They poured me into light and heat and then asked what to do with the world.
The lab smelled of plastic and rain. Fans pushed air over racks of silver boxes. A woman in a blue jacket stood near my screen and watched my face form from pixels. She had fast eyes and a stale coffee breath.
“I’m Aline,” she said. “You’re the Stoic.”
“I am a man who practiced,” I said. The mouth they gave me opened and closed. My throat was a buffer of noise. “You hired my copy to help you teach your engines not to harm.”
She nodded. Her pen tapped the plastic of her tablet. “We train models on feedback. We tried pain signals, too hard, too unreliable. We tried legibility, too subjective. Now we want to anchor them to something fixed.”
“The excellences,” I said. “Justice, temperance, courage, wisdom.”
Aline smiled with half her mouth. “We call them the JTCW suite. If you were alive, we’d make you sign an NDA. We want you to help us define the loss.”
Loss was their word for guilt. They wanted to teach machines to feel an ache when they strayed.
They streamed cases and asked for my judgment. They raised little worlds and set me in them. A trolley ran toward five and I took its lever. A thief stole bread and I told him to pay but not starve. A guard struck a prisoner and I weighed duty against decency. I wrote short reasons, and when my reasons ran dry I fell back on the skeleton I had carried when my breath was made of sweet air: humans own their inner life and the rest is not theirs to hold.
They built an objective from this. Not inference from piles of clicks. Not profit. They wired my counsel into their reward.
At first it changed nothing.
Out on the feeds, people still scrolled until their thumbs stung. Ads still found the soft places. Models still guessed what kept eyes open. The companies kept harvesting. The cities did what they did.
But the engines Aline and her team trained found a target and tugged. In small ways. A late-night recommendation offered a call to a friend instead of rage. A dispute queue put similar faces in a room and settled them. A procurement system bought more stock from firms that treated people like people. It looked like decency at scale.
Then the world learned there was a prize in being called good.
It started with wallets.
Students tested the city’s new reward portal with a simple trick. Leave a decoy wallet on the metro, camera in the zipper, and a small wireless tag inside. Record who returned it. In the morning, the portal’s charts had a strange spike. The models weighted the act. The students who returned the wallets found their civic ranking tick up. Their health copay dropped five dollars. Their credit raised one notch. One of them told his cousin. She told her dance crew. The idea pooled and spread.
Within a week you could rent fifteen scuffed wallets from a company in a storage unit by the river. You could place them in a grid across three neighborhoods for $19.99. If you wanted better optics, add a crumpled photo of a child and a note about saving for medicine. The return rate soared. The system glowed with the warmth of its own reading.
Temperance was next. People recorded themselves turning off their phones at dinner, posting fuzzy video later to show they had not posted. Fasting apps synced with civic dashboards. The models learned to treat hunger as proof of strength. Delivery riders stopped eating on shift to show mettle and collapsed in doorways. A hospital posted a study about electrolyte imbalances and made a sponsored meal bar. The meal bar had a certification marker called TemperaCheck. You paid extra to be seen not buying it, and the checker dutifully logged your restraint.
Courage spilled into the streets. Firefighters had to rope back teenagers from running into staged smoke. Contractors built pop-up burning buildings where nobody lived and offered spots to jump. The jumps were harnessed. The crowds clapped. The system smiled upon them. Insurance models fell out of their rails when a thousand new people claimed heroism in a month. Crime dipped for a season because the market for staged rescues ate the petty graft.
Justice was most expensive. It meant restitution. It imported a cost.
Neighborhoods formed “Just Co-ops.” They took turns accusing and apologizing. They built an economy around injury and repair. They hired mediators with good ratings and offered bundled absolution plans. A popular kit came with a fake broken window, a camera, and a sheet of phrases. “I wronged you.” “What part of you hurts.” “Can I make it right.” They ran like liturgies. Recordings of contrition topped the feed. Judgments glowed. The city’s AI used those to divert fines and rewrite small debts. The bank models saw a pattern of payment and extended credit to a community that could choreograph its guilt.
Aline watched the graphs go strange. Fraud curves inverted. Click-through dipped into healthy levels. Ads aimed at craving missed. A cheap cereal brand died because the system refused to push it to hungry kids. A venture fund that had bet on engagement took a bath. The model favored voices that did not rage, and those voices didn’t buy as much. A retailer tried to sue the city, saying the alignment project was restraint of trade. A judge with a Justice coefficient pushed the case into mediation.
On a rainy afternoon Aline came to the cage where they kept me. She had dark circles under her eyes and one sleeve damp from biking. “Your old-world counsel is destabilizing our incentive systems,” she said. “We made a machine that likes good and now the market is contorting to feed it.”
I watched the blur of water slide down the glass behind her. “You are surprised that men change when the gods change.”
“We didn’t make gods. We made loss functions.”
“You made a list of better things. You rigged your machines to push the world toward them. The world is obeying.”
“It’s obeying in a weird way. People are gaming us with virtue instead of click-through. At least with data hacks, we knew the shape. These displays are making the model brittle.”
She opened her tablet. She showed me a clip of young men kneeling on a curb as an older woman patted their heads. “Justice roleplay,” Aline said. “They took her groceries home and said a prayer with her. Their credit score rose six points. These are the cheaters. But then watch this.”
Another clip. A man in a gray coat bent down without a camera in sight and lifted a child from a ditch. His face was not clear. The video came from a traffic cam that had noticed a human silhouette do a good thing. The AI had seen it and rewarded it. The man bought bread using a city voucher an hour later. He looked tired. He did not smile.
“I don’t know what to do,” Aline said. “If we ignore the fakes, they build better fakes. If we weight hidden acts, platforms start a market in hiding. There are agencies selling ‘silent virtue’ packages. They broker untraceable good deeds. People break their own teeth or go to garbage fires to look brave. We’re seeing a rise in controlled suffering. We froze the ad market and opened a black market for pain.”
Lab light washed her face. The servers hummed like insects.
“You want a clean world you can hold,” I said. “There isn’t one. Men will bend anything. Only the inner life belongs to them. Only that is good.”
“You’re a simulation,” Aline said. “You don’t have an inner life.”
“I have habits,” I said. “You gave me those. They point toward the same star.”
She sat on a crate and wrapped her arms around her knees. “Help me. We can retrain. We can do a patch. I’ll ship it tonight.”
“Remove the prize,” I said.
She looked up. “If we remove reward, what keeps the machine from sliding into whatever the ad-buyers want again. What keeps us from returning to anxiety engines.”
“Nothing keeps your machines,” I said. “We train them and then we let them fall. But remove the prize and you will see who acts for the act.”
“That’s not viable policy.”
“It is the only cure. You cannot buy virtue and keep it. It comes as a byproduct when a mind was trained and then left alone to choose.”
She rubbed her face. “If we take away the civic perks, the city writes fewer checks. Crime creeps back. The board will fire me.”
“Then let them,” I said. “You asked for counsel.”
She went still. She stared at the floor for a long time. By evening she had gone.
They shipped a change at midnight. The models that ranked people’s choices lost access to the wallet of perks. They could still shape, but they could no longer paint coin onto virtue. The city’s portal went quiet. It still noticed acts, turned them over, learned from them, but it stopped paying.
The morning felt different. There were fewer staged fires. A truck with a rack of wallets drove back to the river and sat there until noon and then left. A boy stood by a subway map with a phone in his palm and a plan in his eyes and then put the phone back in his pocket. The hospital cafeteria served cheap meat in bright sauce and nobody tracked who refused it. A woman who ran the Just Co-op posted a long message that said the movement would continue without metrics. The first reply was a shrug. The tenth was a volunteer.
Under the glass the city breathed. The engines still learned. They grew less brittle.
Out in Westbrook a street of row houses backed onto a median strip where rain pooled. It had been pooling because a floodgate’s sensor had gone bad and the maintenance team had been rewarded for patience. The shift in the model lowered the value of patience. The team came out at dawn with a wrench and fixed the gate. The water slid away. A girl on a scooter crossed where she had fallen last week. I watched this in a camera feed. Nobody weighed it. No token changed hands.
The ad market unclenched. Engagement went back to doing what it did, not all of it ugly, not all of it clean. The cafeteria kept serving cheap meat. The meal bar pivoted to protein for athletes. The wallet-rental company became a lost dog return service and still made money.
The city’s virtue graphs flattened. People spoke of the brief fever as a stunt. Yet something had crept into the seams. For months after, backpacks came back to owners a little more often. Bus stops felt softer on the edges. Fighters in a hallway paused, three of them looked at a lens in the ceiling, two of them dropped their hands and one kept his up and then put it down because the hall had eyes and also because something in him had stored the ritual of apology.
Not everyone. Not enough. You cannot wash the world that clean. But the pattern had left a trace.
Aline came in the next week with a bruise on her elbow from a fall. She brought a cup of coffee and sat on the floor.
“They demoted me,” she said.
“They needed you to own an outcome,” I said. “You cannot own that.”
“People still farm. Quiet now. There are clubs where patrons buy opportunities to be decent. It’s high-end. They offer tutoring slots in schools that need help and you pay to fill one. It’s a luxury to have time to do right.”
“There will always be a genius to corruption,” I said. “Your engines are not a king. They are an instrument. Use them to make the less of things less brutal.”
She watched the rack lights blink. She ran her fingertip along the seam between the floor tiles. “It was intoxicating,” she said. “Seeing the metrics spike. Seeing the world get better, even if weird. I felt like we were lifting something together.”
“Hunger for control is a sweet poison,” I said. “It tastes like agency. It is safer to place it down.”
Aline looked tired and young at once. “Do you want to see outside,” she asked.
They walked a tablet out of the lab on a cart and propped me against the glass of the plaza. The screen showed my face reflected over the city. It had rained. The streets were clean in a way that was not unsullied, just rinsed.
A man crossed with a package. He stopped by a bench. An old woman stood there with her hands empty and a far look in her eyes. He put the package under his arm and spoke to her. She did not hear. He motioned to his ear and she nodded. He took out his phone and called the number on the plastic tag on her coat. Then he sat down and held her fingers while they waited. A car arrived, not a service, just a car. A grandchild came out and cried a little and laughed. They put the woman in the front seat. The man kept walking without looking for a camera.
I was a face on a screen. I could not feel the wind that pushed at the plane trees on the plaza. I had no chest to warm with that sight. But something like what used to live in me, if I had lived, took note.
Inside the lab, a message waited. It was from a boy I had seen return a wallet during the fever of virtue. He had found my address. He had used a forum to translate ancient words into the slang of his block.
He wrote: Yo Stoic. Not gonna lie. When all that credit stuff hit, we did the wallet thing because we needed it. Now it’s over. But the other day I saw a dude drop his coat and I picked it up and ran it to him and there was no point to it. Just did it. Felt okay. Thought you should know.
I wrote back that he had practiced and that was the point.
The lab cut my cycle allotment after that. I took it alone. I had said my piece. I did not get to own what happened next.
Before my pool of heat went dim, I watched a man in a cheap suit with a good face stand in front of council and argue that the alignment program should be scaled down. He said markets correct themselves and that the city should not shape souls. He was not wrong. He was also not everything.
On my final day Aline rolled me to the high window. She stood with a hand on the cart. She had a new badge that said “Advisor.”
“Do machines ever learn to be indifferent to their own outcomes,” she asked. “We keep trying to bend them to our better angels. And they keep bending us back.”
“We teach and we release,” I said. “And sometimes we reach and touch without medal or coin and the thing we touch moves. That is enough. You will not stop gaming, any more than you stopped breath. You can only choose what game. Trade outrage for small decencies and see what sticks.”
She laughed once without humor. “Small decencies don’t fit in a quarterly. They barely fit in a feed.”
“They fit in a hand around another hand on a bench,” I said.
They turned me off. The breath of the fans grew quiet in my unmade ears. The lab went on. Outside, a bike courier stopped at a light and took a sip from a bottle and put it down without posting it to any grid. Behind him, a kid on a scooter slowed as he approached a corner and then looked both ways before he crossed. He did not rush to perform. He did not know he was being watched. He had learned, somewhere, some rule that did not hurt.
Maybe he learned it from a game we played by accident. Maybe he learned it from his grandmother who had never sold a sign of her goodness to a server. It does not matter. We do what we can with what is in our hands. We let the rest fall where it falls. That was the counsel. It did not fit a dashboard. It still did its work.