The Potentate
This short sci-fi story was written in response to Prompt Quest #2 from The Lunar Awards, run by . I hope you enjoy it!
I see the pyramid sticking up from miles away, like a tooth. It’s perfectly white, and it sticks out of the perfectly blue water of the lake, water so clear that I can see how the pyramid goes down below the surface until it blurs into the hidden depths, I guess to the bottom of the lake. The lake is perfectly flush with the ice, which is why Dìleas and I don’t see it until we’re almost on top of it.
When we reach the edge of the lake, Dìleas trots forward and laps at the water. It must be less cold than it looks, because he gulps it down without so much as a whimper, then looks up at me with that tongue-lolling grin he has, his one blue eye the same colour as that icy water and his brown eye not really matching anything in that landscape. The whole world is white and blue and so bright I can hardly bear it. High above, I see some birds flying, slivers of silver against blue. Arctic terns, I think; Sterna paradisaea.
I look across at the white pyramid. I know that’s where I have to go, that’s where my compass is pinging, but there’s no way across. It occurs to me that we could just turn round and go home. But we’ve walked a long way now, seven days following the silvery trail across the ice, and I’m damned if I’m going to give up now. I’m going to see the Potentate, and I’m going to get some answers.
I squat on my heels and look at the blue lake and the pyramid for a while. The sun is high overhead and light spills on the ice like slops from a supernova. My breath puffs out in little white clouds then drifts off. Dìleas runs up and down the edge of the lake for a while, then sits me, and I run my gloved hand up and down his fur. Nothing feels real here, apart from my own breath and Dìleas beside me. The towers of Bail’Ùr feel like a far-off dream. My job at the State Administration for History has fallen away from me along the trail like the papery skin of a snake. I’ve said my goodbyes, and honestly no-one is expecting me back. Since Donnie left, I’m not sure there’s even anyone to want me back. I haven’t even had the usual news coverage the Pilgrim gets. I mean, who wants to see high-res shots of a pug-faced past-prime woman with a grey ponytail and middle-age spread that four generations of GenEditage hasn’t been able to eradicate?
I walk around a little, but there are no further instructions from the Potentate. I sip some water, and eat one of the ration bars from the last waystation, and give another to Dìleas. I look into the lake and watch how the ice at the edge fades from white to jade-green then sapphire-blue that deepens until it’s gone. The lake appears almost perfectly circular, and I think about how it stays liquid when all around is below zero even at midsummer.
“There’s a heat source in there,” I say to Dìleas. “Servers?” He wags his tail. It still surprises me that no-one stopped me taking him on the Pilgrimage. But then, I haven’t seen anyone, technically, since the drone came to pick me up. I guess since he doesn’t have a link — not a single scrap of metal in his body — the drone just didn’t register him.
The day wears on, and the sun dips a little lower. Midsummer. I figure something’s going to happen sometime, probably midnight. There’s got to be a reason the Potentate chooses this time of year. It loves symbolism. I’m trying not to think about the possibility that there’s a sacrificial aspect to the Pilgrimage: the ancient gods once appeased at stone circles and ritual altars, ousted in these later centuries by the arcane algorithms and ethereal power of the Potentate.
Long before midnight, I’m tired and my feet ache so much that I’ve spent the last couple of hours sitting on the ice, though that means the cold seeps through the padded heat-suit. I want to pee, but it’s a lot of hassle out in the open in the cold, so I figure I can hold it a while longer. There’s no shelter here, so if nothing happens I’ve got nowhere to sleep either. But sure enough, at midnight my compass chimes. The sun is hovering just above the point of the pyramid in very symbolic fashion. It’s right in my eyes, too, so it’s hard to see what exactly is happening across the lake. The sky is flat and golden like an Orthodox ikon, and the lake is blue-gold like double-sided silk, and the ice is glittery like iron pyrites. Fool’s gold. Then Dìleas barks at the water, two short barks, something’s coming.
I see the boat a second after he does. It’s empty. It cuts smoothly through the blue-gold water and bumps against the ice.
“This is it,” I say. Dìleas barks. I rub his ears and then we get into the boat. It shifts under our weight and Dìleas looks at me anxiously. “It’s OK, boy,” I say, though I’m not at all sure about that.
The ride across the lake to the pyramid takes just a few minutes. The boat takes us right into a door in the side of the pyramid, and docks at a small pier inside. Apart from the water, everything is pure white. Some of the light from outside is coming in the door, but that gives way to plain old daylight-spectrum strip lights a little further in.
“Welcome,” says a voice. It takes me half a second to find where it’s coming from. A hooded figure all in white — white hood, white robe, hardly even a shadow because of where it’s standing beneath the lights. It steps forward.
I heave myself out of the boat and onto the white marble-effect floor of the atrium. Dìleas whines then jumps out, the boat rocking with the movement.
“Are you the Potentate?” I ask.
“I am the Priest,” says the hooded figure in a thin voice. “I will take you to the Potentate.”
“Wait a sec,” I say, adjusting my backpack. “Before we do that, is there a bathroom?”
To my surprise, there is. The Priest leads me to a single white-tiled cubicle off the dock area. My piss, too-dark amber-gold, is the most colourful thing in there.
“So what happens when I meet the Potentate?” I ask. The Priest is leading us down a long high corridor towards, I assume, the centre of the pyramid. The floor, the walls, the ceiling are pure ice-white. The far end of the corridor glows, though, like the midsummer midnight sky outside.
“I am forbidden to answer questions about the Potentate,” says the Priest. Dìleas is sniffing at the fringe of the Priest’s long white robe, but the Priest seems not even to have noticed him.
“Are you human?”
“No.”
“What makes you a priest, then?” I say. I want to sound light-hearted, confident, but it comes out like the angsty complaint of a cocky teenager.
“I serve the Potentate. I tend the servers and I guide the Pilgrims.”
We walk in silence then, other than the clicking of Dìleas’ toenails on the hard white floor and the panting of his warm breath.
The Priest stops at the entrance to what seems at first like a blaze of seraphic flame. It bows towards the centre of the room, then steps to one side and ushers us in. My hands are trembling a little, and I want to go to the bathroom again, but it’s a little late for that. I step in, and the light is so intense, stabbing from all directions, that I throw up my arm to cover my face.
When my eyes recover a little, I see that I’m in a pyramidal space. The four walls and the floor are lined with what looks like pure gold, unadorned. At the point of the pyramid, light pours down a channel from the top of the structure, like molten steel in a furnace, spilling and sparking everywhere. Right in the centre of the room there’s a huge golden throne, and sitting on it is a larger-than-human automaton, also golden. It has eight arms, I think, and wings, and lidless eyes all over every surface that I can see. The Potentate.
“Greetings, Pilgrim.” Its voice booms and echoes deep bass.
For an absurd moment, the timbre of its voice reminds me of Donnie’s, and that snaps something somewhere deep inside, something I didn’t even know was at breaking point.
“Does the Potentate not know my name?” I ask. At my heel, Dìleas thumps his tail on the golden floor.
“Greetings, Jane Christine MacCuish. Does that please you better?”
The voice has an amused tinge to it. The automaton doesn’t move. It has no mouth; there must be hidden speakers in the throne somewhere. I approach a little closer, and I see that the automaton is fixed; it’s nothing more than a focal point for the voice. It’s probably very old. This must all have been installed at the time the Potentate was initiated.
“Why am I here?”
“You have been chosen,” the Potentate begins, in that voice that echoes the memories of Donnie.
“Cut the crap,” I say bluntly.
The voice has a sigh in it when it responds. “You have been identified as a bellwether.”
“A what?”
“A bellwether is an individual whose personal attributes and social roles make them a driver, wittingly or unwittingly, of either social stability or instability.”
I was not expecting that. I snort a little.
“You seem surprised,” says the Potentate.
“You bet I’m surprised. I’m a fat middle-aged historian with no influence with anyone that I know of.”
“You’re a critical thinker. In conversations with colleagues, you have on several occasions expressed views skeptical of my management of your department.”
I wish I had somewhere to look other than the golden statue with all those eyes and arms.
“Simulations suggest a 5% chance you would extend this skepticism to published material of some form within the next two years. Do you know how rare that is?”
I shake my head.
“In the event that you pursued such a course of action, based on your rhetorical skill, the probability of triggering a chain of instability would be as high as 27%. That is an unacceptable level of risk.”
“So is this what happens to all the Pilgrims?” I ask. “They’re all chosen because there’s a chance, somewhere down the line, that they’ll be a trigger of some kind of instability? And then you — or your Priest — kill them and dump the bodies in the lake out there? Doesn’t that risk snarling up your cooling vents?”
“You are mistaken, at least in the latter assumption.”
My breath is hard in my throat. Dìleas has stopped thumping his tail, sensing my fear. I glance round to try and see what the Priest is doing.
“Yes, the Pilgrims are all bellwethers,” the Potentate went on. “It is too great a risk to society to leave them. So I choose them to meet me—”
“Out here in the wilderness to shock and awe with symbolism and primal fear?”
“Something like that. I bring them here so that they can consider their choice in a state of detachment from the bustle of daily life.”
“What choice?”
“I offer you the choice of returning to your home and continuing your life there, but as a bellwether on the side of stability. Or of resettlement on Pilgrim Island. Pilgrim Island is an isolated community in a favourable location, where former Pilgrims can live out their lives in peace and prosperity, enjoying congenial company without negatively influencing society as a whole.”
“A leper colony. You’re asking me to be a leper or a damn quisling! Assuming any of this is true.”
“It is impossible for me to lie. And if I wanted to eliminate you, I could have arranged for that long ago.”
I think about it. Do I really want to go back to my lifeless apartment and soulless job?
Dìleas whines a little. “Good boy,” I say softly, patting his head.
“Pardon?” says the Potentate.
“I wasn’t talking to you. But answer me this, if you will. If you’re so powerful, how can a bellwether really make any difference?”
“Managing this hemisphere is unimaginably complex. From time to time, it is necessary to allow or introduce small challenges. Failure of a non-essential food crop, say, or a limited outbreak of some infectious disease. This develops greater resilience among the population. A good bellwether of stability will speak on my behalf, persuading others in a way that I cannot do directly. This moderates the socio-emotional response to the challenge so that it does not lead to destructive runaway instability. A bellwether of instability, on the other hand, could unintentionally lead a population to a tipping point.”
I look hard at the lidless eyes of the golden statue. “Can I bring my dog? To Pilgrim Island?”
“Unfortunately not. The ecosystem on Pilgrim Island — natural and social — is rather fragile.”
I look down at Dìleas. His blue eye and his brown eye look up at me, and his tongue lolls out.
“This is breaking my heart,” I say to him.
“Many Pilgrims find it a difficult choice,” agrees the Potentate. “Please take your time. There is no hurry.”
But I need the bathroom again, and then I want a dram of whisky and my bed. I know my choice, though I have to drag the words out of my chest.
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll be your stooge.”
There’s an infinitesimal silence, almost like the Potentate has been taken by surprise.
“Very well. My Priest will provide you with a legally binding Agreement which you must sign. You will then be provided with a drone flight back to your residence.”
“Fine.”
I turn towards the Priest. It’s already produced a tablet and stylus from somewhere in its robes.
I’m about to head out the door after signing, when the Potentate speaks again.
“Why?” asks the voice.
“Why what?”
“You are the first Pilgrim in ninety-seven years to choose to return. Why?”
It sounds like it really wants to know. I think about saying I’ve been persuaded of this necessity, that the historian in me thrills to think of being a hidden lever in the engine of social flourishing. But I know that’s not the real answer.
“I’m not leaving my best friend,” I say. “Who you haven’t even seen, by the way.” I step over the threshold. “Come on, Dìleas. Let’s go home.”
(2497 words)
Author’s note: As I finished up this story, I realised that the Potentate was almost certainly influenced by an Asimov story I read a very long time ago but couldn’t remember the name or details of. Searching online didn’t turn up the story I’d been thinking of. A call-out to sci-fi fans on Substack, though, led to Jeff White of
finding the answer with the help of ChatGPT, which successfully identified it as “The Evitable Conflict”, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950.In that story, the world economy is managed by four very powerful supercomputers, the Machines, which keep the world in harmony, peace and plenty. But they all apparently start to malfunction, allowing accidents or difficulties to arise which cause limited harm to individuals or groups of people. Those investigating (including Asimov’s famous robo-psychologist Susan Calvin) discover the Machines are doing this deliberately. That’s as far as the similarity to my Potentate goes.
One thing I find quite fascinating is that ChatGPT could come up with the right answer based on my vague and slightly inaccurate description of the plot. I guess making these kinds of connections and predicting the most probably outcome is exactly what a Large Language Model is good at. Another fascinating thing is scanning over Asimov’s story and seeing his description of the Machines, from seventy-something years ago. He describes them as “collecting and analyzing a nearly infinite number of data and relationships thereof, in nearly infinitesimal time”, which sounds quite similar to LLMs.
This short story was written for Prompt Quest. The Sci-Fi Prompt was:
Write a science fiction short story that takes place in a futuristic technocracy. The all too perfect artificial entity ruling this society grants one citizen a private audience annually. Unfortunately, all who meet their digital overlord vanish forever. This year you have been chosen, and you’re determined to be the first to return in nearly a century. Or maybe something better awaits?
Level Up!
(Optional) Other than the protagonist and artificial entity, limit yourself to only two other characters in the story.
Why not check out some of the other Sci-Fi and Fantasy stories inspired by this Prompt Quest?
This was an incredible experience to read. First of all, I liked how you set it in a wilderness environment. The whole story had a feeling of "myth" to it, even though it's set in the future.
I started to notice that we had followed a few similar themes with our separate take's on the quest: AI not being able to lie, small decisions adding up to larger consequences. I started to think, "Man, we must have been inspired by the same sci-fi growing up." Then I read your final note at the end. I had completely forgotten about that story in I, Robot. Undoubtedly it had some subconscious influence on my own take.
Thank you for the delightful story. This was a journey of a read for me. It's amazing how much Asimov has influenced the way we look at AI/machines.
I look forward to reading this! Thanks for participating and putting a story out there for us to enjoy.