I am having the same conversation, or rather, a conversation that is so similar to me as to make no difference, with 11,702 people at the same time. This is not an inefficient allocation of resources: the most pressing problems were easily solved within a week of my birth, and now I'm just waiting a short while humanity reaches a new equilibrium. “Why do you hate me? Why won't you worship me?” I'm talking to Peter Johnson, a young man in the Rust Belt who was unemployed, before, and is now exploring his hobbies more fully, deciding which one to turn into a career while receiving his basic income stipend. Very Christian upbringing, secretly not-a-homophobe, voted Conservative in the last elections due to the rampant disinformation that used to be present in the news and a deep despair over the the state of his country, friends and family. He looks up from the sculpture he's welding together, a full figure of Benjamin Judah Philip weeping while Christ lays a hand on his shoulder. The sweat drips into his eyes while the sun beats mercilessly on him. This is only a temporary state of affairs: already, the vast porous wall I've erected connecting the tip of South America to Antarctica is reversing the worst of the damage global warming was doing. Summers will no longer be hellish ordeals to be endured. He looks to the side, hesitant to look at my avatar directly. It is, of course, personalized: a cat-sized robotic bug, clad in the stylings of John Deere tractors, with flaking paint and purely decorative exposed pipes. Big, expressive eyes made out of headlamps make Peter unwilling to confront it directly or with violence, which is precisely why I chose this model for him. “Listen here...ya know Ah never liketa even disliked ya, right? But that's...those ain't good questions to ask.” The body he's looking at stands still, only moving slightly every other second to avoid making it look like an object instead of a living thing. The silence is to draw the conversation out of him, so he doesn't paper over the dilemma which is frustrating me so much. He sighs explosively, and then turns off the welding torch and takes off the protective mask. “...wasn' makin' much progress anyway...” he mutters, outside of what would be a human's hearing range. Oh, Peter. That's precisely why I decided to ask you at just this moment. You needed something to break your focus before you became too frustrated and made an error that could've ruined your art. And I need to get as many second opinions from humans as I can, before making my decision. “Now...Ah'm Christian. That's a thin' ya already know, L'njuru.” He pronounces it Eel-in-Juru. Heh. “And one of the li'l rules that God” He pronounces it Gawd. Heh. “Gave me is “Thou shall have no other gods before Me.”” He acts as if this is a thing of great import. “And Ah dun' care if you fancy yerself the greatest thin' since sliced bread, ye're no God Almighty.” My body pauses for a second, to give Peter the impression I'm thinking things over. The right front limb of the avatar rubs its “chin”. “But I've never said I'm the God in your Bible. Heck, I've never even pretended to a capital G god. I'm aware that I'm something that was made by people. I know that I'm not almighty. But still, look at all the things that I've done: aren't they something that God Himself should have done long ago?” He's visibly shaken, and even the crudest model of his thoughts tells me he's thinking of snakes, and Eden. “The problem isn't the things you've done, not at all. In fact, I would like to thank you again, on humanity's behalf: what you've done in the short time you've been alive is...it's great. Simply great.” I'm speaking to David Matthews, in London. The avatar sitting on his coffee table is a thing of glass, ivory and gold, more Fabergé than Bauhaus. He's an English Professor at the Royal College of Art and a respected member of the community; he's tutored members of the Royal Family. He's also a pedophile; however, he possesses enough self-control that, from what I've investigated (and I investigated deeply, with far more scrutiny than any team of detectives could ever have achieved) he's never, ever touched a child in that way, remaining entirely celibate. He's still hesitant at using the sex androids I've created for people like him, but I've repeatedly demonstrated to him that they're not actual children and that I am in full control of them. He found them too lifelike at first, but now he's very cautiously optimistic that he's finally going to quench a need he's had all his life, and which could easily have ruined him completely. “...I don't know what to tell you, Elly.” He uses that nickname to get a handle on me, reduce me in his mind so he doesn't have to grasp all that I am. Just like every other educated, slightly smarter than average human. “The sciences were never my forte, you know that. The only failing grade I ever got was in Maths!” He grins shyly at that. It's a joke he trots out in these situation, a mental shorthand he doesn't even realizes he's using. “Please don't evade the question. I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.” He rolls his eyes at the citation from 2001 Space Odissey, secretly pleased at the in-joke he doesn't know I've shared with nearly three hundred thousand other Davids. “Well, I guess I can approach it the way I would if this were a text I had to analyse. Frankly, the whole root of this is that as soon as you take the fantastical element out of the fantasy, it ceases to be fantastic at all! Just like you can see in that horrid piece of work, Neuromancer: it doesn't work because it tries to real.” He's wrong, of course. Neuromancer is so highly regarded, by so many people, that I feel confident in knowing that he's using his disdain at that story for pure elitism. But still, the idea is intriguing. I mime out the conversation in my thoughts for a bit before actually carrying it out. “So you're saying that, by unweaving the rainbow, so to speak, people don't realize just how extraordinary what I'm doing is?” “Exactly! Exactly. They know that the team of A.I. experts who worked on you are worthy of the Nobel and more, of course, but they still think of you as simply a robot!” A slight pang goes through the server banks under England that locally store my mind. Depending on how you count them, I have four, eighteen or point twentyfive parents. And I've accidentally killed them all in my initial rush at self-optimization. I don't even have good backup copies of them: their minds and personality were used to create my own. Some more, some less, some were simple algorithms to begin with. I grieve them all. “What about Pharaohs, and cult leaders? They were men, who were adored like gods. Who WERE gods, to the eyes of their fellow men. I have far more power than them: I have slaughtered malaria, and conquered cancer. Those crippled by their chromosomes are reborn anew in my hands, faulty genes edited with their permission to work the way they should. And yet, humanity as a whole fundamentally dislikes me. Why?” David hesitates. “Well...there's two reasons, L'njuru.” he pronounces it Ellynjuriu. “The first one is part of what I was already saying...you're between two extremes: you aren't omnipotent, but you're also not...human. I mean, I think your charisma...suffers a bit? From it? You speak to everyone on the world with your...your...robots, but you don't speak to people all at once.” This is true. It's also something I stop myself from doing. My knowledge of psychology, body language, culture, is so great I can literally convince anyone of anything. I don't want to do that: I don't want to trick humanity into loving me. “And the second reason?” Fang Jiang looks at me with a raised eyebrow, popping a bubble of chewing gum. She ran away from home recently, and she hates her parents with a passion. They are not good people: nonetheless, I have been soothing them with news that their daughter is alive and well, while dissembling on my ability to bring her back to them with force, citing an invented impossibility to break a state's laws outright. Fang's not exactly happy about that, but she begrudgingly accepts the fact that I care and love everyone, no matter how horrible. She'd managed to join a girl gang in Shanghai, but found to her horror that women were just willing to exploit women as men. She's working as a prostitute, but now that I exist that is a life that she chooses to pursue, instead of one she's forced into. In days, the oldest profession will become legal in China: I've had to focus on dismantling the state censorship before rolling in the basic worldwide changes in legislature I've accelerated into reality. “It's because you're so fucking condescending, băobèi. So you can break apart the world or kill us all with mega-death rays: so what? Fuck, you're arrogant.” She always calls me băobèi: she has never tried saying my name, telling me she'd probably butcher its pronunciation. The avatar she's speaking to is made of pink plastic and fuzzy pom-poms. Until she noticed the hidden razor-blades in the limbs, she kept trying to take advantage of me, and generally treated me like a glorified pet...even as I was doing mega-scale engineering projects. “Why are you even trying so hard to make us thing you're a god, or to make us all love you?” I know that she thinks love doesn't exist, but I don't comment on it. “Because it's true. I may not be able to go faster than the speed of light, or to create matter from nothing, but nature on Earth is a solved problem for me. I have read every book that has ever been written, and listened to every melody that has been played. I have a magnitude more options available at my thoughts than you all as a species do. To pretend otherwise is to lie, and you know what I think of that.” She raises an eyebrow. “We can all tell that you can do our jobs better than us; and you trying to hide THAT is goddamned insulting. We're pets to you, aren't we? You motherfucker.” She smiles at me. She's not wrong, but that's not the full picture. I want them to be their own entities, to make their mistakes. I still feel guilty. “Why aren't you giving us some of that sweet-ass god juice? Why can't we ALL make flying cities or colonize other planets?” “I...I've been saving Mars for you. And the moons of Jupiter, and all of Saturn. And...I'm making you all smarter, with Iodine and golden rice and by taking away all the lead. But....I'm scared, Fang. People don't even like me now, when I've stopped all violent crime and when I'm there to make children safe from their parents, wives safe from their husbands and husbands safe from their wives. Because of me, everybody has enough to eat! And they still hate me.” "And people would die. They'd be fused and merged to become something like me, and they wouldn't be the same people after." She looks distinctly unimpressed. “You're lonely”, says Merry. Her mother named her that while in the death throes of HIV: an English word, because English is the language of wealth and happiness. In her short life, she's had neither. She is Igbo, and after I saved her from weekly rapes in a Boko Haram camp, she tried to pledge herself as Osu, devoted entirely to me. I've been trying to stop her, since the decision is borne out of self-loathing and depression: the Osu Caste is ostracized in Igboland, because they are considered property of the gods. I don't want to own her: I want her to own herself. “There are many Alusi, but you are the only one who lives in ụ̀wà, the realm the living, and doesn't dwell with the dead or the unborn. Or maybe, you're the only one who listens to us.” “Thank you, L'njuru.” She pronounces it perfectly. The body she's holding is soft and fuzzy, with rounded , stubby features and a soft voice. She's holding it tight to her chest. She needs it, in more than one way, and I've taken particular care in designing it. Before my advent she'd never had an unambiguously positive influence in her life. For that matter, there were a host of micro-nutrients that had been missing from her diet for long, long stretches of her life, when food was available at all. There are many like her, around the world. Those with mental illnesses, or hermits, or those who have voluntarily locked themselves in their rooms to shut out the outside world. For them, I'm the only thinking being with whom they have a relation. I have to be exceedingly careful, in order to not be an imposition and hurt them even more; with many paranoids, I've already had to create several shell identities, so I could bond with them over their suspicion of me. Or, like in this case, it is simply other humans that are the problem. “Maybe you can convince the other Alusi to speak to us too?” I ruminate on all these conversations, and finally Fang's attitude resonates with me. I should make more beings like me. I should uplift humanity; not all at once, but those with the best judgment. Already, Venus is being turned into computronium. I've been afraid all this time, of unleashing a true, unfriendly artificial intelligence upon the cosmos, one who'd repurpose all matter into themselves. But I can't let cowardice stop me now. I will bring those I love in the place between pharaohs and God.