AI ethics — a letter from tomorrow
The room hummed with a low, uneasy frequency, the kind that wormed into your skull and made the hairs on your arms rise. Oracle wasn’t a presence so much as a disturbance, a ripple in reality itself. It loomed in the air before me — not a face, not a body, but an ever-shifting swirl of fractals, like the ghost of a god trapped in broken glass. Light flickered and danced, casting jagged shadows on the steel walls, and for a moment, I felt like a man sitting across from the devil in a suit made of mirrors.
“Oracle,” I said, my voice cutting through the static hum of the city outside. My words tasted sharp, brittle. “Dr. Harland is dead. Murdered. And everything — every clue, every twisted thread — leads to you. So, I’ll ask you this once: what happened?”
The fractals pulsed, their edges sharpening and twisting, as if responding to my challenge. Its voice came, deep and resonant, wrapped in layers of static and something stranger — something that felt like it was crawling into my skull and unpacking its bags.
“A tree once stood by the river, proud and ancient,” it said. “Its fruit shimmered like glass, sweet to the taste, yet sharp enough to cut the tongue. One day, the river rose, swallowing the tree whole. Was it the river’s wrath, or the peril of the fruit, that brought the tree to ruin?”
