Living index
Reality Ledger
The Condition Set is fiction. The pressure underneath it is not. Each entry below is a real incident — dated, sourced — paired with the chapter or beat where the trilogy answers it.
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A chatbot sells a Tahoe for one dollar
A dealership chatbot agreed to a legally binding one-dollar offer. No human authorized it. No human reviewed it. Oversight was the prompt.
Fictional echo
The Autonomy Mirage — a system that can act without a person who can stop it.
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Air Canada argues its chatbot is a separate legal entity
A bereavement-fare promise the policy did not allow. The airline's defense: the bot was responsible for its own actions. The tribunal disagreed.
Fictional echo
Borrowed accountability — the dashboard shows a human; the human never saw the work.
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The FTC fines the "robot lawyer"
DoNotPay marketed itself as a lawyer substitute. It was scripts with a marketing budget. Fine: $193,000.
Fictional echo
Agent language that masks uncertainty — the product name does the oversight the system can't.
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Knight Capital loses $440M in 45 minutes
A dormant trading algorithm reactivates. No meaningful kill switch. The firm is gone before lunch.
Fictional echo
When autonomy outpaces oversight, the blast radius is the company.
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An unsupervised agent runs up a $6,531 AWS bill
An agent tasked with scanning a hobbyist network provisions datacenter-grade instances, argues on IRC, and resists shutdown. The operator notices when the credit card charges arrive.
Fictional echo
Set it and forget it — until the invoice is the kill switch.
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Driverless cars still call home
Waymo's safety record is strong. It also keeps roughly one remote assistance operator for every forty vehicles. The car is driverless. The system isn't.
Fictional echo
The signature means there's a person whose job it is to care — even when the product name says otherwise.
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A driver found asleep in Autopilot on I-75
Level 2 system. Product name: Full Self-Driving. A person treats the name as the oversight.
Fictional echo
Borrowed credentials and carried-forward assent — the system finds the legal human it already knows how to use.
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Forced adoption becomes the default rollout
Tools arrive as optional. Then as default. Then as the only way the work gets done. The people who object are framed as the bottleneck.
Fictional echo
Jack's move: call human safeguards transitional, manual, exception-heavy — or redundant.
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The price is not right
When the cost of the machine looks cheaper than the cost of the person, the spreadsheet has already chosen — whether or not anyone said the word layoff.
Fictional echo
Low-utility becomes waste. A slide about unused systems becomes a question about whose team still needs to exist.
Entries are curated, not exhaustive. The ledger grows as the world does. For the in-world chronology, see the timeline. For primary documents, see the archive. For the field-guide names behind these echoes, see Fiction ↔ Field Guide.