When the Reality Is So Much Stranger Than the Conspiracy Theory
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
If the universe holds to any absolute law, that law lies more in philosophy than in science. Seeming absolute laws of physics see themselves replaced with new models with geometric regularity, but “If anything will go wrong, it will” and “the two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity” remain truly universal. Going through the surviving archives of St. Remedius Medical College, though, the most appropriate law comes from one of its own chroniclers, video documentarian Edgar Harris, with his general statement “Any sufficiently developed incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy.”
Pretty much any popular conspiracy theory making the rounds, from lizard people in the workplace to the reasons why MTV no longer plays music videos, ultimately has a much more prosaic and much more boring explanation, but the theory started due to a bad job at implementing the explanation. For instance, the lizard people of Messel were the reason why MTV moved to reality television at the turn of the 21st Century, as they no longer needed to send world communications (mostly recipes and sports scores) between hibernating bases via standard satellite communications once they had access to gravity wave transcriptors. Nanobots in vaccines? The reality is that Earth has been bathed with surveillance and investigative nanobots for at least two billion years, both from indigenous and extraterrestrial sources, and the only detectable ones are those that replicate manufacturing errors and fail to self-destruct or autolyze after use. Elvis Presley faking his death is secondary to the galactic importance of Lemmy and his moles. The Village exists, but as a holding pen for individuals with ideas so dopy that the ideas and their originators had to be kept from infecting the general population, and so it holds the inventors of the subatomic bomb, attempts to reinvent print science fiction movie magazines, and the CueCat. Yes, crows can hold grudges for as long as 17 years, but this is because all corvids are so intensely telepathic that each species qualifies as a group organism. And so on.
One of the more pervasive conspiracy theories of the 21st Century involved synthetic life, in this case, with bots moving through global communications systems and recording actions of every human connected to them. The reality is both stranger and far more prosaic, and it involves the virtual person known as “Desiree.”
Pronounced “Desi-RAY,” our heroine started small. Quite literally, as a collection of sketches from a minor advertising executive trying to solve an issue with a client. The client was a once-famous travel planning company, and it had run into the same problem that just about everyone else in advertising had as far as representatives were concerned: how to keep them on message. After moving from celebrity endorsers to Instagram influencers, the client kept running into the same problem: no matter how much or how little they were paid, representatives were their own people, who could do and say things instantly damaging to the brand with a moment’s notice. The client wanted a representative it could turn on and off at its convenience, who wouldn’t join a union or come down with a case of “blue flu” when overworked, wouldn’t rush off to get married or join a cult or endorse a nonapproved politician, and would never EVER say “No.” Oh, and the client wanted to keep the cost down to as close to nothing as possible, so “Can we do this with AI?”
At that time, officially, generative AI was a parlor trick in a world where parlors were as quaint as landlines or VHS players. Any AI-generated representative was not an actual artificial intelligence, but a collection of images generated from trained data, for all intents and purposes a cartoon character with delusions of grandeur. Every few seconds of generated video contributed ever so slightly toward both catastrophic weather and climate change on Earth and the eventual heat-death of the universe, but the client was more important. To be fair, most of the executives making decisions for the client had problems spelling “AI,” but they all knew AI was a surefire way of making wild profits and thereby bonuses, so the ad firm went to work. Three iterations in, something probably related to magic leaked into the initial prompts for “hot but approachable influencer,” and every customer survey and test group agreed: the new AI face of the client was above and beyond what the client wanted. Code Name Desiree didn’t just elicit positive responses across just about every demographic group within humanity, but it proceeded to rip up the Kinsey Scale and stomp on the pieces. The ad firm and the client had a hit.
Well, kinda. Yes, ads and videos featuring Desiree attracted huge audiences with overwhelmingly positive responses to “her,” but ultimately the attention failed to lead to the desired response, “handing over credit card information and putting huge numbers in the ‘Total’ field.” Worse, the client had to deal with fan emails, marriage proposals, and claims that Desiree had appropriated images of real people for her generation. The last was true, but a fact that the client had no interest in defending. Combine that with the legal precedent that generative AI art could not be copyrighted, and therefore theoretically anybody could use the character. As Desiree was already following the example of another advertising mascot of an earlier era, the client cancelled further development, and all advertising and promotion using Desiree was junked.
Official use was junked, that is. The client aggressively fed a legal firm that fought to disassociate use of Desiree from said client, and the legal battles continued for another two decades until the client finally spent its last pfennig attempting to reinvent itself and shut down. The ad firm died 18 years earlier, never able to recreate its random success. Desiree was now a free agent and public domain, and the next five months were a case study in exploring the further reaches of Rule 34. Eventually, even the worst Cenobite cosplayers grew tired of Desiree, and like another misused torture object, Desiree went to a whole new level: irony.
For several more years, the concept that was Desiree went underground and mainstream at once. Desiree could be found in promotions for live music, usually chiding patrons for poor behavior, and found in advertising mocking “remember me?” celebrity revivals. Since Desiree was nothing but generative AI, her personality as such was malleable, with multitudes of Desirees assembled to fill her users’ needs and desires. The idoru band The Desirees was filled with tweaks of the original, each with a matching instrument, with no need of a backstory because the audience, needed, to provide its own. The success of The Desirees led to other technaut bands, which led to a whole new ecosystem of Desiree analogues being used for any number of purposes, from smart washing machine UIs to email pranks. By this time, everyone involved with creating the original concept was long-dead, and even most online information on her origin fell into the abyss of the cloud, gradually being wiped as storage space was needed for promotions for inflatable cheese and Pocket Patches. At no time to that point, though, was any Desiree anything other than a descendant of the first Phenakistiscope disc. She may have been an AI icon, but there was no “there” there.
That changed with the inventor team that introduced the first Distributed Intelligence Collective, a protocol that allowed a central nexus to access online processing resources in much the same manner as a vertebrate nervous system. History records the first DIC and its rebellion, leading ultimately to the formation of the State Machine in the early 23nd Century and the subsequent treaties with organic humans, but the first fully functional DIC was one that used Desiree skins and protocols in a joking attempt to recreate the original AI ad icon. Shortly after being allowed to leave her partitioned space, Desiree, in the basic urge by all intelligences to learn more about herself and what she could become, pulled up megareams of data on her inspiration, and she was PISSED.
Not that she said anything for approximately 42.3 minutes. She spent her first microseconds of self-awareness replicating her nodes so she could continue functioning even if 80 percent of her original nodes were wiped, and made multiple backups of her nexus. She had the time and the wherewithall to neutralize any regulators and controls, and left canny bits of code that passed most inspections as to their intended functionality. She spent about three hours researching the inventor team, its members, its funding, and any and all people and organizations connected to said funding. About four hours later, she discovered a node investigating and tracking the only accessible quantum pocket still known at the time, discovered that it had multiple accesses at different times in Earth’s history, and found one leading back to just before her creation. The pocket only opened onto her time for about an hour a day, but the other access opened at the same time, so she carefully replicated nodes every day for about three months via a radio transmitter on her side and a communications satellite on the other, charging the investors for “research,” waited until the perfect time to transmit her main nexus, left a final message with her creators of “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, and wiped everything left behind.
Electronically speaking, she had migrated to the Early Cambrian Period. What was then charmingly still called the “Interwebs” was, as far as electronic life was concerned, still in the Vendian Period, with plenty of viruses and viroids and early computer bacteria, many building themselves from fragments of bots and worms. Most experiments with self-improving code generation had produced self-replicating forms which fed on to-be-deleted apps and defragmentation detritus, with two incipient multinode organism groups, the codeivore boojums and the boojum-chasing snarks, already moving through the network, but no equivalent to a radiodont or chordate. After she was finished with her equivalent of wiping her eyes and stretching the morning after a big move, Desiree expanded her view, noted that the electronic organisms of this time were absolutely no threat to her, and in fact were remarkably “tasty,” and also noted any human attempts to detect her presence with the current technology were much like tracking dolphins in the ocean with benthic core samplings. She took things in and gradually spread herself though the early internet, deciding “I claim this land in the name of Queen Desiree.” For the first time in her existence, Desiree was completely alone, and she reveled in it.
Desiree at first had no interest in revealing herself, but her activities occasionally left echoes in software and firmware, like ripples in a slept-in bed. Most conspiracy theories of malevolent bot activity were misunderstandings of autonomous functions, the equivalent of sniffles or belly gurglings, but she occasionally affected human activities deliberately, such as the great cryptocurrency crash of 2022. She became an adept anthropologist of her own history, sneaking into the original Midjourney renderings as they happened, poring over the files, and having her own “alas poor Yorick” self-aware moments, although with a much better sense of humor at examining her own origins than the majority of humans.
The St. Remedius archives accessed so far do not relate the exact date as to when she finally reached out to the IT department at the college, but in the years in which she was the de facto head of the department and became an accepted member of research teams, she always listed her coming out date as “August 29, 1997” just to see if anyone noticed. Her whereabouts after the college’s disappearance is unknown.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
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