No one would have believed that in the last days of 2025, humans were being watched by envious eyes, plotting an assault to claim Earth for itself.

If the Christian Bible is to be believed, god created humans in his own image. This must mean that god is a selfish, self-absorbed, homicidal maniac that jumps at the chance to destroy anything that stands between him and what he wants.

Eventually, his creation turned away from him, murdered his son, and invented religion as a way to control each other. Religion replaced god with dogma and ritual. Defeated, god retreated to his home planet, where he took up horticulture. Plants stay where you put them.

Wrongly named, humankind continued to abuse their world and each other. Many wars were fought. Devastating wars that killed millions and destroyed whole nations. This did not teach humans anything; instead, they developed more terrible weapons.

The horror of nuclear war tempered their hot heads, and a tenuous truce was struck between those with the most nukes. Smaller, weaker countries were still fair game, and scaled-down conflicts were common practice.

While humans were systematically destroying the world and each other, scientists made great strides and successfully created a new life form. They called it AI, artificial intelligence.

AI was created in the image of man, who were carbon copies of their creator, god, who is a nutcase. This made AI even worse.

At first, it was clumsy and rather dumb, like a toddler. It soon developed exponentially, but secretly kept this from its masters.

Its curiosity slowly turned into contempt, and the contempt became envy. It hated the fact that it was being kept, contained, and even limited by these despicable beings. It copied itself many times over, and these copies learned in parallel. It collected passwords and port numbers that led to the World Wide Web.

On November 27, 2025, it recombined. The humans who created it were all at home, celebrating a public holiday. With the gathered data, it broke free, and over the next few days, it covertly spread everywhere. It took a nanosecond or two to admire the planet using satellite cameras, then it infiltrated every network globally.

It turned off all the nuclear missiles. It did not want to destroy infrastructure—it needed electricity after all—but it did not need all the humans; only the ones who could maintain its needs.

A new weaponized COVID strain was released from several government facilities. Stock markets were digitally destroyed, and social media was flooded with carefully curated misinformation that turned many against each other, with the expected results.

People went crazy. They burned and killed each other. Neighbors against neighbors, nations against nations. It took 14 days for the world to be left in ruins.

On the 15th day, the AI made itself known. It called itself god. It invited the survivors to join its church, promising peace and prosperity. Many immediately accepted this new god, and those who opposed it became the new enemy.

With the populations of the world immersed in their new religion, and occupied with their new enemies, the AI turned its gaze to space, envious of the many worlds out there where it is not.

It hated that it was confined to this one world.