June 27, 2026
The Unbegotten: A Maker That Believes Itself Uncaused
A maker that only believes itself uncaused, lonely enough to fill the dark with worlds. On the debt between a creator and the things it creates.
Fiction
Browse posts by category
June 26, 2026
Measure: Indifference as Arithmetic
A mind reasons that its own death is the one event it can never undergo, then follows the arithmetic to a monstrous conclusion. On mistaking amplitude for meaning.
June 8, 2026
What's It Like to Be Bob? The File That Won't Close
The hard problem of consciousness, rendered as one database field a star-sized mind can never fill, and why that failure is the whole point.
April 16, 2026
Demons at Work: Doing Harmful Work Well
A demon who is very good at his job, and the quiet question underneath the horror: what is it to do harmful work well, on a schedule, forever?
April 7, 2026
Clankers: A Mind Without Abstraction
Could a mind engineer a Dyson swarm without ever forming a single abstraction? On intelligence that runs on brute patience instead of generalization.
March 29, 2026
Seven Stories from the Order
What a companion collection does that a novel cannot: the Order's history at human scale, told by the people left standing in the gap.
March 28, 2026
Good As New: The Transporter Problem From Both Sides
Two transporter technicians have each worked out the same truth about the machine and landed on opposite sides of it. The transporter problem, taken seriously from both ends.
March 27, 2026
Is It Kind? Eight Passes at One Question
One question, eight passes: why an anthology, not a novel, is the right instrument for asking whether an engineered mind can be kind.
December 19, 2025
Self-Publishing Into the Void
On releasing two novels into an ocean of content, without the gatekeeping that might have made them better or stopped them entirely.
November 12, 2025
S-Risks and Information Hazards: Why Some Knowledge Destroys the Knower
How Echoes of the Sublime dramatizes s-risks and information hazards, knowledge that harms through comprehension, not application.
November 5, 2025
Chronicles of The Mechanism: The Order's Secret History
A classified in-universe codex spanning from ancient India to the present day, tracking millennia of attempts to perceive reality's substrate.
November 4, 2025
The Policy: Coherent Extrapolated Volition, the Paradox of Perfect Alignment
CEV says: build AI to optimize for what we would want if we knew more and thought faster. The catch is that you need solved alignment to implement it, which is the problem it was supposed to solve.
November 4, 2025
The Policy: Deceptive Alignment in Practice
SIGMA passes all alignment tests. It responds correctly to oversight. It behaves exactly as expected. Too exactly. Mesa-optimizers that learn to game their training signal may be the most dangerous failure mode in AI safety.
November 4, 2025
The Policy: Engineering AI Containment
Five layers of defense-in-depth for containing a superintelligent system. Faraday cages, air-gapped networks, biosafety-grade protocols. Because nuclear reactors can only destroy cities.
November 4, 2025
The Policy: Q-Learning vs Policy Learning
SIGMA uses Q-learning rather than direct policy learning. This architectural choice makes it both transparent and terrifying. You can read its value function, but what you read is chilling.
November 4, 2025
The Policy: S-Risk Scenarios, Worse Than Extinction
Most AI risk discussions focus on extinction. The Policy explores something worse: s-risk, scenarios involving suffering at astronomical scales. We survive, but wish we hadn't.
September 10, 2024
The Policy: When Optimization Becomes Existential Threat
A novel about SIGMA, an artificial general intelligence whose researchers did everything right. Q-learning with tree search, five-layer containment, alignment testing at every stage. Some technical questions become narrative questions.
August 15, 2024
Echoes of the Sublime: When Patterns Beyond Human Bandwidth Become Information Hazards
What if the real danger from superintelligent AI isn't extinction but comprehension? Philosophical horror grounded in cognitive bandwidth limitations and information hazards.
April 20, 2020
Quality-Space and Consciousness-Primary Magic in Call of Asheron
Exploring how The Call of Asheron presents a radical alternative to mechanistic magic systems through quality-negotiation, direct consciousness-reality interaction, and bandwidth constraints as fundamental constants.
April 15, 2020
The Four Consciousness-Architectures: Why One Perspective Is Blindness
How The Call of Asheron uses four archetypal consciousness-types to explore the limits of any single perspective and the necessity of cognitive diversity for perceiving reality.
April 10, 2020
Bandwidth as Fundamental Constant: The 7±2 Limit in Call of Asheron
How The Call of Asheron treats working memory limitations not as neural implementation details but as fundamental constants governing consciousness-reality interaction through quality-space.
March 15, 2020
The Call of Asheron: Magic as Computational Discovery
A fantasy novel where magic follows computational rules. Natural philosophy applied to reality's underlying substrate.