WORDS

You begin to see double, triple meanings in everything he says.
THE MAGUS, John Fowles
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LIGHT

An AI, a virus, a prophecy.
A cryptic novel for the post-truth era

Haunted by a dream of a mystery woman, burned-out contractor Adam Walker joins an obscure government department overseeing a new system managed by AI.

When a message hidden in a junk email possesses his imagination, Walker enters a labyrinth of coincidence and hidden meaning

Summoned Upstairs, intergovernmental mandarin Akbal reveals the real reason for Walker’s hire. Like his predecessor, Mu, he has the illlness [sic], a virus transmitted by words.

Attacking the temporal lobes, it alters human identity. Subjects become invisible to the AI. Mu has gone dark. Walker must find him before he broadcasts a sequence of words, triggering a pandemic.

Light refers to spirituality on the one hand, and digital intelligence on the other.

Set in London and Tokyo, LIGHT is a rollercoaster dive into human identity.

influences

1984 / George Orwell 1949
The Lord of the Rings / JRR Tolkien 1955
The Magus / John Fowles 1965
Gödel, Escher, Bach / Douglas Hofstadter 1979
Simulations / Jean Baudrillard 1981
The Fire from Within / Carlos Castaneda 1985
An Artist of the Floating World / Kazuo Ishiguro 1986
The Windup Bird Chronicle / Haruki Murakami 1995
The Information Bomb / Paul Virilio 1998
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us / Bill Joy 2000
Falling Out of Cars / Jeff Noon 2002
IQ84 / Haruki Murakami 2009

meta

#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #GodlikeAi
#Virus #Psychology #Dejavu #Dystopian
#Identity #Compliance #Defiance #ScienceFiction
#LiteraryThriller
#Shinto #Prophecy #DragonPrincess
#London #Tokyo #TokyoBay

STATUS

WAVE#1 Early adoption in progress

WAVE#1

AUTUMN 2023

Early adoption, organic spreading.

infect +

WAVE#2

TBA

Public platforms, super-spreading.

infect +

WAVE#3

TBA

Mass trigger, mass limbic, everyone zapped.*

infect +

* Kazusa Research Institute

SHARDS of light

The People I Worked With

The people I worked with were in the basement—IT orcs on a grand a day, running process monitors and admin dashboards, terabit USB keys on lanyards round their necks, flipping windows when they thought nobody was looking.

All Part of the Handover

‘All part of the handover,’ said a voice from behind. An enormous man stood there, toying affectionately with the document feed of the printer. So sudden and silent was his arrival, so extraordinary his dimensions that...

A Peculiar Intensity

Her gaze had a peculiar intensity. It must have been a reflection—the plate on the table—but her eyes looked like they were exuding light. For a moment her face was wreathed in vapour—an aura, a cloud.

Aspects of the Moon

One Hundred Aspects of the Moon began with the slant of moonlight on tatami, the breath-taking detail of exotic fabrics, the translucence of rainfall. Print by print, the night of Yoshitoshi’s imagination descended...

Essays + other stuff

COMING SOON

LIGHT EPISODES

LIGHT serialised in words and audio, with the first five chapters for free.

SUBSTACK
Substack blog

GREEN LIGHT  FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Essays on esoteric matters, current affairs, compliance, defiance, viruses and big changes.

EXPIRING

MEDIUM 

Shortish pieces on life, current affairs and writing.

2024
NOISE cover

NOISE

Short stories of transformation from the UK, Peru and Indonesia, connected by the theme of noise. From noisy neighbours in an overcrowded world to the magic of the rainforest and the wrath of the ocean.

from my Substack

Click image for article
The Karma of Calculus
November 15, 2023

Behind non-partisan spirituality, esoteric arguments abound—often with reference to the Law of Karma, which may be understood as the Law of Consequence, or Newton's Law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The Predator from the Depths of the Cosmos
November 13, 2023

The title comes from Carlos Castaneda’s last book, The Active Side of Infinity (1998). In Chapter 16, Don Juan, the shaman, takes Castaneda, the apprentice, into the Sonoran chaparral to discuss “the topic of topics.”

Demonic Circuits
November 8, 2023

A grand experiment is being conducted in Gaza. It seeks to discover how far that instinctive human response to harm being done to innocents can be suppressed or overridden by conditioning.

Silence is Compliance
November 5, 2023

I wrote my earlier piece, The Spiritual Response, after a discussion about whether taking up arms—the keyboard—online is an appropriate or useful response to what is happening in Gaza. I find myself oscillating between resignation and the urge to respond.