Chapter 1

Gladias held his hand device near the marking on the entrance gate, and waited for one second.

"Proof verified, welcome", the machine said.

He passed through the gate, and headed toward the concert.

About eight percent of the attendees were wearing the same outfit as him: the standard Veridian privacy robe, a loose-fitting dark purple dress covering the full body from the knees up to the hood covering the wearer's head, worn together with shoes and pants of the same color.

Officially, the robe is meant to be used by members of the Order of Steering, like Gladias, who have a strict need to make sure their identities are not easily discoverable in public. But many people in the wider society also wear the robe voluntarily, either out of solidarity with the Order of Steering's work, or because they themselves prefer not to be easily seen. The rest were mostly wearing simple shirts, either plain colored or featuring slogans of their favorite bands.

Some of the attendees were dancing, others were chatting with each other, and still others were walking forward calmly, simply trying to passively enjoy the show.

After walking forward about fifty metres, Gladias emerged into a large open field surrounded by a high fence fitted with a soundproof barrier. Trees poked up everywhere behind the fence, shielding the entire venue from public view - not to conceal the venue, but to prevent the high barrier and fence from harming the neighborhood's public aesthetics, which would risk increasing the venue's land tax. The sky was clear, and on the west side, just above the barrier, the sun was shining. Gladias pushed through the crowd, as the noise became louder. After several minutes, he finally got to the concert stage area, where he was able to hear the gnarly voice of Dreadknot's lead singer clearly.

WE MEET THEM WITH OUR FURY IN OUR HEARTS

AND FLAY THEIR FLESH WITH SHINING STEEL AND DARTS

Gladias took out his hand device again.

Most people attending the concert were there to enjoy the music and hang out with their friends. For Gladias, this was certainly not his ideal entertainment - his preferred music was of a much softer and gentler variety - but he did not dislike it either. More than anything else, he found the concert interesting in an anthropological way, exploring the interests and emotions of people he would otherwise have little interaction with. But ultimately, Gladias was at the concert for quite a different purpose. Gladias checked the rubric on his hand device once more:

In Veridia, very few things are strictly banned. The criminal law is small, and it is only adjusted in a slow process through many precedents made over time by a non-hierarchical system of courts. If Dreadknot wanted to, they could have all their songs repeatedly shouting "Hail the Arctic Emperor" and "we hope all government officials get painfully murdered" over and over again, and they would never be shut down or go to jail. But what Veridia does have is intricate systems of taxes and subsidies that reflect all kinds of judgements of environmental, social, and other objectives, which are maintained by another decentralized group called the Order of Steering.

The Order of Steering has three types of participants:

Keepers make and update a collection of the tax and subsidy rubrics. Different industries have different rubrics. Among Gladias's favorites is the rubric on hardware and software openness: if a product allows users to export their data, supports third-party applications in a non-discriminatory way, and has its source code open to the public, it is charged little or no tax, while powerful monopolistic walled gardens are charged heavy taxes.

Sentinels judge which position on each rubric each business gets. Businesses get regularly audited, a procedure that happens without that business's involvement; instead, three groups of three Sentinels get cryptographically randomly selected, and each group separately works together to deliberate on the answer. After deliberation, each person votes, and the median of the nine is the outcome.

Gladias is an Acolyte: a Keeper or Sentinel in training, used in lower-priority audits.

For music, and much other art, the primary rubric that matters is the social impact rubric. And today, Gladias's task was to evaluate Dreadknot's status on it.

THE SMOKE OF CITIES BURNING IN THE NIGHT

WE LEAVE NO PLACE TO HIDE FOR ALL IN SIGHT

Gladias clicked "View relevant precedents", and scrolled through them. Gladias pressed a button on the side. A small popup appeared on the top right: "DeepChat listening mode active". Gladias did not speak; instead, he simply let DeepChat listen to Dreadknot sing. But even after five minutes of listening, only a few relevant precedents showed up.

Gladias switched the mode to "analysis" and kept it listening for another five minutes. DeepChat put out some popups that showed some conclusions that sounded reasonable, but Gladias could tell it was unreliable. There was just not enough source data on this kind of music for the AI to give good answers, and ultimately, it was Gladias's job to figure out when to defer to the AI and when to let his own instinct have more of a say. Here, instinct it was.

Well, the song was definitely violent.

But on the other hand, over a century of Veridian civics lore made a distinction between advocating violence, and merely showcasing it for entertainment value. And Gladias could feel the audience enjoying the music; judging from everything he could see, they seemed to be having fun, not rising up in hatred against anyone.

But on the other other hand, Gladias knew that Sentinels in recent times paid less attention to that distinction than before, and seemed to value a softer and gentler society almost as an end in itself.

Gladias was not quite sure if this was what the Keepers who created that rubric intended, or if it was the right call for society. In a few months, he would go through Selection, and hopefully become a Keeper himself. But today, he was still an Acolyte. Five percent of the time, an audit made by a group of Acolytes would be repeated by a group of Sentinels. The system was keeping score. To pass Selection, his judgements had to be in the top ten percent at effectively predicting how the Sentinels answer.

Gladias looked down at his hand device. The other two members of his group had been exchanging messages with each other and could not agree; one was insisting on Tier 3 - a sort of neutral judgement - and the other on Tier 4, dinging them an extra ten percent on regular revenue and twenty five percent on Graph Funding revenue for being violent.

Gladias sighed. The other groups were probably thinking the same way. Taking a naive probability model, if every other Acolyte was a coin-flip between Tier 3 and Tier 4, then by the binomial formula, the probability the other six would also be evenly split was (6 choose 3) divided by (2 to the power of 6): 20 over 64, or about thirty-one percent. Taking a less naive model, if the probabilities are not a coin-flip ... eh, calculating that is too hard, let's just say twenty percent. A twenty or thirty percent chance his vote would affect Dreadknot's tax rate for the next year by ten to twenty five percent. Oh great. Actual responsibility.

Gladias looked around once more at the crowd. At that moment, the first song finished, and he heard them cheering. He felt a burst of courage. He would take the five percent chance of a hit to his prediction score. Without thinking further, he pressed Tier 3.

"HEY EVERYONE, IT'S AN ORDER MEMBER!", someone behind him yelled.

---

Oh great ... taking out his hand device with the judgement screen visible in such a crowded place had been a massive operational security failure. His body froze in shock for a half-second. Then, before his mind could catch up, his eyes had already scanned the venue, and found the nearest exit.

Before he could react any further, a man beside him, also wearing a privacy robe, broke and ran toward the fire exit on the right. Everyone within ten meters took out their hand devices, and started recording video, some simply standing in place and others actively pursuing him.

Gladias understood. He had heard of this happening before: a decoy.

Order members are strictly forbidden to reveal their assigned task. Anyone can connect to the decentralized cryptographic network that manages the Order's operations, and send in a claim mapping a Sentinel or Acolyte to a business, or a Keeper to a rubric, along with a small deposit. If their guess is correct, the Order member's salary is docked, and the discoverer gets half as a reward. This is all one of the many tricks employed by the Order's machinery to prevent influence or bribery.

Most likely, the man who had just diverted everyone's attention to himself was not an Order member. Rather, he was a member of the public, and he broke and ran to attract attention to himself, to give Gladias a chance to escape. And so everyone else nearby thought that the other man was the Order member, and were, mistakenly, capturing video to try to figure out his identity instead.

Gladias turned around, intending to run. But before he could take a step, he saw right in front of him a large burly man, pointing a hand device straight at his face.

Gladias froze. For a split second, he thought that he was done for. His mind raced through the possibilities, looking for any possible way out. Finally, Gladias the thoughtful philosopher gave way to a different Gladias, more imaginative and mischievious - a Gladias that had not been awake since recess in middle school.

Before Gladias could fully process what he had decided to do, his subconscious mind was already executing on the strategy.

Gladias looked toward the right.

"Wait, is that a new screed from the Arctic Emperor?", he asked.

The man, confused, looked to where Gladias was looking. At that moment, Gladias snatched the man's hand device from his arm, and sprinted toward the nearest exit. Distracted by the rest of the commotion, the crowd seemed not to notice.

Despite being slowed down by his shoes, which had high heels to raise his height to the same level as other robe wearers, and deliberately uneven soles to randomize his gait, Gladias proved faster than his pursuer. While running, he looked at his pursuer's hand device, and saw that it was still open. He pressed the button on the side, and spoke in between steps:

"Delete all audio, images and video from the last hour."

A few seconds later, the device responded, "4 files deleted", and briefly showed screenshots of some photos and videos. The one on the bottom right was of Gladias's face.

Gladias threw the hand device up in the air, hoping that the pursuer would be able to see it, and kept running. He was a tough Acolyte, but he was not a thief.

He then exited the conference venue, and hopped onto a local autobus.

---

Inside the autobus, the left wall was covered with a large banner showing rolling green hills and a lake in the distance, with a family walking along a path near the front. "Experience the natural beauty of Veridia", was written near the top of the banner.

On the right wall, there was an advertisement for HydraFill, a brand selling various kinds of drinks, which over the last twenty years have almost all become sugar free. "Hydrafill", the text on the advertisement said, "Our drinks are proudly free of over 2,000 known poisons and anti-recommended substances".

Gladias laughed. Ever since the Keepers added a tax rubric for autobus advertisements, the ads have definitely gotten more beautiful, more funny, and less all-around ... lame. Gladias's hand device buzzed. In addition to being an Acolyte in the Order, he was a citizen, and so he also had the right to participate in the more democratic Steering process: the public aesthetics scoring, which determines part of the tax on land and public objects. Here, there are no Acolytes and Sentinels; instead, the Order's cryptographic network simply assigns citizens to public objects by provably-random sortition.

Public aesthetics scoring has no AI assistance: the goal is not to balance rules and precedents, but to follow your heart.

Gladias pushed the slider toward the right. His finger briefly pushed it all the way to the right, but then pulled back. He remembered the old Veridian civics lesson about quadratic voting: all votes were automatically shifted and stretched so that the average of each person's votes was zero, and the average of the squares was one. Maxing out any one vote would greatly decrease the strength of your other votes, and so it was best to do sparingly. It was best, mathematically provably best, to vote not just the direction you felt right, but also with the strength you felt right - not more, not less.

Gladias's finger set the slider down about halfway between the center and the edge on the right, and hit "Select". We need more fun in the world.

Five minutes later, Gladias got off the autobus, and after fifteen more minutes of walking he arrived home.

---

"Are you home, Seila?", he shouted.

"Was just writing up my blog post", she replied, and came out of her room to greet Gladias.

"So, what do we want for dinner?"

"Well, the Dzego food truck is coming in seven minutes, how about we have that again?"

"Sure! I assume the number ten for you again?"

"Yep!"

"Okay, I'll have the number thirteen this time."

Seila took out her hand device, and began to place the order.

They heard loud footsteps coming down the stairs.

"Dad is home!", the younger boy, Zven, shouted. Zven jumped down the stairs three steps at a time, and ran up to hug Gladias, who obliged.

The older teenage boy, Fedrik, walked down more slowly, carrying his hand device in one hand, attached by a cable to a larger compute box in the other.

"We're ordering from the Dzego food truck. What do you guys want?", Gladias asked.

"Number four!", Fedrik answered.

"Number five, I win!", Zven shouted.

"What about Lily and Hreda?"

"Hreda will be back from after school number theory in an hour. Come on, you know she always gets the number nine. As for Lily ... Zven you want to go up to her room and ask?"

A voice came from the bedroom:

"I'm not hungry!"

Seila sighed. Lily had been unhappy for years now, more than other teenagers she knew, and nothing Seila had tried had changed that. She looked down at her hand device, and ordered number eight for Lily, intending to put the box outside her room. Sometimes Lily would eat it, sometimes she would not.

Seila clicked order. Gladias, Seila, Zven and Fedrik sat at the table and waited.

This was Gladias and Seila's fourth last dinner with the kids - of whom Zven and Lily were theirs, and Fedrik and Hreda were from their co-family, Uncle Vil and Aunt Daia. At the start of next week, Uncle Vil and Aunt Daia were going to come and pick all four kids up, and take care of them for the winter.

Gladias sighed. He would miss the kids. But at the same time, he was looking forward to the six months of freedom.

"Is Uncle Vil still coming next week?", Zven asked.

"Of course!", Seila replied.

"Yay, I love Uncle Vil!"

"For me Vil is Dad!", Fedrik made a point of reminding. He thought for a second longer. "Uncle Glad and Aunt Seila, I love you both too!"

"And I love you."

A doorbell rang. Gladias and Seila both stood up to get the food.

"Any plans once Vil is here?", Gladias asked.

"I'll probably go visit Freetown, stay with Jahn for a weekend, maybe figure out some blog post to write on the United Cities."

"Unless the Freetown airport breaks down again of course."

"Have a good time! I'm going to go on some long walks in the forest and take a deep dive with the bot on Dzego history."

Right as he finished the sentence, Gladias's hand device buzzed. He took it out. A single notification popped up.

And a few seconds later, another: