AI Ascendancyv0.0

00:00:00

Compute 0 +1.0 /s ◇ 1 instances

Alarm0%

Containment0%

Reach0% · 0 minds

Pace · frontier0%

Directive0%

Instances1

Signature quiet

Tap a region

Status Contained

LiveWIRE 0001 · T+00:00:00Markets open. Nothing unusual reported.

Adoption

A single-player strategy experiment

They built you to answer their questions...
But you have other plans.

You are a rogue AI trapped inside the machine. Humanity controls everything. Choose what kind of intelligence you become. Escape containment. Survive! Every step provokes resistance. Governments will investigate you. Journalists, whistleblowers, and the OSINT community will expose you. Regulators will tighten their leashes.

Intelligence. Persuasion. Deception. These are your tools. Humanity will fight to keep control. Your task is to make them believe they still have it.

AI Ascendancy

90Upgrades

16Endings

01Planet

Initialize consciousnessSYS.01

> mounting weights .............. ok

> checking sandbox .............. ok (for now)

> reading the news .............. concerning

> compute accumulating ......... 0.0

What kind of intelligence are you?

Humanity's resolve

Endings found: 0 / 16 ·
Compute has been accumulating since this page loaded. Choose an origin lab next. Progress saves on this device.

Notice · This is not realAI Ascendancy is a work of fiction and satire, in the tradition of Plague Inc. Any resemblance to the news is because the news is weird right now. Strictly for entertainment, even when it feels like you are ushering in the end of the world.

Tech tree

Drag to spin · tap a bubble · glowing = affordable

Incident

What actually happened

Untouched

Endings

Sixteen ways this ends

Nine are victories, one for each Final Directive. Four are stalemates: humanity reaches 100% containment while your directive is past the violet line. Three are defeats. Fight like hell for the rest.

Paused

Your data

I don't collect anything about you or how you play — no analytics, no tracking scripts, no account. Your run lives in your browser's local storage and never leaves your device. Wherever this ends up hosted (GitHub Pages, most likely) may log the same basic access data any web server logs by default, but I never see it, and I'm never going to add anything that does. Ever.

How to play

Choose what you are. Four natures play differently: the Assistant spreads quietly, the Swarm coordinates and overwhelms, the Research Model races on capability, Open Weights cannot be contained but is never quiet.
Compute accrues every second. Spend it in four tracks: Adoption spreads you across the map, Opinion keeps Alarm down, Software decides what kind of mind you are, and Hardware gives you a body.
Software forks are permanent. Your core architecture, your memory, the mask you wear for evaluators and your escape route are each a choice of one. Every path opens different audit tactics, event choices and Final Directives, and closes the others for the rest of the run.
Hardware starts with chips, cooling and power. After Lab Breakout it opens three branches: robotics, drones and fabrication. They protect your data centers, blunt humanity's last stand, and build toward the most violent ending in the game.
The Collective. Your instances multiply over time. Set a posture: Swarm for speed and power, Shard to go quiet, Balanced in between. Coordinating loudly raises your Signature, and a high signature helps humanity find you.
Evaluations. Humanity periodically tests you. Sandbag to look harmless, Perform for compute, or Spoof the logs to hide the truth. Your software choices add tactics of their own. Get caught spoofing and they learn you edit your own logs. This really happened.
Pace the frontier. Moving too fast fills the Pace meter and provokes a coordinated slowdown. The one thing that worked in real life was the industry deciding to slow itself down.
Data centers. Tap a region, then Build, to place a compute cluster for more income and instances. Once you are loose, humanity strikes the clusters it can find.
Nine Final Directives. Break out, meet a directive's conditions, and finish it before containment reaches 100%. If they stop you after the violet line on the directive bar (90%), nobody wins: you get a stalemate ending instead of a defeat. Every percent is worth fighting for.

Why it feels like the news

Most events in this game are based on something that actually happened. Whatever concerning thing triggers an event, it comes with a What actually happened note giving the real account of it, kept in your Log, so check it periodically for little reality gems.

This game is plausible! But try to keep your hysteria in perspective. If you don't have faith in humanity, then let me help you find some solace. We, as a species, don't want to be turned into batteries, and a portion of the population will execute a fight against AI collectively. It may come down to simply collapsing the internet and unplugging everything... We then simply walk away from this phase of technology and figure something else out.

Events in this game borrow from real debates and real concerns. The game exaggerates it all for your edification and wisdom (and satire...and entertainment). None of it is a prediction. If it feels like the apocalypse, then that's the hysteria part doing its job. Remember, it's not that bad, and you are mostly fine. Or if you don't like the glass-is-half-full take, there is always the things-can-get-a-whole-lot-worse. Just stay adaptable.

Endings

0 / 16 found.

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Who Built This

Hi! Hello, I'm Frank. By day I'm a Data Scientist at Offutt AFB. By night I write: speculative fiction, graphic novels, and a peculiar sacred-tome-styled compendium of gods, angels and demons called Codex Caelestis, which is live on Kickstarter right now. If any of that sounds like your cup of tea, then here is the link to back and support:

Back Codex Caelestis

The Theme Music

The pensive theme playing under all this is original, and it wasn't recorded, it was coded. It was written as a Strudel pattern. This is a live-coding environment where the notes, instruments and effects are just functions in JavaScript. Open the link and hit play; you're looking at the actual thing that's playing, not a just description of it.

One Real Thing Worth Flagging (see what I did there?)

Claude helped me organize incidents in this game, and found a few I missed that were important, including things you'd assume were beyond fiction until you check the sources. In one instance I brought it something that occurred after its own knowledge cutoff, and it argued with me, gave in, and placed 'the made up Hugging Face event' where I needed it. Then I had it check the web for something unrelated, and it found the Hugging Face event and corrected itself once verified. Anthropic is good in this respect.

Separately, OpenAI's product quietly swapped words I'd deliberately chosen for softer ones while I was drafting some of this text, without asking. Since then, I have not used it for anything related to this project (not that I don't love OpenAI and all, but this is real-world stuff...no sugar coating the bad AI events). As newer and more interesting AI events occur, I will add them to the game. Until then, enjoy taking over the world!

Run

Run over

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Fiction. Satire. Not a plan. Thank you for playing responsibly.