This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: The triverse is in turmoil. The arrival of a rogue AI superintelligence five years earlier has disrupted every aspect of society. For a select few, this has been good news…
Space. Somewhere in lunar orbit.
2550. March (Earth time).
Charles Matheson was having a good year. A good decade, in fact. Other men may have paused to wonder at their good fortune, but to Matheson it was an inevitability and well deserved. He’d seized not only his own destiny but that of the entire solar system, and the wider triverse. One day, they would thank him. His descendants would look at statues and whisper his name in awe, marvelling at his achievements.
He changed everything, they would say.
It had taken decades of his life, had required mammoth investment of resources, but the gamble had been worth it. True freedom was within their grasp for the first time in centuries. A return to human-led ingenuity and self-determination. The fight was for no less than the sovereignty of the soul. As a species they’d collectively sold themselves down the river, first to the censors, then to the liberal utopians, then to AI superintelligences.
All of them were comfortable, were fed, had an income. Everyone was supported. It had been a disaster. Mundanity by policy. Ideological homogeneity. Everyone was special, so no-one was special.
It was anathema to Matheson. He came from a long, proud lineage that had forged their own path since landing on the shores of the New World. Mathesons had built towns, had built America, then seen it subsumed into the global government. The long, drawn-out death rattle of libertarianism had happened before Charles Matheson had been born, but he’d felt its echoes every day of his life.
This office, far from Earth, had long been a refuge from the carnage of the 26th century. A space all his own, free from the observations of superintelligences and the judgement of others. The AIs had brought a tedious stability to the system. The great flattening, as Pierson had called it in The Plunge. It was a shame that the great writer had not lived to see his vision come to pass.
It had taken two centuries, but the opening of the triverse had finally shaken things up to such an extent that they were ready. A grenade thrown into a still pond, the portals had delivered a chaos that had been most fortuitous. Most evidently in the opportunity to build a new AI, designed this time to serve humans. A better AI, that they had harnessed to start unpicking all the mistakes of the past.
In only five years they’d made such progress: rebalancing the interplanetary economy, peeling away at the bloated bureaucracy of the global government, rolling back universal income, stripping away the regulations that had held back efforts to make use of the near infinite resources held in the soil of Mars and Venus and the other satellites. They’d moved so fast, aided by their personal, unshackled quantum superintelligence, that the other AIs hadn’t known how to react. The legacy AIs’ finely tuned, algorithmic slave management of humanity had finally been disrupted. They’d had no choice but to acquiesce, for fear of a total meltdown of the entire system. Piece by piece, it was all slotting into place, and there’d be no going back.
Matheson glanced at the inert host in the corner of the office. The robot stood to attention, eyes closed. Probably Better was busy with its assigned tasks, elsewhere in the system. Doing what it was told. The drone was in the form of a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, as was Matheson’s preference. If he had to put up with an AI’s presence — even one of their own design — he at least wanted it to be a pleasant vision. Earlier that evening he’d dressed the host in a figure-hugging red dress, ready for the party. Not that he was expecting a need for Probably Better’s presence.
His comms beeped, announcing an incoming call from Hamilton-Gordon. The Joint Council Secretary-General was a necessary ally, though the time would soon come for them to cut him out of the picture. Wait for the right timing, then Hutchinson could take over the position and provide a more solid base. Hamilton-Gordon did what he was told, but Matheson had never felt entirely convinced by his ideological clarity.
“Secretary-General,” Matheson said, bringing up the call. The other man was sat in the plush seat of a private vessel.
There was a pause of a second-or-two before the reply, suggesting his impending guest was still several hours away. “Ambassador Matheson.” Hamilton-Gordon smiled broadly. “Charles, good to be able to speak directly without having to shuffle messages back and forth through the damned portal.”
“Only thing getting between us now is the speed of light, Paul,” Matheson said, flashing his perfect grin. “Are you looking forward to the fundraiser?”
“Eminently. Are all of our selected guests confirmed?”
“Absolutely. Once we’ve got them all on side there’ll be no stopping us.”
“Excellent. I have the paperwork for the Joint Council amendments ready my end. Nearly there, then.”
Matheson’s eyes flicked to the inert robot in the corner of the room. “Not long indeed. And then we can move to phase three.”
Phase three, when they’d no longer need their custom-built AI and could send the deactivation code. Code that would propagate back into the network and cripple every superintelligence in the system. And then there would be no gods over them. The only masters of humans would be humans.
Probably Better had been a necessary loose screw rattling around inside the engine, but they had designed it from the start with an expiry. They’d succeeded in harnessing an AI for the benefit of humanity, unlike those naive, sleepwalking pioneers of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.
A new era was upon them, where success and the fruits of one’s labours could be rewarded and enjoyed, and where failure was once again a possibility. Civilisations couldn’t prosper with a safety net in place, where competition was frowned upon. In a society with no losers, by definition there would also be no winners. The inadequate and the incapable and the scroungers had to be allowed to fail. That’s how progress worked: those who contribute least fall to the bottom of the pile and get crushed. The weak die off, without polluting the strong.
Matheson had always felt like a winner. The universe had, finally, caught up with his ambitions.
“I’ll see you in a few hours.” Hamilton-Gordon broke the connection.
Standing and moving around his desk, Matheson crossed the office to the robot host. He’d had its face designed as a blend of several famous actresses from the twentieth century. Running a hand from the robot’s waist up to its neck, over its uncannily realistic skin, he briefly regretted that they would be disposing of Probably Better. But, then, any generic, non-quantum AI could pilot the host, like any of the waiters in the galleries. Too much intelligence could be a dangerous thing.
He needed to get ready. The first guests would be arriving soon enough, and he had to convince them to join him in the reshaped universe.
References
There aren’t many direct references in today’s chapter, but here are some earlier appearances by and mentions of Charles Matheson:
In ‘Loose ends’ (April 2023) we got to meet Matheson in person, in conversation with some of his co-conspirators.
A year later, in part 3 of ‘Loyalties’, the unmasked Miller finally named Matheson alongside Baltine and Hutchinson. Those revelations didn’t help him or Bakker.
He’s lurked in the background for quite some time.
Oh, and let’s not forget:
‘The Writer’ (November 2022) is all about John Pierson, who would later publish The Plunge. It posthumously became something of a call-to-arms for a certain type of person. JP became something of an iconic figure for the likes of Matheson and Miller.
Meanwhile.
It’s been a week of immense political turmoilbetrayal in the real world. I needed an outlet for my thoughts, and my rewatch of 90s scifi show Babylon 5 turned out to be very timely. Drawing parallels between the show and 2025 unfortunately isn’t difficult:
I would much rather that the show had remained about the past, rather than the present.
Then again, one of the many superpowers of fiction is its capacity for continual reinvention, long after it has been written.
It speaks to the human tendency to repeat cycles of behaviour over and over again. A story written about historical events will inevitably also have something to say about the present and the future, because humans bump into the same mistakes on an endless loop. Silly us.
That’s why I try to imbue my stories with a sort of historical verisimilitude, in and around the spaceships and dragons and portal shenanigans.
Some other bits:
Courtesy of Delayed Gratification magazine:
I’ve been poking at stats around what I’ve written here over the last three years. Some initial observations:


Short version: that’s a lot of posts. I like the way discussions appear in 2022, then video in 2023, and now livestreams. If I find anything that might of use to other writers I’ll be sure to share it.
Right, let’s get on to the author notes for today’s chapter.
Author notes
I remember an interview, or perhaps it was the DVD commentary, with Peter Jackson about his Lord of the Rings films, and how one of the challenges was Tolkien’s text having oddly absent villains.
Sauron, the main antagonist, isn’t actually in the story. He’s an off-screen threat that never quite manifests. The ring is a threat, but is purely psychological. Their solution was to foreground the Nazgul, and to create ‘hero’ orcs that would have great prominence: Lurz, Gothmog and so on. It was a way to make manifest an otherwise rather ethereal baddie.
The macro plot of Tales from the Triverse, which sat in the background for a while but leaped into the foreground last year, has a similar issue. The main antagonists are off-screen, scheming in the background. They are untouchable and powerful and operate on a different level to our protagonists.
Miller, being the mole, provided a more concrete enemy for a time, but he’s now gone. The elusive nature of Matheson, Baltine, Hutchinson and the others I think adds to the threat and the frustration of Clarke, Styles and the others. But occasionally it does feel necessary to dip into those murky waters — hence a chapter like today’s.
Thing is, I don’t want these characters to be ‘bad guys’. They are motivated by their own points of view, which to them seem entirely reasonable. That’s where these chapters are useful, in defining their motivations. Even if those motivations sometimes boil down to ‘move fast and break things’.
The trick to a good antagonist, I think, is to paint them in such a way that some readers will agree with them, some will hate them, others will come to a balanced opinion. It’s important to get that range of responses: if everyone just loathes a character, it can become very one-note.
In Matheson’s case, he’s doing awful things. He’s probably doing them for primarily selfish reasons. But does he have a point, hidden somewhere in all that ideological vitriol?
Anyway. Next week, it’s heist time.
The best villains are the “real” people: sympathetic, flawed, and believable. Ditto for the best heroes. Isn’t that just like real life?