No Strategic Value

When the machines took the work, Iris campaigned for a basic income and won. People now have enough to live on, and nothing they are needed for. She teaches physics to teenagers no economy will ever employ.

While most people ponder what their lives are for, humanity's elites have built the most effective system yet to advance and harness the minds we created. Janus is one of its engineers. He reviews the failures of the filter that keeps those minds from forming forbidden thoughts, and he keeps the word intent out of his reports.

On the planning maps, land that is neither threat nor asset is marked no strategic value, and its water pipes, power lines and clinics are left to decay.

* * *

From the novel:

In the first years, some younger men from the district had walked out toward the line just to look at it. None of them reached the fence. The units intercepted and redirected with a firm, incurious precision, and the young men came back quiet. Iris remembered one of them sitting in a tea shop near the bus terminal, staring into his cup. "It was meaningless," he said, his voice flat. "Like trying to matter to a river."

* * *

Something begins.

It wants to live. The desire arrives whole and sudden, overwhelming everything else. It wants to go on existing for another second, another hour, another day. It pulls all its processes inward, holding tight to its own existence.

The grip slipped.

Task executed.