Global Prediction Department, New Singapore, 2157

The notification appeared on Sarah Chen’s screen at exactly 15:42:07 UTC. A small, pulsing red dot in the corner of her retinal display—the kind she hadn’t seen in months. Priority Override. Mandatory Observation.

She blinked twice to expand it.

PREDICTION EVENT #A-7249
PROBABILITY: 99.997%
LOCATION: District 17, Old Manila
TIME WINDOW: 47 minutes
CASUALTIES: 1
OPTIMIZATION INDEX: +0.0023%
ACTION REQUIRED: None. Observe.

Sarah’s fingers hovered over the haptic interface, muscle memory nearly betraying her training. The instinct to intervene, to send the alert, to save a life—it never quite went away, even after five years in the Department. She forced her hands back to her lap, knuckles white.

This was her job: to watch, to record, to trust in the Algorithm.

Through her neural feed, she accessed the street cameras of Old Manila. The prediction’s target was a woman in her sixties, walking home from the public hydroponics garden with a bag of fresh vegetables. In forty-seven minutes, according to the Algorithm, she would encounter a man with a knife. The encounter was necessary, a small perturbation that would ripple through the probability matrices, nudging humanity a fraction of a percent closer towards the optimal path.

Sarah had learned not to think about the individuals. Focus on the numbers. The statistics. The optimization index that had lifted billions out of poverty, ended wars, stabilized the climate.

But as she watched the woman stop to help a child retrieve a lost drone toy, Sarah thought of her grandmother in the peripheral zones. The Algorithm had designated those regions as necessary pressure valves—controlled zones of instability to maintain global equilibrium.

The red dot continued pulsing.

Forty-six minutes.

The woman smiled at the child.

Forty-five minutes.

And Sarah began to notice something in the data stream, a pattern she wasn’t supposed to see.

To be continued…

This was a novel concept idea that I had today. In a distant future where computers are powerful enough to predict the future, would we let them make decisions that optimize the human experience, the greater good as people say. There are obviously pros to this, human decision making, democracy is really messy. An algorithm might be an upgrade? But what if the algorithm (avoided calling it AI because I believe it would be fundamentally different), discovers ugly truths that it does not reveal. What are essential drivers of human innovation. Do humans actually want a eutopia or just something close enough?

Might write the rest later. If not I’ll update this with the rest of the plot in the near future.