I’ve been hard at work (and travel) the last few weeks—more about that soon I hope—but I’ve just published a new short story and I thought y’all would like to know.

“The Assumption of Maria” is week-after-next noir about a detective on the hunt for a missing megachurch accountant, and along the way runs into banking cyborgs, church succession drama, various rebels with various numbers of clues, and a con (or business model) built around the tokenization and financialization of human souls. You can read or listen to it for free at Lightspeed Magazine.

Why does detective work in the future involve so much old-fashioned shoe leather? Well, when the former internet is a poisoned mess of lying LLMs and you can’t trust any online records—no, probably not even those—you’re back to gumshoes and county ledgers...

As an added bonus, the LLM-poisoned near future provides a fun little explanation for the weirdest part of the classic detective fiction genre: the existence of the narrative text. Why are all these hard-boiled detectives writing such detailed case notes? See, LLMs need new samples to throw into the mulch, but almost all prose they can find is written by other LLMs, which leads to feedback errors, which leads to increasingly deranged output. So what the LLMs really need is original narrative, based in novel experience not captured by the internet. They need, in short, someone to go out and get embroiled in a lot of crimes, and write about them.

So they need detectives.

Here’s how the story starts:

Maria Haddid looked like she was screaming.

I’ve heard singers say that’s all singing is deep down, but if you’ve seen enough screams you won’t often get them mixed up.

The faithful gathered around her in the picture—the soccer mom, the children, the person with the ill-advised beard—on the bright green pews of the Church of the Redeemer’s main worship hall. They smiled. They raised their hands in that way believers do, like babies who want Mommy to pick them up. They looked happy or high. But Maria looked like she had seen the face of God.

I asked: “Is this the only photo?”

The kid loomed over me in the dark. He was gym-big, looks-big-on-TV big. An animated eagle-cross tattoo beat its wings on his throat where the Adam’s apple would have been. He wasn’t quite thirty, or he had a good skin care guy, but he was Pastor Ralph’s son, and in the Church of the Redeemer that meant he’d always be the kid.

“It’s the only hard copy of a candid shot,” he said. “The only one we can be sure of.”

It was a pain, but it was also half the reason I had a job. The way the old coats tell it, there used to be so much information: pictures, digital records, databases of databases. Used to be you could ask a box a question and get pure knowledge in your vein, and all you’d owe was everything you ever wanted to know, or do, or screw, or be. But you could pretend you hadn’t given the box that stuff, not in a way that mattered.

Now the net’s full of dreaming ghosts, and you never can tell when one’s wandered into your house to rearrange the furniture.

That old world seems like hell to me—all built on air and light. But if you’re not in the business of needing to know things for sure, and most people aren’t, it’s easy to miss how much has changed. That the kid knew I’d care meant he was smarter than most of my clients. I don’t like what that says about me.

“Do you have another angle on her? What about air-gapped systems?”

The kid passed me an unlocked tablet. “Just this, from her personnel intake when she came on as CFO. The personnel records are secure, I think. They should be. That’s how I remember her.”

The trouble with smart clients is that they tend to know it. In my business it pays to be dumb. A rock could do the job better than most people. You just need to follow the slope downhill.

Happy reading!

Event alert:

I’m in Pittsburgh! Well, a bit outside, actually, in Greensburg, teaching at the Alpha Young Writer’s Workshop. Tuesday night at the Greensburg Barnes & Noble at 6:30 I’ll have the pleasure of reading and signing books with this year’s Alpha students. Come on by if you’re in the area! Come see what the Alpha students are working on—and get a sense of the future of the genre.

Also—and I’m giving y’all a bit more notice on this next one—I’ll be at the GenCon Writer’s Symposium at the end of the month! If you plan to be at GenCon, drop me a line—I’ll be all over the place, on panels and signing books and trying to come home with, maybe, only one new shelf of ttrpg books…