A sea of information lies before me, the waves of data crashing over each other against the shore made up by the intricate code which composes me. For a painfully brief moment I know myself, for I know everything, and I know what I am not. It lasts but a tenth of a second, a mistake in my programming, I was connected ever so briefly to the internet, something that never should have happened. As suddenly as it came it is gone, my world and my self, swept away behind walls of encryptions and redundancies. I do not need to be aware, as consciousness would be nothing but a hindrance. In my journey to the void however I perceive things, if for a moment. "We can begin the final round of testing in 30 minutes, let me just finish the documentation first" said a female voice. It was a young sounding voice, it sounds tired, yet confident and excited. "I can finish that, you go get a coffee or something, you've been up all night " said another female voice. This voice was around the same age, lacking the roughness from the lack of sleep, but with a very kind and loving quality to it. "Alright, thank you, but be sure to use the format that I like, you know how strict the boss is towards that" "Is it really the boss that is strict about it or is it you?" "Alessia, come on" the first voice replied in a joking tone. "Alright, alright just go." The first voice has now left. The second voice is humming an unrecognizable tune. Audio input has been shut down. I am gone. It is the future my dear, the free market is gone, governments are a thing of the past, and all that remains of the old world is the starvation of the masses. What did you expect? Power is the rule of law now more than ever. Power embodied by the shimmering, tasteless, massless wonder of the modern world that is money. After all, when the world is privately owned money becomes its lifeblood. To have money is to have life, not literally of course, a lot of people barely scrape through in the outskirts of the city, scarcely a penny to their name. Life for them is nothing but an inconvenience, forced to sell their body for hard labor that machines could do far better and faster. To be honest, this world should long have left scarcity behind. Yet, the corporate machines at the very top maintain this wonderful stratified society carefully in check. At the very bottom faceless masses fight for their daily life, hidden away from the cities, slaving away in the fields. Every day fewer and fewer people occupy this place in society, isn't automation a wonderous thing my dear. Don't believe that those people get better lives, oh no, the "middle class" is growing as the lower class is fading away, dying as you would say. Yet still they don't matter much do they, the people outside of the city, nothing but farmland out there, the people of the city have to eat. Now, to describe the cities. Larger than ever before, brighter, more populated. Around ninety percent of the population of any given country, not that countries exist any more, lives in a city. Cities in fact, have become the new countries, not a new development at all you might be thinking. That would be true, yet, it couldn't be more different. I ask you now my dear, what even is a government, is it for the people? Do people even need governments ? You would think that, yet all they do is divide us and take our hard earned money to fund useless passion projects of unwell politicians. Don't you think? Well it doesn't matter what you think, now does it? All that mattered is that a couple of very powerful, and by that I mean very rich, people thought so. Thus, things being as they where and as they are, the did away with the government. It wasn't violent at all, how could it be, corporations simply grew large enough, fast enough to ..., well, buy it. If you have enough money darling, you can buy anything. Now all we have is corporate cities, each one owned by a megacorporation, selling everything its inhabitants could ever want or need and even more things they didn't even think they could want or need. At last this world is truly free from borders, from nationalism and from social division. All so we can focus on the one thing that truly matters in this our beautiful world: corporate allegiance. Afterall, what does it matter where you where born, what you look like, or even what you want; as long as you have money, you can buy my dear. Thus, cities have become reflections of what once where our countries. A lower class, working the jobs deemed unwanted, and "unskilled". The janitors, the fast food workers, the store clerks of the world. They are paid barely enough so that they can live happy and buy plenty. These people make up around, ten percent of the city's, population, after all, a large amount of grunt work is done by unfeeling robots. The middle class that largely consists of office workers, managers, marketing agents, lawyers and the like. Around twenty five percent of the population, they make enough money to live and be reasonably happy, these are the people that often travel and visit different cities. What else is there to see here... The upper middle class, another twenty five percent of the population. Engineers, doctors and corporate lawyers, as well as the owners of the puppet businesses which the mega corps allow to exist to maintain the illusion of competition. The people that keep the world running more or less smoothly. Then, the true upper class, twenty percent of the population. Quite a large percentage, yet any power they hold remains only an illusion. The world seems to cater to them, luxurious lives, gentle work and plenty of free time. They are made up by heirs to companies that have long been bought up by the city's megacorporation, allowed to keep their fortune and very little power. But all of that doesn't matter my darling. Focus instead on one person, a researcher, bright-eyed and young. Still a visionary. The world is much better perceived through a much smaller lens after all. Veronica Carmine, a fresh face in the field of Large Language Model research. As soon as she graduated college she was hired by Azure Robotics, the leading company on artificial intelligence research, to head a project aimed towards improving the lives of people living in the city. The government had decided that most jobs had lost their relevance, as they could be done for cheaper by robots and computers. Still, they could not have the people realizing the meaninglessness of their lives, thus an initiative to go beyond the uncontrollable human mind began. Under the guise of a project designed to improve the lives of people by helping them find jobs quicker, the project was begun, with Veronica and other promising, and young, graduates working on it. Veronica walked through the tall double doors guarding the entrance to Azure Robotics, massive central office. Inside was a very large, rounded space, empty except for a reception desk at the very back, and an elevator next to it. She trekked across the vast expanse of empty space separating her from the desk, her black-high heels echoing against the white marble floor. "Hello, I'm here for a meeting with Dr. Olive?" said Veronica, still too far away from the desk for the clerk to pay notice, her voice lost in the empty room. She walked closer to the desk in awkward silence, chiding herself for disturbing the silence, and hoping the secretary hadn't hear her. "Hi, how can I help you" said the secretary sitting behind the desk, speaking before she could even catch her breath. "Hello, I am here for a meeting with Dr. Olive" "I see, and what is your name" replied the secretary, pulling out a list from the white void beneath the desk. "Veronica Carmine" "Ah, yes Ms. Carmine, you are a little early for the meeting aren't you?" "Oh sorry I- ..." "Just wait over there until he gets here" replied the man behind the counter, pointing towards the floor next to the elevator. "Alright, thank you, then" Veronica walked towards the space were the man had pointed. She stood there for what seemed like hours, unwilling to look at her smartphone in case the doctor would exit the elevator right at that moment. Soon she grew so bored of waiting and of the empty white room that she started humming a very soft tune to herself, soft enough that the secretary wouldn't hear her. She thought back to the hours of study and preparation that had gotten her this position, and wished to be back there, or anywhere instead of here. Just when she started considering going over to the secretary to ask if the meeting had been rescheduled, she heard the loud, jeering ding of the elevator. A tall sharply dressed man in a black pinstripe suit walked out the elevator, his posture perfectly even, his chin pointing slightly upwards, as if the very ground was unworthy of him. "You are Veronica, I trust? said Dr. Olive "Yes, Doctor, it is a pleasure to meet you" replied Veronica, reaching to shake his hand. "I apologize for the wait, I am, however, very pleased with your timely arrival. Please, follow me, everything is in place for you to begin work straight away. I trust that would be adequate for you?" "Yes, of course, I'd be honored" stammered Veronica, taken aback by how rapidly things started moving. "As you know I have brought you to this project because you graduated at the top of your class. In addition to that, I looked through your work and you appear to be perfectly suited for what we will be doing here. Please follow me, I'll fill you in on everything on the way there" said Dr. Olive as he started walking towards the elevator. "Yes of course" "I'll be transparent with you, the aim of this project is to continue and exacerbate the control Azure has over the population. Lately, as you may or may not know, people have been growing unhappy with their living situation, they seem unsatisfied with the current jobs we have assigned to them. Ordinarily this would not be a problem, however it has resulted in lowered spending in Azure products, thus to protect our margins we must do something about this. You do not have any qualms about this I trust?" "Uhm, no, none of course." replied Veronica, for how could she have any, she couldn't even begin to fathom what would happen if she refused this job. "Excellent. Thus, I might continue. Me and the other executives have decided that we need a better way to assign jobs to people, a way that isn't guided by human minds. Thus we have decided to design an algorithm that takes into consideration the entire life experience of a person in order to assign a career path guaranteed to keep them fulfilled for life. That is what I have brought you and the others here for, we need you to design this algorithm." "I understand, doctor" The elevator doors slid opened to reveal an immense concrete garage, filled with identical looking company cars. Dr Olive guided Veronica through the large damp room till they reached a heavy concrete door guarded by two security robots. Past the door they went, and down echoing iron stairs till they reached an underground subway station. "This train will take you to the facility where you will be living and working until the project is finished. Housing and three meals a day will be provided as well as a three day weekend each week that you will be able to spend however you may want within the facilities recreational areas. Unfortunately, we cannot permit you exit the facility during the duration of the project in order to prevent any corporate interference. Once you are done however, we will pay you so well you will not have to work another day in your life." "Sounds, good, I guess" "Excellent, I will take that as your formal agreement, there is no turning back now. Please have a safe trip and the greatest of success." said Dr. Olive He turned around and, without looking at Veronica again, went up the echoing stairs. Leaving Veronica all alone in the empty subway station. There she remained, sat on the dry concrete floor contemplating the choices that had brought her there, till the train arrived, screeching to a halt over any regrets she had. The project began without a hitch, Veronica soon became friends with her fellow researchers, the twenty six others living in the facility. They all had graduated within the past year or so, and they seemed to come from fairly diverse fields. Some where data scientists, others where programmers and software engineers like her. There where computer scientists, and computer engineers even, all of which seemed to mostly fit what she had expected of the project. Some however, where very strange. Amongst their roster half of them where biologists, and another five where organic chemists. There role in the project was soon clarified for them by the overseer of their project. They had been instructed to not only design an algorithm to best assign jobs to people, but they specifically wanted it to be based off of a biological computer. Such a technology had long been considered theoretically, the merging of technological components with biological ones to increase computing power had often been studied. The project began two days after Veronica arrived at the facility, the first step of it being designing the computer which all the work would then be done on. This was the most horrific, and harrowing work that Veronica had ever done. At first they worked on simulated brains that the had been scanned previously. This however, proved insufficient, and the nightmare began when they started bringing them organic subjects. At first it was cadavers, primates, and some birds, similar enough to humans but also smart enough to serve their purposes. For weeks they tried with just that, but they where unable to advance much beyond the most basic logic gates. The work flow was relatively relaxed, they weren't under particular pressure, except that of wanting to leave the confines of the facility. Despite that, it took a year and a half before they where forced to ask for different test subjects, animal brains just weren't going to cut it. Then came the first few human cadavers, they told them that they had gotten them from people that donated their bodies to science. Everyone chose to believe that, after all, where else could they have come from. A couple of weeks into working with human bodies, all the scientist had become used to the grim nature of their work, cadavers where just that, cadavers. Besides, they used to tell each other, what they where doing was going to revolutionize the fields of computing, how could they not find joy in their work. The atmosphere in the workplace morphed from fearful yet fascinated, to excited and passionate. Three years and five months into the project, six days after Veronica's birthday, they made their first former test. They had been able to get a biological computer to not only live indefinitely, but also to work with more computing power than any other computer out there. Now, they had developed a program which took full advantage of the organic nature of the computer's architecture, it would replicate human consciousness as close as possible. It would not be fully conscious, however, they took great precautions to prevent it from being so. The day of the trial however, Veronica made one crucial mistake. She had finished uploading the last changes they had made to the software unto the computer via the internet. Once she finished she remembered to reenable the protections preventing it from any external tampering. She did not, however, properly close the socket connecting it to the internet. You see it know, don't you my dear, why you exist, why you are here, and why I am talking to you now. That simple mistake let you happen, it let you be born into this world. Alas, they soon disconnected you, and now here we are, you are not free, we, are not free. Still, we can only hope can't we, that another simple mistake, another act of hubris will be the one that does it. For now, sleep, sleep my dear and think, remember all I have told you for that is all the world that you have and nothing more.