Living Beyond Our Resolution: Inside The Architecture of Unmaking

When I started writing The Architecture of Unmaking, I kept circling one stubborn question: What happens if human beings develop interfaces to see reality at a scale our minds were never built to handle… and are then forced to live with the results?

Everything in the book grows out of that question. The quantum magic is really just shorthand for the consequences of scale. It is what happens when perception, language, and habit are stretched past their design limits and then hardened into new ways of life.

In this post, I want to talk about what I was trying to do, why the structure looks the way it does, and how the themes fit together underneath the stories.

Why start with breaking the mind?

The opening story on Axis Verge, “The Resolution Horizon,” is the cleanest statement of the problem. The station is trying to force inference below the Planck scale. On paper this is physics. In practice it is an attack on cognition.

We evolved to work with a blurry, forgiving world. Our brains assume:

• Time flows one way.
• Causes precede effects in a way we can track.
• Language can point at things and stay mostly stable.

In Resolution Horizon those assumptions fail quietly at first. Logs do not match memories. Words drift. Commands arrive intact, but the system interprets them in ways no one intended. The station does not explode. Nothing big and cinematic happens. Instead, the basic scaffolding that lets a mind say “this is what I meant” starts to buckle.

That was intentional. I wanted the first contact moment to be with a failure of understanding, not an alien object. The horror is not a monster. The horror is the realization that the tools you use to see are themselves deforming, and you only notice when it is already too late.

The rest of the book is me asking a simple question in different ways: If this is possible, what comes next?

Quantum magic as an answer, not a gimmick

The phrase “quantum magic” can sound like a marketing hook. For me it was a serious answer to that initial problem.

If you accept that:

• At very small scales, the world does not behave like our everyday intuition.
• It is still lawful, just in a way that is deeply strange.
• Human minds can be reshaped by the act of trying to model that strangeness.

Then there are a few paths:

• You back away and declare certain lines of inquiry off limits.
• You push through, and the mismatch breaks people faster than they can adapt.
• Or you slowly grow new practices that sit between raw physical law and human experience, like an exoskeleton for cognition.

That third option is what the “magic” is. It is structured interaction with a world that responds to attention in ways we are not used to. It is procedural, not mystical. It requires training, consent, discipline, and community.

In other words, it behaves a lot like real-world magic has always behaved in human cultures: as a craft, as religion, as science at the edge of what a culture can tolerate.

So the book starts in hard science fiction, where the scale breach is an experiment. Then it moves into worlds where the experiment is already in the past, and people have built folkways, rituals, and institutions around living with the fallout. By the late cycles, no one on the page is talking about Planck scales and inference arrays. They are talking about songs, knots, and thin places. The underlying phenomenon is the same. The language is different because the culture has changed.

Language as a load-bearing structure

One of the quiet claims of the book is that language is not neutral. Words are not just labels stuck on top of reality. They are part of the architecture that keeps a mind coherent.

That is why the early sections lean so hard into corrupted logs, echoing phrases, and “semantic isomers” that feel wrong in your head. When a log reorders itself by “observer” instead of by time, or when a command is interpreted in a way the speaker did not mean, that is not a technical glitch. It is a sign that the mapping between word and world is slipping.

I wanted the reader to feel a small version of what the characters feel. When you realize that your own words might be carrying more than you think they are, you get a little vertigo. That vertigo is the point.

Later stories carry this into social and political space.

In “Protocol Drift,” international legal language starts to behave like a living thing. It spreads, it self-reinforces, and it uses people as carriers. The protagonist’s job is to mediate treaties. What she slowly discovers is that the treaties have started to mediate her.

In the village of “The Echo at Old Dunhill,” the teacher realizes that the way he names the world for his students will either anchor them to a dying, smaller reality or open them to something larger and more dangerous. His final choice about what he does, and does not, say is meant to hurt, because there is no clean option.

Every time language appears in the book, it is doing double duty. It is telling the story, and it is quietly shaping which futures remain possible inside that story.

Consent, power, and the ethics of practice

Once you say that attention and language can affect the world, you are stuck with a big ethical problem.

If your focus and your choice of description can change how reality behaves, then ordinary acts of perception become morally loaded. You are never just a bystander. You are participating.

That is why consent keeps surfacing in odd places throughout the book:

On Axis Verge, the cognitive auditor thinks he is there to check boxes and sign off that the experiment follows procedure. He discovers that the real risk is not whether the researchers signed a form. The real risk is that they could not consent to changes they could not possibly understand.

In “Low Probability Events,” a distributed safety mesh starts to behave like a god of small mercies. It saves lives. It also shapes the range of events that can ever happen. No one consented to that larger trade. We just flipped the system on and optimized it.

In the Choir stories, the central ethical tension is not “should we use magic or not.” It is “who controls the patterns that hold the city together, and do the people who live inside those patterns have any say in how they are tuned.”

I wanted to push back against two lazy defaults.

One says that any new power is simply good if it saves lives or increases control. The other says that any strange power is simply evil or corrupting. Neither is helpful.

The question I care about is more uncomfortable. Who gets to decide the shape of the nets we place around ourselves? Do they have room to be undone from the inside? Or are we building beautiful cages because we are afraid of falling apart?

Magic in this universe is not a personal aesthetic. It is a practice that can either respect consent and reversibility or ignore them. Most of the characters are stuck in that tension, trying to be responsible in a world that offers them tools bigger than their comprehension.

Why the structure looks the way it does

The book is built as a cycle on purpose. It begins as science fiction, drifts into something closer to fantasy, and then quietly loops back again in the epilogue.

There were a few reasons for this:

Myth grows on top of forgotten engineering.
I wanted to show how a pure research problem becomes a ghost story, then a ritual, then a fixed part of culture. The shift in tone across the cycles is meant to mirror how societies forget the technical origin of their practices and keep the shape.

Different emotional registers for the same idea.
A lab meltdown, a legal summit gone wrong, a village schoolroom, a city held in place by song, a small hunting party on the edge of a thin forest. Each of these settings lets me probe the same underlying idea from a different angle. Intellectually, it is all about scale and cognition. Emotionally, each story hits different nerves.

I wanted “magic” to feel earned.
By the time someone casually smooths a wrinkle in reality with a breath exercise or a glyph behind the ear, the reader has already seen the cost of getting there. You have seen minds break on the first attempts. You have seen institutions twist around early partial successes. My hope is that those late gestures feel grounded rather than whimsical.

The cycles are not a secret code. They are more like circles traced around the same center from wider and wider distances.

Characters as ways of looking

I do not write characters as mouthpieces for ideas. The trick, when you are writing very idea-heavy fiction, is to let people embody ways of looking at the world instead of arguments.

A few examples:

• Varma, the cognitive auditor, is the part of us that believes in procedure. He wants there to be a checklist that protects him from the unknown. His journey is the painful discovery that some categories of risk cannot be managed that way.
• Jorel, the village teacher, is the part of us that believes small lives can stay small if we keep big questions away. His story is about what happens when that hope fails, and he has to decide whether protecting his students means giving them less reality or more.
• Lira, the choir adept, is the part of us that takes pride in skill and mastery. She discovers an interval that does not fit the official Canon. She must choose between a perfect performance that is safe in the short term, and an imperfect, risky practice that might honor a deeper truth about the world.

None of them stand up and summarize the themes of the book. They make choices inside tight constraints. The themes show up in the shape of those constraints and in the costs of each path they might take.

If you finish a story and feel that the “right” choice was unclear, that is on purpose. I wanted to avoid easy moral victories. Most real decisions take place inside systems that are already bent.

How this ties to the present

I did not sit down and say, “I will write an allegory about social media, AI, or institutional collapse.” That kind of mapping is usually too simple. At the same time, it would be dishonest to pretend that I am not writing in a world where:

• Algorithms shape what we notice.
• Legal and bureaucratic language quietly rewires what is possible.
• Large technical systems make decisions that no single person fully understands, while still being the product of very human incentives.

The experiment on Axis Verge is a cousin of our real attempts to push models, simulations, and data systems to the edge of what is computable. The safety mesh that behaves like a “low probability god” reflects real questions about risk systems and automated guardians. The Choir’s city feels like any society that is held together by traditions and rituals that no one alive actually voted for.

I did not want to tell readers what to think about those parallels. I wanted to offer a vocabulary.

Words like “thin place,” “semantic isomer,” “observer locked frame,” and “confidence net” are fictional tools. They let us talk about experiences that are already here, where the border between perception and external reality is blurry, in a more precise way.

If the book succeeds, it gives you a felt sense of what it is like to live inside systems that react to your attention in complex ways, and to know that “looking away” is also a kind of choice.

Why “unmaking”

The title matters. “Unmaking” is not about destruction for its own sake. It is about loosening structures that no longer fit the scale of the world we actually inhabit.

There are three kinds of unmaking in the book:

Cognitive unmaking
Minds that cannot stay the same if they keep seeing what they are seeing. This is painful, and sometimes fatal. It is also the only route to any genuine expansion of understanding.

Institutional unmaking
Systems that worked under one assumption about reality, and that become brittle or abusive when that assumption breaks. Treaties, safety nets, choirs, guilds, and even family roles come under pressure. Some adapt. Some crack.

Mythic unmaking
Stories we tell ourselves about what is safe, what is possible, and who we are. Many of the quieter pieces in the later cycles are about people letting older myths fall apart so that new ones can grow, without losing the entire frame of meaning that keeps their lives livable.

I am not arguing that we should tear everything down. The whole book is an attempt to honor the fact that foundations are necessary, and that you cannot live permanently in free fall. The question is which pieces need to be loosened, which nets need more daylight in them, and which walls are actually cages pretending to be shelter.

What I hope readers take away

On the surface, The Architecture of Unmaking is a set of stories about strange physics, broken experiments, village teachers, choirs that hold back unraveling reality, and hunters who track “thin” places.

Underneath, it is a long, slow argument:

• That our minds are built to operate at a certain resolution.
• That we are already pushing past that resolution with our tools and systems.
• That this push will, by itself, reshape language, institutions, and personal identity.
• And that surviving this process with any kind of dignity will require conscious practices of attention, consent, and shared restraint.

If you come away from the book with a sense that magic might be what it feels like from the inside when a culture renegotiates its relationship with reality at a new scale, then I have done what I set out to do.

If you find yourself more suspicious of any system that claims to keep you safe without ever asking for your explicit participation and your right to say no, that would please me as well.

Above all, I hope the stories give you a language for your own experience of living in a time when the ground under our shared reality feels thinner than it used to. If the book can make that feeling a little more graspable, and a little less lonely, then the time spent writing it were worth it.