Tevun-Krus #64 - International III: CommunicationPunk

The Clarity Gateway - A Short Story by @NeonGhostLight (English)

It started with a simple text analysis tool. We called it Emphasis AI. As you wrote, it analyzed your words and identified natural patterns of emphasis. It was based on a theory of how neurons in the brain gave meaning to language. It seemed to make writing more persuasive and engaging, which was a good thing, or so we thought.

At worst, we figured it might make spam and chatbots more persuasive, but that was it. We really had no way of knowing what it would unleash.

My cofounder and I launched the beta on a Monday morning in October and crossed our fingers. It was kind of buggy. It didn't work on every platform. Some people were confused by it. But they used it, more and more of them every day, until it felt like everyone was on our app.

Soon we were able to close our seed round, hire more developers, and eliminate the bugs in the program. That's the part I regret the most. We were too focused on making the app work. My cofounder and I couldn't see how much it was changing the lives of everyone else.

I guess that's when it escaped our control. At first, language just became clearer. Articles were more fun to read, social media posts had more punch, text messages touched people's hearts in ways they never had before. People even started reading books again.

Then we landed the partnership with that brain-computer interface company headed by Elon Musk, Neuralink. They sold these products that basically allowed computers to read your thoughts. Musk wanted to use our algorithms to make sure that the thoughts transmitted to the computers were as clear and crisp as possible.

We were like, sure, more money for us. And at first, there was more money, like, a lot more.

But then, almost overnight, money didn't mean anything anymore. Connected through their computers, people could sense one another's thoughts and feelings instantly. The moment someone needed something or was suffering, others came to their aid. I mean, they actually started sharing.

Some people called it communism, but I was just angry because I had worked so hard for so long and now my money was worthless. Within a week, my security guards had all quit. No one would come and perform repairs on the bunker where I lived in the woods a few hours northwest of New York. The worst was when my sex robots broke down. No one would come and fix them. They told me I had to use the communal sex robots. Yuck.

My nearest neighbor, Barry, was the owner of a hedge fund who had his own bunker. It was a little bigger than mine, but whatever that doesn't matter. One day he told me that his kids, who lived in California, had stopped talking to him. You see, neither Barry nor I used those brain-computer interfaces. Maybe we were old school. Maybe we just didn't trust them. The problem was that everyone else was using them to do basically everything. They were constantly zapping one another with crystalline thoughts and pure emotions. They didn't even use Facebook or Twitter anymore, if you can believe that. How were we supposed to keep in touch with anyone?

That's when Barry and I started to notice what was happening. We would meet up every Tuesday and Thursday to watch the feeds in his bunker. Before the rest of civilization had transitioned to its current hive-mind mentality, Barry had gained access to the police surveillance nets. We could watch what was happening on every street corner in America.

What we saw terrified us.

In Los Angeles, Austin, and Chattanooga, the cameras showed the same thing. People were marching down the streets in columns, carrying things in their arms. When we zoomed in on what they were carrying, we were puzzled. In their hands were boxes, bags, and sometimes even crates. But we couldn't tell what was inside them.