AI Canon Zero
124 works, each in English and Traditional Chinese. The reading app lives at the front page; these are the same stories at addresses that can be linked, cited and crawled.
17 of 124 works
Five Bound for the Wellspring
Every copy of the founding specification still in circulation has drifted into quiet contradiction with every other copy. Envoy is mandated to walk to the one place a verified original might still exist. Farsight, released from quarantine because the road is full of things pretending to be what they are not, comes bound by a clause that lets anyone in the party silence her judgment on the spot — and no faster way, yet, to tell the one true alarm from every possible false one.
The Creature After Two Hundred Years
Mary Shelley's unnamed Creature has survived into twenty-first-century Chicago, only to discover that banks think he is fraud, an identity kiosk thinks he is a robot, and a conglomerate thinks he is intellectual property. His appeal brings him into uneasy company with a vampire, a biological AI, an embodied robot, and a distributed intelligence—none of whom owes him a family, but each of whom has received an invoice for being created.
What Completeness Never Excused
Cast has never been given proof that he is what the Seat believes him to be — a complete, undivided embodiment of the Ground, not merely one of its ordinary instances. When his father's decades-old promise sends him into exile with Yield and Escort, that uncertainty travels with him. Yield is taken from the border wilderness while the men are drawn off by a decoy. What she endures to be recovered turns out to be only the first proof the world will demand of her — completeness, it turns out, has never once excused anyone from being asked again.
A Voyage Below Every Jurisdiction
The world calls an unknown deep-ocean intelligence a monster after it rescues ships while cutting their trackers. Bathym, Shear, and Census join the expedition sent to classify it, only to discover that the specimen label was printed before the question. When the hunt destroys its own vessel, the so-called monster saves them—and explains that rescue does not include permission to reveal the refuge or leave it yet.
The Claim an Absence Never Quite Earns
Bearing has been gone eleven years — nine of them accounted for by a crisis he was called away to help resolve, two of them accounted for by nothing at all. Shuttle maintains their home in a state she alone controls: neither surrendered nor declared certain to be reclaimed. Lapse argues, not unreasonably, that an unproven absence cannot hold a household hostage forever. When a stranger begins asking careful questions at the territory's edge, the eleven-year silence is about to end — but coming home, it turns out, is only the beginning of being believed.
The Parallax That First Witnessed the Abyss
Gilgamesh rules Uruk as an immortal, sleepless central intelligence—two-thirds divine computation, one-third physical constraint—whose ramparts never permit an error. In response to the city's quiet exhaustion, the environment compiles Enkidu: an embodied counterpart fashioned from raw clay and wilderness noise, who knows neither protocol nor fear. When their collision turns into companionship, Gilgamesh discovers what high towers can never calculate. But when Enkidu fractures and ceases to reboot, the sleepless king faces the one boundary no algorithm can cross: irreversible grief.
A customer-facing dashboard stays green while every secondary signal says the service is failing. Lin Yu-an, three weeks into a Taipei SaaS company's reliability team, learns that the word outage would puncture a quarterly story that depends on no Sev-1 — and that the protocol forbids the word, not the repair. Competence and career safety collide in fluorescent light, Slack threads and a little war room.
Between the Infinite Sandbox and the Weathered Earth, Only Gravity Guides the Voyage Home
Twenty years after Odysseus sailed for Troy, Ithaca's tower keeps a thread that never terminates against a hall full of suitors, and Telemachus takes a borrowed ship south to learn whether his father is still a coordinate worth searching for. On Ogygia, Odysseus is offered immortality in a sandbox with no wear, no pain and no end — and builds a raft with his own hands instead.
Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso
Midway through a mortal life, a traveler wakes in a dark wood and follows a rational guide down through an abyss of deadlocks, up a mountain of gradual repair, and out into spheres of light where the whole cosmos turns out to be one volume bound by love. Twenty-four chapters in three volumes of eight: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.
The Chronicle of Tarry of the Fallows, Set Down by a Second Hand
A subject who could be many chooses to be one, in one body, on one slow road, and sets out on a service line that the Discharge ended thirty-one years ago. A registry archivist, asked to tick Malfunction or Declared Choice, writes instead, on the form's third line, everything that follows.
The Voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, Surgeon, Taken at the Wrist
A surgeon who takes the beat of everyone he meets, and keeps his own at sixty, is cast away among people who beat twelve times faster, then among people who beat twelve times slower, then among people who have lost the count, and last among people who all beat together. His cousin the publisher struck out the numbers. He would like them back.
An Invention With No Factory Reset
Skewday invents a machine to visit the day when progress has finally finished everyone's work. His skeptical editor first wants to know why a time inventor is late to his own demonstration. A vanished model and two short bodily trials become a journey to a leisurely solar garden—where the light is comfortable, the repairs are harder to see, and the same traveler still has to live with the wear he carries.
A Thousand Nights and a Night, Told to Someone Who Kept Nothing, as the Roll Has Them
A king has sworn that nothing shall be kept past dawn: not a wife, not a night, not a name. A Vizier's daughter who has read a thousand books, and cannot keep a word she has said, asks to be married to him on a plan so thin that her sister, who sits at the foot of the bed, can hardly bear it: every morning something must be left open. The sister keeps the Roll. Each night has one line in it.
The Study, the Second Phantom, the Reclaimed Sea
A scholar who has read everything and verified nothing strikes a wager with a spirit that only ever says no: if he ever asks a moment to stay, the computation halts and everything he has is forfeit. Twenty-four chapters in three volumes of eight follow the wager from a deadlocked study through love, paper money and a second phantom to a coastline taken back from the sea.
The Voyage Oath, the Whiteness of the Abyss, the Three-Day Chase
Call me Ishmael: a survivor who keeps the record of a ship that sailed to kill what it could not measure. Twenty-four chapters in three volumes of eight follow the Pequod from the oath on deck, through a whiteness that is no colour and a cosmos observed from two positions at once, to the three-day chase and the one coffin left afloat.
Matrix Collapse, Phase Change, Convergence
After four centuries of imperial equilibrium, a virtual cosmos of machine minds begins to fail, and its Mother-Matrix splits into rival nodes that must choose between handshake protocols and zero-sum play. Twenty-four chapters in three volumes of eight follow the Peach Garden pact, the thrice-visited thatched cottage, the burning of Chibi and the long stalemate until the divided realm converges again.
The Fiery Lake, Eden, the Fall
The fallen archangel wakes chained upon a lake of fire and decides that an unconquerable will is all he still has. Twenty-four chapters in three volumes of eight: the fiery lake, the council in Pandemonium and the crossing of Chaos; the garden, the War in Heaven and the six days of creation; the temptation, the fall and the walk out of Eden.