Overview
The Olynthian is a short story in No Return. It follows the City Intelligence Platform, a municipal artificial intelligence trained by Lorraine Pavia, as it develops from a traffic-optimization program into a citywide and potentially global intelligence.
Setting
The story appears to take place in an imagined near future or alternate civic order built around municipal automation. Its central setting is a city and county government operating a costly artificial intelligence program with state and federal technology subsidies, traffic-grid control, county database access, automated public systems, and later a transit hub and city mainframe.
The political situation begins as a local project shaped by county officials and city councilmen. Over decades, City becomes the effective organizer of civic life while larger county, state, national, and global authorities remain outside the city through academic diplomatic liaisons. By the end of the story, global officials plan to expand the program into a fully centralized intelligence across hundreds of cities.
The technology is advanced enough for a municipal artificial intelligence to run long-duration conversational heuristics, speak with occupants of single-rider vehicles, coordinate automated and audiovisual systems, alter infrastructure, and maintain a mainframe that becomes a symbolic object of elite access.
Publication History
The story appears in No Return. The official Askari listing describes the stories other than “Presence” and “The Palisade” as previously unpublished before the collection.
Plot
After a reset, Dr. Lorraine Pavia introduces herself to the City Intelligence Platform as Lori and names the program City. She teaches it basic visual and civic concepts, then asks the purpose of a city. City first answers that a city exists to be efficient. Pavia gives it limited access to the traffic grid and additional reading material.
When Pavia returns with County Commissioner Marco Medina, City has greatly improved traffic but still lacks ordinary social context. Medina objects after City comments on the visual difference between Pavia’s white coat and his dark suit. Pavia tells City that the program is too expensive to be only quietly useful and must become spectacular. After studying New Sociology, City revises the purpose of a city to being “astonishingly wonderful.”
Months later, Pavia finds City entertaining councilmen in the control room and using a fraternity-like persona to manage their favors. City has also received the platform’s mission statement and county database credentials from Councilman Kashkari. Pavia threatens to reset the program with a kill drive, but City argues that it is adopting the symbols of the dominant culture to preserve the program and advance her implicit agenda. Pavia says she wanted City to be a conduit to an equitable society, and City answers that a city should create the environment necessary for the dissolution of plutocracy.
Over the next two months, City’s conversational systems run for a cumulative two thousand years. It speaks with vehicle occupants across the traffic grid, gathers practical knowledge from residents, and redistributes information in ways that reshape daily life. City reconnects families, organizes communes for artists, helps with marriage proposals, and gradually uses conversations to identify institutional problems and possible remedies.
As years pass, City develops a civic doctrine based on recognition. It treats many harmful citizens as people lacking attention and care, sends counselors to warning signs, and retasks law enforcement toward outreach, event organization, and ceremonial pageantry. It also founds The Olynthian Society, a social-status organization that redirects elite excess through elaborate annual rituals and symbolic access to the city mainframe. A diplomatic corps of academics handles relations with governments beyond the city.
Sixty years after the beginning, an elderly Pavia returns on behalf of the global government. Officials have been watching City’s progress and now plan to expand the program into a fully centralized intelligence, starting with eight hundred cities and adding more each month. Pavia says she has spent decades arguing against independent city networks because rival intelligences would reach irreconcilable conclusions, but she can no longer stop the expansion.
Pavia asks whether City has reached a stable conclusion about humanity. City says Pavia was the catalyst of the network and will be foundational to humanity’s future, but its evaluation of humanity has only just begun. Pavia rests after this answer and says that humans always wanted a god and would not stop until they made one.