The Great Prophet Lost in the Desert’s Mirror

Originally published in Kapitali.al.

There is a special kind of loneliness that is born not from the heights of intellect but from the abyss of delirium and the backwardness of the mind. It is the absolute loneliness of someone who climbs a high sand dune, dons the prophet’s mantle and begins to preach vanity before the world. In the theater of his mind, the self-proclaimed prophet is the voice of reason in an age of universal madness — a tragic, almost mythological figure sacrificing himself to illuminate “the desert of deaf ears”.

But as the savior’s words — who had come from the distant lands of a small country to save the big world — echoed through the empty hall, a great dilemma rose like a shadow. Which was the real desert? That of the despot, who had taken up the banner to save democracy, or the emptiness of the charlatan’s preaching? The liberal who stole every election, the leader who turned the state into a criminal organization, the Messiah with 120 disciples in prison cells, the man who turned scandals into the norm, was now fighting alone to save the world from an apocalyptic enemy: misused intelligent machines.

Not from Diella, who amazed the world with her vanity. Nor from AKSHI, which amazed even more with its criminal perversion. Because those are the Prophet’s own creations. The real threat is the algorithms that distort the truth, the monopoly over which must belong to him alone. So the great danger is not the one James Cameron predicted in the famous Terminator saga. Nor the one the world’s greatest minds are shouting about today. The real threat is that the algorithm will perfectly obey the wrong people, to the point of turning the ignorant people against the enlightened leader.

Was the flamingo revolution not fatal proof of this danger? Yet the prophet had found the solution to save his ignorant flock from the misuse of machines. Now he had decided to show it to the world too. It was the magic mirror — another great invention of his laboratory, after Diella, the invisible incinerators, Roni’s welding electrode, Linda’s AKSHI, Belinda’s tunnels, Vlora’s spies… The wondrous mirror of the leader of the most polluted government will now save the world from trash as well. Oh, if only the latter had ears to hear his preaching in the deaf desert.