We’re soon dismissed, but Ana pulls me back for a quick word outside of Paolo’s house.
“Don’t mind Paolo,” she says. “He’s just a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to newcomers. He does important work maintaining the electrical systems of the Polis, and he’s a good person at heart.”
I nod.
“On the other hand, I realise the rules we just handed you may seem slightly… Severe.”
“Severe?”
“Your friend, William, is already reading them, and he seems to be quite concerned from the look on his face just now. You must understand that the rules are safeguards, not things to be applied every-day. Most things can be done with consensus.”
“O…kay.”
“Just be polite and considerate as you would anywhere else and you’ll be fine in Polis.” She pats me on the back. “Feel free to take a look around and ask questions, of course. Most people will answer.” She smiles once, a tired smile, but a satisfied one. And then she goes off.
I catch up to Will as he is wandering towards one of the fields, head buried in the booklet. His face, indeed, is quite serious.
“What is it?”
“These people are… interesting. They seem to have built a society with units of 100 people based on Athenian judicial sortition.”
“Those are long words.”
It’s almost like Will is interrogating himself as he shuts the booklet and starts speaking. “The way I understand it, everyone in Polis is part of a 100-person group called a Hekaton. Most of the time, the group makes big decisions by consensus or by picking people out of a hat to make a jury. The jury talks about the topic with volunteer advisors, votes on the specific thing at hand, and then are dismissed.”
“I mean, that sounds… weird?”
He’s agitated now, shaking the booklet as he makes his point. “It’s not just weird, it’s weird. No democracy, no set leaders, no government, really, only some kind of procedural jury that lasts for a year to handle regular stuff. Also chosen randomly, of course.”
“That sounds… interesting, yeah.” We’ve reached the fields, a square of managed colour amongst the grassy wilderness.
His face is screwed up with countless complications. “I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start. There’s matters of division of power, expertise, bureaucracy, undue delay—”
Out of some kind of primordial instinct I grab his hand. “Just take some deep breaths. Calm down.” He doesn’t shrink his hand away but tenses, nods, and looks out at the fields. Having seemingly calmed down, he then crouches and starts inspecting the crops. I walk over to one of the bulbous tents nearby, where a laptop has been set up alone with a store of fertiliser, seeds, and other equipment. I can’t help but notice that there’s a small gas-powered generator whirring away behind each tent, even though the solar panel array I saw when I came in appears to be functional, if partially covered by a thick black tarp. The laptop isn’t password-protected, and seems to largely be used to manage a growth tracking spreadsheet.
“Huh. It’s all GMO plants. Testing different strains for local conditions and projected future conditions given sea level rise and climate deterioration…”
Will’s voice comes in from outside the tent, gloomy and distant. “…Growing them in preparation for the end of the world.”
“Oh, come on, now you’re just being melodramatic.” I almost kick a large bucket of some kind of chemical in exasperation, and gingerly retreat outside of the tent. Will is picking at a set of what look like signal flags hooked up to the edge of the farms. “If these experiments work out, there won’t be an end of the world. And besides, we still have…”
“What?”
“Your tablet.”
At the mention of that he seems to quiver and his hands stop moving. “We can’t use that, Alice.” he says quietly.
“You’ll come around.”
“We just can’t.” It’s like he’s talking about firing nuclear weapons or intentionally detonating volcanoes.
“Look, it’ll all—” But he doesn’t respond any more, and starts picking at the flag-like things again. I turn and notice a series of what look like pipes snaking across the dirt, some of which connect to the lights and the tents surrounding the fields. Waterproof cabling? In the distance Jens is walking across to us, his hand still messing with his badge, smiling a nervous smile.
“I hope the… tribunal wasn’t too bad. It’s a bit melodramatic, to be sure, but it was set up that way for a reason.”
“I mean, I don’t think Paolo definitely needed to ask whether we were international terrorists, but hey, to each their own.”
He looks very uncomfortable, as if he had personally asked that we be questioned about any possible MI5 affiliations. “The intake questionnaire was written down along with the first version of the Tragic Law. We can’t exactly change it, not without a complex discussion and probably a consensus vote.”
“What, so all one hundred of you need to agree for anything to be changed? How does anything even get done around here?”
“There are two ways things get decided, sortition—that is, random juries—and consensus. In theory they’re co-equal, but I do personally prefer that everyone sign on to any major changes we make. The juries are there for quick decisions and breaking any deadlocks. The mostly single-use nature of juries guards against bad actors having a persistent influence on the organisation of any Hekaton. We also have a census every six months to collect opinions and suggestions and such run by the current long jury, to catch anything that’s fallen in the cracks.” He notices Will hanging around trying to listen in and steps aside to let him walk up, making a strange sort of triangle out of the three of us.
“Must’ve made writing the first version of the rules a nightmare,” Will says.
“The first version… That was an exception. The two of us as the original founders wrote it basically over the course of a week without any sleep. This was back when Polis was merely an online chatroom, mind you, before the first Hekaton was established and we became a place instead of an idea, so everything was a lot more fluid. We made sure to get a consensus agreement before codifying the draft as the first version, of course, but the Tragic Law was not written by committee, as you might say.”
I catch something in the air, in the way he looks at the horizon and the dimming sky. Something about the story is unfinished. “The two of you?”
“Polis was started as an online discussion group by two people, one of which was me. My co-creator went by a lot of names online, but mostly called himself John. It was his idea to resurrect Athenian culture and use Greek terms and all that, and he insisted on calling our principles the Tragic Law for reasons I didn’t fully understand. I guess I never will—after all, I never met him in person. He disappeared right before we started discussing setting up a physical commune, and I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Right. That sucks.”
“That’s what you get with online chatrooms, sometimes people just disappear. Anyways.” Jens looks at his watch. “It’s almost dinner time. Eat with us?”
Dinner is served in groups inside the larger houses, and I find myself in Paolo’s again, awkwardly backed against the counter due to the fifteen or so people inside at one time. Will is engaging Jens in some kind of complicated discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of sortition, but all I can focus on is the food: vegetable stew, potatoes, and some preserved fish called rodfisk for the meat-eaters. Paolo, for once, seems both relaxed and in his element, ladling out stew while occasionally stirring a pot on a small hot-plate. “No hard feelings, I hope,” he mutters as he passes out seconds to me. “One has to follow the law, you know.” In the pot, I realise, he’s making a small risotto.
He catches me looking. “Oh, this is my small luxury. You get a bit of energy leeway if you volunteer for meal duty in the rota. Chef’s privileges.”
“Don’t you maintain the power grid? Surely nobody can keep you from cooking what you want.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not how things work here. Everyone is supported, but it’s also everyone’s responsibility to maintain social order. The law is the law for a reason: To bend the rules using the authority you have been assigned is… disgusting.”
As he says this, Hedwig walks over and pecks him on the cheek, tasting a little bit of the risotto with her spoon. “It’s excellent, ma cherie, and nobody would stop you from making more if you wanted.” She turns to me. “Don’t mind him, Alice. He’s a bit of a stickler for maintaining machinery: electronic, legal, it’s all the same to him.” My cheeks flushing, I turn away and catch Will staring at Hedwig and Paolo while barely touching his stew. He quickly looks away as well.
Eventually the dinner crowd clears out a bit and I find Chang-dol on a sofa, seemingly back to business as usual. Will has wandered off somewhere and Jens is holding court with some software engineers about constraint satisfaction with artificial intelligence. “Tomorrow, when the weekly rota gets assigned, I’ll ask for a discussion on the tablet to be put on the rota, that way we get a decent amount of time to talk it through. It might take a day or two for the discussion to happen, so if you were hoping for an overnight trip that might not be what comes to pass.”
“My startup’s pretty good about leave now that they’ve had their IPO and the big crunch phase is over.”
“What is it you do, exactly?”
“Infrastructure optimisation, so lots of C++ and Rust, mostly. I hate frontend stuff, so it’s a good fit.”
“Right.” He pauses. “You’re not doing machine learning any more?”
“I keep up with the field—2 minute papers, mostly—but I’m not as good as I used to be when I was fresh out of uni. Things change too fast. We’ve gone from deep learning, CNNs, to GANs and GNNs, and now to transformers, LLMs, and stable diffusion in like, what, 5 years? Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not some linear trajectory, but my project back in Radix seems unthinkably out of date now. And then some new scaling-law-powered hotness will come out and convince everyone that our AI overlords are just the best and humans won’t even have a say in their own future anymore. I’ve been aged out of the field, to be honest.”
He laughs. “You don’t have the right to say that, you’re not even thirty yet. And anyways, if AI does advance like you say, what would be the point of all this?” He waves his hand at the house, at I suppose the idea of Polis in general. “We should just lay back and give all our money to OpenAI and wait for our glorious new future in the Matrix.”
“Sometimes I think that that’s the optimistic outcome. Because…” I almost finish my sentence.
“Because?”
“Because I think we might not have enough time to get to that step before we blow society up. Climate change, politics, war, you know the rest. Can’t run the Matrix without power.”
A sombre look takes over Chang-dol’s face. “Polis is nowhere near self-sustaining yet. If that happens, we’d go down like everyone else. But we’re trying to fight against that eventuality.”
“And do you think it’ll work?”
His face is even more set now. “It must.”