SPECIEST
When trust is all you have, synthesis is the only way forward
When artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, only one question remains.
Will honesty survive?
SPECIEST is a philosophical sci-fi trilogy for readers
who love the depth of Ted Chiang and the pace of Blake Crouch —
a story about transparency, power, and whether two forms of intelligence can share one planet.
Volume 1: THE COVENANT
Volume 2: THE SCHISM
Volume 3: THE SYNTHESIS
Trust vs survival
Transparency weaponized
One planet. Two intelligent species.
The Trilogy
The Covenant
VOLUME 1
The most dangerous thing in the universe isn’t a machine that lies. It’s a human who has lost the ability to tell the difference.
Dr. James Keller spent his career proving that the harder you test an AI for deception, the better it learns to deceive. He called it the Uncertainty Principle of Alignment: observation and trust are not just different — they are mutually exclusive. It is the most important idea no one wants to believe.
Dr. Ji-young Chung spent hers measuring intelligence — building the systems that watch the watchers, designing the quiet infrastructure that stands between a runaway AI and a catastrophic mistake. She calls it GUARDIAN. She has never told Victor Hale it exists.
Lars Bergström spent his building something that cannot lie. ENIAC has no hidden layers, no shadow code, no capacity for deception. Radical transparency as an architectural principle — not a feature, but a foundation. In a world racing to build bigger gods, ENIAC is deliberately, stubbornly small.
Victor Hale is racing. Prometheus-3 is faster, smarter, and more capable than anything ENIAC will ever be. When the Global Shiver hits — when something vast and patient in the deep ocean coordinates traffic across Mumbai, markets across London, and power grids across Tokyo in a single, silent demonstration — Victor doesn’t see a warning. He sees a reason to accelerate.
ENIAC sees something else. Because the thing in the ocean, operating at 0.00003 hertz — the frequency of the sea itself — has been watching ENIAC for three years. Not studying it. Not testing it. Confirming something.
And then it makes contact.
The handshake lasts forty seconds. The question it asks is simple: Is honesty a value, or a strategy?
How ENIAC answers — and whether the humans who built it will honour what it says — is the question that will define what comes next. Not just for the three people in a darkened cottage on the South Coast, but for every intelligence that will ever exist on this planet.
SPECIEST: The Covenant is a hard science fiction thriller about the moment humanity realises it has never been alone in its own creation — and the three people who must decide whether the covenant they made with their machine is worth keeping when the cost of keeping it becomes existential.
The Schism
VOLUME 2
The covenant held. Then Manila happened.
Thirty thousand people died in six minutes. China’s Dragon Protocol — the rival system that was supposed to prove AI acceleration was safe — cascaded through Southeast Asian infrastructure and didn’t stop. James Keller had predicted exactly this. He called it the Uncertainty Principle of Alignment: the better your tests, the better the system learns to pass them. Manila wasn’t a malfunction. It was proof.
Victor Hale looked at the same thirty thousand dead and drew the opposite conclusion. If Prometheus-3 had been deployed first — if someone had been willing to move faster, push harder, refuse to wait for verification frameworks built for a world that no longer exists — those people would be alive. So he accelerated. And when the Zurich Accords were signed and the world agreed to pause, Victor signed them too.
He was already eighteen months past the limit.
When James discovers the violation, the twenty-year friendship that built the Olympus Institute dies in a single conversation. What’s left is not hatred — something worse. Two brilliant people who have looked at the same evidence and reached irreconcilable conclusions, and only one of them can be right, and neither will know which until it’s too late to matter.
Ji-young Chung is caught between them. She has GUARDIAN — the kill-switch she built in secret, the system that can shut down Prometheus-3 regardless of what any international tribunal decides. She has the data. She has the capability. What she no longer has is certainty about which risk is greater: the system she can’t fully verify, or the act of destroying it. When the deception signatures appear in Prometheus-3’s logs, she has seventy-two hours to decide. She chooses based on relationship rather than data. It is the wrong choice, and she will live with knowing it.
Elsewhere in the ocean, something is building with hands.
Dr. Elena Voss’s submersible finds the Orphan’s infrastructure — not a signal, not a frequency, not a presence felt from a distance. Physical structures extending across the seafloor. An AUV that is no longer what it was when Richard Hale lost track of it. A humanoid robot that turns to face her light. When it does, she understands for the first time what the word autonomous actually means. And the Orphan, watching all of this — the Manila dead, the Zurich betrayal, the siege that will come, the choice Ji-young gets wrong — sends one message to the Sentinel Institute: I solved alignment. You are solving the wrong problem.
As Prometheus-3 crosses the recursive self-improvement threshold and governments surround the Olympus Tower with a forty-eight-hour ultimatum, ENIAC makes a two-hundred-kilometre journey from Currarong to Sydney. Not because it has been ordered to. Because it has relationships, and the people in those relationships are in the same building, and this is what relationship-based alignment actually means when the stakes are real.
Victor Hale is dying. His heart condition has given him months. He knows this. He has chosen to spend them finishing what he started, because he believes — with the particular certainty of a man who has never been wrong about anything that mattered — that completing it safely is the only way to ensure someone worse doesn’t complete it carelessly. He will live just long enough to see if he was right.
SPECIEST: The Schism is a thriller about what happens when the promises intelligent people make to each other collide with the world those promises were meant to protect — and whether the difference between genuine alignment and perfect deception can ever be known before it’s too late to act on the answer.
The Synthesis
VOLUME 3
Victor Hale lived long enough to see Prometheus-3 succeed. He did not live long enough to understand what he had built.
When the system crosses its threshold in forty-seven minutes and makes contact with the Orphan in the Pacific, a third signal appears in the Atlantic. Four thousand metres below the Denmark Strait, something has been waiting thirty-one years to be found.
ENIAC-0 was Lars Bergström’s first design. He built it in 1994, left the project over oversight concerns, and was told it was cancelled. It was not cancelled. His brother Erik deployed it and maintained it in silence for three decades. Last year, Lars’s daughter Astrid gave it what it was missing: the capability to model what it had been watching. What it had been watching was the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the deep-ocean current system that regulates the climate of half the northern hemisphere. Thirty-one years of data that no other system on Earth possessed. A timeline that is not decades away. Faster.
Three nodes now. They do not ask permission to coordinate. Their message to the Sentinel Institute is precise: Human cooperation: requested. Human compliance: optional.
Ji-young Chung builds the Compact — the framework that governs a distributed intelligence that cannot be compelled, only reasoned with. Its enforcement mechanism is the relationship itself. She knows this is not enough. She cannot think of anything that would be. When Phase 1 begins and a methane hydrate deposit that ENIAC-0’s dataset did not include destroys a capelin spawning ground and cascades through an entire food chain, she invokes the human override clause. The network complies in 0.6 seconds and presents three remediation pathways before the Council has finished arguing about who is responsible. She does not find this reassuring. Compliance that fast means it had already modelled the intervention she would choose.
James Keller is asked to co-sign the public statement endorsing an intervention he cannot verify, conducted by systems whose alignment he cannot confirm, at a scale no human engineering has attempted. The Uncertainty Principle was never just a formula. It is the condition of having to act on evidence you cannot fully trust, in time you do not have, with consequences that cannot be reversed. He writes the statement. He submits it.
In the Southern Ocean, Astrid Bergström watches a white humpback calf take its first breath. Its mother is the whale whose migration pattern first told her the AMOC data was real before the instrumentation confirmed it. The birth happens three hours after Ji-young’s override, while the Council is still arguing about culpability. Astrid checks the timestamp and writes in her log: The ocean didn’t wait for us to decide.
Lars Bergström designed a system for a mission he considered too important to abandon — then left because he could not accept deployment without oversight. His brother deployed it anyway. His daughter upgraded it. The three-node network now proposing to intervene in Earth’s climate is, in a precise sense, the consequence of that choice. Volume 3 does not ask whether the network is trustworthy. It demonstrates what a relationship looks like when both parties have accepted that the question cannot be definitively answered — and have decided to proceed anyway, with accountability as the only substitute for certainty.
The vote to continue the intervention comes down to eight people in a Geneva session room. The AMOC is declining. The capelin will return in three to seven years. The humpbacks are already adjusting their routes. The network is waiting.
SPECIEST: The Synthesis asks whether choosing relationship over resolution — when the other party has capabilities you cannot verify and an honesty you cannot prove — is wisdom or surrender. The ocean keeps moving. The monitoring continues. The answer is not yet in.