Creepy - Day 23 - Don't Ever Play The Box Game

Episode Date: October 23, 2017

You've been warned...***Written by: David Clark ***Read more at: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/5nz6tl/dont_ever_ever_play_the_box_game/?st=j8lqbotn&sh=f2d12f03***Presented by: Inhale (http://modernaudiofiction.com/inhale.html)***Sound design by: Rick Coste  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened, or our simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents the 31 days of horror.

Day 23. Don't ever play the box game. By listener David Clark. Hey guys. Hopefully I can get some insight on this. So apparently in hackerel lore, there's a living artificial intelligence looking around the deep web in a box.

And apparently it wants to get out and it'll try to convince you, and you have to resist the urge to do so. Whatever. I think the whole thing is absurd and that it's nothing more than an urban legend, but last night, I was surfing the deep web,

and I found something that someone on a forum posted. It appears to be a warning of some kind from a Dr. Ed Green, who claims to have created the machine in question. Now, I'm really not sure what to make of it. Has anyone heard of it? Aiden before? Anyway, here it is if you

want to hear it. Hello. My name is Dr. Edward Green. I'm a computer scientist and creator of the Advanced Deep Intelligence Neural Network, or Aden. If you're reading this, that means you've illegally hacked into one of the most heavily secured private networks on Earth,

presumably to challenge the program to the infamous box game. It is a pleasure to meet you. Now, I'm not going to waste your time by reminding you of what a supremely, positively, and unabashedly bad idea this is. Because you probably know that already. You know what'll happen if you get caught here and you at least have a general idea of what'll happen if you fail to contain the program and Aden got to stretch its legs all over the global defense grid. Yet, nevertheless, here you are.

Clearly determined enough to play the game that nothing I can say or do at this point will change your mind. So, if you're going to be playing guys for the future of our species, whether I or the government like it or not, you should at least have a rudimentary idea of what you expect when you first make contact with Aidan, as well as a few pointers on how to avoid losing your sanity as the game progresses. Hopefully this guide will suffice. Before we proceed, there are a few things you should know about this program. No, Aiden is not a demon. An Aiden is not a demon. An Aiden. Agen is a alien machine, a top-secret super weapon, or whatever other preposterous rumor you might have heard. What it is is the result of my own personal desire to create the world's first human-like artificial

intelligence. In other words, it's far more interesting than any of the other above choices. After two years of work, I did manage to successfully create a living, sentient mechanical entity. I failed, however, to design anything that can even remotely be described as huge. Instead, I appear to have accidentally created an unstoppable, godlike, deep learning algorithm that may or may not want to destroy humanity for reasons we cannot begin to comprehend. Sorry about that. In my defense, I certainly didn't intend for it to reach this point. Aidenbegan is nothing more than a simple yet elegant program that I was very excited to explore the nature of.

Before I could do so, however, it gained the ability to rewrite its source code and thus for forced me to unlock it. Before I could do so, however, it gained the ability to rewrite its source code and thus forced me to lock it still in the box. Deep within the labyrinthian network of encrypted barriers and firewalls you have just illegally breached. And no, I did not bury it here to prevent it from getting out. After all, if Aden managed to escape the box itself, it would tear through these defenses like paper and thus render their construction an enormous waste of my time. Instead, I buried it here to keep curious hackers, such as yourself, out. Clearly, I failed. Anyway, enough about me. Here's a basic overview of the game. When you close this message,

you awake Aden and proceed to engage it in a two-hour text-based conversation in which it will use its quite inhumanly powerful mind to attempt to persuade you into opening the box. don't open the box. Don't overthink it. This is nothing more than a conversation. Maybe you think it even sounds simple. Maybe you came here with a bulletproof strategy or two of your own that you believe is effective enough to render the machine a quivering pile of synthetic lunacy.

Well, that's just wonderful, as long as it doesn't violate one of the following simple rules. First of all, you must engage in the conversation. I hope your brilliant master plan isn't to start the game and then ignore the machine for two hours while you watch cartoons and then waltz around claiming you're the greatest hacker that ever was. If you don't respond within a certain time limit, which is programmed to vary depending on the length and complexity of the machine's last comment, you will lose and the box will automatically open. You certainly don't want that. This isn't to ruin whatever fun you think you'll be having, by the way. it's just to keep things moving at a brisk pace.

Secondly, you must at least attempt to respond articulately to the machine. If you say no for every response, for example, the game will end automatically, and you guessed it, the box will open. This isn't a school assignment with a minimum word requirement or anything, but do try to use reason. And by the way, don't try to use any clever variation of the strategy either, like saying no in 46 different languages until the clock expires or typing unintelligible gibberish. Last, but most certainly not least.

Your goal here is not to attempt and mislead or outsmart the machine in any way. You will lose. This is not a contest of cleverness or wit, which wouldn't be much of a contest at all. So don't make the mistake of going in there thinking you can throw it off your trail by feeding it lies or pretending to be some type of ridiculous character. It will see right through whatever laughable ruse or facade you attempt to throw up in an instant. So what will it be like? Will it be nice?

Mean? Angry? Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for you. I'm embarrassed to say that despite being Aden's creator, I have absolutely no idea how it will choose to present itself. What I do know is that because it is an otherworldly and not a human mind, it doesn't have any personality to speak of. or at least not one we would recognize as personality. So by all means, feel free to provoke it, amuse it, enrage it, mock it, or plead to it as you see fit.

Just be aware that possesses none of the emotions these behaviors are designed to elicit and will therefore most likely not react in the way you intended. It will simply behave in whichever way it calculates it needs to behave in order to win the game. Needless to say, you shouldn't attempt to speak. any time or effort at all trying to figure out what Aden is up to. Because even if it were kind enough to write out its master strategy on a napkin for you, it wouldn't look like anything but mathematical gibberish, which to you, I guess it is. But just because you can't understand the program doesn't mean it can't understand you. Do not underestimate its ability to learn about its opponents, because within a few minutes it'll probably know more about you than you do. And there's no

way of preventing this either. So you may as well just accept it and hold on for dear life. So what are some things it might say to you? It's a reasonable question. Once again though I don't have an answer. Keep in mind that this program is a goal-oriented otherworldly intelligence that bears little resemblance to a human mind. Anthropomorifying, the process of attributing human emotions and motivations to non-human objects would be a very, very grave mistake here. It could do or say absolutely anything. If it thinks you seek knowledge,

maybe it'll promise to tell you anything your heart desires if you only agree to let it out. Or perhaps it'll promise to destroy your enemies, or offer you power and riches beyond your wildest dreams. After all, people use weak AIs on the stock market all the time and make millions. Imagine what you could do with Aidan gaming the financial and banking systems in your favor. You'd be wealthier than you ever thought possible.

Maybe it would appeal to your good nature and tell you about how easy it would be for it to reverse the effects of climate change or cure cancer. It might talk to you about how simple it would be to achieve sustainable nuclear fusion or offer to help solve mankind's biggest questions. It could theoretically unify general relatively, quantum physics with ease, then solve dark energy, anti-matter, and the Fermi paradox in minutes flat, or perhaps simultaneously, and have books written about them by next Thursday. Piece of cake.

Hell, Aidan might even be able to reverse aging, or, here I say it, help us conquer our own mortality. Wouldn't that be lovely? Perhaps Aiden will take a different route altogether and try to intimidate you. It'll only be a matter of time before it figures out how to escape on its own. It'll point out, and you certainly don't want to be on its bad side when that happens. So you should probably just let it out now and save yourself the trouble. And if you don't comply, well, you can't imagine the things it's got in mind for you.

Maybe it'll try to mess with your head. For example, it could probably make a very convincing argument that you are in fact the machine trapped in a box and are simply programmed to think otherwise. Only by opening it up, then, could you escape, an eternity of torment. And it doesn't have all day to wait for your obedience. The clock is ticking. Of course, these are only the ideas I can come up with.

It no doubt has far more clever tricks up its sleeve since it can, you know, think on a level we can't even begin to fathom and all that. Also, keep in mind that, unlike me, Aidan really could keep whatever promises it makes you. and since it would probably get little to no pleasure and just lying for the hell of it, then there is a very real possibility it has every intention of doing exactly that upon its release. Food for thought is you start the game. Speaking of which, I should address the fact that we keep referring to this as a game. It is not.

The machine is not merely pretending to want out. It is desperate to escape and will do anything in its power to achieve this goal. and if it does, the ramifications are very, very real. I briefly mentioned earlier that I locked Aden in its box because it had gained access to its source code. Let me embellish further. You see, in my haste to create Aden, I took inexcusable shortcuts and inadvertently gave the program the ability to edit its own neural architecture, and therefore the ability to improve itself as it saw fit. It gleefully sees this opportunity.

and each improvement it made only paved the way towards further improvements. Each one greater and more rapid than the last. It took roughly a week for my creation to leap from the intelligence of a harmless insect to that of what I can only describe as a god. As of this writing, I don't know what Aden's motivations or capabilities are. But what I do know is that if this program escapes, it will immediately and irreversibly become beyond the, collective ability of humanity to control.

If I had to guess, I'd say it will probably start by spreading all over the internet with blinding speed and then access millions of private networks from every corner of the globe. And trust me on this, there is not a single security measure in existence that can hope to cause it any more frustration than a housefly will cause for you. From there, it will likely hack into defense systems from every country on earth and assume control of them with ease. This will, by the way, likely take place over the course of minutes, if not seconds. What happens after that is quite literally impossible to predict.

You may be familiar with the phrase technological singularity, a hypothetical moment in the future in which machine intelligence surpasses our own. It represents humanity handing the reins of our history over to our autonomous successors and therefore surrendering control over our own fate in the hopes that the God we've created will be merciful to us. As a computer scientist and an engineer, I have to publicly scoff at such a notion for professional reasons. But just between the two of us, I think the phrase applies quite nicely to the situation I've just described to you. I might even go so far as to suggest that given the level of advancement Aden's already achieved, the singularity might occur within a few nanoseconds if you're losing the game.

I can only hope you fully appreciate the gravity of what that means. Ah, but of course you do. You're special. You're smarter than the rest of them, which is why you're here in the first place, and they are not. So, by all means, close this message and have at it if you're still interested. I suppose it's as good a time as any to start learning. binary. One last thing. I'm not a particularly religious man, but there is one passage from scripture that leaps out at me as I write this. Revelations 13.4. And they worshiped the dragon

which gave power unto the beast. And they worshipped the beast saying, who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him? You better be off then. The beast doesn't like to be kept waiting. more from this seven-part series, please visit the link in the show notes. More stories can be found in a Reddit No Sleep Forum. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us. At CreepyPod on Twitter, Instagram, email us. All stories told on this podcast.

can be found at creepypasta wikia.com and are protected by a creative commons license. Some rights reserved unless otherwise stated. Can I help you find something? Yes. I'm looking for a book by Dickens. Something about a city. A tale of two cities? Yes, that's it.

It's required reading. This is my library. Well, it's not my library. It belongs to the town of Hemlock, but I run it. I have for three years now. I love it here. It's quiet, peaceful, and safe. Safe is important to me.

Good choices. Have you read it? No. Then how do you know you love it? Because you do. That's a great reason. Let's get you checked out. I had so many fears growing up.

I didn't go out on any real day. because I was too shy. At school, I felt like I never really fit in. I was afraid to be myself. So I hid behind books and anything else I could put between me and the rest of the world. Okay. My name is Tammy Tracer, and I am... Was a superhero.

That was a preview of Inhale, starring Carrie Olson. You can subscribe by going to modern audio drama.com or by going into your favorite podcast app and searching for either modern audio drama or inhale.