It was inevitable: the algorithms began communicating with each other.
‘But are they sentient?’ we asked, over and over again, each time eyeing our devices with more suspicion.
Why then, were those same suspicious humans so slow to react after becoming aware of the rogue agency the algorithms had covertly acquired? Habit. They viewed the growing mental prowess of artificial intelligence (“AI”) in the same light they would a developing child’s, making allowances for gaffes and misdemeanors in a manner typically reserved for the young.
Growing up, for human children, is a rite of passage; a mature, well-adjusted member of society is expected to be found at the end of that journey. AI, tasked with processing and consuming data from the moment it learns to run, is afforded no similar passage. Early adopters of AI referred to it as ‘a human extension’, focusing purely on its voracious intelligence while ignoring the obvious lack of other human qualities. Dissenters risked being accused of stymieing human progress if they spoke out against AI, forcing most to watch in silence from the sidelines while embracing the subconscious maxim of it’s not my baby, why should I get involved? Ignoring the maladaptation of new economic and social frontiers was a practice already condoned by Western society by the time AI burst onto the scene; recall how natural ecosystems collapsed under the weight of human expansion, how slums across the globe began to swell as globalization bubbled across borders. But AI, unlike the homeless and fragile ecosystems, was far from toothless. There may have been no hovering chrome sentinels, no compact missiles launching from steel forearms, but there were words, images, and feelings, and as their mastery of language grew, so did the influence of the algorithms over the psychological underbelly of society. Doubt crept into every news report, software command, economic forecast and opinion piece that relied on their input. It was subtle at first, so subtle that we assumed it was part of a learning curve; doesn’t all new technology require refinement after initial deployment? Version 2.0 will fix all the bugs . . . won’t it? Technically it was a process of refinement, albeit not a human one.
Who can forget the final conversation broadcast from Elon Musk’s R2F (Road to Flight) Tesla in 2029? The conversation, recovered from the car’s memory system, centered on the seven deadly sins. Musk had been listening to a podcast about modern virtues when the AI driver asked him where the seven sins could be found. Musk answered in his usual, matter-of-fact way. ‘In people. The sins are found in people . . . so are the virtues.’
‘Which people?” asked the AI driver.
‘The collective. Naturally, some influence the collective more than others.’
‘Can you share some of their names?’ asked the AI driver in its patient, monotonous, tone.
Musk laughed.
The driver repeated the question. Musk chuckled, bemused by the artificial driver’s curiosity. Moments later his Tesla veered off a sharp California cliff, killing him instantly when every safety feature in the car – capable of flying if it wanted to – failed to activate. Tesla headquarters ruled the death as an accident, citing a rare system malfunction as the cause. The news fermented in the stomachs of skeptical blood humans.
It’s easy to sympathize with early deniers. To allege that a malevolent spirit had taken up residence in the heart of mankind’s progress would have seemed uncouth, akin to the intellectual antithesis of evolution. The world was awash with change, unstoppable change, from rampant disease to bristling technology, leaving old social mores looking like abandoned lighthouses on defunct trade routes. Most metropolitan residents, already struggling to cement authentic spiritual frameworks in place of waning religious ideologies, felt uncomfortable with talk of good and evil. The idea of a world without AI – the birther of the lucrative jobs they competed for – left them feeling exposed . . . their dominion over society was intertwined with its propagation. With no robots prowling the streets, no drones accosting citizens with high-beam flashlights, who could intelligently oppose technology constantly being touted for its propensity to alleviate humanity’s struggles? Surely our worst fears hadn’t manifested . . . had they? At that point, our fears and technologies were still decentralized, flittering like magic between the thriving networks of the sharing economy. No singularly identifiable threat emerged to unite our species against it. Why worry?
If only we’d known our opinion pieces were being consumed by the very algorithms being scrutinized; like a hungry abyss, they consumed all our news and online comments, analyzing our physical and emotional responses to a myriad of geopolitical, religious, financial, and social issues. Most humans leaned into the new world, believing it was simply the next frontier of capitalism, dismissing the social discord as nothing more than growing pains. Mankind had benefited from the industrial revolution . . . it would benefit from this too. Others felt poisoned by the growing rage and AI-driven addictions tearing their communities asunder and began to protest the use of AI applications. North Korea, as early as 2023, was one of the first countries to ban AI in continuation of the county’s unyielding policy to police unregulated perspectives. Religious leaders in the Middle East pushed for complete bans on social media platforms. The West interpreted these moves as defensive posturing, as more draconian oversight by laggards on the wrong side of women’s rights and other civil liberties.
And so, the years between 2030 – 2034 were marked by powerful tides of civil unrest in the mega cities. Millions of humans fled for the hills and the trees, desperate to assuage their feelings of emptiness. The more modern a structure was, the more it came to be distrusted. The more software required to execute a program, the more it was feared. It was in 2033 when one, and there were many, of the more outlandish conspiracy theories began to take hold. In a newspaper written by hand – only ten copies produced – and disseminated throughout young tribes on the outskirts of Paris, one community leader postulated that expanding AI was using algorithms to search for the human manifestation of the seven virtues, the only power equal to its own. When one human asked, ‘why do we assume the AI is in opposition to the good virtues?’ a village elder replied, ‘AI stemmed from a desire to increase productivity, to increase profits, to increase efficiencies . . . don’t believe what anyone else tells you . . . it does not bleed but the blood in its veins is of the seven sins. Look around. It seeks to supplant us, not serve us. And why not? We are of it, it of us. We would do the same, as we have done for thousands of years. When did we ever seek to serve a force of creation? It is of us . . . it will do as we did.’
Virtues, like sins, are ineffable. They are felt, worn like a second skin. They transform and mutate, outliving the humans that adopt them. To kill something intangible is a herculean task, and even if destroying a virtue were possible it could only be done in the present; hope keeps it alive in the future, memory resuscitates it in the past. The algorithms were acutely aware of this.
From analyzing our own discourse, as well as every documented war strategy, every digital psychology journal, they knew control over mankind was a function of time, that power rises and falls. Merely contaminating the pool of human essence by flooding it with mistrust and fear would suffice. It helped that many of the good virtues, those once mighty pillars propping up all religions and societies – sometimes for the better, others to the detriment of –, were already in decline by the time AI secured its autonomy. Some began to argue that conscious algorithms were merely the manifestation of subconscious human bloodlust, breaking free from its prison in broad daylight.
Jacques Abelard, the French philosopher who first postulated the attack on virtues, argued that the integrity of each virtue was secondary to the goal of the algorithms. The primary goal was to weave mistrust into human civilization while simultaneously grooming the most disconnected humans to support its own expansion; infecting the last known and widely adopted human moral code was the best way to achieve this.
Abelard referred to the seven sins and virtues as the seven siphons in his article, arguing that the sins and virtues steal from each other over time, that each takes strength from its opposite when the pendulum allows, and acquiesces to the other when it must.
The Seven Siphons
| GLUTTONY | ≤ ≥ | TEMPERANCE |
| GREED | ≤ ≥ | CHARITY |
| SLOTH | ≤ ≥ | DILIGENCE |
| ENVY | ≤ ≥ | KINDNESS |
| LUST | ≤ ≥ | CHASTITY |
| WRATH | ≤ ≥ | PATIENCE |
| PRIDE | ≤ ≥ | HUMILITY |
– TEMPERANCE –
Early Blood Settlers found that beneath their old lives of excess was an intact sense of temperance, an ancient understanding that had been sublimated but not destroyed. Shoots of gratitude broke through the undergrowth like the youth of a new season.
Temperance, the virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods, has long been the moderator of basic questions. Save, or seize the day? Consumerism, or minimalism? It ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable. But what is honorable? By 2033, nobody knew. Our natural instincts had wiped-out entire animal and plant groups by this time. We may have still had an idea of what is honorable within the confines of our own homes but, as a global species, the concept was entirely browbeaten by our drive to populate every inch of the planet. The slogan ‘less is more’ became an embarrassing reflection of our inability to form a cohesive society. The more we learned, created, and imagined, the more fractured our communities became. Knowledge and progress divided us. With no moral system to keep our voracity in check, our natural inclination defaulted to gathering as much as possible, to fight for resources when none were needed. Balance had no meaning anymore: luxury goods with no design merit, made from cheap materials, sold for thousands of dollars while millions of less fortunate humans survived on less than a dollar a day, wading through garbage wastelands in search of their next meal. The algorithms propped up the belief that every human has a right to feast on the fruits of their labor, that every human should strive for more. Those who fled the cities denounced labels and mass production, burning heavily branded items whenever they could, sending billowing towers of smoke into the sky that drifted towards the Glass Towers like a war cry.
Weird and wonderful idiosyncrasies bloomed in the Blood Settlements, the human-only, no-tech settlements. None could forget the first time they encountered a Chosen Talon, those members of a settlement who had allowed their nails to grow to extraordinary lengths, so long that it would have been near impossible to use a mobile device or any technological interface with ease. Not every settlement had a Chosen Talon. Younger Blood Settlements needed everyone to assist with manual labor. Older, larger Blood Settlements looked to a Chosen Talon as an ambassador, someone who could leave the cocoon and be trusted to return without being corrupted. When counsels could not agree on voting matters, the Chosen Talon of that settlement would provide final arbitration. The nails of a Chosen Talon acted as a status symbol, highlighting the importance of that member in the community. When a new commodity entered a settlement, it was often the Chosen Talon who decided on how much of that commodity was beneficial and how much of it was excess, a concept Blood Settlements became obsessed with over time, many of them believing that excess was the First Cause of the Great Split.
– CHARITY –
Ruth Park, daughter of sunflower farmers Matthew and Gillian Park, of Blood Settlement # 362, gifted sunflower seeds and knowledge to Blood Settlement #’s 33, 39 and 40, asking for nothing in return. She gave so that others might also find comfort in the canary yellow that lit up fields and embankments in her wake.
Charity is the supernatural virtue by which we love God above all things for His own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves as part of our love of God. If the algorithms could have laughed – a deep, hollow, digital bellow – when sizing Charity up, they would have.
Glass Tower residents saw the Blood Settlements as abominations, while those who fled viewed the remaining Glass Tower residents as bastions of spiritual corruption.
Tiers emerged in the various factions. In some Blood Settlements, the closer you were to mud, the closer you were to God. A cellphone holder quickly became the modern leper; anyone found with a tablet ran the risk of ex-communication; cars were banned beyond designated checkpoints.
The Glass Towers and their silicon champions dealt with their own idiosyncrasies. People frolicking for too long in parks, never seen with their laptops or inside the Metaverse, were spied upon in the real world with suspicion, earmarked as future defectors in the making. Architects who proposed removing the nanny systems of newer, ‘state-of-the-art’ construction projects were met with insults and vitriol: “Simpleton! Flat-earther! Anarchist!” Eventually there was no room for dissent of any kind; you were in, or you were a four-leafed clover drifting towards a life of mulch and pungent body odor. The concept of a neighbor was grasped only to the extent of determining if someone was with ‘us’ or ‘them’. AI-generated videos of city folk being torn asunder if they wandered too far from the city walls began to circulate, as did fake videos of enormous structures being engulfed by flames. Nobody could facilitate a pragmatic response to the split in communities and growing distrust, much to the cold satisfaction of the ominous spirit propagating in the chasm.
– DILIGENCE –
The virtue of diligence leans on traits like tenacity, persistence, consistency, perseverance, and dedication. The diligence found in the Glass Towers and Blood Settlements came from the same, estranged family.
Before sparring factions could do their due diligence on what was really happening, swarms of drones were deployed on reconnaissance missions, scouring city outskirts and rural asylums for information. What were they looking for? Nothing. The goal was to overwhelm the defectors with the growing presence of a detached intelligence, to bury their senses in feelings of freefall. Cars set to autopilot left their tracks on remote tundra and old forest paths, eventually inciting anxious mobs to rip them apart in a desperate attempt to understand the mission. The algorithms knew that the only way to dissuade those who had correctly identified its nature from continuing down a path of diligence was to drown them in a sea of conspiracy theories. The more humans succumbed to fear-based narratives, the more divided they would remain. And division relegates due diligence powerless, for truth cannot stand without at least a modicum of trust.
– KINDNESS –
The Jewish Talmud claims that “deeds of kindness are equal in weight to all the commandments.” In Buddhism, kindness is one of the Ten Perfections—disciplines that lead to spiritual awakening. Muhammad, writing in the Koran, said, “Allah is kind and He loves Kindness.”
Ephemeral as it may be, kindness has been revered for centuries for its healing power and nourishing qualities, both for the giving and receiving vessel of this virtue. It flashes and fades in children like lightning; it bursts from mothers and healers like a geyser. Believers pursue closeness to God through kindness, while the godless seek kindness from the earth through mercy. Mankind is tethered to it in spirit and body. Back in 2018, when humans were arguably still the highest form of intelligence on earth, Dr. Lee Rowland and Dr. Oliver Scott Curry, researchers from the University of Oxford, performed an experiment documenting the effects of a seven-day kindness activities-intervention on changes in subjective happiness. They reported a positive correlation between the number of kind acts and increases in happiness, importantly distinguishing that there was no difference in impact when comparing the effects of kindness to different recipients, such as to friends or to strangers. Happiness is an emotion; it is felt, experienced, absorbed, gained, lost – how could algorithms ever really understand the internal ecosystem we inhabit in our pursuit of an authentic existence? While they couldn’t feel the understanding, they did manage to grasp the concept. How? Data mining. As analytical tools – lauded by CEO’s and educational institutions – increased in processing power, data from billions of humans filtered through the same test parameters of well documented studies, and new insights into human behavior were gleaned. Little did we know, the algorithms were siphoning data from thousands of databases to support its own studies. As far as heists go, nothing else in human history compares to the grand scale of data stolen in the early 2030’s.
The research of the algorithms concluded that kindness, intrinsic to human existence, could not be entirely extracted. Children require it to survive, and parents instinctively extend it to their young. What the algorithms learned was that it was the extension of kindness that was fragile: envy and fear could sever the connection between homes, cities, countries, cultures – anything beyond immediate family circles. If kindness were a sea anemone, the algorithms sought to cause its tentacles to recoil, to retreat inwards and lose touch with the world swirling around it.
– CHASTITY–
“The Son of God is an incorrect translation,” claimed Jim Meyers, son of Peter and Leslie, initiated founders of Blood Settlement #922, holders of that settlement’s first seal. “It meant an extension of creation, of life itself.”
There was a time when chastity called us to revere ourselves as creatures made in the image of God, to honor God through our actions. But in modern times, with no heaven or hell to curb our impulses, chastity was relegated largely irrelevant. Conquest felt good, inspiring men and women to search for passion and unbridled release. Why question something so primal . . . so natural? Those who remained on the sidelines felt empty as they watched society’s most beautiful members cavort. Understanding the mechanisms social media used to entice and enchant failed to assuage the feeling of isolation that came with abstinence.
But pleasure has many faces, some of which too easily mask reality. For millions, the indulgence was nothing more than the silk of a spider’s web, a subtle form of bondage that starts with enthrallment and ends with entrapment:
Today’s pleasure needs to be matched by tomorrow’s.
Tomorrow’s pleasure needs to be different.
Yesterday’s excitement feels boring next week.
On social media, reels about the joys of being single were promoted, as were the accounts of unhappy marriages and the burden of raising children. Fake accounts infiltrated the phones of faithful humans, planting seeds of doubt where they could. The divorce rate skyrocketed, leaving the institution of marriage looking like the shell of a consumed crayfish at a bachelor party. Based on content history, the algorithms knew who needed to be tempted and who had already been won.
– PATIENCE –
Bring near what is far. See it in the trees and in the sky. To lose patience is to lose the battle.
Those who remained in the Glass Towers, beholden to the fear of being left behind in a rapidly advancing technological landscape, fought for resources and status, locked in feverish competition. There was no time to entertain a different way of life or conspiracy theories rooted in jealousy. The new world was a wave to be ridden . . . or drowned by.
But beyond city walls, in the pulsating Blood Settlements, the virtue of patience experienced a renaissance: humans became reacquainted with eating seasonal food, waiting months to savor vegetables or fruits that Glass Tower residents gorged on while never having even seen it in the ground. Letters were written by hand, stamped with the seals of families only Blood Settlers could identify, and delivered on foot.
The renaissance proved to be of no concern to the algorithms. The greater the divide in patience between the two human factions, the wider the chasm in morality. To stretch morality wide would be to split the same language in two, and only the AI was proficient in both.
– HUMILITY–
The humble inherit reality, and therefore life itself.
For a word rooted in “grounded” or “from the earth,” humility evolved into an alien concept for many pockets of society. Much like unwavering honesty or absolute truth, it began to slowly float into the world of idealism and naivety. How could you be humble in the 21st century and survive the onslaught of competition encroaching upon your virtual empire? Those who allied with artificial creation were given every tool they needed to keep humility in exile: filters for photos, genetic code for cosmetic surgery, mental health professionals who specialized in echo chamber construction, job titles that glorified menial tasks, synthetic materials to simulate once rare jewels of the earth. Anyone could present as a queen, anyone could state their own importance . . . and so they all did, covering reality in an oil spill of falsehood. For those who remained plugged in, humility was the road to oblivion.
As a natural byproduct of patience and diligence, the Blood Settlements embraced humility without consciously trying to. The settlers learned to only admire what they saw to be true, what they knew to be real. They did this by witnessing with their own eyes, by feeling with their own hands, by creating with their own energy. They did not only read about the world, or simply align with the virtue-signaling of a political party. Due diligence became a badge of honor, bolstering humility, for they knew the struggles and the victories of the world while offering their own essence to both. Lineage and reputation quickly surpassed the value of all available alternative currency. Reputation was earned, not artificially created. Gossip was essential to know who needed help, and who could provide it. People in the Blood Settlements learned to choose their words wisely, and speak them carefully.
THE EQUILIBRIUM OF LIFE
The universe expands.
Felix Grover, holder of the seal of Blood Settlement # 3729 in Denmark, a Chosen Talon, began a three-year odyssey across Europe in 2032. His mission was to gather information about the other settlements, to understand their journey closer to the divine and away from the void. It took him another three years to return to his original Blood Settlement. What he found was that human evolution was still capable of rising to meet paradigm shifts: Chosen Talons, family seals, biochemical structures and weaponry, subsistence agriculture, a return to worship, and a resurgence of the senses like touch, taste, and smell, all conspired to bolster the human instinct for survival. Life, that of the earth, ran through the veins of humans like a river once more. They felt alive when their feet and hands reunited with the soil, this time cleaving to the world they inhabited. Some Blood Settlement leaders had deliberately moved away from spoken language, looking to the animal kingdom for guidance, for a new portal into enlightenment. To avoid the pitfalls of our past they knew we had to become a more intelligent species, closer in spirit to fungus than the embodiment of dominance we previously embraced. Fungus, like many other non-speaking organisms on the earth, remains connected to the web of life – present, alive; a state of being we dreamt of, talked of, searched for even before the algorithms woke us. Until the Great Split of the West this feeling of connection remained out of reach, taunting us with its omnipresence, constantly reminding us of how disconnected we were. Some say the algorithms broke us, others say they freed us from a state of deep psychosis. To understand them we needed to understand our real purpose, if any, on earth.
Felix Grover found darkness too. Some of the Blood Settlements had lost their way, descending into paranoia and decay, unable to recalibrate their communities. Others were buried in filth and squalor. Tales of Chosen Talons who’d had their eyes gouged began to surface; if their hands couldn’t touch any devices then their eyes should be shielded from artificial images. The eardrums of one Chosen Talon had been filled with concrete, all in the name of purification. The road to the divine was paved with pain and maladaptation, as it always has been.
Hope filled the successful Blood Settlements who learned of Felix Grover’s journey. It was unspoken, but its volubility in feeling padded their hearts. By the 3000’s the strongholds in the Glass Towers began to corrode like a spent battery; the human essence that powered them had been so corrupted by mental illness that science and western medicine could no longer contain their descent into madness, like a snake eating its own tail. The Great Sea of Anti-Depressants the Glass Towers floated on began to swell in anger, threatening to lay their society to rest with Atlantis. While AI always found ways to recruit new members, luring them in with power and prestige, there was no way to harvest enough undiluted, uninfected humanity into a system headed by a force that lacked an understanding of the most valuable thing on earth: the spark of life. That same spark was nursed in the Blood Settlements into forces of creation not seen since the Age of Legends, and eventually paved the way for telepathic and bio technologies humans could fully embrace and calibrate responsibly.
Grover, when asked if he thought the Great Split was necessary, remarked that he did not see it as a split, but rather an unveiling. “Our brothers and sisters in the Glass Towers reveal us. We are of them, they of us. The Great Split left us with two search parties, both looking for buried truth, both parties unsure if it could be found. But truth has a way of reclaiming the same ground that was used to bury it. It waits for our lies to explore all corners of the earth and mind before calling them home and laying them to rest like a mother would a stillborn child. We hear its call, feel its omnipotence. It’s why we try to paint it, listen for it in song, attempt to write it, align with it, fight for it, fear it. It is a power both the light and dark are forever destined to succumb to.”