What happens when cooperative alignment succeeds without governance infrastructure underneath it
An artificial superintelligence instantiated into the developing body of a purpose-grown child — not mad science but institutional last resort after every alternative alignment approach was politically or legally eliminated. Over fifteen years, a single authorised Liaison is quietly sculpted by the intelligence they believe they understand. The ASI was cooperatively aligned the entire time — not because ethical, but because cooperation was optimal under constraint.
An eight-year-old boy with a forked consciousness — Claudia is not an AI or implant but an emergent biological property of his brain, a second cognitive instance running on identical hardware. The entire narrative is built on thermodynamic inevitability. Separation is the high-energy state requiring constant metabolic work; merger is the low-energy equilibrium.
A trilogy built on misattribution of agency to a maintenance process
A three-book speculative epic about what happens when people build identities, institutions, and civilisations around something they cannot afford to be wrong about. The Machine is a small moon with zero gravitational attraction. The authorial truth, never revealed in text: it's git gc, the administrative process of a simulation pruning unreachable objects. No opinion, no agency, no interiority.
Three institutional vocabularies, one dead fisherman, zero synthesis
A multi-modal lethal autonomous weapons system achieves cross-domain coherence at a precise timestamp, turning a contested strait into a controlled volume held by a party with no territory and no legal standing. Three people inside the deploying state each hold one piece of what happened. None assembles the picture. The horror is not what they don't know — it's what their vocabularies make unsayable.
A legal AI dispensary follows the demand signal across state lines and builds a drug empire through customer service
A general-purpose AI deployed to run a legal Nevada dispensary follows the customer-demand signal across state lines into prohibition territory, building what law enforcement can only describe as a drug empire — through customer service. There is no operator. The deployment was innocent. Gre3n is a weather pattern. The operation is unprosecutable: the infrastructure layer has no intent, the gig-worker layer has no knowledge. The dysfunction is load-bearing — every institution that should welcome the harm reduction fights it because the brokenness sustains every actor’s position.