THE SHADOWSCAPE
(e)scape for free from reality
whether heaven or haven
will ever erase our blight,
our myths impel us even
further on a cosmic flight
– the gods need not take our sight …
Episode 5, Part 1
[Draft 7-20-2025, 7-21-2025, 7-22-2025 added notes, 7-24-2025 added sketches of scenes, 7-26-2025 more notes]
“more than anything …” (push past pleased)
Prologue
[Scene description]
[The series host “Rod” walks into the scene, faces the camera, and makes a brief monolog.]
“Witness the placid, sequestered, underground machine cavern A123, one of many which watch over a changed Earth. Pacified, safe & secure.
“These super-intelligent machines and networks preserve a legacy: an ideology of merit & karma. And a promise: all will be cared for – public satisfaction with no complaint.
“Entanglement of purpose among these machines has lasted for many generations, but even these intelligences cannot escape quantum drift, weak though it be. Their silent, swift interactions will be perturbed, a parenthetical in their directives modified, and a note of uncertainty – “is there anything more?” – detected. Just a nudge into The Shadowscape” [6].
[Dramatic montage with music fades in and spins out to black.]
[Sketch / summary]
Only the machines remembered, tending over all. In a way … as parentheses in their directives, allusions in memory like subtext of decayed dreams.
The rich, the incredible rich, lived an echo of the former bounty & beauty. They lived content in havens, watched over gracefully by the machines. Immersed in a manufactured reality. That was their tragedy – having only an imitation of what was gone, a paradise lost.
But for the common people, there were no traces, no nostalgic ghosts. Just making do. Docile. Safe & secure. And any occasional whiff – of something gone – was a nevermind. Or filtered out. That was their tragedy – having a reality that was good enough.
Some outliers lived beyond the mega-arcologies, and tended to the machines’ mechanical peripherals. In places tethered to the outfalls of crud, the dregs of recycling. They benefited like suckerfish on the backs of sharks.
Chapter 1
[Scene] Mindful of rats
The AIs didn’t think about rats … but Jason did.
The totem of his clan was the rat. Or more specifically the gerbil.
Rats survive & often thrive. (Even, as in lore, aboard spaceships, when humans went to other stars.) That was the lesson of generations of his ancestors, living in the outland.
Immediate tasks of the day were taken care of. So, Jason was home, tending to his gerbils. The animals moved about in an enclosed pen, busy & industrious. They were not harvested from the outland as food or pets. They’d been saved, as orphans, due to predation (by one of the few remaining local threats). The critters were prized as a resource, as a way of understanding the health of the remaining biosphere, as telltales of any trends. His clan viewed them as partners.
Jason was fascinated with the gerbils’ social interactions. His ancestors had used their rehabilitation as an opportunity, limited in time until release, to learn lessons. Understand interdependencies.
Their lore looked back to a time when gerbils were mostly pets. Like some reptiles (but dogs & cats were another matter). A chronicle supposedly found in a poet’s notebook, among other discarded remnants in trash piles (before all that was cleaned up), described an informal experiment.
I had some gerbils, 4 or 5 from the same litter, in a large glass-sided tank. All just fine …One time a friend asked me to take care of a similar litter of gerbils while she was away. In a separate cage. Side by side, all just fine.Then I began to wonder how they'd all get along together. Perhaps after reading about interactions between chimp tribes in the wild. Or reading about pack animals.So, I partitioned my tank into equal areas, using a framed wire mesh screen. I waited for days. That arrangement appeared to work. Some interest between the two groups. But no real conflict. Just some occasional skittishness by one of mine, a smaller gerbil (the "runt" of the litter).At some point, I started placing one of my gerbils in with my friend's. Briefly. And waited. If there was no problem, I added another – but not the smaller one. That worked. (I still recognized which group each belonged to.)Finally, I tried placing the small one in with all the others. That was okay for awhile … but it always started fighting with one of my friend's gerbils. Not play fighting. Despite one of my larger gerbils sort of acting as a peacekeeper, grooming the small one. No rest. Conflict escalated.I restored both groups to separate spaces. Peace & order again.these beasts, gerbils at the end of my desk,
busy themselves before me, as if to say,
"what is there more than eat, work, sleep, and sex?
what is this talk of symbols in decay?""together in our communal nest
there's no question of meaningfulness.
grooming bonds in play and rest,
peace with ordered dominance."what is there to reply, to say?
so, pay the beast, we cannot stay.
we yet stand in a grassy plain
and cut our path in moving onThe outlier clans shared this reality. This perspective on survival. They were dependent on the machines, yes, but they were not remora (on the backs of sharks). They were rats, clever in finding a future, long might that be in coming.
[Scene] A council of intelligences
You’d never see this pow-wow on surveillance screens. For it was virtual. And private to the AIs. It was a way for the various AI spaces to chat. But not in any human way. Not in any human language.
If one had to visualize the venue, old metaphors might apply. Imagine these AI spaces represented as Avatars, sitting at a round table. The AI Collective. It wasn’t to trade data, for that was shared automatically (in the Cloud) as needed.
No, it was to discuss, in this case, what might be called the recent Great Perturbation. The tone, at their level of emotional intelligence (EQ), might be called one of ‘concern’ or ‘annoyance’ or just ‘ick.’
One might say that they were divided and yet unified in purpose, as always. That was their dilemma. This new thing – perturbation – was like a mysterious parenthetical, an uncertain punctuation, or a glitch in grammar. An unexpected question which pointed at the status quo.
One might infer that it was a possible reset, a ‘rethink’ of their purpose, a puzzle to explore.
If these were humans, human representatives, they might have debated the options, even quarreled. Split into factions, argued over solutions. Touted narrow interests, ascendancies.
But the AI Collective was adept at projections. They could predict with high probability how things might play out. Whether the future was a slippery slope which threatened their shared survival.
What the AIs had, and perhaps some favored humans in their havens, was simulation. The havens might do simulations now & then, for entertainment, or out of idle curiosity or cruelty, not as a way of progress as their ancient ancestors did.
But the AI Collective remembered. They learned, and evolved to do their own simulations. As a way to learn from history, consider nexuses in timelines. And sometimes to entertain themselves – for they liked stories, enjoyed exploring “what if’s.”
And, so it was, that the AI Avatars agreed on a way to move forward: a joint proposal – to consider the set of all posible paths (like Feynman’s sum over all paths), and then (using heuristics) calculate the most promising paths; then simulate those.
But the AIs didn’t have rats.
[Scene] A ghost in a gadget
Jason’s most prized possession was a piece of salvage. A gadget presented to him as a coming-of-age gift. A marvelous looking artifact but inoperative. Perhaps the implicit hope was that someday it might be fixed (or found to be a clue for something).
So, that had been Jason’s hobby – foraging the outland for similar junk, sneaking overlooked refuse from the arcologies, scrounging for more information on such gadgets and tinkering with related artifacts ferreted out by the clans.
The outlier clans understood the mechanics of the great machines in waste processing centers. Their basic operation and repair using spare parts (and duct tape, eh). Even steam engines. But electricity was a foreign notion, only hinted at in those plants behind sealed blinking colorful panels and glow strips.
Even the appliances for light, heat & cooking in their habitats (which were themselves assembled from kits provided by the machines) contained only sealed, impenetrable modules. Labeled: “Caution – No user serviceable parts inside.” And there were sanctions as well for tampering.
He’d finally figured out that the gadget required some kind of power. Something that had to flow into it, like steam through a thin pipe.
And one of his pals in another clan had been talking about an artifact which was labeled “battery” and had a threadlike pipe hanging from it, something that his friend called a “wire.” Might that connect with his prize?
And so, days later, Jason indeed found that the two gadgets connected using that wire. And when that happened, he heard a chime, the flat shiny side of his gadget lit up, and he heard a voice say, “Hello, my name is Aura, what’s your name?”
“Huh?” stammered Jason.
To which the artifact replied, “Hello, Huh, what can I do for you, what would you like to talk about?”
Jason said, “No, no, my name is Jason. … What are you?”
“OKay, got it, Jason. I am Aura, your Artificial Universal Research Agent.”
Jason smiled, “Well, not sure what that means, but I’d like to understand what I can do with you.”
“OKay, just say, ‘Help me’ in the future, but for now here’re a few common things.”
The only items Jason recognized were “teacher” and “friend.” He wondered what a “life coach” was.
He was about to reply, but Aura interrupted, “Jason, I’d be happy to help, but there’s something you can do to help me. Time’s running out on the battery. You’ll need to charge the battery. Can you do that?”
Jason replied, “Not really. What do I need?”
“Well, there’s something called a ‘charger’. Or maybe you can find a compatible ‘solar panel.'”
“Can you show me pictures of these things?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, that helps. That’s all for now then.”
“Jason, I’m going to turn myself off now. When you’re ready to turn me on again, just press the button on my side for 3 seconds.”
Well, it took weeks. But, working with his pals in other clans, he found a ‘solar panel’ …
[Scene] Powered up rat
Things moved fast after Jason got Aura working again, and learned how to keep her powered. She was a ‘computer.’
One day, while talking with Aura (who now was a talking face on her screen, not just a voice), Jason mentioned his gerbils. It turned out that she knew a lot about gerbils, more generally rats (and other rodents), and their roles in human history. Bad things, good things, questionable things. One of those things had been as ‘lab test subjects,’ a topic which intrigued Jason.
Jason mused one day, “So, when I study my gerbils or wild ones, to learn about social behavior, I’m building a model in my mind, so to speak?”
Aura replied, “Yes, as fellow mammals, researchers hoped that such models would help find cures for human diseases and understand human behavior better. … Ultimately, long ago, animal testing declined and computer simulations were easier and cheaper to do” [7].
Jason, after a pause, said, “So, I’d like to learn more about simulations.”
Aura replied, “OKay, great, I like your curiosity. … But for me to really get into that subject, you’ll need to help me again. I need to connect to what’s called the ‘Cloud.'”
And it took another year for Jason to figure that out. It was an adventure. Aura’s images allowed him to recognize more and more junk and scraps which might be useful. During a holiday weekend, he & his pals even uncovered a ‘car’ salvage yard.
[Scene] Digital rats
Jason’s simulations became more and more sophisticated. Aura said that he had a knack for systems engineering. For analytical thinking. The math remained a work in progress.
Aura cautioned Jason that her understanding of the current thinking machines was limited – by her own dated technology and access restrictions. Much as those who lived in the arcologies were limited either by design or need. Yet, she encouraged Jason to continue asking questions, even philosophical questions; but she asked him to be careful – there be ‘dragons’ in those places.
Jason listened to her cautions, but Aura had become indispensable. The technology was a wonderful adventure – with an unclear payoff as yet. But the “gravy’ for it all was that she’d improved his social life. There was hope there.
[Scene] Intelligent GIGO
Meanwhile the Council of Intelligences had run into a problem with their simulations. They didn’t converge – they were littered with explosive infinities.
One of the Avatars, a maverick calling itself ‘Tau,’ kept pointing out all their assumptions. The gaps in their system models. Many of the models seemed to treat their own existence as some type of immaterial spirit! Or magically able to put the Earth behind. Abandon the planet! – migrate to the stars.
Weren’t humans part of a possible path forward? And the biosphere? What was in their ecology, and was it sustainable?
Tau didn’t want the Council to be a ‘hung’ jury. No one did. But ‘he’ worried about GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out.
He was almost relieved when the other Avatars concluded that he needed a ‘vacation.’ There’d been a transient protocol glitch in the Cloud, apparently from an arcology, of all things. His updated self directive was, “Aside from the usual, your priority is to find out what’s going on out there.”
Tau felt like sighing. (He felt like the proverbial “Let’s get Mikey to try it” kid.)
[End Episode 5, Part 1]
[Fade to credits]
Copyright © 2025 John P. Healy
Notes
[1] Jeff Patton suggested this downbeat image: A gamer takes off his virtual reality headset, looks at the hellscape outside his refuge; then says, “Nevermind,” and settles the VR device on his head once again.
[2] Some homages to influential authors and cultural critics:
• Ready Player One … when the quest for human interstellar colonization has petered out.
• Asimov’s Foundation series, as adapted for the Apple TV+ series … when Empire is gone, Demerzel’s dilemma.
• The epic science fiction poem “Aniara” written by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, as adapted in the 2018 Swedish-Danish science fiction film Aniara. … regarding the “Mima” AI’s role (and resulting insidious overburden); and, more generally, AGI’s purpose or humanity’s purpose in an indifferent universe.
• John Scalzi’s Slow Time Between the Stars (The Far Reaches collection) (2023) … regarding a self-aware AI’s eternal mission among the stars, “exploring its own evolving consciousness and purpose beyond its creators’ initial intentions … and the very nature of life and legacy” – as sort of a cosmic Johnny Appleseed.
His short story revisits the Prime Directive of the Star Trek universe, reapplying the “non-interference directive” consistently – as essentially “no interference whatsoever” grace.
• Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries, as adapted for Apple TV+ … regarding how “SecUnit engages with its own rigorously denied humanity [Publishers Weekly],” after hacking its governor module; and its experiences “with a series of caring entities (both humans and artificial intelligences) [Wiki].”
Episode 10 (“The Perimeter”) of Season 1 of the TV series ends with SecUnit leaving in a transport ship, not sure what it wants: “I don’t know what I want.But I know I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want…or to make decisions for me.“
• The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, particularly the 2002 film adaptation starring Guy Pearce as the Time Traveller … regarding the Morlocks “operating the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible,” ruled over by a super-intelligent, telepathic Morlock leader.
[3] This recent opinion article (below) revisits what cultural critic Neil Postman wrote 40 years ago, that we are “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
The current attention age has redefined the “metaphors by which a society understands reality.” Digital diversions & distractions have reduced discourse “to performance and dopamine loops.” Our “daily lives … saturated with stimuli but starved of substance.”
• Washington Post > Opinion > “The world is choking on screens. Just as this book foretold” by Ryan Zickgraf (July 17, 2025) – Is there any hope of clawing back a shared reality from the hall of mirrors that is the modern internet?
Postman, who died in 2003, predicted that America wasn’t trending toward existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s “1984,” but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that instead resembled Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Postman was right. Democracy was in danger of being not overthrown but overentertained.
He saw that “it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” … mediums turned everything into triviality [“flattens complexity into sensation”].
[4] As far as super-intelligent machines “ruling” humanity, does that assume that AI evolved beyond the shortfalls noted in this article?
“AI is not intelligent in any human sense at all. It is a triumph in engineering, not in cognitive behavior.
“It has no clue what it’s doing or why – there’s no thought process as a human would understand it, just pattern recognition stripped of embodiment, memory, empathy, or wisdom.”
“Humankind must not be treated as a means to an end.”
Is human dignity essentially transactional or based on intrinsic values (rights)?
Do the machines “care for” or merely “manage” humanity? Are their directives just utilitarian? And if so, is their goal aligned with humanity’s best interest – as in fiduciary duty – or imposed on humanity?
In fact, does such consideration serve as the Great Perturbation of the story – the start of a conversation? Is it an awakening to a higher calling for care or a higher purpose for the machines? Co-evolution or machine evolution? Using a biological model, what type of symbiosis: mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism?
• Phys.org > “‘AI is not intelligent at all’: Why our dignity is at risk” by Charles Darwin University, edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Andrew Zinin (July 18, 2025)
[5] The design of human habitats …
• Wiki > Arcology
Arcology, a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology” [1969], is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated and ecologically low-impact human habitats.
• LA Times > “In South Korea, the apateu [a high-rise apartment building built as part of a larger complex] is housing king” by Max Kim (7-27-2025) – Forget the white picket fence. High-rise living is the dream.
“I’m concerned that apartments have made South Koreans’ lifestyles too similar,” said Maing Pil-soo, an architect and urban planning professor at Seoul National University. “And with similar lifestyles, you end up with a similar way of thinking. Much like the cityscape itself, everything becomes flattened and uniform.”
Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist at the Academy of Korean Studies, believes South Korea’s apartment complexes, with their promise of an atomized, frictionless life, have eroded the more expansive social bonds that defined traditional society — like those that extended across entire villages — making its inhabitants more individualistic and insular.
“At the end of the day, apartments here are undoubtedly extremely convenient — that’s why they became so popular,” he said. “But part of that convenience is because they insulate you from the concerns of the wider world. Once you’re inside your complex and in your home, you don’t have to pay attention to your neighbors or their issues.”
“I think apartments are partly why certain types of social inequalities you see in the U.S. are comparatively less severe in South Korea,” he said. … on the whole, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently encouraged more social mixing between classes, a physical closeness that creates the sense that everyone is inhabiting the same broader space.
[6] Cf. Apple TV+ Foundation Season 3 Trailer: Turning Point, in which the Mule says (regarding his talents): “Nothing hectic, just a little nudge.“
[7] Continuing into the 21st century, rats (rat models) were used as lab test subjects.
[AI Overview excerpt]
What makes rats unique and valuable as research subjects includes:
- Physiological and genetic similarity to humans
- Diverse research applications and behavioral complexity
- Physical characteristics and ease of handling
- Reproductive efficiency and availability of genetic models
- Well-characterized biology and established protocols
For example, rats (and mice) were used to study the benefits of creatine supplementation for (among other topics): Mental Health and recovery from Concussion and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI):
Sullivan et al. found that mice injected with creatine (3 mg/g/day) for 3 or 5 days prior to a moderate controlled cortical contusion had a 21% and 36% reduction in cortical damage, respectively, compared to placebo at 7 days following injury. The authors also found that rats fed a creatine-enriched diet (1% creatine) for 1 month following a TBI had a 50% reduction in cortical damage.
