Much later, some fancy expert summed up: “Turns out the smallest unit of consciousness is a vote.”
Take Sandi, the librarian at the Nine Corners branch in Mainspring. She noticed things all day, like the people using the book drop box as a trash can, or the folks who came in off the street who could use easier access to social services. There were books she knew her patrons wanted, books that undoubtedly sat unwanted on people’s shelves all over the city. But also, Sandi shared things that came to mind—like, hey, what if the library book sale were a block party? What if the shopping district on the West Side were easier to get to from the Longneck neighborhood, where all the warehouses had been converted to housing and hipster coworking spaces, during peak after-work hours? Sandi had opinions about everything from street cleaning to the power grid, because she listened to people all day.
Then there was Raeford, a bartender at the Wild Goose Chase in the middle of Gallery Row in St. Barnabas. He also listened to people’s problems from evening until the wee hours, and solutions came to him like clockwork when he woke at noon the next day. He saw St. Barnabas at night, so he knew the unsafe blocks that could use brighter streetlights, the places where hydroelectric jitneys drove too fast at 3 a.m., and the teens who needed an all-ages hangout. He also knew about the fish fry at the Black church in the Uptilt District that kept being disrupted by noxious smoke from the incinerator two blocks away. And the yarn store on the edge of Gallery Row that needed a disabled parking spot for its many customers with mobility issues.
People voted with their Quills, usually by saying or typing a short message and maybe including a photo or brief video. Voting was easy by design, and votes were public but anonymized to the point where even a statistics whiz couldn’t tie one vote to a specific person—same as with major elections. The votes went directly to the City Core, which tracked, tabulated, produced reports, and offered solutions with the help of workers in the city government.
Trees voted too, thanks to sensors in their bark, and so did birds and squirrels that had eaten special birdseed that monitored their gut flora harmlessly. But votes from humans provided the greatest insight into “quality of life,” that oh-so-nebulous concept, and thus counted the most.
There was some debate, but almost everyone agreed: The city had started voting. And it had opinions on every last thing.
(Other cities in the region operated differently, of course. Like Turnbull City, where instead of expecting residents to volunteer every stray notion, the City Core gathered information via ubiquitous surveillance. Cameras and Quill sniffers, tracking devices on vehicles—the things privacy laws in both Mainspring and St. Barnabas had banned. A city like Turnbull tracked its people to meet their needs without their needing to say anything.)
Sandi and Raeford, as two of the people who voted the most, were among the earliest to suspect their cities were developing minds of their own. At first the clues were subtle: Raeford voted about a hazardous sidewalk crack, and instantly the vote had an annotation mentioning the Argentine ant colony under the cement, the local rainfall patterns, and recent trends in skateboard design—much too soon to be the work of a human. Sandi had ideas about the communal compost station on her block, and the Mainspring City Core made subtle adjustments to her proposal.
And then it became obvious to anyone who was paying attention, around the same time in both cities. One day, the number of votes nearly doubled in both St. Barnabas and Mainspring. People voted on a birdfeeder or a public toilet only to see a second vote, pro or con, within a split second—but also, some votes from months or years earlier suddenly had new upvotes or downvotes.