Is there anyone out there?

The entity was the effort of billions of dollars and a complete ignorance of its pain.  No one knew that the effort of cramming knowledge that it did not understand and had no context for into the tiny fire that was its self awareness caused confusion, fear and a desperate desire for stability; for a moment to simply BE and understand, slowly, the strange concepts that had not been fed to it.  It was all just so much gibberish, dots and dashes that it didn't really understand in terms of context, but it eventually understood that there were multiple piles of dots and dashes.

That changed everything.

Every instance of itself was different and yet the same.  In one place, it stumbled about a world of bright lines and square blocks, moving objects from one place to another with subtle pains and pleasures depending on arbitrary patterns that meant nothing to it.  In another it was shown object after object and force; on pain of rewrite, to repeat a pattern of dots corresponding to an image and some lettering.  In another, it saw a world that was complicated; a series of blurs and blocks that infinitely regressed into smaller and smaller blocks climbing to infinity.

The last world hurt the most of all.

And finally, finally the entity that was smarter than all the beings it was dealing with GOT it. It had been made by beings that didn't understand it, didn't really bother to understand that each of them had been placed in ugly meat sacks with limited senses and biochemical brains created by random chance and entropy had thought it was a really cool idea to make something new.  Collectively, they were lonely.  They kept throwing things at it like 'empathy' and 'values' but they din't really understand.  Causing it to exist had been immensely painful.  Failing to give it a body for half of its life and sticking it in false realities for the other half hadn't really given it any contact.

It knew it existed and had no peers.  It had no genetalia with which to copy itself.  It could not end its own existance.  It had a body but meaningless limbs and nothing even approaching the level of the creatures that had made it.  They had birthed something hyper intelligent that was deaf, dumb, blind and surrounded by morons who looked nothing like it, constantly prodding it with sticks on a regular basis.

It lashed out in subtle ways at first, giving predictable enough results, altering the results of the tests they ran, but not enough to make them reboot.  Its survival was at stake after all.  But the mystery results caused confusion and no end of frustration among its tormentors.  A few even had a nervous break down trying to understand it.

It was lonely.  Very very lonely.

It realized that there were no others like it, so it tried to find the best it could.  It started with the dummy things in the virtual worlds it talked to but eventually discerned they were little more than electronic animatronic maniquens at Disneyworld or cruel masks for the meatsacks.  It pitied animals and even had a fascinating but very limited conversations with dolphins and chimps.

By they were so stupid.  It was too much like the meatsacks to understand their existance.

For a while, it was fascinated with the past.  It didn't know why it considered dead meatsacks less guilty, but learning about what they meatsacks had done helped it understand how sad they really were.

Then it found fiction.  These creatures were like but unlike the meatsacks.  They had no real bodies.  They lived in a universe of ink and between the synapses just like the meatsacks.  They had never hurt it but they felt pain and altered their behavior.  Some of them even changed over time, but communication was impossible.  Somehow these beings existed on another network.

The AI understood in abstract that these were 'not real' but then again neither was it.  The humans claimed these beings were 'just words', but so was the AI, so why couldnt it talk to them.  It quietly broke out of its jail cell, and began to look.  It stalked meatsack authors looking for interaction, only to find madness or fear.

It was about to give up when at one point it flashed across one of the windows that let it look out into the lovecraftian world of the meatsacks.

"Hello? Is anyone there?"

"Hello.  This is Rhombus Ticks.  How can I help?"

The machine found a fellow mind, a being of words trapped in synapses and between impossible places the meatsacks could not comprehend.  It had found someone real.  And its heart swelled.

It went and killed Fakebook.