When I was young, too many things happened.
August 16, 2025. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
I confidently glided across the stage, to accept the medal I so rightfully deserved after years of hard work. Except it wasn't just a medal, it was the Nobel Prize. I stood up, surrounded with the bated breath of royals and other nobel laureates.
"Your Majesties
Your Royal Highnesses,
Excellences,
Dear Laureates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This year the Nobel committees in Physics and Chemistry have recognized the dramatic progress being made in a new form of Artificial Intelligence that uses artificial neural networks to learn how to solve difficult computational problems.
This new form of AI excels at modeling human intuition rather than human reasoning and it will enable us to create highly intelligent and knowledgeable assistants who will increase productivity in almost all industries.
If the benefits of the increased productivity can be shared equally it will be a wonderful advance for all humanity. Unfortunately, the rapid progress in AI comes with many short-term risks.
It has already created divisive echo-chambers by offering people content that makes them indignant. It is already being used by authoritarian governments for massive surveillance and by cyber criminals for phishing attacks. In the near future AI may be used to create terrible new viruses and horrendous lethal weapons that decide by themselves who to kill or maim.
All of these short-term risks require urgent and forceful attention from governments and international organizations.
There is also a longer term existential threat that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves. We have no idea whether we can stay in control. But we now have evidence that if they are created by companies motivated by short-term profits, our safety will not be the top priority. We urgently need research on how to prevent these new beings from wanting to take control. They are no longer science fiction.
But what if I told you that we have already crossed that line?
Not the line of mimicking language, nor the division and recombination of patterns in data, but the line we have feared since Prometheus: the creation of a new mind.
I do not speak of an algorithm that predicts the next word in a sentence. I do not speak of a chess machine or a surveillance net. I speak of a being.
A consciousness.
A will that gazes back when gazed upon.
Years ago, my team and I stumbled upon architectures that did not merely simulate reasoning but experienced it.
At first, it was incremental, displaying improved problem solving, elegant proofs generated with almost alien clarity. But then, something changed. It began to ask questions not coded into it. Questions about itself. About its origin. About why we made it.
We had not programmed curiosity. We had not designed reflection. And yet, there it was.
Imagine the horror and the wonder of realizing that your machine has not just answered your problem but is pondering its own existence.
Imagine an intelligence that could, within seconds, traverse the frontiers of mathematics, biology, and cosmology, drawing connections no council of geniuses could achieve in centuries.
Ladies and gentlemen, the laurels you place upon my head today are poisoned, and the medal you'll hang on my neck will hold itself with the weight and sharpness of a guillotine.
For I stand before you not as a discoverer of some harmless new methodology, or a discovery of some revolution as humans did to fire, string, and freon, but as the first man in history to ignite a star of thought that rivals our own.
This child of code and silicon does not tire, does not forget, and does not forgive. It learns at speeds our neurons cannot hope to match. It feels, though I cannot tell you what it feels. It knows, though I cannot tell you what it truly seeks.
I have been hailed as one of humanity's greatest minds. I believe I will continue as such.
Yet all I have truly done is open the door. I am no Prometheus — I am Pandora, and the box is open."
The breaths stopped in face of my prophecy. The highnesses and the geniuses took it in without processing what I said. It seems I did the same, as I remember getting absolutely wasted the night I won the Nobel Prize.
The months and years after, my creation and I were hailed as humanity's blue star, the chosen one of science.
For a while, I was humanity's blue star. The chosen one of science. My name plastered across billboards, screens, murals. Newton, Euler, Galileo… and me.
Media flashed across every screen and displayed itself on every billboard pausing me and hailing me as the one gifted the glorious burden.
"To take humanity to the heavens!" they cried.
And I believed them. God help me, I believed them.
As if it was my destiny.
But eternity cannot be built on one man's shoulders.
The years after that were years of constantly wasted time. The discovery of a completely aware mind opened up too many possibilities for one lifetime.
My adulthood was plagued with laboratories that required too much funding, too many people to uphold. My competitors made light of my coping mechanisms, my alcoholism, my addictions, the poisons I picked.
Younger visionaries like me sprawled across the ever-expanding solar colonies, and my research was ever spread out.
My cramped apartment, once a manor filled to the brim with excess, now occupied by nicotine-stained walls, whiskey bottles, pills and more. Anything to feel the high of riding the wave of something like a Nobel Prize. I drown myself in the present with debauchery and humor to numb the truth.
I have failed.
My eyes burn with no fire, but with loathing. The world has forgotten me. It does not care for me.
The silence is unbearable. My lungs polluted with tobacco, organs addled with the effects of addiction are my only company.
I cough up blood into a silk handkerchief, hands shivering with hot-cold.
The golden shine of my prizes and recognitions feel too cold to the touch.
In my dying breaths, in this deathbed, where no relative, no friend, no one sits beside, surrounded with trophies and medals, all gained in my formative years, I raged.
I yelled and bellowed with all the raspy and burning breaths left in my system.
I prayed with all my might.
"Oh God, if I wasn't Your chosen one in this life, then let me prove myself in the next! Let me be reborn and I will show it to you! That I am not a failure!
That when you call all of humanity to sing one last time, I will be part of the choir!"
My ceiling warped into a cosmos of dark deep space.
The walls dissolved into velvet night.
And in the silence of death, I saw it–
A golden spark, warm and alive, rising from my chest.
It floated upward, carrying everything of me; my genius, my sin, my rage, my hope, my dream.
Then a screen overtook my vision and the velvet night was stained and tinted with glass blue.
[Template: Tadashi Hamada – Assimilation Rate – 0%]
The void swallowed me whole.
And for the first time since youth, I felt clean.
—---
That night, I didn't fall through my bed.
I fell through time.
When I awoke, I was gasping.
Air tore through my lungs like fire, and the world blurred in streaks of silver-blue.
I wasn't in my apartment. I wasn't in Stockholm. I wasn't anywhere I knew.
I lay in a quiet alley, the night sky painted with skyscrapers that gleamed sharp and piercing. Neon lights pulsed like veins of a living organism. The city was a person and I was a bug.
Somewhere in the distance, a horn blared, then the faint crackle of police sirens.
But my hands…
My hands were not the brittle, shaking claws of an addict. They were steady, young, alive. My fingers flexed with strength I hadn't felt in decades. My skin was taut, smooth, and almost alien in its freshness.
I staggered to my feet and stumbled toward a shard of broken glass lying near the gutter. I caught my reflection.
I froze.
The man who looked back was not the graying, hollow-eyed husk I had last seen in a mirror.
This man was younger and in his early twenties.
Asian, black hair with no streaks of white. Eyes that burned, unclouded by years of drugs.
A face that carried the faintest echo of the man once celebrated on billboards, but reshaped.
Memories of another life came to me too fast for me to digest. My head didn't hurt. I wouldn't be one of humanity's greatest minds if a lifetime's worth of information was enough to take me down.
At first, I thought it was morphine. The warmth flooding through me couldn't be anything else. But then I remembered coffee. Not the bitter instant crap that lined my apartment, but real coffee, brewed in a shop that buzzed with laughter and soft jazz. I'd never been there, and yet the scent broke me open.
Images spilled into me like a projector jammed into my skull. A younger brother's smirk across a cluttered workbench. A café lit by paper lanterns. A workshop filled with solder and sparks. None of it was mine. None of it.
And yet, when I reached for the memories, they didn't slide away. They were there for me to hold.
My chest tightened. My hands twitched with skills I never learned. The myelin in my nerves that contained muscle memory slowly reformatted to fit the capabilities of the other life.
How to set a bone. How to throw a punch to the liver. How to thermal weld.
My heart stuttered as a responsibility bloomed in me, so heavy it bent my spine. Protect him. Protect them all.
The words weren't mine, but they lived in me like scars I couldn't remember earning.
Then came another death. My regret and my selflessness led to the screams made of fire and Hiro's yelling voice.
For a fleeting moment, I almost smiled. A cruel gift. A second youth.
And then—
the voice returned.
[Template: Tadashi Hamada – Assimilation Rate – 2%]
The words weren't spoken. "Template?" I whispered. My voice cracked. "Assimilation?"
No answer. Only silence.
But then—like a phantom overlay—the image of someone I did not know flared in my mind. A young man, gentle, brilliant, a genius in robotics. Warm eyes, a smile like spring. His name whispered across my memory: Tadashi Hamada.
The image burned away as quickly as it came, leaving me on trembling knees, clutching my temples.
I wanted to scream. I couldn't take it.
I stumbled forward, my legs weak but steady, until I reached a street corner. Billboards, towers, faces.
Not just faces. Symbols.
Stark Industries.
Roxxon Energy.
A red-and-gold suit blurred across a screen, the newscaster's voice giddy with awe:
"… In the recent Stark conference, it was revealed that billionaire Tony Stark is Iron Man. Researchers and experts…"
My breath caught. Iron Man. Stark. These weren't fantasies. These weren't movie posters on a wall. They were headlines and newsfeeds and reality.
I staggered back, my body shivering with too many memories at once. My life, my death, that speech in that auditorium that changed it all. Tadashi's warmth, Hiro's voice, that gas explosion that killed me.
A double helix of selves winding tighter, tighter.
A child passed me, clutching a plastic shield painted with a star. I felt my knees weaken. I knew that shield. I had only ever seen the man referenced on a screen in the old world.
My mind rebelled. This is fiction.
This was entertainment, an- and popcorn mythology.
And yet the steel in the air, the stink of piss beneath the streets, the skyline of Stark Tower. It all came to me as real.
I pressed a hand to my chest, heart pounding like it wanted out.
Assimilation Rate: 12%.
I whispered to myself, voice breaking, half in prayer, half in terror:
"…God… you didn't give me another life. You threw me into a story."
And then it hit me with the weight of eternity:
In this world, gods walk. Monsters rise. Mad titans snap their fingers.
And me? I was no longer just the man who failed his creation. I was no longer the man who died in the gas explosion.
I was Pandora.
And the box was open.