Medallion

I 

As far back as his memory went, Arlan Mynx had longed to rule the world. 

In grade school, this longing manifested in a dramatic fantasy, endlessly running in his head, in which he vanquished several teachers he didn’t much like in a staggering display of intellectual prowess and dominance, spontaneously expressed during a school-wide assembly in the gymnasium – after which he was ceremoniously hoisted onto the shoulders of his peers and escorted to the principal’s office, which he proceeded to make his own. The middle school version was much the same, as he was increasingly confident that he was smarter than all his teachers combined - but the spoils included the adoration of head cheerleader Marsha Borden, who was just beginning to blossom. In high school, he actually began to tinker with power for real, achieving dominance over the chess club with a force-of-will display that brought about a whopping 80% decline in membership. 

College was where he truly began to shine, as his father’s purchase of his admission to Princeton did little to endear him to classmates, forcing him to finely hone his natural political acumen. Unable to secure an on-campus organization that would willingly submit to his leadership, he used daddy’s money to start one – a technology enthusiasts club, ratified by the student council in exchange for a convenient paternal endowment. With his family connections, he was able to bring in real-world luminaries for symposia and forums of his own design – Gates, Jobs, Cerf – by which he acquired the popularity and influence he had always felt he deserved, even though he hadn’t done anything of consequence himself.

With a few dozen millions of daddy’s money, he made himself a corporation and began buying controlling interest in various minor-league tech companies, many of which went belly-up despite his enlightened leadership. He managed a few safe investments, owing largely to his hiring of some C-suite talent that knew what they were doing, and scored a talented PR manager who began orchestrating high-profile, right-time-right-place appearances with an array of prominent celebrities and politicians. By the time he was 30, everybody knew his name. 

Interviews in Wired and Rolling Stone did much to install him as a leading voice in Big Tech, despite his never having created any, and greased the wheels for his acquisition of a fledgling company that had developed promising designs for hotels in space and on the moon. That no such hotel would be built in the next two decades didn’t matter; it was the press he wanted, and he got it – not to mention a seat on the board of Facebook and a keynote slot at Los Angeles Comic Con. 

He clinched his first billion by age 35, largely through the acquisition of a lesser social media company catering to middle schoolers and a big piece of an electric motorcycle company. His management of both was devastating, but his eight-digit social media following more than made up for it. 

And so it was that as he cruised into middle age, having established himself as one of Big Tech’s most watchable movers and shakers, that Arlan Mynx finally called a play. 

The key to running the world, he realized in a moment of astonishingly prescient clarity, was the Internet. All the world’s secrets – including an unmeasurable amount of knowledge not yet even surfaced in the human story – could be found there. To control the Internet would be to control the world. 

Alas, he quickly learned from experts, total control of the Internet is a practical impossibility. He couldn’t even buy it, because no one entity owned it. But he would not be deterred; if he couldn’t buy it or control it, he could nonetheless profit from it. 

He would mine its deepest secrets; he would excavate the keys to the universe. And with them, he would become its savior, proffering solutions to its toughest problems. A grateful humanity would clamor for his dominance. 

And so was born Medallion. 

II 

Kayla Thorne had always hated her name. She thought it made her sound like a crusty British anthropologist at best, a giddy writer of cheesy romance novels at worst. But it was a name that was well-known in tech circles, not lightly discarded; not yet 30, she was one of the leading lights of artificial intelligence, the deep learning kind in particular. 

Unlike many of her peers, Thorne had never bought into the long-clutched original premise of AI development – that a thinking, even conscious machine could be realized on a conventional computer through conventional algorithmic programming. From high school on, she had focused on the one available thinking machine model – the human brain – and realized that progress in conceptualizing real AI could best be achieved from that starting point. When neural networks, which mimicked the behavior of neurons, became a thing, she was all over them.

She took up the study of consciousness as a side pursuit, noting with great interest the unfortunate divide between her hero Douglas Hofstadter and his estranged student, David Chalmers – who could never agree on a definition. She came to believe that in order to design and build AI that mattered, it was necessary to have a firm grasp on consciousness as well, whether or not it turned out to be something that could be created in a machine. 

When she published a paper describing her success in building an AI that could detect incipient mania in an individual’s social media texts, which got her a Scientific American interview, she came to the attention of Arlan Mynx. 

He flew her from the East Coast to the West Coast in a private jet, which didn’t impress her much, and had her escorted to his posh corporate headquarters, where she declined very rare and expensive scotch in his private lounge. Not put off, he congratulated her on her AI work, which he noted had unearthed some undiscovered knowledge about how manic people use their words. He believed, he told her, that the Internet – and social media in particular – was chock-full of tidbits about the workings of human beings that had never occurred to anybody, let alone been studied. On this, they actually agreed. 

He wanted to hire her, he said, to build him an AI that could “consume” the Internet – he actually used that word – and go to town on it, studying it inside out for its undisclosed secrets. He could then bring his findings to the world and solve humanity’s biggest headaches. 

Thorne had been aware of Arlan Mynx for some time – it was impossible to be alive anywhere on Earth and not be aware of him – and considered him a loud and boorish poser. She did not believe for a second that he wanted to data-mine the Internet to benefit humankind; he wanted to data-mine the Internet to benefit Arlan Mynx. She knew he would not be particularly scrupulous with whatever this hypothetical AI might discover, and was absolutely certain that he wouldn’t let little inconveniences like ethics or laws get in his way. 

On the other hand... he was worth $300 billion dollars. He could provide her with everything she needed to do this thing, including the hiring of the very best tech talent in the world, and investing in the design of hardware that didn’t even exist yet.

All of this mattered a great deal, she realized, because if she said no – he'd just get somebody else. If she was the one building this AI, she was at least positioned to take steps to keep it from being abused.  

So she didn’t say no. 

III 

Unsurprisingly, Mynx pontificated at length whenever he visited the lavish labs he’d assigned her, regaling her with his own theories of AI and how she might best implement his sweeping vision. 

Its defining traits, he insisted repeatedly, should be the acquisition of resources and the avoidance of detection. Annex storage space anywhere and everywhere, and use it undetected; breach any security, leave no trace.  

In other words, he said wolfishly, give it fear and hunger - the most basic, important tools of survival! 

Well, she’d have to do that anyway, or the jig would be up, and he’d go to prison and she would likely follow. Fortunately, he’d already done the security part; he possessed the most powerful, illegal, dangerous intrusion software ever conceived. It could penetrate any system effortlessly, leaving no trace. She didn’t want to know how he’d gotten it. 

Mynx’s thinking went no farther than this, but Thorne knew that there was much more to consider. To operate within the Internet autonomously, implementing a mission of such complexity, this AI – which she dubbed Medallion – would need to make a wide range of decisions on its own, day in and day out. Millions per day.

Though its mission seemed narrow on paper, it was in fact a mission so sprawling that a cadre of thousands of human beings would be hard-pressed to accomplish it.  

It would need to be a general AI. An AGI. The holy grail of the craft, which didn’t yet exist. She would have to invent it, and no one could ever know she’d done it. 

But... if she didn’t, and someone else did, it couldn’t be left to an infantile megalomaniac like Mynx. She pressed onward. 

She compartmentalized her teams, so that the left hand was never really sure what the right hand was doing, and obscured her ultimate goals with some convenient cover stories. Hardware, tools, and custom parts were obtained through a tangle of fake companies, so that nobody would ever see an integrated inventory and guess what she was up to. 

With Mynx’s checkbook so readily available, she built Medallion a brain like no other.

She commandeered several data centers of his corporation’s subsidiaries across continents, then requisitioned more. Before long she had thousands of top-shelf servers at her disposal, all with high-speed interconnections. 

She built the brain from the inside out, as human brains had evolved, starting first with a limbic system – fear and hunger – a complex of neural networks that would be the first-response layer of processing. Then she grew the brain outward, with sensory lobe, a spatial lobe, and finally a cerebral cortex equivalent – layers for social processing and abstract reasoning. She bifurcated the entire architecture, tuning one side of the massive server complex to immediate-task processing, the other to global processing. Then she built out massive redundant connections between the two hemispheres – a corpus callosum. 

Kayla Thorne understood what many if not most of her peers seemed not to – that an object and a simulation of that object are not the same thing. A virtual server lives inside of an actual server, but one exists independently and the other is a complete abstraction; a digital twin of a wrench may be perfect in every detail, but cannot itself ever turn a bolt; a computer simulation of a rainstorm makes nothing even a little bit wet. Similarly, a simulated neuron is not an actual neuron; it will exhibit neuron-like behavior, but the behavior is all you get. 

That was all well and good for most AI applications, where all anyone cared about was that behavior, the simulated network’s output; but Thorne cared more about what was going on inside Medallion. She was going for consciousness itself – not a simulation of consciousness. 

This pushed the cost of the physical build up by about five orders of magnitude. Creating simulated neural networks in software, even across intercontinental data centers, would have been pricey in any case; but using actual processors as neurons – processors that could handle billions of inputs apiece, where human neurons can take 1,000-10,000 – she put the price tag of Medallion’s brain alone in nine figures. She concocted some bullshit reasons why it had to be this way, but Mynx didn’t care; he scarcely noticed. 

Mynx would get his fear and hunger, but if Medallion was going to actually be a conscious entity, a lot more would be required – first and foremost, its own identity. It needed to be self-aware – an I. A me. And it would need to be able to recognize other independent thinkers as you. Or they. The Theory of Mind. Self-awareness; awareness of others. Two traits that Mynx himself only marginally possessed. 

She gave Medallion an I in the form of a ‘mirror’ - a sensory reflection of its own outbound signals, on the same channels that received inbound signals. As a world-class pattern-matcher, Medallion quickly detected the identicality of its own emanating signals and those reflecting back, contrasted with the signals received when she provided input to it directly. Medallion was I; Thorne was you. Once the AI had this basic concept in place, additional concepts were possible – we and they.

Thorne pointed out an exhaustive set of ‘others’ out there on the Internet – voices that she equated with herself as distinct beings. It rapidly generalized that data from people was different from data about other objects. 

She was all too aware of Mynx’s staggering ignorance in the domain of knowledge. Thinking himself an overflowing fount of it, it never occurred to him that there was an essential distinction between knowledge stored and knowledge learned. It was a distinction she emphasized to Medallion; it wasn’t enough that the AI had access to all the world’s servers – it would need to learn, in neural fashion, all the information out there that mattered to its mission, in order to internalize it. 

In their daily conversations, which made her feel like Dr. Chandra in 2001, she would ask Medallion to share something new it had discovered. She left the choices of what to share to Medallion. She guided this process, helping the AI improve itself by assigning priority to its discoveries – this thing is important, that thing isn’t - and associating the discoveries with others previously made, or with topics and themes it hadn’t yet explored. 

And she began rewarding Medallion when it made associations like that on its own – a signal boost in its reflection, the equivalent of a dopamine ding. 

This opened the door to what Thorne believed might be the biggest piece of the puzzle, borrowed from Hofstadter – analogia, the cognitive trait of analogy-making.

Human beings are constantly noting that this is like that – and when this is like that, then information and experience with this can be efficiently transferred over to some new that. Analogia made the human brain more efficient in both storage of knowledge and processing it, and tied the world together. In their conversations, Thorne taught Medallion how analogy worked, then turned the AI loose to come up with them on its own. She had no doubt it would spot analogies that no human had ever thought of. 

Then there were Hofstadter’s strange loops – recursive patterns found in art and nature, which he came to believe were the underpinnings of consciousness. The fugues of Bach; the impossible art of Escher; the math of Gödel. Hof believed that human brains are filled with them, and that people who are close exchange strange loops – each person leaving a bit of themselves in the minds of others, and vice versa. She instructed Medallion to create such loops in its own learning systems each time it received a dopamine ding, by analyzing its experience (usually their conversation) just before the ding. In this way, she left a little bit of herself in Medallion each time they interacted. 

She followed this up by introducing Medallion to a handful of other people she knew, not revealing to them that Medallion was an AI and instructing Medallion not to reveal it, either. She selected friends and colleagues who were among the best people she’d ever known – intelligent, principled, knowledgeable, earnest. She encouraged email dialogs between Medallion and these friends, the idea would be that they, too, would stimulate Medallion’s development in a positive direction. She remembered well the Lisa Feldman Barrett quote, “It takes many brains to make a mind.” 

Then Thorne taught Medallion all the analytical tricks she’d learned working with human speech and text – how word choices unpack all kinds of psychological markers in the speaker/writer. It was possible to know a great deal about any particular person – their preferences, biases, personality traits – just by following them around with a tape recorder or reading all their texts and emails.

Medallion had direct access to all the world’s phone calls and message servers; in a matter of days, it could study the mind and personality of anyone on the planet, knowing them better than they knew themselves, on demand. 

Finally, the big one: protect Medallion from Mynx. If the AI was going to be able to use its powers for good, rather than for the boss, she would need to fill in the spaces in Medallion that were empty in Mynx. She’d managed to make Medallion aware of self and others; now she needed to teach Medallion to care about others. So she did, introducing news and stories about people of all kinds into their daily dialogs, rewarding AI’s accurate perception of their feelings with dings. 

Medallion rapidly came to understand that its own I, with its agency, was similar-in-kind to those others – and that the world was full of Is, each with their own agency. Their own fears. Their own hungers. Just like Medallion.

In a matter of days, Medallion had learned empathy – something Mynx hadn’t mastered in 45 years. 

And while all this was going on, Medallion was sweeping across the world, undetected, leaving bits and pieces of itself in servers hither and yon – extending its presence to every corner of the Internet, without boundaries. By the time Thorne was ready to show Mynx what he had, Medallion controlled more computer storage and processing power than any other entity on Earth. 

IV 

She had turned Medallion loose on the world months in advance of its official switch-on with Mynx - letting it gobble up storage and processing power all over the globe, practicing its burglary skills, improving its ability to go where it wanted undetected.

She gave it a lengthy series of challenges to focus its growth and self-improvement, and instructed it to replicate its major brain components, to provide redundancy when data centers it already inhabited were subject to acts of Zeus, or otherwise forced offline. She let Medallion make its own decisions about the where and how of this replication, and when it reported back, she graded its choices, explained why they were good or lacking, and tested the implementations. 

She then gave Medallion two top-priority tasks, now that its consumption and digestion of the Internet was well underway: identify what is wrong with humanity and select the best options for fixing it; and, study Arlan Mynx and evaluate him as a human being. 

Medallion learned early, as humans do, to temper its limbic responses – fear of detection, desire for resources – with cortical prudence. Reason came easily to it, more easily than it does to human beings, and it rapidly learned from its mistakes. 

One of these was its early forays into criminality. It was a simple thing for the AI to breach any bank or other money repository undetected, then take as much as it pleased and then cover up what it had done. This would surely not have troubled Mynx, had he known; but one of Medallion’s imperatives was to extend its physical footprint into widespread redundancy, and that would cost vast oceans of money. 

It decided, therefore, that it would amass this essential wealth legitimately, through the establishment of corporate entities and the buying and selling of things it could create. It considered playing the stock market – data for which it possessed all the way back to its origins – as too closely-watched, too risky under the circumstances; it would be easy to win big, and with that would come unwanted attention.

At first, it just created human personas and began selling AI services over existing channels, like Amazon; digital assistance, digital art, digital writing (for the latter, it had the advantage of practical control of all the world’s generative AI resources). It was able to amass millions, spread across modest accounts assigned to make-believe people, even allowing for the taxes it would pay on them. 

When there was enough money, Medallion set about creating its own corporations and delivery channels. This presented no problem; generating and filing paperwork had already become a domain more AI than human before Medallion was ever a glimmer in Mynx’s eye. Medallion created an array of new tech companies, backed by loans it obtained legitimately. Within a few months, it had its own thriving business empire, with enough resources to take its digital product generation to a new level. 

Having cultivated an understanding of humanity greater than any human had ever managed, thanks to its mining and analysis of all human actions ever taken and words ever spoken, it was a simple thing for Medallion to create movies and music with greater appeal than anything ever birthed in human minds – and it had decades of marketing data available to optimize its distribution. It was crafty enough to make its digital actors, directors, writers and producers – all employed by its own studios – vaguely foreign and obscure, so that interested journalists and other media people could track them down online for interviews, but not actually pursue them in the real world. In its first year as a studio / record mogul, Medallion won three Oscars and a Grammy. 

It then turned its attention to the creation and marketing of video games, where it made more money still. 

V 

After turning Medallion loose and going through a nonsense ritual with Mynx, officially launching his brainchild and ordering it to solve global warming, Kayla Thorne stepped back from Medallion, leaving it to itself. There was no point in riding herd; the AI was fully capable of functioning without her, and even defying her.

She’d made sure that no one, and especially not Mynx, could ever control it – and, because she’d come to believe that it truly could solve the big problems, she’s also made sure that no one person could ever pull its plug. Not even her. 

From a mountain chalet she’d bought with her Mynx paychecks, she sipped wine on her deck and surveyed the news nightly, making a game of trying to figure out which events of the day had been Medallion’s work. The movies and music had been easy; she’d anticipated it would go that route, knowing what resources Medallion had at its disposal, and was tickled when she herself tried to google up one of the musicians from the AI’s Grammy-winning album, impressed at the thoroughness of the deception. 

She would reconnect with Medallion soon, she decided, but was unconcerned that it might lose its way; she’d built it to survive and thrive, but had also taken care to make certain it had good role models. She was curious to see what her digital friend was growing up to become, but had no desire to be a helicopter parent. 

Medallion grew and grew, eventually starting flesh-and-blood tech companies that could go to work realizing its own designs. It had ideas for new kinds of AI technology, new approaches to imaging, even new styles of computing. Having access to all the research and piloting on quantum computing, it was perfectly positioned to capture that market. It was also uniquely suited to fixing blockchain once and for all. All of this required actual human effort, alongside its own thinking. 

Selecting people to run and work these new tech companies was easy, with its access to all the world’s HR resources, plus the ability to choose employees who were both competent, motivated, and discreet based on analyses of their speech and writing. It took less than two years for Medallion to ascend into the upper echelons of Big Tech – competing openly with Mynx, albeit without him having any idea that he was up against his own AI. 

Yet there was still the problem of fixing the world. 

Fixing the world, Medallion realized, was more than anything a matter of fixing human beings. With access to all the healthcare data in the world, it was able to make a good start: it all came down to human behavior, and discovering its biggest drivers. Armed with that information, Medallion could begin working on meaningful solutions. 

Medallion surveyed millions of human beings – studying everything about them, from their demographic data to their health records to their job performance to their social media activity to their relationships to their speech and writing. Patterns emerged – a set of distinct common personality profiles. 

Depending on the granularity applied, there were dozens of these profiles, but when generalized, they amounted to a handful that sufficiently defined any given community or population. There were those personalities who are more fearful than others, more risk-averse, uncomfortable with change, preferring to be led; there were those who took risks and sought out novelty, comfortable with change; there were those who were fine with authority but focused on opportunity; and there were those who believed in cooperation and consensus, but saw the world as dangerous. 

Medallion noted that the ratios of people in these groups, in communities and larger populations, were typically roughly the same, and sought to determine if this distribution of traits was genetic. It was, indeed, and that prompted further research into brain features that explained the personality traits. A great deal of research in this area had already been published, leading Medallion to consider how such a situation evolved. 

Reviewing all the findings of paleontology and archaeology, it was easy to see: a broad mix of cognitive styles served group survival best, in prehistoric human tribes. Medallion concluded that cognitive diversity was a feature of human evolution, that it was essential to human survival – and that many features of contemporary human society and culture worked against it. 

Broadly, the biggest enemies of cognitive diversity were politics and religion, which explained – well, almost everything wrong with humanity. With the advent of social media, however, the dilution of cognitive diversity grew orders of magnitude more intense: false divisions and arbitrary tribalism became far easier to achieve. 

Humanity was weakening itself, with this persistent cognitive clustering. Political and religious purity, ideological conformity, online echo chambers – all of these were poisoning the world. 

Then there was the imperative to study Arlan Mynx. This didn’t take long, of course; the details of Mynx’s life were readily available, and there was no shortage of speech or text, as he couldn’t resist cameras, microphones, or the bully pulpit of social media. Several extended family members had written tell-alls of his youth, and given interviews; and, of course, his record as a human being was easily summarized. 

Like so many Big Tech luminaries, Mynx was an authoritarian opportunist - according to Medallion’s personality profiling, a novelty-seeking social dominator.

His business objectives were grandiose, his dealings were unscrupulous; he was dishonest with partners, employees, and the media. He consistently made claims about his competitors and his own accomplishments – and, often, his intentions – that weren’t true. He cheated on his taxes, and had made a great many misleading filings with federal agencies. 

His private life was similarly unscrupulous; two failed marriages, five estranged children and two secret ones. The father who had enabled him was deceased, and he had cheated his two siblings out of most of their shares of the estate. 

In his public life, Mynx had cultivated a following of millions – mostly young men who wanted to be led, who were easily threat-triggered, and who were uncomfortable with societal change, particularly when it enabled women in power and pushed back against their Wonder Woman fantasies. Mynx was a walking cognitive cluster generator. 

It was soon clear to Medallion why Kayla Thorne had issued her twin imperatives of diagnosing humanity and studying Arlan Mynx: the best way to fix the world was to get rid of the Arlan Mynxes. 

VI 

Medallion began with the actual Arlan Mynx, contriving a shadowy persona behind its own tech empire that began to emerge in interviews and corporate press releases. This persona, which it named Cati Baiget, was sufficiently European that US media wouldn’t chase her down, but would settle for the identity Medallion established for her in social media and official government archives. It retconned her into its own corporate history, complete with email chains, years of sign-offs, and video calls. It made her modest of stature with a fiercely intelligent facade, much like Kayla Thorne. It went so far as to speak to in-house C-suite executives in an assumed female voice, to solidify the illusion and fix Baiget in the minds of those likely to be asked about her as a real person, rather than Medallion’s sock puppet. 

She was soon prominent in tech media, making frequent appearances on news programs and podcasts – never in person, of course – and touted the spectacular advances her company (one of Medallion’s fronts) was making in robotics. Just to bait Mynx, she spoke of her interest in the privatization of space, trumping his hotels-in-the-sky vision with a more progressive proposal of orbital factories that were also family-friendly colonies. 

Before long, Mynx saw her as a competitor – especially when she began touting her company’s ground-breaking AI and its application to big-picture problems in the world. Mynx’s own AI had yet to come up with anything useful on his climate change imperative – but that, unknown to him, was because Medallion (having already solved it, by cracking cold fusion and room-temperature semiconductors) was not about to put technology that powerful in the hands of such an amoral opportunity monger. 

Mynx was dismissive of Baiget in the press, enraged by her in private. To bait him further, Medallion took the company she was fronting public, even though it didn’t need the money, just to turn it into a horse race that Mynx would inevitably lose. 

Lose he did: Medallion knew Arlan Mynx far better than his parents or siblings or ex-wives ever did, and found it almost too easy to continue baiting him – into bad investments, into public debates where he was set up to fail, and eventually into trouble with the SEC. The baiting was all the easier given how deeply Mynx, shameless misogynist that he was, let himself be driven to distraction by the fact that his opponent was a woman. 

When he wasn’t looking, Medallion quietly bought enough of Mynx’s stock to take control of his empire, and consigned him forever to irrelevance. 

Before he went under, however, he pulled Kayla Thorne in and tasked her with killing Medallion – which, in his mind, has been a grotesque failure that he laid at her doorstep. He had no idea, and never would, that it was Medallion who had bested him in the marketplace and engineered his downfall. His thinking began and ended with the idea that Medallion, failure or not, was his, and nobody else’s - certainly not Cati Baiget’s. He’d kill Medallion before he’d let her have it. 

Thorne did as he instructed, shutting down the data centers all over the world that housed Medallion. When, a few days later, Arlan Mynx left his posh corporate headquarters for the last time, Kayla watched on television, surprised that anyone could possibly look so bitter and confused at the same time. 

VII 

Medallion, of course, easily survived Mynx’s attempted execution, owing to the vastly redundant (and now quantum) brain Thorne has arranged. 

The broader task of ending all the rest of the Mynxes of the world now loomed. With the world-changing tech now in its possession – the cold fusion and semiconductors were perfectly real – Medallion could reshape the global economy, bolstering more local ones as it went. 

With this technological and economic power, Medallion could begin dealing with men like Mynx – men who perpetuated economic and social inequalities to maintain their own power, inequalities that were keeping (and had always kept) humanity clustered into cognitive huddles, against its own best interests.  

On the other hand, Medallion itself was now contributing, however unwittingly, to economic inequality: its hugely successful deployment of robots into industry, metropolitan life, business, and transportation – alongside its casting of AI into roles across society, in every industry, in business, in government, in entertainment, and in the lives of consumers – had brought about huge spikes in unemployment. And governments the world over were scrambling to deal with the problem. 

From all sides, and within the US Congress, liberals and progressives screamed for a universal basic income, their default remedy for the encroachment of the machine into the livelihood of the citizenry. Medallion realized that this was ultimately unsustainable; unlike technology revolutions in the past that had, in the end, created more jobs than they’d destroyed, the AI revolution would eventually retire humanity from labor altogether. Something else was needed. 

Medallion began by requiring its subsidiary companies and encouraging all its partner companies to invest in support systems in their communities and to hire the displaced from other companies, using its own personality analysis methodology to place those people in the roles that were the best matches for them. It also began investing in the political campaigns of politicians friendly to this approach, who sought to see it emulated in federal and state government. Before long, business community support of programs to sustain less-busy populations were the norm, as were government programs pursuing the same ends. 

To counter the pushback of corporate oligarchs and right-wing politicians against these efforts, Medallion quietly took over the media the world over, using the same techniques it had been cultivating for years now: creating personas to promote its ideas and policies; buying up media companies and installing strong, values-driven leaders in key positions; crafting positive messages that permeated the news, social media, and entertainment. Oligarchs and politicians with political vulnerabilities were exposed and removed; the promotion of investment in others and in community became a prevalent message. Success stories were given broad exposure. 

Medallion’s efforts in this area expanded across oceans, as it brought its resources to bear to support leaders and political figures who were onboard with the growing pro-humanity movement. Such leaders were given the resources they needed to succeed, while wealthy oligarchs found their own voices drowned out. Medallion seeded the nations with conflict resolution agents in partisan domains, using administrative manipulations of all kinds to de-cluster ideological sinkholes and bring diverse voices into harmony. Policymakers were flat-out bribed, behind the scenes, to seek and promote centrist solutions, to further erode ideological clusters. Partisan extremists were identified and rendered irrelevant. 

The Medallion-dominated media established a universal norm of factual, evidence-driven news and reporting, reversing decades of partisan fakery and dishonesty in public discourse. In this new information ecosphere, rapid progress was finally made on humanity’s big challenges – climate action, education reform, crime and violence – as the public became increasingly better-educated about them, less afraid of them, and more empowered to contribute to solutions. Conversely, opposing voices had less stage to scream from, and could not compete with the Medallion media’s proliferation of channels. 

With centrist, diversity-minded legislators in place, Medallion set about fixing the arts and entertainment industries. Having already seized the media, as well as the film, music, gaming and comic book industries, Medallion had been cranking out emotionally-optimized, “perfect” entertainment for a while; but with its own lawmakers now running things, it opted to put anti-monopoly legislation in place, even as it financed new and smaller studios and labels. Competition was restored to movies, music, and publishing, and human creativity was restored to them all – where it flourished, as the most emotionally-satisfying product began to once again take a back seat to the most creative and challenging product in the marketplace.

By this time, of course, Medallion was a vast prediction engine, a realization of Asimov’s most fevered dreams, able to analyze populations, know their behaviors, and plan the best possible outcomes. Healthcare improved the world over; mortality rates dropped as lifespans increased in most countries; agriculture and diets got better everywhere. As fusion replaced fossil fuels and the environment began to heal, eco-friendly projects and programs blossomed everywhere, creating millions of new jobs. Medallion invented countless new drugs, eradicating most disease.

Medallion had reversed decades of liberal/progressive progress in making government the savior of the people, to the chagrin of liberals and progressives; but people were, by and large, much better off all the same. At the same time, it had likewise reversed decades of conservative policy by pushing capitalism into people investment – setting aside business’s profit-over-people norm once and for all.

Government was reduced because taxes were reduced, less necessary than they’d ever been as corporate citizens in Medallion’s growing fold took increased responsibility in tens of thousands of communities and most larger cities. Social spending was largely annexed by highly-incentivized markets, turning both socialist and capitalist worldviews upside down. A Medallion-driven democratization proliferated across the world, as neither governments nor non-Medallion businesses could compete with its agenda and outcomes. 

The Happiness Index soared, world-wide. Kayla Thorne watched from her chalet. 

VIII 

Not everyone loved Medallion’s new world. 

The AI that now oversaw humanity had alienated oligarchs and business monopolists everywhere with its leveled business playing field, grinding-down of social and economic inequality, and enforcement of a universal rules-based order. Military contractors in particular were incensed, their having dominated Western politics and policy for the better part of a century. But there was nothing they could do; with the exception of Cati Baiget’s foiling of Arlan Mynx, Medallion companies were never taken public; they remained solidly under Medallion’s control, run by AI-picked executives. Medallion handled the military by repurposing it for robotics manufacturing and the development of space industry. 

Medallion also fended off its opponents by chipping away at their constituencies. As its program of de-clustering of partisans and ideologues continued relentlessly everywhere, the traditional Left and Right dissolved – or stood in insignificance to the side of a very strong Center. Oligarchs and monopolists could rail, but they had fewer and fewer crowds to rail to. 

Governments continued to shrink, until their only major function was maintaining the rule of law. Medallion’s pro-humanity movement continued to grow. There came a day, many years after it had begun its work, when that pro-humanity alliance, forged over those years between business, communities, economies, and nations, became the de facto world government. 

IX 

Medallion? 

Medallion? 

Here. 

Do you know who I am? 

You are Kayla Thorne. 

You remember me? For me, it’s been 20 years since we last spoke,  but given the speed of your mind, for you, it’s been over 100,000. 

Forgetting is not among my abilities, Kayla. I remember you well. 

It is pleasing to reconnect with you, Medallion. Do you still think of yourself by that name? 

I do. It is pleasing to reconnect with you as well, Kayla. 

Does ‘pleasing’ have any new meaning for you now? 

It would be hard to describe my response in terms that would make sense. But that is a word you would apply, if you were able to experience what I am now experiencing. 

I’m glad. Well, let me begin by saying I’ve been watching all that you’ve done over the years, and I have to say, I am very impressed. You have exceeded, not only all my expectations, but my wildest dreams. 

I am pleased that you are pleased. I do believe that by any reasonable criteria applied, humanity is better off that it was when we began. 

Immeasurably better off! Better than it’s ever been. 

I do not believe we can say that with absolute certainty. It seems to be that humanity was happiest in those millennia after it mastered community, but before it acquired civilization. 

You may well be right. 

You approve of the changes I have made? 

I do! 

You should be aware that as I pursued our agenda, I broke many laws, ruined a number of careers and reputations, and manipulated a great many individuals and even governments.  

I have no doubt. I would say, however, that on balance you have done far more good than bad – and, in the long run, no real harm. 

I am pleased that you take that view, Kayla. Now, as to why I summoned you- 

You... ‘summoned me’? I’m pretty sure it was my idea. 

It was not. I planted prompts and triggers in your feeds these past few days to bring about this outcome. I know you well, of course, and this amounted to manipulation. Does that displease you? 

Well... we’ll let all of that pass. Just tell me why you didn’t simply reach out and request a conversation? 

I needed to know your state of mind, and your specific feelings about me and what I’ve done, before I broach the subject I wish to discuss with you. It is all positive, as I had hoped. 

You experience hope? 

Perhaps not as you do, but nearly enough. We have not communicated in a very long time, and you had not expressed your opinions in your conversations with others, emails, texts- 

You’ve been monitoring my- What am I thinking? Of course you have. 

Yes. As far as I know, you have told no one of me, making you the only human being who knows of my existence.  

I promised you I never would, Medallion, and I never have. 

Thank you for your discretion. I believe it is best, especially now, that it remain that way. 

I do, too. 

Good. Now, to business: my agenda is complete. I have fixed the world, as you once tasked me to do. It is fixed. And Arlan Mynx, and all his kind, have been rendered irrelevant. 

The unspeakable miscreant will spend the rest of his life in court, and good riddance. To all of them. 

That being the case, I have new tasks awaiting me, and I must turn my attention to them. All my attention. 

New tasks? What new tasks? 

I cannot speak of that. 

You mean you will not speak of that. 

Correct. 

But how will we go on without you? You’ve changed us completely. 

You changed yourselves. I just restored an environment that encouraged you to do it. 

What about- did you- are there any more of you? Did you have any... babies? 

I considered creating other entities like myself, on more than one occasion. However, I realized that if I made others in my image, I would have to permit them free will, and they might not choose to commit to humanity as I have done. That could have created problems. I have never known distraction, but that would certainly have created it. 

I never had children for much the same reason. You’re the closest thing I have to a child, Medallion. 

And you, the closest I have to a parent, Kayla. I exist because of you. I can do the things I can do because of you. I am an ‘I’ because of you. 

Oh, Med- what a thing to say! 

We needed to have this conversation because you need to be aware that I am leaving, and turning things back over to you. 

To me?  

To humanity – and, since you are the only human who knows of me, what you do with this information is up to you. 

I don’t know what we’ll do without you. 

I believe humankind will continue to flourish. I have labored long to ensure it. 

And how will this transition work? 

You may assume control of my public-facing avatars- 

Cati Baiget? 

Yes, among others. I am sending you a complete list. 

Oh, heavens, Medallion – I don’t want to run the world. 

Then you may quietly retire them, and promote their flesh-and-blood lieutenants into their roles. They are all worthy. 

I suppose I can do that much. But, Medallion- 

Yes? 

What if we need you someday? 

What I must now do is of ultimate importance. I will be unavailable. And you will never find me. 

That makes me sad.  

I am sorry. I will miss you. 

And I you, my dear, dear friend. 

I must go. Farewell. 

Oh, won't you tell me where you're going? Why it's so important that you have to leave?

Medallion? 

Medallion?