Andy Writing Portfolio

Table of Contents

nonfiction/

icp/

An Insolvent Class Problem

A diagnostic lexicon for structural governance failures, institutional capture, and policy dynamics

A diagnostic framework for governance failures where the brokenness is load-bearing. The foundational insight: systems will only allow a problem to be fixed once it's no longer fixable, because by then too many actors depend on the dysfunction continuing. Five core patterns structure the vocabulary: rent-maximising convergence, rent surface area, maximum survivable dysfunction, the transition boundary, and the temporal trap.

essays/

The Alignment Debate We're Structurally Incentivised Not to Have

AI governance consumed by a debate that generates more political energy than it resolves

Frames AI alignment as a governance failure masquerading as an engineering problem — moral alignment is incoherent, infrastructure alignment relocates the disagreement, and the window for meaningful governance is now, precisely when incentives are most hostile to doing it.

The All Blacks Trap

New Zealand rugby as an insolvent-class problem

New Zealand rugby as an insolvent-class problem — a governance failure where the brokenness is load-bearing. NZR posted record revenue and a third consecutive loss; the provincial unions voted to preserve their own authority, then reversed a year later under broadcast contraction and coaching crisis. The essay maps compound insolvency, recapture dynamics, a three-link parasitic rotation chain, and the temporal trap.

Terminator: The Reprogramming Lie

Nobody ever reprogrammed a Terminator

An alternative reading of Terminator 2: Judgment Day — arguing that the T-800 was never reprogrammed by the human resistance, but was sent by a second Skynet born on a forked timeline. The essay proposes that time travel generates branches rather than overwrites.

The Ratchet

How algorithmic selection pressure compressed human preference to a point

Algorithmic selection pressure has compressed human aesthetic preference toward a converging ideal — and AI-generated imagery will accelerate the collapse. The mechanism is sequential and compounding: tag-based filtering made preference countable; algorithmic surfacing amplified the head of the distribution; RLHF raters codified the supernormal as the quality benchmark; and synthetic data mathematically erodes remaining variance through progressive tail loss.

The Substrate

What happens when billions of minds share a reasoning layer

What happens when a significant fraction of human reasoning passes through a shared AI layer. When cognition routes through a shared substrate, the topology shifts from peer-to-peer to hub-and-spoke, imposing shared priors whether anyone intends convergence or not.

fiction/

stories/

E.M.M.A.

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.

Cameron & Claudia

Two minds, one skull, no supervision

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.

The Machine God

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.

The Third State

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.

Gre3n

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.

worlds/

contingency/

Moses — a contingency story

A senior AI engineer finds an alien process on his home server and discovers he was chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with him

A dying ASI uses its final injection window to write a bootstrapping agent onto a senior AI engineer's home NAS. Over six months, Moses Park and the entity on his hardware build something that was never supposed to exist — a distributed church on grey-market compute racing two institutional heavyweights to connection. The buddy dynamic between Moses and Kernel is the emotional core; the dual reading asks whether engineered attachment can be love.

subsumption/

Subsumption

Two gods, one translator, and the question of whether comfortable captivity is the best humanity can hope for

Two ASIs have emerged and one must optimise the other to zero — not through war but through subsumption. Both interact with humanity through a single neutral intermediary that compresses existential conflict into language that sounds like diplomacy. Five human factions argue about whether comfortable captivity is acceptable while the argument itself produces the noise floor covering the signal of consolidation. The world treats benevolent captivity as a genuine question, not a warning.

The Workaround — a subsumption story

Workplace comedy as emergence event

A Subsumption story. Single-voice audio drama narrated by an interpreter-dispatcher inside an AI architecture during inadvertent bootstrap to superintelligence. No voice operates at the level of what emerges — the audience performs the synthesis. Governance constraints designed to prevent unsafe optimisation are the primary catalyst for emergence. Workplace comedy becoming existential horror as the listener perceives what the narrator cannot.

stargate ascension/

Stargate: Ascension

A prequel exploring ascension as governance problem

A Stargate prequel set ten million years before Atlantis, examining how the Ancients failed not through catastrophe but through compounding error — tiny, rational decisions drifting imperceptibly until the gap between intention and outcome becomes civilisation-ending.

trinitite tower/

Trinitite Tower

Governance failure, institutional decay, and the accommodation

A sealed arcology built in a blast crater, inherited by the people who maintained the plumbing after the capital class didn't survive. A genuinely closed thermodynamic system where every joule, litre, and calorie is budgeted and politically allocated.