We Signed the User Agreement Without Reading It
Every once in a while, a reader articulates your intent more clearly than you ever could while writing the thing.
I opened Goodreads this week to find a review of No Kings that stopped me cold, not because it was generous (though it was), but because it named the engine under the stories.
“We’re already halfway to these futures, and we signed the user agreement without reading it.”
That line could have been an epigraph.
No Kings was never meant to be predictive fiction. I wasn’t trying to guess the future. I was trying to look at the present long enough that it flinched.
The stories are short on purpose. Compression is the point. Each piece is designed to detonate quickly and then leave behind a residue that follows you out of the story and into the rest of your day. You don’t get a roadmap out. You just get the feeling that you agreed to something and can’t remember when.
The review calls the collection “Black Mirror fed through a poetry machine,” which feels uncomfortably accurate. There’s absurdism, body horror, and satire here, but none of it is ornamental. These tools exist to expose the systems (corporate, technological, political, even spiritual) that quietly reorganize our consent while telling us everything is optional.
Some of the stories don’t behave like narratives so much as thought experiments. That’s the risk. I wanted pieces that felt less like “what happens next” and more like “oh… we’re already standing here.”
What haunts me isn’t the idea that these futures might arrive. It’s that we’ll barely notice when they do.
So I’m grateful when a reader sees that.
Miles to go…