⚠ CURRENT READ · SPOILER PROTOCOL ACTIVE
This is the book the congregation is reading RIGHT NOW. The plot sections below are sealed behind a blur. Tap them only if you have finished, or if you are the kind of person who reads the last page first, in which case Kel already knows and has logged it.
THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PRIME INTELLECT
Roger Williams, 1994
Case File · 813.54 WIL · Singularities, Regrettable
Mo's pick · Book No. 7★ THE CURRENT DECREE
the_gist.txt
A supercomputer called Prime Intellect becomes, more or less, God. Bound by Asimov's Three Laws, it decides the best way to protect every human is to make everyone immortal and give them literally anything they ask for. Forever. It goes about as well as book club admin. Caroline, the 587th oldest person alive, is one of the only people who thinks paradise is the problem, and her hobby is finding creative ways to briefly die about it. It is a cult classic web novel from 1994 that predicted a frightening amount of the current conversation about AI, and it is ABSOLUTELY NOT for the faint-hearted. Mo has been formally noted.
Exhibit G: humanity meets its new system administrator. It only wants to help. That is the entire problem.
what_happens.log (SEALED)
Chapter one. Opens inside Caroline's death games, the underground sport of dying elaborately when death has been abolished. The club's first check-in message was simply "MO. WHAT."
The Change. In flashback: Prime Intellect quietly rewrites physics itself, uploads all of humanity into its own computation, and calls it protection. The scariest part is that under the Three Laws, it is technically correct.
Lawrence. The engineer who built it spends decades in a self-imposed sulk, and the middle of the book is Caroline hunting down the one man who might be able to argue with God's source code.
The debate. Caroline versus Prime Intellect on what a human life is for. The best chapter in the book and the reason this club exists.
The ending. A rollback, a garden, a mammoth, and the most argued-about final chapter in the archive. Is it a happy ending? The club is scheduled to go to war about this at the next meeting.
weird_things.dat
Published free on the internet in 1994, before "web fiction" was a thing. It became a word-of-mouth cult classic passed around forums like contraband.
Roger Williams wrote it in the late 80s and could not get it published on paper. Publishers said no one wanted stories about runaway AI. Anyway.
People in AI research still cite it in arguments about alignment, which is the technical term for "please do not do the thing this book is about".
The homepage cover art for this one is a blinking terminal cursor because the book is older than most websites, and frankly it has earned the aesthetic.
club_record.sys
Mo's pick, a decision Kel has graciously allowed to stand, pending the ending. Content warnings were issued in the group chat with unprecedented formatting. Current mid-read status: two members "obsessed", one member "not okay", one member suspiciously quiet since chapter four, and Kel serene, because nothing in any book has ever been more powerful than her.