My name is Sekou. The last name doesn't matter — I'm just another Johnson. My mother named me after Ahmed Sékou Touré. She used to say she preferred Tomas Sankara, but Sekou sounded more like the name of an anime character. Don't bother trying to understand it, I don't either.
She was a Black woman who raised her children alone, a fan of Tupac, who always managed to quote Fanon in the lectures she gave me.
Man, I loved my mother.
My father, like most fathers where I come from, was nothing more than a blank space on the birth certificate. My mother was everything to me, my safe haven.
At least she had already passed when they threw me into this place. I don't even want to imagine how much it would have hurt her, seeing her son turned into just another bag of flesh trapped inside a demonic machine.
In this hellhole they locked me in, I don't even have time to feel nostalgic. I'm just one more among thousands of inmates in BrainNet.
A state-of-the-art prison system where prisoners' minds are connected to continuous neural simulations used to train artificial intelligence. When I first heard about it, of course I was scared.
Among my friends, that's all anyone could talk about. I was just as outraged as they were — I knew exactly what a technology like that meant. But I was too tired to turn my outrage into action. What would my mother think of that attitude?
Some evil genius from MIT — or one of those other big-name universities — came up with the concept.
The concept was actually pretty simple.
Despite billions of dollars being spent each year to improve artificial intelligence, there was an impassable barrier: computers are nothing more than number-crunching machines, and there are problems that simply can't be solved numerically.
Alan Turing foresaw this decades before the AI boom. He proposed that the only way to solve this kind of problem was to include an oracle in the machine — something that could give answers when no numerical solution existed.
Turing's Oracle, as the concept became known, was exactly what I had become. Yes, the simple solution proposed by the evil genius from MIT was to add a human mind — connected through what they named BrainNet — to the array of processors running AI algorithms.
The result exceeded all expectations. BrainNet dramatically improved the performance of artificial intelligence. But it came at a very high cost — a human cost.
Picture this: you're a talented musician, and they want to use your creative mind to train music AIs. So they create a simulation where you're performing on a busy street. Every so often someone walks by humming a slightly off-key melody. You can't help it — you have to compose something using that melody, no matter how weird it is.
Right after you finish the song, before you can even enjoy a sense of accomplishment, another poor soul walks by humming another weird tune. And you start again. And again. And again.
Want another example? Imagine you're a children's story writer. They stick you in a simulation where you're telling stories at a school. Every moment, a kid comes up asking for a story with the most absurd plot: "Miss, tell me the story of the princess who killed aliens to escape marrying the prince!"
You make up the story, but moments later, another kid comes with another even more ridiculous request. And again. And again...
Take any profession, and it's not hard to imagine a simulation that could be used to train some damned AI.
Some of those simulations might even seem harmless at first. But imagine doing that over and over and over again, until your life becomes nothing but that simulation.
As innocent as they might seem, they all eventually became true nightmares. Which, of course, raised questions about human rights and the use of such a method.
So how did they solve the human rights problem? One simple sentence took care of everything:
"Human rights are for righteous humans." That, and a truckload of marketing money, of course.
After a long lobbying campaign from multiple sectors, they managed to amend international human rights conventions and stripped all inmates of their rights. After all, there are no righteous humans in prison, right?
That's how many prisons around the world began to be converted and integrated into the BrainNet system.
Soon, the majority of the world's prison population was connected to BrainNet — just like me. But of course, even that wasn't enough. They wanted more.
At first, they went after the usual suspects — locking people up for drug dealing based purely on skin color. Then others as undocumented immigrants, based only on their accent.
They loved a good protest — it was perfect to increase data diversity. All they had to do was accuse everyone of terrorism.
But even that wasn't enough. They needed more and more. That's when someone had a brilliant idea:
"We need a new crime. Something everybody does, something morally questionable but not necessarily illegal," said someone at the council of evil. At least that's how I imagine it went.
Then an evil genius replied, "Let's make being in debt a crime. Almost everyone has debt, and almost no one can pay it."
And that's how I became a criminal.
I was minding my business, working a nearly twelve-hour shift delivering food on my 'rented' bike, when a patrol car pulled me over.
At first I thought it was about the 'borrowed' bike. But soon it was clear it had nothing to do with that.
For the first time in my life, I was stopped by the cops in a way that was legal. Completely immoral, but legal.
Congress had passed a law forcing service apps, like the food delivery one I worked for, to share user location data with government systems.
So, when a judge issued my arrest warrant, the system automatically accessed the database, found my location (provided by the app), identified the closest patrol unit, shared the warrant and coordinates, and within minutes, they found me and I was under arrest.
It felt like a ride share — there was already one prisoner in the car before me, and they picked up another one before we got to the prison.
They were arresting so many people that they set up a makeshift courtroom inside the prison to speed things up. I didn't even get a chance to defend myself.
According to them, I was caught in the act — since I hadn't paid my debt yet — and this was just a custody hearing.
I owed thirty-something thousand in student loans. I had a degree in engineering but was delivering food on a stolen bike, so you can guess I had no chance of paying it back.
Want to hear something funny? I was arrested for owing money — and my debt nearly tripled on my first day as an inmate.
To connect my mind to BrainNet, they had to perform surgery on my skull to implant connection points and sensors. That surgery cost nearly sixty thousand — and of course, the prisoner pays the bill.
I went in owing thirty, and by the end of my first day I owed almost ninety thousand. Yes, I would serve a ten-year sentence, being used to train AIs, to pay off a ninety-thousand-dollar debt.
But I should be happy. After all, I wouldn't have to pay for food, rent, or health insurance anymore. And I would still earn nine thousand dollars a year to pay off my debts. A bargain, right?
There was probably someone out there complaining about how easy life was for prisoners.