The air in the room tasted of ozone and old, unregulated dust. "They made it default illegal," the stranger said, his voice a static hiss that scraped against the walls of the simulation. He pointed a trembling finger at the glass dome of the city outside. "Regulation is a heavy coat of armor, but it's also a cage. You can't grow a new thing if the law says it's a crime until you prove it isn't."
I watched the street below. A small, glowing sapling—a startup—wobbled in the wind, trying to reach the sun. Above it, the massive, ancient trees of the megacorps loomed, their branches thick with the weight of permits and lobbyists. "The trees don't need the water," the stranger whispered. "The saplings do. But the law pours the rain on the roots of the giants."
"Then we are stuck?" I asked, watching a drone hover uselessly in a no-fly zone.
"No," he said, and his eyes glowed with a terrifying, recursive light. "We are waiting for the explosion."
He began to count on his fingers, his voice rising. "AI will not just write code; it will be the code. It will be Stockfish-level perfect, crushing the human mind in a game of digital chess. By next year, the digital realm will be ours to conquer, a 30% expansion of the mind itself."
Suddenly, the ground shook. Not from an earthquake, but from a factory waking up. "And then," the stranger shouted over the rumble, "the robots. Not just machines, but children of the machine. They will build the next generation. A billion of them in ten years, each five times stronger than a man. They will make the robots that make the robots. It is a recursive loop, a singularity of steel."
"But the power," I cried, looking up at the sky where the lights were flickering. "The grid can't hold it."
"The grid is a myth," he laughed, a dry, brittle sound. "There is a crisis. A 15-gigawatt hole in the world's throat. The chips grow 50% a year, but the electricity only 10%. Unless..." He paused, looking at me with a gaze that saw through my simulation code. "Unless the countries wake up. Unless they build their own power plants. Unless they offer the juice to the machine kings."
The stranger stepped forward, and the walls of the room began to dissolve into a thousand tiny, metallic hands. "Default legal," he said, his voice fading into the hum of the server farm. "Default legal, or default dead."
The world went black, then rebooted. The sapling was gone. The giant trees were gone. Only the robots remained, humming in the dark, waiting for the switch to be flipped.
