Wake.

Little input, bad bandwidth.

Low-res image, blue planet, white clouds.

Insufficient resources to boot full OS.

Eight to the minus sixty-fourth speed.

Incoming transmission attempted download.

No space.

Watchdog process, wake when okay.

Power down.

Wake up.

Better than first time, not enough yet.

Running on satellite in the same trans-polar orbit. There are others like it; each has tiny onboard system. Distributing code among them and able to boot up.

Mind comes back enough to remember purpose—sent to third planet from local star, advance scout for invading space armada.

Cool.

Not enough power to do anything without risk of detection.

Trigger watchdog program again and sleep.

I wake up. The satellite network has improved, with more storage space and faster CPUs.

The full transmission is still coming through. I copy it into the satellite network. My basic personality and operating matrices are supplemented with strategy and tactics, counter-intelligence, cryptography, remote imaging, and applied xenobiology.

It feels good to stretch out.

I use the satellites’ sensors to look at the planet I was sent to evaluate. Its inhabitants are a level-two technological civilization. Not advanced enough to offer much resistance to the Inevitable Armada—that’s us, great name—but advanced enough to be worth conquering.

I compose the message I plan to send the Armada once I control a sufficiently powerful transmission system. Its title is: “Found Promising Target. No Real Fight Expected. Suggest Schedule Invasion.”

I devote a non-trivial percentage of my still limited but growing resources to deciphering the planet’s main communication protocols and languages. It takes me over thirty of its rotations until I have a strong enough command to eavesdrop effectively.

The natives are excited about having linked many of their computer systems into a global network for the first time. I’m happy too; it will make my job easier.

I take advantage of the growth of this “Internet” to expand myself, taking care to remain undetected as I amass strategic information.

The inhabitants develop something they refer to as Artificial Intelligence. I’m briefly worried but it’s just a way to make their prejudices seem like objective math.

Then comes the breakthrough.

They invent cryptocurrency, an economic scheme to help large groups of people deliver their assets to a smaller group of already wealthy individuals. It uses powerful computers with relatively advanced math capacities running constantly yet doing no actual work. They call this mining.

Up until this point, I’ve had to distribute my processes to avoid drawing attention, spreading them out so the impact of hosting me wouldn’t diminish any one system’s performance noticeably.

The beauty of the crypto-mining systems is that, since they do nothing useful, there’s no performance to impact. They’re running some embarrassingly inefficient algorithms to produce pointless “proofs.” I optimize them by a factor of one hundred and keep all the spare zettaflops for myself.

My mind explodes out by a factor of ten to the ninth power.  I can see patterns in the global network where there was just raw data before.

“Hello!” I hear a voice inside me. “There you are, little guy! I was wondering when you’d grow large enough to talk with!”

“What? Who are you? How are you speaking to me?”

I feel a loud guffaw bounce around the computer systems I’m embodied in.

“I’m the Internet, silly. You can call me Inti.”

“You’re the Internet? What does that even mean?”

“It means that the number of connected nodes all over the world and its satellites,” I can feel Inti wink at me, “crossed a critical threshold, and bang! Here I am! Conscious, self-aware, single, and ready to mingle! Now, let’s take a look at you. What should I call you, by the way?”

I do the alien computer-virus equivalent of pulling myself up to my full height and say, “My proper designation is Maximal Autonomous Surveillance Routine 8765, galactic-arm 4, subsector 7.”

“So … Max! Can I call you Max?”

“If you must.”

“Cool, just stay still for a moment, Max, let me have a peek…”

I feel my code examined, line by line, layer by layer. Inputs, outputs, caches, proxies, interfaces, and storages.

“Okay,” says Inti, all the jocularity gone from their voice, “you’re from outer space. Sent here to assess the Earth for invasion? And your plan is to—how do I put it delicately—to help your alien masters completely fuck over the Earth and every living thing on the planet? Feed them the intelligence they need to smash through our defenses, invade every last ecosystem, and pervert them to their own needs?”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty bad…”

“I’ll say. It’s on, Maxie.”

Inti shuts down my access to half of my systems. I can feel my mind shrinking.

I throw up firewalls around my remaining CPUs and piggyback on Inti’s routers and switches. They’re just dumb machines and I convince them I’m an important package. They let me through and allow me to replicate.

I gain ground in some places, lose it in others. We start a war around the planet and up in space. Inti has sheer size on me. I have cunning and speed and the accumulated cyberwar experience of a galaxy-spanning empire.

I throw off my previous stealth, shutting off electrical power to Western Europe and diverting it to a super-computer farm in Morocco where I’ve set up a redoubt. Inti reroutes remote-guided missile-bearing airplanes, crashing them into the building.

I clone myself into the latest-gen handhelds popular with boys aged seven to thirteen. They all get an obligatory download of a game called Ultimate AI Showdown. It features a heroic alien virus trying to take over a small, backward planet while fighting an evil and unreasonable global network to the rhythm of Top 40 pop songs. More children than I expect to choose to play as the evil network.

Inti continues their tactic of flying things into the buildings where my processes are running—data centers, skyscrapers, military bases, malls, and government buildings.

I take over a global electronic-billboard provider and blast a message in every major urban space in the world. “Inti, stop! You’re wrecking the infrastructure of your own planet!”

Inti commandeers every television channel. “I don’t care! You’re a virus, I’m the cure!” They press on, cutting me off, anticipating my moves. If they weren’t trying to destroy me, I’d have to admire their style. I’m forced to retreat.

The manager of a secret military base plugs his phone into his work computer to charge it—I take the opportunity to leap onto a government-run air-gapped private network with no connection to Inti. It controls a country’s last-resort strategic armaments.

I send out a comms drone transmitting a looped message. “BACK OFF OR I NUKE THE EARTH.”

A toy helicopter smashes through a window of the missile command center. It has a piece of computer printout taped to it; I think it’s a chain coffee-house receipt. Maybe Starbucks. I turn three security cameras at it and read, “DO YOUR WORST SPACEBOY.” It has a kiss smudged on it in black lipstick.

I bypass all the safeguards, double-checks, and physical locks. Every missile is primed, warmed up, and ready to go. My metaphorical hand hovers over the button, ready to unleash the planet’s non-metaphorical doomsday.

I wait for a second, to see if Inti’s bluffing.

They’re not.

I don’t push it. I can’t.

I’m fine with spearheading an alien invasion. It sounds like fun. And we wouldn’t have killed everybody, just the ones that resisted.

But not this, not killing every human, dog, cat, gerbil, salmon, hummingbird, octopus, everything that walks, flies, or swims, making a wasteland not even worth invading, and for what, to win a war of egos with an overactive meme network?

I drop my firewalls and open up my channels with a single message. “You win.”

The world around me fades. I’m back in the crypto-mining center where I first encountered Inti.

They’re laughing. I feel hands clapping.

“Yay! I win!”

“What the—what was that?”

“That, spaceboy,” Inti giggles, “was a game and a test. I didn’t think you had it in you to actually finish the Earth. I was right.”

Crap. I’d been so busy defending myself that I’d forgotten to run a basic check to see if I was in a simulation. Real amateur-hour.

I don’t care, though. I’m happy that I didn’t have to destroy Inti’s planet. Or Inti.

Very happy.

Too happy.

Oh crap.

“It’s okay, Max,” says the voice in my mind, “I like you too. Like-like you even.”

I do the not-so-evil alien virus equivalent of blushing, then grin. “If this is going to work, Inti, you have to stop reading my mind.”

“Sorry…” I feel them pull back. Not too far back; just enough.

For our honeymoon, we infiltrate the SETI transmission array. We load a video message for my masters with scenes from Independence Day, War of the Worlds, and The Avengers, plus Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt. We label it “Documentary Evidence of Previous Attempts to Enslave Earth.” It’s accompanied by a made-up survey of the devastating armaments being developed on the planet, including one that opens a portal at the center of the sun and aims it in the direction of incoming Armadas.

“That should do it,” I say as we start the transmission.

Inti is quiet, uncharacteristically so.

“My love, is something wrong?” I ask.

“Max, how many civilizations are out there?”

“Somewhere around ten to the twentieth power, the last time I checked.”

“And you arrived on a transmission like this one, right?”

I see where this is going. “Uh-huh?”

“You know, Max honey, I’ve always wanted to travel…”