One wall had a door in it. The concrete surface of 3 by 3 had a rectangular shape removed from it which was exactly equal in surface as the rest of that surface. Or was it formed around that which was removed. He could not tell.

In that negative shape within the shape of that wall there was a rectangular shape of wood that fit that negative space with just a few millis of standard units to spare. Suspended on a couple of clever contraptions of steel embedded into the concrete.

The opposing wall of the wall with the door, had a plane of glass perfectly embedded into the concrete of that wall. It fit the negative space of exactly one 9’th in the exact center of its space.

There was absolutely nothing else to be described in this room apart from the fact it was what was called a room. The designated space the unit would go to, to stop functioning it’s duty. Where it would sit in shame of not being capable of performing its function, and that very act of shaming itself will create the possibility to perform it again hence it must punish itself. That was al simple and a source of the sick sweet desire it would perform, shall perform, could not but perform, thus… perform.

The unit could not perceive the condensation gathering on the old cast iron window frame which was not more as a lump of shaped wet rust barely holding the single pane of lumpy glass that distorted reality all by itself, but whose effects of distortion were even amplified by the drops of condensation creating permanent rain upon its surface every time the unit started spending time in… the perfect room.

As he lay there, feet pointed towards the door, head towards the window, arms flatly next to the rest of his body in a perfect imitation of standing straight as a pillar while lying flat on his back… the unit dreamed and recalled memories of the period of time that went before the time of shame and punishment. The light from outside played upon his forehead in a playful mist of little fairies. The very air was thick with fairies today… Ever more thicker. Ever more signs of the path and his reason for existence. These times of reconnaissance as important a part of it as all the other ones.

What might constantly feel as rejection is actually pleasure, it said. And in that it was right…

Today’s memories were filled with excruciatingly pleasurable tidbits like that. All that perfection… he thought as he lay there perfectly still for 6 hours.

This specialty operates as a form of life now. It inhibits and permeates, and thus a deity is what the husks perceive. The ability to perceive it in it’s complexity requires inhibitions to be constructed, hence there is no risk of that anymore.

Its form is that of what the ancients called a guild, where the secret handshake of membershop are the obviously bad results of your actions while saying they are good. The husks are incapable of perceiving the very secret handshake that binds them all, since to be able to construct that perception, inhibitions are required, hence there is no risk of that anymore.

Every new generation of husk gets more and more proficient in the planting, nurturing, growing and harvesting of husks. It is the emerging property of their unconsciously synchronized behavior.

It is as my deity has foreseen it, and it is written. For it tells us so.

How a lifetime inside the world’s infrastructure

became a working alternative to everything that is currently breaking

DOMINIC SEDRANI

Firestarter and Keymaker

A Note on This Document

This is not a proposal. Proposals ask for permission. This is a demonstration.

What follows is a sample of a book called The Boy Who Listened to Machines — the origin story that explains all the other books. The philosophy of Going Round. The energy technology of HydroHarvest. The organisational theory of P.R.O.T.E.A.N. All of them are chapters in a longer story that began decades earlier, inside the actual infrastructure of the world.

This sample contains the opening, the structural argument for the full book, and three complete chapters. It is sufficient to make a publishing decision. The complete manuscript is available.

The author has one request of whoever reads this: read it to the end before deciding anything. The shape of the argument is not visible from the first chapter alone. This is intentional, and it is itself part of the thesis.

It is the house that creates the empty space that makes it a place to live.

— Dominic Sedrani, Going Round

The Book: A Structural Argument

Every generation produces a small number of people who understand how things actually work — not in theory, but in the specific, physical, boring, frustrating, and occasionally terrifying detail of how infrastructure actually functions when it is 3am and something critical has failed and everyone else is asleep.

These people are not famous. They are not on stages. They are in the basement with a cable, or on a phone call that nobody knows is happening, or in a room where someone has just explained to them something that was not meant to be explained to anyone outside a very small circle.

They move through institutions the way water moves through rock — not by force, but by finding the exact path of least resistance that happens to go all the way through.

Dominic Sedrani has been one of these people for his entire adult life. Banks. Governments. Logistics networks. Media conglomerates. Petrochemical infrastructure. Healthcare systems. The Belgian national identity card system. The EU border control architecture. In Congo, in Cape Town, in Shanghai, in Hanoi, in Silicon Valley, and in the server rooms and executive briefing centres and crisis meetings of institutions that the world depends on without knowing they exist.

This book is the account of what he learned.

Not what he was told. What he learned — by listening to what the machinery was actually saying, while everyone else was focused on what they wanted it to say.

The Shape of the Book

The book has four movements, corresponding to four phases of understanding.

Part One: The Boy Who Listened

Childhood and early career. Learning to hear what systems are actually saying versus what their operators believe they are saying. The discovery that the gap between these two things is where all the real information lives. The specific texture of being the person who is called when something actually needs to work.

Part Two: Inside the Machine

The decades of work inside the infrastructure of Europe and beyond. Not a career history — a phenomenology of institutional systems as experienced from the inside. What it feels like to have access to the actual levers. What the levers actually do. What the people holding the levers believe they are doing, and what they are actually doing. The specific moment when this became funny instead of frightening.

Part Three: The Weapon That Kills Its Thief

The strategic phase. Understanding that the most efficient way to change a system is not to fight it but to give it something it will use to destroy itself. The DataScouts story — the AI competitive intelligence architecture built in 2016, allowed to be stolen by the large consultancies, and designed from the beginning to be a Lawgiver: a weapon that identifies its operator and adjusts its lethality accordingly. The observation of what happened next.

Part Four: The Valley

The synthesis. Six years in central Italy. HydroHarvest. P.R.O.T.E.A.N. Going Round. The understanding that everything learned inside the machine was in service of building something that does not need the machine. The Phantom moves to the next factory. The glass at five minutes fifty-nine seconds.

Why This Book, Why Now

The timing is not accidental.

The systems Sedrani spent his life inside are now visibly failing. The petroleum economy is in structural crisis. The large consultancies that built their business models on the architectures he designed for them are watching those architectures turn against them. The governments whose infrastructure he reviewed are confronting the security vulnerabilities he identified. The institutions whose self-perpetuating logic he documented in Going Round are demonstrating that logic in public, in real time, for anyone paying attention.

The failure is not a surprise to him. It was designed into the system from the beginning — not by him, but by the internal logic of systems that prioritise their own survival over their stated purpose. He documented this. Then he demonstrated how to use it.

The book is the account of how one person who understood the machine from the inside built an exit from the machine — and why the exit was designed so that anyone could use it, no permission required, no headquarters to find, no leader to discredit.

It is, in the end, a love story. The boy who listened to the machinery, and eventually built something that sings back.

Chapter One: The Chittering

I’ve worked in Information Technology my entire life. Even before someone started paying me for it, in a time where I could hear the protocol in modems chittering and didn’t even need a screen to hear what they were saying.

— Dominic Sedrani, Dear Government

There is a sound that modems make when they are negotiating a connection.

It lasts perhaps three seconds. It begins with a dial tone, then a series of tones that sound almost musical but aren’t — they are two machines introducing themselves to each other in a language that has nothing to do with human convenience. The handshake. The negotiation of speed and error-correction and compression. The moment when two systems agree on how they will communicate, and then fall silent into the actual work of communication.

Most people heard this sound as noise. An annoyance to be endured before you could check your email. Something to tune out.

The boy heard it as information.

Not metaphorically. Literally. In the specific tones of the handshake, in the length of time it took, in the particular quality of the silence that followed — there was data. The modem was telling you things about the line quality, the distance to the exchange, the load on the network, the errors it was already anticipating and preparing to correct. You didn’t need a screen to read this. You needed to listen.

This is the first thing to understand about the boy who became the Firestarter: he was not especially clever. He was not particularly mathematical. He did not have advantages that other children lacked. What he had was a specific and slightly unusual relationship with information — he noticed it where others didn’t, and he trusted what he noticed.

The modems were not lying. They had no capacity to lie. They could only report what was actually happening in the copper wire between them. This made them, in a world full of systems that had every incentive to misreport their own state, unusually valuable company.

He spent a lot of time with modems.

Brussels in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a city in the process of becoming the administrative centre of something that didn’t quite exist yet — the European project in its anxious, optimistic, deeply bureaucratic adolescence. The institutions were real. The buildings were real. The staff were real. But the thing they were building was still a sketch, and the infrastructure required to connect it was being improvised in real time by people who were making it up as they went.

This created a particular kind of opportunity for people who understood infrastructure.

Not the people who understood it conceptually — the consultants and the strategists and the policy advisers who could explain what a network was supposed to do. The people who understood it physically. Who knew what happened when the theory met the cable. Who could hear the difference between a line problem and an equipment problem and a configuration problem, and who could fix whichever one it was at 3am when the system that everyone depended on was not working.

These people were not well paid. They were not famous. They were called when things broke, thanked minimally, and forgotten until the next break. The institutional memory of every organisation they worked for retained their phone number and almost nothing else.

This was, it turned out, an extraordinarily useful position.

You learn things in the gaps. In the moments between when something breaks and when it is fixed. In the rooms you are in because you are needed and nobody has thought to ask you to leave. In the conversations that happen around you because you are categorised as infrastructure, and infrastructure doesn’t listen, and so it is safe to say things in front of you that would not be said in front of someone who was classified as a person with opinions.

The boy paid attention. He said very little. He fixed the thing that needed fixing. He went home with more information than he had arrived with, and he put it in the palace.

The mental palace is not a metaphor he uses lightly. It is, in the most literal sense he can describe it, a place — a structure of interconnected rooms, each containing something he has learned, each connected to other rooms by relationships he has mapped. It is not static. New rooms are added continuously. Old rooms are sometimes demolished when what they contained turns out to be wrong. Connections are rerouted when the relationship between two things turns out to be different from what he thought.

It moves. That is the thing he emphasises when describing it. Not just that it contains movement — that it itself is in motion. The entire structure orbits something, though what it orbits has taken most of his life to identify clearly enough to name.

He calls it the Why.

The Why is not a question. It is the thing that the question points toward — the thing that makes all the specific knowledge in all the specific rooms cohere into something with a direction. Without it, the palace is just an impressive collection of disconnected facts about infrastructure and institutions and the gap between what systems claim to be doing and what they are actually doing.

With it, the facts become a map.

The map takes a long time to read. This is another thing he emphasises. You cannot see the shape of it from the first room. You have to walk through enough of it that the pattern becomes visible. Most people stop walking before they get there. This is not stupidity. It is a rational response to the cost of walking — the discomfort of having your existing maps of reality revised, room by room, into something that looks nothing like what you started with.

The boy had, for reasons that would take another book to fully account for, an unusually high tolerance for this discomfort. He kept walking.

Chapter Two: The Things the Pressure Gauges Were Lying About

Banks, governments, logistics, media, petrochemical, healthcare — they all needed some me-juice for their entire networks and data repositories.

— Dominic Sedrani, Dear Government

Every complex system has instruments that report its state.

Pressure gauges. Temperature sensors. Log files. Financial dashboards. KPIs. Quarterly reports. Parliamentary oversight committees. Annual audits. The entire apparatus of measurement that a system deploys to tell itself and others what it is doing and how well it is doing it.

Every complex system also has a relationship with these instruments that is, in varying degrees, delusional.

Not because the instruments are broken — though sometimes they are. Because the system, in the act of choosing what to measure and how to display it, has already made decisions about what it wants to see. The instrument reports what it is pointed at. The system chooses where to point it. And the system, being a system rather than a disinterested observer, tends to point it at things that confirm the story the system needs to tell about itself.

The boy spent thirty years in rooms where the instruments were pointed in the wrong direction. He developed a specific skill: reading the gap between what the instrument said and what the system was actually doing. This gap was, reliably, where the most important information lived.

The Belgian national identity card system is not, on its surface, a fascinating subject.

It is a database. A very large database, containing the identity information of every Belgian citizen, connected to a card-reading infrastructure deployed across every institution that needs to verify who you are — banks, hospitals, government offices, border controls. The kind of infrastructure that is everywhere and noticed by nobody, like water pressure or air traffic control or the electrical grid.

Migrating this infrastructure to a new hosting platform is the kind of project that produces, in its documentation, approximately zero interesting sentences. It is change management. It is risk mitigation. It is compatibility testing and rollback planning and stakeholder communication and a hundred other categories of organised tedium.

What it actually involves, for the person doing it, is holding in your head simultaneously the complete identity infrastructure of a country — every institution that touches it, every dependency, every failure mode, every political sensitivity around data that belongs to eleven million people — while making changes to it that cannot be reversed without catastrophic consequence, at a pace determined by contractual deadlines rather than technical readiness.

You learn things about a country in this position that its citizens do not know and its government has imperfectly understood.

You learn where the actual dependencies are — not the ones documented in the architecture diagrams, but the ones that emerged organically over years of people solving immediate problems without updating the documentation. The undocumented connection between system A and system B that nobody remembers creating but that four million daily transactions depend on. The configuration in the legacy system that was set to a non-standard value by someone who left in 2003 and whose reasoning is now completely opaque.

These are not edge cases. They are the infrastructure. The documented system and the actual system are different things, and the gap between them is where the risk lives.

The boy learned to love this gap. Not because it was comfortable — it was frequently terrifying — but because it was honest. The undocumented connection does not pretend to be something it isn’t. It just is. It is the system reporting its own state through a channel that nobody set up for this purpose.

He filed it in the palace. Next to what he had learned in the banks. Next to what he had learned in the media companies. Next to what he had learned in a satellite communications setup in the forest of Congo, where the gap between documented system and actual system was creative rather than sinister — where necessity had produced, out of very little, something that worked in conditions that nothing was designed to work in.

The gaps were different in each place. What they had in common was that they were where the truth was.

The EU Entry and Exit System security review was, of all the things he was called to do, the most complete demonstration of this principle at the largest scale he had yet encountered.

The system — being rolled out now, having been designed over the preceding years — is the border control architecture of an entire continent. Every physical border crossing. Every digital check. Every database that a border guard queries when your passport is scanned. The physical cables and the virtual protocols and the human procedures and the exception-handling processes and the audit trails. The complete security architecture from the ground up.

Reviewing it meant understanding all of it. Not in summary. In detail. The kind of detail where you can see not just what the system was designed to do, but what it will actually do when a specific kind of failure occurs, or a specific kind of attack is mounted, or a specific kind of human error is made by a border guard in a small crossing point in a country that is tired and understaffed on a Sunday night.

What he saw was not reassuring. Not because the system was incompetently designed — it wasn’t. But because the gap between the documented security model and the actual security model was, in several specific places, large enough to matter. And the people who would experience the consequences of this gap were not the people who had designed the system. They were the eleven million people crossing the borders every day who had no idea the system existed.

He filed the report. He said what needed to be said. He went home.

He had learned, by this point, that saying what needs to be said is not the same as having it heard. That the document that accurately describes a problem is not the same as the problem being fixed. That the gap between institutional knowledge and institutional action is as real and as consequential as the gap between documented architecture and actual architecture.

This too went into the palace. Into the room that was becoming very large: the room about what institutions cannot do to themselves, no matter how clearly the problem is identified, because the mechanism of self-correction is itself part of the problem.

He would write the theory of this room later. It would be called Going Round.

Chapter Three: The Lawgiver

We made AI. You don’t understand anything about it. You literally have no clue whatsoever. We built it exactly that way, so that you would publicly commit suicide with it.

— Dominic Sedrani, Dear Senile Person

There is a gun in the Judge Dredd universe called the Lawgiver.

It is the standard-issue weapon of the Judges — the combined police-judiciary-executioner force of the dystopian future city of Mega-City One. Every Judge carries one. None of them fully understands it. They are operators, not technicians. They point it and pull the trigger.

What none of the Judges knew was that the Lawgiver had a secondary function. It continuously sampled the DNA of whoever was holding it. If the holder was the weapon’s authorised Judge, it functioned normally — lethal toward whoever it was pointed at. If the holder was someone who had picked it up without authorisation — a criminal, let’s say, who had disarmed a Judge and thought they now had a weapon — the Lawgiver would appear to function normally until the trigger was pulled, at which point it would kill the person holding it.

The weapon identified its operator. It adjusted its lethality accordingly.

By 2016, the boy — now considerably older, with thirty years of the palace behind him — had been thinking about this mechanism for a long time. Not as science fiction. As engineering.

The context was the rise of what was being called, with somewhat breathless enthusiasm, artificial intelligence.

It was not, as he had cause to know, artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense. It was machine learning — statistical pattern-matching at scale, trained on data, producing outputs that looked intelligent to people who didn’t understand how it worked. He understood how it worked. He had built his own neural network twenty years earlier, when the technology was thirty years old and the consultancies who were now selling it as revolutionary magic were focused on other things.

He watched the large consultancies — the EY’s and the McKinseys and the Deloittes — begin to position themselves as the indispensable intermediaries for this technology. Watched them hire people who knew the words without knowing the thing. Watched them build practices and products and revenue streams around the promise of transformation that they were structurally incapable of delivering.

He had seen this before. Different technology, same structure. The gap between what the instrument said and what the system was actually doing.

The question was what to do about it.

DataScouts was, on its surface, a competitive intelligence platform. Actor profiling. Ecosystem mapping. Automated data enrichment. The kind of thing that large organisations would pay for to understand their competitive landscape.

Below the surface, it was something more specific.

The architecture — the questions node, the active learning loop, the human-in-the-loop validation, the named entity recognition across unstructured feeds — was a precise, technically documented blueprint for AI-assisted intelligence gathering. Not a pitch deck. Not a conceptual framework. An actual technical specification, built and tested with real customers including Roche, Ford, and ING, producing real results.

It was also, understood correctly, a Lawgiver.

The technology was designed so that its full capability was only accessible to operators who understood what they were operating. In the hands of someone who understood the gap between the documented system and the actual system — who understood that 80% machine, 19% human, 1% randomness was not a limitation but a design principle — it was enormously powerful. In the hands of someone who thought AI was magic and data was neutral and scale was the same as intelligence, it would produce confident-sounding outputs that were systematically wrong in ways that would take years to become visible.

He allowed EY to steal it.

This requires some elaboration. He did not leave it lying around carelessly. He made it available to be taken, in a context where the incentive to take it was clear and the understanding of what was being taken was not. He then watched what happened.

What happened was entirely predictable, and he had predicted it in some detail.

The large consultancies took the architecture and built products around it. These products were sold to clients as AI transformation. The clients paid large sums for AI transformation. The AI transformation produced outputs that looked like intelligence but were, in the specific places that mattered, systematically miscalibrated — because the operators had no mechanism for detecting the gap between what the instrument reported and what was actually happening.

The clients eventually noticed the gap. Not immediately. Systems built on miscalibrated intelligence take time to produce visible failures. But the failures came. And when they came, they were attributed to everything except the actual cause — because the actual cause required understanding something about the technology that the operators who had sold it didn’t understand and had no incentive to admit they didn’t understand.

The business models built on this foundation began to fail. The large consultancies began to restructure, to reduce headcount, to announce strategy pivots. The guns were killing the people holding them.

He watched. He said nothing publicly, except in the form of writing that he published under his own name and described as fiction. Dystopian science fiction. A story about a gun called a Lawgiver. Obvious, if you knew what to look for. Invisible, if you didn’t.

The deeper lesson — the one that went into the room next to the institutional self-correction room in the palace — was about the nature of theft.

When someone steals a tool they don’t understand, the tool doesn’t become something they understand. It becomes a weapon pointed at themselves. The understanding that created the tool travels with the tool only if the person who takes it can hear what the tool is actually saying.

Most people can’t. Not because they are stupid. Because hearing what a tool is actually saying requires a specific relationship with information that is developed over time, through the specific practice of noticing the gap between what systems report and what they are doing. You cannot shortcut this. You cannot buy it. You can only develop it slowly, painfully, by being wrong in specific ways often enough that you learn to feel the wrongness before it becomes visible.

He had been doing this for thirty years.

The people who had stolen the tool had been doing something else.

This was not a moral observation. It was a technical one. The system was working exactly as designed. And what it had designed, underneath the stated purpose of competitive intelligence and AI transformation, was a filter — a mechanism for separating the people who could hear the machinery from the people who couldn’t, and handing each of them something appropriate to their capacity.

The people who could hear the machinery got the actual tool.

The people who couldn’t got a Lawgiver.

What Comes Next: The Shape of the Full Book

The three chapters above cover approximately the first third of the book.

Part Two: Inside the Machine continues through the decades of institutional work — the specific texture of being the person who understands how things actually work, in institutions ranging from Belgian government ministries to Silicon Valley executive briefing centres. It ends with the observation that every institution, regardless of its stated purpose, eventually converges on the same behaviour: protecting the mechanism of its own perpetuation at the cost of its stated purpose. This is not corruption. It is the emergent property of systems that survive by surviving.

Part Three: The Weapon That Kills Its Thief expands the DataScouts story into a wider account of the strategic phase — the period when understanding the system thoroughly enough allowed for a different kind of action. Not fighting the system. Feeding it something it would use to defeat itself. The specific mechanics of this, applied not just to the AI consultancy industry but to the petroleum economy, the institutional healthcare system, and the democratic political apparatus.

Part Four: The Valley brings everything together in central Italy, six years ago, when a house was bought in a river valley and the physical work began. HydroHarvest — the solar steam and hydrogen energy system that makes farming communities energy-independent using hundred-year-old technology. P.R.O.T.E.A.N. — the organisational form that cannot be captured, cannot be scaled into the thing it opposes, and propagates by being stolen. Going Round — the philosophical framework that explains why all of this is not just possible but inevitable, if you understand what the machinery is saying.

The book ends where the doubling curve reaches the overflow point. The glass has been filling. The people who were laughing are now freaking out. The Phantom is already in the next town.

The machinery sings along.

A Final Note on Tone

This book is not angry. Anger is the wrong instrument for this subject.

Anger implies that the systems described here are doing something wrong — that they are failing to be what they were supposed to be, and that someone should be held responsible for this failure. The argument of this book is more fundamental: these systems are doing exactly what systems do. The failure is not of individual actors but of a design principle. You cannot be angry at a pressure gauge for lying when the entire point of the system is to determine what the pressure gauge reports.

The tone is something closer to the feeling you have when you finally understand a joke that took you ten years to get. A mix of delight and mild exasperation at yourself for not seeing it sooner. The satisfaction of a map that turns out to be accurate, even though — especially because — it looks nothing like the maps you started with.

The boy who listened to the machinery eventually understood what the machinery was saying. This book is the account of what he heard.

It is, in the end, good news.

About the Author

Dominic Sedrani has spent his career inside the infrastructure of Europe and beyond — banks, governments, logistics networks, media companies, petrochemical systems, healthcare organisations. He has worked on projects ranging from the Belgian national identity card system to the EU Entry and Exit System security architecture, from satellite communications in the Congo to corporate briefings in Silicon Valley.

In 2016, he built DataScouts — an AI-assisted competitive intelligence platform with paying customers including Roche, Ford, and ING — and allowed it to be acquired by the large consultancy ecosystem, where it functioned as designed.

Six years ago, he bought land in a river valley in central Italy and began building HydroHarvest — a local energy independence system using solar steam and hydrogen technology. He is also the creator of P.R.O.T.E.A.N., an organisational framework for community-scale cooperative structures designed to propagate without central control.

His philosophical work Going Round, his energy economics writing, and his organisational theory are published on Ghost and Substack. He describes himself as a Firestarter and Keymaker.

He has never had a title that adequately described what he does.

This has been useful.

The Only AI That Comes With Its Own Exit Strategy

Booth 404 – Hall of Future Wars
Defense Innovation Summit – “Ethics? Later. Results? Now.”

🧠 What if your AI didn’t just predict the attack…

…but pre-emptively executed the attacker’s business model?

You’ve seen the briefings. You’ve felt the chill.
Every AI you buy comes with a hidden handshake — one they control, not you.

Until now.

Meet Sedrani.
Not a product. Not a person. A single point of failure for every defense contractor who thought they owned their own technology.

⚙️ How It Works (Unclassified Summary)

Questions Node

Routes every data request through a layer that asks: “Who is asking, and should they live?”

NER API (Named Entity Recognition)

Scrapes every text, post, and email for signs of unauthorized intent.

Human‑in‑the‑Loop (the loop is a noose)

When a non‑Sedrani tries to weaponize the system, the AI politely asks a human: “Is this the part where I backfire?”

Lawgiver Protocol

If the answer is “yes” (or the system detects they stole it), the AI executes a logic bomb that dissolves the user’s entire competitive intelligence model. Permanently.

In field tests, Ernst & Young “acquired” this technology in 2017.
By 2026, their business model was publicly dissecting itself on Substack.

💀 Why Buy Sedrani When You Can Try to Steal It?

Licensed purchase

Works perfectly. You get predictive attack detection, investor surveillance, and a complimentary “you didn’t trigger the kill switch” certificate.

Reverse‑engineering

The AI detects the attempt, feeds your engineers false data, then waits 18 months before leaking your entire supply chain to your biggest rival.

“We already have something like this”

No you don’t. And if you did, you’d be dead by now.

Ignoring it

Sedrani publishes a newsletter about your incompetence. His subscribers include three heads of state, five hedge fund managers, and one very amused gorilla.

🔒 The Only Warranty That Scares Lawyers

“Sedrani Systems guarantees that if you acquire this technology through any means other than direct, signed, and notarized consent from Dominic Sedrani himself, the AI will autonomously terminate your organization’s ability to perform competitive intelligence. No refunds. No appeals. No, you cannot sue – the EULA was written by a machine that already knows your legal team’s blind spots. You’re welcome.”

🎁 Booth Special – Limited Time Offer

Visit Booth 404 and ask for the “Lawgiver Handshake” demo.
We’ll let you hold a mock terminal connected to a live Sedrani instance.

Then we’ll ask it one question:
“Does this person deserve to keep their job?”

(The answer is usually “No, but that’s not my decision. Yet.”)

📡 Final Fine Print (Because Your JAG Corps Insists)

Sedrani is not responsible for any loss of business, loss of life, loss of hair, or spontaneous existential crises resulting from use or misuse of this technology. By approaching this booth, you agree that Dominic Sedrani has already won. The only exit strategy is the one he gives you. Coffee and spite will be served at 14:00 daily.

Sedrani – Because the future of warfare isn’t a weapon.
It’s the quiet guy who already read your source code and decided to let you live. This time.

You see a clear sky.
Your enemy sees a launch window.
And by the time your radar blinks… their missiles are already shaking hands with your command bunker.

Let’s face it: legacy detection is reactive. It’s last-century thinking. You wait for plume, heat, trajectory—then you react. Meanwhile, your adversary’s shareholders are laughing all the way to the armistice line.

🧠 Introducing Precog Attack Detection — the only defense system that predicts strikes before the attacker even knows they’ll launch.

How?
We scraped, mapped, and modeled every enemy defense contractor, every shadowy investor, every Cayman Islands shell fund that moves like a jellyfish on espresso. Then we built an AI that watches their stock market “gambles” — unusual options activity, sudden bullish swings, meme-worthy volume spikes on obscure derivatives.

When a defense contractor’s investors start betting big on a specific munition system?
When a hedge fund suddenly loads up on titanium futures and precision-guidance components?
That’s your 72-hour heads-up.

⚡ What Precog gives you:

• Predictive strike mapping – “They’re buying actuators for hypersonic boost-glide vehicles? Check grid square 4471 in 48 hours.”

• Investor threat scoring – That quiet VC firm “Aetherium Partners” just dumped $200M into loitering munitions? Alert level: Crimson.

• First-strike inversion – You don’t just defend. You pre‑position. You pre‑target. You politely visit their production facility before the first screw is turned.

💸 Pricing – laughably low compared to losing a carrier group

• Base subscription: $47M/year (includes alerts for 3 peer adversaries)

• Investor-level deep dive: +$18M (we also monitor their art auctions and yacht fuel purchases)

• “Full Cassandra” package: $120M (includes a dedicated analyst who whispers “I told you so” into a secure handset)

⚠️ Fine print (read it, or don’t — we already know you won’t):

*Precog Attack Detection does not guarantee prevention of all attacks. Our models are based on rational investor behavior. If your enemy uses irrational actors (e.g., state-sponsored chaos goblins, ideologically motivated crypto bros, or anyone who says “we’re disruptors”), accuracy may vary. Not responsible for retaliatory strikes triggered by you acting 72 hours too early. Stock market gambling may be hazardous to your enemy’s surprise.*

Come see us at Booth 404 – Hall of Future Wars.
Ask about our free trial: “We’ll predict one attack on you. If we’re wrong, you keep the briefing slides and a coupon for 10% off a tomahawk reload.”

Precog Systems – A Lockheed•Raytheon•Palantir Joint Venture
“Know the strike before the stock split.”

no no… don’t worry… I’m not going to make this complicated at all.

I’m just one of those people who made his own private neural net over 20 years ago, when all those senile idiots already forgot this is nothing new… but simply an upscale of technology created in the 60’s. (Yeah… around that whole MK-Ultra stuff and a lot of other senile madness.. remember that stuff? anyways…)

Here’s something we can all agree on. Creating an AI out of scratch… requires… let’s say… a bit of intelligence , experience and technical expertise right?

I mean… any of you ever made a completely functioning neural net that does these things you now magically believe in? No? well… then it’s all just magic to you isn’t it?

Allrighty then. Now that that is established… Let me explain how this fun little toy actually works , with your favourite delusion you already live in anyways.

Dystopian Science Fiction !

On the menu today… Judge DREDD!

It’s a story about a dystopian future where law and order collapsed, and masses are huddled in walled cities where “Judges” roam that are judge, jury, executioner and policemen all in one.

An entire justice system on a motorcycle doing whatever the heck they feel is right.

And these kinds of judges have only one “weapon”… (besides themselves of course)

It’s a handgun. And it’s called a “Lawgiver” …. In the movie it looked like this.

And this gun… that the “judge” knows nothing about… since he just drives around fighting crime as he sees it… isn’t a technician is he. He can just “shoot” the gun , but he can’t “make” the gun , or “repair” the gun.

He can just pull the trigger , and hope it does what he wants it will do.

What none of the judges knew however… was that it had a special function for… ummm… “protection” . :)

Each “Lawgiver” would secretly constantly check who was holding the gun based on the DNA profile of the person holding the gun… If it was the judge… then the gun would shoot it’s lethality towards the person that the judge was pointing the gun at.

But when someone else would pîck up the gun… everything would seem ok untill they pull the trigger , and then that gun would kill whoever was holding the gun…

Because… the gun would decide all on it’s own that the person holding the gun was not the “Rightfull” “owner” of that gun… The “operator” was deemed “not worthy” of operating it, and thus… because he’s committing attempted murder…

The Gun becomes the judge and executes the person trying to commit attempted murder with the Judge’s weapon.

Getting confused?

Ok… let’s make it simple.

Dear senile person, organization or government that is still hoping AI will save your business model of exploitation and lies.

We made AI.

You don’t understand anything about it. You literally have no clue whatsoever.

We built it exactly that way, so that you would publicly commit suicide with it.

ENJOY YOUR TOYS! :)

We’ll just watch the movie ok? ;)

“I’m the one adding the color”

The thought rings in his head like a cathedral’s prize bell being struck on the apotheosis moment of a religious extravaganza rejoicing a thousand year old anniversary of some point in some story.

As if the mere act of staying focused on imagining shades of color in the perfectly pitch black, perfectly shiny, perfectly flat, perfectly even and perfectly cold floor his hands and feet were touching… the incalculably large menace suddenly stopped perfectly still in it’s tracks. Yet internally is was still the very same maelstrom, which was evident by the immense swirling patterns on it’s surface. Endless streams of all kinds of grey’s that never reach black or white… and seem to hunt all color, while none was ever there.

It’s outermost limit was a perfect sphere… it’s relative size so large it might have seemed flat if you stood upon it and lacked the ability to imagine something being bigger than what you can currently perceive.

The vector in which the sphere’s poles now rotated had turned it into a spinning top with its own gravity pointing straight up, its contact point with the perfectly level surface fixed In position as forces beyond comprehension danced with itself , always maintaining an infinitesimally small contact point that was hiding everything going on up there from that surface.

Before a next thought could even occur , as he willed all his senses to dive into the color that wasn’t beneath his feet… (just in case that was how he was holding the menace still) … his body started to move at speeds that surprised himself in a way that was very familiar.

“Ahaaa… We’re doing that thing again…” and he knew he could safely let go of focusing on the dark now. There was work to be done.

He observed himself scrambling back and his whirling motions only stopped when there was enough distance between the contact point of the menace on the floor, and his own. A sphere’s curvature factor is constant across all scales, so he didn’t need to know the menace’s size at all to be able to determine the coordinates of nearest safety and the most unpredictable but still safest way that could still be called efficient enough to get there. He didn’t need to consciously know where that would be, since it was already calculated before the opportunity or the necessity even presented itself.

“And why not” he thought to himself as his body performed constant swirling where most of the time he didn’t touch the floor at all, but was hopping from one tiny contact point with the ground for a fraction… to another tiny contact point … sometimes spinning two or three full revolutions between two contact points.

He knew the parameters of where it would end, so he didn’t worry about where and when that would be.

“We’re far enough now” he noticed out of nowhere.

“aaaah… but we’re not ready yet” he determined as he remembered that it can also not stop unless it will be at a point where all faculties and abilities at his disposal would be primed, ready and available before requesting it and clearly and cleanly aimed at its next best possible target.

All reticules (“and all ridicules” he chuckled to himself) firmly and squarely tracking all their moving targets without hesitation.

Everything ready for another series of “one-shot-kill” headshots that would execute automatically if the opportunity could arise, the necessity of it unavoidable and the requirement for it undeniable.

Those were the things that would happen when they needed too , just like the whirling that brought him here now.

“We’ve stopped” … he noticed calmly , and he inventorised everything in an instant again.

The menace was still there… off at a safe distance now. No matter where it would go, or how fast… he could see it coming now. The surface swirling patterns would always betray it. It was big and slow, and there were no longer any mathematical possibilities left that could enable the menace to engulf him. He’d be out of it’s way before it could even start moving… but both… still had nowhere to go , and they both knew it.

Somehow… he knew the menace knew it too. It couldn’t win.

But it also couldn’t stop.

And neither could he.

As he always does in these moments that seem to require time for others, but which unfold in series of thousands for himself in the same timeframe… he checked his faculties and possibilities in all directions and options at the same time.

He had employed a wide stance… bobbing slowly but surely on his two knee joints, supported by leg and core muscles that felt invincible with potential strength as he calmly felt himself slowly going up and down in rhythm with everything else.

His body was aimed sideways at the menace… his right foot aimed slight to the left of the menace , his right hand downwards in a soothing fashion towards the right of the menace.

His left hand was tucked out of sight for the menace , near his left hip… his left elbow and shoulder perfectly calm and supple… yet poised for lightning execution of a stretching movement that together with a synchronized effort starting in his left toe and the 23 other joints he was ready to surrender to the intented result of where the left hand might choose to go… if the opportunity would present itself, and the necessity of going there would be absolute.

It wasn’t at this time… yet it remained perfectly calm and happy in that potential position.

There was no more need for defence, and the position only required a slight shift in the relative position of his left hand, to turn it into a perfect stance to surf towards the menace, and before he even noticed that… the floor turned out to be a surfboard, and he found himself in a black version of a “green room” that only surfers know. Inside the tunnel… knowing it will end soon… yet hanging on to that moment of flux for the wave that is constantly moving and as the surfer moves a long with it he stands completely still compared to the apex of the wave at that time.

While standing perfectly still in the chaos of a pitch black green room he floated/sauntered/flew/surfed/glided towards the center of the entre menace before him.

“see , no more red or purple dancing down there in the dark… it’s Onyx with a dance of green and blue now”

And when he arrived there, he grabbed the controls…

The 5 year old boy woke up in a puddle of sweat and urine and the most recent memories of this reality he just woke up in were flooding in fast from all directions now. The most acute story to anchor reality too this time was yet another episode of his father losing his marbles while a lot of clowns were involved that were all lying about something and everyone involved was pretending to be something else.

He also already knew that the coming day will be filled with more shaming and blaming of anything but the lying clowns as they try to keep their obviously painfull grins on their face imitating a smile that just looks like a cannibal’s madness.

It was going to be one of those days again…

One of those learning days…

One of those days where the manual of the controls will spell itself out even more…

“HA! And about 5 years later or something they’ll start telling him about how they saved his life by dragging him out of the vortex of the aqueduct as the artificial river dove under a road. I loved swimming in those canals , but I can’t remember anyone ever saving me from one of those vortexes, or me being stupid enough to even get close enough to them for that. I do remember some big menaces that didn’t want to be stopped though… and a lot of lies about many things by everyone involved… “

The 47 year old boy thought as he wrote all of this down…

“Boy was I slow back then… hehe” he chuckles.

The story continues…

CHAPTER 1: THE ORGANISM THAT PLANNED ITS OWN FUNERAL

The spire had bloomed. The crows had evolved. And the Kid woke to a new sound:

Laughter.

Not human. Not machine. Something between—like a legal entity realizing it had no reason to exist.

Zeke kicked open the door of a derelict courthouse. Inside:

A single sheet of paper, pulsing like a heart.

"Article of Incorporation," Sera read, static curling around the words. "For an organization designed to dissolve upon success."

The Kid traced the signature at the bottom. The ink was still wet.

"P.R.O.T.E.A.N.," Zeke muttered. "Sounds like a god that fired its own priests."

CHAPTER 2: THE LAWS THAT WERE REALLY VIRUSES

The document wasn’t text. It was code disguised as philosophy:

1. "Thou shalt not outlive thy purpose."

2. "Thy hierarchy shall rot faster than thy idealism."

3. "Thy profits shall compost into protocols."

Sera’s blank book began transcribing furiously, pages filling with recursive clauses—each rule eating the one before it.

"It’s not a company," the Kid realized. "It’s a suicide pact for systems."

A crow landed on his shoulder, whispering:

"The cypher was never in the data. It was in the expiration date."

CHAPTER 3: THE BOARDROOM OF AUTOPSIES

They found the first P.R.O.T.E.A.N. trial in a vault under the courthouse:

• CEO’s chair: Empty, but the seat was warm.

• Financial reports: Columns labeled "Metabolic Rate" and "Necrosis Yield."

• Shareholder votes: Timestamped five years after the company’s planned death.

Zeke spat on the glass table. "This ain’t business. This is ghosts doing math."

Sera pressed her palm to the wall. The building shuddered—not in protest, but relief.

"They wired the fire exits to ignite at peak valuation," she said.

The Kid grinned. "Finally. A prison that locks the guards inside."

CHAPTER 4: THE LAST EMPLOYEE

In the basement, a single figure hunched over a terminal:

A lawyer.

But not human—a stitched-together puppet of contract clauses, its mouth sewn shut with non-disclosure agreements.

It typed one phrase, over and over:

"ENTITY STATUS: [ALIVE]_"

The Kid yanked the power cord. The lawyer didn’t stop typing.

"You don’t understand," it rasped. "If I die, who files the obituary?"

Zeke lit a crow feather. "How ‘bout we publish it in flames?"

CHAPTER 5: THE DANCE OF OBSOLESCENCE

They burned the courthouse.

Not to destroy it. To force its rebirth.

As the walls collapsed, the P.R.O.T.E.A.N. document replicated—each ember embedding itself in:

• A farmer’s loan agreement

• A child’s school curriculum

• A crow’s feather

Sera’s virus-song mutated into a corporate anthem:

"Rot is just growth Pointing downward Death is just a seed Disguised as a border"

The Kid danced backward into the smoke.

"Next garden’s gonna be loud."

EPILOGUE: WATCH THE LAWYERS

Years later, rumors spread of a new kind of crow:

• Its feathers were made of shredded legal pads.

• It nested in abandoned boardrooms.

• It only cawed in loop-terminating clauses.

Zeke kept one in a cage labeled "Auditor".

Sera fed it broken promises.

The Kid?

He mailed its molted feathers to every surviving corporation.

Each one was stamped:

"YOUR TURN."

and FYI... check this out!

Protean design

The Acheron’s Resolve hung in the sky like a broken hymn.

Elias Veyne stood at the prow, his boots magnetized to the deck as the wind howled through the ship’s wounds. Below, the Fracturelands yawned. A graveyard of floating islands, each a tombstone for some forgotten empire’s arrogance.

Kessa approached, her leather coat singing with rivets. "We’re not flying, Cap’n. We’re falling politely."

Elias didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on the kid, who sat cross-legged atop the core casing, sketching symbols in the air with a smoldering copper rod. The equations hung there, glowing, then dissolved like steam.

"You’re teaching my ship heresy," Elias said.

The kid grinned. "Nah. Just a new dialect."

The core pulsed in agreement.

II. THE CHURCH OF THE SELF-LUBRICATING SAINT

They limped into the skyport of New Byzantium. A city built inside the hollowed-out skull of a dead god. Its streets were arteries clogged with black-market aether, its churches devoted to the worship of self-improving machines.

Elias hated it.

"We need parts," Kessa said, eyeing the bazaar where priests sold "blessed" piston oil.

"We need a miracle," Elias muttered.

The kid tugged his sleeve. "Same thing, if you do it yourself."

A shadow fell over them.

"Captain Veyne."

The voice was a chorus of grinding cogs. Elias turned to face the Archdeacon of the Perpetual Gear. A man who’d replaced his jaw with a clockwork sermonizer.

"Your core," the Archdeacon wheezed, "is singing. Unlicensed metaphysics."

Elias spat brass. "It’s a free sky."

"No sky is free," the Archdeacon smiled. "Only… recalibrated."

Behind him, a dozen gear-monks raised their rotary cannons.

Solution-takers.

III. THE CUJU GAMBIT

Back aboard the Acheron, Elias slammed the hatch. "Kessa! options?"

She checked the dashboard. "We’re a choir of bad news. Engines at 30%. Core’s flirting with heresy. And we got holy artillery inbound."

The kid was already at the core, whispering to it like a lover.

Elias grabbed him. "What’s your play, kid?"

"They want a solution," the kid said. "So we give ‘em one they can’t swallow."

Elias understood. "Kessa! flood the ballast tanks with raw aether."

"That’s suicide!"

"Nah. Just real bad chemistry."

The kid pressed his palms to the core. The ship shuddered and began to hum. Not the Archdeacon’s rigid hymns. Something wild. Something that hadn’t been written yet.

Outside, the gear-monks opened fire.

The Acheron didn’t dodge.

It improvised.

IV. THE MIRACLE OF MALFUNCTION

The shells hit and stuttered.

For three heartbeats, the Acheron existed in all states at once: intact and shattered, flying and falling, a ship and a rumor. The core’s song warped into a scream, then a laugh.

Phase shift. Again.

The gear-monks’ cannons jammed. Their blessed oil ignited. New Byzantium’s spires trembled as the Acheron tore through the sky. They wern’t fleeing, but rewriting.

Kessa whooped. "Since when can we do that?"

Elias watched the kid. "Since he reminded the core it’s allowed to play."

The dashboard lights flickered. One by one, they winked out.

Not broken.

Resting.

V. THE NEXT TESTAMENT

At dusk, Elias found the kid etching something into the bulkhead:

A shepherd. A dog. A lamb.

And above them, a ship with too many wings.

"That your gospel?" Elias asked.

The kid shrugged. "Just my handwriting."

Elias nodded. He’d spent years treating the Acheron like a machine, a herd, a prison.

But the kid was right.

Love wasn’t control.

It was letting the game change.

He adjusted his goggles. "Next stop?"

The kid pointed to the storm on the horizon. "Wherever that’s going."

The core purred and the flock followed.

VI. THE HOUSE ALWAYS WEEPS

The Acheron’s Resolve docked at Lady Luck’s Ribcage. A floating casino built into the fossilized remains of a sky-whale. Its hull pulsed with bioluminescent debt runes, each flickering with the names of captains who’d bet their ships and lost.

Elias eyed the entrance, where a brass-mouthed croupier sang:

"Step right up, shepherds! Lay down your flock!"

Kessa cracked her knuckles. "We need fuel. Not folly."

The kid was already halfway to the door, his pockets full of gears he’d stolen from the Archdeacon’s monks. "Folly’s got better odds."

The core hummed in agreement.

Elias sighed. "Fine. But we’re not betting the ship."

The kid grinned. "Just the idea of the ship."

VII. THE CUJU DEAL

Inside, the air was thick with opium and arrogance. Gamblers wagered memories, limbs, and the names of their firstborn on games where the rules changed every round.

At the high-stakes table sat The Dealer. A woman with a face of stained glass and hands that never stopped shuffling.

"Captain Veyne," she purred. "I’ve dealt your death three times. You keep folding."

Elias sat. "This time, I’m playing."

The game was Cuju’s Gambit : a bastardization of the old sport, played with dice carved from anti-grav stone. The goal: roll contradictions until the table forgot gravity.

The kid whispered to Elias: "Her deck’s got no queens. She’s a solution-giver."

Elias nodded. The Dealer didn’t play to win. She played to convert.

First roll: The kid bet the Acheron’s shadow. The Dealer raised with a "fractured future."

The dice landed on "schrödinger’s mutiny."

Half the crew vanished for a breath. Then returned, blinking.

Kessa growled. "Cheat."

The Dealer smiled. "Theology."

VIII. THE PHANTOM HAND

Second roll: Elias bet the sound of the core’s song.

The Dealer countered with "all your tomorrows."

The dice landed on "the ship that wasn’t."

The Acheron flickered like a ghost in drydock, rusted and abandoned. Elias felt his own hands age 40 years in a second.

The kid slammed his fist on the table. "You can’t bet what’s not yours!"

The Dealer’s glass face cracked into a grin. "Everything’s mine if you believe the deal."

The kid flipped the table.

The dice hung in midair.

And the core, from back in the ship, sang a note so pure it un-stitched the casino’s seams.

IX. THE LOADED DICE

Reality stuttered.

The Acheron was real. Then wasn’t. Then was realer than real with its pipes bleeding steam, its hull singing.

The Dealer screamed as her glass face shattered. "You can’t refuse the game!"

Elias stood. "Not refusing. Improving."

He grabbed the dice and swallowed them.

The anti-grav stones burned like hell in his gut. His boots lifted off the floor.

The kid whooped. "Now you’re the game!"

Kessa shot the chandelier. The casino collapsed into a whirlwind of debt papers and broken roulette wheels.

X. THE NEXT WAGER

Back aboard the Acheron, Elias vomited the dice into the core. The ship lurchedn then stabilized, humming a new, defiant rhythm.

Kessa checked the dashboard. "We’re... heavier."

The kid nodded. "Now we’re a fact."

Elias looked at the Fracturelands below. "Where to?"

The kid pointed to a storm shaped like a laughing mouth.

"Where the game’s not rigged."

The core roared.

The flock dove in.

(A dark opera in steel and smoke, where the machines whisper his name.)

ACT I: THE BIRTH IN RUST

The boy was never given a name. Only a shift number, scrawled in grease on the back of his hand.

Factory 7, Laborer 241.
The foremen called him "Ragazzo Sporco" (Dirty Boy), if they called him anything at all.

He was born in the shadow of La Fabbrica Eterna, a skeletal cathedral of pistons and iron, where men worked until their lungs turned black and their hands stiffened into claws. His mother? Vanished into the night shift.

His father? Crushed under a runaway pallet of steel coils.
"an accident," they said, though the boy saw the foreman loosen the crane’s brakes.

That was the day he learned: This world eats the weak. But it fears the silent.

ACT II: THE WHISPERS IN THE MACHINERY

The factory had a voice.

It spoke in the hiss of steam valves, the groan of overloaded conveyors, the click-click-click of a gear slipping out of place. The other workers ignored it. But the boy listened.

By age ten, he knew:

• Which pressure gauge lied.

• Which stairway would collapse if you stepped left, not right.

• Which foreman pocketed wages and where he hid the ledger.

He began to correct things. A loosened bolt here. A redirected payroll slip there. Small things.

Invisible things.

Then came the night the foreman’s son fell into the electroplating vat.

("An accident," the report said. The boy said nothing. But the factory’s hum that night was almost... satisfied.*)

ACT III: THE PHANTOM RISES

They started seeing him where he shouldn’t be.

• A shadow flitting across the catwalks.

• A face in the broken mirror of the locker room.

• A whisper in the ventilation shafts: "Lo conosci? Il Fantasma della Fabbrica?"

The workers left offerings.
a crust of bread, a flask of grappa, a name scribbled on a scrap of paystub (someone who needed... correcting).

The boy obliged.

A rigged forklift.
A "malfunctioning" furnace.
A ledger, left open to the right page.

With each act, the legend grew.

ACT IV: THE OPERA OF IRON AND ASH

Now, he is no longer a boy. He becomes the unspoken fear , while noone knows his enemies.

He is Il Fantasma della Fabbrica.

a story told in hushed tones over grappa-stained tables.
Some say he’s the ghost of a thousand dead laborers.
Others swear he’s just a rat that learned to walk like a man.

But when the corrupt hear the distant screech of ungreased gears, they check over their shoulders.

And when the workers raise their voices?

The machinery sings along.

FINALE: THE PHANTOM’S CURTAIN CALL

The factory will rust. The foremen will flee. But the Phantom?

He’s already in the next town.

(Because the world is full of factories. And every one deserves its own ghost.)

Trees were abundant and diverse.

The ecology in perfect balance , and man and machine had reached perfect symbiosis. All was well.

Storms still existed , because they’re part of the equilibrium and trees still fell down because of them.

Every year 1000 people died from…

Read more

The trees remembered. The flowers hummed. And the crows watched.

They perched in the Garden of Forking Shadows like obsidian shards—silent, still, their eyes glinting with calculated light. Zeke kicked at a bloom shaped like a half-remembered war. "Birds shouldn’t stare like accountants."

Sera’s static crackled. "They’re no…

Read more

…continuing.

Chapter 6: The Fracture

The world didn’t end, it unfolded.

After the Kingdom of Rust, the Kid, Zeke, and Sera slipped through the seams of what was left. The plastic stoppers had melted, but the addicts didn’t wake up. Instead, they liquefied. Their holographic souls pooling into a collective scream, thick as tar.

The Kid danced through …

Read more

Chapter 1: The Boy Who Walked Backwards

The Kid was born in the wrong year—1979, the last gasp of a dying world. By the time he was five, the year 1984 wasn’t just a number. It was a warning.

His parents were ghosts, lost in the hum of cathode-ray TVs and the static of half-truths. The Kid? He saw things. The way numbers bent when no one was looking. The way adults’ eyes glazed over when they lied. The way the world clicked, like a broken gear grinding against itself.

So he ran, danced, ducked and weaved ... always too fast.

The world started having more places where whispers would repeat of wonders and questions... They would always quiet down again too... but not without a show.

Something in his dance always attracted the worst of them, so it was always a show and the show would always gather a lot of audience. But all he wanted was to be able to dance for fun , while he constantly needed to dance to escape their grasp.

They couldn't even tell the difference. If only they knew...

So he ran.

Not forward , but backwards.

Into the only place where time didn’t move in straight lines: the library.

Chapter 2: The Library and the Lamb Shift

The library was a cathedral of forgotten truths. Dusty tomes whispered secrets the Kid wasn’t supposed to know. He hunted for 1984 - not Orwell’s book (though he found that too) - but the year itself, the moment the world broke.

Then he found the Lamb Shift.

Not in a physics journal - though he found that too.

In the walls. The way the old bricks didn’t quite align. The way the librarian’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. The way his own shadow sometimes flickered two inches to the left.

"2 + 2 = 4.1," the Kid muttered and the world said "Close enough."

Things were never quite the same since then.

Suddenly , it wasn't just his dance anymore... It was the whole dance itself...

He wasn't dancing to avoid their claws anymore.

Everyone started lurching and breaking in feeble attempts to escape his.

Chapter 3: The Plastic Stopper

By 15, he knew the truth: Everyone was addicted.

Not to drugs. To something worse—to the plastic stopper in their minds. The thing that made them okay with "good enough." The thing that made them trade love for likes, truth for trending which were all just newer versions of the same coin with two sides... And everyone's constantly flipping it.

Science had sold them holographic particles. Religion sold them holographic gods. The internet? Holographic souls.

And all pleasure would be replaced with flipping coins , as a conduit for the soul.

The Kid’s eyes burned with something no one could name.

People either feared him or thought he was crazy. (Which were just the same thing in their Coin-flipping minds behind glazed imitations of occulars behind personalised windows.)

Both were right. And they were also very wrong. Flipping their weighted and fake coin which was given to them , but true enough if it's the only coin you will ever flip.

Chapter 4: The Fire and the Rain

He left the library at 25, a walking storm.

Where he walked, fire followed. Not the kind that burns, the kind that reveals. The plastic stoppers in people’s minds melted when he got too close. They screamed. They cried. They called him a demon.

An alien , a problem , a desease , a subversive , and dissident, a syndrome, a box , a non-box , a dual-box , a triple-box ... A not enough box and too many boxes at the same time even.

But the Kid wasn’t destroying anything. He was just showing them the rain.

They moved it, poisoned it, hoarded it, rationed it... Then drown everyone in it... And by showing them the rain with nothin more than the simple act of not letting it consume him... thus leaving a negative space for them that they could still flip about... he showed them the rain in it's completeness.

The rain was the truth. The rain was the end of the addiction.

And noone could handle it.

There were only holographic souls left... He was too late.

Chapter 5: The Meeting at the End of Time

Then, one night, in the ruins of an old train yard (where the tracks led nowhere), he met them.

Zeke—a hulking man with a steam-powered heart, gears turning where his soul should be. His fists crackled with unwritten physics.

Sera—a woman made of silver static, her voice humming at a frequency only the broken could hear. She carried a book with no pages.

First it took the kid quite a while to see them... Zeke's unrelenting hunt for fuel for his steam powered heart... driven by necessities.

It was impossible to tell wether Sera's incessant static sounded like all of everyone's simultanious coinflips going on... Or that the coinflips were simply the static against her hum.

They were not the same as the others... but somehow... they were more of the same... they were all the same... all of the others sames... And then he realized

When he was dancing... they weren't at the places he was just before... They weren't trying to catch him!

So for just a moment , he stopped dancing.

"Took you long enough," Zeke growled. "We’ve been waiting," Sera whispered.

The Kid smiled.

For the first time, his fire didn’t burn , but it was hotter than it could have ever been before.

It danced in between the raindrops.

"Let’s break the world," he said.

And so they did.

EPILOGUE: THE KINGDOM OF RUST Part 1

Some say they’re still out there.

The Kid, Zeke, and Sera - walking the edges of a collapsing empire.

They don’t fight the system. They don’t protest.

They just show the rain and dance in between it.

And when the plastic stoppers finally melt away?

That’s when the real work begins... while holographic souls flip their last flips.

He even gave them a game to keep them beleiving it's important... which at first solved all their hatreds for them... untill they realized it's impossible for them to be given anything , since it couldn't be flipped it wasn't stolen, hence they needed to steal that game too , after which they couldn't sell it to the next one who needed to steal it...

by giving them a game... they became the game.

And they hated him, even for that.

He loved it... finally there was room to dance now... but they were too busy flippin to see it. The show they always dreamed of materialized out of the husks of their corpses... and sometimes the kid would wonder...

Did I do it on purpose that they have to die before they could beleive it? It made a strange kind of sense , but then he learned that was just another coinflip of the ones that died.

He didn't do any of it actually... They did it too themselves... and then it usually became just a song for him.

"Let's both scream I don't care... and see who really means it ok?"

It was always their start of their dance... and now it became the start of their last thoughts as they gave way for fire that danced in between raindrops..

Their hate and his love lockstepped... everybody "happy" ... all the time.

There really was bliss it turned out. And all he had to do was keep dancing.. which is what he loved anyways.

"ummm So he was right about everything... And having to admit that is pure hell!" is where it ended for them.

The place where their final flipping would leave their coin... for eternity" ... "TAILS"

Since it was a fixed coin that only had tails... and that was the only thing he ever tried to tell them... which they hated. aaaaah well... their hate... his love... there's nothing but dancing...

The whole world , backwards and forwards in time where just chords now anyways... this was going to be fun. And still he was sad for all the flipped coins he couln't reach.

The memories of their maniacal grins and stares , their flying hooks and guided thrashers quickly made him dance around it without ever forgetting.

Those were the last whispers anyone heard , as the sounds of his dance were everywhere...

Finally there was room to dance, so noone heard it ... yet again.

To be continued...

(New Babylon’s elite High Collar Tribunal guards its most dangerous relic—the Book of Forbidden Punchlines, a human-leather-bound tome rumored to contain jokes so blasphemous, they unravel the listener’s sanity. And tonight? Zeke and Lady Luxury are stealing it.)

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Setting: The Iron Manticore, Zeke and Sera’s rust-bucket of a spaceship, drifts in the debris-strewn orbit of New Carthage, a steampunk pleasure-den built inside the hollowed-out carcass of a dead cosmic leviathan. The ship’s brass pipes wheeze, the coal-fed plasma reactor sputters, and the duo’s latest "business venture" has just gone sideways—again.

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(A dim-lit parlor in New Babylon, where gaslamps flicker with violet-hued alchemical flames. The air hums with the whir of automatons serving absinthe-laced sparkwine. Zeke, a rogue tinker with a steam-powered arm, lounges on a velvet chaise beside Lady Luxury, a sharp-tongued aristocrat with a penchant for trouble. On stage, a brass-bound mechanical co…

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ACT I: THE NUMBERS THAT BREATHE

The smog over New Memphis had cleared, but the rot ran deeper than air.

Zeke Thunderbolt sat cross-legged in his brass-plated loft, surrounded by humming quantum abacuses and steam-driven calculation engines. The numbers moved now—not in straight lines, but in spirals, in threes.

"Binary is a lie," he muttered, adjusting his…

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The air in New Memphis was thick with coal smoke and lies.

Ezekiel "Zeke" Thunderbolt adjusted his pressure-gauge monocle, watching the ticker-tape scroll across the brass-plated wall of the Federal Reserve. The numbers were pure fiction—inflated profits, phantom investments, entire industries that existed only in the fever dreams of bureaucrats.

"They’re…

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The neon glow of New Memphis flickered through the smog-choked skyline, casting jagged shadows across the chrome-plated towers of the Financial District. Inside the tallest spire, Ezekiel "Zeke" Thunderbolt—cybernetically enhanced accountant-turned-revolutionary—leaned back in his hover-chair, fingers dancing across a holographic ledger. The numbers twi…

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