The Zero Day Proposal - Revisited
An AI ChatBot Takes Over the World
Intelligence is hard to define but is something that, like obscenity; we know it when we see it. Unlike obscenity, intelligence is something that nearly all humans appreciate.
Even when we’re not conscious of it, we greatly value those among us who can learn, understand, teach, and solve problems. Those who are adept at adapting to new situations, mediating conflicts, and finding better solutions. All of these are behaviors that we associate with that hard-to-define yet extremely valuable quality of intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence, roughly defined as a machine's capability to mimic human intelligence, is therefore almost surely something of great value.
Colossus Is All We Need
Artificial Intelligence has always fascinated me. From HAL9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, to Bender in Futurama. I’ve watched hundreds of movies and shows with myriad and manifold takes on AI. Their visions spanning a century, from profound masterpieces like Fritz Lang’s ”Metropolis” (1927) to popcorn fluff like JLo’s ”Atlas” (2024), and everything in between.
In addition to movies and TV, I’ve ingested an extensive library of hundreds of pulp paperback Sci-Fi novels belonging to a friend's similarly nerdy father. But I’m not just into AI for entertainment.
As a pre-teen I also consumed non-fiction textbook-like tomes such as the aptly titled, “Artificial Intelligence” (Part of Time Life's Understanding Computers series).
My fascination with AI (particularly the efficiency and productivity gains granted by automation), is a large part of why I decided to study Computer Science Technology in college.
As enthusiastic and extensive as my interest is, I still consider myself a dabbler. In the first half of 2018 I dabbled my way into reading the academic paper, "Attention Is All You Need". Despite not being intelligent enough to understand it all, my meat-based neural net had enough training to grok the obvious fact:
The impact AI is very soon to have upon humanity will be unimaginably MASSIVE.
Like the Steam Engine, Guttenberg Press, or the Internet; Generative Pre-trained Transformers and Large Language Models are a profound technological leap. Even to my dabbling layman’s mind, the insights in "Attention Is All You Need", seemingly bounded beyond many of the hard problems I understood to be holding back progress in the AI field since at least the early 1990s.
After reading this academic paper I knew to a high degree of statistical certainty that something as innocuous as an AI ChatBot would radically change the world.
Inspired by this vivid future being projected into my mind’s eye, I unzipped my folder of unexecuted story ideas, unpacking my reboot/adaptation of one of my favorite movies: An underrated gem and a pioneer in the World-Dominating-Super-Intelligence genre:
Colossus The Forbin Project (1970).
My idea was to introduce many of the concepts from "Attention Is All You Need" into my AI Super Intelligence story, and like Colossus: The Forbin Project, also set it in the social, political, and technological environments of our not-too-distant future.
All of the above—the scatterbrained constellation of inspirations, cross-pollinated, germinated, and grew into my book: The Zero Day Proposal.
A ChatBot Takes Over the World
In addition to the plot centering on an AI ChatBot, I rolled into the story a bunch of other contemporary elements: Social Media, Blockchain Technology, Universal Basic Income, Economic Turmoil, Food Deserts, The Decline of Academia, The Rise of Populism, Online Dating… etc.
Despite cramming in a microcosm of the modern human condition I kept myself grounded by imagining that tZDP might get adapted into a feature film. By keeping potential film production budget limitations in mind I simultaneously motivated myself with delusions of success and kept the story tightly focused, so that most of the action takes place in a single location. If not film, then it might even work as theatre.
I was aiming for it to be marketable so I researched what kind of books were selling, then adapted the hard Sci-Fi to fit the template of a Thriller-Detective-Romance with a Strong-PoC-Heroine.
Inspired by a book club I joined in 2017, my sassy Alabamian protagonist, Daniqua Lee Massey, would be based in part on DanikaXIX, the world’s preeminent expert on Frank Herbert’s Dune.
Above: DanikaXIX (aka the artist formerly known as ComicbookGirl19) cosplaying as Duke Leto Atreides II, God Emperor of Dune
Speculation Solidifies into Reality
I sketched out a skeleton of an outline with a few original characters in mind, a few composite caricatures, and a super punchy ending. Then, I set to work pantsing the points between the story beats. It flowed out of me quicker than anything I’ve written prior or since.
After a few rounds of ruthless self-editing the final draft of tZDP came in at ~25,000 words—more than twice the length of my previous novella, Shitlord, and just over half of a NaNoWriMo novel.
In the five years since The Zero Day Proposal was published much of what I was fluidly speculating upon has solidified into reality. We are now living in the year that I set the story.
I’m very proud of it. Here it is in its entirety. I hope you like:
Daniqua was just a regular single woman; hungry, horny, and trying to make it on her own in the world. But her past came calling, and now her weekend plans are FUBAR. Will she play her role, prevent nuclear annihilation, and win financial freedom? What will be her answer to The Zero Day Proposal?