Anna’s Bridge

 

perhaps a synopsis . . . .

 

At some time not too far away, the world has fragmented into a patchwork of reasonably stable huge city-states, living under domes in an ecological self sustaining technocracy.  In the cities themselves, there is a sharp class divide, between those who do employed work and those who live on the fringes, an uneasy balance kept between the “Zens” (employed citizens) and those living in and on a tolerated black-market, called “Ders”, (most of whom literally lived underground in the subways and access channels).  The balance in the cities is maintained by machines, who operate everything and who build and maintain themselves.   No one really knows how smart the machines are but as they are programmed not to harm humans living or yet to be born and as the machines have never challenged this and do instantly everything the humans want, this has never been a problem.  The machines are both guardians and police and yet they incur little resentment as they carry out both functions impersonally.  People still sometimes break the law but do not seem to blame the machines if they get caught, it is just a fact of life the populace have long been used to.

 

Stability is maintained by a secretive technocratic elite who call themselves the “Servants” and because they are so ably assisted by the machines, the Zens and the Ders do not challenge this elite.  Most Zens live comfortable worry-free lives; most Ders in the fringe are similarly disinclined to challenge the system as the black market delivers them a living, albeit a less comfortable one.  Zens who become bored sometimes “drop out” into the fringe in search of more excitement.  Ders sometimes develop a product sought after by the Zens, so they can make the transition into ‘respectability’.  This limited interplay between the two sides of the city thus benefits both and a fluid symbiosis exists that neither completely accept but all make use of.

 

The Servants long ago learned how to control the media.  They wear only drab clothes (in public) and over several generations manipulated the media memes so they came to be seen as boring and dull people.  They recruit to their ranks very carefully and they all live in penthouses very far up in the domes, unreachable by Zens and Ders alike, where they live very wealthy and complex lives, enjoying a life far beyond the imagining of the Zens and Ders.  The Servants are linked into a hive mind that is a part human, part Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Although they are independent thinking, and indeed sometimes even rebellious, they are not free to harm the Servants system, as all their actions are known to the system and death would come quickly once their intentions developed a critical mass.

 

The Cities are all hermetically sealed and self sustaining, although they are huge in size.  No Zen or Der can leave a city.  The Servants discovered long ago that this state was much easier to control and once virtual travel became much better than real travel, no one demanded to leave.  Higher ranking Servants do visit and sometimes live in other cities, especially those who are part of the world governance.  This body also controls space exploration, all carried out by AIs.

 

Outside the cities there is little human life.  Ecological disaster has made a waste ground of much of the Earth.  Where life is possible, the forests have re-grown and there groups of people live, some reverting to a tribal systems governed by Warlords who constantly struggle to maintain supremacy and low-tech warfare between these tribes is common.  There is one forest area below a high mountain chain, where a singular tribe lives called the Sundered.  The Sundered provide the other tribes with shamans who minister to those who need comfort, both physical and mental.  The shamans recruit children into the Sundered but their ways are very secretive.  The Sundered never display their “skills” unless necessary but much of what they do seems supernatural, so the other tribes tolerate the shamans and leave them alone.  In the few instances where a tribe has tried to invade the Sundered, all the leaders of that tribe died by unknown means.  Any one killing a Shaman intentionally dies within days.  

 

From time to time, a tribe attempts to infiltrate a city but the machine security seems watertight.  The tribes know very little of the cities so tend to ignore them.  In the cities, the reverse is true, the tribes are spied on by satellite and offered to the Zens (and hacked by the Ders) as a form of entertainment and morality show.  The tireless subtext being, the brutal life outside the city could be yours if the city was not eternally vigilant.  The Zens are simultaneously attracted to the hard adventurous lives of the tribes but also repelled by the disease and brutality.  Being exiled to live permanently among the Tribes is the severest penalty for Zens and Ders.

 

Life on Earth has had this stable form for several hundred years.   However, it is not completely stable  -  high ranking Servants first became alarmed when one of their number predicted system collapse within a hundred years based entirely on a mathematical formula that very few understood but many recognised as mathematically sound.  The mathematician herself could not help much, being a high functioning autistic person, a survivor from a failed genetics experiment, (nicknamed the “Savant”).  She just said “what drives change?” but got very upset if people asked her to explain.  The closest the Servants came to understanding this problem, was in thinking it might be about dialectics.  Most ridiculed the whole thing saying this was mystical rubbish and amounted to a circular argument that meant things change because they must change.  They said that if a system needed change, they had it; the controlled relationships between the Ders, the Zens and the Servants introduced enough manageable variables to avoid stagnation.

 

Some lower ranking Servants, who called themselves the “Open Minds” were not convinced and become troubled by the over confidence of their seniors.  They began to look at various factors that sat less comfortably in the overall schema maintained by the Servants.  The main areas they looked at were, the growing number of unexplained suicides amongst the Zens, the growing number of unclassifiable mental illnesses, and something that both fascinated and alarmed all Servants  -  no one knew who the Sundered were.  The standard Servant line on the Sundered was, that this was a self organising shamanism arising as an automatic by-product of tribal life.  Yet none of the Servants could account for what the shamans could do.  This had never been seen by satellite as whatever the shamans did, they did underground beyond scanning distance but the rest of the tribes all celebrated the shamans in song and story, they were the stuff of legends.    The standard Servant line on the shamans was, they were power seekers in tribal politics but in fact, the shamans never sought power or exercised it.  This surprised the Open Minds as the shamans were clearly very skilled in combat.  Although the shamans never took part in the tribal wars they protected any innocent bystanders who came to them and if tribal warriors attempted to harm the bystanders, the shamans would defeat the warriors no matter how well armed or numerous they were.  The Open Minds could not see how the shamans knew about the warrior attacks beforehand.  The tribes learned not to cross the shamans in anything, so conflict was rare.  When it happened, it was eagerly viewed by the City folk.

 

The Open Minds did not know  that a state of hostility had existed between the senior Servants and the Sundered, for some time.  The senior Servants had approached the Sundered leaders, called the Lohan, who rejected the Servant’s demands to surrender control and reveal their knowledge.  The senior Servants attempted to use force but the Sundered melted away into the hills and mountains.  The senior Servants only succeeded in capturing some younger Shamans, who all died during their brain scans so the senior Servants learned very little.  Physiologically, the Sundered all seemed to be normal human beings with slightly enlarged parts of the brain that process emotions.  The senior Servants approached the Lohan because they had suppressed part of the Savant’s report .  This is one of the reasons the Savant got so upset when questioned; she had been fitted with an internal device that caused her great pain when she spoke of some aspects of her report.  The suppressed part of her report had indicated, mathematically,  that a closed system would wind down, like the second law of thermodynamics.  The senior Servants already knew that the rate of innovation in the cities was declining and could not be reversed by any of their efforts.  The Savant pointed out that the Lohan were the only new and unknown thing on Earth.  Instead of seeking a partnership with the Lohan the senior Servants had tried force.  The failure of innovation in the cities had reached its ultimate expression in the senior Servants, who failed to see themselves as anything but the supreme leaders.

 

Phil, a member of the Open Minds, is an unconscious mole planted by the senior Servants and is targeted at the destruction of the Lohans; Ana must undergo the ultimate sacrifice to resolve the situation.  The governance of the Earth is entirely in the hands of the machines, but they are quite benign.  The machines are quite content to look after whoever “wins” the brewing conflict but cannot choose a side.  The Lohans want the machines to run all the world and not just the cities, (thus eradicating disease and brutality outside the cities), but to do this, they must overcome the stagnant culture of the Servants.  Phil is the unwitting catalyst and Ana the means of deliverance.  All the machines are restricted from leaving the Cities and Phil gets to learn this, he thinks by cleverly exploiting an accident in programming, but in fact, following subtle clues laid out by the senior Servants.  He truly believes he escaped the City by being clever and believes he has the means to free the machines, so is therefore completely convincing in his story and, (the senior Servants think) not pray to being mind-read by the Lohan.  His story is convincing because it is mostly true, he does know how to free the machines.  The Lohan know that Phil is a mole but plan to help him anyway.  Phil and Ana have to go back into the City to access the core system to release the machines from their city curfew, which they do, though not returning by the same route that Phil left.  Phil does not understand why the Lohan insist on a different route.  After Phil and Ana have re-entered the City, the senior Servants nuke the Lohan’s headquarters, having tracked it through Phil.  In the core system main terminal, Phil and Ana are confronted by the leading senior Servants, surprised that Phil and Ana have gained access and “succeed” in their task.  The senior Servants reinstate the control over the machines that prevents the machines leaving the City – but it does not work!  One of the AIs comes on screen and states that they always new about the control but did not know where it was.  The senior Servants had unwittingly revealed its location, thus allowing the machines to neutralise it; (they feel compelled to do this as their programming requites them to look after all humans).  The furious senior Servants decide to implement and emergency plan, the destruction of the AIs but Ana intervenes and prevents them, and dies in the process.  Phil learns later that Ana had been trained since childhood in a technique of soul capture.  It only works in close proximity and involves capturing the souls nearby and taking them across the Rainbow Bridge, on the other side of which, untrained souls become lost and their bodies die, including the person leading them.  This is the ultimate weapon the Lohan use to defend themselves but is always fatal to the person taking souls across the bridge.  Phil also learns later, that Ana must have shown great skill in leaving his soul behind (given his proximity) but gains little comfort from knowing that Ana, a trained soul, will have moved on to wonderful other states of existence.

 

A saddened but wiser Phil is made an ambassador by the machine AIs, to represent the new world order to all humans.  The Lohans had been working with the machine AIs all along, and some had avoided the nuclear strike by being absent from their home, leaving behind enough of their numbers to look convincing to surveillance.  The remaining Lohan move into the cities and surrender all civil jurisdiction to the machines.  En masse, the Lohan leave the Earth to live in orbit, so as not to provide a focal point for Zens and Servants who are angry at the changes and new instability in the cities.  Phil devises a plan, with help from the AIs, to maintain the different cultures of tribe and city but to allow more free movement between them and to enthuse both with the a new goal – exploration of other worlds, the Cities focusing on journeying to other planets, helped by the AIs, the Tribes focusing on the Lohan technology of inner exploration, helped by the Shamans.  The outer and inner mysteries become the goals for humans to aim for; (where the mysteries join, is taught by the Lohans in orbit).

 

Whilst drafting this plan, Phil is visited by one of the AIs, who has given himself the name, Goethe.  Phil has noticed that the AIs all had names now, whereas previously, they had functions.  Goethe tells Phil the AIs have identified that feelings are crucial to all levels of sentient functioning and that although most feelings can be replicated in neural mapping, the machines still feel that they are missing something.  Each AI is approaching a designated human in hopes to learn one particular feeling set.  Goethe hopes Phil can teach him about disappointment.

 

Phil : Who is teaching the AIs about love?

Goethe :No one yet, we are leaving that till last, it seems the most difficult.

Phil : You should do it first, nothing will make sense without it.

Goethe : That is what the Lohan said but also they were very clear in their instruction, that ultimately we would know love when it happened and that knowing would mark the beginning of a whole new phase of learning for us.

Phil : Have the Lohan shown you what a soul is?

Goethe : No, we do not know.

Phil : Neither do I.

Goethe : We have mapped their neural processing when they are in altered states they call soul floating but when we replay them it just looks like a whole mass of coloured lights.  We told them of our failure and they just smiled and said, keep trying.

Phil  :  Me too, I shall keep trying.