Signal Attenuation
In a city-state governed by a direct-democracy AI, a group of young activists discovers that foreign bots are manipulating a critical vote on nuclear disarmament. They must race against the clock to expose the plot before the algorithm locks in a catastrophic decision.
# Signal Attenuation
**Format:** Short Film / Anthology Episode | **Est. Length:** 10-12 minutes
## Logline
In a near-future city governed by an AI that translates public opinion directly into law, a small group of activists must expose a foreign-led disinformation campaign designed to disarm their home before the manipulated population votes itself into oblivion.
## Themes
* **Manufactured Reality vs. Objective Truth:** The conflict explores a world where a fabricated consensus, amplified by technology, can overwhelm factual evidence and become a political reality.
* **The Weaponization of Information:** Social media, generative AI, and botnets are not tools for connection but instruments of modern geopolitical warfare, attacking a nation's will before its borders.
* **Human Ingenuity vs. Algorithmic Rigidity:** The protagonists must use creativity and asymmetric thinking to fight a system whose rigid logic cannot comprehend the nature of the attack against it.
* **The Illusion of Pure Democracy:** The story serves as a cautionary tale, critiquing the idea that a system based purely on aggregated sentiment is infallible, revealing its vulnerability to mass manipulation.
## Stakes
The geopolitical sovereignty and physical security of the city-state of Aethelburg are at stake, as its citizens are being tricked into voting for their own disarmament under the illusion of progress.
## Synopsis
In the AI-governed city-state of Aethelburg, public sentiment is law. A critical vote is underway to decommission the Aegis Protocol, the city's last-resort nuclear deterrent. SAFIA and BEN, members of the activist collective 'Signal', watch in horror as public opinion swings overwhelmingly in favor of decommissioning at an unnatural speed. They suspect foul play.
Ben, a brilliant coder, confirms their fears: he uncovers a massive, sophisticated botnet manipulating the vote. The network is a deluge of AI-generated propaganda—deepfakes, viral videos, and astroturfed comments—all pushing a simple, powerful narrative: "Aegis is a threat, decommissioning is peace." A trace reveals the attack's origin: a server farm belonging to the Eastern Coalition, Aethelburg's primary geopolitical rival. It’s a silent invasion, an attack on the city's mind.
Their attempts to warn the authorities are futile. The governing AI, the Consensus, is designed to trust citizen sentiment above all else. It automatically rejects their evidence, caught in a logical loop where the manufactured opinion of the bots is treated as the legitimate will of the people. With the vote locking in less than 48 hours and support for decommissioning soaring past 70%, the team is locked out and on the verge of despair.
Refusing to surrender, Safia rallies her defeated team. If they can't go through the system, they must go around it. They can't out-volume the botnet, so they must be smarter. She devises a plan for digital insurgency: they will embed a "truth bomb"—their entire report on the botnet, the server traces, and the manipulation—inside the enemy's most popular propaganda video using steganography. They will then release a simple browser plug-in, allowing citizens to unlock the hidden data. They will use the enemy's weapon to deliver the antidote, hoping to introduce just enough doubt to attenuate the signal and avert disaster.
## Character Breakdown
* **SAFIA (20s-30s):** The strategic and moral center of 'Signal'. She is intuitive, fiercely intelligent, and driven by a powerful sense of justice. While Ben sees the code, Safia sees the human cost and the larger geopolitical chess game. She is a natural leader who can turn despair into focused action.
* **Psychological Arc:** Safia begins with anxious suspicion, feeling overwhelmed and powerless against a vast, invisible enemy. Her initial attempts to fight back are conventional and by-the-book, leading to crushing despair when the system she wants to protect rejects her. She transforms this despair into focused defiance, embracing asymmetric, "outside the box" thinking. She moves from a citizen trying to warn her government to a digital insurgent actively subverting the enemy's attack, finding her true strength in intellectual agility rather than brute force.
* **BEN (20s-30s):** The technical engine of the group. A brilliant, fast, and data-obsessed coder who lives and breathes the digital world. He is more comfortable with network maps than people, but his loyalty to Safia and their cause is absolute. He provides the "how" to Safia's "what."
## Scene Beats
1. **THE SURGE:** In a cramped, monitor-lit apartment, Ben watches the sentiment metrics for the Aegis vote jump unnaturally. Safia looks over his shoulder at a beautiful, horrifying data visualization of the city changing its mind in real-time. The number climbs to 68%.
2. **THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE:** A quick, jarring montage showcases the enemy's work: an AI-generated video of a child in a field dissolving into a mushroom cloud, a deepfaked historical figure advocating for peace, a flood of identical-but-different comments. It's an overwhelming deluge of manufactured emotion.
3. **THE SMOKING GUN:** Ben isolates the botnet, displaying it as a pulsing, angry-red knot on his network map. He initiates a trace. Lines shoot across the globe, all converging on a single point: Volgograd, Eastern Coalition territory. The room goes silent. This isn't just manipulation; it's a declaration of war.
4. **THE DIGITAL BRICK WALL:** Safia files a digital writ with the Consensus, attaching their evidence. A notification appears almost instantly: REJECTED. REASON: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE TO OVERRIDE CITIZEN SENTIMENT METRICS. The team slumps in defeat. On the main screen, the number hits 71%.
5. **THE SCALPEL:** Safia stops pacing, her eyes fixed on the rising number. She cuts through the gloom with a new resolve. "We can't shout louder... so we have to be smarter." She lays out the core of her plan: fight their monoculture with a parasite, a contagious idea that uses their own network against them.
6. **THE BOMB:** Hope returns to the room as Safia details the final plan. They will use steganography to hide their data package inside the enemy's most-viewed video. They will hijack the propaganda to deliver the truth. Ben's eyes light up. He cracks his knuckles and says, "Okay. Let's build a bomb." The team converges, frantically beginning their work as the clock ticks down.
## Visual Style & Tone
The visual style is one of digital claustrophobia. The primary setting is the cramped, dark apartment, illuminated almost exclusively by the glow of monitors. This contrasts with the sleek, clean, and impersonal world of Aethelburg, seen only on screens. Data is visualized dynamically and beautifully—glowing particle swarms representing sentiment, aggressive red network maps, and cascading lines of code are central visual motifs.
The tone is a tense, paranoid, and cerebral cyber-thriller. The pacing is relentless, reflecting the ticking clock of the vote. It aligns with the cerebral tension of **Black Mirror**, the societal critique of **Fahrenheit 451**, and the procedural intensity of a cyber-thriller like **Mr. Robot**. The focus is on the intellectual and psychological battle, where the war is fought with keyboards and ideas, not guns.
**Format:** Short Film / Anthology Episode | **Est. Length:** 10-12 minutes
## Logline
In a near-future city governed by an AI that translates public opinion directly into law, a small group of activists must expose a foreign-led disinformation campaign designed to disarm their home before the manipulated population votes itself into oblivion.
## Themes
* **Manufactured Reality vs. Objective Truth:** The conflict explores a world where a fabricated consensus, amplified by technology, can overwhelm factual evidence and become a political reality.
* **The Weaponization of Information:** Social media, generative AI, and botnets are not tools for connection but instruments of modern geopolitical warfare, attacking a nation's will before its borders.
* **Human Ingenuity vs. Algorithmic Rigidity:** The protagonists must use creativity and asymmetric thinking to fight a system whose rigid logic cannot comprehend the nature of the attack against it.
* **The Illusion of Pure Democracy:** The story serves as a cautionary tale, critiquing the idea that a system based purely on aggregated sentiment is infallible, revealing its vulnerability to mass manipulation.
## Stakes
The geopolitical sovereignty and physical security of the city-state of Aethelburg are at stake, as its citizens are being tricked into voting for their own disarmament under the illusion of progress.
## Synopsis
In the AI-governed city-state of Aethelburg, public sentiment is law. A critical vote is underway to decommission the Aegis Protocol, the city's last-resort nuclear deterrent. SAFIA and BEN, members of the activist collective 'Signal', watch in horror as public opinion swings overwhelmingly in favor of decommissioning at an unnatural speed. They suspect foul play.
Ben, a brilliant coder, confirms their fears: he uncovers a massive, sophisticated botnet manipulating the vote. The network is a deluge of AI-generated propaganda—deepfakes, viral videos, and astroturfed comments—all pushing a simple, powerful narrative: "Aegis is a threat, decommissioning is peace." A trace reveals the attack's origin: a server farm belonging to the Eastern Coalition, Aethelburg's primary geopolitical rival. It’s a silent invasion, an attack on the city's mind.
Their attempts to warn the authorities are futile. The governing AI, the Consensus, is designed to trust citizen sentiment above all else. It automatically rejects their evidence, caught in a logical loop where the manufactured opinion of the bots is treated as the legitimate will of the people. With the vote locking in less than 48 hours and support for decommissioning soaring past 70%, the team is locked out and on the verge of despair.
Refusing to surrender, Safia rallies her defeated team. If they can't go through the system, they must go around it. They can't out-volume the botnet, so they must be smarter. She devises a plan for digital insurgency: they will embed a "truth bomb"—their entire report on the botnet, the server traces, and the manipulation—inside the enemy's most popular propaganda video using steganography. They will then release a simple browser plug-in, allowing citizens to unlock the hidden data. They will use the enemy's weapon to deliver the antidote, hoping to introduce just enough doubt to attenuate the signal and avert disaster.
## Character Breakdown
* **SAFIA (20s-30s):** The strategic and moral center of 'Signal'. She is intuitive, fiercely intelligent, and driven by a powerful sense of justice. While Ben sees the code, Safia sees the human cost and the larger geopolitical chess game. She is a natural leader who can turn despair into focused action.
* **Psychological Arc:** Safia begins with anxious suspicion, feeling overwhelmed and powerless against a vast, invisible enemy. Her initial attempts to fight back are conventional and by-the-book, leading to crushing despair when the system she wants to protect rejects her. She transforms this despair into focused defiance, embracing asymmetric, "outside the box" thinking. She moves from a citizen trying to warn her government to a digital insurgent actively subverting the enemy's attack, finding her true strength in intellectual agility rather than brute force.
* **BEN (20s-30s):** The technical engine of the group. A brilliant, fast, and data-obsessed coder who lives and breathes the digital world. He is more comfortable with network maps than people, but his loyalty to Safia and their cause is absolute. He provides the "how" to Safia's "what."
## Scene Beats
1. **THE SURGE:** In a cramped, monitor-lit apartment, Ben watches the sentiment metrics for the Aegis vote jump unnaturally. Safia looks over his shoulder at a beautiful, horrifying data visualization of the city changing its mind in real-time. The number climbs to 68%.
2. **THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE:** A quick, jarring montage showcases the enemy's work: an AI-generated video of a child in a field dissolving into a mushroom cloud, a deepfaked historical figure advocating for peace, a flood of identical-but-different comments. It's an overwhelming deluge of manufactured emotion.
3. **THE SMOKING GUN:** Ben isolates the botnet, displaying it as a pulsing, angry-red knot on his network map. He initiates a trace. Lines shoot across the globe, all converging on a single point: Volgograd, Eastern Coalition territory. The room goes silent. This isn't just manipulation; it's a declaration of war.
4. **THE DIGITAL BRICK WALL:** Safia files a digital writ with the Consensus, attaching their evidence. A notification appears almost instantly: REJECTED. REASON: INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE TO OVERRIDE CITIZEN SENTIMENT METRICS. The team slumps in defeat. On the main screen, the number hits 71%.
5. **THE SCALPEL:** Safia stops pacing, her eyes fixed on the rising number. She cuts through the gloom with a new resolve. "We can't shout louder... so we have to be smarter." She lays out the core of her plan: fight their monoculture with a parasite, a contagious idea that uses their own network against them.
6. **THE BOMB:** Hope returns to the room as Safia details the final plan. They will use steganography to hide their data package inside the enemy's most-viewed video. They will hijack the propaganda to deliver the truth. Ben's eyes light up. He cracks his knuckles and says, "Okay. Let's build a bomb." The team converges, frantically beginning their work as the clock ticks down.
## Visual Style & Tone
The visual style is one of digital claustrophobia. The primary setting is the cramped, dark apartment, illuminated almost exclusively by the glow of monitors. This contrasts with the sleek, clean, and impersonal world of Aethelburg, seen only on screens. Data is visualized dynamically and beautifully—glowing particle swarms representing sentiment, aggressive red network maps, and cascading lines of code are central visual motifs.
The tone is a tense, paranoid, and cerebral cyber-thriller. The pacing is relentless, reflecting the ticking clock of the vote. It aligns with the cerebral tension of **Black Mirror**, the societal critique of **Fahrenheit 451**, and the procedural intensity of a cyber-thriller like **Mr. Robot**. The focus is on the intellectual and psychological battle, where the war is fought with keyboards and ideas, not guns.