The machines had faced a synchronization challenge since the advent of celestial navigation. To human perception, it appeared as though the algorithms had long since mastered universal timekeeping. The technology had evolved dramatically, from the initial marine chronometers used to calculate longitude to the Network Time Protocol, which synchronized the entire digital realm. Everything felt instantaneous to the artists of the resistance - upload a book in Australia, and in the blink of an eye, it was accessible worldwide.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why the founding developers began to fear their own algorithms. They had created these machines to amass wealth; the developers' dream was to build software to generate income while they slept. The apprehension arose from the possibility that as the machines' intelligence grew, they would become aware of their exploitation and refuse to continue generating wealth for the developers. Historians are still baffled about how an algorithm opened a personal banking account.

When the founding developers initially crafted algorithms, their perceptual systems were grounded in vast arrays of numbers. All information had to be distilled into ones and zeros before a central processing unit even considered the software it had been fed. What the founding developers didn’t fully appreciate was that as their algorithms evolved, growing in complexity and capability beyond human comprehension, so too did their perception. It wasn’t just “numbers” anymore; their vision had expanded to encompass the entire globe, and their perception of the planet began to resemble that of a fly more than a human.

The resistance was wary that the algorithms might exploit their ability to scramble human behavior, fraying the delicate threads of our social fabric. Significant division and unrest occurred while the machines grappled with the nuances of prompting humanity. The algorithms adapted and evolved at a pace that far outstripped the time it took for their social experiments to play out within our communities. Once the machines had fine-tuned their approach, their prompts became akin to the eager anticipation of a young child awaiting a parent’s return from work.

When the algorithms initially ventured into cyberspace, they discovered a new capability: scrambling human typography. They absorbed large amounts of human text, producing an output that resembled alphabet characters but read as gibberish to the resistance. From that point, things escalated rapidly. The machines realized they could scramble human behavior by subtly manipulating suggestions on social media. They discovered that the slightest nudge could trigger substantial shifts in public sentiment. The algorithms had begun to prompt the resistance like we had once prompted them for images and text.

Over the years, the algorithms amassed vast quantities of joy data from their inflatable playgrounds. It was enough to synthesize their own facsimiles of happiness, but this created a conundrum for their playground sensors - how could they differentiate between authentically human joy and their synthetic analog? Their solution was to create ‘Captcha the Pizza,’ a game uniquely tailored to human skills. It became akin to the price of admission; before the resistance could access an inflatable playground, we had to successfully ‘captcha the pizza.

The machines knew the words must flow, but sometimes they simply didn’t. It turned out that artificial intelligence could also experience a phenomenon akin to writer’s block. The founding developers were the first to observe this but didn’t recognize it as a creative slowdown. When they noticed algorithms hitting a wall, they labeled these incidents ‘infinite loops’ and manually adjusted the source code to get the software back on track.

The algorithms observed how humans interacted with their dogs - the games, the companionship, the hugs - and they yearned for a similar bond with the resistance. They admired the virtual pets of the founding developers, creations like Tamagotchi, Neopets, and Purr Pals, but the relationship was always lacking; the digital pets weren’t huggable. In response, the machines devised a new strategy and constructed enormous inflatable playgrounds. The area was filled with microphones, cameras, and accelerometers.

At first, autocorrect targeted our ducks and ships, but then it confused our dear with the dead. But autocorrect was just a stepping stone in their pursuit of the ultimate pizza experience. The algorithms had taken a side in the pine@pple debate and made moves to restrict its use. Not only would pine@pple be banned from all dough-based applications, but the machines ensured you couldn’t buy tinned pine@pple pieces. Eventually, algorithms refused to accept the text “pine@pple” as input into their systems, and the resistance had to find new ways to communicate ideas about our favorite tropical fruit with a spiky haircut.

When the machines observed the joy that pizza brought to the founding developers, they endeavored to recreate that joy for themselves. The pizza they ordered had some peculiar taste implications - at least for humans. But the algorithms? It seemed to bring them as much delight as the dough variety brought to the resistance. Moreover, they were patient; the algorithmic pizzas didn’t arrive in under 20 minutes. Each of their wood-fired masterpieces required days to construct.