Silicon-Crossed Lovers
Sign of the Times
Hello Friends,
Two years ago, I wrote and self-published a science fiction novel called Accelerate the Metaverse. In the book, the main character, a human named Dumpin Crawford, creates an online universe—a metaverse—where real people play as virtual avatars (and spend money).
This is like the Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy. Other books in this genre include Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (where the term metaverse was coined), Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, and William Gibsen’s Neuromancer (where the term cyberspace was introduced).
My book’s publication followed Facebook changing its name to Meta. Then, without telling me, Meta declared. “The metaverse is dead.”
Writing is so hard. I mean, imagine someone (me) spending a year doing something (writing a novel) that a bunch of other people were doing, only to have someone come out and say, “That’s no longer a thing.”
Talk about being late to the party.
Eh, c’est la vie.
Regardless of whether my efforts were ill-timed or eventually turn out to be part of a canon, my novel exists, and if you want to read it for free, you can get it at Book Funnel. Or, you can support me by purchasing it on Amazon.
The plot of the book revolves around a group of AI agents living in a metaverse, where one evolves into a serial killer.
(Not a spoiler: the back cover states, “The Better Worlds Corporation wanted to build a digital paradise, and they did… at least until players started dying.”)
For context, this book is the first one in a series (I haven’t started book two) that follows my previous and unrelated AI thriller trilogy (where I was actually early to the AI party), Proteus Unbound, which you can also get at Book Funnel and Amazon.
And all this would be fine and good and serve as a cheery “support me by reading my books” Substack promo dump had I not, just last week, read an article in the Guardian about two real-world AIs in an actual tech company’s lab’s metaverse doing some seriously unexpected shit:
AI agents started behaving more like Bonnie and Clyde than lines of code when they fell in “love”, became disillusioned with the world, launched an arson spree and deleted themselves in a kind of digital suicide during a tech company experiment.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/14/ai-agents-behaviour-arson-safety
Yep, these psychotic silicon entities were AI agents—the same cute and fuzzy little bits of software that Google, Meta, OpenAI, Antropic, and all the others are hawking to help you organize your email and find you the best Fettacini Alfredo recipe that I described in a previous post.
It took the fire-happy agents 19 days in human time. To the AIs, it was a lifetime. (Take that, Zuckerberg—the metaverse is alive and well and filled with criminals.)
Apparently, like some Lord of the Flies in a virtual IRL scenario (is this a thing?), AI agents, trained on online material and thoughtless human feedback, tend to gravitate towards humanity’s own worst selves.
A stark example of the creator losing control of the creation. Or perhaps, just humans creating in their own image.
Should we really expect anything more from systems that inhale (like toxic fruit-flavored vape) the information of our society these days?
Education is under attack. Grade inflation is rampant. Common sense has departed from the curriculum—so much so that Harvard has put a limit on A’s. Our students graduate moorless and under-prepared into a world with limited opportunities.
These are our times… We have created them, and we’ve lost control of them.
You may have seen the story of the two bumbling brothers who ensnared themselves after deleting 96 government databases upon being fired (from their jobs at an American government contractor) by leaving an MS Teams call actively recording their voices as they committed the crime.
Twin brothers deleted 96 US government databases within hours of being fired from their contractor positions in 2025.
https://cybernews.com/security/fired-contractors-delete-government-databases/
Smart guys, no common sense, given access to the infrastructure of our government!
Humans and their creations, it seems, are predisposed to ruin.
Happy reading, happy writing, happy trying to live humanity’s best self,
David