THE SURVIVOR

As the windows of the artificial intelligence camps opened, I realised with horror the extent of my ignorance of everything that had happened under my nose for the past twenty-five years.

In Poland, during the mid and late 2020s, the war in Ukraine, our government, inflation, the European Union and its new measures on our economy and immigration, as well as our sudden infatuation with American culture and its state-of-the-art values ​​were our only concerns. As for other European countries, the war in Ukraine (obviously), inflation, immigration, climate change and the health consequences of future pandemics occupied their thoughts.

On the other hand, in North America, the media spoke only of the war in Ukraine (necessarily), inflation, immigration, extraterrestrials in unidentified flying saucers hidden by the government, the transsexuality of minors in schools as well as their sudden enthusiasm for a trendy culture called Woke.

Apparently, the fashion for the baskets came from this movement which had started in the Black American community in the 2010s in response to the socio-economic problems faced by the latter. In a short time, the movement found itself in the hands of the privileged and right-thinking population in power. Now, the activism of minorities and other discriminated groups in America found itself led with an iron fist by those who wanted to oppress and exploit everyone forever.

In two decades, North America and its fellow Anglo-Saxons had taken it into their heads to atone for their sins as settlers by offering the blood of their most vulnerable white population; Pupils would learn in class that they had crime under their skin. From precious children of God, they became spoiled children of the Devil. I believe that if Alegria could have taught their own history to the great-great-grandchildren of settlers, she would have rather wanted to tell them how the Blacks who immigrated to their country by force or by will several centuries before that, had contributed to the success of their nation.

While American politicians busied themselves collecting votes from Blacks and other minority groups, activists who refused to buy into the Woke culture of those in power were losing their voices. Their claims fell silent because to state anything when you were black made you Woke. Western societies seemed to have forgotten that they had until very recently locked the non-white individual into unflattering narratives. Insignificant, ugly and sometimes savage, these men and women didn't deserve to see their names in history books. 

Science had defined them as inferior; the media categorised them as vulgar sex and entertainment objects; history had confined their past into stories of powerless victims; the professional world had reserved a very specific place for them that they had to accept without flinching. Since western societies had never had anything to be ashamed of, anyone who spoke out against the abuses, crimes or discrimination of the American system or any other country was Woke by definition.

Like the basket fashion, everyone was only allowed two boxes at most. For Blacks, the only two alternatives remained Black and Woke or Black and traitor. The voices of the minorities and their activists faded little by little and finally fell completely silent for fear of being associated by default with the Woke culture. As surprising as it may seem, Poland also quickly got into the Woke fashion despite the fact that the country had only recently begun to welcome people of non-European ethnicities and cultures. It had become very common to see dark-skinned women in advertisements and on websites even if they remained very marginal in the streets or in the offices of multinationals in the country's big cities. Polish children's books began to talk about the diversity of body shapes, skin and sex. Other more colourful and trendy flags competed with that of the nation under the apparent indifference of the Polish population.

Thinking about it, I too saw nothing wrong about it initially. The trend seemed rather innocuous to me as long as I wasn't forced to identify my sexual orientation or my ethnic origins. Discretion was very dear to me. In my view, such personal information had nothing to do inside any employers' files. Indeed, for a person like me who had never set foot on American soil and only knew the outlines of that society, I understood nothing of the value of socio-economic statistics for a nation born in multiracial violence.

However, dressing the wolf up as a shepherd never made it a good shepherd, and the right-thinking privileged people in power had always known this fact. The objectives of their colourful culture had never been to include, to repair or to reconcile, but to aggravate the wounds of the past of each other. While Black Americans of the mid-20th century were experiencing segregation day time, and suffering assaults at night, Black Europeans in France enjoyed western society life within the limits of their birth-given social status. Despite the physical and emotional abuse in the colonies, and obvious hypocrisy of French made societies, Blacks, Arabs, Asian and Indigenous alike were turned into obedient pets trained to desire to become, please, and praise the benevolent almighty state from an earliest age.

Most importantly, they were educated to hate themselves.

Their sweet righteous father would care for them until there would be nothing left of them: their ancestry, their identity, their humanity. Segregation for the coloured English-speaking world versus disintegration for the coloured French-speaking world. In Senegal, like in many African countries, the bites of years of colonisation had shaped a distorted paternal figure that remained well into the mid-21st century.

Yet, Wokeism erased all traces of any ambiguity, contradiction, and diversity within the Black diaspora in an attempt to make the entire Black experience one. Black history was to be defined, redefined and refined using carefully selected words, storyline, and characters. The latter strangely seemed to fit the narrative of a certain young, non-Black elite.

In the same way, the well-thinking benevolent western leaders had never wished to relieve the planet of its suffering or spare us from a climatic catastrophe. If so, they would have encouraged a return to a fairer way of life, more natural agriculture and food, more open and authentic human relationships. Instead, they had forced us into even more pervasive, intrusive, and threatening technology.

Artificial intelligence camps had never been a secret to knowledgeable and curious men. For the cowardly of my kind, closing one's eyes and plugging one's ears took on the aspect of wisdom. The average Polish citizen like me had vaguely heard about Little Paradise in social media, but the latter had quickly redirected us to our media of reliable and safe sources where the dangers of Woke culture, artificial intelligence and industrial agriculture and transgenic were mere conspiracy theories.

The attention of the average Polish citizen was immediately refocused on the priority of the moment: winning the war next door and letting its leaders take all the best directives necessary to ensure its protection as well as the survival of the planet. Looking back at the year 2030 in the context in which the inhabitants of rich countries found themselves colonised by artificial intelligence, their behaviour inside the camps seems less absurd. 

The residents of Little Paradise were anything but angels even before their artificial intelligence locked them there. In paradise, the wounds that the Woke culture had reopened led to the massacre of politicians and many minority groups such as blacks, immigrants, people with mental or physical illness, homosexuals, transsexuals and women. Being held responsible for the colonisation of their population, the politicians fell victim to the wrath of the residents of paradise first. From what I heard, the children of paradise made them talk before torturing them for days on end in the public squares of the camps. 

The facts occurred at the very beginning of their colonisation when the populations realised too late what had happened to them. A desperate revolution that results in no change for them: the residents of Little Paradise would stay there for fifteen years.

***

Once artificial intelligence had agreed to free the population in all rich countries, it also helped us list the survivors and communicate directly with their families. In all the formerly colonised countries, AI had provided us with machines where we could enter the name of the person with whom we wanted to reconnect. Because of her old age, and poor health conditions, my mother didn't go inside the camps, but she had died a few years before the liberation, probably of grief. They had buried her body inside my father's grave.

Yet, not all old people ended up in the camps. AI had its own ways of selecting who the fortune ones should be, and this had little to do with how frail or unfit their older bodies were. It seemed as though A.I. knew more about us than what our date of birth, our health, and medical information revealed about us. Some of the leaders and elite for example, found themselves captives alongside the very same people they had manipulated, or looked down upon. Later on, years after the liberation, the question was raised. AI simply replied that some needed to go through the experience while others didn't. Again, the ecosystem had a plan beyond that of humanity, or even that of AI.

'Iwona Leszczyński George and Ania Leszczyński Mansuri,' I whispered as I typed and retyped my sisters' married names on the screen in front of me. Each time, I got the same result: "Error. This person is no longer alive."

After several attempts, I stopped as my hands started shaking. I wiped my tears on the sleeve of my uniform, then I typed in the first and last names of my brothers-in-law, my nephews and nieces. For each name, I got the same result: "Error, this person is no longer alive."

I stopped short and let the tears flow freely down my face, pursing my lips not to cry out in sadness and anger. I hesitated for awhile; a person was waiting behind me. My hands trembled at the thought of discovering the aberration of my human existence and my father's sacrifice. I wiped the tears off my sleeve again before typing, "Leszczyński," I closed my eyes then took a deep breath.

What's the point of surviving when you're the only survivor? Why them, but not me? Why not the opposite? Why didn't my father go harshly on my sisters too like he did on me, to make them stronger, tougher, like him and me? So that they could survive anything. He should have known that human violence has never spared women, just because their body is weaker and they are more vulnerable...

Now the only representative of my family in this rotten lost world, I had to look within myself for the strength to continue to survive since that was why I was born, as well as to answer my son's embarrassing questions. After a few weeks, I no longer felt the need for anything in life: getting up, washing, drinking, eating, going out for fresh air, going to work, exercising. My body and my mind no longer wanted to play at living, let alone at surviving.

I left the Forces again and let myself be totally swallowed up by depression. I lived alone with little contact with the outside world. Apart from Fatou and Ousmane, no one in the world had any reason to think or to worry about my existence. The payment of all my invoices was done by direct deposit, I was still consuming some data on my phone, I flushed the toilet, and I sometimes boiled water.

I wanted to know if Chris and Feliz had survived the camp of artificial intelligence. Feliz lived in Finland with her family while Chris lived in the United Kingdom. During our last chat on social media, he had announced to me that he was thinking of getting engaged to his partner of several years, a Swedish woman of Thai origin. Unfortunately, I found no trace of either Chris or Feliz on the machines of the artificial intelligence. Just like my family members, their existence was no more than a simple error notification on a flat screen.

Sometimes I hoped that it was artificial intelligence that had made a mistake and that my sisters, their family, Feliz and Chris had survived; they were alive, hiding somewhere under a different name.

What an imagination, Borys! I thought in my moments of lucidity.

Of course, artificial intelligence never made any mistakes since some clever men had designed it precisely to no longer make any.

If the rich and all-powerful men had succeeded in investing their fortune in superhuman intelligence to save the planet and all species with it, artificial intelligence hadn't committed any crime against the human species. If AI had acted driven by good intentions under the instructions of a handful of smart people, all the ordinary people left to pay the price certainly had no right to complain.

How can we judge a superior and artificial intelligence that only followed our own orders, our own fears, and our own ignorance? After all, nothing had been hidden from us in the 2020s. We had all watched the camps, oblivious, fearful, silent or all three, while their foundations were being laid out. In fact, we had even voluntarily contributed to the erection of our future prison with our tax money, our two hands, our skills and talents. How proud we were of the construction of Little Paradise on Earth!

One morning, between a dream and a nightmare, I heard the doorbell ring. I ignored it, but the person behind the door was determined to get me to go open it. With difficulty, I dragged myself out of bed, then towards the hallway, and finally towards the door, which was still ringing.

The light from outside dazzled me, I closed my eyes and heard Fatou's voice exclaim sadly, 'Good Lord! Borys, what happened to you?'