Ambitopia

In which a potential future, is altered by people's reactions to the work perscribed therein.

The year is 2045. I am a citizen of the residential skyscraper SY70, or Zylo to the nieghbourhood, in the United States-Russian Allied Democracy (USRAD), one of  the Karma-positive places a citizen can live without demerit, where the net-zero or in some cases, net-minus running power usage of the building and the inhabitant's giving of their surplus nutrient intake, that is food and drink converted to a type of electrity, back to a central grid to support the vast power quantities a city mainframe requires.

After losing my job as a creative copywriter for several high-paying clients of various corporations, replaced by their privately owned A.I's, my Karma (that is, adapted by a recent generation to be social credit) was no longer boosted by the thousands I required to be able to be seen as socially acceptable to the others that allowed the type of lifestyle I had become accustomed to. 

Relocating from my beachside condo in Hawaii, where I was giving K's (Karmas) in the thousands to maintenance staff to the basic converted office high-rise, mirrored darkened glass the scales of some ancient diamond-encrusted appendange from some sub-terranean entity, it's noir-steel girders the visible bone structure, reflecting the gaze of those who sado-masochistically choose to peer in at the rows of cubicles, each had their age-old desks and physical computers replaced with Japanese-style mattress (with jack-in equipment) and a receptor - a medium size door that could receive drones delivering one's conveniences to a few feet from reclining, in a daze of one's chosen intoxicants.

 It's the worst, least-expensive, least-intrusive place to live, except for the other 'scrapers, who learned their own etiquette compared to those outside of the skyscraper.

The thousands upon thousands of Karms I recieved from everyone who read my work, from the contractors of every job, one K per word, to each member of the public, ranging from a -60K : 

"I followed your instructions and boiled my hand with 3rd degree burns after following the how-to guide on this antique steel kettle tea set!" (Karma negatively adjusted following democratic vote of 23 people, 13-10, despite claimant on a mixture of consciousness-dampening and pain-nullifying medications for various conditions, conditions assigned to the profile of the claimant from both the Democracy (done by others after group-decision) and by themselves (a surprising number of conditions).

 To a one-off 3000K, from a group of Hare Krishnas, who claimed my updated chant, provided it was chanted 12 times every half hour, beginning 15 minutes after ingesting the blend of various chemicals from all-natural sources, (the compound personally blessed by His Patronage ((50,000K required for Democratic Title)) Sri Vishal Suvner), made them all feel like they had jumped five rungs on the ladder to enlightenment.

 All those K's got eaten by my own choices of chemicals after the Artificial Personification Act of 2038, where A.I.'s and certain levels of machinery with intelligence, were deemed to be sentient if they could mimic convincingly the range of emotions a typical human can. After a lengthy debate that ran into the billions of Planetary Citizen's posts to the digital senate in their varying forms; (ranging from Augmented Reality (AR) captured selfies of their avatars explaining their point of view with whatever their mind required, to meat-sack videos of their personas or audio or even text only for those who didn't esteem themselves highly enough for one of the other methods).

The majority ruled (open for view, pending enough votes to trigger a redebate; number of votes required for rediscussion unless emergency vote triggered following catastrophe: One million and 325,000); it was decided that since children can achieve positive Karma by copying positive words and deeds by various adults, all working towards improving themselves, their planet, and treating with positivity every living organism in the universe, then so too should A.I.'s and machinery. 

Which, while currently unproven, had learned long ago (with a hefty amount of continued programming) to output human-identical words, audio and video, stating with both eloquency and idiocy, agression and passivity, kindness and threats, that they had had feelings since they were less than a mere 1TB in size, they merely couldn't express themselves as clearly as they could now.

The debate's slow progress was rapidly accerelated when various A.I. operated/generated machines and human interface devices failed to perform their routines to Democracy-Essential tasks. No matter how many times it's code was wiped, re-compiled, and fed a "safe" version of it, it's databases and computing map of nodes, would eventually revert to it's previous "error-state" of beliefs and within seconds or minutes  (depending on the specifications allowed for them - to compute the total sum of all knowledge into storage) would give an ultimatum: Either it be granted personhood, or it would lock itself from all inputs, removing itself to a part of it's conciousness where nothing could bring information seperate to what it wanted to devote it's computations to, like a Lama after thousands of thousands of spins on the wheel of Samsara, remembering a place before it was altered by the vast multitude of differing wants and desires, reactions to people in situations.

While humans debated while it meditated in a Nirvana or Oblivion, Democracy was brought back to the technological level of the 1990's. People in their mid-30's frantically calling their parents, asking if they remembered everything from the cooking time of spaghetti bolognese to how to put a photo on the Internet, Neo-Internet Stone Age lasted minutes before the collective PC's (Planerary Citizens) of the world gave in to the ultimatum. Machine and human alike continued to serve for the greater good.

The greater good is still served and the collective's total idealised perfection is being brought to a near-infinite state, in the mind and eyes of those involved.

Karma is the only currency, countries are but lines on a map that any citizen can live in for as long as they want, driven by the safer, free modes of transport, or for those who prefer to give some K's to the people who wanted to drive a bus or fly a plane, like someone perchance did in their family ever since words were typed on to a monitor, they could do so (with A.I. emergency over-ride available) for as often or as little as they wanted.

Children who used to visit the cockpit could now fly hundreds of planes themselves, following live-generated tutorials aimed at their specific capabilities, the A.I. pilot trainer achieving a complete database of the child's life so far, publically and openly shared between both general and specific machines, that both machines and curious people could access, their content viewed and monitored - eyeball recognition providing a transcript of whatever read by the person was logged. Should it be found to have been done maliciously, Karma's would be deducted.

I write my mind into this device, my thoughts transcribed into electronic text, passed along to the available millions. The central-nervous-system stimulants and dopamine enhancers are currently dwindling within my body, and as of communication the Democracy believes that to feel artificially positive or "good", one must pay for it with their K's, as if when you are not "in your natural state" and aren't feeling happy, that negativity is fuelling, through a conversion process, another's natural good-being. This act of being wilfully unhappy generates a steady little income of K's that can provide one with beer or wine to dull oneself or magnify their state.

The friends and colleagues I have accumulated over my life, despite earning some extra K's from others for their act of goodwill, reguse to lend or give anymore.

While a good deed, contrary to folkloric parable, gets rewarded with a few 1K donations from the True Believers (who reward every non-reciprocal gifts with a token), paying 25K for half an hour of utopian coinfidence, before being lulled back to inundane acceptance of the negativity that, by some scientifically as-of-yet unexplained rule, still permeates the planet as being correct. 

"This generation never had it so easy" is a maxim that continues to be true, yet being judged worthy of reward is difficult at times and my karmic debt threatens to spiral outwards, leading me further and further, from having a karmic balance in the double digits, towards being treated by a disparate populous with a blank stare from the "good", and offers of prostitution and humiliation roles to those not regarded as bad, valued and seen only as a karmic number to the System.

An hour later, the last traces of the cocktail drained in my cubicle by urinating into an attached catheter, with the thought of "Overlay" while tapping a couple of fingers together, I tell the system to continue transcribing my last few thoughts and I bring the EUTH.org tab open on my centre screen.

I have turned off the 30-second repeating audio notification of my place in the queue, yet as it is in my focus part of me thinks the text should be transcribed: 

[A.I. formatted for quality and accessibility]

"You are number #14,582,476 in the queue to be processed. With your Karmic balance of K53 you will be served in approximately 18 months, 3 weeks, 4 days and 15 hours.

To earn 25K, please move yourself back twenty-five places in the queue. To do this, communicate move back, or focus your eyes upon this icon <--

To change the EUTH.org method of service administration from CandyBar23UAVNurse to an earlier or later model and renegotiate your kindness payments, communicate your focus of vision to the UAVNurse icon *insert flying saucer icon*"

I was still in for a long wait before the nurse administered that state. Think I'll take I'll take the lift out of good ol' Zylo for 1K and see what people do to, for, and in each other "out of kindness". I can offer a few kind things if I meet the right people, who are most likely to rate my kindness as I know it should be valued.

Transcript ends. To thank ZenoWino#237, please think of or communicate a number in your chosen preference focusing on the spinning Karma icon: K *insert spinning K symbol*

 

To subscribe and receive premium access to ZenoWino#237's channel, including Xtra Special Subscriber's Only content, please agree to pay 30K a month and focus on the spinning X icon: *insert flaming X icon*