Minds Like Fire

Minds Like Fire reimagines the animal kingdom as a world of humanoid peoples, each species possessing human-level intelligence, complex societies, language, currency, armies, trade, culture, and all the machinery of civilization we recognize. The lion-people, the boar-people, the hyena-people, the dog-people, all feel distinctly human in their interior lives, their politics, their loves, their conflicts. Then humans evolve. In this world, what we consider “normal” human intelligence is the baseline for all animal-peoples. But when humans emerge, their intellect represents something on the order of a thousand or billion times that baseline, thinking in timescales, abstractions, and complexities that are fundamentally incomprehensible to the animal-peoples. The story magnifies humanity's actual relationship with animals into fantasy scale: domestication, factory farming, enslavement, consumption. What does it mean for a species to be domesticated? What does a slaughterhouse look like when the animals inside are people with full interior lives?

This is the mirror held up to our current moment, the advent of AI, the questions about what it would mean for something to subsume human intellect and subsume the human race. Rather than exploring this directly through AI, the story asks what it would look like for us to be on the receiving end of that domination. The humans in this world are what superintelligence might be to us: inevitable, inscrutable, playing games at scales the animal-peoples cannot perceive. The horror is not in cruelty but in absence, the absence of thought, of confrontation, of having to look something in the eye. The story must sit in uncomfortable questions: Is it okay if a human chooses to lock up an animal if the animal has space to graze? Where is the line between care and captivity? What does it mean that individuals can be moral while participating in immoral systems? This is a weird type of tragedy: the humans are us, and that's the horror; the animal-peoples are us, and that's the empathy.