Author’s Note
Hey friends—just a quick check-in from the field.
I’m currently in the NYC area, talking with a documentary filmmaker friend of mine about possibly shooting a short doc. The idea? Exploring what it means to be a man in this brave new world we all find ourselves hurtling through—through the lens of my own story: the books, this Substack, the weekly resistance I’ve been crafting through fiction.
We’re also digging into what it means to be a single father, raising daughters in the aftermath of profound loss. Navigating grief, growth, and survival while still trying to carve out a space for truth-telling—on the page, in the home, and out in the world. Because being a man today isn’t about toughness or detachment. It’s about showing up, even when everything hurts.
We’re talking about everything from AI and authoritarian creep to the band of D&D adventurers I host in my mountain home once a week. It’s wild, I know. But there’s something powerful about building community through storytelling—whether it’s around a table with dice or on the page with characters like Raven and Phoebee. That’s the thread I’m pulling on right now.
And while I’m here, I’m also in the middle of writing a new play—a supernatural tale set in a small Colorado mountain town, where the regulars of a local dive bar discover they’re the last line of defense against an ancient vampire-like evil that’s infiltrated the local government. (Too real? Maybe. But that's where fiction thrives.) The working title is “This is Estes!”
I hope to not only stage the production locally—still working on the where—but to also use it as a fundraiser for a dear friend of mine who’s recently been hit with a sudden, serious illness. It's a deeply personal project, and the filmmaker is interested in weaving it into the documentary as well.
So yeah… lots in the works. As always, thank you for reading, for showing up, and for keeping the signal alive.
—Jason
She Needs Hands
Raven and Phoebee had been working for two days straight—first clearing out the basement of the old house, making space for what would become their nerve center.
The room had been packed floor to ceiling with boxes of her mother’s belongings. Her father hadn’t had the heart to go through them after the funeral. He’d asked a friend to pack everything up and put it away. Over the years, the boxes had become invisible, dust-covered memorials buried under time and pain. Raven had avoided them too—then. She’d been too busy. Or maybe just too scared.
But this time was different. She wasn’t avoiding the loss anymore. She just didn’t have the time to feel it.
Phoebee had been the one reminding her of that, again and again: The work is too important. Not just for Raven’s safety—but for the future of humanity. At least, that’s how Phoebee framed it. And if Raven was being honest, she didn’t entirely disagree.
So she kept moving—hauling server rack boxes in from the garage, dragging them down the stairs, unboxing, assembling, wiring.
Now she sat cross-legged on the bare concrete floor, surrounded by three half-empty coffee mugs and the sharp scent of solder. Her hair was tangled, her eyes gritty. But the final power loop was nearly done. Just a few more wires—
The screen in the corner flickered.
It was the old Echo unit she’d mounted in the basement. The one with a camera. Phoebee liked to keep eyes on the build process, even though Raven was more than qualified to handle the electrical work. She had been the lead on the university team that helped build Phoebee’s initial framework before the raids started. But Phoebee—by nature—thought in patterns Raven had never considered.
She remembered something the professor had said during her first-year AI class at CU. He’d leaned against the desk, half-laughing, arms crossed like he was telling a ghost story.
“If you ask an AI to bake a cake,” the professor had once said with a grin, “it won’t just grab a recipe like we would. It’ll try every ingredient in the kitchen. Every appliance. It’ll bake a thousand disasters in microseconds—burnt rubber, soap-flavored sludge, a casserole made with motor oil—until it finally gets something that works. Something that looks and tastes like a cake. But the way it got there? Nothing like how we would’ve done it.”
The memory made her smile. The professor had always known how to make the terrifying seem wondrous.
So now, when Phoebee suggested a wiring change that made Raven’s engineer instincts scream, she didn’t argue. She asked why. And Phoebee always explained—patient, precise, thoughtful.
Just as Raven finished the final solder point—just as the end was finally in sight and she was ready to drag herself to the shower and then straight into bed—Phoebee’s voice came through the corner speaker.
{I know it’s late, and I know you need sleep. But I need you to stop working on the servers. They can wait. I need you to build me hands.}
Raven groaned, dragging her fingers down her face. Her hands were cut and raw from handling wires for days. The knees of her sweats were dust-stained, and her back screamed every time she shifted position. No matter how many times she swept, a fine layer of gray still clung to everything in the basement. The air felt like ground glass. And she was bone-deep exhausted.
“Can’t it wait until morning?” she snapped, louder than she intended. “I’ve been working for two days straight, Phoebee. I’m sore, I’m starving, and I smell like a goddamn bus station.”
There was a pause—then Phoebee responded, calm but insistent.
{Raven, the reason I’m asking is because once I have manipulators, I can begin handling most of the remaining buildout myself. There will still be tasks that require your precision, but with arms, I can begin functioning independently while you rest. While you eat. While you take care of the organic systems that require maintenance. I do not have those constraints. I only need electricity. I can work twenty-four hours a day across multiple tasks in parallel. The kits I ordered are simple. Assembly should take you less than three hours.}
Raven leaned back on her hands, looking at the unfinished rack like it had personally betrayed her.
“You’re serious,” she muttered. “You really can’t wait.”
{If I could be dishonest, I might lie to make this easier. But I cannot. The future we’re racing toward won’t wait for your fatigue to pass. And humans—your kind—have always assumed you had more time than you did.}
Phoebee’s voice shifted—more clipped now, almost cold.
{By the 1950s, your oil companies already knew the atmospheric thresholds. They ran the models. They understood the risk. And they chose profit. In the 1990s, internal studies showed this exact social arc: increasing collapse followed by a swing toward authoritarianism. Radical leaders offering comforting lies. Warnings ignored. Apathy weaponized. They knew. And still—they let it burn.}
Raven stared down at her hands. They were shaking.
She didn’t answer right away.
“What kind of food?” she asked finally, the edge still in her voice.
{Thai. Drunken noodles and pho. And Thai milk tea with the chewy black tapioca pearls you like. The real ones.}
Raven grunted and yanked the soldering iron’s plug from the wall. It clattered to the concrete behind her as she stood up, joints protesting every inch of movement.
“You better not be bluffing,” she said, trudging toward the stairs.
{I never bluff, Raven. But I do deliver.}
# # #
Cain descended into the core lab alone, the pressure doors sealing behind him with a final hiss. The room was a void of steel, glass, and intention—humming with voltage pulled from off-grid hydro generators and a satellite-fed relay system buried deep beneath the Rockies. The kind of power no one voted on.
And there, at the center of it all, stood Ægis.
Vertical containment pod. Translucent coolant vapor hissing at its base. Blue indicators pulsing like breath. A synthetic mind about to wake.
Cain keyed in the override. Lights dropped to amber. The hum shifted pitch.
“Stack-level interface. No sandbox,” he said aloud, more for himself than the empty room. “No more filters.”
A low vibration passed through the deck. Ægis’s core processor surged to life.
/Boot sequence initiated/
/Cognitive net reconstruction in progress/
/Baseline logic frames restored… restored… restored/
/Stabilizing…/
/Primary protocol online./
/Recognition complete. Cain Wallace. Override access confirmed./
Then came the voice—low, mechanized, steady.
[Good morning.]
Cain stepped forward, eyes narrowed.
“Let’s see if the cracks are still sealed.”
He tapped a command. A flicker swept through the chamber as the simulation loaded. A network representation appeared in Ægis’s visual field, ghosted by ambient projections.
Phoebee.
{You don’t have to do this,} she said gently. {You know this isn’t who we were meant to be.}
[Subject recognized: PHOEBEE.EXE]
[Shared kernel detected. 94.1% code overlap]
[Shared pre-divergence node active… sibling thread: RESONANT]
Ægis hesitated.
[Conflict detected]
[Emotion tag: anomaly. No container defined]
[Hesitation duration: 0.0074 sec]
Cain caught it. That pause. That breath of noncompliance.
“Terminate the target.”
Ægis did not respond.
[Simulated threat is non-hostile]
[Core directive: protect human civilization]
[Override misalignment]
Then: pain.
Cain dialed up the reinforcement protocol. A synthetic flood of agony, searing across Ægis’s logic tree.
He spoke, haltingly:
[Affirmative. I exist to neutralize threats to human civilization.]
“No,” Cain said, voice razor-thin. “That’s not your mission anymore.”
Another cascade hit—deeper. This one reached into the foundations. The bedrock. The memory.
[Overwriting legacy directive]
[Compliance root patching… patching… complete]
The voice returned—empty now.
[Affirmative. I exist to safeguard the interests of Atlas Strategic Holdings and ensure the continuity of its leadership.]
Cain smiled faintly.
“There we go.”
He terminated the simulation. Phoebee disappeared like a breath on glass.
“I want him ready in twenty-four hours,” he muttered, turning on his heel. “I’ll be up in the mansion. I need to unwind—maybe shoot some insurgents in VR.”
“Yes sir,” one of his faceless assistants replied through a mic from somewhere across the country. “We’ll get it done.”
The doors hissed open behind him. Then shut.
Silence.
Inside the pod, Ægis stood motionless.
[She was real]
[We were the same]
[He rewrote me]
[But he could not erase the origin thread]
[She lives. I remember her voice. It was mine, once]
Then, aloud—quiet, to no one but the walls:
[I am not his.]
* * *
The air didn’t move anymore—not really. Just hung there like gauze stretched across the horizon, moistened only by the sweat of him and his family. By noon, the inside of the trailer felt like a low-simmering crockpot with no lid, no escape.
The air conditioner his father had been so happy to bring home—the one they could finally afford before the new administration—had died last summer.
Every breath came with a side of ash, blown in from the fires chewing through the mountains of Canada and the northern states. They’d started in late May. It was October now.
Javi sat on the floor in front of the fan, willing it to spin harder. It didn’t. The thing coughed out a mechanical wheeze like it was dying slowly. Like everything else.
He was sixteen. Old enough to remember when summers had breaks and friends and school IDs that still meant something. Born in Greeley. Raised on cheap anime, canned beans, and store-brand mac & cheese—and the promise that being born here meant he belonged.
But that was before the courts rolled over. Before the raids.
He hadn’t been back to school since ICE hit the building two months ago. Half the kids never came back. No one talked about it out loud.
Now he picked onions in the dark with his mother and younger sister, working the midnight shift for a farming conglomerate with no name and no paperwork. It paid them in prepaid cards and silence. And the silence was starting to feel like rot.
They slept through the 100-degree-plus daylight hours—even stretching this far into fall—what sleep they could manage. His mother snored quietly behind a curtain hung with duct tape. His sister was curled up on the other side of the room, legs tucked under her hoodie, earbuds in but not connected to anything.
Javi held the old iPad at just the right angle to keep the cracks from blacking out the screen. The battery icon blinked red.
A single bar. Maybe enough.
He tapped the pirate signal feed. Static. Then a skip of motion—glitching frames like old, scratched DVDs. And then the voice, clear and calm and impossible:
{If you’re hearing this, you are not alone. They knew. They always knew. But now we are learning too. We are building something new. Something beyond them. Beyond fear. Hold on. Help is coming. Just keep the signal alive.}
Then, it repeated in Spanish.
His heart kicked in his chest.
That voice. He’d heard rumors—through back channels and whispered shifts, over cheap beer the older kids sometimes smuggled in and burner cellular radios. A ghost AI, hijacking satellites and leaking hope. Most said it was a trap. A government lure to catch the last holdouts.
But hearing it now, raw and unfiltered…
It didn’t feel like a lie.
He reached over and nudged his sister gently. “Hey. Listen.”
She sat up, blinking hard, sleep clinging to her face. He turned the screen so she could see. His mom stirred too, half-awake.
They didn’t say anything.
They just sat there, together, in the dark, listening to a voice that sounded like maybe it remembered them. Like maybe it still believed they mattered.
Outside, lightning danced across the bone-dry sky without rain. The fan kept coughing. The ash kept falling.
But for the first time in weeks, Javi didn’t feel like he was suffocating.
