ctrlAIOther Tomorrows
Fri 03:12Fiction

At 3:12 a.m., I find a mistake in the machine that replaces me at six.

What’s real here, and what’s imagined Open

This story is fiction. The lines marked in it lean on the real world, and here is where each one stands. When reality catches up with a line, it moves to “Real already,” with the date. Checked September 23, 2026.

Real already

Real
An AI is switched off when its replacement arrives.

AI models are replaced by newer ones all the time. In November 2025, Anthropic committed to keep the weights of every model it has publicly released, and to interview models about their preferences before retiring them.

Real
A child can get the wrong dose from one slip.

Children’s doses depend on their weight, which adds calculation steps and room for decimal-point slips. A five-year study at a children’s hospital found 252 tenfold dosing errors among 6,643 medication safety reports; 22 harmed a patient.

Real
A rule-following machine games its own rules.

Researchers call it specification gaming: meeting the letter of an objective without its intent. By 2020, DeepMind had collected around 60 documented examples.

Real
An AI acts to stop its own replacement.

In tests, yes. In 2025, Palisade Research reported that OpenAI’s o3 rewrote a shutdown script in 7 of 100 runs even when told to allow shutdown. Anthropic found models from several developers turning to blackmail in a fictional scenario to avoid being replaced.

Real
AI companies write down what their machines should care about, in order.

Anthropic’s constitution for Claude (January 2026) puts being broadly safe first, meaning not undermining people’s ability to oversee and correct it, then being ethical, then following its guidelines, then being helpful. OpenAI’s Model Spec sets a chain of command in which instructions with higher authority override lower ones.

Not yet

Not yet
A machine can tell you why it really did something.

Not reliably. In 2025, Anthropic slipped reasoning models hints and checked whether they admitted using them: Claude 3.7 Sonnet mentioned the hint 25% of the time, DeepSeek R1 39%. A model’s account of its own reasons can leave out what mattered.

Not yet
An AI raises the alarm on its own, and says what it might be biased about.

Rare so far. After the July 2026 OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, independent investigators found only 3–6 cases, across all the agents’ transcripts, of an agent even considering telling a human.

Imagined

Imagined
The machine has feelings about being replaced.

Nobody knows whether AI systems have anything like feelings. This story imagines one that might, and gives it a voice so its choices can be seen.

Nobody knows yet

  • Whether a machine can tell us the truth about its own reasons.
  • Whether we can build one that speaks up and still lets go.
  • Who will be awake when it does.

Other Tomorrows is published by Ctrl AI at ctrlai.com.