They sat in a circle—fourteen of them, from nine countries, in a wooden building surrounded by birch trees and snow.
The screen in the center showed a visualization of their collective attention: a network of brainwave patterns, linked by the AI facilitator into a real-time map of shared awareness. When they breathed together, the network pulsed in unison. When one of them became anxious, the others could see it—a flutter of red in the web—and the group would unconsciously slow its breathing to bring the pattern back into coherence.
Dr. Eriksson watched from the edge. She'd been designing these sessions for a decade—combining meditation practice, AI-facilitated perspective-taking, and developmental psychology exercises into a protocol she called "collaborative consciousness expansion."
Today's exercise was simple: the AI would present a complex policy dilemma about autonomous weapons, and the group would deliberate—not to reach a conclusion, but to practice holding multiple perspectives simultaneously without collapsing into tribalism.
What happened next was what always happened, and what never stopped surprising her. The group didn't argue. They didn't take sides. Instead, the AI visualized each perspective as a spatial position, and the participants moved through them—feeling what it was like to be the military planner, the civilian, the engineer, the child in the conflict zone. Not intellectually. Experientially. The AI translated each perspective into an emotional and cognitive configuration that the participants could inhabit.
After forty minutes, something shifted. The network visualization showed a pattern she'd seen before but could never quite predict: a sudden, spontaneous coherence, as if fourteen separate minds had found a frequency they shared. In that moment, the group could see the problem from above—not any single perspective, but the shape of all the perspectives together.
It wasn't consensus. It was something stranger and more useful: collective sight.
One participant, a former drone pilot, was crying quietly. "I've never understood it from the other side before," he said.
Sanne wrote in her notes: "Day 247. The capacity is real. The question is whether we can scale it fast enough."
Outside, the birch trees stood in the snow, patient as they had been for centuries, waiting for a species that was trying, with everything it had, to grow up.