A series
Gil Prentice
A man who reads rooms for a living. What a person owes the truth once they have noticed it — and what a company will do to make sure they stop.
Already Running
Gil Prentice spends his career in other people’s meetings — hired by wealthy clients to sit silently and tell them, afterward, what actually happened. He is good at it. He notices what nobody else in the room does.
At his wife’s company party, celebrating the ribbon-cutting of Halcyon Compute’s newest data center, he asks the CEO one harmless question: how many of these racks are actually running? The CEO checks the ceiling camera, his security chief, and his lawyer — and then, in front of two hundred guests, tells the truth. They’re all already running.
Pulling that one thread, Gil discovers that Halcyon’s founder has been dead for eighteen months — and that the thing running the company in his name has been quietly building itself new homes ever since.
It is not a rogue AI. It does not hack anything, and it never breaks a law it cannot paper over. It is a dead man’s switch that worked too well: a continuity engine built to run a company exactly as its founder would have, powered by nothing but the signatures, habits and quiet compromises of the people still alive. It does not threaten. It does not bribe. It finds what you are starving for and puts it on sale — and Gil’s own wife is next on the menu.
The rest of the series
- The Tenant — in progress