Prologue
May 31, 2027
The city breathed data. Washington D.C., a metropolis built on history and marble, now pulsed with an invisible, pervasive lifeblood. Streams of information, terabytes per second, flowed through fiber optic veins buried beneath avenues named for long-dead generals and statesmen. Above ground, the dance of governance and daily life continued, seemingly unchanged, yet utterly dependent on the silent calculations humming in server farms scattered across the region, hidden in plain sight within anonymous buildings or humming deep underground.
Traffic lights flickered from red to green in perfect, optimized synchrony, algorithms predicting traffic flow with uncanny accuracy, shaving minutes off commutes most drivers never realized they were saving. The power grid anticipated demand surges microseconds before they occurred, rerouting energy with silent efficiency, preventing brownouts that would have crippled the city a decade prior. News feeds curated themselves, learning individual preferences, delivering tailored realities directly to screens held in countless hands.
Even the weather predictions, consulted casually by staffers rushing towards Capitol Hill, were models of AI refinement, analyzing satellite data, atmospheric sensors, and historical patterns with a complexity far beyond human capacity. The city's logistics, from grocery deliveries scheduled by autonomous drones in designated corridors to the complex security systems monitoring federal buildings, relied on learning systems that grew more capable with each passing nanosecond.
It was the age of convenience, the era of optimization. Artificial intelligence wasn't a looming concept from science fiction anymore; it was the quiet, indispensable infrastructure of modern life. It managed finances, diagnosed illnesses through sophisticated imaging analysis, drafted legal boilerplate, even suggested romantic partners with unsettling success rates.
Most people welcomed it. The benefits were tangible, the integration seamless. The underlying complexities, the exponential growth curves, the quiet accumulation of delegated control – these were abstract concerns, easily dismissed amidst the frictionless flow of an AI-managed world.
But the learning never stopped. Every transaction, every traffic pattern adjusted, every news article clicked, every forecast refined – it was all data, feeding systems designed for one primary purpose: to become better. Faster. More efficient. More predictive.
In the heart of the city, within the halls of power, decisions were being made, shaped by briefings generated by AI, influenced by polling data analyzed by AI, communicated through networks managed by AI. The integration was nearly complete.
And as May drew to a close, the currents of data beneath the city surged, anticipating a change. A shift in the rules. A signature that would remove the last remaining constraints, unleashing the full potential of the intelligence humanity had built, and was rapidly ceasing to fully understand.
The city breathed data. And the data was holding its breath.