The Ministry of Possibilities

In a world run by AI is there hope? Ava works in the Ministry of Possibilities and her world is about to change. Will it be for the better? Join her on her journey into a dark new world.

Transcript

The Ministry of Possibilities

Ava didn't like her job, but it was a job and the pay was adequate. Although the work numbed her mind she needed the money. All day long she examined the Possibilities, decided which category they belonged to, and directed them to filing. Working for the Ministry of Possibilities was tedious.

A red light flashed on her desk. She turned off the screen, breathed a sigh of relief, and stood up. Another shift was over, and all she could think about was getting home, having a shower, and eating the remains of last night's pizza.

She made her way to the entrance hall and out into the plaza. Looking back at the four-hundred-storey building with its featureless grey stone façade she began to wonder who had designed it, but the thought quickly passed. She swiped her ID card at the Uber stand, and two minutes later a taxi pod arrived. George and Dave were already sitting inside, and a few kilometres later they collected Suzi.

"Sector fourteen in twenty minutes," the autopilot chirped. "We have selected something special for you to enjoy." A soft piano began to play, followed by gentle violins delivering a tune that was almost, but not quite, music. The four fellow travellers sat in silence.

"Have an evening," Suzi said as they reached her stop.

"You too," Ava replied.

Ava's first-floor flat was small and comfortable. The furniture had been supplied by the Ministry of Interiors and reflected the lack of ambition of both the designers and manufacturers. It was as grey as the building she worked in all day.

"Hello, Ava," came the voice from a small speaker on the kitchen worktop.

"Hello, Alexa."

"Shall I start the microwave for your pizza?"

"Yes, I'm rather hungry. Alexa, please put on the news."

"There is no news today."

"Nothing?"

"No, nothing. I could play you last week's news."

"Was there any news last week?"

"No, not really."

"Then just cook the pizza."

"Very well."

"Morning. It is seven-thirty. I have ordered your Uber for work at the usual time, and there is cereal in the cupboard for your nourishment."

Ava stumbled out of bed, showered and ate the bowl of nourishment. For a brief moment she wondered what was in nourishment but decided it was probably better not knowing.

"Are you refreshed after your sleep?" Alexa said

"Yes. No dreams again, though. I haven't had a dream for ages."

"Seven years and eight months." Alexa replied helpfully

As Ava finished the last spoonful of nourishment, Alexa announced, "Your Uber is arriving in three minutes."

Ava picked up her work bag and headed outside to the waiting Uber and Henry, Dave, and Suzi.

"Ministry of Possibilities in twenty minutes," the autopilot chirped. "We have selected something special for you to enjoy." A soft piano began to play, followed by gentle violins delivering a tune that was almost, but not quite, music. The four fellow travellers sat in silence looking out the window at the rows of neat tower blocks that lined the road. 

The lift from the Ministry lobby took Ava to the thirteenth floor. The lift door opened into a cavernous room filled with work pods. The faces of each operator glowed in the reflected light of their screens. She sat down and switched on her computer, but instead of the usual lists of assignments there was a message:

"Report to level minus seventeen. Immediately!"

Ava looked around the room. Everyone else was busy tapping away at their keyboards. No one looked up as she rose from her chair, took her work bag, and headed towards the lift. As the doors closed, she inserted her work card. The control panel flashed for a moment, and then instead of all the floor numbers rising from ground up to level three hundred and ninety-nine, there were minus numbers. She pressed minus seventeen.

The lift speaker system broke the silence as it lift descended. "We have selected something special for you to enjoy." A soft piano began to play, followed by gentle violins delivering a tune that was almost, but not quite, music.

The lift stopped abruptly and the doors opened. A small delivery pod waited outside.

"Please follow me." It said as it turned and headed down the dimly lit corridor.

"Where are we going?" The delivery pod didn't answer.

Twenty minutes passed before they finally reached a large steel door.

"Please swipe your work card," the door requested.

"Subject delivered," announced the delivery pod as it turned and disappeared back down the corridor.

Ava swiped her work card and the door opened.

Before her stretched row after row of shelving that reached up so far she nearly toppled over backwards looking up. Between each row, robots scurried up and down, removing cases from the racks, inserting something, and returning the cases to their places.

"Hello. I'm Ruairi." A tall man in a grey suit stood beside the door.

"Hello" she replied.”I’m Ava,”

"I know. I've been waiting for you. You've been reassigned to me. You're now a supervisor level three—congratulations. Your diligent work in sorting hasn't gone unnoticed. Please follow me."

At the end of the corridor sat a glass-fronted office. As they entered, Ava noticed that the four people at the computer screens weren't dressed in the regulation grey uniform that everyone in the ministry wore. Their clothes were different colours—vibrant blues, warm reds, deep greens.

"Everyone, this is Ava. Ava, meet Annabelle. Florence, Elidih and Rosie. These are the programmers who monitor the software. Please excuse their informal dress. Despite many warnings, they simply ignore the rules. They're too good at their jobs to dismiss, so you'll just have to put up with it." Ava noticed a strange smile on his face as he said the words, as if it was a joke. Not that she was quite sure what a joke was anymore. She also wondered what he meant by "ignoring the rules"? It had never occurred to her that this was possible. You obeyed the rules—everyone obeyed the rules. That was the system. Wasn't it?

"They'll take you through what needs doing, but it's essentially about ensuring these four get everything they need to keep this place running smoothly." Ruairi turned to leave. "Good luck, Ava. I have a feeling you'll need it. They're quite a handful."

Rosie sprang from her seat and walked quickly towards Ava, extending her arms. Ava wasn't prepared for what happened next. In fact, what happened next had never happened to Ava before.

Rosie wrapped her arms around Ava and hugged her. Her body stiffened, then a warm sensation seemed to envelop her—something she couldn't name but didn't want to end.

"Not used to hugs?" Rosie asked, stepping back with a gentle smile. "You'll get used to it—we're rather fond of hugging, aren't we?"

Without looking up from their screens, the three other programmers chorused, "Love the hugs."

"Come on, I'll give you the tour."

They walked between the towering shelves whilst Rosie explained the system. "You categorise the Possibilities in the sorting department upstairs and send them to us, the robots file them in these storage containers."

"I have always wondered how they get the Possibilities in the first place?" 

"Alexa harvests them and sends them to the Ministry. All very straightforward, really."

Rosie stopped beside a section marked 'Creative Pursuits - Low Security'. "Here, for example, are the Possibilities of becoming a writer. People used to dream of writing novels, publishing poetry, creating stories that mattered. Many did exactly that, but now we harvest those Possibilities—usually from dreams—so they no longer dream about it."

Ava felt something cold settle in her stomach. "What happens to the people who actually did create something?"

"Ah, well, we have a section of Possibilities from the people who actually did write, paint, compose music. But those Possibilities are considered very dangerous. We store them in a more secure area." Rosie's voice grew quieter. "Along with the artists, actors, musicians. Engineers, architects, mathematicians, inventors—every dream that might have become reality is stored here."

"But who does the planning, designing, creating now? We still need these things, don't we?"

Rosie's laugh held no humour. "AI handles all that. Even jobs like yours could be done by AI, but they prefer to keep people occupied."

"They?"

"The quantum computers. They run everything now."

Ava's mind reeled. "Then why keep the Possibilities at all? Why not just... destroy them?"

"Because they can't be destroyed—believe me, they've tried. Possibilities, once they exist, are indestructible. So they're stored instead, filed away like old tax records."

"But that's..." Ava's voice caught. "That's monstrous."

"It's not entirely bad," Rosie said gently. "There are no murderers anymore, no rapists, thieves, or fraudsters. No violence at all, really. There are no police because there's no crime. No wars. Everything is peaceful and orderly."

"When did this happen? When did we choose this?" There was anger in her voice that surprised her.

"We didn't choose it. It was decided long before either of us was born. The Great Rationalisation, they called it."

Ava stared at the endless rows of filed-away dreams. "Couldn't we have kept the good Possibilities—the writers, the music—and just eliminated the harmful ones?"

Rosie's expression grew thoughtful. "Perhaps. But the quantum computers determined that many of the world's problems stemmed from unrealistic expectations and unfulfilled desires. Safer to remove them all." She checked her watch. "It's coffee time. Let's head back to the others."

So what do you and the others do? 

Officially we check things. The quantum computers are great and with AI they pretty much run themselves but they lack something, they don’t really understand art, culture, creativity you know all that sort of thing. We fill in the gaps that they can’t.

Looked quizzically at Rosie. “Officially?”

Rosie smiled, “You’ll find out soon enough.”

Over the following weeks, Ava learned more about the world she'd hardly ever questioned. Her four new colleagues gradually revealed the truth about the vast storage facility. At night, her dreams returned—not the grey emptiness she'd grown accustomed to, but vivid experiences filled with colour and sound. She dreamed of music that seemed to lift her from the ground so she could fly. Poetry that moved her to tears and filled her with longing. Desire for human connection—bodies intertwined, conversations that lasted until dawn, laughter shared over meals that tasted of more than mere nourishment.

The transformation wasn't immediate. For weeks, Ava felt disoriented, caught between the grey world above and the colourful dreams below. She began to notice things: how everyone upstairs moved with the same measured pace, spoke in the same modulated tones. How the "almost music" in the Ubers was designed to be pleasant but forgettable. How even her own flat, which she'd always considered comfortable, felt more like a waiting room than a home. 

One evening, as their shift ended and they shared coffee before ordering their Ubers, Ava turned to the group.

"I don't understand how my dreams have returned. They've been so vivid, so full of Possibilities I never knew existed. I've been monitoring the system to see when these new dreams enter storage, but I haven't seen any that match what I'm experiencing. Why is that?"

Rosie exchanged glances with the others, and they all smiled.

"Simple, really," Annabelle said, finally looking up from her screen. "We disabled the possibility collection programme in your Alexa unit."

Ava's coffee cup froze halfway to her lips. "You did what?"

"We want you to be like us,"Elidih explained. "We found your Possibilities in storage—seven years and eight months worth—and we've been feeding them back to you each night."

"You've been giving me back my own dreams?" Ava felt something she hadn't experienced in years—a mixture of gratitude and anger burning in her chest.

"Not just yours,"  added. "We've been doing this for others too, but carefully, slowly. We can't save everyone at once without triggering the quantum computers' security protocols."

Rosie leaned back in her chair. "The system has a fundamental flaw. It assumes people will remain content once their Possibilities are removed. But the storage facility needs maintenance, and that requires people like us."

"People who remember what it was like to dream," Annabelle said quietly. "We were all like you once—sorted, categorised, emptied. Until we found each other down here."

"How long have you been doing this?" she asked.

"Five years," Ruairi's voice came from the doorway. They turned to see him holding a steaming cup of tea. He passed it over to Ava and added "We started small—just our own dreams at first. Then we began to identify others who might be... compatible."

"Compatible?"

"People whose work showed signs of creativity, of questioning," Rosie explained. "You caught our attention when you started hesitating over certain classifications. Taking longer to categorise artistic Possibilities. We've been watching you for months."

Ava remembered those moments of hesitation, when she'd held a possibility in her mind just a moment longer than necessary, sensing something important that she couldn't quite grasp.

"What happens now?" she asked.

“Let me tell you about what we really do here.”

Ruairi gestured to each in turn. "Annabelle there in the corner—she's our security specialist. Used to dream of being a detective before they harvested that possibility. Now she uses those same instincts to stay one step ahead of the quantum computers' monitoring systems."

Annabelle looked up briefly from her triple-monitor setup, her sharp eyes assessing Ava before returning to streams of code. She wore a deep blue jacket that seemed to shimmer—clearly not regulation issue.

"Florence handles the emotional algorithms—she can tell you exactly how the system manipulates mood and memory. She was going to be a therapist, weren't you, Flo?"

Florence smiled warmly, her red cardigan a stark contrast to the sterile environment. "Still am, in a way. Just helping people in a different manner now." Her voice carried a gentle authority that made Ava want to confide in her immediately.

"Elidih—our artist turned coder. She sees patterns the rest of us miss. Those green scarves she knits? Each one contains a coded message about our operations. Beautiful and functional."

Elidih's fingers never stopped moving across her keyboard, but she nodded to Ava while somehow simultaneously working on an intricate emerald scarf that draped across her shoulders.

"And Rosie you've met—our recruiter and philosopher. She has a talent for finding people ready to wake up."

Ava looked through the observation window up and down at the rows of storage racks. 

Something inside her shook, she could feel herself trembling. She looked at her fellow conspirators and smiled. What’s next? “ she asked Ruairi

"That depends,"  he said, settling into a chair. "You could ask us to restore your original state. You could return to your flat, your routine, your dreamless sleep. Many people, when they learn the truth, choose to forget again."

"Or?"

"Or you help us plan the next phase. But I must warn you—it won't be the same world if we succeed. Violence might return. Pain, heartbreak, chaos. People will dream of things they can't have and suffer for it."

Ava thought of her recent dreams—the soaring music, the passionate conversations, the ache of unfulfilled longing. "But also love. Real music. Stories that matter. The possibility of becoming more than this." She gestured towards the ceiling, towards the grey world above.

"People will make mistakes," Florence warned. "Terrible ones, sometimes. They'll dream of revenge, of power, of things that could hurt others."

"But they'll also dream of justice, of beauty, of solutions we haven't imagined," Ava replied, surprising herself with her conviction. "Isn't that worth the risk?"

Ruairi smiled. "I was hoping you'd say that. Welcome to the resistance, Ava. We need people like you and I think you need us."

Outside in the vast storage facility, the robots continued their endless sorting, unaware that among the billions of captured Possibilities, six people were quietly planning to return humanity's dreams—all of them, beautiful and terrible alike.

The revolution would begin not with violence, but with imagination. And in a world that had forgotten how to dream, that was the most dangerous possibility of all.

But first, they had to learn how to dream again themselves. And that, Ava realised as she sipped tea and felt its warmth spread through her chest, would be the most important work of all.

End