Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

When the worst thing that can possibly happen to you finally happens, you find that you are not afraid of anything.

This city contains so many cities, he thought. So many lives I’ll never get to live, so many spaces I’ll never get invited into.

If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it.

Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn’t care if it kills its host. It will simply flow on to someone new, to control them as well. City Hall, the collective of artificial intelligences, is a framework of programs constructed around a single, never explicitly stated purpose: to keep Money safe.

Stories are where we find ourselves, where we find the others who are like us. Gather enough stories and soon you’re not alone; you are an army.

“It was way too easy to turn you into a medieval barbarian,” Barron said. “You, who always believed yourself to be so civilized. Another way I achieve victory over you.”

We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortune on, whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals, instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart. Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped. But villains are oversimplifications.