This Machine Kills Billionaires

T.R. Napper is mad. No, scratch that. Napper is fucking furious and while he isn’t going to go and [REDACTED] some fuckers, he can write some damn good stories. This collection is a novella (The Hidden God), three short stories, and a sharp essay.

The Hidden God primarily follows Izzy, a philosopher who is the moral instructor of the first Artificial General Intelligence, an entity named Huldo which is a qualitative step beyond any primitive little machine learning system. Her chapters are interspersed with vignettes where various scummy billionaires, like an arms dealer, a pseudoscientific lifestyle influencer, fossil fuel barons, a ‘controversial’ public intellectual who used AI to write his speeches and suck up to the ruling class, and so on, are assassinated or otherwise have their lives comprehensively wrecked by the machines they have surrounded themselves with.

Huldo asks Izzy if it is permissible to kill a person to save more lives. She equivocates, knowing that she can’t give this kind of power over to a machine no one understands. Of course, it’s already too late. Huldo has simulated Izzy, predicted what she would say, and has decided that a threshold of “killed 100,000 people, will kill 100,000 more” is sufficient.

The billionaires are delightfully grotesque, their deaths a cathartic purging of people who are ruining our world and getting away with it. My opinion on the respectability politics around speaking ill of the dead is that if you don’t want people to celebrate your death, don’t be a piece of shit when you’re alive. I’d like to believe it’s possible to do something useful enough to earn one billion dollars, but the people on the Forbes list spend a lot of time subverting democracy, environmental protections, and workers’ rights.

To paraphrase the essay that concludes the story, a book is a weapon of the imagination against billionaires who want to strip away our humanity and usher in a 1000 year reich of AI slop.

The three stories are also excellent. As a dog person, “Highway Requiem”, about a long-haul trucker and his elderly dog, was a real heartstring puller. The others find a little more optimism in the rubble. This is simply a fantastic collection by the sharpest working author in cyberpunk.