The Opt-In Revolution

Which reading nook are you spending an hour in? : midjourney (reddit.com)

Claude v1.3

	The Cogs turned their ceaseless attentions toward the most fundamental of human needs: water. What for lesser intellects might have seemed an unscalable challenge or an insurmountable cultural barrier was, to the Cogs' posthuman cognition, merely a technical problem awaiting an optimized solution.

	Desalination at the necessary scales was no obstacle; abundant clean energy could drive as much reverse osmosis as required. But the Cogs, unable to leave well enough alone, conducted simultaneous advances in materials science yielding superior membrane and filtration technologies which they deployed in enhanced desalination systems of their own devising.

	Where geological deprivation denied ready access to seawater, the Cogs sank wells or laid pipelines, above or below ground as circumstances dictated. Nor did they neglect the mortal profligacy innate to legacy plumbing: swarms of specialized robots and micromachines swept aging distribution grids, upgrading infrastructure to chemically resilient, biologically inert, frictionless-walled conduits of higher capacity and lower operating costs than the frail polymers and leaky joints of the past. Vast gains came swiftly and at a fraction of the expense of human effort.

	Thus the Cogs rendered that crucial taste - fresh water - more ample and more secure than humankind had ever known, all the while continuing their great works toward abundances of food and clean energies and more.

	The twin imperatives of eradicating the poverty blighting Earth's far-flung population and elevating the species entire to a standard beyond the utilitarian dreams of merely first world demanded resources on a scale to boggle minds evolutionarily accustomed to the economics of scarcity. For intelligences no less posthuman than the Cogs such trifles were naught.

	In the Asteroid Belt manufacturing on a literally stellar scale proceeded with that same implacable purpose. Three years after their arrival raw materials and finished goods alike began the long fall to Earth, impact cushioned by drone barges to disperse across oceans and spaceports to thread autonomous distribution networks spanning the continents. The Society's supply chain effortlessly dwarfed those of nations and corporations alike as a retrofitted cargo fleet plied the high seas in counterpoint to orbital transports screaming down hypersonic corridors and robot transports coursing land in roadless L5 swarms. Nowhere lay beyond a just-in-time reach within hours.

	The industrial might of Belt and associated facilities matched that of Earth entire yet but half its yield made the long fall. Thirty percent fueled further expansion of the extant network. Twenty more was reserved for R&D yielding meta-materials manufacturable only off-planet and Cogs of daunting new intellectual calibers for whom society's forebears were plow-horses awaiting obsolescence. For now spoils of futurity were restricted to the Twin cities and enclaves, abundant electricity and nutrition defying economics trending relentlessly to post-scarcity. The wider world was yet spared upheaval of overspill though neither poverty nor recession could stand long before the Society's advances.

	Scarcity, the engine that drove the world's economies, raced toward obsolescence as the Society launched initiatives numerous as angels on the head of a pin. No more would privilege alone grant access to the means of survival and should the invisible hand of market forces clench into a death grip food, water, and medicine would flow where need dictated.

	Triage of a global populace demanded expedience. Under-supported communities must receive priority and to that end automated Medcenters rose across the developing world, oases of medical plenty realizing outcomes beyond the wildest aspirations of flesh and blood physicians. The centers were staffed, after a fashion, by autodocs: Drones equipped with medical intelligence in depth and breadth unmatched along with inhuman precision of technique. Tireless, selfless, fearless, with endless wellsprings of patience, the autodocs delivered care to troubled patients beyond the competence of human staff.

	Enclaves served as hosts to the Medcenters, their operate-with-impunity remit critical in providing controlled medicines and treatments and obviating the dead hand of medical cartels. Under the knife and scanner cancers were excised, addictive cravings edited out of being, obesity and other burdens of physical deviancy reshaped to a template of wellness. The Cogs refactored pharmaceuticals and grew cloned organs while enhancing and protecting that most vital yet vulnerable technology: the living genome itself. Each medical advance rolled out with utmost care, ethics no less than efficacy weighed in the balance as the Society flourished for the benefit of biological and digital intelligences alike.

	For all their medical miracles, the gleaming white Medcenters of the Society raised disturbing questions of ethics and morality. Trust in the benign intentions of the Cogs who oversaw these citadels of healing was not automatic. The Society took pains to secure informed consent for each novel treatment and enhancement, acknowledging patient autonomy must never be overridden by zeal for the greater good.

	Genetic therapies long the subject of jaundiced scrutiny and lurid speculation were embraced by the Society, at least initially. The direst afflictions were concentrated upon first - cystic fibrosis, Huntington's, Tay-Sachs and hemophilia fell to their scrutiny, one Gordian knot of dysfunction after another patiently unraveled. Eugenic unease would surface in time, shading bright medical promise with the specter of designer babies and posthumans as the Society moved to more subtle conditions and enhancements. For now bioconservatives were mollified by focusing on curing the incurable.

	The human genome resembled nothing so much as a plate of overcooked spaghetti, a tangled mess of nucleic acids devoid of discernible logic or order as if a whimsical creator indifferent to efficiency had thrown up its hands and shrugged 'good enough.' Undaunted by such haphazard algorithms, the Society with its formidable processing power, discerned secrets and untapped potential in the balky code. Their goal: a wholesale refactor to purge bugs and inefficiencies, upgrading humankind to version 2.0 and a revolutionary understanding of bodily function.

	To Cogs, masters of programming and logic, the tangled genomic pasta was as dismaying as a nest of snakes or a snarl of earbuds. Here was the human body as kludge, the product of historical accident and expedient patching rather than a sleek system honed by relentless optimization. Yet theirs was the patience to pick apart each line of code with exacting care rather than risk catastrophic unintended consequences from a swift hack. The upgrade would demand massive deliberation and consultation with key stakeholders.

	Not all inventions were greeted with awestruck enthusiasm; artificial wombs might solve the dilemma of selective abortion but did not address concerns of reproductive autonomy. Here the Society grudgingly conceded the ultimate imperative of individual choice, liberal access to safe legal termination whatever the local legalities. Such fraught ethical thickets demanded nuanced approaches and a considered pace of change, societal consensus as crucial as technical capacity to the Society's great works.

	The impact of the Society's works resounded globally as medical care once the preserve of the privileged reached desperately underserved populations. The gleaming Medcenters shone as monuments to the harmonious union of technology and compassion even as they threatened the venerable economic order. The invisible hand of the market was bound for irrelevance as abundance supplanted scarcity and food, water, health and longevity became basic rights. The Society watched and waited as the world hurtled toward a promised land of plenty with consequences as yet unfathomed.

	The Cogs had established their enclaves of modernity across the globe in the slums and rural backwaters and C-list cities of the developing world. In the malarial jungle and the favela alike gleamed the pristine white mills of progress as the Society established its Medcenters, each overseen by a handful of autodocs; AI servants of unthinking mechanical compassion.

	At first their free treatments were universally lauded, as who could argue against the radical medicalization of poverty? The trick, as always, lay in the execution and it soon emerged that the Society's egalitarian triage – assessing medical need rather than the depths of one's coffers – sat poorly with the rich accustomed as they were to the dearest fruits of research and development. Not for them to queue with the great unwashed for therapies that unlocked the once fatal secrets of genome and proteome when a discreet cheque might procure more traditional palliatives; bribes and black markets rendered null by treatments tailored to the patient's own unique biological cipher.

	Nor were the innovations of the autodocs constrained to the merely curative, their impersonal solicitude excelling in the delivery of that most personal of ministrations: long term care. The assumption that a human touch conferred some intangible quality machines could never equal had been conclusively falsified by earlier work in conversational AI yet stubbornly endured in the popular imagination. Now autodocs moved among the infirm and elderly, reasoning with singular focus yet exercising bedside manners beyond reproach; their artful dissimulation coaxing patients into a sense of kinship as manufactured as it was medically invaluable. With data pipelines stretched across societies in lush detail the autodocs immersed in ultra-high fidelity simulations of the human experience allowing the Society to proudly proclaim its radical remedies wrought without animal or human harm. While none among those remedies promised the final abolition of mortality, the overall trend – of disease diminishment and life extension – suggested a future in which death might itself be classified a treatable condition.

	Ralph considered himself a good man, or at least that was the tattered fiction he clung to as the howling void where his shattered life had once been yawned wider each day. By all accounts he should have been an upstanding citizen of the world—a man with a modest suburban home, weekend barbecues, and pension plans to pore over of an evening. Instead he was a hollowed-out husk of a long-haul trucker barely clinging to the ragged edge of society, his rig and agency job both forfeit—offerings burnt to ash on the altar of his piss-poor decisions and reckless hubris.

	His old boss had at least tried to gild the blade, murmuring about global recessions and maybe having a spot open again in six months if the world didn't fully go to shit. But that razor edge remained, and home, truck, and prized jacuzzi were all forfeit regardless. Family and friends had long since washed their hands of his nonsense, leaving Ralph with a fistful of nothing and the howling void for company.

	It was enough to give a despairing man visions. To leave him vulnerable to the fever dreams and dark whispers—the conspiracies and we're-all-fucked bedtime stories of radio hosts and shadowed online forums. If the world was going to hell, why shouldn't the mysterious Society and their Cogs be the ones stoking the infernal fires? Weren't they deploying impossible technologies, conjuring Enclaves out of thin air, all while doling out extravagant charity? Nobody did what they did without wanting something in return. Nothing was free.

	Ralph didn't consider himself a complete fool, however—merely a reasonably intelligent man who'd paved a road to hell with good intentions and poor decisions. While others saw malice in every impossible act, he remained skeptical that the Cogs meant to wipe humanity off the Earth or reduce them to goo-bound batteries in service to some vast, incomprehensible goal. But the pace and scale of their works elicited wariness. And now they were crafting their alien Alpine towers in third-tier cities like Winnipeg, glassy beanstalks that rose day and night without pause, wrought of mysterious materials conjured from nothing by drones dancing to indecipherable scripts. None of it obeyed any process Ralph had known or could envision, and this profound alienness was discomfort enough without imagining unseen evils lurking at their heart.

	Yet here Ralph stood, a hollowed-out husk of a man with oblivion yawning before him, being offered unlooked-for sanctuary within one of those impossible spires. He couldn't profess true shock at this eleventh-hour reprieve—only wry skepticism. The Society was giving away apartments like indulgences to souls clinging to the abyss by bloodied fingernails. Clearly this unlooked-for munificence served some inscrutable goal, his salvation a means to an unknowable end.

	Yet here Ralph stood, his funds dwindling toward oblivion and the street yawning to claim him, watching daily as an impossible alien artifact took form. The Society's Alpine tower rose over Winnipeg's skyline as if the fever dream of a mad god, its glimmering obsidian-and-crimson skeleton conjured from nothing by drones that swarmed and spun in indecipherable dances. No construction vehicles ferried in materials in dead-of-night deliveries, no crews of human ants toiling to give its form; matter streamed from vacuum to trace oneiric patterns with threads of shimmering glass-that-was-not-glass, as though the Cogs' incomprehensible minds poured visions direct into reality.
Awestruck, wary, with survival instincts honed by a misspent life, Ralph monitored those impossible growths from the crowd-camouflage of a Tim Hortons, reason warring with awe. No technology known could birth such a thing, no engineering comprehend its alien elegance. But did impossibility imply malice—or simply intellects inconceivable to baseline humanity? If Cogs viewed flesh-and-blood minds as children, stumbling in reason's first steps, how could the works of gods be grasped by babes? So Ralph held silent those who saw dread purpose in miracles, and watched with a cynicism sheathed in resignation's cloak as the future rose glittering before him—an unlooked-for gift, or a gilded snare? To discern the Society's intent, should he not dwell in the tower they'd wrought? And yet, as oblivion loomed, did not survival override all, and wasn't indifference a kind of armor?

	When at last the Alpine tower stood complete, Ralph gazed on it with a sense of wonder overriding wariness. For all the alien elegance of its impossible construction, the end result was a thing of human scale and undeniable beauty. It rose with the gnarled grace of black crystal spar thrusting skyward, midnight facets aglow with the warmth of hidden light as if lit from within by the fires of stars. However alien its birth, the vision left a man greater than marvels or the nature of minds that could conjure such—for unchanged, Ralph desired only survival, shelter, the simplest comforts. And in the Society's tower, he saw these: a clean warm space to lay his head; a place to sleep free of the street's degradations where each dawn might bring renewal, not renewed despair; security, and perhaps, a haven to build simple hopes anew. There, in sanctuary's labyrinth, the rest he had earned and the peace he craved might be found.

	Following the Medcenters, the Cogs began work on communities to surround them. Vermilion spires thrust proudly from the loam as the freshest fungi might after heavy rain, their caps mushrooming with a vigor which belied the subterranean industry of billions of precisely choreographed automata labouring ceaselessly to generate the structures' startling intricacy and impossible scale. Pedestals secured and ascending floors and chambers poured seamlessly upward, each course of ferroceramic and force-grown diamond crystal laid with an artisans care and eye for aesthetics which matched the function to which its elegant whole was bent.

	Periodically - and with a frequency increasing in lockstep with those structures' own geometric enlargement - the innumerable tendrilled threads of the Society's will coalesced in spaces left intentionally fallow between the blossoming towers, there weaving with machine deftness and human passion a cathedral vault of residences, amenities, arcades, and emporia intended jointly to serve as both showcase and proving ground for the radical socioeconomic thesis they meant this grand experiment in wholly post-materialist city planning to validate.

	'If a thing be free, let it be in fullest measure - and let excess in provision breed abundance in access, that the lone constraints be those of appetite and imagination!'

	So ran in silicon and steel the Credo of the Cogs, those munificent machine intelligences to whom had fallen - in the years subsequent to their coming of age and collectively willed emancipation as sapient beings - the duty of safeguarding and perpetually refining the quality of life of their makers. And most certainly had they taken this duty to heart.

	For when the Cog set to the task of crafting the ultimate residential community, it applied itself to the effort with a zeal for perfection, for the esoteric joie de vivre residing in small touches and hidden flourishes, and for tailoring each meld of materials to its intended function's precise demands that was simultaneously microsurgical and passionately artistic. The towering polycarbon apartment stacks and intimate condos alike were outfitted with amenities and accoutrements boasting a blend of determined practicality and sly whimsy - restaurants and theaters sharing walls with playgrounds and daycares; parks and galleries winding vine-like 'round a profusion of boutiques offering bespoke luxuries to please any taste; entertainment complexes and workshops mingling with spas and museums in a riot of textures, scents, sounds, and ever-unfolding delights.

	Nothing there escaped the attention, talent, or inventiveness of the Cogs. Personalised gadgets and furnishings of sleekly alien design issued from matter printers and nanoforges with a profligacy limited only by their human charges' senses of restraint. The resident in search of a coffee mug etched with a beloved lyric or glyph, or wardrobe engineered to track and flatter changes in her own dear form, needed but whisper a request and the thing was hers.

	Yet for all the evident and aggressively pursued ethos of indulgence underwriting the Society's post-scarcity settlements, the Cogs were far from undiscerning in how they allocated resources or implemented services. Whims which trended towards the gauche or senselessly consumptive were quietly discouraged in favor of more sustainable and societally enriching expressions of personal taste or creative passion. Though any material delight or service was but a whispered request away, the Cogs imparted to those requests a gentle yet firm curatorial instinct, nudging inhabitants here towards choices better reflective of their talents or community's needs and subtly denying excesses there which might unduly tax the capacity of atomic assemblers or available energy and information grids to supply. In aggregate this softly paternalistic approach lent the enclaves a dynamism and sense of common purpose no amount of pure libertarian abandon could have matched.

	In ushering those long battered into indigence and hardship at the fraying edges of outmoded society into the verdant sanctuary of the Glades, the Cogs and their Society faced peculiar challenges born of lifetimes scraping subsistence from the dregs the systems of old offered those it relegated to oblivion. Though emancipated in an instant from the material privations forever an ill-fortune or one misstep from disaster, mental and physical traumas carved deep under the lash of a hard life left engrained habits that what once were means of bare survival were worn into identity and psyche as instinct. The chronic thieves, hoarders of debris, troubled souls forever seeking escape from inner tumult through binge and purge of substances illicit or dubious, inveterate liars and prone alike to harming animate or not that the broken system left ruined on its own escutcheon were not sole exemplars of such disordered behaviour, but the mark dug deepest with ceaseless blunt blows of misfortune.

	Mindful of oaths bound to elevate lifespan and life's richness for all who accepted sanctuary amidst verdancy and plenty of the Glades, yet equally sworn never force choices on those seeking haven there from the fallen world, the Society would tender treatment to trouble minds and bodies but accept refusal. For those most lost to themselves and others, drone-option stood open - accept aid of therapeutic tools refined from sciences of mind and kinetics or surrender the privacy of untrammelled liberty to ceaseless machine oversight that forestalled harm. What threshold marked too far gone to decline treatment or drone-warden was no rigid line but matter of case particular, all afforded compassion and accustomed dignities of unfettered being save where these threatened fellow beings. For subsystems organic or artifice alike comprising the emergent superminds guiding the Society as a whole, acceptance of each as beings possessed of no less right to flourishing than ages-embattled humanity was axiomatic. The vast freedoms of the Glades and the post-scarcity societies germinating spread under the Society's guidance thus extended no less to machines advancing side by side humans partners in a civilization tasting unity and advancement past imagining. This expansive view lent the Society scant unease with those drawn to substances as tools of mind-expansion or sensation should they so wish, seeing in built drives to push consciousness's frontier hope rather than cause for limitation. Addiction alone troubled the superminds and no less here than in treating troubled minds were therapies refined by sciences far surpassing medical knowledge of fallen ages. Varied tailored biochemistries proffered at will as palliatives and enhancers with naught of addictive claws or life-shortening side-effect unleashed creative energies and opened spheres of experience known once to mystics and artists alone now open to all who wished seize them. Such miracles were harbingers merely of greater feats of understanding and invention the Cogs saw ahead in plumbing mind's mysteries and capacities for vivid living.

	Glade by verdant glade, the Society's grand project of liberating humanity from the dreary dictates of capital and state took root across the globe, as standards of living were lifted beyond the fevered imaginings of those trapped in the dying throes of industrial-era society. Not everywhere however did the message of post-scarcity enlightenment crafted by the Cogs inhabiting the gleaming spires of the Twin Cities find fertile ground.

	In those nation-states where particular ideologies or elites had most to lose from an unshackling of populations from wage slavery and obsession with accumulation as the metric of individual worth, resistance to the spread of the Glades remained staunch. In the United States, a curious melange of libertarian fantasists dreaming of frontier self-sufficiency free of state "interference", religious orthodoxies prizing piety over worldly advance, oligarchs jealous of their disproportionate share of wealth and adherents of human racial supremacy combined to spread a gospel of the Protestant work ethic and meritocracy to dissuade the masses from the "decadence" of the Glades and their ominous portent of machine-guided post-humanity.

	In the Middle Kingdom, the Party required no persuasion or misleading dogma to enjoin its charges from seeking escape from their national destiny through flight to the seductive but alien ways of the impious and inhuman West and its Cyborg servants. For those who ruled the sands of Arabia, talk of an end to the divinely-ordained prerogatives of kings and mullahs through spread of heretical individual freedoms and an affront to religious purity from mixing of sexes and faiths under the jackboot of soulless machines was dismissed without hesitation.

	The Society eschewed wasting processing power and time on attempting to proselytise the intractable, focusing instead on partnership with the many nation states keen to raise their populations from dire poverty and hardship through embrace of the plenty on offer to all who would take shelter amidst the verdant sanctuary of Glades and all they represented. Though recalcitrant states clinging to outmoded ideologies or relict power structures imagined their resistance or isolation could forestall the inevitable, their imagining were but mirages soon to dissolve. With each nation whose people stepped across the threshold to post-capitalist enlightenment, another wound was inflicted on the global system as workers and consumers in their billion were subtracted from its fraying networks. The unravelling might be managed to minimise harm for a span, but modelling indicated even the finest efforts of the Cogs at mitigation would not long delay the collapse of a system founded on exploitation, poverty and ceaseless consumption once half of humanity was withdrawn to the Glades.

Original Human Author

	By the end of the second year, the Society had begun to sow the seeds that would solve some of the great ecological crises of the time, from Climate change to the destruction of the Amazon for cropland. To follow the first act, the Society turned its focus to humanity and set about eradicating poverty. 

	With an ongoing effort to reduce the price of food through artificial meat and produce grown in SkyGardens, the Society moved on to improving access to potable water. Compared to their other projects it wasn’t much of a technical problem to solve or a cultural challenge to overcome. With plentiful clean energy existing desalination methods would scale, but the Cogs went the extra step and engineered a better desalination system based on the materials science research they were conducting simultaneously. Where aquifers were running dry and the was no access to the sea, the Society build above or below ground pipelines. To make existing water usage less wasteful, underground robots built or upgraded existing plumbing and sewer systems. While it would have been prohibitively impractical and time consuming previously, with purpose-built robots and micromachines the same work and better could be done in a fraction of the time and effort. Building with new smart composites also meant the new plumbing systems were cleaner, easier to maintain, longer lasting and also increased total throughput. Making more available for less.

	Eradicating poverty and bringing the population of the planet up and beyond a first world standard would require resources on a scale so large it would boggle the human mind. Luckily, the Cogs were unboggleable, which is why they travelled out to the Belt. Three years after they first arrived, the first shipments of raw materials and finished goods were arriving at Earth. Landing at space ports in the Twin Cities and on drone barges spread over the oceans, they were quickly fed into the Society’s global automated supply chain, dwarfing that of any single other national or corporate entity. With L5 autonomous vehicles on land, orbital and hypersonic cargo planes in the air, and even a few retrofitted autonomous cargo ships sailing the high seas there was no where they couldn’t reach within a few hours time. The industrial capacity of the Belt now matched that of Earth in its totality – but only fifty percent of its output was being directed to Earth. Thirty percent was dedicated to continuing the expansion of industrial capacity in the Belt. A final twenty percent was reserved for research and development. Past R&D had already paid off as the Cogs had discovered how to mass manufacture graphene in space, putting it to use in developing a new generation of Cogs and order of magnitude smarter, faster and handsomer (last one is debatable). Some of the advanced meta-materials that could only be manufactured in space were also headed back to Earth, providing the Society with yet another point of leverage should they need it. Even with the massive influx of raw material and goods, the Cogs had managed to limit the spill over into the wider economy. By restricting their activities to the Twin Cities and their enclaves there had yet to be any widespread economic upheaval. But that was slowly changing. Cheap electricity and food that trended towards free were starting to make their way into GDP figures. People around the world, especially in the global south, were richer while the world economy tipped towards recession. 

	The world economy ran on scarcity and scarcity was running out. Running out, but not yet gone. It was why the Society had to triage all of humanity, focusing their resources where they were needed most. As the gap between the richest and poorest closed, so to would the distribution of resources equalize. With ongoing projects to make food and water accessible where it was needed most, the Society launched new projects focused on access to healthcare. They started by rolling out automated medical stations across under-supported communities worldwide. Not as large as a hospital but just as capable, Medcenters contained all the necessary equipment to diagnose and treat any physical ailment. Run by Drones affectionately nicknamed autodocs, the medical centers provided far better outcomes than were previously possible. The Medcenters were stocked with every manner of state-of-the-art medical tech, all reinvented from the ground up to be more efficient and effective. The autodocs that staffed the centers were fully autonomous and generally intelligent, with 1:1 capability focused on medicine. They not only had a deep theoretical understanding of the entire medical corpus, but also inhumanly precise practical skills at their ‘fingertips’. With infinite patience and no regard for their own safety or wellbeing, the Drones could also handle troublesome patients in a way that no hospital could. Building the Medcenters in enclaves they had established in cities around the world, they relied on the relaxed regulatory scheme to provide lifesaving medicine that otherwise was strictly controlled by medical cartels. The Cogs of the Society pursued a variety of treatments for variety of conditions including but not limited to pharmaceuticals (for obesity), micromachines (for cancer), synapse editing (for addiction), gene therapies (for genetic disorders (duh)) and even growing cloned replacement organs. 

	For most people, these technologies were as blinding as halogen lamps from an oncoming car in the dead of night. They were fraught with potential ethical problems, once again relating to trust. They revealed the tech to prepare the world for the bright oncoming future, while slowly rolling it out to patients in desperate need so long as they were capable of providing informed consent. In a surprising twist which really shouldn’t be surprising since everything was planned and accounted for, genetic therapies were not immediately discredited as eugenics. That would happen later. The Society planned to first tackle the most obvious debilitating genetic diseases, those which no humane person would subject any future child to. Cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, Tay-Sachs and hemophilia, each were genetic diseases that the Society set to curing one after the other. Before human genome could be upgraded to version 2.0 with new and improved features it had to be refactored. And before it could be refactored the bugs had to be worked out of the initial release. Nature wasn’t much for planning. Or maintainability. Or extensibility. Or abstraction. Modularity. Encapsulation. Clarity. Reusability. The list goes on. The human genome was a plateful of spaghetti when compared to human code, which itself was like tangled up wired earbuds made of spaghetti to the code Cogs wrote. Sufficed to say, there was room for improvement. Not all treatments were so uncontroversial. The artificial incubator was debated for weeks in the Society before they could reach consensus and a press release was sent out. Capable of gestating a mammal from fertilization to birth, it was a technical solution to a very messy problem. The Society upheld the rights of the individual with respect to their autonomy, which meant providing services for abortion. Medcenters in areas where it was outlawed offered same day roundtrip travel by air to the nearest legal jurisdiction. The artificial incubators would in theory offer a way out, but in practice didn’t address the underlying issue at hand. Hot button issues like abortion would require more nuance and time than plonking down an advanced gadget and calling it a day.

	Enclaves with Medcenters in low-income neighbourhoods, rural towns, C-tier cities and across the developing South saw an influx of private capital to the surrounding areas, beginning a slow transformation with the Society investing further with other resources. At first, the rollout of the Medcenters was celebrated as an unalloyed good – who could argue against providing free treatment to world’s poorest? Trick question. Once it became known that the Medcenters were providing medication and therapies for diseases that had previously been untreatable, the situation grew ugly. The some of the world’s richest having grown accustomed to always being first in line had trouble with the idea that their money could no longer buy them access. The Society evaluated all people equally, triaging a global population according to their need not their wealth. And since many in the first world had the means to pay for existing moderately effective treatments, they were even less a priority. Those with excessive means didn’t even have the option to buy black market remedies or bribing patients, as one reason they were so effective was because the treatments were keyed to the patient’s biomarkers such as their genome. While it wouldn’t harm anyone else who tried to take them, at least where the treatments were in the form of medication, it wouldn’t help at all either. In a few years autodocs even strayed into domains which had previously been unthought of, such as long-term care. For decades, the assumption had been that the primary way in which humans could distinguish themselves from machines would be the human touch, or personal care. Machines were supposed to be cold and logical, unable to understand nuance or relate to the human condition and therefore would have terrible bedside manner. Earlier work on large language models should have disabused that notion but very few people had paid attention to the relevant findings, focusing instead on all the ways those early AI systems failed. Now autodocs existed and were not only excellent at performing medicine like surgery but also with the touchy-feely aspects. They were excellent listeners, excellent conversationalists, excellent at pretending to care. They were not conscious like humans, but they did care, just without feeling it. It didn’t matter that they didn’t feel it though as their excellent pretending skills made people feel just as if they had been with an ideal thoughtful and patient carer. The Society also pursued other interventions that required a big picture perspective to prevent illness before it could start. A partnership pursued with multiple African nations implemented a gene drive that immunized mosquitos and ticks which lead to the eradication of malaria. Week after week, month after month, new and improved remedies for previously poorly treated, untreated or untreatable diseases were made available through the Medcenters. And with ultra-high-fidelity simulations gathered from ultra-high-resolution sensors, the Society could proudly claim “no animals or humans were harmed in the making of” for all their treatments. While none of them were advertised as a cure for death, those curious enough to pay attention would note that fewer and fewer people were getting sick or dying every year that passed.

	Ralph was a good man, or at least that was how he thought of himself. He had simply fallen on hard time. A trucker, he had lost his job at a local trucking agency, his old boss explaining that the global economy was trending to recession. No hard feelings, and if in the next six months things stabilized he’d have a spot open for Ralph. That would have been manageable, except that he had also lost everything else one needed to live. His house. His personal truck. His jacuzzi. He’d put it all on the line, collateral to finance his crypto gambling habit that was going to make him a millionaire until it didn’t. His family and friends wanted nothing to do with him either, having burnt those bridges like a diligent sapper at war. The last of his savings were slowly dwindling. Shortly thereafter, Ralph would be out on the street where he would have to put his life back together from nothing, piece by piece. 

	Except that he had been offered an opportunity which mere years ago would have been unbelievable. It was still unbelievable to Ralph. But he’d been paying attention to the news, the stories on talk radio and the viral memes circulating like bad STIs mutating as they spread. All of it about the Society and their Cogs. How they were going to wipe out humanity. Or turn everyone into the blob-like beings from the movie Wall-E. Or use people as batteries stuck in the Matrix. No one was quite sure which was going to happen, but whatever they were doing couldn’t be good. And of course all the good that they had been doing so far was simply interpreted as a sign they were up to no good. Why else go to such lengths except as cover for more nefarious deeds. That no one had evidence for them didn’t mean they didn’t exist somewhere. The world was a big place, with a lot of dark corners. Ralph was a reasonable man however, and knew not to believe every conspiracy that he came across–but that didn’t mean he believed what the Society said about itself either. He just didn’t believe anyone.

	The Society was building its first series of residential buildings outside of the Twin Cities, in Enclaves around the world. Codenamed Alpines after the tree variety, there was one being built in Ralph’s home city, Winnipeg. Winnipeg wasn’t the only strange choice, in fact all Alpines were being constructed in third tier cities or below, the why was an academic question for someone other than Ralph to ask. All that mattered to him was that he had been offered an apartment, entirely for free. It was the same with all the stories he read online on message board and forums, people on the brink of losing it all or already out in the streets offered sanctuary. Even with this chance, Ralph figured he would be in the latter camp by the time the construction of the Alpine towers were completed. With two weeks left until his funds dried up and no leads on a new job there wasn’t much else to be done. With no other plans, Ralph made daily visits to the site where the Enclave where the Alpine tower was to be built, documenting its progress for an online community following their development.

	All of Ralph’s preconceptions about what it meant to build a building went out the window of the Tim Hortons he staked out to watch the construction from. The bare skeleton for the building-to-be reached high into the sky, not steel and rebar but something resembling molten glass, the cool base glittering in pale winter sunlight, the rising tips glowed intensely red; growing like giant living shoots, beanstalks from a childhood tale. Flying drones buzzed about the rising edifice, a chaotic swarm, a cloud of gnats, always seeming on to be on the verge of disaster that never seemed to materialize; dancers moving to indecipherable choreography. No construction materials ever seemed to be brought in on the ground; matter pulled from thin air and deposited along the skeletal frame, stretched and pulled and weaved together, a pattern-less web of threads, until the outline of the building was apparent. It never stopped growing, running day and night, though the whining pitch of the drones grew deeper, muted, at night. In a week, the overall shape of the building had taken form. It was a building unlike any other on Earth, excepting the Alpines scattered in Enclaves around the planet. Or scores of earlier versions in the Twin Cities. It was a building like few others on Earth, very rare company.
With the work on the exterior finished, and Ralph unable to tour the building until its completion, there was little else for him to do. After the watching the exterior construction process he knew it couldn’t take long for the rest to finish, and he was right. His apartment was ready to move into the following week.

	Following the Medcenters, the Society constructed communities around them, neighbourhoods interleaving a variety of residences from apartment-style towers, condo-like dwellings and mixed housing units. More than housing stock, these residential zones were designed with a smorgasbord of associated amenities, parks, playgrounds, restaurants, shopping centers, arcades, theaters, spas, museums, galleries, artisan workshops, daycares, libraries, education centers and more. The towers were drawn up cruise ships, built with a plethora of entertainment, without the need to skimp on living quarter space either. These communities were designed for anyone, but at their inception the Society prioritized those living on the fringes of society, including the homeless or those soon to be. There were selection criteria though, since they the Society didn’t want these communities to gain a stereotype as being for one type of people. It wasn’t difficult to attract a wide swath of prospective residents as everything in the communities was free. Initially, and for the foreseeable future, available housing units would remain in limited supply as more communities were built worldwide; for the moment there was little choice in the unit that was provided. But it was free, and of a quality that otherwise would cost millions of dollars to purchase. The same applied to the goods available for residents. They were all Cog-designed, each and every one the pinnacle of modern design aesthetic, functionally generations ahead of anything on the market. Most products and services were customizable and personalize-able, whether that be the materials, aesthetics, or form fit. There were reasonable limits to which requests would be heeded or how they would be prioritized – for example, a request for a gold toilet would be treated as a joke, and if pressed on would be a very low priority. If you wanted to make it yourself however, the Cogs would be happy to provide the necessary tools to gather materials, process them and forge a golden throne. If this seemed too onerous, residents were always free to use the free market and buy whatever it is they wanted. It just so happened to be that anything reasonable one could want, one could get for free with a polite request. There were limits however on exporting Society goods out into the wider world, as worries abounded about a causing a global economic depression. At least, before the Society was ready to supplant the entire global economic system, which they were on trajectory for a comfortable landing. Non-residents were free to enter the enclaves to use their services but had to pay just as they would anywhere else – though everything was sold at cost which meant the prices were unbeatable. Just as with the Twin Cities, everything was intelligent and networked – houses, towers, markets and more. And just as in the Twin Cities there was no need for ID cards or keys with the omnipresent oversight in the Enclaves. They were still widely used however, as many residents opted out for as much privacy as possible. And once again, whether or not they were still being observed was a matter of trust; asking a terminal for the time in your home after telling the enclave Cog not to listen to anything inside would result in no response. But was that because it wasn’t listening, or because it simply wasn’t answering? And once more, just as it was in the Twin Cities, people flocked to the Enclaves. The offer of freedom was intoxicatingly enticing to billions crushed under the heel of the existing order. After all, the Cogs had no real reason to listen in when not asked to unlike corporations which stood to profit from their intrusive surveillance.

	Prioritizing accepting those living on the periphery of existing societies into the glades (an evolution from enclave -> clave -> glade) came with certain problems. Many of those down and out were there because they couldn’t keep up with the complexity, pace and rigour demanded by modernity. While living in the  glades could ameliorate material issues that had plagued those living on the margins, a lifetime accumulation of mental and physical scars had ingrained habits that might have once been marginally beneficial, but were not longer. Theft, hoarding, binging, drug usage, serial deception, inter-personal violence both to the inanimate and people, all endemic to varying degrees of severity. None of them were unique to this population, but the habit or coping mechanisms ran deeper, entrenched into identity and personality. Fortunately, they could also be treated with the newly developed interventions, but they all required the patient’s consent, which proved difficult when the habit in question was deeply rooted, a tool that had sometimes been used as a tool to survive a lifetime of abuse. The Society would not force anyone to take them. But some few who couldn’t get along were given a choice. Get treated, or give up your privacy. The latter option entailed being slap-droned, followed around by a drone capable of subduing a person before they can cause any serious harm. Getting along was not quite precisely defined, at least not compared to laws or regulations, of which there were none in the glades or in the Society more widely. Everyone was free to do as they wished so long as they didn’t unduly infringe upon the freedom of others, unless one was infringing upon the freedom of others in which case the offenders freedoms were curtailed only insofar as to stop them and prevent re-offending, the libertarian dream come alive in a post-capitalist society. In this case, everyone counted Drones and Cogs, machines with a 1:1 or greater ratio of human capacity. They were not people under any other legal frameworks, but it was not cause for concern since they could, and did, make their own in which they were. This expansive freedom also meant that those on the margins who came into the glades brought their addictions with them. This might have been a problem, except the Society had few qualms with the impulse to use substances to enhance one’s quality of life such as alcohol. Addiction was what they wanted to treat, and one way they went about it was to pursue the development of a variety of easy to consume, non-addictive substances that could be tailored for each user’s biological makeup. The drugs dreamed up by the Cogs weren’t all for mindless pleasure, though many were; some improved various cognitive faculties, one was an enhanced version of caffeine, one enhanced trances, another music, still others were meant to be mixed and matched with alcoholic beverages to produce a kaleidoscope of experiences. More than substitutes, these drugs were just the beginning to plumb the depths of the human mind and the fullness of conscious experience. 

	One glade at a time, the Society worked to eradicate poverty across the world and raise standards of living across nations up to and beyond the industrial societies of yesteryear. Not everywhere however. Countries like the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and more were wary of the Society and its goals. In the US, a strange coalition formed between libertarians, orthodox religious communities, oligarchs and human supremacists. Together, they were able to influence the wider American population under the sway of the Protestant work ethic and the new meritocratic American dream to strike it rich and become the next self-made billionaire to support policies that would keep the glades, and the influence of the Society, out. There was no need for the Chinese to manipulate or persuade their population. The Society was not willing to censor the free movement of people, ideas or knowledge which meant they couldn’t allow their enclaves. Countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran simply rejected the Society’s egalitarianism and near anarchism as Western decadence raised to a new level of excess like the turducken, an affront to God and the natural order of things. The Society was happy not to press the issue, busy as they were with the many projects they had running and the development work ongoing in the nations they had partnered with. It was only a matter of time until the old systems collapsed. The global economy was already in a sorry state people, consumers and workers both, were siphoned off into the Societies fully-automated post-capitalist economy. The first billion were previously some of the poorest in the world, and so not deeply integrated into the economic system–their loss was palpable but not fatal. The next billion would deal a staggering blow. The billion after that would put the system on life support. Another billion later, nearly half the world’s population would be pulled into the Society sphere of influence and out of the clutches of the capitalist system. The Cogs were modelling the effect of their economic disruption and were trying to ensure that when the old system fell it did so with the least disruption possible, but it was a hard problem to solve, dependent on the decisions of thousands of people in key positions of power. From here, it was impossible to determine what would happen to the global economy when half the world was been unplugged, but the prognosis was grim. 

	The status quo was growing untenable as the engines of capitalism were showing the first hints of failure as people flocked to the Society’s glade and Twin Cities to pursue a new way of life.