I'm a Futurist in the Security space for a large retailer. In my free time, I write near-future novels. The Condition Set is a trilogy — Redundant, Contingent, Essential. Julian Bleecker and I were on the same team in 1999, back when the web was new. Small world.

Near-future fiction isn't the day job. It can't be. Think of it like a transformer in a circuit — you need it to step down the voltage before it's useful, but you wouldn't put it in the same circuit as the thing it's transforming. The near-future has too many opportunities for complicated conversations about politics and controversy. My personal fiction isn't influenced by my day job — it's the other way around. Future world-building is better done off the clock. The question is how I draw boundaries.

Three ideas span the trilogy. UBI and Agency: everyone was excited about UBI, but a few years in there's a general sense of ennui — comfort as pacification. The Resistance: while the future happens, people continue to fight it — the series focuses on the ways AI complicates that fight. Inference Engines: carrying forward current trends — AI accelerating vulnerabilities, adversaries increasingly autonomous. Resistance is futile.

PDF and ePUB — audio coming. Fiction isn't finished anymore — the blog continues, the terminal interacts. AI helped with planning and ideating, but final reader-ready prose? Even the best models still really suck at it. Free for Near Future Laboratory Patreon supporters — just email me. If you read it and conclude it was awful, I owe you a drink. Not a money-making venture, but the low price offsets the token cost.