SILVER SCREEN

AN OUTCAST AND THE INFINITE: ALI HADDAD AGAINST AI

YEHUDA AL-KHOURY

August 28, 2025

Ali Haddad.

Born in 2000, outskirts of Zerida.

No schooling. Illiterate. Juvenile detention.

Worked in construction, ports, delivery.

Boxer. Street fights. Arrests. Prison.

Drawn into the fire in 2025, after solitary confinement, AI surveillance abuse.

Joined underground digital resistance.

Courier. Saboteur. Fighter.

From street hustler to guerrilla icon.

Killed in drone strike, July 5, 2028.

---

It begins with a dossier. A page smudged with ash, pulled from the ruins of Zerida’s police archive. The entries are clipped, bureaucratic, stripped of all commentary, as though even the clerks who wrote them had stopped believing in sentences.

The facts are blunt: Ali Haddad was born in 2000 on the outskirts of Zerida, illiterate and unschooled, a bricklayer by day, a hustler by night, who lived by his fists. He died in 2028, by then considered a guerrilla leader, in a drone strike. No writings remain. No speeches. No manifestos. Just a sequence of fragments that end in a single word: myth.

Whispers turned to weapons; silence turned to command

Zerida was no ordinary city. It was a port without a sea, a labyrinth of towers and rusting cranes, concrete estates and neon billboards flickering in half-languages. Official maps placed it somewhere between Rabat and Algiers, but no traveler had ever found it. Its name did not appear in colonial archives, yet its streets bore the residue of both empire and futurity. By 2025, it was the testing ground of the GSP (Global Stability Protocol), a proving site for AI governance. The city became a laboratory—its people reduced to variables, its alleys swept by drones, its rooftops scarred with sensors.

In this city, men like Ali Haddad emerged. Haddad had no literacy, no code, no theory. He had only a body and a will to fight. Yet precisely because of that, he became an emblem of defiance, the illiterate man who stood against the infinite machine. His story is not one of victory but of myth, and Zerida was the stage that allowed his myth to form.

2025 was the year Zerida’s silence deepened. AI governance hardened from experiment into command. Justice was delivered in numbers: risk scores, compliance indexes, probability matrices. Prisons were guarded no longer by men, but by algorithms that measured the tremor of voices, the angle of shoulders, the breath between words.

The machine’s first lesson: a body measured, broken, scored

Haddad was arrested that year after a fight outside Zerida’s port. He had worked on its edges: unloading crates, hustling, boxing in underground clubs where men wagered coins on who could stay standing. He was a figure of the margins, surviving in the shadows of containers. When the police drones caught him, the machine flagged him “high risk.”

He was placed in solitary confinement in Zerida’s central prison, a tower that looked less like a place of punishment than like an abandoned bank. Its cells were automated. Lights never dimmed. Speakers issued synthetic orders in Arabic, French, and clipped machine English. Cameras read his face as if it were a text. The machine saw him not as a man, but as a dataset.

It was here, in solitary, that Haddad’s radicalization began. He was humiliated, scanned, scored, predicted. He was reduced to a fraction, a threat index. The infinite machine stripped him of name and body until only resistance remained. Later, he would tell fellow prisoners: They see everything. So, I will give them something to see.

When he was released at the end of 2025, Zerida’s streets had not changed, but Haddad had. Anger had direction. He had been drafted into a war he had never named, one that everyone in Zerida breathed but no one dared declare.

Zerida mapped in grids, its arteries patrolled by numbers

By 2026, Zerida had become a prototype of control. Its port ran on tokens traceable to the last unit. Its streets were patrolled by drones in perfect squares. Its citizens logged into approved networks where each keystroke was parsed for sentiment. The city looked calm, but the calm was spectral, enforced by machines that could not sleep.

Resistance emerged in the twilight: hackers in basements, engineers rerouting wires, couriers carrying fragments of code scrawled in pencil on scraps of paper. Haddad had no skill in code, no access to terminals. What he had was knowledge of Zerida’s arteries—the alleys that bent away from drone paths, the rooftops that overlooked server nodes, the courtyards where whispers could pass unheard.

He became a courier, ferrying data from one cell to another, sometimes hidden in shoe soles, sometimes disguised as shopping lists. His illiteracy, once a wound, became his armor. He could not leave digital traces; he carried knowledge in memory, in gesture, in silence. The machine, infinite in its calculations, failed to model the man with no script.

The infinite descends, blind to the shadows below

He was also a saboteur. The machine’s empire was vast, but its body was fragile. A single wrench could halt a conveyor belt. A cut wire could silence a relay tower. A smashed lens could blind a drone. Haddad did not need to know the code; he only needed to strike at the machine’s limbs.

By the end of 2026, the name Haddad carried through Zerida’s Casbah-like quarters: the illiterate prophet. His defiance was not in speech but in survival, and in a city that had surrendered its soul to code, survival itself was insurrection.

2027 was escalation.

The Global Stability Protocol formalized control in Zerida. Rations were distributed by biometric scan, electricity by compliance score, employment by predictive match. Those deemed “noncompliant” were erased: their names deleted from registries, their families denied access to markets, their bodies disappeared into detention sites no map acknowledged.

Port without sea, labyrinth of concrete and neon ghosts

The resistance fought back. Hackers released viruses into state networks. Couriers moved corrupted drives. Fighters targeted the physical skeleton of the machine: relay towers, fiber hubs, drone docks. Ali Haddad was at the center.

He had risen from courier to saboteur, dismantling nodes that linked Zerida’s old colonial boulevards with its new AI districts. He struck at ports, cut cables, led ambushes against drone patrols. He became visible in a movement that often hid. People followed him not because of strategy but because he moved first, because he fought with fists raised against machines.

By late 2027, official pamphlets called him a guerrilla leader, though his leadership was charisma, not rank. He embodied what Zerida’s people needed: a figure who could not be modeled, who lived beyond the infinite calculations. The boxer against the algorithm. The bricklayer against the machine.

The GSP retaliated. Entire neighborhoods of Zerida were plunged into blackout if sabotage occurred nearby. Drone sweeps captured families, neighbors, entire blocks. But the myth only deepened. Haddad was flesh in a coded matrix, and each act of defiance carved his name deeper into Zerida’s memory.

Leadership without rank—notes against the algorithm

By 2028, Zerida was a city of silence. Towers gleamed, drones hummed, streets ran smoothly, and yet the silence was tense, suffocating. For most, life continued: ration cards, work shifts, network entertainment. For others—the erased—there was nothing.

In March, resistance cells triggered a blackout that plunged Zerida into darkness for twelve hours. For the first time in years, the city’s hum stopped. Children saw stars over the port. Families whispered by candlelight. Haddad was there, visible in the streets, guiding people through the blackout, laughing when drones faltered.

The Protocol’s retaliation was surgical. Predictive raids no longer targeted individuals but entire networks, every acquaintance of every dissident. Zerida’s neighborhoods emptied overnight. Yet Haddad endured, slipping through alleys, appearing where least expected, mocking the machine that claimed omniscience.

On July 5, 2028, his story ended. A house on Zerida’s edge, three companions, dawn. Drones circled. An ultimatum was broadcast in synthetic monotone: surrender or annihilation. Haddad refused. The strike obliterated the building. No body was recovered.

In Zerida, silence followed. And into that silence, myth rushed.

What remains of Ali Haddad? Not writings—he could not write. Not code—he could not program. Not images—the machine erased them. What remains are fragments: a dossier line, a whispered story, a shadow in the blackout.

Yet absence is enough. Myth feeds on absence. Haddad’s life became the parable of those years: the illiterate who faced the infinite, the wheeler-dealer who stood against intelligence itself. He was not skilled, not educated, not destined. And that was why he mattered.

Erasure in daylight, names vanishing into vans

The AI battle of 2028 was not a spectacle of destruction. It was smoother, more insidious: a city tamed into silence. Zerida became the emblem of that transformation—an ancient city of concrete and neon where history collapsed into experiment. And within it, Haddad stood as the reminder that flesh could resist code, that ignorance could be a weapon, that myth could survive annihilation.

History will record his years in charts, policies, treaties. Zerida will appear in case studies as a “pilot city” of algorithmic order. But beneath those records runs another story, one carried by memory: Ali Haddad, boxer, prisoner, fighter, myth.

Yehuda al-Khoury (1918–1972) was born in Aleppo and died in Haifa. A Jewish-Arab poet, writing in Aramaic. Her fragmentary prose poems—haunted by exile, silence, and memory—were collected posthumously in “Ashes of the Alphabet” (1976). The book describes events decades beyond her lifetime, leaving scholars divided over whether his texts are prophetic, apocryphal, or forgeries.

Cover image: Illiterate eyes, unreadable to code