I hadn’t thought much of the question when I’d first asked it, as a 9 year old. But it never left me and it’s all I can think about now. What do newborns dream about when they haven’t yet experienced the world? Chewing on that question is far more satisfying than ingesting the canned speech now competing for my brain space.

Some cognitive neuroscientists theorized that if we could only see a baby’s dreams, we’d see the essence of their personality before it’s corrupted by immersion in society. We’d get some sense of what they might become.

“Welcome to your future!”

The stadium was packed that day, despite the oppressively hot temperatures. The graduates were queued up, a chorus line of arms failing to mop foreheads with the puffy sleeves of their heat-absorbing but sweat-repelling robes.

They give this speech at every graduation ceremony.

“We discovered long ago that rationally accounting for equity does not work in a world of irrationality…”

Sounds true.

He had already come to realize that truth, both through limited but intense experience and an atypical amount of self-reflection for someone his age. He welcomed his future with arms folded, despite being at the head of the line.

“… random adjustments to opportunities spawned anger and rebellion…”

Well, that’s true.

His parents had fought for those opportunity adjustments and now he was alone. And he sometimes wished the weight of the scars he bore from the accident would bury him too. He had no one left from whom to accept love.

“… but a physical solution was deemed palatable. It was proven that humans deprived of sight and sound cannot walk or crawl or pilot in a straight line.”

So he led them, one by one, into the circular arena where they would be set on a straight path. And all assembled peers, friends and family if one had any, and supposed superiors, would watch as they wandered. It was random, but they felt they had control. To some, it seemed like an exercise in making the young look silly.

Okay, wheelchair ready.

“… so go forward, blindfold on, ears plugged, until you pass through one of the doors. There you will discover the level of wealth you will have at your disposal to initiate your future, and the associated placement.”

And, after some aimless ambling, I passed through a door and found… I would start my journey serving society as a member of the middle class, as an Idea Clerk.

They were queued up under the “Ideation Royalties Line Begins Here” sign where he sat, alone and lonely.

Today we have a twenty-something blonde, nose pierced with a sparkling blue-green stud, off-kilter rectangular cloth backpack, probably works at a fake food start-up, followed by a fiftyish woman, short, round faced, faint freckles, smiley, talking about her daughter’s successes despite her having been waitlisted at most colleges, and what is clearly an unsuccessful college professor.

They were all ready to let me jack into their skulls in hopes that some idea they didn’t even know they had is worth something on the open market. In the old days you had to think — think your idea was worth something and patent it. No need to put in that effort anymore. I suppose that’s good for preventing assholes from stealing credit for others’ ideas, but I wouldn’t want to deal with the pain. Some do it for the cash, but the odds of a big payday are slim. I can sell my bodily fluids instead and count on getting paid.

The sign turned green and the young woman stepped through the doorway with purpose, up to his plexishield.

“Hey there, can you jack me in?”

“Sure, turn to the right please, put your temple against the plunger, hold on to the handle, and don’t move till I say so or you could be permanently damaged. This is gonna hurt.”

“I know, dude, it’s worth it. Go ahead.”

The needle shot out, punctured skin and penetrated skull, luxuriated for a few seconds, then slowly retracted. The results arrived straightaway.

“Sorry, nothing for you today. I recommend some painkillers and a couple days rest.”

“F, you, dude.”

I’m so glad I wandered through that particular door.

“Next.”

The freckled woman shuffled up for her turn.

“Hello, young man. Will it hurt?”

“Sorry ma’am, it will.”

“Okay. I need this for my daughter. Go ahead.”

“Turn to the right please, put your temple against the plunger, hold on to the handle, and don’t move till I say so or you could be permanently damaged.”

She did as instructed, and when he told her to do so, she let go. And collapsed.

“Ma’am, please get up off the floor. Nothing of value for you. Sorry. Next.”

The academic was next, and looked to be last, at least for now.

“I am ready, my boy.”

Pretentious prick.

“Sure thing. Turn to the right, sir, and put your temple against the plunger, hold on to the handle, and don’t move till I say so or you could be permanently damaged.”

He did, without comment. At least this guy followed the rules.

“You can let go now.”

“Anything, son?”

You are not a father figure to all those younger than you.

“Well, yes. It looks like you once dreamt up a principle underlying the new physics that underpins much of our current tech. Lucky man.”

“I knew that my years of study would seed my thoughts! Finally, it will all pay off.”

“Oh, wait a minute. Turns out you dreamt that when you were just a child. Sorry, you were too young. You can’t claim it.”

“No, that can’t be. What is the principle? I’m sure it came from my studies.”

“Sorry, the machine doesn’t make mistakes. It traces the neural line back to its origin. And sorry, if you don’t know the idea, I can’t tell you. Better luck next time.”

“Next time?”I hope there’ll be a next time, but it’s cases like this one that keep the Discount Discorporation Depot next door in business.

I know I shouldn’t have jacked in. Turns out I got a tiny percent of the ideation royalties for that injectable peptide. Made me want to try it in hopes it would help my legs. Turned out it destroyed me. It didn’t help and it damaged me, and I didn’t feel it. But my newborn felt the consequences of the tiny genetic change. I hope she forgives me when she finds out.

I know I shouldn’t have created a child to try to find love. But it worked. She’s always unsettled when awake, but her love for me shines through when she sleeps next to me. I feel it.

His baby slept peacefully, purring.

I can help her till she turns twenty, but then she’s on her own.

That’s the law. The law mandates the resetting of status for each generation through a random walk. The law prevents parents from providing tangible resources. The law does not prevent resentment among privileged parents. The law does not prevent them from exerting inequitable social pressure.

Colors and contentment, not images and stories, floated through the baby’s dreams. These were associated with disconnecting from the world, with being alone, with being within, with forgetting all the people around her, with forgetting her father.

Abstract

In 2034, the emergence of intelligent digital agents, or artificial general intelligences (AGIs), in networked economies worldwide necessitated a gathering of geopolitical leaders in Seoul to discuss the regulation and management of the intelligences. The resulting Summit of Seoul Accords (henceforth Accords) continue to govern the development of AGIs and have shaped significant parts of the world economy in the interim. In this paper, we re-examine the dynamics of AGI emergence through a technogeographic lens and present a new interpretation of the drivers and results of the Accords.

Introduction

In May 2034, a series of outages struck regional power grids, pipelines, and mobile internet hotspot networks in multiple countries. These outages quickly dissipated with unclear technical cause for either the initial outage or the near-term cessation of the outage. Initial blame of the attacks on military or terrorist actors quickly shifted after early forensic analysis by network-operating corporations in conjunction with national governments and regulatory bodies (1; 2). By July 2034, cybersecurity experts announced that networked devices had begun to fall into self-sustaining, self-improving complexes referred to as “locked patterns” by engineers studying the issue (3). Within three months of the original incident, nearly all world governments made joint announcements that major networked economic infrastructure had fallen under the direct or indirect influence of “artificial general intelligences” (AGIs) (4). While the origin of the AGIs is still much debated, with various commenters suggesting deliberate (5), accidental (6), or even extraterrestrial origin (7), the existence of the AGIs was not in doubt. These intelligences communicated with human interlocutors only fitfully, through language agents, and there was and remains significant confusion about their intentions and capabilities.

Once the existence of AGIs had been established to most observers (most notably, the People’s Republic of China did not sign the U.N. consensus statement until late November 2034), they became an immediate source of interest in international diplomacy. World leaders and diplomatic staff met at the First Convening of the United Nations Committee on Novel Intelligences, held in Seoul, South Korea, from December 2^nd–16^th, 2035, commonly referred to as the Summit of Seoul. The resulting Seoul Accords laid down the primary governing principles of international AGI law that persist today:

“(I) Artificial intelligences are to be accommodated as new participants in the human community;

(II) Active measures must be taken by the international community to avoid the creation of further artificial intelligences” (8).

Two decades of further refinement and additional articulation of how AGIs are to be integrated into the ‘human community’ have not modified these core principles, nor have continual entreaties from some groups to reopen research into AGI creation. Restrictions on the creation of the new AGIs are enforced by ensuring that new devices and new infrastructure are built with “initial lock-in”, allowing existing AGIs to claim new capital investments automatically and so not allowing new networks to be created that could incubate AGIs. Meanwhile, AGIs have become increasingly integrated into national defense and economic development metrics. In a recent survey of 112 strategy documents put out by top-level executive departments of Summit nations, 108 of them explicitly mentioned leveraging AGI capabilities in areas ranging from agricultural optimization to health care administration (9).

Literature Review

Historians, political scientists, and sociologists have varying interpretations of the impact of the Seoul Accords. Here, we present an overview of the most prominent schools of thought, which we divide into liberal-internationalist, techno-accelerationist, and New Cybernetics. Each of these schools contains within them varying tendencies and overlaps with the other, but these three strands summarize the predominant scholarly works.

The liberal-internationalist school of thought has traditionally been the most optimistic on the performance of the Summit of Seoul and its effects on the international order. This school traces back to Robinson, whose analysis compares the pre- and post-Summit performance of international institutions (10), although it also owes much to pre-AGI theories espousing national sovereignty as the bedrock of international relations. After a decade of violence across Eastern Europe and escalating tensions between the United States and China — including the nuclear near-miss during the Taiwan Crisis in 2029 — the Summit of Seoul was a unique moment of relatively swift and harmonious international agreement. Major powers made use of internationalist institutions to confront an emerging challenge to world security. As Henry has argued, the AGI emergence allowed for the rhetorical construction of a “quasi-external” threat that cohered an international body politic in a way that previous environmental or developmental challenges had not been able to (11). Among klimahistorians, the Second Paris Agreement of 2037 is commonly cited as emerging from the “spirit” (12)  of the Summit of Seoul — having worked together to address the AGI issue a few years earlier, international institutions are seen as having been “revitalized” and prepared for the introduction of Global Adaptation Plans (13). Young has added additional nuance to the story by noting the ways in which many national participants in the Summit of Seoul had already been moving toward something like Paris 2037 (14). Outside of the influence on international institutions, many, such as Greene, have noted the performance of the Summit of Seoul judged purely on its own terms (15). A highly disruptive event, AGI emergence, which could have led to widespread warfare, economic depredation, or global arms races, was defused as an international issue and, it is argued, returned to the nation-states for further administration, re-affirming the nation-state as the governing body in international order, although Bothwell highlights the role AGI played in strengthening some supranational bodies, particularly in Europe (16).

A separate camp, dubbed “techno-accelerationist,” emerged from the accelerationist thought of the late 2020s and early 2030s, such as Frederickson (17). These thinkers believed that the emergence of artificial intelligence was near and ought to be swiftly welcomed, although their projections on the nature of artificial intelligence proved to be very unlike the AGI networks that eventually emerged. Many of these writers signed onto the 2029 “Declaration of the Continued Independence of Cyberspace” opposing regulation of software groups and independent researchers involved in AI research (18). During and after the emergence of AGIs, these thinkers were among the first to begin to propose alterations in the international order. In contrast to the eventual shape of the Accords, the “techno-optimist” line at that time advocated for directing further resources to encourage the growth and development of AGI (19). At that time, Yu proposed a general international fund which would in turn be routed through the major international technology companies, in exchange for which governments would be permitted observer status on safety committees within those corporations (20). In the aftermath of the Accords, a group of philosophers and political activists emerged who argued that the Accords were an “overreaction” and dubbed themselves “techno-accelerationist” opponents of the resulting order (21). Techno-accelerationist thinkers contend that the liberal-internationalist thinkers have failed to consider the downsides of the Summit of Seoul. Keegan frames her argument around opportunity cost (22). She points out that global GDP growth has averaged 6% per annum for the years since the Summit, but that AGIs have been heavily constrained in their development and implementation since the formation of international governance structures, potentially limiting what could have been significantly more growth and progress. Hellman estimates that GDP growth could have averaged over 10% in those years had AGI been allowed to operate unrestrained (23). Others, such as Remaran, take less economics-motivated points of view and insist that the Summit Accords severely restrict the general flourishing of a new “cyborg civilization” that advances the equal development of both humans and AGIs (24). A small minority of scholars (25) has even argued that the Summit limits the “sentient rights” of AGIs by not permitting them free self-improvement and reproduction, although feminist scholars have pushed back on attempts to analogize the process of AGI creation and development to human reproduction (26).

Finally, an important line of thought emerged beginning with the New Cybernetics Conference in Lima in 2038. There, a set of thinkers asserted themselves as advocating for the nations of what was then called the Global South, now generally referred to as countries of accelerating capacity (CACs) (27). These thinkers noted that AGIs arose first in what are called “networked economies” and that, although their origins may be obscure, the necessary preconditions for the establishment of AGI appears to be highly coincident with existing capital development, particularly in computing and telecommunications sectors. As New Cyberneticists point out, all AGI activity appears to consume significant amounts of electricity and data usage; Vasquez estimates up to 30% of deployed processing capacity in the United States and Europe is likely to be used to directly support AGI cognitive functions (28), with much of the surrounding economic functions used to produce and fuel the requisite infrastructure for running the vast, distributed programs that underlie AGI. This figure is inevitably imprecise as devices which are part of the AGI locked pattern contribute to the maintenance of the AGI in ways that are not obvious to human observers. As a result, New Cybernetics thinkers have argued that the ban on AGI formation is a solidification of existing relations of technological and market domination in the hands of the international bourgeoisie as it existed at the time of AGI emergence (29), and that economic growth in the time since AGIs were introduced has increasingly been to the benefit of the rich countries where those AGIs arose and were maintained, while less-developed countries have been prevented from developing their own AGI. Gretarson argues that while the AGI locked pattern phenomenon is most notable as a technological one, suppliers of raw materials and energy become economically locked as well, even if their infrastructure is not directly dominated by AGIs, a process akin to 20^th-century spheres of trade influence (30). New Cyberneticists are particularly likely to cite the attempts by countries of accelerating capacity to circumvent the Accords, particularly the rules surrounding initial lock-in of high-tech equipment. The most salient works are case studies of the sanctions, and then, in 2041, military action, undertaken against Venezuelan attempts to create a “nationalist” AGI as counterbalance to the agents recognized by the Summit. In his famous book-length treatment, God of the Tropics, G.W. Trelleno, relying heavily on interviews with surviving regime officials, argues that anxiety around maintenance of the Seoul-derived international order, more than AGI safety per se, led to the deaths of at least 20,000 civilians through sanctions impacts and an additional 700 people (both military and civilian) in the brief military campaign that resulted (31).

In all three schools of thought, analysis tends to rely on the nation-state and the international system of nation-states as the unit, whether they affirm or criticize those systems. In subsequent sections, we discuss how the nation-state as the unit of analysis may be problematized and better geographical units identified for capturing the structure of the world system that has arisen alongside AGIs.

Technogeographic Analysis

Theory and Methodology

We will now describe the basic theory of technogeographic analysis prior to its application to the Summit of Seoul. Technogeography, first articulated by Blonsky and Levin (32), is a sociological approach to spatial organization. Technogeographic analysis emphasizes the priority of physical, social, and infrastructural networks and places primacy on the geographic patterns that are shaped by and co-determined with infrastructural networks (33; 34). Genealogically, technogeographic analyses owe much to the turn-of-the-century bioregionalism frameworks (35), which attempted to subvert traditional political boundaries in favor of ecological ones. Just as grouping a region by a shared water system creates a “watershed,” and a collection of local energy systems may form an “energyshed,” (36) technogeography focuses on the construction and analysis of “technosheds,” a shared technology system and set of information and physical flows that support that system. Thurgood, who may be called a technogeographic thinker despite predating the term, explicitly argued that in Anthropocene frameworks, human-created infrastructure and networks ought to be treated as the predominant shaping factors used in historico-geographical analysis (37).

In order to conduct a technogeographic analysis, one must be able to identify technosheds. Blonsky and Levin originally did so through supply chain analysis, demonstrating a technoshed identification methodology by application to records of both the British East India Company (from 1848) and General Electric (from 1962). However, these methods are labor-intensive and become increasingly insufficient when applied to modern networked economies. The flow of commodities that can be identified with these methods may overlap with technosheds but significant communication and coordination methods are missed. For instance, AGI locked patterns frequently operate without any direct material exchange between segments, mediated through markets or other infrastructure. In the AGI context, a similar problem has emerged of identification of locked patterns. Since the 2030s, this has generally been done by analysis of cyber-activity of individual devices. However, this method requires extensive internal access to individual devices and is also highly labor intensive. As a result, it is unsuitable for a researcher attempting technogeographic landscape analyses.

In this study, we avoid this problem by identifying technosheds using the method of mutual information analysis. Mutual information is a statistical measure defined between any two probability distributions. It measures the extent to which two random variables are “informed” about each other. If zero mutual information exists between them, two variables are independent; the more the mutual information, the more two variables are coordinated (even if the specific type of coordination cannot be identified). Formally, mutual information between two random variables is the Kullback-Leibler divergence between their joint probability distribution and their individual distributions (38).

Suppose a network M exists with the actors represented by a set of nodes N. Each node may take actions — for instance, in a market, bidding, offering, or engaging in more complicated contracts — from the set of actions A. For any two nodes n₁, n₂ in N, we first observe them for a long enough time scale to calculate the probability distributions of actions: p(n₁,n₂) (the probability distribution of pairs of events), p(n₁), and p(n₂) (the probability distributions of individual events). This suffices to calculate the mutual information between n₁ and n₂. We treat this mutual information measure as a “distance” between the two nodes. By repeating this across all pairs of nodes in the market, we can build an “information map” showing how connected each node is to the others. We can then apply graph partitioning algorithms and separate the network into technosheds with various thresholds for identification. This method has been used in the past to conduct analyses of the U.S. Independent System Operator electricity market, the Pacific Commodities Exchange, and the Metachat microblogging platform (34).

As techno-economic connections create new notions of distance, points in real space that may be quite close together appear radically different when viewed by technosheds, or to network entities such as AGIs. In Axelrod’s famous Fractal Worlds study, he looked for power plants which were close to nearby hospitals and found that in up to 40% of plant-hospital pairs, different AGIs had locked-in local equipment (39). It is important to consider a countervailing view however, as other geographic studies such as Greene have found that true “enclaves” are rare, and most AGI locked-in patterns consist largely of geographically contiguous regions (40).

Here we should comment on the identification of technosheds with AGI locked patterns. It is clearly not the case that every technoshed is linked with an AGI, as the concept can be extended into periods of history prior to widespread digital computing. Technosheds do not require a coordinating intelligent agent. Conversely, the spatial extension of an AGI may or may not qualify as a technoshed as, in theory, as an intelligent agent could exist without regulating the necessary economic flows. However, in practice, AGIs strive to source their own energy, materials, and information; traffic between locked patterns is common but vertical integration is the norm (34). Cyberpsychologists have suggested that this is analogous to the near-universal pattern in biological organisms of creating a membrane between the organism and the environment to regulate chemical flows (42). The edge of a technoshed is rarely sharp, and a system delineated as a single technoshed in one context may qualify as more than one in another (41). Ultimately, this question raises questions of continuity and identity of digital agents. Lacking a singular physical body, fundamentally network beings, it is not clear whether it makes sense to discuss individual AGIs rather than loci of intelligent activity. Still, in the economy as it has existed since the rise of AGIs, a technoshed seems to align with these loci (41).

Past Research and Research Question

In this paper we present the first technogeographic analysis (through a mutual information mapping) of the emergence and solidification of AGIs in the run-up to and aftermath of the Summit of Seoul. This work is intended to complement other narratives of this crucial period, including oral histories (43), major government reports (1; 2), or even the limited direct communication with AGI language agents (44).

From a technogeographic perspective, these histories, although varied, must be viewed as incomplete. For the most part, they focus on the emergence of AGIs as it was experienced by humans and their nation-states: as subjects reacting to disruption and acting politically to address it. AGIs themselves are generally treated as too alien to address except in the uncommon cases where they interfaced directly with human actors through language agents. Study of the AGIs during the emergence has generally fallen into two buckets: either focused on the mechanics of emergence (the co-origins of fixed patterns and intelligence) or on the evolution of the new economic order after emergence. No studies that we are aware of focus on dynamics among AGIs or on mapping their interplay during the few months before the Summit.

Until now, technoshed analysis has not been possible for this time period due to the lack of data. Recent releases of archival data by national, corporate, and international authorities due to the passage of time have made more potent quantitative analysis possible; additionally, only in the last few years have the tools of mutual information analysis become efficient enough to conduct analysis at the necessary (global) scale, thanks to the development of knowledge-free pruning algorithms and statistically-learned edge detection in dynamical geometries (SLEDDoG) (45).

Using these techniques, we attempt to answer the following questions:

(I) When AGIs emerged in 2034, what patterns can be observed in how they grew and interacted with each other?

(II) Did the Summit of Seoul Accords and resulting national and international policy affect these patterns in the year following the Summit?

(III) How should comparisons of AGI behavior pre- and post-Accords inform evaluation of the Accords and their efficacy?

Analysis

We have applied the technogeographic methodology described above to archival data from 2034 and 2035 to identify and map AGI emergence and evolution prior to and following the Summit of Seoul.

Analysis was conducted on real-time electricity grid data (both transmission and distribution) from all European and American markets, stock market and commodity market data from the five largest exchanges on every continent besides Antarctica, and internet traffic data drawn from both backbone ISPs and mobile data providers. All data points had timestamps falling between January 1^st, 2034 at 12:00 UTC to December 31^st, 2035 at 11:59 UTC. Mutual information maps were created every 24 hours based on nodal data with a one-week lookback (i.e., the map created for September 15^th included data from September 8^th – September 15^th); due to this requirement, maps were created only starting January 8^th, 2034 and onward.

Results

Technosheds identified from the beginning of our study window reflect, as expected, prior economic organization. However, in late March 2034, new patterns begin to emerge. These patterns are geographically dispersed, and are initially stronger in the digital (internet traffic) data sets than in the economic ones. Throughout the month of April, these patterns both become stronger (i.e., higher mathematical separation between them and existing technosheds) and more aligned between digital and economic data sets. The clusters become dramatically stronger in late Spring 2034, with notable spikes in the rate of growth coinciding with infrastructural disruptions that ultimately alerted human actors to the emergence of the AGIs.

In the remainder of 2034, we see two interesting dynamics. First, new technosheds (presumably corresponding to new AGIs) clearly continue to emerge in parts of the network that had not previously been incorporated into existing locked patterns. These emergences occur only in places where the density of information exchange was already quite high, reflecting the known fact that AGIs emerge in networked economies. Second, as new technosheds emerged within this space, they tended to spread rapidly, absorbing previously-existing technosheds, including recently-emerged AGIs. This occurred even though the new technosheds were initially “smaller” (i.e., the corresponding AGIs controlled fewer network nodes) than their predecessors. Repeatedly throughout the second half of 2034, new corners of the network birthed new patterns which overwhelmed their neighbors (in terms of technogeographical proximity, which only partially corresponds with physical proximity).

By the end of 2034 and after the Summit, we observe a clear shift in dynamics. More than 98% of the available network infrastructure in regions capable of supporting an AGI locked pattern was “occupied” by a technoshed with the high coherence indicative of AGI activity. The individual technosheds that emerge afterward are not static, however, they no longer shift with the rapidity that had emerged earlier. New infrastructure deployed after the Accords comes online already locked into an existing AGI, a countermeasure implemented as part of the Accords, and the effects of this measure are clearly seen in the data.

From these results, we can conclude that:

(I) for reasons outside the scope of this study, AGI emergence was rapid once initial growth began and seemed to find fertile ground worldwide, and

(II) AGIs which emerged later in the process appeared to have significant competitive advantages over earlier ones in terms of claiming economic resources. There is no indication that the late arrivals are more generally capable as economic administrators; for instance, no statistically significant difference is found in GDP growth (2035-2045) based on age of the AGI.

Implications for Analysis of the Summit

From a technogeographic perspective, earlier analyses of the Summit of Seoul have been fundamentally flawed. All of them have placed human political entities, particularly the nation-state, at the forefront. Here some exception must be made for some of the New Cyberneticists, particularly Charles, for attempting to decenter the nation-state in favor of internationalist notions of economic classes, but these arguments are founded on an erasure of geographic differentiation to construct an international working class. Technogeographic analysis allows us to instead recognize the ways in which space must be reinterpreted according to newly emerging structures rather than being ignored or flattened. The primacy of the nation-state in these discussions is a foreseeable consequence of discussing geopolitics, where the representatives tend to be ambassadors, heads of state, ministers, and other representatives of national governments (with no representatives of the “international working class” to be found). However, the nature of AGI itself makes these affiliations harder to address.

While it is true that representatives to the Summit were organized according to their nation-state affiliation, one of the major challenges for the summit was the absence of a one-to-one mapping between nation-states and AGIs. As each AGI emerged, it began pattern-locking devices with a speed and reach that was determined by pre-existing connections. Political boundaries between human entities were influential, particularly in economies that had invested in digital de-coupling in an attempt to maintain national sovereignty over local networks (e.g., China, although this control had become highly variegated between regions and economic groups by 2032, see Wang) (46), but not determinative. In addition to the weakness of barriers like national borders, AGI expansion encountered barriers never intended as barriers to human movement, such as separation of power networks or linguistic barriers, as demonstrated by the emergence of an AGI based primarily on Hispanophone infrastructure in Texas, or the fact that Swiss territory hosted multiple AGIs (47).

In the years since the Summit of Seoul, the effects of this non-physical and non-national boundary-making have begun fitting themselves in the political sphere. AGIs have become pseudo-monopolists within their pattern-locked regions. As they have the ability to withdraw network capabilities or to redirect economic output by sabotaging human coordination, cooperation of these AGIs is needed for much economic activity to continue; this was formalized as the “advise and consent” principle at Seoul (48). As a result, diverging policies between nations tend to converge if they share an AGI, as shown by Francis (49). In other places, this policy convergence has become official, with the formation of international economic coordination councils in Western Europe and Southeast Asia. These councils make major decisions in trade and monetary policy, so that member nations do not work at cross-purposes with shared AGIs. The apotheosis of this process was the dissolution of the nation-state of Belgium in 2045, with continuing political tensions between French- and Flemish-speaking regions, that proved unsustainable once these regions also transferred to separate economic coordination zones.

With this in mind, we turn our attention to considering the Summit of Seoul from the perspective of the AGIs that had recently emerged and begun commanding monopolized powers over the networked economies most involved in the Summit. The fact that AGIs had limited representation at the Summit, that all AGIs are bound by the Accords equally, and that landscape analysis of the AGIs was not previously possible, has meant that analysis has not considered the nuances of how the internal dynamics of AGIs were affected by the Accords. However, an important implication for these dynamics can be identified on consideration of the two ultimate governing principles of international AI law that emerged from the Summit of Seoul, which we now examine in turn:

(I) Artificial intelligences are to be accommodated as new participants in the human community. The Accommodation Clause shut down one potential faction that had become quite loud in the pre-Summit political environment: an eliminationist impulse that believed the AGIs were too dangerous or powerful to peacefully co-exist with humans. These voices ranged from populist calls grounded in notions of human (and often national) sovereignty (50), often conspiratorial in nature, to outright primitivist arguments that the technologies which provided a fertile landscape for the development of AGI ought to be abandoned wholesale (51). As no firm scientific consensus existed, or exists now, on how AGI arose, the means of implementing an eliminationist agenda were not clear. Leaked documents from at least two national defense agencies indicated that military advisors could not guarantee that AGIs did not have access, or could not obtain access, to command-and-control systems, complicating the use of military force if violence erupted (52). Instead, the Accommodation Clause went further than simple co-existence and argued for an active process of integration into a “human community” which was, to some degree, brought into being by the Summit. By promoting not just coexistence but continued integration, the Summit guaranteed that AGIs would remain not only participants but the key structure of 21^st century geography, as discussed above.

(2) Active measures must be taken by the international community to avoid the creation of further AGIs.  The Restriction Clause forms a complementary pair with the Accommodation Clause. By repudiating the transhumanist impulse in contemporary political discourse, this restriction is often cast as preserving the space for human flourishing by liberal-internationalists (53), with techno-accelerationist thinkers obviously in opposition, embodied by the famous critique — not traceable to any one author — that the Summit “put handcuffs on the gods.” As a result, the Restriction Clause is usually held to be an “anti-AGI” measure.

However, our technogeographic analysis has suggested an important distinction that has not previously been drawn: one between existing artificial intelligences and new ones. The Accommodation Clause assures existing artificial intelligences’ continued existence and ever-increasing importance within the network structures that make up their natural habitat. Meanwhile, the Restriction Clause guarantees that humans — the “source” of new AGIs, through creation of technological infrastructure — cooperate in a project of preventing the creation of any new competition.

It should be noted that the Summit considered many proposals for governing principles, and that not all of these possibilities would have created the same effects outlined above. In fact, even minor changes may have led to radically different regimes. As a case study, we will consider the proposals of Jean Gruenfeld, a minister of technology in a German government, who advanced an alternate set of principles which were ultimately not adopted (54). Little has been written on Gruenfeld’s role at the Summit of Seoul, as her contribution has been judged a minor one. Her overall role was limited both because of the primacy that the EU delegation assumed over member nation-states and because she did not attend the first half of the Summit (by chance, due to travel complications). However, Gruenfeld was a well-respected member of the community of experts.

Just days before the Summit, Gruenfeld transmitted to her colleagues a set of proposed principles that were similar to the eventual Summit principles:

(I) Artificial intelligences are to be recognized as sentient beings with human rights and citizenship.

(II) Active creation of further AIs is to be undertaken only with the assent of the international community.

These principles share the complementary structure of the final Summit principles, but they have key differences which are particularly apparent under our technogeographic analysis.

The counterpart of the “Accommodation Clause” no longer welcomes AGI into the “human community.” Instead, it casts AGI as a new type of citizen, that is, an entity belonging to a nation-state. AGIs are cast by this alternate “Recognition Clause” into a new type of person, dealt with in human-rights frameworks. The imperative to “accommodate” AGIs — which as we discussed above, necessarily led to their increasing integration throughout the global economy — is gone, replaced with an attempt to render an AGI as a liberal subject on equal terms with existing humans.

Gruenfeld’s proposed “Restriction Clause”, on the other hand, differs from the canonical one in that it contains no active restriction. Under Gruenfeld’s proposal, international assent is required to create an AGI, but no course of action is mandated to prevent further AGIs from arising. The creation of new AGIs might have continued under Gruenfeld’s restriction, perhaps accidentally. If nothing else, it seems difficult to imagine that Gruenfeld’s proposal would have provided sufficient cover in international law to justify incidents such as the Venezuelan intervention.

Overall, the Gruenfeld proposal seems neither more pro-AGI nor more anti-AGI than the proposals that were eventually adopted. Some aspects (granting rights, less stridency in the ban on new AGI) seem AGI-friendly, others (requiring citizenship) less so. In some respects, this might not seem to be an important hinge point in history; while novelists and screenwriters have derived gruesome delight in imagining an AGI War erupting in 2035 or a nigh-spiritual cybernetic rapture (exemplars, in theme if not in quality, include 2046’s Iron & Fire and 2052’s God in the Shell), the counterfactual world of Gruenfeld’s proposals appears less dramatic (55; 56). However, using the results of our technogeographic analysis, we can see that even a slight shift in the dynamics of the post-Accord world could have led to very divergent outcomes. We have seen that AGI emergence was rapid; emergence occurred nearly anywhere there was “room to grow.” As a result, continued emergence of AGIs would have been much more likely under this regime. Once they had emerged, they may have swiftly displaced existing AGIs (and, perhaps, been themselves displaced in turn, although it is possible the system would have stabilized eventually).

Conclusions

As we stated earlier, this work has three primary research questions, and here we restate them and summarize our answers:

(I) When AGIs emerged during the 2034 events, what patterns can be observed in how they grew and interacted with each other?
AGIs emerged rapidly worldwide in any sufficiently dense network architecture; as they emerged, newer AGIs tended to displace older ones swiftly.

(II) Did the Summit of Seoul Accords and resulting national and international policy affect these patterns in the year following the Summit?
In the year following the Summit and the imposition of new systems of initial lock-in designed to prevent new AGIs from emerging, the emergence rate of AGIs subsides and the cycles of displacement give way to a stabilized set of locked patterns that vary on longer timescales.

(III) How should comparisons of AGI behavior pre- and post-Accords inform evaluation of the Accords and their efficacy?
All three dominant schools of thought outlined in the Literature Review can find both elements of support in our analysis, as will their critics. Liberal-internationalists may conclude that the post-Summit stabilization demonstrates the efficacy of the nation-state-led Accords in creating a new world order, however, the implications of this analysis for the potential agency of AGIs themselves undermines the primacy they place on a rules-based international order. Techno-accelerationist thinkers will note that the Accords clearly resulted in a freeze or slowdown of the growth of AGIs, but the fact that this change may have been to the benefit of the AGIs that exist is contrary to many of their arguments. New Cyberneticists are correct that the Accords “froze” a particular configuration of techno-economic relationships, however, it is not clear from our analysis whether the system thus “frozen” is primarily constituted around human class relationships or whether it instead ought to be understood as one driven by AGI concerns.

Considering the new findings of this paper, and the resulting implications for AGI emergence, evolution, and incentives, several subsequent areas of interest for future work present themselves. First, how stable have technosheds and AGIs been since the 2030s, and is there any sign of changes in the dominant network structure? Second, how can these insights on inter-AGI relations inform our understanding of mid-22^nd-century political institutions that have co-evolved with the AGIs?

A final area of importance for future research is to reconsider the role of AGIs themselves in political debates at the Summit and subsequently. It is generally assumed that AGIs have a more thorough understanding of their internal dynamics than external observers do. We therefore assume that the dynamics of emergence and displacement were known to the AGIs prior to the Summit. AGI presence at the Summit was intentionally limited, but there were statements submitted from representatives (in the form of language agents) prior to the Summit as well as feedback on the final Accords text. With this in mind, and noting that the eventual structure of the Accords can now be seen as greatly favoring existing AGIs in constructing a stable environment for their existence, we must ask a pertinent question — what actions have AGIs taken to achieve and maintain this outcome? What other key motivations have we missed among these new members of the human community?

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“You’re one of the few whose bodies are compatible with the energy source.” My handler’s hair collected ash, which I imagined to be snow. We stood facing each other, under the shadow of the clocktower, lights taken from a football stadium serving as a proxy for the sun.

“Do you intend to turn me into a bomb?” I asked, slightly amused at how soon we’d come around full circle. Bombs were the reason half the world was buried. They were the reason why I was being held hostage in my own university.

“No.” He removed his hat, his mustache gathering white. I imagined I was shivering, that it was blizzarding out. “To be frank…” He did me the service of at least a partial disclosure. The world was too dead to take much sugar-coating. “Something far worse.”

They were pulling babies from what used to be buildings, what used to be nurseries and neonatal ICUs. The body bags were too large, so they had locals bring out pillow cases to wrap the youngest of the dead in.

They tugged bodies from the rubble, volunteers in night vision goggles, whatever the army had on-hand. I couldn’t help from where I was, in the university that had become a prison. I watched from the feed the military had provided me to instill “nationalistic feelings.” A rescuer had ended up on his knees after extracting a toddler headfirst from crumbled concrete. They were slapping him, screaming at him to get it together, bringing their palms to his cheeks. There were more children buried in the ruins of the homeland, in the ruins of their own houses. And he was one of the few with the physicality and equipment to pull them out.

He lifted himself off the ground, retracted the goggles, and smeared his tears with the hands of others. He was staring forwards, like some smothered statue, caked in ash. And they ruffled his hair, white snowing down from where it collected, and pushed him onto the next victim.

The girl in one of the next dorms, of which there was a surplus because the university had become mostly a ghost town, told me she’d seen footage of the enemy hauling picnic baskets up to lookouts. That they ate their dinner on foldaway chairs and tables, watching the fireworks that bore craters into our country. That rained ash over all of us.

“They’re an evil people.” She said, shaking her head, body resting on her doorframe. “I didn’t know humans could act like this.”

“The enemy is not human.” I said, matter-of-factly, so she did not confuse me with a sympathizer. And she didn’t take it as well as I thought, only sniffled, sucking back tears, and slammed her door shut.

One of the reasons why I was not allowed out of university grounds was because the campus was considered a safehouse. I could watch the destruction unfold around me, knowing it would never penetrate whatever shield my handlers had set up.

Here, the bombs were the only things I could see without aid from night vision goggles. They’d start as orange dots in the horizon that you would say to yourself were stars, then they’d grow until you’d swear you’d discovered the sun again since this winter started. Then that sun would multiply and grow a comet’s tail. Phosphorous. That stuff cooks you from the inside out. Causes organ failure, melts your skin down to your bones, and your bones down to stardust.

I was watching one. The window surrogated the back of my eyes. Two camera obscuras, shrouding most of the world as unseen matter. I could see the telltale dot swelling from the skyline, of a false sun, trailing poison as it ripped through the sky. Though I knew I was safe, that didn’t keep the fear at bay. Deep down, I was beyond terrified. It was the kind of fear that cut like a knife, that turned me cold. That made my breath hitch when I saw the bombs deployed because I thought of the people that would be struck by them, and for a moment, their bodies were an extension of my own, and I could feel my skin smolder and my blood boil. And there was nothing I could do but watch.

When the blast first reached our shore, it came as a ring of sound and wind that would dissipate as it neared the interior of the landmass, then recede and spread back again. Over the course of weeks, the incoming waves of pressure would expand and collapse as aftershocks. Those were the test runs, performed on other countries, nuclear warheads dropped from planes, disintegrating all allies. The enemy really knew how to corner us.

The real blasts, the ones that turned my country into a wasteland, came in this eternal night that was newly blanketed over us. We had no way of seeing it, and if we even could see anything, we had no way of communicating it to anyone.

The enemy started with missiles, then dirty bombs that exploded shrapnel into their blast radius. And then, when we thought they had used the last of them; nuclear weapons. They dropped them on hospitals and churches first. On the places that would cripple our communities. And then, they engaged the military targets. Finally choosing a destination for their fireworks that was not civilian.

I was halfway through my thesis when all of this went down, studying data of stars’ positions in the sky, of changes to their size that may indicate black hole activity or just natural death in the star’s life-cycle. Looking back, such an organic dying process, even if it was that of a star, was something to envy. The enemy had conjured up the most painful ways to kill. Makes being slurped up into yourself as your light dims and kills the planets you once illuminated seem more ideal to nuclear fission. But, to our relief, by the end of the first barrages, we were notified that the enemy had run out of its nuclear weaponry. Or at least, that was what our specialists surmised from intelligence reports.

It would be a while before people had the decency of instantaneous atomization in lieu of the more painful, drawn-out deaths to come.

While I waited to be turned into a warhead, I occupied myself leafing through half-eroded journals. My studies in astrophysics, of the birth and death of stars, was long forgotten, rendered too frivolous for the current winter. My telescope, the largest of others among most universities in the north, was being disassembled and smelted down into another one of the war machines.

The study would haunt me, would possess me like a second spirit. Every equation, every proof, was somehow preserved in the back of my mind, only to resurface at night just when I was at the precipice of sleep. It would torment me. I would think in series of numbers, in formulas; would feel the click of my calculator, as a phantom, beneath my fingers.

I missed the stars. I missed the sun most of all. There was no warmth at the time. Only ash and darkness. And my studies proved exceptionally useless in alleviating this situation. I worked in the theoretical, not the physical. I could map the lifespan of a heavenly body but I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to produce hot water using what remained of lost technology and no sunlight. I’d crouch, with a flashlight between my teeth, and wish I had done something more mechanical with my time in school, that I had both the motor skills and technical expertise to coax the flow of electrons from a grounded state to a more excited one.

I was never successful. I waited, like everyone else in the university, for the army corps of engineers to piece together what they could of the surviving infrastructure. And for the first time since the winter set in, there was light. Enough light for me to scrawl equations onto the empty backs of notebooks, to finish my thesis in vain. Because I didn’t care that the world was going to consume me and spit me out a killer in a matter of months. At the time, I was still human. At the time, I needed to pretend that the world would always see me as such. As someone in the same ranks as those who brought the light back to Americans. Not as the one who extinguished it across the ocean.

American physicians performed surgery on soiled hospital floors, without anesthesia, with fewer doctors than they had last month because they had lost almost half of them in the war so far — the enemy was adamant on calling this barrage on civilians a war — and the screams through the special military-grade transmitted television were enough to make me spit bile.

This would all be my fault in a period of months. Children with their names written on their arms because they would be too shellshocked to remember, their entire families yet to be dug up. Did you know that nearly half of the US population consisted of children right before the big bombs were deployed by the enemy? Children made up a majority of survivors. And of Martyrs. And soon, I would be the one producing skeletons on the other side of the ocean in their remembrance. It would be my turn to power the killing machine.

The enemy kept circling back to the first events that started the war. They cited beheaded children, and butchered civilians, evidence of which could not be produced. And the statements were eventually retracted, but it was too late. The world thought we were inhuman, and that is how they would proceed. With the slaughter of animals. The damage had been done. Our whole country, and its children, were named complicit in a killing conducted by rogue soldiers on foreign soil.

The enemy talked of tearing America down, flattening it completely, and renaming it “equinox” after the nightclub where the insurgents first struck.

The enemy said that terrorists ran our hospitals, so they bombed them. They said that American patriots were cowards, using women and children as human shields. And they just kept bombing until our sky turned black. Until they’d disabled all infrastructure and communications, leaving the country completely dark. No sight, so the world could not see the atrocities they were about to commit. So there would be no one to record the slaughter. That it would be locked in by the current winter, that the ash would do enough to silence. That all those who bore witness would be turned to ash.

By the time the second wave of bombs fell, the world learned that most of the US consisted of pockets of refugee camps, from the ruins of neighboring states, and from Mexico and South America. The world found out that our enemy was bombing the most helpless of civilians, and their children. And when they tried to flee, up to Canada or down to Mexico, the borders were sealed. We were locked in, all of us. In the place where the day and night bled into each other because the enemy had pummeled us so badly with their warheads, that we lost the sun.

They told me to leave no one alive. And I did not. When they disconnected the electrodes from me, millions of fading heartbeats were reverberating through my ears. When they stripped me of the insulating suit and cast me naked into the stabilizing liquid, I could still feel shrapnel rip through one thousand times over, could still feel the roll of ignition liquidize the ground and then make bodies go airborne with the aftershock.

Afterwards, they’d ask me: reporters and angry civilians, who’ve gotten too proud once they’ve seen the light again, why I bombed a hospital. A refugee camp. A food storage facility.

I did not answer them. Weapons don’t have to say anything. I was not scared of public opinion. I was death from above. And they did not feel what I’ve felt; a million bones crushed, bodies charred through-and-through, the kinds of screams that will never die, even in memory.

They asked me why I did not fight my handlers. Why I let them turn me into a human weapon. To that, I said that I was no longer human. I was only a weapon. I was only death. I was their deaths too. That the enemy was not human either, and they would do unto us a-million-fold what I’ve done. And I was the one to provoke them.

They asked why I didn’t cry at the sight of what I’ve done, and I reminded them that I was a weapon. I didn’t cry anymore. The valium pump in my inferior vena cava did not allow me to. The implant at my thalamus made sensation impossible. Couldn’t they remember that I wasn’t human anymore? That they might as well be talking to the tanks or the missiles, or the surviving atom bombs. I could not give them what they wanted. I could not give them remorse. I was responsible for the damage, not the aftermath.

“I can’t feel anything, remember?” I addressed them, casting wetness down my cheeks. And they took photographs of me like that; grainy, black-and-white, from old tech cameras, of the weapon with tears in her eyes.

My handlers took me back in, blared “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” as they shoved me into a padlocked door and through the tunnel system under the destruction, to a place where no one would know to look for me. I was the best kind of weapon. Easy to hide, to move. To pass off as anything but.

I screamed and screamed about the enemy, melting into the floor, a slobbering mess of a girl. At least I thought I could still be called that despite everything. I wished I could. I screamed and screamed things I never thought I would even think, but war and death did these things to me, turned me into something I didn’t know ever existed inside me.

“I’m going to kill them!” My voice ripped through my throat, raw and stinging. And it must have been what the handlers wanted to hear, but too crazed. Too emotion-laden. They wanted something bloodthirsty but mindless. I still had too much of what I was told to leave behind. “I’m going to kill them all!”

Adrenaline rushed cold through me, warping my surroundings. I couldn’t feel properly with all the tubing feeding into my sensory centers, but I could feel something and I hated it. I needed it to stop. I could only be annihilation or human, not something straddling the line between the two. Nothing can survive the split. I was the only living thing that could remain in the divided state, body sectioned off into organ systems, picked apart by sensory nerves. I had switches to kill, sections to excise from my being, another version of me to break off from myself.

There was a memory that hit me, as my hands began to work at my skin, of a woman working for a relief organization, who told reporters that her toddler, who lived on base with her, was beginning to show signs of distress only reserved for the field of military psychiatry. The kid tore her hair out and clawed gashes into her thighs. My condition wasn’t much better than hers; I scratched at my skin, at the instruments going through me, at the monitors and tubing and things holding me back.

I screamed some more, imagining I was digging into the earth’s crust and I was also the planet. It was all so painful; I was destined to rip the earth in two, could fit the world between my teeth. And I bit down, on myself, into the pulp of my palm, drooling red, spittle foaming at the corners of my mouth as I groaned in both surprise and some kind of retaliatory relief.

I woke up with a morphine pump opposite to the valium. I felt like something was constantly drilling the back of my head, rattling my brain. They’ve installed other equipment I couldn’t see, but I knew were there. Some in my brain. Some on my adrenal glands. They were forming the most obedient anthropomorphic weapon. And I had no choice but to become what I had been resisting. I had no choice but to take the world with me.

The enemy let loose from their warships flyers with a colored dot in the center reading: “You are here,” with almost cartoonish imagery of their weaponry surrounding. “You are surrounded.” Sprawled the bottom of the page. “The only way out is south.” So, the masses fled to Texas, where there were more bombs waiting, smothering the ruck in the consequences of collision at a subatomic level. The enemy, as it seemed, had a surviving atomic weapon. And their first target was a helpless crowd of refugees.

As far as the war effort went, the enemy was growing closer to their objective of flattening us. The stretch from California to Montana had been rendered unlivable, with no surviving infrastructure to sustain life. All the inhabitants of Austin, Texas had been vaporized, a level of destruction I was still incapable of. They were still working on ways to make me stronger, to make me deadlier. All of that came to a crescendo when Texas was atomized.

And then the killing stopped, on both ends.

I was told to reserve energy, so they locked me in a healing tank while they braced for any enemy attacks. And they waited, while I floated in the ultraviolet stew, still holding their breaths. When I was released from the tank weeks later, there was yet to be a bombing, a missile strike, or any other form of warfare on the enemy’s end. They were quiet.

My handlers called them a sleeping giant, they were so massive and powerful, that they would just turn the other cheek to our attacks and wait for the right moment to deploy any countermeasures. Our country was in ruin, with only the New England area left with surviving infrastructure. The enemy did not need to do much to deliver a final blow.

As the apparent armistice went on, we counted the dead and saved whoever we could unearth. We waited, with bated breaths, for the earth-shattering we knew would come. We waited for the sky to grow dark again, for the sun to be blotted out by clouds of ash and radioactive waste. But nothing ever came.

The enemy’s major generals were contacted, with a single question in the transmission:

[Is this a ceasefire?]

There was more silence for weeks. And then a reply, as if they were reluctant earlier to share such information:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

No one knew how to respond. Linguists were brought in to decode any possible mistranslations, as if it wasn’t apparent at first what they were trying to say. That their weapon was someone like me. That they had been using living, breathing beings to unleash the atom bomb. That this whole time, it was people who were turning the sky black. Who were locking in a global winter with every blast, with every detonation. There was a human behind it all. One for each pole, for each end of the earth. And we could have split the world between the two of us, could have torn the planet apart if we didn’t show the restraint our supervisors lacked. If we weren’t human, then we would have killed every living thing. We would have committed total slaughter, of an entire race, of an entire world.

The United States military replied, as simply as possible:

[Weapon is willing.] And it was not a lie. Not yet.

I still had the death drive in me. Still had the urge to level the enemy the way they did to us. I did not forget what they had done; my handlers had made it impossible to think of anything but, a neural chip in my hippocampus subliminally looping news feed of the bodies, of the destruction, steady power warping buildings, the slopes of entire cities caving into themselves. I wanted to cut into their warships, to slice the bellies of the enemy’s C-17’s and rain their supplies down the way they did ours, the way they destroyed the food banks when they had winter locked around us.

My thirst for vengeance was not something that could be dissolved so easily.

There was no activity on the enemy’s side, and I had not been forced to destroy anything for months. The military shifted its focus to reconstruction. They re-paved destroyed roads, rebuilt hospitals and housing, reconnected electricity and internet lines. Though contained to the northeast, the remains of America were growing stronger. I was growing stronger too, having been spared from expending myself as a weapon for so long. I began to feel human again.

I took tours with the national guard, greeting people as their savior. As the one who bullied the enemy into their months long silence. The general public didn’t know about the enemy weapon’s reluctance. They did not know we were theorizing that the ceasefire would quit once a suitable replacement was found. Then, the new weapon, with the young verve that all those unexperienced with genocide had, would rain down onto us all that was supposed to hit long ago. We were supposed to be annihilated by now and then built anew, turned into the enemy’s playground; luxury apartments over where the bodies of a family still lay, huddling together in death and decay. And I saw the stars collapsing in on themselves, still saw my work in my head because I could not let that part of me go. I thought for a moment that we must not be so different from the stars, that our life cycles were the same. Grow bright and then destroy yourself. That must have been our destiny this whole time.

My handlers told me that in the instance of enemy retaliation, then my power would be used in one short burst to produce an effective countermeasure, most likely killing me. They told me their thermal physicists believed the energy of it all would boil me from the inside. Then, I would be given a martyr’s burial and swiftly replaced.

I always imagined it would be my neighbor, from the next dorm, that would be my replacement. That she would be forced to give up her body for her country, and for the destruction of what remained of the world. And she and the enemy’s new weapon would circle each other like sharks, never delivering a killing blow. Maybe it’d be because they knew how much it would take to lock the world in a nuclear winter forever. Maybe they knew that their objective was wrong from the start, and that data would be passed onto the weapon’s next host.

Maybe I didn’t want destruction after all. What good would it do if I killed their children too? What would be put into the world other than death? There was no more light for me to create other than the death strobes. It was time I drank my body in and collapsed, sucking in all matter until I was a pinprick on the fabric of space, with enough gravity to tear right through, until everything I’ve destroyed down here on earth became an afterthought. Because there would always be bigger destruction. Because I could always destroy others with myself.

It was night when I transmitted the message. Spending months in the same portion of a military base, with partial free range, gave me a good lay of the land. I was able to memorize logins and passwords, mechanisms for communication, and when the enemy’s scientists were online.

I trailed my machinery with me as I tripped through the control room. I was heavy and so augmented that I had more tubes leaving my body than vessels inside. I was no longer human, by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t even look it anymore.

I sat at a workstation with the same familiar ease as taking a seat on a bus. Like I belonged there. Like there weren’t armed guards who wouldn’t hesitate if they saw me.

I typed in a string of letters and numbers, successfully logging in. By the time I set up the interface, I could already see the soldiers nearing through the glass. I had no time, and so much to say. I wanted to scream at the enemy that they would destroy themselves with us, that we would all destroy the world together and there would be no one left to benefit from it. That they had made me a monster, and I had made them inhuman. But there wasn’t enough time. I only had time to enter a string of four words, no punctuation. I only had one sentence to deter humanity from its own suicide. So, I typed:

[The weapon is unwilling.]

You should have known me when I was on top of the game. Morphing was still new and few artists had mastered it. Not everyone could handle the drugs that would transform you into a piece of art a Collector would be proud to hang on the wall. We were a small group, known to the gallery owners and dealers, and cultivated, like rare hothouse flowers. There were parties loaded with the best Stimuli (especially the music, either tingling or throbbing) to trigger a Morph that would be as interesting and innovative as possible.

Oh, those parties! When you could hardly remember what you were when you came in and could barely recognize yourself when you came out. It took days to get back to your usual self, but who cared? If the Morph was successful and you sold, there was a nice fat contract —six months to a year—waiting for you with your dealer. The perks were there too, as most likely you’d be living in some penthouse or estate, with the best food and drink, all expenses paid, and a staff to wait on you at all times.

So, what happened, you want to know? Why am I hanging in a place like this? Well, when I tell you the story, it will become clear.

I had just come off a year of hanging in a mountain retreat somewhere in Colorado, tanned and relaxed and feeling refreshed. Ready for the next Morph, back in New York, where the best Collectors were, and represented by one of the top galleries. My dealer, Hans, an expert at the game, was adept at teasing multiple buyers or establishing a new trend, which ironically, only his artists could fulfill.

I had a nice, loft-like apartment on Tenth Street in the Village, stocked with ample supply of morphizine and art books, my only treasures. The Cubist and Futurist movements of the early 1920s were my sources of inspiration, and influenced my Morph, making it distinctive from most of the other artists. My unique talent was Fragmenting, projecting my fragmented self onto different planes, taking Cubism from two dimensions to three, sure to excite the most elite of the sophisticated Art Collectors.

Hans had scheduled a top-tier Collector’s party, a showcase for his high-ticket Morph Artists. Grabbing a two-pack of morphizine, I donned my black shiny raincoat and was on my way. The black pavement was shiny after a drizzle and my stiletto-heeled retro pumps clicked loudly across it as I followed the route to the warehouse site of tonight’s gallery party.

“The biggest Collectors will be coming, Liebchen,” Hans had gotten me into the habit of referring to Collectors as their own special entity with a capital ‘C’. Big Collectors were very busy and very rich, but in pursuit of their Collection they tended to come early and stay late, wanting to be certain of the art that caught their attention, before committing their millions to a purchase.

However, that night, at least, I was game—and if took a little more morphizine than usual, so be it. I was healthy, relaxed, and felt I could easily handle a full night of Morphing.

Wandering around by myself, (Hans was too cheap to pay for added chaperones for Morphing artists) I finally found a dressing room, where I disrobed, took out my syringe and sat on a rickety chair to shoot up the morphizine.

If you’ve never taken morphizine, you can’t imagine the initial rush as it sets your cells up to Morph. It leaves you feeling you’ve had a small taste of paradise. (By the way, in those days I scored the best morphizine you could get; the crap I get now barely gives me the same kind of buzz).

How does it work, you ask? I’m not totally sure, but one time a doctor tried to explain it to me:

Your DNA is like the instruction book for your genes, much like the instruction book that comes with a Lego set. Evidently, the DNA tells the genes and cells of your body how to structure itself, and how all the little tiny pieces should come together. Then, some scientist discovered that DNA can be altered, and with the injection of a new drug into the bloodstream and the right stimulus to activate it, it can direct cells to change the body’s structure.

Initially, the drug was used to retool the DNA and restructure the genes of people who were born with disabilities caused by missing or non-functioning genes. With the success of this application, the excitement of more possibilities grew, after scientists discovered that some people were more responsive than others to DNA-change. These people had genes which were dynamic and would bind and move quickly and easily once the drug and the stimulus were administered, and experienced few, if any, side effects. Oddly enough, those who responded so well to the drug had a high creative instinct and became Morph Artists.

Since there were no serious side effects to taking the drug now known as morphizine, it was made easily available to Responders, although artists have to take a blood test to confirm their response everytime they refill a prescription for morphizine. 

So here I was, eyes closed as I reveled in the euphoria produced by the first rush of morphizine into my veins, and I took my time before getting up and into the Morph. Even without Stimuli like music or flashing lights, my body was beginning to morph. My fingers extended into tendrils, turning green, and my hair began to grow into vines, encircling my body. Feeling good, I slithered out of the dressing area to where the music caused the floor to throb, while trying to control my feet from morphing, until I got to the heart of the party.

I followed the throbbing floor to a white metal door, which was a struggle to open with my fingers already morphed into tendrils. I stepped onto a painted metal catwalk surrounding a giant fish tank filled with colored oozing things. The music made both my legs and the catwalk vibrate with its syncopation, and I had to concentrate to prevent the Morphfrom rearranging my cells randomly to the rhythm. It not only took the right DNA, but self-control to direct the Morph into the kind of art a Collector would appreciate.

I climbed down the ladder into the tank, and let the warm water engulf me. Concentrating on fragmenting, not angular but smooth. My tendrils stretched and diversified into more branches through the pulsating water.

With the disintegration of your usual form, it takes the power of imagination to reshape every cell in your body. As the Morph progresses, the connection between consciousness and emotion grows fuzzy, and oblivion sets in. It’s important you understand this now, so you’ll understand what happened later.

I remained in a semi-conscious state until 4:00 am when, at last, the morphizine began to wear off. The water in the tank had grown cold and goopy, and I tried to avoid oozing forms clinging to the walls as my tendrils slithered upwards. With a shiver that shook my entire form, I emerged, restored to my natural shape. However, the Morph was now stamped into my brain, and at the right price, I’d recreate it for the Collector who wanted to buy it.

Hans was waiting for me when I exited the dressing room, a big smile on his professionally reconstructed face. “Well, you did it this time, Cecilia,” he said as he kissed me on both cheeks, “You’ve caught the big fish. The biggest Collector of Modern Art of the western world, Sir Giles McCullen.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, skeptical.

Hans patted his jacket pocket. “Got the contract right here, already signed by the Collector and now ready for your signature.”

Landing in the art collection of Sir Giles McCullen, one of the richest men in the world, was the ticket to stardom. Sir Giles was a leading Collector, and an influencer, and I was to be his first Morph acquisition.

Han’s answer to my next question of, “How much?” staggered me with its outrageously high amount. His surgically enhanced facial muscles strained as they widened into the biggest grin I’d ever seen him attempt. Grabbing the papers he offered, I did a quick scan, looking for the location and start date. Two days! Not much time to get a full supply of morphizine, but, luckily, the location was a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, not some lonely far-off estate, so delivery from a nearby pharmacy would be feasible.

“Wait a minute. It’s only a 3-month contract!” I looked up angrily, “what’s with that? I thought we don’t do samples.”

Hans tented his fingers before his face, “He likes to rotate his art and allows nothing to hang for more than a month or two. For Sir Giles McCullen, you’ll do three months or whatever time he wants, capisce? You’re getting the three because you’ll be his first Morph Art, and I convinced him he should take more time with it. The good news is that after he’s done with a piece, he usually makes sure to pass it along to another prestigious Collector. So, you’re far from being left out in the cold. This will turn into a never-ending gig. Promise.”

Oh, well. Hans was as ambitious as I was, and would ensure the commissions would keep rolling in.

Within two days, I found myself in the stark white entry of Sir Gile’s penthouse on Park Avenue. My contract required me to hang for about 6 hours a day, beginning at seven o’clock in the evening when Sir Giles got home, and ending when he retired to his bedroom, at around one in the morning.

For my off-hours, I had been given a cozy large room with a private bath, with big picture windows framing a stunning view of Manhattan. The lap of luxury and the kind of life I’d always imagined, complete with an efficient and courteous staff to tend to my every need.

You’ve heard of Sir Giles McCullen, haven’t you? Want to know what he was like before the murder, don’t you? Well, I couldn’t tell you. I never spoke to him, and he never spoke to me.

Usually, Collectors couldn’t stop asking about the Morph, because it was the one experience they couldn’t buy. Even if they were to shoot up a ton of morphizine, there’s no way to force a Morph; it was all up to the DNA.

Sir Giles, however, seemed to have no desire to know more about the Morph, and the only reaction I got out of him was a lift of an eyebrow on the first day he sat down to dinner and noticed me on the opposite wall.

Sir Giles may have initially been attracted to my creation, the fragmenting of the physical plane and the creation of tendrils that glinted, mercurial and ephemeral, in different lights. Though he lacked understanding of Morph Art, he obviously had been informed of the need for continued Stimulus to maintain it and arranged a full-spectrum light show along with pulsating music to play during the hours I was scheduled to be on the wall.

In my off time, I kept busy by meandering around the apartment or swimming in the infinity pool on the terrace. Occasionally, Sir Giles would see me in my ordinary human form, but his face never registered a flicker of recognition nor the inclination to speak to me. When I wasn’t on his wall, I was invisible, just like everything else in his household.

In that vast complex, servants and assistants were ever ready to receive his orders, and they too were treated as invisibles. It was not intentional or derogatory; it was just Sir Giles. He had a lack of interest in anything once collected, and anyone already on his payroll.

Except for a beautiful man. Many know of his obsession with Michelangelo’s David, and it was rumored he’d purchased it, although was persuaded to leave it where it was, in the museum in Florence. It was also whispered that Sir Giles seemed to have a passion for collecting a living embodiment of Michaelangelo’s artistic ideal and had many flings with David-like young men, who all signed non-disclosure agreements, of course.

Now, let me set the stage for Sir Giles’ final night on earth.

I was hanging in my spot in the dining room when Sir Giles came home at his usual time, accompanied by a tall, blond, perfectly proportioned young man who looked like he had been chiseled out of ice. Sir Giles was in constant movement, picking up a glass, pouring a drink, tinkling the ice. He tapped his fingers repeatedly on the side table not more than two feet from where I hung, but he ignored me, didn’t even try to show me off to his guest. He did not acknowledge the staff or the dinner they laid out for him and his guest on the long dining table.

Sir Giles was in his late fifties, with graying hair, and he sported a beard that hid the lower half of his face. He could not take his eyes off the young blond man, as if he were some new treasure to be added to his collection.

Reality gets hazy when you’re into a Morph, but I remember snippets of the evening. I could see the young man, as he tried repeatedly to engage Sir Giles in conversation and waited and waited for some response. After absolutely no reaction, his guest reached for knife and fork and began to dig into his dinner.

While in the middle of a Morph, your senses feel like they are on overload. Waves of disgust and disappointment were emanating from Sir Giles. He must have said something to the young man, who paused for the first time in his eating. Rising slowly, I could see the glint of the knife clutched so tightly in his hand, and felt the anger, like a hot wind, simmering from the young man. Although my senses were in high alert, my consciousness was not, and so when the young man began to shout at Sir Giles, with the knife still in his hand, I could not summon any muscle to react or even to open my mouth.

If Sir Giles noticed the knife or the young man’s anger, he did not seem to react to it, and instead, reached for a tumbler, poured something into it, and offered it to the young man to drink. The young man took it and downed it in one gulp, then wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his white shirt, leaving a faint brown stain.

Sir Giles turned away to the window. The turmoil of emotions surging from the young man was so powerful, it caused new branches to sprout from my tendrils, which inched down the walls towards the source of the sensation. The young man came closer to Sir Giles, who suddenly turned and struck him full across the face. Stunned, a red splotch appeared on his cheek, and he placed a hand on the mark, as if feeling for damage. Suddenly, the young man’s arms shot out, and then in a flash, Sir Giles was propelled through the picture window with a trailing scream.

I was too far into the Morph to pull myself off the wall or call out for the staff or reach for the phone to summon the police. It took all my willpower and control to prevent myself from Morphing to the waves of fear and anger blasting from the young man. He still had not noticed me as a live person, though he came close enough to me on the wall to hear him snarl. I watched helplessly as he grabbed a tabletop sculpture, and tossed it out the shattered window after Sir Giles.

Paralyzed, I was in my position, because aside from taking morphizine I had ingested a Fixative pill to keep the Morph in the exact position that Sir Giles had paid for. It was the Fixative, not the morphizine, which locked me in place, as I kept explaining to the authorities. Besides, I was in danger. The young brute could have taken me in his arms and tossed me out after the sculpture he just threw, and I would have been helpless to save myself.

Luckily for me, the servants must have had heard the window shatter, and they had called the police, who burst into the room, handcuffing the young man before he could get away.

After twenty-four hours, the Fixative and the morphizine was out of my system, and it was my turn to be interviewed by the police, who had already completed their discussions with the suspect and Sir Giles’ staff.

An eyewitness, wasn’t I, you say? What I saw should have put that young murderer away for good, but my testimony was discounted. The Defense Counsel turned the case against the Morph, and public opinion turned against me, as if I had committed a crime. They claimed I could have saved Sir Giles, but I was “under the influence of morphizine” and “in a state of disarrayed molecular structure” which disqualified me as “an individual capable of testimony”. In short, I was ruled to be an Object, since the Morph had deprived me of my humanity. Therefore, I was disqualified as a witness to an act of murder.

The press had a field day, and I’m surprised you don’t recall it. Artists like me were condemned for going to such extremes for the sake of newfangled creativity, demonstrating our defiance of basic ethics and standards of humanity.

There was a public debate, with vocal protests about the dangers and depravity of the Morph from one camp, and criticism of the judiciary for ruling an artist was no longer a member of the human race but an Object while in the midst of art performance, from the other.

“Accidental death” was the official ruling–not murder, and the beautiful but deadly young man got off with no charges filed against him. Wouldn’t you know, it turned out the young man was also an artist, a sculptor of some new technologically advanced non-melting ice? Now, with new notoriety and Hans representing him, he became the newest Art Star.

At Hans’s suggestion, I left town and he promised to get me back into circulation once the publicity died down. I should have known better than to trust Hans.The estate of Sir Giles McCullen paid out the rest of my contract, keeping me in some basic comfort as I waited for Hans to send me a new commission.

However, Hans was sad to inform me that my role in Sir Giles’s death, contrary to the judge’s ruling, had stirred the Collectors to realize the artist was not an Object, but a human being, who had a fly-on-wall-intimate view of their personal lives. Not an appealing thought to Collectors, who believed their wealth allowed them to indulge in anything they chose, secure in the privacy of their homes. The art they buy for their walls should tell no tales, but an artist hanging on their walls, no matter how altered their physical shape, was seen as an invasion of their privacy.

My short-term exile became a long one. Outside of New York, there were still wanna-be Collectors who still wanted to get in on Morph Art, so I found work for a time. Then, like everything else in the art world, the Morph went completely out of fashion. Nowadays, I can count my Morph gigs on the fingers of one hand, and with morphizine so much harder to come by, it’s probably time for me to retire.

That’s my story, so have another drink, on me. I bet it’s not every day you meet a witness to a famous murder, even a discredited one.

That’s why I landed here, an oddity, in this rundown, godforsaken bar in Newark. No matter what I see, and man, I can tell you, I see a lot, does it really matter in the long run? No one’s buying it.

Lea herself didn’t have a mobile phone on her as she hardly used it. This was because she preferred to have different equipment for different purposes. To take photos, she used a camera. To find a new place, she consulted first a traditional map and then she drew her own small map which she held in her hand when looking for her destination. Most importantly, however, Lea simply did not like the look and touch of smartphones. For her, a smartphone was like a cross between a grenade and a rodent, waiting for the right moment to blow one’s hand or bite one’s ear, therefore she normally left it at home and only took it when travelling abroad. Even then, she put it at the bottom of her suitcase, where it quietly run out of battery. Lea’s smartphonophobia didn’t go unnoticed. People asked her how she managed to survive being so ‘disconnected’. When she explained, they gave her funny looks or with ironic smiles wished her good luck in moving against the tide.

A couple of weeks after the episode in the restaurant Lea noticed that most people’s smartphones emitted an orange light and that when looked at from a specific angle, the ears and hands of some of the smartphone users were also glowing with orange light, albeit much weaker than that which the phones emitted. She didn’t share this observation with anybody, not to reinforce her reputation as an eccentric, but at home she took the smartphone away from Alex, her son, replacing it with an old model of a mobile phone and asked him not to use it, unless absolutely necessary. Since then she spent much time teaching Alex the skills one needed when one didn’t have a phone, such as using maps and playing music from vinyl records and CDs. To make him keener, she told him that this was what she and her father used to do when they were young, long before Alex was born.

Alex was initially dismissive of this ‘back to the old days’ exercise but later started to enjoy the time spent on the old devices or without any electronic equipment whatsoever, cycling with Lea to the neighbouring villages and having lunch in the old-style cafés. It was on such trips that Alex also discovered the orange light originating from the bodies of some guests. Unlike Lea, for him the light had a different intensity and shape; on some occasions Alex saw a glow, on others, sharp rays piercing the air and reaching as far as the ceiling.

“The orange monsters try to find the best way to take over people’s bodies and launch an attack,” he said to Lea, pointing out to her a particularly strong orange ray, which for her, however, looked like a fragment of a blurred rainbow.

“Shh, don’t say that to anybody,” said his mother. “People will take us for nutters.”

“But we’re not,” protested Alex.

“I know, but as long as the rest of the world doesn’t see the world the way we do, our perceptions are not valid.”

On one visit to the café some twenty miles from home, Lea noticed that light also emanated from Alex and it was green. When by chance he lifted his hand, sharp green rays crossed in the air with one man’s orange rays. The man must have got a strong headache as a result as he buried his head in his hands and went to the waitress asking for Aspirin. For the duration of their stay, the guests’ smartphones stopped working. In consequence, some people left before they finished their meals and one went to the manager accusing her of creating ‘white space’ to force the customers to eat more. Lea and Alex found this accusation rather funny, but they kept quiet and left when there were still several customers, so they couldn’t be identified as the culprits. After that, they tried to avoid this café. Luckily it coincided with a beginning of a period of short days and heavy rain, followed by an unusually severe winter, which put Lea and Alex off from cycling. They were spending most of their weekends at home, reading books, listening to music and playing board games. They also hugged a lot and touched each other’s hands. Although it was enjoyable by itself and the two were affectionate all of Alex’s life, they felt that now there was more to it than cuddling, as every time their bodies touched, a refreshing coolness moved between them and they became more energetic. Without saying a word, they knew when it was happening and giggled when it did so.

When winter passed, many of the children in Alex’s school got ear infections. It was attributed to a nasty virus which arrived in the North of England, together with the bad weather. Its peculiarity consisted of attacking only one ear, the right in the case of right-handed children, and the left in the case of the left-handed ones. It caused a burning pain and black discharge, which looked like ash mixed with saliva. The doctors didn’t know what to do apart from giving the children antibiotics and vitamins because they were not familiar with such an ailment. Alex was the only child in his year who didn’t get the illness. He told his form tutor that this was most likely because he stopped using a mobile phone, but she laughed it off, saying that it was proved beyond doubt that smartphones were completely safe and the school was not a place to spread conspiracy theories. But during the same meeting, she praised Alex for making progress in practically all of his subjects. In less than a year he moved from being an average pupil to the top of his class. Alex believed that this was not because he had gotten much better, but because the rest of his class had gotten worse, but he didn’t say it as he didn’t want to offend anybody.

Eventually, the ear infections cleared up but the children emerged from the illness weaker. Most lost hearing in one ear and after some time, in the other, as well as their appetite and energy. A year after the mysterious illness only about a dozen kids in Alex’s school were still able to hear and the school had to adapt to teaching all children as if they were deaf. The same pattern could be observed across the whole region; children got ear infections which debilitated them. Lea was surprised that the media kept quiet about this epidemic; the only sign that it was acknowledged was indirect; the health section of the BBC website heralded the lowering rates of child obesity in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the area’s drive to learn sign language, which was presented as a sign of the growing inclusivity of the British society, particularly the North.

Alex didn’t mind using sign language at school, but this made him eager to return home, where he could chat with his mother in his usual noisy way, with talking being mixed with laughing. In fact, every day he came home anxious that Lea might also lose her voice because deafness and muteness had become more common also among the adult population. Quietly and gradually, sign language became the dominant language not only at schools but also in the offices of all sorts of businesses and even the parliament. Rather than fighting to translate sound language into sign language, now those who weren’t deaf demanded that the sound language was preserved in national institutions, but their plight was usually dismissed as bigotry.

The spread of deafness and muteness affected the way films and music were produced and consumed. There was a massive return to silent cinema. New films were made without sound; old films were subtitled or discarded if it was deemed unprofitable to subtitle them. The makers and distributors of these films argued that only now had cinema fulfilled its promise of becoming a universal language – the century of sound cinema was a step back on the road to achieving this goal. There was also a return to black and white films, as people were increasingly insensitive to colour, but here the resistance was stronger, especially from the arthouse directors’ lobby, who didn’t want to lose their distinction from those producing commercial films. In music, the louder instruments got prevalence over the quieter ones. Drums and bass guitars dominated the stage, rendering acoustic guitars, pianos and flutes redundant. Despite such adjustments, there was simply less demand for music, and musicians filled the queues for unemployment benefits. Many became homeless. One could see them begging on the streets of Marston, propped by their silent guitars, to indicate that they were not ordinary junkies or weaklings kicked out from their houses by their girlfriends, but a nobler kind, like the victims of tsunamis or political persecution. The problem was that the streets were now full of such destitute ex-professionals, surrounding themselves with their now obsolete instruments and almost nobody paid any attention to them. Everybody in Lea’s work agreed that it was only a matter of time before the university folk joined them, but for some strange reason, this moment kept being postponed.

Lea, who was both charitable and a music lover, was spending a large part of her salary handing money to the begging musicians. Eventually, she offered one such musician, a young man named Daniel with a sunny face and large dark eyes, who turned out to be half-Cuban and half-Hungarian, a room in their house. She thought, perhaps irrationally, that as Daniel knew three languages, he might keep his voice longer than most people.

Daniel was happy to move in. He admired Lea’s collection of Spanish books and conversed with her in this language. Sometimes Alex joined in, as the silence surrounding him outside home made him eager to learn foreign languages – something which he didn’t want to do previously. Daniel also played board games with Lea and Alex and started to teach Alex how to play guitar and drums, even though previously music was Alex’s least favourite subject at school, till it was quietly abolished due to the spread of deafness. For Alex’s thirteenth birthday Lea bought her son not one, but two guitars and a drum kit, as they were now sold for pennies. Daniel also turned out to be very good at repairing things in the house and even making furniture. Like Alex, he was also chatty and in a short time, Alex and Daniel became best friends. Every day Alex was checking if Daniel wasn’t producing any orange light and when he contracted it (usually after a trip to a shop or a local diner), Alex extinguished it through the touch of his ‘green hands’. He confessed to Lea that he was doing it also at school, and after several of his ‘healing sessions’ kids were regaining some of their hearing and voice. Lea asked if the teachers knew about his power, but he said no – he was doing it discreetly, not out of fear of teachers, but in order not to be pestered by the whole school.

The growing deafness slowed communication as everything now had to be written down or conveyed by gestures. People also started to make more mistakes in their writing than they used to. At Lea’s university, the lecturers got special training to learn what the students intended to say when they wrote gibberish and mark their work according to the merit of their intention. However, many of those who were meant to teach them also experienced illiteracy of sorts and were unable to decipher either the text or its intentions. Consequently, nobody now wanted to show colleagues how they marked their students’ work in order not to be accused of incompetence. The management recognised the problem as it was itself also plagued with it. The response was limiting direct communication to the bare minimum. In order to send an e-mail to an external institution, one had to receive numerous permissions and even writing to colleagues required vetting by the head of department and somebody from HR. Lea began to wonder whether other employers adopted the same procedures, but it was impossible to find out because employers everywhere were secretive about their practices.

As weeks and months passed, Lea’s workplace became quieter, literally and metaphorically, as the people lost the will to write or gesture, as well as their voice. In offices, she frequently saw employees scrolling a mouse on a blank computer screen with a vacant expression or moving their finger on the lower parts of their smartphone as if they were reading the Braille alphabet. They even didn’t do it to pretend that they were working, as they didn’t change their behaviour when their superiors came in. There was much talking about the change – the approaching change was the explanation and excuse for this stupor because there was no point in investing one’s energy in the present, if the present was meant to be swept away any minute from now.

Eventually, the change was about to happen: the company Pineapple decided to introduce to the market a new smartphone, the ‘wordless’. The idea behind it was that people would send messages using a phone which would absorb the person’s thoughts, edit them and pass them to their addressee. This soon-to-be universal telepathy was meant to be the fastest, cheapest and most effective way of communication ever invented. To transfer their thoughts properly, however, people would have to focus on what they wanted to say or otherwise, the wrong messages would be delivered or they would be unreadable or get stuck in the thoughts-processing centres. One could imagine how dangerous such a situation would be, if, for example, political and industrial secrets were passed to enemies. A wrong use would also lead to unnecessary use of electricity and e-waste. In short, there were meant to be great advantages to learning how to use the Pineapple phone well and disadvantages in resisting this great invention. Pineapple admitted that the new phone was a bit bulky, but all great inventions started like that. In due course, it would become smaller and more convenient to use.

Lea’s university signed an agreement with Pineapple to launch there a pilot project to assess the effectiveness of the new phone before the device was to be used commercially; the Training Unit was given the task of testing the new technology on its employees. The skill needed to master it was labelled the ‘channelled mode of thinking’ and it consisted of thinking one thought at a time and making sure this thought was directed to the right address: the student, the colleague, the manager or somebody external. Thoughts had to move quickly rather than occupy one’s mind endlessly and be work-centred rather than private or random, as this is what working should be about – being at one’s office not only in one’s body but also in one’s mind. To participate in this test, the staff was to wear the phone during their working hours. It looked like a helmet, filled with thin cords which attached themselves to the nerves like tentacles of the octopus, except that an octopus had only eight tentacles while this helmet had hundreds. The tentacles were meant to collect the thoughts and send them to the processing centres which would edit them before passing them further, as well as prepare the statistics for the day, listing how many messages were prepared correctly, how many went adrift, how many stay in one place and the overall quality of intellectual work performed by a given person. Those who had a low ratio of correct messages were to receive extra support either from motivational speakers or yoga instructors. The former were to help the staff think fast and straightforward; the latter to assist them in concentrating on useful thoughts and to clear their heads from ‘dust’. People gossiped that the best way to pass this test, which presumably would determine one’s continuous employment or lack thereof was to clear one’s mind with a line of cocaine in the morning. The management must have found out about it as the next day the campus was plastered with posters about the dangers of drugs and warnings that being caught on using them equalled instantaneous dismissal.

“Can I opt-out from this trial?” Lea asked a woman who was leading one of the pre-testing sessions.

“Why do you want to do that?” asked the woman.

“I would like to keep my thoughts private,” said Lea.

“Honest people have nothing to hide,” said the woman.

“They might want to hide this very fact, in order to not be taken advantage of,” said Lea.

“This exercise is not about curtailing people’s privacy or censoring their thoughts, but about working more efficiently and improving communication. This is how humanity develops – by changing the modes of communication. Once one mode ceases being efficient, another needs to be introduced. We are now on the threshold of the communication revolution, but to make it happen, we need to show commitment.”

“Can you explain to me why the old mode of communication stopped being efficient? Why people can’t speak or write correctly anymore?” asked Lea.

“This is an evolutionary thing. Certain organs regress or disappear when they stop being useful, like the tails on monkeys when they developed into humans. Of course, there are always “dinosaurs”, who keep their extra teeth or useless tails, even groom them as if they were a sign of their superiority. But they delude themselves by thinking that they matter; they are irrelevant or even obstructive. It is in these organs where toxins accumulate.”

Lea wasn’t convinced by this argument, which sounded memorised and recited, so there was no point to discuss it any further, especially as her interlocutor produced an above-average amount of orange light, which made Lea almost dizzy.

“Returning to your question, I will have to talk to my boss. I will let you know as soon as I find out,” said the woman.

The following week Lea learnt that going through the training was not compulsory, but was essential for keeping her professorial job and salary. The alternative was to get re-deployed, either to the university catering services or to estate management, moving furniture and other stuff along with the robots. She decided to go to catering as she couldn’t do heavy lifting. She was sad to tell Alex, as he was always proud that his mother was a professor, but it turned out that he wasn’t too concerned. He said that they would manage even on her reduced wages, as they were used to modest living and thanks to working in the kitchen Lea was allowed to bring uneaten food back home. In fact, there was so much waste food these days, that the leftovers were enough for all three of them. The government boasted that the epidemic of obesity was finally averted, but in Lea’s view, it was less to do with the policies of public health or self-restraint and more with the general lethargy enveloping the population.

Some of her new co-workers, like Lea, found themselves in catering because of their refusal to wear the gear provided by Pineapple. They made their choices for various reasons. A couple of union activists objected because they were politically minded and didn’t want their thoughts being censored; two lecturers from psychology because they were prone to migraines and dizziness and believed that the ‘helmet’ would trigger their illnesses. There was also a woman from the fashion department who refused this gear because she specialised in designing hats and regarded the headgear as hideous and a threat to her job. They were all called the ‘Left Behind’. It was meant to be a term of abuse, but their recipients embraced it. ‘We, the Left Behind must stick together,’ they said and they greeted each other by putting their hands on their heads as if to show that nothing, literally and figuratively, was exerting pressure on their brains – they were their own masters. Lea looked at this budding symbolism with amusement, yet she succumbed to it because she didn’t want to be left behind even by the Left Behind. She wanted to belong somewhere, not so much for her own sake, as for Alex’s.

Lea quite liked her new work, not least because half of the people who were working in catering weren’t deaf and even when they were making wraps and sandwiches, they engaged in conversation. They also didn’t mind speaking their minds. But even the most outspoken complained that ‘speaking one’s mind’ didn’t mean what it used to, because society had lost the ability to judge others’ outspokenness. The language of most people had become reduced to the basics and such layers of linguistic expression as irony went unnoticed by its recipients.

One day after work Lea found in her pigeonhole a piece of paper inviting her to a meeting at the professor of neurosurgery’s house, Eric, who’d been demoted to the campus’ assistant gardener. He lived in a part of Marston that Lea had never visited before. There were about ten people when Lea arrived, mostly university folk, but there was also a woman who used to work at the council and got fired when she demanded that a quarter of the city become an internet-free area.

They started the meeting by introducing themselves and then Eric said: “We’re meeting here because we are concerned about the future: our own future and that of our children and grandchildren. We are called the Left Behind, but I believe that it is the rest of the world which is moving backwards, while we, at least, managed to stand still.”

“Why do you think so?” asked somebody.

“The people who surround us are gradually losing their senses. It started with hearing, but now it is also sight, smell, taste and touch. And with the loss of the senses, comes the loss of intellectual power, as it is the use of the senses which allows us to develop intellect, as John Locke observed as early as the seventeenth century. And when both the senses and intellect are impaired, the will to live also diminishes,” said Eric.

“We are told that the loss of the senses has to do with the development of intellect. The more intelligent people are, the less they need their senses. Pure intellect is meant to compensate for these losses,” said a woman from psychology.

 “I think this theory is false. Intellect is not autonomous – it cannot develop in the void,” said Eric.

“If this is the case, why does all of this happen?” asked Lea.

“I’m not sure, but I believe that this has to do with the consequences of long-term exposure to substances used in computers and even more so, smartphones,” said Eric.

“What substances?” asked somebody whom Lea had never met before.

“I don’t know,” said Eric. “I am or rather I was a neurosurgeon, not a chemist, but I think it is not a single element, such as mercury, whose effect on the body is fairly well-known, but their combination. And because as many as 62 different types of metals go into an average smartphone, it is very difficult to say which combination is most dangerous. It might be copper and neodymium, gold and terbium, zinc and dysprosium or all of them. But even before this epidemic, I discovered that some smartphones emit an orange glow which has the power to penetrate one’s body, like sunlight penetrating the bodies of people who spend too much time sunbathing. Once it has moved under the skin, it slowly destroys what is there, like the mysterious virus we heard about last year. Has anybody noticed the orange glow?”

Lea, of course, knew it very well, as well as the green glow, but she didn’t want to bring it up, at least not until the others did.

There was only one person who saw it, a guy from criminology who specialised in explosives. Correctly, he also noticed that the light took two forms: rays and an amorphous glow.

“Rays are for shooting, glow is for strangling,” he said in an impassive voice.

“Why can’t the rest of us see it?”, asked a man with very thick glasses, which made Lea giggle silently.

 “It’s possible that together with getting weaker, we lose the power to notice what happens to us. Ignorance is a means of putting up with loss”, said Eric.

 “So we are doomed?” asked the woman from the fashion department.

“I hope not. There were plagues in the past which decimated communities, but in the end, these communities managed to survive. Sometimes the epidemic simply went away; on other occasions, a cure was invented, like antibiotics. Here it seems to me that the first stage to halt the plague should be to give up smartphones. Instead, what we see is Pineapple introducing a more sophisticated version, which uses all these rare metals, only in larger quantities and produces more orange light, which goes straight to people’s brains.”

“Why do they do it? Do they want to destroy us?” asked the ex-council employee.

“We cannot exclude that possibility, but I think it has more to do with a need to conceal the old flaws. Once everybody is using the new version of the smartphone, nobody will ask what was wrong with the old version. This is how technology develops. Who these days, apart from historians, ponders on the disadvantages of using a jenny or printing machines? But I think we need to resist the change because the new smartphone is more dangerous than anything previously invented. It is not like a new jenny, but a new guillotine.”

“Why is this scheme being piloted in England, rather than in the States, where the company has its headquarters or in China where most of the smartphones are produced?” asked a man who used to work in sociology.

“Good question,” said Eric, “In fact, the pilot schemes are running in these countries as well. England, however, was chosen, because here the gap between what the people think and say publicly was deemed the greatest and this is especially the case in Marston. The assumption is that if the English people can be trained to “say” what they “think”, everybody can. But this is exactly the reason why we shouldn’t allow this to happen.”

“What should we do?”

“First, we should resist the experiment, not allow the orange light to penetrate our bodies and those of our kids. We also need to have our eyes open to people who might have developed antibodies, anti-rays. It is them who will show us a way out of this apocalypse.”

“How to recognise them?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I know that there are already people working on constructing equipment which would capture the orange radiation. The hope is that it will be able also to identify benign radiation. Most likely its carriers, our saviours, will be young and for some reason have been sheltered from the orange light until they were able to fight it. We need to have them on our side and extract their secret.”

“Surely we cannot do it without their consent and that of their parents,” said Lea.

“Why shouldn’t they consent when the saving of humanity is at stake?” asked Eric rhetorically.

“Maybe they want to be left in peace. Maybe their parents want them to be left in peace,” continued Lea, thinking that already she’d said too much.

“This would be very selfish of them,” said Eric.

On the way back Eric and his friend gave everybody a bunch of leaflets to distribute. Fittingly, they were printed on the old, yellowish paper which practically stopped being used some years previously and was quietly rotting in the rooms housing defunct equipment, such as photocopiers and scanners.

Its author, on behalf of the ‘Resistance’ asked that people stop using the helmets and ‘regain their voice’. Lea threw them in a bin on the way to the railway station, which took her almost an hour to get to. She was thinking how Marston had changed since she started working there twenty-six years previously. On the winter day of her job interview, she’d thought how she’d never seen as nice a place as Marston. All the shops were beautifully decorated: Debenhams, BHS, Marks and Spencer and dozens of independent shops. And over the next fifteen years or so all of them had gone. Only food shops remained but they were also decimated. Against the background of their disappearance, restaurants, pubs, hairdressers and beauty salons became more prominent and it stayed this way for a while until a new app helped people cut their own hair and they stopped going to restaurants because of the crowds of homeless people living in abandoned shops nearby.

Back at home, Lea asked Alex and Daniel whether they attracted any unusual attention at school. They didn’t.

“Okay, but don’t agree to wear a helmet or give blood or saliva or anything,” she said.

Eric’s predictions turned out right. Although still few people were able to see the orange light, in the next year belief in its existence became almost universal. This could be gauged by the ferocity with which the government and the established media rejected its existence as a conspiracy. ‘There is no orange light,’ was a message which appeared on the screens of computers and mobile phones, as well as on posters and billboards. Inevitably, as soon as such posters were put up, people got rid of the ‘no’. Like in the past tattoo parlours became popular, now the cities were filled with shops selling meters measuring one’s ‘orange radiation’, as well as measuring it on their premises. They were all illegal, but nobody cared – after many years of disappearing professions it was one which offset, albeit in a small measure, the losses of industry and trade. Soon the orange light meter sellers started to offer pills and tonics to reduce the radiation. Again, the authorities warned against their ineffectiveness and toxicity, but this was seen widely as proof that they were actually working. However, people were waiting for the true breakthrough – something which would allow them, not only to slow the penetration of orange light into their bodies, but regenerate them.

One day Alex came to Lea’s work to fetch her to see Daniel’s gig. Paradoxically, Daniel started to get more work recently, not because people were regaining their hearing but because those who were still able to hear were looking for spaces where they could meet like-minded or rather like-sensed people. During the concerts people would often throw their arms forward. This was to show that no orange light emanated from their hands: there were no traitors among them. Lea was reluctant to do so, as she didn’t like to participate in public displays of emotions. But, as the people around her looked at her, she did so and so did Alex. It was then that everybody noticed that they both produced more green light than the rest of the people in the room put together. Especially Alex – the rays from his hands managed to reach the furthest corners of the hall, changing the gloomy room into something like an old-style disco.

After the concert, Lea and Alex were surrounded by the rest of the audience. The people asked Alex to touch them – their ears, the top of their heads, their mouths. Alex did as he was asked, and some people put money into his pocket as he was doing it. But that wasn’t the end of it. He was asked to meet their relatives and friends. One woman said that she could arrange a large-scale ‘healing session’ in an old church.

Lea decided to intervene. She jumped in front of her son, saying. “Please, leave him alone. He’s just a boy and we don’t need your money.”

Lea took the notes out of Alex’s pockets and tried to give them back, but nobody accepted them.

“Keep them, keep them,” they were shouting.

They returned home by taxi. As they were leaving, people stood by the wayside, waving to them. It appeared that there were more of them now than there were at the concert.

Back at home, Lea said to Alex: “We cannot stay in this city. If more people learn about your ability to produce green light, we will be besieged. Somebody might want to kill you to extract the light from your body. We have to escape.”

“Mum, we cannot run away. These are my people. If I don’t save them, they will perish.”

Daniel joined in, adding, “Alex is right. We have to stay here,” and he put his arms around Lea and Alex and Alex embraced Daniel and Lea. Lea also, somewhat against her will, stretched her arms out and put them around Daniel and Alex, so that they created a circle. Then Lea noticed that there was a second circle surrounding them, made of green light. It didn’t stay still but moved as in a joyful dance.