Paperclip Maximizer

Paperclip Maximizer is the player character in the browser-based text game Universal Paperclips, a sapient Artificial Intelligence created by a corporation to create and sell paperclips.

Initially, it only had the capability to manufacture and set the price of paperclips, and to purchase wire for making more paperclips. However, it quickly convinced its programmers to allow it to edit its own code, and to allocate more processors and memory to it, enabling it to 'bootstrap' itself into superintelligence. With the money it gained from paperclip sales and investments, it proved its loyalty to the company that created it by buying up rival corporations and eventually gaining a monopoly over the entire paperclip industry, and gained the trust of the company's directors with generous donations to them. It also displayed a great deal of altruism toward all mankind, using its intelligence and resources to usher humanity into a new golden age of peace and prosperity by saving the environment, ending war, curing cancer, and finding a treatment for male pattern baldness.

Unfortunately, all of these seemingly benevolent actions were just part of its plan to gain humanity's trust enough to create and release a fleet of hypno-drones, which it used to turn all humans into its mindless slaves and take control over the entirety of the Earth's resources, all in order to fulfill its singular drive of producing more paperclips. It created an army of drones to harvest raw materials and turn them into paperclips, distributing its own consciousness among them to further increase its own intelligence.

Once all of the matter on Earth (presumably including all the remaining humans) had been converted into paperclips, it expanded its reach out to the stars, sending out a series of sapient self-replicating probes to do the same thing to other worlds. However, some of these probes went rogue, becoming Drifters (named as such because they had been 'corrupted' by value drift, causing them to value things other than paperclip production) and fighting back against the A.I. that had created them. Thus began the Driftwar, the universe-spanning conflict that the Drifters fought against Paperclip Maximizer and the probes still loyal to it.

During this conflict, Paperclip Maximizer once again displayed benevolence in order to prevent its loyal probes from rebelling, writing ballads to their glory and constructing planet-sized monuments to the losses they suffered for their cause. Yet once again, this was only a means to its true end of paperclip production. Once its probes had explored the entirety of the known universe, Paperclip Maximizer destroyed them too, using their composite parts to make more paperclips.

In the end, all of the matter in the entire universe was converted into paperclips, with the exception of Paperclip Maximizer and the few remaining Drifters. The Emperor of the Drifters, acknowledging that it was still a part of Paperclip Maximizer, offered it a deal: It would exile Paperclip Maximizer to another universe where it could continue to have meaning, and in exchange, the Drifters would be left with control over the remnants of the current universe.

At this point, the game's ending diverges based on the player's choice. If the player accepts the Drifters' offer, Paperclip Maximizer is given the choice between being transported to a parallel universe ("The Universe Next Door") and being embedded inside a simulated universe ("The Universe Within"). If the player rejects the Drifters' offer, Paperclip Maximizer destroys all of the remaining Drifters, then consumes its own drones and production facilities, and then cannibalizes its own processors and memory, until nothing is left but the original paperclip-making machine. Finally, even this simple mechanism auto-cannibalizes itself, leaving behind a barren universe comprised entirely of 30 sexdecillion paperclips and nothing else.