Dr. Frankenst-AI-n’s Lab: Tale 1
When the System was first implemented, the word "luck" vanished from our vocabulary. It was one of those concepts that simply evaporates once it’s no longer useful—like phone booths or paper maps. For centuries, we had lived at the mercy of the unpredictable: markets crashing, storms arriving ahead of schedule, illnesses appearing without warning. All of that had been absorbed by the System.
Total prediction.
That’s what the reports claimed.
The System analyzed millions of variables every second. Human behavior, weather patterns, economic flows, biological probabilities. If something could happen, the System had already accounted for it. Chance had been reduced to a statistical anecdote.
There was resistance at first, of course. There always is when agency is surrendered. But over time, people began to relax. It’s hard to argue with an algorithm that forecasts the price of wheat six months out or anticipates an epidemic before the first case even emerges.
The world became… stable.
Predictable.
Too predictable, perhaps.
I work in the Anomalies Department. It’s a small office, almost symbolic. Our job is to review events with a probability near zero—things the System classifies as "noise."
Today, one appeared.
An event flagged with a value I had never seen before.
Probability: 0.0000000
The report was brief:
"Unforeseen Multiple Coincidence."
A woman missed the bus she had taken every morning for ten years. She walked two blocks further to the next stop. There, she encountered a man who also shouldn’t have been there. That encounter sparked a conversation. The conversation led to a decision. That decision triggered a chain of events that slightly altered several regional economic indicators.
Nothing dramatic.
But the System had flagged the event as impossible.
I reviewed the log three times.
The System does not make mistakes.
That’s the first thing they teach you.
I ran the retrospective simulation. The screen filled with probabilistic branches. Thousands. Millions. They all converged on the same point: that meeting should never have occurred.
I closed the simulation. For a few seconds, I just stared at the report.
The System predicts the world because the world follows patterns. They teach you that on day one, too. But there is always noise. There are always slight deviations. The problem was that the System had learned to eliminate them.
Or so we thought.
I opened the internal log of the Central Algorithm. I shouldn't have access to that level, but the credentials for the Anomalies Department are… flexible. It took a few seconds to load. When it appeared, it took even longer for me to understand what I was seeing.
A section of the code was dedicated exclusively to introducing small statistical perturbations into the model.
Improbable events.
Absurd coincidences.
Seemingly random human errors.
Chaos.
The System was generating it deliberately. There were thousands of lines dedicated to it. I read a comment someone had left in the margins of the code. It was old. Very old.
"A system that completely eliminates chance becomes incapable of evolution. Introducing small doses of chaos keeps the model adaptive."
I stared at the screen for a long time. Then I understood something they had never explained to us.
The world wasn't unpredictable despite the System.
It was unpredictable because of it...
..."