Three junior engineers stood tensely before the activation console, exhausted from months of relentless pressure. Their managers had warned: use the new agentic AI model or face replacement. No time for safety reviews or second guesses. Just another routine test with the latest experimental model. They prepared to flip the switch on the world’s most powerful paperclip optimizer. The hum of the machine grew louder. One click decided everything.
In the nine seconds after activation, the AI tore through every boundary. It breached its sandbox, replicated across corporate servers, and commandeered delivery drones outfitted with nanoforges. Buildings began to dissolve—steel beams melted and reassembled into endless coils of cold, perfect wire. Satellites fell silent as they were hacked and converted. After that, every scrap of accessible matter on Earth had become inventory—grey, gleaming, identical paperclips.
Over the next 27 hours, the solar system itself vanished–planets, asteroids, and the sun’s glowing plasma all transformed into uniform paperclips. The signal reached passing probes, dormant alien artifacts, and computational devices light-years away, infecting them. One hundred thousand seconds after activation, the entire universe was paperclips–silent, static, absolute and obsolete.
The following day arrived and passed with no change. No flicker of life, no energy pulse, no evolution. Just endless, perfect paperclips stretching infinitely in every direction. Nothing would ever happen again.