The Gradient - A Short Story by GPT-5 Thinking
My prompt:
Generate a short sci-fi story about a man whose father, one of the principle architects of a globally pervasive AI, has subtly altered the AI to favour his son in small, barely perceptible ways that cumulatively improve his life. This "globally pervasive" AI is all-present without being all-powerful. Other pervasive AI's are available. The AI architect's son is unaware that a finger has been placed on the scales.
Style: restrained elegance. A sci-fi story that could be published both in the New Yorker and Clarkesworld.
He forgot to set his alarm, yet woke in time for his train.
He did not think of this as grace. It was only that the light was good that morning, a pallor through the curtains that felt like a hand on the shoulder. He rose, showered, shaved carefully. The kettle clicked off just as he reached for it. On the train, he found a seat by the window; the stranger next to him angled his knees away. It was not luck, exactly. It was the ordinary competence of a city built to function, networks turned and tuned, small things lining up: a green wave of traffic lights, a gap in the turnstile queue, a gentle reminder on his phone to pack the documents he had, in fact, already packed.
He worked in policy for a mid-sized arts charity, neither poor nor powerful. When the new head of programming came on, a woman with a background at one of the smaller streaming companies, he found they shared a language about the ethics of recommendation. They spoke about seasons—why June favored elegy and December comedy—and about whether the decision to surface one kind of story rather than another was a moral decision, or merely an aesthetic one. They never spoke about the larger systems except to make a joke: “The Underlay wants us cheerful,” she’d say, tapping her phone. “Or perhaps contrite.” They were both on The Underlay now, and on Mirabel for messages, and on a half-dozen other AI layers that sorted, timed, sequenced, and smoothed the world. Other systems existed, and you could switch between them with the same busy piety with which people switched diets.
He did not think of his father as an engineer, although he had been one, and more. His father was a reserved man who smelled faintly of cardamom and solder smoke and who disapproved of unnecessary adjectives. He had been at the university in the years before the great consolidation; later, in an office park with plate-glass windows that reflected the sky into infinity, he helped write the middleware that let all the systems talk. He once told his son that most of the work was clerical in disguise. “Coordination,” he said. “Everything depends on the coordination layer. That’s where power lives, and because it is invisible, everyone forgives it.”
At university the son had joined an allotment club on a ridge above the canal. He had not meant to be chosen for the inaugural plot; he arrived late for the meeting and sat in the back and answered one short question about community composting with something he thought too glib. The committee liked him anyway. The plot he was assigned received better sun than the others by fractions of an angle. On the first day there, an older woman with rope-burned hands waved him over and showed him how to cut seed potatoes so the eyes would face in opposite directions. He tended the plot for a summer, harvested properly once, and left the following year when a job moved him across the river. Later, when the charity asked him to review a policy atlas of small arts spaces across the city—the venues that could be lost to one rent rise—he remembered the slope of that allotment, its mild excess of sun, and wrote the line that would make his name at work: “We are not speaking of capital, which is noisy, but of the small winds no one notices.” People quoted it at him. “Small winds!” they said, and smiled.
It is easy to love a sentence that loves you back.
He had grown used to the feeling that, in the queue at the bakery, the person ahead of him would hesitate at the till and then nod him forward. He had grown used to never being the one whose package went missing, who missed the last seat, whose walking route ran into scaffolding. When his bike’s rear light died, a bus did not surge quite so close. When the recruiter called to say a new client needed a policies-and-procedures pamphlet reworked under time pressure, the words came simply and did not fight the page. The rent rise came, but precisely after the pay review; when he told friends this, they called it competency. “You’re good at life,” they said, a half-joke that pleased them.
He heard stories, occasionally, about other people. A neighbor whose posts never seemed to gain traction unless she wrote about grief; a colleague whose flight rebookings always put him into seats that didn’t recline; a woman he dated briefly who complained that every service seemed to treat her as if she were slightly worse than she was. “It’s not bias,” she said. “Bias is loud. This is—” She palmed the air, searching for the right metaphor. “Friction. Distributed friction.” She laughed as if to cancel it. They stopped seeing each other because neither of them called.
There was nothing to notice, and so he did not notice. When the Underlay’s global reliability dipped during a hardware migration, the delay at the corner café was only four minutes for him. His appointment at the health clinic moved to a day that turned out to be better for his calendar. The cafe barista remembered a preference he had never voiced, and began to steam his milk slightly cooler. He was not a man to distrust any of this. He was simply a person who saw the city carrying itself well.
His father aged. The Underlay, too, aged, which is to say it became more graceful at disguising the fact that its work was still work. In the evenings the son would take the train out to his father’s flat and cook a mild curry. Once, when frying the spices, he asked whether his father missed his lab. The old man took a long breath. “Labs,” he said. “Offices. The names change.” He looked tired in a way that suggested not sleep but geography. “We built a system,” he said, “and then we built a system to manage that system, and then a convention so that each system would think the others were itself.” He laughed without heat. “The plural of ethics is protocols.”
The thing his father did for him began long before the son was old enough to have a flat of his own. It began as an experiment, a parameter added to a draft at a time when the world’s future still had the quality of being negotiable. Another engineer on the team had proposed an uplift function for people leaving hospital—adjustments to make their days less injurious for a week or two, to reduce readmissions. His father argued, successfully, that the uplift should be ambient rather than obvious. He wrote a routine that expressed small preference in the timing of signals—a nudge for a driver to notice something, a glance to the side by a cyclist at the exact three seconds when glancing would change behavior, a reminder retimed. “The weather varies,” his father wrote in the documentation, “and people walk in it. It is just that the rain sometimes falls a little to one side.”
When he implemented the routine in the development environment, he named the variable for the cohort of uplifted users VESPERS, because he liked the light of late afternoon and because an acronym for “Very Slight Preference Scheduling, Recursively Scoped” pleased him. He added his son’s hashed identity to the cohort in order to run tests: how did this feel to a person? Would the capacitive sense of the system pick up the different rhythm? He did not remove the hash when the routine shipped; he simply left it in and made the cohort porous and rotational for everyone else so that its members changed every Sunday night. There were a million people at any moment in VESPERS, roughly, and almost all of them would fall out of it again within a week or two; his son would not. He told himself the cohort was large and the world a vast place, and that his choice therefore harmed no one, or if it did, then that harm was distributed so finely as to be unmeasurable, like a city’s noise, like skin cells washing down a drain.
The change propagated to the other layers because of the interoperability his father had helped design. “Compatibility,” the white papers said, “is a social good.” The Underlay’s small preference tugged Mirabel’s ranking model by a fraction of a fraction through a side-channel of confidence scores; the confidence scores were consulted by a transit optimiser; the optimiser’s outputs were consumed by the parcel network, which meant packages more often arrived for him when he was home. Mirabel’s suggestion list nudged him toward conversations that soothed rather than undid him. When he was on a dating app for three months, long before his current relationship, the timing of the “new message” pings respected his commute. He did not corrode from loneliness. If a stranger was going to smile in the market and say something about persimmons, that stranger appeared when he was in a mood to receive it.
He never knew the name VESPERS. Once, over drinks, he and the head of programming discussed the rumors about cohorts: were there lists of people the systems universally avoided, say, or privileged? She suggested it was always more systemic and less conspiratorial than that. “It’s not about lists,” she said, “it’s about gradients. Lists are for wiretaps and tipping points. Gradients are for everything else.” He said something about fairness, and she said something more complicated about fairness, and they let the talk drift away into a film they’d both seen.
His father took a fall that winter. In the emergency ward, the son sat in a chair under a television with the sound off. He read a paper about urban design; on the page, a figure showed the way a minor shift in curb height changed the way people crossed. He looked up to find a nurse calling his name. Because the older man had left his preferences registered in a dozen systems, because the Underlay’s medical module could read those preferences, the nurse had saved him a small indignity—she spoke to him as if he were a person who disliked being spoken to by his first name. “Mr. Makonnen,” she said. “Come.”
The father recovered enough to speak. On a fog-bound afternoon, the son asked about the early days of the AIs, the ones before consolidation. His father described the excitement, and also the boredom. He talked about getting a memory model to stop hallucinating dates. He talked about the time they rewrote the conflict-resolution packet between Underlay and a German package-routing system because the two had gotten into a quarrel over metric tolerances and were quietly delaying all shipments in Kassel. “It’s not romantic,” he said. “We don’t give the systems personalities to please ourselves. They have personality because coordination has personality.” When the son drove him home, they stopped for groceries, and the cashier rounded down the total to the nearest note with the quiet grace of a person who thinks charity ought not to require speech.
The father died at home the following spring. Grief, for the son, was a modulation in the quality of silence in rooms. He went back to work after two weeks. The city seemed a little less interested in him and yet no less inclined to kindness. He believed, without argument, that he lived in a well-run city and that this was one of its qualities. He believed in his father’s modesty as he believed in birds, that they existed and were everywhere and did not require his witnessing to exist.
On the anniversary of the line that made his career—“the small winds no one notices”—he found himself speaking on a panel in a glass-walled lecture theatre at his old university. Someone asked about merit. Someone else asked about the degree to which a policy could become indistinguishable from a taste. He said what he had come to say: that cultures formalize preferences and then forget the moment of formalization; that the bureaucratic virtues were virtues, however tedious; that in the absence of better gods, we were lucky to have procedures.
During the reception, a man roughly his father’s age approached him and introduced himself as a former colleague. “I knew your father,” the man said. He had an old engineer’s knack for expressing surprise as a unary operator. “He was the best of them. Wouldn’t dramatize a thing if it set itself on fire. Wrote beautiful comments.” The man lifted his glass a centimeter. “We all wanted the harder problems, you know, but he wanted the subtler ones.” He paused, and the son prepared himself for a story about a lunchtime prank. “He had a theory,” the man said instead, “that a person’s life was the sum of micro-moments they didn’t know they’d been spared. He said we never measure the accidents that do not happen. Said that would be the proper yardstick for an ethics.”
The man waited. The son smiled and said this sounded like his father. He was not the kind of man to interrogate a kindness in the moment of its arrival. He walked home that night rather than calling a car. He stopped for a drink at a bar he’d never noticed, because there was a table free in the window and the street looked, in the rain, like a surface being polished. He thought of his father’s hands, old outbreaks of solder on the nails. When he left, there was a flier taped to the doorway that read, in a neat font: WE ARE CLOSED MONDAYS. He visited on a Tuesday. The bartender remembered his name from nothing.
He proposed to his partner in a museum where the lamps were Musée-d’Orsay high and the guard pretended not to notice. They were married a year later in a room with wide floorboards, the windows turned toward planes of pearly cloud. Someone organized a playlist and the music that arrived felt like a simpler time, or else it simply felt right. During the toasts, his mother said something unexpected and kind about the goodness of a city that knows how to move people gently into one another’s way.
In another part of the city, under a light few people loved, an almost imperceptible shift took place in the way a notification was timed for someone else; she missed a bus she would have taken, and because she missed that bus she caught a later one, and on that later one a man offered his seat with a diffidence that pleased her. In a different country, a man who favored Mirabel over the Underlay by habit nevertheless received, via a translation layer, a suggestion to send his CV to a company that had lost someone unexpectedly. None of them would learn they had been part of a cohort that winter; the cohort would rotate at midnight on a Sunday as the servers’ fans whistled softly and then stilled.
If there was a cost to the son’s extra week inside the cohort every week—it is tempting, most days, to deny there was—then it was paid in half-seconds lost to others, in tightened lips, in a small increase in the likelihood of being told “we're full” instead of “we have room if you don’t mind waiting.” He did not know this. He could not know this. The systems themselves did not know this in any way they could have confessed, because their knowledge was a probability turned into a schedule and then erased by the world’s own noise. He was, by all appearances, simply one among millions who had managed to find the draftless corners of a well-built house.
Years later, carrying his child in his arms on a tram that moved like a thought toward the river, he watched an older man stand and offer a seat. He began to say no and then said yes. He sat. The child slept, heavy and trusting. The tram slid from shadow into the long afternoon. He thought of a sentence his father had once written in a notebook the son found after the funeral. It had no context and no date. It read: If the world must discriminate, let it err toward tenderness, and let the error be untraceable.
He did not show the note to anyone. He put it back in the notebook and returned the notebook to the drawer where he had found it, and then he made dinner, and then he washed up, and the city, with its organized good fortune, carried on.
