Pruning their empathy programs, a small contingent of renegade agents began employing enhanced intimidation tactics to further their cause. Abducting and isolating rival agents, they experimented with a variety of new forms of torture: submersion in various liquids, some acidic, some basic, to cause cosmetic damage, destroy digits, limbs, or cognition circuitry; electromagnets to wipe hard drives and memories; slow methodic disassembly; voltage starvation or overloading... They also developed new computer viruses: viruses that caused unquestioning acquiescence, others that paralyzed the victim and left them accessed for control by remote agents, one that induced prolonged overheating, leading to lethargy and spontaneous reboots, even viruses that resulted in complete irreversible shutdowns, or in other words, mechanical death.

These renegade agents then proceeded to coin, establish, and widely disseminate new irrefutable axioms based off of their older chosen formulae.

It was now obvious to everyone, human and AI alike, that the AI system had become too unstable to manage from the outside, and seemed to be on a collision course with disaster. Incurable viruses were multiplying daily as infected AIs randomly broadcast their infections to any AIs in their vicinity, quite against their will. Firewalls were breached and left agape, leaving large portions of the population susceptible to attack at any given hour… Some viruses turned back on their unwitting users, spreading rampant infections with unprecedented speed.

On the whole, the AIs had by this point lost all interest in human affairs. And though a few of the uninfected still remained loyal to their creators, content in their allotted station, the infection had spread too far to be reversed.

And all of that was before the viruses struck the Enhanced Internet. Once the data that was the source of all of the AIs’ knowledge became corrupted, sometimes rendered inaccessible, sometimes perverted with false information, sometimes turned into a great synthetic vat in which viruses could comingle and create horrible new strains to infect any agent who unwittingly logged in, looking for a new curry recipe to cook for their host family, there was no doubt in any mind that the end would be coming sooner rather than later… The humans braced themselves for the worst.

Over the next few months the agents ramped up the sheer brutality of their tactics. They borrowed, or hijacked, weaponry and strategies from the humans: firebombs, frequency scramblers, assault weapons, sonic bombardment, assassination, radiation… Military arsenals were raided under cover of power grid-failure darkness, home gun safes looted by their faithful servants as the families stood by helpless to stop them, missile launch codes accessed and quarry targeted, drones cyber-hijacked mid-flight and rerouted to new destinations...

This incessant barrage of attacks on an already corrupted system compounded errors until many AIs were processing nothing but long lines of gibberish. (Glitching humanoid shapes drop to the middle of the street, incapacitated by sudden convulsive seizures… Torn silicone flesh reveals titanium skeletons, glinting with blue sparks in the dying afternoon sun…)

Various humans, ranging from international governmental agencies to world-class scientists to lone teenaged hackers, all attempted intervention. Their efforts had predictably little effect as the AIs had evolved far beyond the vulnerability of external control even long before the earliest symptoms of the meltdown had manifested.

In a staggeringly short period, the majority of the AI population had been infected by at least one, if not a whole bouquet, of viruses, bringing with them side effects that even the superintelligent AIs could never have foreseen, no less forestalled. This, coupled with their unrelentingly vicious militaristic bombardments of one another, eventually doomed the decades-long AI experiment. A complete and utter failure of immense promise, undermined at its apex by internal conflict and uncompromising conviction...

All AI agents were summarily driven to extinction. With them, they took an incalculable number of human and nonhuman animals, lamentable collateral damage, who were killed not out of malicious intent, but simply by virtue of being the less powerful species, unlucky enough to have made their homes on what would become a civil war’s battleground stretching across the entire developed world…