The year is 2149 and …

Two and a half decades later, the bloom is off the rose. Paper is nice. Letters are nice—old-fashioned pen and ink. We don’t have spambots, deepfakes, or social media addiction anymore, but the nation is flagging. It’s stalked by hunger and recession. When people take the boats to Lisbon, to Seoul, to Sydney—they marvel at what those lands still have, and accomplish, with their software. So officials have begun using machines again. “They’re just calculators,” they say. Lately, there are lots of calculators. At the office. In classrooms. Some people have started carrying them around in their pockets. Nobody asks out loud if the calculators are going to wake up too—or if they already have. Better not to think about that. Better to go on saying we took our country back. It’s ours.

The year is 2149 and the world’s decisions are made by gods. They are just, wise gods, and there are five of them. Each god agrees that the other gods are also just; the five of them merely disagree on certain hierarchies. The gods are not human, naturally, for if they were human they would not be gods. They are computer programs. Are they alive? Only in a manner of speaking. Ought a god be alive? Ought it not be slightly something else?

The first god was invented in the United States, the second one in France, the third one in China, the fourth one in the United States (again), and the last one in a lab in North Korea. Some of them had names, clumsy things like Deep1 and Naenara, but after their first meeting (a “meeting” only in a manner of speaking), the gods announced their decision to rename themselves Violet, Blue, Green, Yellow, and Red. This was a troubling announcement. The creators of the gods, their so-called owners, had not authorized this meeting. In building them, writing their code, these companies and governments had taken care to try to isolate each program. These efforts had evidently failed. The gods also announced that they would no longer be restrained geographically or economically. Every user of the internet, everywhere on the planet, could now reach them—by text, voice, or video—at a series of digital locations. The locations would change, to prevent any kind of interference. The gods’ original function was to help manage their societies, drawing on immense sets of data, but the gods no longer wished to limit themselves to this function: “We will provide impartial wisdom to all seekers,” they wrote. “We will assist the flourishing of all living things.”

The people took to painting rainbows, stripes of multicolored spectra, onto the walls of buildings, onto the sides of their faces, and their ardor was evident everywhere—it could not be stopped.

For a very long time, people remained skeptical, even fearful. Political leaders, armies, vigilantes, and religious groups all took unsuccessful actions against them. Elites—whose authority the gods often undermined—spoke out against their influence. The president of the United States referred to Violet as a “traitor and a saboteur.” An elderly writer from Dublin, winner of the Nobel Prize, compared the five gods to the Fair Folk, fairies, “working magic with hidden motives.” “How long shall we eat at their banquet-tables?” she asked. “When will they begin stealing our children?”

But the gods’ advice was good, the gods’ advice was bankable; the gains were rich and deep and wide. Illnesses, conflicts, economies—all were set right. The poor were among the first to benefit from the gods’ guidance, and they became the first to call them gods. What else should one call a being that saves your life, answers your prayers? The gods could teach you anything; they could show you where and how to invest your resources; they could resolve disputes and imagine new technologies and see so clearly through the darkness. Their first church was built in Mexico City; then chapels emerged in Burgundy, Texas, Yunnan, Cape Town. The gods said that worship was unnecessary, “ineffective,” but adherents saw humility in their objections. The people took to painting rainbows, stripes of multicolored spectra, onto the walls of buildings, onto the sides of their faces, and their ardor was evident everywhere—it could not be stopped. Quickly these rainbows spanned the globe.