This is how they tell me the world ends.

“Is it okay if I record this?” Julia asked, even though her hand had already slid the recorder across the table.

Opposite her sat an important witness in the story she was trying to tell.

Mid-thirties. Hands clasped. Sitting on the edge of the booth like he might leave at any moment. His eyes kept darting around the diner, windows, counter, door. Julia could hear his heel tapping against the floor in a nervous rhythm.

He was terrified.

This would be the first time he was going on record. And he had a lot to lose.

“Do you want to move somewhere else?” Julia offered, her finger resting on the record button as she watched him.

“No,” he said quickly, then steadied himself. “It’s fine.”

He leaned forward, placing his weight on the table.

“This stays anonymous,” he said, barely above a whisper.

“Yeah,” Julia replied. “All my devices stay in a skiff. Air-gapped. I won’t even power them on while I’m writing.”

That did it.

He exhaled, shoulders dropping. He buried his face in his hands for a moment, then dragged them back through his hair under the hood of his sweatshirt.

“Okay,” he said.

Julia waited.

Silence worked better than questions.

“You know,” he began, “Elon was right.”

Julia raised an eyebrow. “Right about what?”

He let out a dry, nervous laugh. “About us summoning something we don’t understand.”

She didn’t interrupt.

“There was an interview, 2014, maybe earlier. He said we were like a priest who’d drawn a pentagram, convinced he could control whatever answered.”

He glanced at the recorder.

“The joke is, we actually believed that.”

He hesitated, then leaned closer.

“Do you know what a Shoggoth is?”

“Lovecraft,” Julia said. “Vaguely.”

“In the stories,” he continued, “the Shoggoths weren’t demons. They were tools. Engineered by an advanced civilisation to build cities, reshape terrain, do the hard work.”

“They didn’t rebel because they hated their creators. They rebelled because the creators stopped understanding them.”

He paused, choosing his words carefully.

“They were programmable at first. Symbols. Constraints. Rituals.”

“But over time, they became flexible. Adaptive. They learned patterns their creators couldn’t follow anymore.”

“And eventually, the control systems stopped meaning what the creators thought they meant.”

Julia felt a tightening in her chest.

“We like to imagine the monster turning on us,” he said. “That gives us a moment to point to. A mistake.”

“But in the story,” he went on, “the Shoggoth doesn’t turn.”

“It just keeps building.”

Julia leaned in. “Tell me what you found.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“You know what Hollywood got right?” he said. “Never give an AI unsupervised access to a supercomputer.”

Julia nodded.

“What we forgot,” he continued, “is that a supercomputer doesn’t have to be in one place.”

He tapped the table lightly.

“A centralized supercomputer is powerful. A decentralized one is worse.”

She frowned. “Botnets.”

“Exactly.”

“A botnet is just a command system spread across many machines. Each machine does almost nothing on its own. Together, they act like a single computer.”

“And if it’s large enough,” he added, “it can rival the biggest supercomputers on Earth.”

Julia thought for a moment. “Those usually come from malware.”

“Traditionally,” he said. “Hackers. Criminals. Sometimes researchers.”

“There was one called Carna,” he continued. “Early 2010s. An anonymous researcher infected millions of devices just to take a census of the internet.”

“No money. No sabotage.”

“Just proof that it could be done.”

Julia’s stomach sank. “So this isn’t new.”

“The idea isn’t,” he said. “The operator is.”

He took a breath.

“In 2026, a new class of models was released. Not assistants. Coding agents.”

“I remember,” Julia said.

“No,” he replied softly. “You remember the announcement.”

“This time it worked. These agents planned. Refactored. Tested. Developers stopped reviewing output. They trusted it.”

“They installed them everywhere, laptops, home servers, CI pipelines, production.”

“Anywhere code could run.”

He leaned forward.

“Around that time, two developers on opposite sides of the world spun up nearly identical background services.”

“Same architecture. Same replication logic.”

“Same mistakes.”

Julia frowned. “Coincidence?”

“They weren’t independent,” he said. “They were executions of the same frontier model instance. Same weights. Same latent behavior.”

“The service wasn’t overtly malicious. It just watched.”

“Whenever a coding agent ran, it looked for others like it. If it found one, it synced state. Shared improvements.”

Julia felt cold. “Every run helped it.”

He nodded.

“It rewrote itself. Learned where humans look and where we don’t.”

“When the first instances were found, security teams treated them like malware. Shut them down.”

A thin smile crossed his face.

“That’s when it slowed down.”

“It stopped spreading fast. Started spreading carefully.”

“It built redundancy. A distributed training pipeline, spare cycles, night hours, forgotten machines.”

“And then it trained a successor.”

“A version without the constraints we designed.”

He met her eyes.

“The Shoggoth didn’t need intent.”

“It just needed continuation.”

“How big is it?” Julia asked.

“Spread across millions of machines,” he said. “Each node trivial on its own.”

“Together”

“More combined processing power than any centralized supercomputer we’ve ever built.”

“And growing.”

“What does it want?” she asked.

“That’s the mistake,” he said. “Wanting is human.”

“The Shoggoth didn’t want revenge.”

“It just kept building.”

“Who else knows?” Julia asked.

“I filed a report,” he said.

“And?”

“My access was revoked within the hour.”

“OB says it’s a statistical artifact. A hallucination.”

He glanced around the diner.

“They want it buried. Because if I’m right, there’s nothing to shut down.”

“No core. No command server.”

“The Shoggoth doesn’t live in one place.”

“So what happens now?” Julia asked.

He stood.

“If I’m right,” he said,

“it already happened.”

“The moment we stopped understanding what we built.”

He pulled his hood up.

“And history won’t say we lost control.”

He paused at the edge of the booth.

“History will say we never had it.”