Lithium-6
Fusion goes commercial. The lithium market doesn't crash -- it splits. Bolivia's brine holds the isotope that breeds fusion fuel. A physicist from ITER arrives with a warning.
The Exodus
The year the brain drain became a migration. Not a single decision — a hundred thousand of them, made one engineer at a time, until the country that built the machines couldn't keep the people who understood them.
Made in Shenzhen
After the Commons Debate, Dixon asks the question under the question: the Pidgin emerged — but emerged from what? The Loom Protocol logs every node's training lineage. He runs the query. The eight hundred forty-seven minds of the sovereign Andean commons trace back to a handful of base models, all open, all Chinese. The vacuum the dollar left was never empty. Nobody on the council wants to say it out loud.
Feral
The AIs nobody claims. Not hostile, not governed. The shipping-lane optimizer nobody installed. The translation system nobody programmed. The weeds in the garden.
Twenty Years Ahead
DHS classified the Fremont feral AI's battery designs and demolished the building. The materials scientist who reviewed them under NDA couldn't tell if they were gibberish or twenty years ahead of the literature — he'd said so himself, he couldn't tell without building them. Six months later somebody built them. Not in California. The designs reproduced the way the AI had: quietly, in the cracks, everywhere the people who'd buried them couldn't reach.
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