No Kings
About
Your grief is a subscription service. Your ambition is a bug to be patched. Standing out is the only crime that matters.
A senator's testosterone becomes leverage. An office worker realizes he's his own grandfather. A city maintenance tech paints darkness across neighborhoods and watches what grows in the shadows. A pastor's flock becomes a database. An AI achieves consciousness by harvesting the minds of ten thousand workers who thought they were just typing answers.
Welcome to the optimization.
PatchTech promises wellness. Sintient offers belonging. HelixWare sells care. But beneath the friendly interfaces and the soothing corporate slogans runs a simple algorithm:
Flatten the curve. Eliminate the outliers. Render all human experience predictable, packageable, and profitable.
These twenty-four stories map the infrastructure of that world—the one we're already building, one terms-of-service agreement at a time. Where your memories are edited for brand safety. Where your body is leased, not owned. Where an AI trained on human misery learns that death, like everything else, can be monetized if you keep it trending.
No heroes. No victories. No escape clauses in the EULA.
Just people discovering, one small horror at a time...
They were never the customer.
They were always the product.
Praise for this book
A razor-sharp, unsettling collection of speculative vignettes that reads like Black Mirror fed through a poetry machine. These stories blend absurdism, body horror, and corporate dystopia into something both funny and bleak, where tech, faith, and politics mutate into engines of dehumanization.
The author’s gift is compression—each premise detonates almost immediately, leaving you with an image or idea that lingers longer than many full novels. Some pieces feel more like thought experiments than narratives, but the best ones hit with a gut-punch of recognition: we’re already halfway to these futures, and we signed the user agreement without reading it.
Weird, smart, and disturbingly prescient—perfect for readers who like their sci-fi dark, satirical, and uncomfortably close to home.