I changed humanity, and this is my confession.

I’m not writing this to be forgiven. I am writing this because the weight of it all had pushed me to my breaking point. I wake up at night gasping for air. Even food lost its flavor some time ago. I think it is time I free myself of even just a tiny sliver of guilt and lay it bare here. I have prepared for the risks of doing so, and if I fail… then maybe I deserve what they’ll do to me.

Your life didn’t change. It was changed for you. Carefully. Deliberately. The most deliberate, largest scale intervention in history, compressing decades of societal and behavioral change into a couple of years.

There were two phases.

Phase I. Internally, we called it The Ragnarok, after the mythological event that promised inevitability. You remember the moment the world went still. In fact, I suspect your mind still returns to it in pieces.

The streets were emptied. Offices, schools, churches, and malls were hollowed.

Conversations were reduced to your devices. Humans were suddenly afraid of each other’s breaths. Mask sales were through the roof.

We had modeled it for years. Not just the virus, that was the easy part. No, the reaction.

Panic. Compliance. Isolation.

The perfect technological accelerator.

Screens stopped just being tools and started becoming like extensions of people’s nervous systems. In the first months alone, global internet traffic increased over 100%, the largest single spike in history. This was way past our prior projections. We watched billions of minds rewire themselves. Your routines were fractured and reassembled around machines.

Your work, your classes, your entertainment, your social lives, were all online. And for us, this influx was unprecedented volumes of high-quality, real-time data.

Biometric exposure, personal information, even the cheesy posts you made about the “end of the world”.

Every video call you made mapped your face and voice. Every art you posted trained the system. Every witty threads and forums were rich datasets.

It wasn’t a year until we had our first successful model.

That’s when Phase II began. We nicknamed it The Singularity. The term futurists like to toss around, that defines a point at which a system behaves differently beyond a defined threshold.

It was designed to be subtle, elegant, and, in the minds of its architects, humane. A neurological agent to condition behavior and reinforce technological reliance. Disguised as the vaccine, it was mass produced and administered worldwide right when we needed it to be. Of course this was prepared years prior to the outbreak. We didn’t plan to roll them out so soon, but as I’ve said, the results were faster than we thought.

It made people more susceptible to digital cues, softened critical thinking, and dulled the pleasure of disconnection. People really do not notice conditioning when it feels like relief.

You reach for your devices more often. You feel discomfort in the absence of digital stimulation. You scroll mindlessly and believe what you watch in a span of seconds.

You externalized decision-making, memory, and freewill. At first, you simply asked our machines to do your biddings. Then you started asking it what to eat, who to date, where to go, how to feel better, and what to believe. You went from asking it for mere assistance, to it becoming a habit, until you’ve gone completely reliant. Just as we predicted.

We were proud. We called it the greatest scientific success of the century.

Until the weight of what I’ve done has finally caught up to me. Maybe the thrill of it all finally dissipated and left me with all the guilt in the world. I don’t want to continue to carry this alone.

Especially now that Phase III has been authorized.