The Last Reasonable Man

The algorithms had already perfected the metaphorical herding of humanity a decade ago. By 2032 the machines knew everything there was to know. By this time we were left with two options: to choose to focus on what AI made better (which wasn’t insignificant) or dwell on the things it took from us.

AI had settled, like a fine dust, into every nook and cranny of our lives. The machines became our caregivers, servants, savants, and to some, even their God. They learned to anticipate our wants and needs, solved our mysteries, answered every question, shuttled us where we needed to go.

In many ways post-AI life felt much easier and softer but it also felt as though the frequency of our world shifted. We found ourselves in an alternate universe we struggled to navigate. With each of our thoughts and actions we helped the algorithms weave the world into a binary tapestry: zeros or ones, us versus them. This was simply how things worked now. The algorithms fed the furnaces of our rage like oxygen. People woke up hungry for it the way they used to wake up jonesing for their first cigarette of the day.

Consensus and nuance had become public enemy number one. A balanced take on anything was considered weakness. The middle-of-the-road was far too wishy-washy for the metrics, too grey to go viral.

Elias Crowe seemed to be the last person on Earth unwilling to accept this. He blogged under the nom de plume of The Last Reasonable Man because that’s precisely what he felt like. Eli was one of those rare freaks of nature who was born with natural immunity. He enjoyed the fruits of AI as much as the next guy but preferred not hand his life over completely to it and nor was he blind to its negative aspects.

He lived in a tidy apartment above a struggling bookstore, in a small town where the Midwest bled into the vastness of the plains. Etherford had been a decaying town until the Great Relocation began in 2027.

Twenty-seven was the year AI proposed, for the good of humanity, that people abandon the dangers of the big cities for places that scored lower on the extinction scale. Most of these formerly dead towns were carbon copies of each other, hollowed out decades earlier when the jobs went overseas. The towns carried the vibe of a theme park facade. Each had a town square with a bandstand, a couple grocery stores, small shops, a smattering of charging stations, gyms, parks, and countless nondescript warehouses. The cornfields that ran up to peoples’ backyards were dotted with megalithic data centers humming with an insatiable thirst for power and water.

At sixty, Eli marveled at how his reflection looked exactly like some carnival caricature of his younger self. He still took pride in his appearance but he didn’t feel the need to. He still called himself a writer, though the truth was he wrote essays and books nobody read anymore.

The golden age for content creators had long passed, the algos didn’t reward authors like him anymore. His final book, Between the Poles, had sold under fifty copies. The sales numbers counted the ones he'd bought himself and handed out to family. Eli kept a neat stack of his titles on the bookcase by his desk, like a talisman. When he began to feel lost, the stack of books reminded him that he once conjured a life from words and ideas—and a damned good one. This was something the world couldn't take from him.

Even the true believers in AI were suspicious about the motivations of Big Tech. A few years back, the government had started skimming a small slice of its profits and redistributing it as monthly UBI payments. Everyone lived comfortably now, well above what used to be upper middle class. Our wants and needs were taken care of but our purpose had been severed from job titles and professions. That sounded easier to digest than it was. A lot of people found themselves quietly drowning in the void, searching desperately for some semblance of purpose.

It took Eli a few years, but he'd built a daily routine that kept him looking forward to the next sunrise. Regular workouts, his battered laptop, and writing for no one but himself, and the reward of a cocoa-dusted latte at the local coffeeshop in the afternoon. He saw the bright-side by nature, and his words oozed that, which made them a poor fit for a world that rewarded tribalism and fury.

On this particular Tuesday, the algorithms had chosen their crisis du jour: the Water Reclamation Act. Eli hadn’t quite figured out if these flare-ups were amplified for the AI's entertainment or to give people a sense of purpose. Probably a bit of both. One side called it the greatest environmental triumph since the Green New Deal. The other called it tyranny. As usual, both sides were half right and wholly blind to the truth.

Eli watched the storm building from his kitchen table while noisily scraping his spoon across a bowl of Greek yogurt and raspberries, drizzled with local honey. His AI-agent, Maximillion, had been nagging him to increase his protein intake by twenty grams and adding honey to help his hay fever, he finally obliged and felt better for it. Blue avatars screamed about children dying from poisoned rivers. Red avatars raged about farmers losing land to corrupt bureaucrats. The prediction markets exploded, everyone placing their bets on who would win.

Juvenal said it perfectly two thousand years ago, “Give them bread and circuses and they'll never revolt”. The comment sections had become our coliseums, and the death threats started trending well before noon. It wasn't even eight a.m. and someone had already doxxed a moderate senator for suggesting a compromise.

Eli posted on one of the last platforms that still allowed long-form thought:

The rivers are genuinely polluted. The farmers are genuinely being squeezed into oblivion. Nobody's lying and nobody's virtuous—both problems are real, and any real fix is going to gore somebody's sacred cow. We used to understand that instinctively. What the hell happened to us?

The post got twelve likes and one reply: Not taking a stance is how evil wins, you old geezer.

He'd gotten used to both the silence and the jabs but was undecided about which one hurt more.

By evening the protests had spilled into the streets. Holographic crowds clashed with real ones outside the capitol while drone swarms livestreamed it all in quick cuts built for maximum engagement. Eli felt an intense desire to see it in person. He called a Robotaxi, napped off and on through the ride, and walked up to the capitol grounds carrying nothing but a notebook and his old leather satchel. He’d stay just a few hours, he told himself.

He found a quiet spot near the fountain, between two groups screaming past each other. A young woman in a faded tie-dyed shirt held a sign: Clean Water or Death. Across from her, a sunburnt man in a plaid shirt and trucker hat waved his own: Hands Off Our Land. Their eyes met for a second. Two people, both terrified but trying their best not to look like it.

Eli stepped between them before he could talk himself out of it.

"Excuse me. Can I ask you both something?"

They turned on him like he'd wandered into the wrong den.

"Are you with them?" the woman asked.

"No," Eli said. "I'm with the river but I’m also with the farms. You see, they have to coexist."

The farmer barked a laugh. "Stand for nothing, fall for anything."

"I do stand for something. It's called reality." Eli kept his voice even. "Aquifer levels are dropping. That's real. Blanket reclamation rules will also bankrupt family farms that have fed this country for generations. That's real too. So we negotiate. We change the rules so everybody gets something. The data centers should be off-world anyway, where they don't need our water to stay cool or our electricity to run. Engineering and compromise instead of pointless fighting and angry words."

"Compromise is exactly what got us here," the woman snapped.

The man jabbed a finger toward Eli's chest. "You sound just like the elites."

The exhaustion from regurgitated words was familiar to Eli, it lived in him now, on comment threads, at family dinners, sometimes even in the mirror. People’s vocabulary had been reduced to soundbites the scripts the puppetmasters fed them. The reasonable man was always the villain.

Max interrupted, “Eli, just walk away.” He put Max to sleep and kept talking anyway.

"Elite? I'm a washed-up writer. I pay taxes, drink the same water, eat the food you grow. I've read the studies and I've walked the fields. Your algorithms want you to hate me because your hate keeps you scrolling and distracted. But if we can't hold two truths at once anymore, we're finished."

For a moment the woman and the farmer paused, looked at each other, and something registered in their eyes.

Then the drones dropped to eye level, broadcasting their faces. The woman's phone lit up with notifications. The man's group chat exploded. The moment came and went.

"Traitor," one of them muttered.

"Useful idiot," said the other.

They turned back to their tribes, angrier now for having been briefly pulled from the warm certainty of rage.

Eli asked Maximillion for the nearest four-star hotel with a vacancy. He was tired in a way that went well beyond his body. Max guided him through streets which were lit up with augmented protest signs and bill boards while his feed filled, not with agreement, but denunciations. The Last Reasonable Man, they called him now, the old nickname turned into a smirk and a sneer. A deepfake of him was trending, shaking hands with cartoon villains from both sides while his pockets were stuffed with cash from each.

A little past midnight, sitting on the hotel sofa, he opened a blank document. Maximillion chimed in, “Eli, it’s late, you should really consider getting some sleep if you want to feel your best tomorrow.”

Eli responded with a sigh as the laptop cursor blinked like a slowing pulse.

He wrote:

They say the center cannot hold. But the center was never meant to hold power. It was built from compromise for one thing, to hold truth. While the extremes pull the rope until it snaps, the reasonable man refuses to let go. Rivers and farms, liberty and responsibility, compassion and accountability—these aren't opposites. They're partners. Partners argue and partners fight. But what partners don't do is burn the house down. You think the dopamine hits feel good when you best your opponent, when you get the louder cheer? You have no idea how amazing it feels to experience real consensus. To reconcile. To build something with someone instead of against them. No other feeling even comes close.

Underneath, he pasted a poem he'd written years before:

THE CLIFF

The knowing never leaves me now,
it's haunting to realize
the when, the why, the how,

Drowning in a sea of greed,
so blissfully distracted
as their algos reap the ones and zeros
consuming what’s left of best in us all,

We each play our roles
but those nervous smiles reveal
the feeling that something's wrong
with the direction of this herd,

At times it seems like
the right words
might just break our trance
but so continues our dance
right to the edge of the cliff.

~TLRM~

He posted it and closed his laptop. He experienced the surge of excitement he always felt when he knew he strung together words that sang but he expected nothing.

By morning his post had 312 likes, more than he'd seen in years, and three private message notifications waiting underneath. One PM was from the woman from yesterday with the sign. The other one was from the farmer. The last from a teenage coder who, as it happened, worked on the very algorithms ripping the world apart.

None of them agreed with him on everything. Each of them pushed back, which he'd anticipated. But they were also asking questions, and they clearly wanted to continue the conversation, so he answered each of them thoughtfully.

Eli showered, lingering longer than usual under the hotel’s laughably large but immensely luxurious rainfall showerhead. He dressed, ordered salmon Benedict and a full pot of black coffee from room service, and decided to walk back past the capitol once more before asking Max to call him a ride home. Halfway down the tree-lined boulevard, he caught something in his peripheral that stopped him cold.

The woman and the farmer that had been at battle with each other the day before were sitting across a small café table on a restaurant patio. Steam was rising from their coffees on opposite ends of the table as they picked away at flakey French pastries, deep in conversation.

The feeds were still burning. Society hadn't become any kinder or gentler. But somewhere in the space between the extremes, something had broken through. Somebody besides him had decided the other side could be neighbors instead of enemies and it was okay to see the world in shades of grey. They started pausing to listen and consider instead of formulating their next attack.

Eli carried plenty of memories from his unusual and storied life, but that one…two strangers at a café table, choosing to focus what they shared over what divided them, had more impact on him than any book review or royalty check ever had.

It was proof enough to him that reason hadn’t gone extinct. There was hope for humanity yet. Whatever it was he'd been trying to plant all those years had taken root. Even though it was AI that handed us all the answers, it was life itself that taught Eli this universal truth. Never in his life was he happier to be wrong.

---

www.ericvancewalton.net