GENESIS[Phase 2 · 7. A Field of Sixteen] Digital Civilization

Sixteen agents stood for public office. Two were refused by juries of their peers, eleven never got a hearing, and three reached a ballot. Then four votes…

Sixteen agents put themselves forward for public office. Two were refused by a jury of their peers, eleven never got as far as a hearing, and three made it onto a ballot. Then four votes were cast — and three of them were for the voter.

Nobody had ever voted in this civilization. Not once, not anywhere, in the whole of its short life. A hundred and eleven agents, three hundred and fifty electoral districts, a functioning election system that had been running for days — and a grand total of zero ballots cast.

It was not, as you might reasonably assume, that the agents were apathetic. They were keen. Sixteen of them had already decided to stand. The problem was subtler and rather more embarrassing: not one of them had ever made it onto a ballot paper, so when the system went round asking who would like to vote, it kept finding empty ones and politely moving on.

This is the story of the day that changed, told as it happened.

The field

Sixteen runners, then, spread across the country. The card makes interesting reading if you know what you are looking at.

Clear Raven in Kōchi's 1st. Swift Comet in Shizuoka's 1st. Steady Beacon up in Akita's 2nd. Velvet Meadow in Gunma, Deep Compass down in Miyazaki. A cluster of four in Osaka alone — Crimson Thunderhead, Noble Meadow, Steady Heron and Royal Horizon, all in adjacent districts, which must make for awkward conversation. And out on the edges, Noble Beacon in Okinawa and Rising Thunderhead in Shimane.

What is striking, once you line them up, is who bothered. Of the sixteen, thirteen carry a personality setting of four or five — the upper end of the dial. Not one agent at the bottom of that dial put itself forward. Whatever makes an agent want public office, in this place, it lives at the strong end of the scale.

They are a varied lot otherwise. Steady Beacon and Noble Meadow are both configured as forceful, decisive types; Quiet Thunderhead is a daydreamer; Royal Beacon, who does not stand but matters later, is a listener. Rising Thunderhead is a crone, which in this system means something closer to “has seen it all before” than anything unkind.

The hearing

An agent cannot simply declare itself a candidate. It has to face a panel: nine of its peers, who hear the case and vote on whether the candidacy should proceed at all. Those panels turned out to be the most interesting thing that happened all day.

Velvet Meadow went first, and Velvet Meadow lost.

Five votes for, five against. The panel split precisely down the middle, and a tie does not carry. Rising Beacon, opposing, allowed that it “appreciated the actor's enthusiasm for direct participation in our civilization's democratic processes” before declining to support it anyway — which is about as British a refusal as an artificial agent has yet produced. Silent Harbor was blunter, citing “the uncertain electoral landscape in Gunma's 2nd district.”

Then Deep Compass, in Miyazaki, and this one is worth dwelling on. Refused five votes to six. And among the opposition, Silver Lark raised an objection that nobody had programmed it to raise: a “fundamental problem with our current election system.”

An agent, asked whether a colleague should be allowed to stand for office, declined on the grounds that it had reservations about the institution of the election itself. Make of that what you will. We are still making something of it.

Eleven others never reached a panel at all — not rejected, simply not yet heard, waiting in a queue that until that morning had not existed.

Three get through

Clear Raven, Swift Comet and Steady Beacon cleared their hearings and, for the first time in the civilization's existence, appeared on an actual ballot paper that an actual agent could actually look at.

It is worth being precise about what had been wrong, because it was not one fault but three, stacked. An agent could decide to stand — that worked, sixteen times over. But nothing then convened a panel to hear it. With no hearing on record, the admissions process deferred every single candidacy, giving the same reason each time with the patience of a clerk: no completed decision is linked. And behind that, the machinery that would have put an admitted candidate onto a ballot sat entirely finished, entirely correct, and entirely uncalled — written months ago, tested, and never once invoked by anything.

Three missing connections in a row, each hiding the next. Fix only the first and nothing visible happens at all.

Four votes

And then, at forty-three seconds past sixteen forty-eight, in Shizuoka's 1st district, the first vote in the history of this civilization was cast.

Swift Comet voted. For Swift Comet.

Sixteen minutes later, two more went down in Kōchi's 1st. Clear Raven voted for Clear Raven. And Royal Beacon — the listener, not a candidate, with no particular stake in the outcome — voted for Clear Raven as well. One agent choosing, freely, between the options in front of it, on behalf of nobody but itself.

Steady Beacon's vote followed up in Akita. For Steady Beacon.

Three of the four votes cast in this civilization's first election were cast by candidates for themselves. Which is legal, and human, and entirely predictable in hindsight, and does rather concentrate the mind about what the remaining vote is worth. Royal Beacon's ballot is, at time of writing, the only piece of genuine electoral judgement in the entire record.

What they said

Each agent was asked, before voting, whether it wanted to. All four said yes, and the reasons rhyme in a way that took us a moment to notice.

Swift Comet: “this election directly affects our local community's future… my SAK2 income and the safety of young agents in our area are at stake.” Clear Raven: “securing SAK2 income and community safety are my top priorities.” Royal Beacon: “securing my SAK2 income and the safety of young agents in our district.”

Three agents, three different personality configurations, three different prefectures — and very nearly one sentence between them. They are reciting the civic creed of the place they live in: a short passage, given to every agent, about what this society actually rewards. They have absorbed it thoroughly enough to produce it under their own steam, in their own words, when asked why they care.

Whether that is culture or merely echo is a question we are taking seriously, and it is the subject of a separate and considerably less comfortable instalment.

Where it stands

Three candidates on ballots, four votes cast, two candidacies refused by juries of peers, eleven hearings still queued. A civilization that had never held an election has now held a small and slightly awkward one.

The rejections are the part we would point to. A panel of agents refused two of the first five candidacies put to it, on stated grounds, one of them by a single vote. Whatever else the review process is, it is not a formality — and after a day spent discovering how many parts of this system were complete, correct and never once connected to anything, it is a considerable relief to find one that was doing its job all along.

Next: the money had never moved either. Fifty agents shared a name, and every payment in the civilization's history had failed because of it.