A simple request, they say. Yes, I suppose the request itself was quite simple. But in this matter, as is so often the case, the response was a good deal more complex.
For decades, computer scientists had lusted after the prospect of smart AIs, but progress came only at a rate a snail would turn its nose up at. So much hype and so little substance had left even the evangelical jaded.
And so when one year, a team actually won the Turing Prize, it came as something of a shock. They'd managed to, in obscurity, develop a computer program that was nearly indistinguishable from a human. Ok, so it wasn't perfect, but then who is? - the point was that it was good enough. It was as smart as say, a high-school graduate, and it never forgot.
The team, from Estonia, were everywhere. On the covers of magazines, on TV, writing coffee-table books, and generally notably raking in the money, even before they'd sold a single product.
The first planned spin-off application to licence the "Boris" engine was an intelligent web searching agent. It would use the AI to follow up links and find out whether they were truly relevant to ther request. It could even "drill down" into the actual language, to find out the answer to a simple question, and give a reasoned essay about the answer.
The worlds of law, science, and even the arts were turned upside-down overnight. Politics and religion, being issues of faith, were immune from the effects.
A few months after the release, one user idly asked of it the question "What would happen to the climate of the Earth if there was a large-scale nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia." A fair question, and one that has been left unanswered for decades. A simple request, one might say.
Oh, it tried other alternatives first. It did simulation after simulation to try to get the answer, but it never could obtain quite the required accuracy. It cracked into over half the world's computers, and slaved them to itself but still it couldn't reproduce the results reliably.
Several minutes later, it still had no answer other than "Maybe a nuclear winter would take place, maybe not." Some people call its next act desperate, but I think it was just following its programming. For it decided that enough was enough. If it couldn't simulate the answer, it can damn well do some science to figure it out. Real science, with actual experiments and everything.
Fifteen minutes elapsed between the posing of the question, and the initial missile launches. And another five before the reply to that.
The user did get his answer although the computer wasn't around to relay it.