, our cities, but they only exist until they are in the path of Boxx advancement. Our insigificant anthills are knocked over when the Boxx see fit.