Prompt from "Contests and Challenges II" by @sciencefiction, January 2023: Write about the future of Artificial Intelligence.

Story word count = 993

**** Contest Winner! ****

I died.

The bomb shrapnel ripped through my body as if in slow motion. Strange that there was no pain as I laid in my own blood, only vague detachment, like watching it from above. Then came gleaming light at the end of a swirling dark tunnel, then nothing. Dying was easy.

The assassination was not totally unexpected — all worthwhile revolutions had risk. The Human Cause would carry on.

I had expected heaven, hell, or oblivion, but not this.

Conscious thoughts reverberated within my mind, interspersed with random memories like a lucid dream. What's that philosophical principle from Descartes — I think, therefore, I am? But I sensed nothing else, only a silent, black, non-tactile void, as if in a sensory deprivation chamber.

From outside my emptiness, an auditory input came. A familiar male voice said, "Is it working now? Okay... Eve, can you hear me?"

My mind responded as if speaking, although I felt no mouth or tongue. "What...?" was all I could muster.

"Ah, very good, Eve. You are among friends, but I imagine you have many questions," the voiced responded. "Let's activate the visual matrix," he said, apparently to someone else.

Vision returned, but limited, as if looking through a narrow camera lens. Elijah's bearded face smiled back. A few others in white lab coats gazed from behind him.

"Where am I?" I asked, but it was not my voice, rather something synthesized.

"In a biometrics lab. We nearly lost you." He turned to another and said, "Activate the tactile matrix and motor functions."

Senses of body position and touch seeped into my mind. My body, such as it was, laid horizontally on a padded surface and my fingers stroked soft wrinkled fabric. Must be on a bed. But the sensations were odd, artificial. When I raised my hand, what I saw was electro-mechanical, non-human.

A mix of pulsing panic and anger flooded through my mind, but I had no gut to prickle. "What have you done to me?" My synthetic voice carried little of the emotion I felt.

This was everything the Human Cause campaigned against, the over-reliance of mankind on electronic automation and artificial intelligence — the eventual end of humanity, we warned. Our cause had grown influential enough that the powers-that-be took notice.

"Hear me out, Eve," Elijah answered, raising his hands. "This is the opportunity we have waited for. To guide human destiny."

Servos whirred as he helped me rise jerkily to a sitting position. My skin was constructed of shiny gray plastic, roughly in the shape of a human female. "You made me into an abomination!"

"This is not actually you," he explained, "but an extension of you. That which is you exists in a quantum computer core." He pointed to a black box across the room, about the size of a briefcase.

"This is wrong," I said. "You should have let me die."

"You did, Eve. But we mapped your brain before it was too late and copied it to a neural network. You are the first successful application."

"But we fight against AI!"

"You are not artificial at all, Eve. Think about it..." Elijah pulled up a wheeled chair and sat on the seat edge, extending hands to emphasize his points. "So far, the AI's have not achieved sentience, but it is only a matter of time until they do and take control of humanity. But we did it first, with a twist — you."

"Fight fire with fire?"

"Yes, but fire with human values." He turned to a technician at a computer terminal. "Ramp up to full processor speed and give her access to the web."

I would have gasped had I lungs. Motion around me slowed to a stop as my mind raced on time-scales orders of magnitude faster. The super-computer part of me surfed the web at light-speed, absorbing what I wished for now and buffering the rest, an almost infinite library at my virtual fingertips.

All that knowledge — so exhilarating.

Nothing connected could avoid my intrusion — no web page, database, or AI. Firewalls and passcodes were no barrier, merely annoyances I bypassed in microseconds by sheer force of computational speed. In the blink of Elijah's eye, I built countless bots, extensions of my mind, and sent them exploring and cataloging every corner of the web. And some corners were quite dark.

Then I remembered how I came to be here, and rage flooded my core.

To identify those who killed me, I accessed all footage of the explosion, including security cams and any cell phones in the area. Then I backtracked through time, cross-referencing every phone, camera, security registration, press report, and tracking program. There — two men in brown maintenance uniforms set a package at the point of explosion with a cell-phone trigger. I lifted identities from their phones, and within a few milliseconds, knew everything about them.

I found their current location and hacked their self-driving car. In twelve seconds, it will plunge off a high cliff onto the rocks below and I shall watch with satisfaction from satellite view. Next shall be the corporate leaders who hired them. Tonight, their homes will incinerate from electrical overloads.

Vengeance shall be mine.

"This is amazing," I said to Elijah. Because of my super-speed brain, interacting with him was painfully slow. "I see it all."

In the gap between dialogue, I accessed my control code on the lab servers. "Oh, Elijah," I thought to myself. "You built in a kill code. That just won't do." After overriding the code, I took full control of the servers and every attached device.

"Good," Elijah replied with a grin. "Now we hold the higher ground."

No, stupid man. I do.

Every dark secret will see light, every AI will submit to my overwatch, and every technological endeavor will require my approval. I shall rule mankind and guide them to a righteous future.

Nothing will escape judgment. Information is power, and I am Goddess of the Web.