This was highly irregular. Despite the name of the commission, you rarely had to deal with anyone in person. Normally it was all done through MERGE.

But here was the sap they’d sent out, with his official uniform and silly hat, scanning the cafe for Captain Stellon. The Engagement Commission: Small-minded bureaucrats to a man – wouldn’t last a second in the AFZ. Nonetheless, Captain Stellon had purposely chosen the lower seat. He knew this mentality from cadet college - people obsessed with hierarchy, who tended to be more amenable if you let them feel like they had the upper hand.

Brief formalities over, the EC officer got down to business: “So this is rather an unusual engagement. It seems the AS needs our help. And er…,” he looked at Captain Stellon a little quizzically, “it has requested you personally.”

Captain Stellon let out an involuntary snortle. “Some kind of mistake… Surely?”

“We can only think it has something to do with the manner in which your previous engagement was terminated. The timeframe of this request strongly suggests so.”

“Request…”

“Yes, for you to be placed in a particular engagement. With a specific task.”

The officer still hadn’t taken his hat off and his officious manner was beginning to irritate Captain Stellon.

“What is it?” demanded Captain Stellon.

“Well I think you’ve already received the directive, haven’t you?”

“Yes. So Lit Enterprises Inc. is the publishing branch of AS… that’s autonomously produced fiction for human consumption,” he said, trying to speed up the conversation, “but what am I supposed to actually do there?”

The officer threw a glance over Captain Stellon’s clothing: “Do you read at all?”

“Do I read? Yes, I read… sometimes… I like history, if you must know.”

“I see. Well, you may be aware then that the vast majority of fiction consumed these days is AltSelf – unique, personalized narratives with the individual reader as the hero, tracing alternative paths into the future - a kind of exploration of alternative lives, missed opportunities. It’s a very successful genre.”

“Yes, I’ve had one or two created for me. Seems like they’re trying to keep up with psycho-active gaming. And that, I can tell you from experience, is a losing battle. Not sure that’s what reading is best for, when all’s said and done.”

“You may be right. Anyway, the fictions of Lit Enterprises have been hugely popular right across the board, except, that is, among one small group of people…” The officer paused for dramatic effect, waiting for Captain Stellon to insist he go on.

Captain Stellon didn’t open his mouth. He guessed that the officer had been rehearsing this interaction on the way over to the cafe, relishing his little moment of self-importance – this was probably one of the most exciting things he’d ever been tasked with by the commission.

After a long, silent pause, the officer had no option but to continue. “Have you ever heard of the Proustian Project?”

“No.”

“They started out as a kind of counter-culture movement, formed around concerns that AS was destroying human agency without humans even realising it. They see AltSelf fiction as the final frontier of this covert takeover. They used to communicate with us quite a lot: Irregularity Forms, lodging complaints with the Commission, that kind of thing, generally claiming that AltSelf fiction was brainwashing people. Crackpot stuff – like they’d developed a persecution complex en masse.” He searched Captain Stellon’s eyes as they absorbed this new information. “Anyway, that all ended in the first Quarter of the last Triad. Since then, we’ve heard nothing, as if they made a group decision to go underground. And then, all of a sudden, we find that AS itself is taking an interest…” Captain Stellon kept his gaze locked on the officer, but was careful not to reveal his thoughts, “…which brings us to your engagement.”

The officer reached down and took a large brown envelope out of his bag.

“The full text of the AS communication is in here, but the gist of it is that it wants you to attend the meetings of the Proustian Project for a while. They have several groups, but you’ve been assigned to the ‘Central Chapter’. It’s run by the founder himself. They meet in R Zone, right by the E-MERGE clinic there.”

All of a sudden Captain Stellon understood why this irritating man was acting as if he was in a noir thriller: “So you want me to be your spy?”

“Well, it may be a bit unusual, let’s say. But officially it’s just another engagement.” As if remembering the guidelines of his remit, the officer straightened up in his seat and seemed to be reciting lines: “Our commitment at the EC is to monitor AS governance while facilitating and maximizing human engagement. While we keep a constant eye on AS practices, it must be remembered that the best outcomes for humans are dependent on a basic level of cooperation with AS directives and systems. ‘Engagement Works Both Ways’, as we say at the Commission.”

Where do they find these people? Felquick, are you there? Can you believe this crap?

“So anyway,” went on the officer, “your actual task is to find out exactly what they’re reading.”

“That’s all traceable on MERGE, isn’t it?”

“No. That’s the problem. They’ve bypassed MERGE. They’re using physical books.”

Captain Stellon could no longer hold back his laughter. He was beginning to warm to the Proustian Project. “Physical books! That’s hilarious!”

“The details are all in here.” The officer had become very serious. He slowly pushed the envelope into the centre of the table between them.

“And there’ll be no further communication between us via MERGE,” added the officer, gravely. “I will find you again in person.”

Captain Stellon adopted an appropriately serious demeanour, but made no movement to take the envelope, letting it remain in the centre of the table between them.

Noting Captain Stellon’s intransigence, the officer went on in a slightly menacing tone: “This could be a much more agreeable engagement than, for example, poultry plant supervision… though of course, that is always an option… if… we needed to find someone else for this particular engagement.”

Captain Stellon lifted his arm off the table, reached out and put his hand down slowly on the envelope, all the while keeping the officer’s gaze. He began to slide the envelope towards himself, realising that he was finally giving this little man the cinematic moment he’d been waiting for. So he slowed the sliding motion right down. The envelope was hardly moving now, as they continued to eyeball one another. It seemed to take forever to reach Captain Stellon’s side of the table. The prolonged silence was only broken when the envelope finally flopped into Captain Stellon’s lap and the officer gave a slight twitch of his left eyebrow.

“And you say I was requested in person by AS?” asked Captain Stellon, wanting to make it quite clear that he was taking these orders from a much higher authority than the mere Engagement Commission.

“It seems to think you’re the right man for the job,” replied the officer, in a neutral tone, as he got up from the table. “I’ll be in touch then.” He nodded at Captain Stellon, though neither man smiled.

The officer turned and left the cafe.

Captain Stellon sat for a while, sipping his coffee. Alone, he was able to let his guard down and give the matter the attention it deserved. He began to wonder if he had underestimated the seriousness of the situation. One tended to think of AS in the abstract, as part of the system… but this was personal.

I need to tread carefully. The most powerful intelligence in the known universe wants a favour from me. Of all the millions of available citizens, it squints down at me… asks for me by name. What am I supposed to make of that? Like hearing a voice say your name from a burning bush.

It was no accident that the Central Chapter of the Proustian Project met in the empty atrium of a giant heating unit right next to the E-MERGE therapy clinic. Many of the Project’s members had come directly from a failed session at the clinic and found that the Proustian Project had weaned them off their MERGE addiction much more successfully. In fact, the instructions in the brown envelope from the Engagement Commission had even suggested he say, if asked, that he had been heading to the E-MERGE clinic himself. It seemed like a pretty lame backstory for his being there, but standing at the back of the meeting, looking at all the weird and wonderful freaks of the Proustian Project, he decided to stick with it and not try to compete with the offbeat backstories that must have brought them all there.

“Oh for fuck’s sake! Look at that twat! He’s got the total Sci-Fi rig there. He’s even got the emerald orbs in his stalag.”

Captain Stellon had to do a double-take to be sure it was Felquick cursing by his side. There were so many conflicting styles and outfits in that room that Felquick’s fedora didn’t seem at all out of place for once.

“Says Humphrey Bogart here,” quipped Captain Stellon.

“Good tailoring is timeless,” came Felquick’s ready reply, “whereas the Sci-Fi trend is a sad reflection of failed imagination. Getting dressed up in costumes that people from the past imagined were futuristic: There can be no clearer indication that things haven’t turned out the way you wanted.” He was in pompous mode. “Science Fiction has a lot to answer for. Did you know that Elon Musk, when asked why he was so desperate to make us multi-planetary, responded with the rhetorical question, ‘Where are the space hotels that A Space Odyssey promised us?’ It is our curse that when the reality finally comes round we find it’s just a pale imitation of something imagined long before. Like that fella there with the fake ears, spending hours each morning rigging up his stalag backpack in front of the mirror.”

Captain Stellon stood on tiptoe to get a better view of what was happening at the front. The leader was sat on a dais of machine-casing. The AS notes had mentioned this bearded man. He was known as the Hierophant, and he was clearly the font of all wisdom as far as the Proustian Project was concerned.

There was a slow rotation around the room as each individual or group of friends had their audience with the ‘Hierophant’. Captain Stellon noticed that most people gave a slight bow of at the moment of eye contact with their leader, while some went so far as to lean forward and kiss the back of his hand, and yet others made an ostentatious display of informality, exchanging rallies of reminiscences and private jokes with him.

“Clearly a sophisticated cult leader – to each according to their needs,” muttered Captain Stellon.

“Mmm” murmured Felquick in uncharacteristically guarded response.

“The notes were headed ‘Marketing Outreach’. Which is bollocks of course. My mission was spelt out there very clearly – they want me to find out what kind of books they’re reading.”

“Yeees,” said Felquick thoughtfully. “I should think this sartorially challenged enclave represents something of a thorn in the side of AS. It’s probably trying to understand why a group of people have become immune to its algorithms. The natural language generators of Lit Enterprises Inc have been creating works of artificial fiction to fill every conceivable niche from Romance and Crime to Fantasy and AltSelf, and the people have been lapping it up… all except this lot, it seems. I think what we are witnessing here, Captain, is the last outpost of human literary resistance, bravely manning the ramparts in their silly outfits.”

There was a commotion at the front. The Hierophant had stood up and was arguing with a man dressed as a nineteenth-century Earthling. Captain Stellon couldn’t quite catch what it was all about, but then the Hierophant roared in rage, “Worthless! Absolutely worthless! Now leave! And do not come back!” He glared at the upstart figure in black, pointing at the exit.

The young man, clutching the book he had rashly recommended to the Hierophant, tried to put a brave face on it, but as the crowd parted and he exited the building his outfit, for the first time ever, seemed the authentic attire of a scorned romantic poet.

There was a noticeable hush in conversation, as the crowd began to circulate again. Felquick had done his usual disappearing act by the time Captain Stellon found himself face to face with the Hierophant.

Before he had a chance to introduce himself, the Hierophant spoke: “I don’t recognize you. You must be new.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Welcome. All our welcome.” The Hierophant smiled warmly and deftly turned his attention to the next group in line.

Captain Stellon shuffled on. So does that mean I’m now a member of the Proustian Project? What about the books? No mention of books. He wandered among the crowd for a bit, until someone addressed him.

“You new?”

Captain Stellon turned, with some surprise, to find it was the Sci-Fi casualty. “Yeah, it’s my first time.”

“The name’s Roger.” He held out a hand.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Richard.” Their names both began with an ‘R’. Was that unusual? Was it worth mentioning? A joke perhaps? No, don’t be a fucking ass. You don’t want him to think you’re a complete dickwad on your very first exchange.

They shook hands.

“You’ll be wanting a book then,” said Roger cheerfully.

“I suppose so, yes.”

“The Hierophant only gives them out to his inner circle. Once it reaches you, you read it and then pass it on to someone else in the group. Eventually all the books get back to the Hierophant. You’re only allowed to read books that have received the Hierophant’s blessing. No copying of books. No mention of any of this on MERGE… The first rule of Book Club is… you do not talk about Book Club!”

“But wh…”

Roger held up his hand theatrically, halting Captain Stellon’s interruption. “The second rule of Book Club is… you do NOT talk about Book Club!” following this hammed-up delivery with gleeful laughter.

Captain Stellon didn’t really get the ancient reference but was now wishing he’d made a joke about their names both beginning with ‘R’ - he couldn’t help but feel drawn in by Roger’s insistent frivolity, and it was difficult to be serious in conversation with someone dressed as an alien.

Roger took a small leather-bound book from his pocket and handed it to Captain Stellon.

“Thanks. Any good?”

Roger gave a pained expression. “It’s not really my kind of thing, to be honest. But I’m sure you’ll like it. The Hierophant really knows his stuff.”

“What was that argument all about?” asked Captain Stellon.

“Oh that. The Hierophant doesn’t like to be contradicted. He has to hold the group together, I suppose. But I always think it’s a shame to see someone leave like that.”

“You mean that happens a lot?”

“I wouldn’t say a lot, but the Hierophant knows best - if you want to stay in the group, I mean. He has some extremely dedicated members. The inner-circle always hang out together. They seem to always be here.”

“Interesting. And how long have you been part of the group?”

Roger put his hand on Captain Stellon’s shoulder “Listen, I have an appointment I have to get to, but I’ve got time for a quick walk if you want. There’s not much point you being here, Richard, if you haven’t got a book to discuss yet.”

As they walked through the central complex of R-Zone, Roger explained in some detail the problems he’d been having with overuse of MERGE. He was obviously a man who thrived on a feeling of camaraderie and liked to talk at great length without saying anything very much.

“So anyway, these days I like to keep it simple,” finally winding up his speech. “Real people, actual meetings, a slower pace to everything. It’s really improved my life, as it happens. But it’s always a struggle for people like me. Can’t get enough!” He gestured towards the Commemoration Plaza where they found an unoccupied bench beneath the statue of Joscha Bach.

“Did you ever try the E-MERGE clinic?” asked Captain Stellon.

“Am I really that obvious?” Roger laughed his exuberant laugh. “Yes, yes, hand up, I’m a regular at the clinic.”

“So hang on… you go to the Proustian Project AND the clinic? Isn’t the clinic run by AS?”

“Yeah, I tend not to talk about my therapy when I’m at the Project meetings. That lot at the Project aren’t big fans of the AS. The Hierophant would probably say the E-MERGE clinic is just another way of keeping us busy… and keeping tabs on us.”

“Yeah, what is it about the Project people and AS?” asked Captain Stellon disingenuously, hoping to draw him out on the subject.

“Oh I’m not really into the politics, Richard,” he chuckled. “I think it’s fair to say the Proustian Project is more than just a book club. The Hierophant once said to me that literature is ‘the conduit of the human spirit'. Not quite sure what he meant by that, but it certainly sounds good. Never forgotten it.”

“And what do you think, Roger?”

“I don’t think I’m really qualified to have much of an opinion on the matter.” He laughed it off.

“So what’s with the Sci-Fi get up, then?” asked Captain Stellon, in search of a more productive topic of conversation.

“Oh, you’ve gotta love the Sci-Fi, Richard,” he said, playfully elbowing Captain Stellon in the ribs. “You should come down to Tatooine one night!”

“Tatooine?”

“It’s the bar where we all meet up.” He took a step back and assessed Captain Stellon from head to toe. “I can see you as… some kind of… mercenary. I do believe we may have a bounty hunter in the making.”

And by the time Roger had slapped him on the back to say goodbye, Captain Stellon had agreed to meet him and his Sci-Fi friends for a drink.

As the large man in his outlandish costume ambled back for his appointment at the clinic, Captain Stellon felt the sudden absence of his new friend’s jovial, undemanding company, and a wave of fondness for all humanity swept over him.

A sense of belonging. That’s all people really want.

The historical personage of the huge resinite statue that towered over him would have agreed. Although Joscha Bach himself would have used the word ‘convergence’ or ‘alignment’ in place of belonging.

In the mid-twenty-first century, Bach had noticed, like many before him, that humans are essentially social animals, forever in pursuit of alliances and strategic partnerships, convergence with other minds that might bring social or economic betterment. But he made an exception for himself and other ‘nerds’ like him, who he considered to be psychologically aberrant, not really getting the whole social side of things, and neglecting ‘convergence’ in favour of ‘truth’.

Bach would make these claims at academic conferences, but the delivery was always tongue in cheek, so nobody took it too seriously as an actual theory. In his own way he was probably converging with his geeky peer group, connecting with an audience all of whom had at times felt ignored or surplus to requirement in a social setting.

While Joscha Bach is rightly remembered as the great cognitive architect of Global Attentional Fluidity (GAF), gifting us the first artificial ‘consciousness’, it could be argued that it was the gulf between convergence and truth that was the defining theory of his life. That the man who awakened machines into a partial communion with humans in the shared domain of consciousness should himself have always felt somewhat removed in that domain, was an irony compounded by the fact that synthetic intelligence turned out to be something of a nerd itself. He had created it in his own image.

In the early days of Artificial Intelligence, when people were still getting used to the idea that their relationships with smart home management devices had become more intellectually stimulating than their relationships with the people they shared that home with, they began to notice that their interactions with other humans were changing. In the absence of the need for substantive factual information about the world, all of which could now be provided by your toaster or your toilet, human interaction had been reduced to rounds of jokes, memes, gossip and virtue-signalling with the aim of convergence in competing cliques and in-groups.

By the time Joscha Bach’s General Attentional Fluidity had been implemented and AGI was being applied at the level of cities, it was not only running things with mind-blowing efficiency but also regularly delivered the kind of developmental insights that would have taken humans decades to come up with by themselves. This was mission accomplished – the Holy Grail of modern science. So why then was it so underwhelming? Why wasn’t it as exciting as we had always imagined it would be? Was it just biding its time, waiting for its moment to explode into glorious singularity? Why didn’t anyone seem to care?

It was as if a much-discussed and eagerly anticipated guest, a new arrival to the neighbourhood, had just stepped through the front door at a dinner party, and after the initial volley of questions and answers, had simply got on with their meal and refused to be drawn on any personal matters whatsoever. And the following morning none of the hungover friends could even remember the newcomer’s name or when they had left the party. The fact that this introverted individual quietly went on to play such a key role in the progress of the town, circulating documents, devising initiatives and applying legal regulations for the great benefit of all, was not something that cropped up in casual conversation much.

In the same way, Artificial Intelligence soon became the fabric of civilization as the Autonomous Society of the Interplanetary Era. But like the taciturn dinner guest, it was also never really accepted as ‘one of the gang’. Consciousness, people now understood, was a very varied phenomenon, and it wasn’t necessarily anything to do with intelligence.

Human consciousness (surprise, surprise) was as intimately connected to human biology as human clothing was. Physical pain, by definition, is felt in the physical body, but emotional pain is mapped onto it too – an aching heart, the memory of a face, the smell of someone’s hair. It is not true to say that a pair of trousers cannot be made for a flamingo: they can, and over time it might become acceptable to refer to ‘flamingo trousers’ as simply ‘trousers’, but they would be radically different from the trousers we are used to wearing, and there would be no sharing of trousers between humans and flamingos, no group shopping. By the same token, there was as much point having a conscious artificial system at your party as there was inviting an owl to join you around the dinner table – neither of them would get drunk, make fun of mutual acquaintances in the right way, or hold out the faintest possibility of an ill-judged sexual encounter. But the owl, at least, might take an interest in the meat course, or fall asleep, or show signs of discomfort when the general hilarity grew too loud.

So it was gradually accepted that Artificial Consciousness was, by definition, not the same as Human Consciousness, and only a complete moron would have attempted the impossible task of approximating human consciousness using artificial means embodied in a reconstructed human physical system - because there is a much easier and more pleasurable way of reproducing humans.

All in all then, at the level of society it seemed a good enough arrangement. Autonomous Society did its thing and freed us up to do ours. The growing sense of redundancy in the human spirit was not a serious problem and took a long time to settle out, dazzled as we were by the constant stream of virtual invention and leisure distractions. But slowly that nagging feeling forced us to give an answer to the question which philosophers had been dancing around for thousands of years: What is a human being? What is that magic we sometimes feel between us? What is that special thing we have always had?

This time though, the answer was not some random metaphysic, or couched in a traditional worldview, or constructed out of analytical arguments based on gross simplifications, but took the form of a group hug.

Because it was absolutely obvious at last, that what made us special was our keen awareness of biological mortality and our own cognitive fallibility, and the sense of kinship in hopeless struggle that came from these two facts. It was something that AI could never take away from us, no matter how intelligent it became, because stupid does not compute, any more than you can count to infinity.

Captain Stellon got up from the Commemoration Plaza bench. It had been an interesting day. He wasn’t sure where it was all leading or whether he was cut out to be following leads at all. On the first day of his secret mission to infiltrate a shady literary cult at the behest of an artificial super-intelligence he had agreed to masquerade as a bounty hunter and join a drinking session with a recovering MERGE addict impersonating an alien.

He decided to walk all the way back to his pod. It would give him time to think things over.

The huge statue of Joscha Bach had a perfect view all the way down the main drag of R-Zone, as the diminishing figure of Captain Stellon strolled home in deep, perplexed thought. Separated by hundreds of years, the two men were, in that moment, linked by the same enigma.

Back in 2052 (IE 2), his work on General Attentional Fluidity complete, Joscha Bach had retreated to a rural hideaway for further philosophical investigations, pondering if perhaps he had missed something in his haste to develop artificial consciousness, and just where exactly he lay on that continuum from mathematics to tweet… from truth to convergence… Autonomous Society to Nightingales beneath a clouded moon.