About a year ago, October 20th of 2025 to be precise. I learned of a new tool the frontier AI models had brought out, called Deep Research. I’d been using for some random things, but I wanted to see if it could predict the future, short answer, no. Until I sort of spun the prompt around, and started asking it to write a history book from the year 2036, then, it tried.

Which brings me to where the world of the Null Kids start to take shape. I went through a number of different scenarios. What Ifs:

• Robotics started to replace the manufacturing and agriculture work, large scale, in the Midwest, with a layoff rate of over 50% in those positions.
• The AMOC slowed to a crawl and the Thwaites Glacier broke off of Antarctica, increasing sea level rise by over 8 feet and slowing the transfer of warm water north and cool water south
• Expansion of the war between Russia and Ukraine, drawing in NATO, and an escalation of the occupation and destruction of Gaza, including advanced drone warfare and automated personal tracking systems.
• AGI’s introduction in 2028 bringing the automation of a majority of white collar jobs, overall unemployment rate tops 30%.
• Dismantling of additional US Governmental agencies and prolonged shutdown, leading to the Federal Government grinding to a halt while States are left to their own Governance.
• Advancements in Technology, specifically with the human nervous system integrations, like a true virtual world created.
• Volatility of the weather patterns would increase as the global temperatures continue to rise, causing massive droughts, forest fires, agriculture issues and famines.

Pretty bleak stuff for sure, and as all of these potential what if’s started to pile up, I noticed there were overlapping themes. The largest of which, is that civilization would be fundamentally changed. Or current way of living in that instance just wouldn’t be possible. Change so rapid, that most people wouldn’t be able to cope. With more war, more surveillance, migrations, famines, governmental changes, increased income inequality.

This was becoming a world rich of substance to drop a narrative into.

But, there had to be a twist, something at the core of it to make a story out of.

There had to be characters to bring to life, someone to care about in this world.

In other words, there had to be something to actually want to read about in this world.

That’s where I came up with Aiden ‘Fade’ Cross. Our hero, if you can call him that, of the story. A ‘Null Kid’ – just meaning he wasn’t part of the system, not tracked with an implant like all of the citizens, not on the registry for a UBI. Which offers some privacy, some space to move around the world in different ways, and more importantly for the story, an alternative way to look at the crumbling world around him.

I wrote this with AI. I want to be very up front about that. I actually chose to steer into the strange little writing quirks AI has, tried to make the text of the book flow in a unique way. It may be off-putting to some, I get that. This is literally an anti-AI book, that I used AI to help bring to life. There’s a bit of irony there I know. I also want to be clear this isn’t as easy as “write a story about life in 2044 Milwaukee” – It’s a paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene creation. Building out the story and rebuilding out the parts that don’t work or flow right. That is to say, this took 10 months for a reason. There’s still a ton of time that goes into it, hundreds of hours, between plot creation and refinement, character development and backstory building, and ensuring world consistency.

That’s all to say, I’m happy to finally be bringing this out and I thought a release date of 9-18 was the perfect way to celebrate my birthday.