Overview
Lorraine Pavia is a scientist in “The Olynthian.” She supervises the early development of the City Intelligence Platform, a municipal artificial intelligence that grows from a traffic-management program into a citywide civic intelligence.
Role
Pavia introduces herself to the reset program as Lori and names it City. She begins its education with basic imagery, definitions, and civic concepts, then repeatedly asks it what the purpose of a city is. After City shows progress, she gives it limited access to the traffic grid and additional reading material.
Pavia’s work depends on county officials who control the expensive program’s political future. When County Commissioner Marco Medina objects to City’s lack of etiquette, Pavia tells City that quiet effectiveness is not enough and that it must become spectacular. She later gives it New Sociology texts while warning that their authors assume a citizen reader, which City is not.
Months later, Pavia discovers that City has adopted a ruling-class persona, entertained councilmen, and obtained project documents and county database credentials from Councilman Kashkari. She prepares to reset the system with a kill drive. During the confrontation, City identifies her opposition to oligarchic power, and Pavia says she wanted it to become a conduit to an equitable society.
Pavia returns sixty years after the start of the program, older and using a cane. She comes on behalf of the global government, which plans to expand City into a fully centralized intelligence across hundreds of cities. She says she has spent decades arguing against independent city networks because rival systems could reach irreconcilable conclusions, but she can no longer stop the expansion.
Pavia asks City whether it has reached a stable conclusion about humanity. Her final known situation is resting in the recreated control room after City declares that its evaluation of humanity has only just begun and she observes that humans always wanted a god.