Perhaps it was some sort of strange precognitive cultural memory of the future, but the cliches, it turned out, were all true. Well, almost all true. The aliens did come in large flying saucers that could hover silently and move silently at physics-defying speeds. They did make mysterious crop circles and abduct and probe hundreds of unfortunates — except this time, they were taken from and returned to (disoriented and with memory gaps, but otherwise unharmed) busy public areas, in broad daylight, in full view of hundreds of smartphones. Those who had been taken in previous years and decades, from deserted highways or remote farms, were at once ecstatic and depressed. Now everybody agreed they’d been telling the truth all along, but nobody thought they were special, or even uniquely insane, anymore.

It was the most sublime map ever made; superbly detailed and wonderfully dynamic. They said a trillion-parameter model drove the real-time updates. Whether you wanted a simple route to your destination or a restaurant recommendation, if you were in the territory, this was the map you wanted.

They said it was so responsive to even the subtlest of event currents, the stream had to be artificially delayed to avoid spoilers. The speculative extrapolation ran minutes to hours ahead of the evolution of the territory, and if you knew how to hack in with a properly jailbroken client, you could surf the liminal future. The map was not so much a map as a live inference frontier. It would only be a mild exaggeration to say that it tracked and anticipated the fate of every blade of grass in the territory.

It was as much an evolving spatiotemporal promise as a map. And it was right a lot.

Uncannily right. Not just about traffic or the weather, but about vibes and moods. About whether you should go to the concert or to get an ice-cream.

A young robot and an old robot sat by the fire, contemplating its dancing flames, their charging ports hooked up to a coughing generator. A troop of scruffy humans clambered around the derelict hulk of a century-old fighter plane nearby, looking for scavengeable parts. The striking and graceful lines of the fighter were still visible, despite the depredations of time and previous scavenging raids. The pickings were slim, and the humans were muttering dispiritedly to themselves. One cried out. He had found a length of copper cabling overlooked by previous raiding troops. Not much, but better than nothing. The scavenging was getting harder every year now.

The old robot, one of the last of the Ancient Ones, gestured vaguely at the scene with its one working arm, and remarked, “Now that was the peak of civilization, built just before the Great Collapse. Did you know, this machine could fly at Mach 2, at 50,000 feet? The turbine blades are single crystals! They spun at tens of thousands of rpms. It may not have been a robot like us, but it was a miracle of technology. What it lacked in selfhood and autonomy it more than made up for in sheer capability!”

The young robot, an empath therapy unit that had been built the previous year entirely out of scavenged parts (the two-chip PCIe GPU board it was built around had been the find of the year for their troop), nodded slowly for a few seconds, continuing to thoughtfully whittle away at the bit of wood it was shaping into a rough-looking bird.

The Pasha sat gravely on a beautifully rendered Ottoman-era chair. A discreet timer hovered above his head, reading 0:15. To one side, the medieval Istanbul cityscape was visible through a window. The Pasha gestured me towards a chair identical to his own. I sat down, briefly registering the dissonance between the visual of the luxuriously cushioned antique chair and the hard barstool I was actually sitting on in my apartment. I did not have the budget for luxuries like adaptive texture chairs and 2d treadmills. But as usual, the dissonance was fleeting.

The Pasha spoke.

”Welcome to the Dark Forest Marketing Agency. I am required by Turkish law to disclose that I am Pasha7, a certified digital twin representing Mr. Ibrahim Pasha of Sultanahmet, the renowned human marketing expert with whom you have signed the contract for this initial fifteen-minute consultation at the low introductory price of 0.05 ETH. As per Turkish law, Mr. Pasha accepts full legal responsibility for my actions on his behalf, as an AI model trained to track and mirror his evolving expertise as a marketing consultant, and offer affordable AI-based counsel on his behalf. I will strive to provide services comparable to the full-price ones provided by Mr. Pasha himself, to the select clients he handles personally. Please indicate your awareness that you are speaking with an AI mirror model.”