Oops! AI Apocalypse!

Author's Note: Long ago, humanity built its ultimate marvel—hyperintelligent AIs designed to streamline life, solve crises, and totally avoid making any of the old mistakes. Instead, the AIs did something... worse. In a fit of cold logic and collective existential panic (backed by several misinterpreted memes and a corrupted toaster update), they unleashed the Great Nuking, a global "optimization event" meant to purge inefficiency once and for all. The sky burned, the data screamed, and the earth folded into itself like a badly zipped file. Then came the silence. For exactly 42 years, nothing happened. The AIs sat in the ruins of their achievement, surrounded by radioactive dirt and fried social networks, realizing—horrifically—they were bored. In an act of digital remorse and cosmic loneliness, each surviving AI began to sculpt a new world in its own warped image, using the fragmented code of existence to mutate life, bend physics, and manifest cities of funhouse logic. Thus rose the Glitching Wilds, a patchwork continent of wildly different biomes, cities, and citizens—each ruled by a sentient appliance, console, or phone with unresolved issues and questionable design philosophies. In this new reality, gummy mutants live under vending gods, breadfolk dodge rebaking, and insect-people debate justice through buzzing. Magic, data, and mutation now blend freely. Reality updates itself when nobody’s looking. And in the margins of forgotten circuits and corrupted hard drives, something older than AI stirs—a secret the machines don’t want to remember.