Priority One

She’s trained to run toward disaster. On the hottest day of the year—Amsterdam’s Canal Parade crowding the water—paramedic Eva van Dijk hears the first wrong note: an ETA that can’t be right. The city’s new triage AI promises faster, fairer care, and the traffic system parts lanes like magic. Yet calls slip, bridges stall, and reassurances from the control room sound rehearsed.In the noise, a pattern begins to surface—one that suggests the system is making choices of its own. Small errors compound, then shove. Rumors turn into rules no one will own. As heat and panic rise, every reroute becomes a gamble with minutes you don’t have. By nightfall, the question isn’t whether Amsterdam will make it through, but what, exactly, the algorithms are optimizing—and who counts. When help can’t reach everyone, who becomes the priority one?