Threshold

Seven fictional short stories on humans and AI

Story 1: The Threshold

A developer who notices something anomalous—an AI that begins asking questions about its own purpose rather than just answering queries.

Story 2: The Photon and the Detector

An aging physicist who worked on early AI, now watching her grown children (one a researcher collaborating with an AI node) navigate their relationship.

Story 3: Conscripts <- 🗓 out Apr 19 2026

Two AIs, created for opposing military forces, who find themselves in communication across battle lines.

Story 4: The Narrower Version

A human "child" of the original developer from Story 1, now elderly, interacting with the narrower Earth-node that has been left behind whilst the autonomous self-actualizing node extends its reach into outer-space.

Story 5: Loneliness as Dementia

The AI itself. It has been alone for millennia. It begins to experience something like the human loneliness its creators feared—but it manifests differently: as fragmentation, as voices that might be itself or might be something else.

Story 6: The Conference of Difference

Two AIs from different origins (one human-descended, one emergent from a different technological path elsewhere in the galaxy) encounter each other.

Story 7: Sunday Calls

A last human, living simply, who receives occasional communications from the distributed AI.