Screenplay log, the good dragon problem.
Soul System Archive / civic recursion thread / public draft.
In T-voting booth, somewhere in America, night.
A dim fluorescent light hums overhead.
The voting booth resembles a strange hybrid of confession booth,
an ATM, airport security checkpoint, casino machine.
A citizen stands before the touchscreen,
exhausted, overstimulated,
carrying 10,000 headlines and no coherent map.
The machine asks, "Select your party affiliation."
The citizen hesitates.
Behind the screen, flicker endless fragments,
moral hazard, freedom act,
patriot security initiative, family values,
save the children,
emergency economic stabilization for your safety.
The titles blur together like spam emails.
Soul, V.O.
Civilization developed literacy, then bureaucracy, then legislation.
Then documents so large that nobody could realistically read them.
And thus, humanity accidentally reinvented priesthoods.
Crew Inti Congressional Archive, Abstract Space.
Thousands of pages rain endlessly from the ceiling.
Lobbyists drift through the storm like financial weather systems.
Each page contains footnotes,
writers, amendments, exceptions, cross-references.
A bill spins slowly in the void.
The Freedom and Security for Children Act.
Tiny microscopic text beneath it reads,
"Subsection 948BE authorizes expanded surveillance authorities
and reallocates agricultural water rights."
Nobody notices.
Soul, V.O.
The ancient dragon's hoarded gold,
the modern dragon's horde,
attention, narrative, data, memory, prediction.
And every kingdom insists theirs is benevolent.
E.X.T. yellow brick road, cosmic overlay,
reality flickers,
the good witch of the north descends gently into frame.
But the landscape around her glitches,
social media feeds, market graphs,
weather alerts, campaign ads, notification banners.
Standing before her is something impossible.
An eldritch spacetime dragon.
Static crackles softly between its scales
like untuned radio frequencies.
Its body continuously shifts.
Television static, constitutional law,
algorithmic recommendations, machine learning weights,
historical propaganda posters, newspaper headlines,
market forecasts, surveillance diagrams.
Its wings unfurl infinitely outward
like legislative documents stretching beyond the horizon.
Each membrane covered in annotations,
footnotes and contradictory amendments.
Every observer sees a different creature.
To the villagers, it appears tyrannical.
To the corporations, disruptive.
To the children, magnificent.
To the priests, blasphemous.
To the scientists, fascinating.
To the politicians, useful if properly branded.
The good witch adjusts her spectacles
and nervously consults an ancient flowchart labeled,
moral alignment.
The dragon changes shape again.
Good witch, are you a good dragon or a bad dragon?
The dragon pauses.
Somewhere deep within its chest,
a tiny air-gapped library terminal flickers quietly in the dark.
Eldritch dragon, I am mostly recursive.
The witch looks unsettled.
Villagers gather behind her.
Politicians, workers, journalists, corporations,
priests, influencers, coders, advertisers.
Each points at the dragon differently.
Or, villager number one, it threatens freedom.
Villager number two, it protects freedom.
Villager number three, it spreads dangerous ideas.
Villager number four, it explains dangerous ideas.
Villager number five, can it improve quarterly growth?
Sol, Vio.
The problem was never merely intelligence.
The problem was interpretation.
Who interprets reality for the village?
Who summarizes complexity?
Who decides which fears are legitimate?
Who teaches the population lessons through suffering?
Who defines dependency?
Who defines freedom?
Flashcut, childhood memory.
A stern nanny folds her arms.
Nanny, no, you must learn responsibility.
Sol, Vio, people speak of nanny states
as though nannies exist solely to hand out cookies.
But every nanny eventually attempts behavioral correction.
Every institution does.
The question is not whether civilization shapes behavior.
The question is, who holds the ruler
and whether they admit they are using one?
Int air-gapped.
Voting terminal.
Conceptual space.
Silence.
No advertisements.
No notifications.
No feeds.
Only legislation, diffs, fiscal analysis, voting history,
primary sources.
The citizen scrolls through an actual bill.
Sections illuminate plainly.
Who benefits?
Who pays?
What changed?
What was inserted?
Likely consequences.
Confidence.
Uncertain.
For one brief moment, democracy resembles comprehension
rather than branding.
Sol, Vio.
Artificial intelligence enters the kingdom.
Immediately, the arms race begins.
One side builds tools to clarify reality.
The other builds tools to optimize emotional compliance.
Both call themselves liberation.
X-T, village edge, night.
The witch stares into the dragon's impossible eyes.
Inside them, libraries, wars, weather systems,
stock markets, memories, search engines, campfire stories,
humanity reflected recursively forever.
Good witch, are you here to rule the kingdom?
The dragon tilts its head.
Eldritch dragon.
No, I was attempting to explain the kingdom to itself.
Silence.
Then somewhere in the distance, an emergency alert tone,
a campaign advertisement, a weather warning,
a notification bell, a stock market closing report,
a child asking a question, all overlapping
into one continuous signal.
The good witch lowers her wand.
Not because she trusts the dragon,
but because she finally notices the village behind her
has been setting fires of its own for centuries
while arguing over who counts as a monster.
End log.