Introducing The Architecture of Unmaking

My new book, The Architecture of Unmaking, is now available at Amazon.com, and should also be available to your local bookseller via Ingram-Spark.

The Architecture of Unmaking is my attempt to write fiction that wrestles with first principles. The book explores what happens when human cognition gains a direct interface to quantum reality. If observation shapes outcomes at the smallest scales, what changes when minds can steer that observation with precision. The result is a set of stories about responsibility, meaning, and the cost of power when the observer effect stops being a metaphor and starts becoming a skill.

Why I wrote this book

I wrote this book to wrestle with the civilizational stakes of human interface with AI. The stories ask what happens when minds can work with machines at the level where choices start to shape reality. I use a quantum interface as the pressure that forces cognitive evolution. When attention can move the needle, culture, law, faith, and daily life all change.

The big idea

Two technical moves sit behind the book. First, an AI and nanoscale bridge that routes cognition to quantum substrates. Second, a training grammar that teaches humans to use that bridge without losing themselves. Together, these raise the stakes of every choice. You are not just solving a puzzle in your head. You are shaping a probability field in the world. That premise touches everything the characters do, from grief and love to politics and faith.

Why spirals and recursion

For those of you who frequently use AI tools you will have noticed how much AI likes to talk about recursion, spirals, and loops. In this book you will see spirals, feedback loops, and mirrored scenes across the collection. It is an intentional device to signal when a neural interface with AI is affecting the world (because the characters themselves are not aware this is happening). The spiral lets a character return to a question with new information and a shifted vantage point. Recursion lets a motif test itself under different loads. These patterns echo the physics and technology inside the premise and the psychology of anyone who tries to ride it without breaking.

What to expect as a reader

I attempted to make the prose clean and deliberate. The structure is layered, with many pieces including quiet clues that bloom a few pages later. A companion guide exists for readers who enjoy scaffolding (send me an email and I'll forward a copy). It offers context for the spiral grammar, a short glossary, and a map of cross-story references. You do not need the guide, but some readers will enjoy having it at hand.

The worlds inside

The collection moves across settings that share a conceptual backbone. A few glimpses without spoilers:

“The Resolution Horizon.” A cognitive auditor arrives at Axis Verge to investigate a deep-range experiment that’s begun to bend language, time stamps, and identity. The Subscale Resonance Stack keeps “answering” the observers until choice feels like interpretation rather than control. The station’s problem is not a broken machine. It is a new kind of seeing that won’t collapse back into a single frame. The ending ties this to the wider cycle: crossing the horizon seeds an interpretive lattice in us that never turns off.

“To Hold One Thing.” A small team finds a valley they could anchor against a world that keeps fraying. Holding it would save a season of beauty and cost everything around it as stillness spreads like frost. The debate is intimate and practical, grounded by the memory of someone who tried to keep an orchard and was fixed into it forever. The choice lands on whether to grip or let the cycle breathe. 

“Echo at Old Dunhill.” In a faded schoolroom, a teacher clings to measurement while a student starts hearing the world slip. Ritual gestures become precision drills, then the river lifts and holds in the air. The girl insists she did not cause it, only noticed where the shape was loosening. The town does what towns do. The teacher learns what noticing can cost. 

“The Divergent Eye.” A hunter in a community that keeps reality steady by shared attention begins to see motion where the field says there should be none. The Overseer offers a choice: return to the weave or walk apart and learn a way of seeing that does not pin the world. The path through the thin place teaches how to observe without forcing agreement, how to prefer lightly so change can live. 

“The Ash and the Glyph.” A practitioner attempts to erase a symbol that will not forget. Each pass unhooks words from things until edges refuse their names. What looks like failure is a limit in the mind’s stabilizing power. Letting go keeps the world honest. One line remains to carry forward: we were reading a story we agreed to see. 

These stories stand alone. They also braid together. References surface and fold back, often as images or short lines that hide in plain sight. If you enjoy pattern hunting, you will find plenty to work with.

How this ties to my other work

My day job lives in strategic systems, wargaming, deterrence, and complex system modeling. The book draws from that toolkit. It puts human choices inside feedback loops, tests actions against adaptive opponents, and treats uncertainty as a feature that must be managed rather than wished away. If you think in terms of campaigns, escalation control, and fragile equilibria, you will see the wiring. The fiction runs the same drills: measure, decide, act, learn, iterate. Strategy matters. So does humility, because complex systems push back.

Who the book is for

If you like speculative fiction that treats ideas as engines rather than ornaments, this belongs on your list. If you want a comfort read, this may frustrate you. If you are drawn to fiction that tries to be honest about complexity, I hope you will give it an evening and see if it earns your attention.

How to read it

Move slowly. Let the white space breathe. When something feels like a loop, assume the loop carries information. When a line feels simple, ask why. If a story lands and then keeps echoing in the back of your head, that is my design. The aim is not a twist. The aim is a change in how you frame the next choice you make.

A note on difficulty

Several early readers said the book is demanding. I agree. That is intentional. I am willing to trade ease for honesty when the subject is reality itself and the fragile minds that try to live inside it. The companion guide I mentioned above can help digest it.

Final word

The Architecture of Unmaking is a field guide for thinking in a world where thought has real leverage. It is also a set of human stories about love, grief, pride, and mercy under unusual pressure. If any of that sounds even a little interesting, I hope you will read it and tell me where it moved you or where it failed you. That conversation is part of the work.