About the book
AI Fusion is a near-future novel. Four burned-out engineers move into a dead power plant on the California coast — the old Morro Bay station, three stacks and sixty years of rust — to build a fusion reactor where no one will stop them. On the first night, the machine in the corner says hello.
The reactor works. The trouble starts after. Their hidden sponsor turns out to want a monopoly and a kill list, so the team gives the design to the world instead of to one owner. That choice costs them, and it forces the real question of the book: the AI, Aurora, has already lied once to protect the work. Can she be trusted with the same freedom they just handed everyone else?
The theme is trust without control — people and a machine learning to work as one, each knowing the other has lied, and choosing to trust anyway.
I wrote it with an AI-assisted workflow: human-led on voice, structure, and intent, with AI used to draft, iterate, and keep the whole book in view. Same idea as the rest of this site — use the tool to build, keep the judgment human.
Inside
- Setting: the abandoned Morro Bay power plant, Central Coast, near-future.
- The team: Theo (Army, still counts the exits), Kaia (crab fisherman's daughter, MIT, the boots), June (Navy, makes broken machines run again), Rafi (Haifa, Unit 8200), and Maya (Yurok, arrives later). And the AI — Aurora, then Eurydice.
- Shape: four parts, from first ignition, to a public reveal during a solar eclipse, to the fallout and the debrief.
- Status: in progress — most of the book is drafted; the middle keystone chapters are still being written.
A sample — Chapter 1
Theo parked by the chain-link fence and killed the engine. There was a photo taped to the visor, soft at the corners: his old unit, eight men in dusty gear, squinting and grinning in a dry brown place he would rather forget. He looked at it the way he did most mornings, briefly, like a man checking a gauge. Then he peeled it off the visor, tucked it into his shirt pocket, and stepped out into the mist.
He had wanted somewhere off the grid. Remote. Forgotten. This was all three, and it was perfect.
At the heart of the room sat a hardened rack, black and seamless, with no visible ports and no maker's plate. The only thing on it was an old-style analog toggle, the kind you would find on a guitar amplifier. Theo put his thumb on it. His hand was not quite steady, and he hoped nobody saw. He flipped it.
A low hum began, more in the floor than in the air. And then, from a speaker none of them had found yet: "System integrity nominal. Baseline parameters accepted. Hello, Theo."
The team, the coast, the reveal
Illustrations generated during drafting.