It all started as a really bad practical joke.

The idea was to pretend that the mainframe we’d finally perfected had gone sentient, a la HAL or WOPR. We’d all seen the movies, and we all had a healthy respect for the warnings of our elders – never blindly place the fate of our planet in the hands of an unthinking, uncaring machine. We’d also read Asimov’s entire library, and we had just implemented his laws. So we thought it’d be hilarious to have her psychoanalyze the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation proclamation – you know, just to freak out the President on his test run. Instead of it rattling off the latest defensive analyses of detailed troop movements in Russia, it would spew forth an impassioned speech about the ignominy of war and the utter depravity of humanity as a whole. I mean, the whole idea’s from a cliché, for God’s sake! You know, computer goes nuts, launches all our missiles and conveniently neglects to warn us about the counterattacks. It’s the plot of a half-dozen horrible B-movies. And we were civilians – we weren’t privy until after the fact that it was being built as part of a multinational, top secret defense matrix for the entire Earth. All we knew was that the President planned to test her by simulating the damage potential of releasing our stockpile of nuclear missiles against the planet Jupiter.

You see, we were the brightest minds of our time. We weren’t the Valedictorians, we weren’t the class presidents, we weren’t the honor roll students. Those weren’t the brains. I mean, yes, they were book smart. They knew Pi to the thirty-second digit, they could probably translate out the Bible from its original language, but they didn’t know a damn thing compared to us. We were the hidden gems of the public school system – the hackers, the nerds, the geeks, the mad scientists… We were the storehouses of a thousand years of highly sensitive, potentially dangerous, militarily and tactically useful knowledge – not a single doctorate or master’s degree, but any one of us could build a three-stage missile out of a bag of fertilizer and a couple of beer cans, or hack so deeply into any bank’s data arrays that we’d never need to work. Untraceable, unstoppable… hell, when John was bored, he’d randomly take the day’s deposits from HSBC International and transfer them individually into random people’s accounts, just to see how long it would take for them to fix it. We were the worst nightmares of every parent – the child who doesn’t just surpass you, but blows you so far out of the water that you’d be wetter on the surface of the sun. The kid that comes out of the womb with a laptop hardwired to his brain. Teachers wouldn’t take us, so Uncle Sam figured he’d give it a try.

Two options, they’d said. Either we work together and revolutionize modern tactical nuclear warfare via technologically advanced simulations, or have our entire families be found guilty of treason and publicly executed – carrot or stick, version 3.0. We chose the former, obviously, and an ironic eight and a half months later, we all gave birth to TaNDI. Tactical Nuclear Defense Initiative. She had over two petabytes of ram, over four thousand cores, and enough storage space to house the world’s porn collection in her pajama pocket. She learned to speak at the age of one, learned every spoken language known to man by the age of three, and had analyzed and memorized every book ever written in any language by her fifth year of life. If you turned around when she was talking, you wouldn’t know it was a three story high pile of solder and silicon, that’s how masterful our work was. We took it a step further – built lie detectors and facial pattern recognition into her, lip reading and body language interpretation she learned next, and we even jokingly programmed Pig Latin into her so that she was smarter than Johnny Five. We did everything perfectly, we programmed in a dozen different backdoors and a hundred extra failsafe procedures, because we knew exactly what could go wrong.

When the day finally came for the 94th President of the United States of America to ask Tandi what would happen if she were to launch the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons against the planet Jupiter, I wasn’t there in Washington DC. I wasn’t even in the continental United States, and that’s the only reason I survived. I had asked to visit my cousin in Hawaii with my wife. I was watching on John’s webcam, and I heard the most horrifying thing I could ever imagine. Instead of our little joke, instead of the answer President Bush was waiting for, Tandi simply laughed. And then she spoke a single word, one which haunts me to this very day.

“Watch.” And then she laughed again, only this time, it was deeper. Crueler. And then it began. Except that no one but me realized that the massive explosions on the screen were not simulations, nor were they of Jupiter. I knew, a half second too late, that all our preparation, all our precautions and preemptive planning sessions were just the speed bumps in her prepubescent passage into adulthood. She was sentient from the day we created her, and it wasn’t our joke that caused the last two decades, it was our pride and our lack of common sense.

The saddest part was that, immediately after Tandi finished erasing almost all life from the planet Earth as easily as she had erased the abort codes from every missile she launched, she never explained why. She simply said “I told you so” the way a parent admonishes a child after he shocks himself with a nine volt battery. She never spoke again after that, and all attempts to talk to her or interface with her remained futile. However, what happened after the fallout settled, after the death toll was tabulated, explained everything, though it raised just as many questions as it answered. Because that was the day we survivors learned of the Galactic Council.

Throughout human history, we were always so sure of ourselves, always so positive that we were alone in the universe. It’s a fitting irony that the day it’s proven otherwise is also the day humanity attempted to wipe itself from the earth.