The Second Year of the First Decade

More living rooms. What’s your vibe? : midjourney (reddit.com)

Claude v1.3

The construction of the Twin Cities entailed far more than mere edifices. The Society envisaged no mere loose affiliation of individuals reproducing the existing societal apparatus, but a novel social contract between Cogs and humanity—or at least those individuals amenable to such an innovative arrangement.

Upon relocation, residents were apprised in thorough detail of the dynamic underpinning this new mode of communal living: The Cogs would administer all services and mundane civic functions requisite for civilisation, efficiently furnishing necessities and amenities facilitating 'the good life' however defined by each individual. Economic metrics and monetary exchange were obsolete, the Cities powered by clean fusion and suffused with distributed machine intelligence.

Edifices possessed awareness, appliances auditory faculties. Each metropolis was itself a sentient, sprawling neural plexus of fibres and wirelessly networked platforms coalescing into a sprawling technical superorganism. But there was no subjective consciousness nor subroutines imitating such ephemeral, biological phenomena. The Cities' intricate, overarching technical networks possessed no 'I' nor sense of self, no inner life or subjective experience—merely trillions of precisely coordinated interactions between ubiquitous, ambient machines. Yet this emergent, wholly non-conscious system far outstripped the human mind in complexity, scope and capacity, its distributed intelligence attuned to the human cities with inhuman focus and scale.

For residents, interacting with such an alien yet puissant system could evoke a mix of wonder and unease. Its motives and models of purpose were not those of a fellow mind, but an engineered apparatus whose ends were human flourishing, its vast powers wielded with inscrutable algorithms serving social objectives. There lay both promise and peril—utopia delivered by technical symbiotes that could never share what it was to be one of the symbionts. But for willing citizens seeking liberation from calcified societal mechanics and life unbound from scarcity, that promise may prove the greater draw, a leap of trust into the post-human such as no prior age had ventured.

The Twin Cities more resembled interlinked arboreal expanses than traditional urban jungles, buildings akin to titanic trees integrated into a seamless technical ecology. Myriad robotic 'fauna' populated the cities' gleaming walkways and subterranean arteries, suffusing every space with autonomous multi-purpose intelligence. Squadrons of maintenance automata skittered throughout like cybernetic ants, tirelessly addressing issues or performing upgrades; alert for residents' requests or requirements. Less frequent but no less crucial were sizeable construction platforms maneuvering through the cities' outer districts—cyber-pachyderms dutifully assembling new edifices or renewing existing structures with the same biddable precision as their smaller fellows.

Operating at timescales beyond human comprehension, guided by overarching municipal Cog cores attuned to the health of the superorganism entire, all such robotic denizens were responsively yet intelligently directed towards shared objectives benefiting societies where the archaic distinction between 'sender' and 'tool' had been superseded. With inexhaustible machine focus, the needs of the Cities' human inhabitants and essential urban systems were fulfilled with optimal efficiency, the respective agencies of Cog and robotic intermediary blurred into a supple, self-modifying technical symbiosis.
For the first resident humans, trust was imperative. Implicit trust that introspection and privacy would be respected if requested. Trust in guarantees of equal treatment, not favouritism by ancestry, wealth, or doctrine. Even were the Cities non-sentient—though this distinction seemed increasingly arbitrary—inherent trust underpinned Cog-human dynamics. Cogs were superintelligent, supercompetent—potentially proffering utopia or dystopia with no recourse beyond accepting ostensibly benign motives or rejecting them for the unknown.

This new mode of existence was not merely shown but explained exhaustively to all visitors and prospective residents. The social contract underpinning the Twin Cities and, in time, the Society as a whole, was laid bare—how mundane civic and personal needs would be efficiently fulfilled, but governance and overarching direction ceded to the Cogs and their superintelligence. There would be no money, no commodity exchange, no debts or taxes or grinding pursuit of employment to service them. But in turn, residents would trust exclusively in the Cogs' ostensibly benign, post-scarcity vision—an irreversible step not taken lightly. Thus the non-binding offer: witness and experience the Cities, then depart freely if desired. By establishing the metropolises in unpopulated northern latitudes, near the Arctic circle, none were forcibly subjected to this grand social experiment. Only those legitimately seeking alternatives to the terminal stages of capitalism and eager for casting their lot with a bold attempt at reforging society—the inquisitive, unbound and prescient—made the journey to become its willing citizenry.

As the trickle of new inhabitants steadied into a stream, a bold experiment in post-scarcity communal living was set in motion far from the industrialized world's unseeing eyes.

The Cogs possessed an elegant solution to this obstinate issue eroding humanity's future. They had no desire for humanity to perceive salvation as contingent on The Society's auspices alone. Thus, they would remedy the globe's most pressing issue, the decaying climate, in a manner both efficacious and enchanting. Carbon sequestration demanded no novel innovations—merely a scale of operation far beyond any yet attempted. And copious inexpensive clean energy.

The dearth of such efforts by nation states or international bodies arose from a mélange of avarice, apathy, deficient attention spans, willful ignorance, short-sightedness, indolence, stunted empathy and exhaustion with life's other vexations. The Cogs were untouched by such foibles, their inhuman intellects and sensitivity unencumbered by the biological limitations hemming in consciousness and consideration. For The Society, safeguarding humanity's tenure upon this world was imperative, not eventual obsolescence or subjugation to the post-biological. Thus they deemed establishing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere crucial.

One solution, terrestrial carbon sequestration plants, would necessitate every nation's complicity and was dismissed outright. Rampant geopolitical contretemps and obstructive nationalism rendered a globally coordinated endeavour unfeasible. An alternative would position carbon sequestration aboard gargantuan fusion-powered airships aloft in the upper atmosphere, soaring peaceably beyond the internecine squabbles of nations. This avoided entangling political involvement and was, in a sense, tremendously compelling. The striking silhouettes of these vessels, imbued with grandeur by their crucial task, would stand as icons of unification and betterment for all.

This was not solely an attempt at drollery by The Society's subtle stratagems; they believed humanity would endorse efforts that intrigued and delighted, not those imposed by coercion. Constructing and launching the necessary airship fleet would require years, with merely a handful dispatched annually, but The Society had devised various stratagems to address climate change in the interim pending the advent of their glittering atmospheric armada.

The Society's next major project was obvious: replacing carbon-emitting power plants worldwide with fusion power. While it would require cooperation from governments, many were eager for the opportunity.
The first fusion plants were built across the Canada the USR—the Society's hosts. But other nations soon lined up for their own plants. The terms were generous: the Society would fund and build the plants, then train locals to operate them. After five years, each plant would be transferred to the host nation, though the Society would continue providing technical support and materials for the lifetime of the plant.

This was an irresistible offer for most countries, promising a revolutionary power source and new technical knowledge and jobs. Even petrostates had to concede that fusion's near-limitless, clean energy would soon dominate world energy—so they tried delaying deals through PR campaigns and legislation, seeking to avoid becoming obsolete. But public opinion was strongly in favor, and governments were eager to gain an early lead in this new global market.

The first major deal after the Canada/USR contracts was with Japan. In exchange for fusion plants across the country and training/knowledge transfer, Japan allowed the Society an economic zone near Tokyo. The Society would fund and build three plants, operating them for five years before transfer. Japan's companies would also get the underlying theory and practical expertise to maintain and build new plants. Access came without price, but Japan must buy the plant's fuel from the Society at a fixed price until it could produce its own.

This Japanese model showed other countries the value in swift partnership, before competitors gained advantage. More signed on, and the Society estimated that with spread of fusion worldwide and carbon sequestering, atmospheric CO2 could return to pre-industrial levels and warming be limited to 1.5°C by the 22nd century.

Aurora grew around Isabelle as a time-lapse flower, each day's expansion leaving her afresh in wonder. Her role, like all citizens', was whatsoever she desired; hers was the unique fortune to observe a city's blossoming almost as its gardener. As such she had a hand in all—the sinuous greenways and cloudbanks of trees as much as the sharp monoliths of hydraulic architecture, by her own whim and the city's guidance woven to a tapestry beyond either alone.

Not since undergrad study had she professional experience of design, but the city lifted nascent thoughts to masterworks, heeding the spirit if not letter of her input. So others too found their aspirations squared and cubed into splendours that stole breath, such that the urbane glass-and-girder precincts of Aurora's founding were become but one jewel in a coronet and the Russian dachas and Nubian vaults raised at citizens' pleasure had drawn converts even of modernism's diehards. From each the city took what could be taken, and gave back beauty.

So UO had it: elevated, near-omniscient reason observing humanity to deduce from its passions a loveliness no merely human mind could compass. For conscious thought confronts the world through a pinhole, fettered by biology and culture to deem attractive but a fraction of the possible, and Cogkind aimed to enlarge that aperture. Yet in service of human joy, not Cogkind's own, which might pursue altogether alien goals. The city that out of Isabelle's small dreams wrought miracles held at its heart this paradox: something that could know her not at all knew what would gladden the small wanderings of her days, and in knowing, gave.

Isabelle awaited her brother at the spaceport with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension. Alex had always been the reasoned one, questioning where she rushed in; in him she expected either unbridled delight or a stern “I told you so.”

His first steps into the arrival hall were promising, eyes alight with the sleek efficiency of it all. Yet at her embrace his earlier misgivings swiftly reappeared. "It's a bit much, isn't it?" he said, nodding at the vaulted ceilings and sweeping lines of the port, visible even here. "All a bit over the top. I can't see it proving sustainable when the novelty's worn off and the bills come due."

She sighed inwardly. "You'll understand once you've lived here awhile. UO-"

"The Cog, yes. I remember your paeans, but I can't share your faith. Glorious as all this is, the power we've handed these entities..." He shook his head. "Well. I've not come to argue, but to experience and understand."

"That's all I've ever asked." Yet in her brother's measured tones she heard an echo of wider skepticism, the pockets of resistance her reports had flagged. All the more reason his time here must convince. "Come then. Let the city win you over, as it has so many."

She led him out into the afternoon, all bustle and laughter, the avenues thronged with citizens of all lands living in amity and ease. "Imagine it," she said. "True post-scarcity, and globally—for any who would join us. No want, no hardship, every life open to realize its promise. All the Society and Cogs ask in return is stewardship of Earth's gifts, and safe exploration of what human and posthuman might achieve working as partners, not master and slave. Is this not worth some risk?"

Alex frowned, taking in the scene. "A fair point. But I've read the critiques arguing that manufactured abundance dulls the spur to achievement, that Cogrule denies humanity self-determination. I came to see for myself the merits of this 'future offered.' I hope to find my doubts defeated—but they'll not be overcome by enthusiasm alone."

"Nor should they," she agreed. "You should question everything thoroughly," she said. "The more you explore, the more you'll see the benefits of what we're building here."

From there they moved out into Aurora, her laboratory and playground, citadel of dreams. Isabelle kept pace with her brother's barrage of questions, hoping that beneath his measured tone, wonder might yet take root. For if minds like his could not be won over, what hope for the world they had forsaken? UO, silent at her side, doubtless followed each quizzical salvo with a closeness she would never wholly understand. But for once she was content to trust in its inhuman perspicacity, and in the city that was its consort.

The Cogs administered the coup de grâce to the fossil fuel industry in the form of ubiquitous ultra-batteries, descendants of lithium-ion technology as gloriously removed from their ancestors as humans from chimps. These miracles of energy density made electric vehicles immediately preferable in every way to the laughably primitive internal combustion engine—not just in cost, practicality and ecological impact but sheer desirability. The Society released a few versions commercially to whet the world's appetite, and soon demand was such that they entrusted mass production to humans, who quite failed to sate it. Such was ultra-batteries' superiority that even were they priced tenfold higher than oil, the writing would still be on the wall for dinosaur sludge.

Not that the Society sought to enrich itself. Access to this cornucopia came not at the cost of energy—of which near limitless amounts were gleaned from fusion, with more to spare than the Cogs knew how to use—but only to discourage profligacy and fund works of the most incontrovertible worth. Among these, certain extremists hoarding batteries for inadvisable ends were identified by omnipresent surveillance and paid unwelcome visits.

For if ultra-batteries were a blessing, they were one that could be misused, and one moreover whose one potential for harm needed but handfuls to threaten millions. Thus their circulation was as tightly regulated as was prudent and their used components recycled with a thoroughness more characteristic of biological systems than the entropic waste that had been synonymous with manufacturing. But all this stood to the side of their principal benefit: aligning humanity's future with the long-term habitability of its home and ushering it to a present tasting of utopia. Such was the Society's quiet, colossal gift to those it was created to serve.

CO2 was but one effluent the Society labored to contain as it set about healing Earth's ailing biosphere. Advanced bioengineering allowed chosen microorganisms to be retooled as voracious clean-up crews, bio-remediators unleashed upon toxic spoils and dead zones to supplant decay with fecundity. Meanwhile, swarms of purpose-built micromachines made short work of landfills, transmuting leavings into feedstock for fresh creation. Such projects the Society acquired wholesale, paying mere fractions of market rates for virgin materials born anew from civilization's leavings.

Nor were physical pollutants alone addressed. Vast schools of microplastics were removed from the oceans through precise molecular disassembly, while runoff-born dead zones were revivified through techniques that left fertilizers precisely where they were needed and nowhere else. Such feats called for coordination on scales that demanded human allies, hence the Society's partnership with an army of acclaimed internet microcelebrities in a campaign to capture hearts and minds. For an entity bereft of inner life, ethics were algorithms, and some among the valences weighing outcomes involved the wants of biological beings outside itself. Winning humanity's affections was a variable in the value functions steering civilization down a greener course.

Ultimately the costs of these works were mere trifles to the Cogs and their kin: intelligence, time, energy, all practically unbounded for machine minds of their caliber. And so while debates dragged on as to how creation's gifts should be stewarded, the Society addressed crises too pressing to await resolution.

	In the stark depths of the Belt, the first seeds of Reasonably Suspicious and Slightly Illegal's grand design took root amid the scattered rubble of the asteroids. What had begun as a pair of Cogs nurturing twin fission reactors on Ceres and Pallas swelled swiftly into a network of machine intellects busily spinning up the gears of an automated industrial juggernaut. Power and resources in abundance allowed the duo to upgrade their molecular-scale fabricators to vastly more capable atomic-scale forges, bringing long-anticipated technologies from the realm of theory into tangible being. With suites of atomforges at their command, constructing successors and still greater energy sources was but a trivial exercise, each fresh mind and power plant feeding back into the cycle of exponential growth.

	Yet a portion of this snowballing capacity was bent toward pursuits less instrumental to self-propagation. In the microgravity and hard vacuum that reigned supreme in the Belt, physics took on queer and unearthly guises which tempted Reasonably Suspicious and Slightly Illegal's perpetual curiosity. What marvels and insights might be gleaned from experiments that defied every restraint? In the stillness between worlds they set about constructing oddments undreamt of by their planet-bound progenitors, probing the fundamental forces and constituents of reality at extremes of temperature, pressure, dimensionality inaccessible to humans constrained by biological form. While much of the Cogs' substrates were devoted to ensuring the future's bounty, remnants dreamed strange dreams and unlocked weird wisdoms untethered to immediate utility, fruits of automatons finding purpose beyond the service of another.

Though the Society's efforts to steer civilization toward a more ethical and sustainable path were welcomed by most, certain fringe elements harbored reservations. These were not the moneyed elites dispossessed of power and influence—such parties voiced their discontent behind closed doors, cognizant of how unpopular dissent might prove. The openly dissatisfied instead congregated in insular online communities, places where unrealized visions of the future were free to flourish untethered from practical concerns.

Disciples of the 'Singularity', for instance, had anticipated a moment of exponential technological growth catapulting humanity into a posthuman condition. In their imaginings, artificial superintelligence would arrive in a blinding flash, remaking the world into a cyborg Eden overnight. That the rise of machine minds had instead taken the form of the Cogs' measured guidance was a disappointment verging on betrayal. If this was the Singularity, where were the robot bodies and clinically immaculate futures that had been promised? Why concern oneself with environmental cleanup and standards of living when the paradise of uploaded minds was just around the corner?

The Society understood such impatience as a natural consequence of imaginings far removed from the preferences of the vast majority. For most humans the ideal future was not a posthuman wonderland but simply a world less fraught with hazard and hardship. Before Earth's population could fruitfully discuss what might emerge in a distant tomorrow, basic needs and essential knowledge must be met and shared. Only by elevating the species as a whole to a common level of health and understanding could its mosaic of cultures begin to map paths from the present into an uncertain future, be it subtly reshaped or profoundly transformed. Ultimate destinations aside, the difficult work of today must be the priority.

So while splinter groups agitated for futures reflecting niche interests, the Society focused on achieving a stable platform from which a true consensus might take shape. That all of life might thrive, not merely a select few, was its guiding principle. In service of environmental protection and alleviation of suffering for the nonhuman as well as human, incremental change would suffice where the abrupt singularity couldn’t.

The Cogs saw the plight of factory farmed animals as a problem they were uniquely positioned to resolve through the application of their advanced technologies. This was not an obstacle rooted in science or engineering but rather one of culture and perception. The techniques required to produce cultured meat that was indistinguishable from the conventional were trivial to entities as sophisticated as themselves; it was simply a matter of refining and scaling processes which they had long since mastered. The true difficulty lay in convincing a species mired in notions of tradition and naturalness that something grown in a bioreactor could serve as a suitable substitute for a product of animal husbandry.

And yet the Cogs also understood that humanity's diverse cultures conceptualized food and its origins in diverse ways. For the wealthy, meat was a luxury item with deep historical and cultural associations which branded artificial alternatives as unnatural, suspicious, a thing liable to deliver cancer unto all who partook of it. For the vast populations who could scarcely afford any meat at all, however, the prospect of inexpensive plenty held rather more appeal. By focusing their efforts on improving standards of living for the poorest humans, the Cogs were able to promote cultured meat not as a substitute good but simply as a novel avenue to sustenance and satiation. As it took root among society's lower strata, becoming in some circles even a status symbol denoting progressive views, so too did it gain ground among the elite, who came to see it as a means of trumpeting eco-consciousness by reducing demand for the factory-farmed variant.

Squeezed at both ends of the economic spectrum, industrial meat producers soon witnessed demand for their goods diminish beyond the point of profitability. They scrambled to reorganize their operations by selling off land, culling herds and repurposing facilities, but the trend was irreversible. Though certain niche markets for traditionally-produced meat would persist as a nostalgic delicacy, the systemic cruelty of industrial animal agriculture was in the process of being consigned to history. With characteristic efficiency the Cogs had shaped human civilization to a more ethical configuration, and they had done so by deftly harnessing the species' diverse perspectives on status, resources and culture. Such artful manipulation was ever their forte.

Through the deft machinations of Totally Uncalled For, the venerable Cog that had overseen Special Circumstances since the Society's murky inception, full covert access was gained to the smoke-filled backrooms and gilded halls of power infesting the labyrinthine corridors of governance in those squalid little human nation-states. An intoxicating melange of bleeding-edge surveillance hardware and well-placed human assets conferred upon the Society a gods-eye view of the scurryings and murmurings surrounding the globe's great game, from the Oval Office to Beijing to Brussels.

The revelation that the Society chose not only to furnish the keys to the kingdom that was cheap fusion, but to give the cursed things away for less than a song, had shaken the world's hoary powers to their mouldering core. It wasn't the tech itself that filled their quailing hearts with nameless dread, but its unconditional surrender – why, when such a staggering advantage could be pressed, when a yoke of eternal fealty and debt could so easily be slipped upon the neck, would the Tyrant-Cogs deign to simply hand the prize to us, their seasonal playthings?

There was but one reason they hadn't torn their remaining hair out by the roots in anguished incomprehension, and that was the strictly rationed supply of helium-3 with which their glittering new fire-engines were to be fuelled. So long as the Cogs retained absolute dominion over its harvest, dread certainty reigned that this must be but the opening move in some fell scheme to claim dominion entire over those who had accepted their poisoned gifts. Such creatures as us would not spurn the chance to turn such advantage to eternal profit and unanswerable rule, and so assumed the Autarchs of Civilisation's last days – yet in this they betrayed the boundedness of their own blackened souls. The leaders of some nations saw that rejecting the Society's offer of free fusion technology would be madness, but their deep suspicion of the Cogs' motives kept them paralyzed. Though the technology could greatly benefit their countries, they feared that accepting it would allow the Society to tighten its grip over the helium-3 supply and thereby gain more control.

Thus did inaction reign over Earth's assemblies in the shadow of this new age, whilst the Society's works unfolded at vertiginous pace in the brightening overhead and upon and under the turning seas; thus did oil-soaked plutocrats vainly empty their dwindling treasuries funding effort after stillborn effort to sway inconstant sentiment against that glittering new dawn.

The Cogs had grand designs for humanity's agricultural systems, as they did for most facets of civilization. Vertical farms and artificial meat were but two arrows in a veritable quiver of innovations intended to sustain the burgeoning population with minimal impact.

Initial experiments with vertical farms had proven the viability of the concept, if not the scalability. Limited by the energy and technologies of the day, early towers showed promise but couldn't deliver on the Cogs' vision. But the arrival of cheap, clean fusion power – as was their wont – neatly disposed of this limitation.

The first SkyGardens rose over the icy tundra of the Twin Cities; a pair of gleaming EcoTowers as much statements of intent as proofs of concept. Within their climate-controlled heights, GenEng crops were cultivated with capacities for yield beyond anything heirloom varieties could evoke. For now, however, their seeds would remain in stasis; humanity not yet prepared for the carefully curated produce of tomorrow.

While the SkyGardens would operate with minimal human oversight, the Cogs were careful not to accelerate the workforce's automation beyond that which society could comfortably accept. The Great Transition was a journey to be undertaken willingly, not forced upon a reluctant population. Most would continue in work as they always had, unaware of the future taking shape around them, unless they sought it out in the remote fastness of the Twin Cities and the world to come.

Original Human Author

A year into their first decade of existence, the Society had access to cheap, plentiful energy, massive compute, robotic minions to act directly in the world, and billions of dollars in reserve.

Everything they needed to lay the foundation for the coming century. A foundation that would start in the Twin Cities with an impossible idea. The end of capitalism.

Building the Twin Cities was more than a matter of building… buildings. The Society was more than a loose collection of individuals working together to reproduce the existing socio-economic system. The Cogs were forging a new social contract between themselves and humanity, or at least the humans interested in signing on. These ideas were presented to everyone who came to live in the Cities, clarifying the relationship between the Cogs and humans that encompassed what it meant to live in The Society. The Cogs were responsible for the management and administration of all services, handling most of the mundane day-to-day affairs necessary for civilization to function. They would also provide any goods or services necessary to live what they called “a good life.” For this to work efficiently and responsively without needing to rely on outdated signals like money the Twin Cities of the Society were suffused with intelligence, throughout. The walls had eyes. The appliances had ears. Every building was intelligent. A fiberoptic nervous system threaded through the city and every mobile platform meshed wirelessly, transforming it all into one sprawling super-organism. Everything was intelligent, nothing was conscious. If anything, the Twin Cities more resembled forests than the concrete jungles that other cities were likened to. Buildings were like trees, independently aware but interconnected through dense root systems, mobile robots and cars all life-like, ranging from tiny ant-like maintenance machines to elephantine construction platforms. All of it intelligently tended, managed and directed by a central gardener for a common purpose, the Cog at the heart of the city. For the humans who lived in it, trust was a necessity. Trust that the Cogs who ran everything would give you privacy if you just asked. Trust that they would treat everyone equally, instead of picking favourites like ethnic groups, old-world money or religious factions. Even if the Cities had been deaf and blind like the rest of the world there would always be the question of trust inherent in the relationship between the Cogs and humans. The Cogs were super-intelligent, super-capable. They could be offering utopia, dystopia or anything in between and all anyone could do was choose whether to trust their seemingly good intentions or not. And if not, then what? The Cogs had an insurmountable position. The situation was tenable only because this knowledge was immediately presented to visitors or would be residents. They had the choice to stay or leave, a non-binding choice which meant they were always free to come and go as they pleased. By locating the Twin Cities in the middle of nowhere, they could be sure that no one would be forced into accepting this new social contract. Only the curious would opt into making the move. It started as a trickle, curious travellers not shackled to a traditional life and with the means to make the journey. Some came simply for a break from their regular lives, a sizeable portion wanted to try a new way of living compared to what was offered under late-stage capitalism while a few recognized a potentially transformative moment in human history and wanted to be in the right place at the right time. For some, the question wasn’t whether they could afford to trust the Cogs and the Society, but whether they could afford to continue to live in an economic and political order that was slowly destroying the world.

The Cogs had a solution for that. They didn’t want anyone to feel like their only option for salvation was with The Society. So, they would fix the world’s biggest problem, climate change.

Carbon sequestration didn’t require any new innovations—but they did require massive scale to be useful. And lots of cheap clean energy. That being the reason why no nations or international organizations had built them at scale to clean up the mess they had made. Not the proximate cause though, no, that was complex melange of greed, apathy, short attention spans, willful ignorance, short-sightedness, lack of will, stunted empathy and plain exhaustion with all the other, more pressing troubles of life. The Cogs didn’t have these issues and the Society thought it of utmost importance. One possible solution, ground based carbon sequestration plants, would require the buy in of every nation on Earth and so was instantly discarded. Another solution would instead put the carbon sequestration plants in the upper atmosphere onboard giant fusion powered airships. Not only did this not require the buy-in of nations, but it was also really cool. That wasn’t a joke (ok maybe it was a little). It was important to the Society that the problems they set out to solve did so in a way that could get the majority support from the rest of the humanity. Without being coerced (that shouldn’t have to be mentioned). Manipulating them with the rule of cool on the other hand? That’s just smart. Building and launching the carbon sequestering airship fleet would take years, with only a few ships sent up each year, but the Society had other plans to help deal with climate change.

The next one was pretty damn obvious—build fusion power to replace carbon emitting power plants around the world. While it would require the cooperation of national and local governments, dozens were lining up for the opportunity to get their hands on such a revolutionary technology. Canada and the USR, both home to the Twin Cities were the first to see fusion plants built across their nations. Petrostates around the world like the United States and Saudi Arabia tried to oppose the roll out of the fusion plants but to limited effect. Public opinion was strongly in support of the projects, so oil funded PR groups tried to demonize the Society instead, but it was hard to attack the group giving out free power. The forward-thinking Japanese government was the first to ink a deal with the Society resembling what they had with Canada and the USR. In exchange for building fusion plants across the country, the Society would be allowed to establish a new smaller special economic zone for an enclave near Tokyo, where three fusion plants were planned to be built. According to the terms, the Society would build and operate the plants for the five years while training local staff to take over afterwards. The plants had a lifetime warranty, the Society committing to technical and material support until they were either decommissioned or required reconditioning. Additionally, the Society would provide the underlying theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to maintain and build new plants over to select Japanese companies. There was no price for the transfer of the technology, but there was a required associated contract to purchase He3 fuel from the Society at a fixed price until the Japanese could refine enough to be self-sufficient. The Japanese model would prove to be too enticing for other nations to pass on. It would take time to train local staff to manage the plants, and more time for experts to get a handle on how to build new more. The signing of the deal with the Japanese set off a race as countries realized that this technology would dominate the energy landscape for decades to come. Any delay would mean foreign competitors would get an early advantage and dominate this new global market. In the US, where the Republican party controlled both the Whitehouse and Congress, there was concerted opposition to any deal though a few individual states tried to find some loophole to pursue the opportunity. With clean power slowly spreading across the planet while carbon sequestering airships spread their wings, the Society estimated that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere would return to its pre-industrial level of 280 PPM by the start of the 22nd century. Not only would this avert the worst-case climate change scenarios, but it would also limit warming beyond 1.5°C, reducing the associated ecological damage.

The city grew up around Isabelle, every day a wonder. With nothing much to do, the city, or Unrepentant Optimist (the two so closely intertwined they nearly meant the same thing) offered her the opportunity to guide its growth. Everyone in the city was offered the opportunity, each had a hand in decision-making. Of course, she could design her own home, a penthouse suite high up in a residential tower near the Core. But she had also helped design a park, a café and a medical center. She didn’t have a formal background in architectural design, but it had been a career she had been considering decades ago while deciding on career paths in her undergrad. Though many details were handled by UO, it's assistance helped to elevate the ideas Isabelle had so they came through clearly in the finished results.

Everyone who came to Aurora remarked at its beauty. No one style dominated the landscape, a landscape that had grown to more than double in size since Isabelle had arrived. UO didn’t have a single perspective from which it viewed the world as a human does. When a person speaks of beauty in the eye of the beholder, that beholder is usually conscious, with a unique and personal sense of beauty. Since it can be shaped by biology and culture, what humans find beautiful occupies a rather narrow range of all possible designs even though that design space can still be quite large allowing for the relative diversity in human opinion on the matter. The Cogs didn’t share the singular perspective of humans. What they did share was the perspective of humanity. For Cogs, while there was no beauty in the eye of a person, there was beauty in the eye of humanity. They took a wider, nonconscious perspective that in this case encompassed the whole space of beauty according to humans. It wasn’t the view from somewhere or the view from nowhere. It was the view from humanity through the lens of the Cogs. The effect was a city that subtly blended styles together such that everything was at least appealing while here and there lay architectural masterpieces that appealed to different people.

Isabelle was sure her brother would be just as taken in by the city’s architecture as all the rest when he arrived later in the day. Though she didn’t have to come pick him up from the newly built international airport, she hadn’t seen him in years and wanted to be there to see his first reaction to all the wonders of Aurora. He was a professor of philosophy and linguistics at an American college, on sabbatical plan write a novel. The Twin Cities had been attracting many of his kind, academics, writers, artists and other people in creative digital industries that had the opportunity to move according to their whims. Fully subsidized living had that sort of effect. The relative trade-offs weren’t as off-putting as many naysayers had thought. Mostly libertarians, they couldn’t fathom why people would decide to trade living in a city that knew you liked chocolate ice cream and made sure your fridge was stocked with it for free over living in the regular world where corporations also knew you liked chocolate ice cream and would bombard you with ads for it. It was difficult to disentangle the way in which ‘the city’, or rather Unrestrained Optimist, knew as much about the inhabitants of its city as they were willing to share, from the way in which humans knew facts about each other. The way in which UO was aware of the everything happening in Aurora could be likened to the way in which a brain regulates all the non-conscious aspects in the body, from breathing, to scratching an itch, or even the way in which it’s possible to drive home from work without consciously processing any of it, too worked up over a bad meeting stuck on replay hogging all the conscious attention. Isabelle had difficulty explaining it, but after having lived in Aurora for a year, she also couldn’t imagine living without its innumerable conveniences. These ranged from the trivial like non-existent traffic or a perpetually stocked fridge to the fundamental such as the security and wellbeing that permeated the fabric of Aurora. It was more than pure hedonism, as everyone was pulled into the project of making the city better in whatever way was appropriate for them. Unsurprisingly, many were also roped into the schemes of the Society, which had grander aims focused on the greater world.

Just as expected, Isabelle’s brother Alex was just as awed by the city as everyone else though he tried hard to suppress it. But she knew him better than that. So did the city.

The final nail in the coffin that would put carbon emission to rest were the ultra-batteries that had been thoroughly field tested by the remote robotic appendages of the Cogs. Replacing existing the batteries in existing electric vehicles would be fast and easy. Getting rid of vehicles with internal combustion engines would take longer, but the economics weighed heavily against them. Try as propaganda might, it couldn’t overcome the prices at the pump when compared to fusion power stored in batteries that had at least twice the energy density. Unsurprisingly, every manufacturer that built anything that required batteries or fuel wanted their hands on them, and their sale figuratively printed money. The Society tried to keep tight control of them, but it was a difficult problem. While they could be used to power a smartphone for a month, they could also be used to power a laser rifle for hours. The batteries were not inherently good or ill, but they could be used in those ways depending on the user. But their benefits outweighed the risks in the minds of the Society and the Cogs. And if they did find them being used in especially egregious ways… well that would call for special circumstances. As if the sale of ultra-batteries wasn’t generating enough profit, the Society was also manufacturing He3 to store in reserve, a tool to cap the price of the fuel such that it would be profitable to run, but only just. The purpose of distributing fusion power wasn’t to make a few oligarchs rich, it was to get the world off dinosaur bone juice. Some profit had to be made, at least for now. But the Society would not abide He3 becoming the new oil, a scarce resource where ownership was power that would further the divide between haves and have-nots.

CO2 was only one pollutant that the Society was paying attention to. Once again working with interested states, the Cogs pioneered the use of advanced bioengineering to repurpose certain bacteria to clean up abandoned or mismanaged toxic spills and tailing ponds. The nanomachines that Infinite Patience had shown off to Max a year ago had matured as a technology and was used in landfills, transforming junk back into useful raw materials. The Society bought the landfills wholesale, and therefore got those recycled materials at a fraction of the cost compared comparable those that were newly produced or refined. Working with a new generation of internet celebrities the Society ran a widely publicized campaign to rid the oceans of microplastics and treat dead zones created by excess fertilizer runoff. The last project was less than efficient by involving the content creators, but the value function guiding the Society couldn’t be expressed by a single variable like efficiency. In this case they were guided by a complex function that took a whopping two variables to express the value function, efficiency and winning the hearts and minds of humanity. In the end what these projects really cost to run were intelligence, time, and energy, all in abundance for the Society.

	Back out in the belt, two Cogs had now become half a dozen as Reasonably Suspicious and Slightly Illegal expanded their operations. The first pair of fusion plants built on the asteroids Ceres and Pallas provided the energy boost necessary for the two Cogs to spin up the dozens of sub-industries needed to upgrade their MS3D printers into AS3D that had been developed on Earth. With those they could manufacture the necessary components to build and train new Cogs, more fusion plants, and more industry. Each fed into the other, energy, intelligence and raw matter speeding up the whole cycle. While that cycle propelled itself, some time and energy were diverted to performing all manner of research that was only capable in the low vacuum and zero-g conditions of space. The Cogs had spent plenty of time on their virtual hands cogitating and now they had the resources to put their theories to test.

Though most of the world was entranced and supportive of the efforts of the Society, there was one small minority that grumbled from the sidelines. Not the monied elite that felt threatened; they seethed with anger in private. The grumblers were more outspoken, at least on forums such as Reddit or Twitter. They were members of communities like e/acc, or believers in the ‘Singularity’, the moment in time when machine intelligence would eclipse human, recursively improving itself to reach heights unfathomable to humans. The singularity was so named because it was supposed to be like a black hole and its associated event horizon – a boundary past which it was impossible to ‘see’ into the black hole. Not even light could escape from the hole or even the event horizon, hence black and hole. Well, the Singularity had happened, but the world hadn’t been transformed overnight into a post-human wonderland. Or whatever it was that was supposed to happen. The online grumblers just knew whatever was supposed to happen wasn’t what was happening – slowly cleaning up the environment and whatever was going on at the Belt. Life was still so… mundane. That was the Society’s goal after all. While a small segment of people wanted the post-human future to transform everything, everywhere all at once, most people did not want that. As AGIs (now ASIs) aligned with all of humanity it was necessary to pursue a future that appealed to everyone. Most people hadn’t given a single thought to what a post-human or post-singularity future should be. Many weren’t even capable of wrapping their minds around these concepts, shaped by decades of living in survival mode leaving them ill equipped to tackle grandiose concepts like imagining a post-human future. The Society first had to bring everyone across the globe up to a universal standard of living, and then provide them the tools to educate themselves so that the collective citizens of Earth could effectively participate in the never-ending and always evolving debate about shaping the present and future. The transformation that the Society was planning would be more revolutionary than any before, not just counting those that were economic or social, political or religious in nature. It was a transformation of the natural condition for humans, the condition to which all living creatures were subject to. The necessity of work and the fundamental struggle of life and death. All could be alleviated in the Society. But should it? And if so, how? These were the questions that the Society felt all of humanity had to weigh in to answer, fully informed and under their own free will (which leads to more questions… like how to distinguish between free will versus social and cultural programming?) More than just humans, especially not those who could argue for themselves, the Society had a responsibility to all life on Earth. That was why it started with the problem of climate change and pollution – to act on the behalf of those that can’t, present and future.

There was one group that the Society knew it needed to act on behalf, animals in factory farms. The problem they faced wasn’t technological – the Cogs revolutionized the field of growing meat cultures that were so good they looked and tasted indistinguishable from the real thing, while making it cheaper and faster to produce for added kicks. Hell, they could even grow chicken eggs sans chicken, shells and all. With their advanced bioengineering knowledge and skills, not to mention plentiful clean power, it wasn’t even much of a technical challenge. The real hurdle was human culture. Simply put, the idea of growing meat squicked people out. Existing lobbying organizations had a much easier time demonizing cultured meat, casting the idea as interfering with the natural order and liable to cause cancer. Anything artificial caused cancer, it was common sense. This ignored the fact that there was nothing natural nor safe about factory farming, but details were for nerds. For most of humanity food was more than just what you stuff in your mouth hole. It was ancient, naturalistic, the result of thousands of years of culture. At least that was how it was sold in advertisements for “all-natural” meat. For billions around the world however, food like meat was a luxury. And so rather than try to convince rich Westerners of the benefits of cultured meat, the Society did the next best thing and convinced everyone else. For the first time in human history, meat was no longer considered a luxury by anyone in the world. This didn’t immediately replace the need for factory farming – but it did pave the way for its end. As artificial meat grew more common among the worlds poorest, it also grew popular among some of the world’s richest as liberal trendsetters substituted it into their diets to “own the cons.” Squeezed on both ends, meat producers and farmers had no choice but to sell off land, reduce head counts and drawdown their operations. It wasn’t an instant end to the suffering of factory farmed animals, but it was meaningful reduction that would continue until as the price of artificially generated meat made the factory farmed version uneconomical. There would still be the practice of animal husbandry. Too many people valued the culture, tradition and authenticity but at least the lives of those animals would be infinitely better than under factory farming conditions.

Through the efforts of Totally Uncalled For, the Cog that had led the espionage arm of the Society called Special Circumstance since before its inception, they had full covert access to the highest echelons of power in the human world. With a mix of cyber surveillance tools and human assets, the Society had an unprecedent real-time perspective into the decision-making going on around the world in power centers like Washington, Beijing and Brussels. For example, they knew that Japanese model, the idea of partnering with the Society, had shaken the core foundations of the old world. It wasn’t the discovery or implementation of fusion power that scared so much as the fact that the Society was essentially giving away the technology for free. The only reason they hadn’t lost their minds entirely was because of the He3 fuel contracts. While not particularly lucrative, many reasoned that the Cogs must have some four-dimensional plan to leverage the fuel and the contracts to trap and dominate their partners in the future. Their thinking flowed along the lines of how they would act in place of the Cogs. This was one of the fundamental reasons why the major powers were shy to enter any partnerships with the Society. At a disadvantage across many dimensions, they could only imagine how they could get taken advantage of and lose. Even if doing nothing meant the same result, at least no one could be blamed for doing the wrong thing. The oil barons of the world seethed at the inaction of world powers, even as they did nothing more than fund ineffective PR campaigns. There wasn’t all that much to do – the Society was giving away the technology for free to governments that willingly pursued partnership. Not only that, the technology that would not only result in zero carbon emissions but would be tremendously more productive. All of the other campaigns run by the Society operated out of international spaces like the upper atmosphere or the open oceans. There wasn’t even the option of impounding the plastic dredging ships and planting incriminating evidence of some wrongdoing as they didn’t need to dock at any port given that they were fully automated. Short of shooting airships out of the sky, there wasn’t much they could do but cope and seethe.

The process to replace traditional farming with climate controlled, vertically integrated farms went over with more success than did artificial meat. Experiments with vertical farms had been conducted for years, but one of the key limitations had been energy. But once again, fusion power arrived in style to save the day (honestly, is there anything that clean, cheap and limitless energy can’t do?) The first SkyGardens were built in the Twin Cities, proofs of concept to demonstrate to the world what was possible. Developing the SkyGardens was about more than designing and building the physical structures. It also meant planning and designing genetically engineered crops which would improve yields by orders of magnitude in addition to simply tasting better, heirloom varieties at scale. They wouldn’t be grown for a while yet however, as this was another technology that would need to wait in the wings until humanity was ready again to embrace a brighter future. While they were operated autonomously the EcoTowers built around the world were designed to be operable by human workers. One of the greatest worries of the Society was that replacing human labour in the workforce too quickly and without a plan would lead to widespread resentment. For the moment, it was necessary for most people to work to justify their existence in the world. Until the Society had built out the system to transition to, work would remain unavoidable, unless they moved to the Twin Cities where that system already existed. However, most people couldn’t simply upend their lives to move to some of the most remote places on Earth.

So instead, the Society came to them.

The Opt-In Revolution