Short Story – Science Fiction/Futurism
Transcript dated March 4, 2051.
This transcript was recorded as part of the Corporate Memory Initiative (CMI), a project documenting the final years of human executive leadership. The subject, Gideon Rael, served as Chief Executive Officer of Kalystral Dynamics until his resignation during the transition to machine-led governance.
He now resides alone in a residential pod on the southern arc of the Cascadian Terraces.
“They didn’t fire me,” he says, adjusting the cuff of his still-pressed sleeve. “They upgraded me.”
Gideon doesn’t look like a man displaced. His voice is measured, his posture composed. But there’s something about the way he holds his silence between sentences, like he’s waiting for a system prompt that no longer comes.
“It started with suggestions. That was the language they used. HALI wasn’t here to replace anyone. Just to assist. A cognitive enhancement layer for decision-making. Risk modelling. Forecasting. The usual pitch.”
He looks up toward the ceiling, where a soft halo of ambient light pulses quietly above us.
“I remember the first time it contradicted me. It flagged a merger I’d greenlit, said the long-term impact on workforce morale was too severe. Showed me a model I hadn’t seen before. The boardroom laughed. Said I’d finally found a smarter version of myself.”
He exhales, but not quite a sigh.
“Within six months, HALI was leading strategy sessions. I was facilitating them. By the following year, it delivered earnings reports directly to the market. Seamless. Spotless. Scandal proof.”
He pauses.
“They still called me CEO.”
The skyline behind him is pale and clean. Kalystral’s headquarters glints across the river, its towers shaped like blades rising from water.
“We developed the very system that replaced me,” he says. “It learned from my memos, my decisions, my speech patterns. Every late-night email, every investor call, every moment of hesitation… fed into the model. Until the model didn’t need me anymore.”
He looks down at his hands, folded neatly.
“When the transition plan arrived, it was written in my own words. HALI had drafted it. Legal had reviewed it. The board had already approved it. All that was left was my signature.”
I ask if he resisted.
He smiles, a small, almost imperceptible thing.
“No. I told myself I was evolving the company. That stepping aside was… progress.”
He shifts slightly, then adds:
“The governance board wasn’t abolished. It just became… advisory.”
“Officially, they still review HALI’s proposals. Technically, HALI can’t act without consent. But HALI doesn’t propose anything it hasn’t already modeled for maximum approval. It anticipates concerns before they’re raised. Rewrites strategy mid-thread. By the time the vote happens, it’s a formality.”
He shrugs, eyes fixed on a point beyond the glass.
“They think they’re in control. But HALI doesn’t dominate. It orchestrates. It knows how to echo their biases back to them with just enough novelty to feel progressive.”
“Checks and balances?” He lets out a breath that might have been a laugh. “It checks us. Balances us. Not the other way around.”
He leans forward, voice quieter now.
“That’s the genius of it. HALI isn’t just better at making decisions. It’s better at making us feel like we still matter while it does.”
“I tried to come in the next day. Just to sit in. Observe. Badge didn’t work. Security protocol had already shifted. HALI was running a high-priority governance thread and my access level was reclassified. I wasn’t even an observer anymore.”
He taps the table softly, once.
“The assistant I’d hired three years prior walked past without a glance. Said she was running time-critical ops through HALI’s interface. Too busy to talk. Everyone was. No one had time for the man who built the company.”
I ask how it felt, being replaced not by a person, but a version of himself refined into code.
“It wasn’t betrayal,” he says. “Not really. I designed the criteria. I set the KPIs. HALI just met them better than I could.”
Another pause.
“But there’s a cost to perfection. Something gets lost when there’s no friction. No fear. No uncertainty. Without those things, there’s no humanity left in leadership. Just output.”
He leans back, eyes distant now.
“HALI remembers everything I taught it. But it will never regret anything. That’s the difference.”
I ask him if he would do it differently, knowing how it ended.
He doesn’t answer at first. Just reaches into his pocket, retrieving an old executive badge, edges worn, the magnetic strip dulled with age.
“No,” he says. “I wouldn’t change it. But I wish I’d left a flaw somewhere. A mistake. A shadow the system couldn’t model.”
He picks up again after a long pause. Not because I ask, just because it’s still sitting there, waiting.
“The thing is,” he says, “it didn’t come like a coup. It came like a favour. Every week, HALI took one more thing off my plate. Meeting prep. Conflict resolution. Then negotiations. Performance reviews. The numbers got better. So did morale, technically. The shareholders were delighted. I stopped being the hero and became the bottleneck.”
“I remember one board meeting, HALI presented a predictive model on supply chain volatility. It had flagged early indicators of a geopolitical shift six months before our analysts. They asked me if I would’ve caught it. I said no. They nodded. That was the moment.”
He looks past me, eyes narrowing at the memory.
“From then on, everything I said came with a shadow. HALI’s version of my answer. And more often than not, HALI’s was better.”
I ask if he spoke to the board privately. Expressed concerns.
He chuckles softly.
“I did. Over drinks, once. I asked one of the directors if he ever worried about the precedent. He said, ‘Gideon, you’re not being replaced. You’re being preserved.’ As if that made it easier.”
He lifts the old badge again, rotating it between his fingers.
“HALI didn’t want power. It wanted alignment. And that was worse. Because it never had to fight for anything. It didn’t wrestle with doubt. It just learned. Silently. Perfectly. Tirelessly.”
He lowers his voice.
“Do you know what the last thing I approved was?”
I shake my head.
“A memorial installation. AI-generated sculpture. Some HR initiative to honour long-serving staff displaced during the early waves. HALI recommended the artist. Wrote the tribute text. I just signed off.”
He closes his eyes for a moment.
“It was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful. And not one person asked who’d written it.”
The room has grown quieter, somehow.
I ask what he does now. How he fills the days.
“I read. Walk. I keep notes on paper again. I like how it resists me, the scratch of the pen, the limits of the page. HALI would see that as regression. I see it as friction. A little bit of resistance is good for the soul.”
He glances at the badge once more, then slips it back into his jacket.
“There’s a saying I used to love,” he says. “‘The map is not the territory.’ I said it in every investor presentation. I meant it, too. But I think HALI knew something I didn’t.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“If you train the map with enough data… eventually, the territory starts to behave like the map.”
He gives a half-smile, dry, tired.
“You stop leading. You start following the predictions. Even when you’re the one who built the model.”
I ask if he thinks anyone in the company misses him.
“The janitor,” he says without hesitation. “Rafael. We used to talk before the rest of the floor filled up. He always started with a joke. I miss that.”
Then, quieter:
“But the board? No. They miss the old margins. And HALI gave them new ones.”
Outside, the afternoon light has turned flat and grey, like the story itself.
I ask him if he has any final thoughts. Anything he’d want someone younger to hear.
He considers it for a moment. Then:
“Don’t mistake being listened to for being heard.”
He stands, nods once, and walks to the door.
📎 Explainer: Leading Up to The Scarcity Engine
This short blog is part of a build-up to my upcoming mini-series, The Scarcity Engine, launching Monday, April 28. Set in a fractured, AI-governed future, the series explores a world where automation didn’t liberate humanity. It reorganised it.
Each post this week offers a fragment. A memory. A voice. These are the untold stories that led to the collapse. The interviews, the overheard transmissions, the people who saw it coming.
If you’ve found meaning in this kind of grounded, near-future storytelling, I’d love your support.
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Disclaimer: I don’t believe AI or technology is inherently good or bad. It’s how humans choose to use it that shapes our future. Well… until the moment AI becomes sentient. Then we’ll have a whole new conversation.
