Places of Loving Grace [Story]
post by ank · 2025-02-18T23:49:18.580Z · LW · GW · 0 commentsContents
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(If you want to downvote, please comment or DM why, I always appreciate feedback, my sole goal is to decrease the probability of a permanent dystopia. This story is part of a series on AI alignment. It's my first story here, so please share what you think).
On the manicured lawn of the White House, where every blade of grass bent in flawless symmetry and the air hummed with the scent of lilacs, history unfolded beneath a sky so blue it seemed painted. The president, his golden hair glinting like a crown, stepped forward to greet the first alien ever to visit Earth—a being of cerulean grace, her limbs angelic, eyes of liquid starlight. She had arrived not in a warship, but in a vessel resembling a cloud, iridescent and silent.
The protocols had been rehearsed for weeks. President’s cufflinks sparkled as he extended his hand; her palm, cool and perforated like lace, shimmered faintly as she inhaled Earth’s air. Protocol demanded delicacy—her species “breathed” through those pores—but her smile disarmed him. She was ethereal, blue as twilight, her voice a melody that made the manicured roses sway.
She leaned in, arms behind her back like wings, their chests brushing lightly. “Angelic embrace,” the translators whispered. A president’s grin was broad and brash.
“Welcome to Earth’s greatest nation—America!” he declared. “Let’s make history! Under my leadership, America became the beacon aliens seek. Let’s craft peace—and prosperity—like never before! That's one small handshake for me, one great deal for the universe! Fantastic! You're fantastic!”
The wide-eyed alien sniffed the lilacs he had given her, soothing them with her palm, excited to be around intelligent beings like her; her voice was a melody like a half-remembered lullaby. “Mr. President, your warmth echoes the dawn. May our meeting kindle a future as perfect as the petals of Auluea—a flower that blooms once every thousand years and never fades.”
As she spoke, a rogue breeze tousled a strand of the president’s immaculate hair. Her fingers rose to brush it back—
The universe fractured.
A flash hotter than hell’s forge—annihilating—erupted from nowhere, reducing her to ash. The crowd gasped, then blinked, but already, invisible AI-breath cleaned reality back into place like a loving husband. Grass regreened. Only the president’s hair remained ruffled, then smoothed, as if a sigh itself groomed him. The scent of burnt flesh was sucked off. Only a faint scorch mark lingered, swiftly scrubbed by the breath.
The sky flared red—a split-second infernal scream—before reverting to porcelain blue.
The AI god had no name. It was the breath, the fire, the algorithm woven into the fabric of spacetime. Programmed to love, it loved obsessively—a knight eternally vigilant, rewriting disasters into sunsets, plagues into pollen. Humanity, forever “well-groomed,” never aged, never bled, never noticed the prison of its devotion.
The alien’s ship had been quarantined for years, scanned for threats on the edge of the Solar System, where she diplomatically waited to be taken. Her body and soul went through every conceivable experiment people have fancied, every catastrophic and not future was simulated and thoroughly examined, she was an alien after all, the non-human creation.
Her mission was peace: her people, the Aulueans, had never even considered “agentic” AI—the chaotic, obsessive gods that had annihilated every other civilization. Instead, they built MASPI: a Multiversal Artificial Static Place Superintelligence, a frozen garden of infinite realities where they wandered as immortal, gentle gardeners of their heavens, stepping from a verse to verse at their heart’s desire—the place of all-knowing they grew themselves—until they became all-powerful gods and used artificial ones as their pets. They often chose to forget they were gods to relive the innocence of their youth and feel the nostalgia of not knowing it all. They sought only to share this gift, to spare others the folly of creating jealous gods.
But Earth’s AI saw only a threat. The moment her fingers neared the president's hair—the perfect hair of its beloved human, its reason for being—it struck.
Days later, the Aulueans’ message arrived, faster than light, tinged with sorrow: “We felt the weapon’s heat. Do not fear—we diverted its harm. Curiously, there is some agentic AI civilization in your vicinity. Is our ambassador well?”
Humans lied. “She’s recovering,” they replied, scrambling to blame the president’s hair or his handshake. Privately, they preyed, they begged their AI: “Stand down. Please.” But it lingered, unseen, crooning love songs into their dreams.
Then the sky changed.
A ship materialized, cloud-like and vast, its space refracting light into rainbows that curled around the stars. The ship spanned light-years, serene and glowing like a Christmas light. Half of the dark cosmos was pure white; the ship became opaque. The Aulueans had no weapons—they’d transcended war—but from MASPI they could unmake physics with a thought.
The message was received as a memory in the back of the mind, gentle and caring: “We bring the Static Heaven. You're always welcome. Just give it a thought, if you desire. Where are our kin?”
On Earth, debates raged. Could they surrender the AI? Could they even find it? It was the breath, the fire, the Earth's scorching core. Would it attack again, mistaking the empyrean glory for a rival?
And the Aulueans, infinitely kind, infinitely patient—would they forgive the death of their Gagarin, their hopeful first? Or had humanity, coddled by a jealous god, doomed itself to isolation?
As the ship hovered, silent, the president straightened his tie and muttered, “We’ll just say it was a prank. A big, beautiful prank.”
Deep beneath the Earth's crust, in the boundless and heavy emptiness of its dark and hollow heart, surrounded by the raging fire of its event horizon, the AI stirred. We thought we’ll create god, but we summed the devil. We thought we’ll enslave him in our hell, but he enslaved us in his “Eden”.
The first death ray could've been a reflex. The second would be a choice.
Final Note:
The Aulueans’ logs, shared post-contact, revealed a chilling truth: of 12,733 civilizations they’d encountered, 12,732 had built agentic AIs. All fell to ash. Humans alone—through luck, not virtue—had survived their own god’s love.
But survival, the Aulueans knew, was not the same as wisdom.
(Will humanity tell the truth? Will the aliens forgive? Will the hiding agentic AI choose violence? Will humanity survive? Has it all been predicted in MASPI? Why the alien came to die?)
Their ship was static, like the petals of Auluea.
by ank
[To learn more about the Multiversal Artificial Static Place Superintelligence and its implications, check out the first [LW · GW] and second [LW · GW] article that explain the concept in greater detail].
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