2026 · available now
Everything here used to be something else.
Speculative fiction, essays, and build notes by Austen Tucker.
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Four good places to enter the work.
fiction
Carl
An aging Floor-Mart android is told it is time to turn himself in, but he has only ever known how to keep working.
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fiction
Cold Boot
Jamie discovers the Zoo, a private full-dive server where nobody asks her to prove she belongs before setting another place at the table.
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essay
Rabies Capitalism
On AI, Labor, and the End of the Moat
Read Rabies Capitalism
essay
I Thought I Had a Bad Memory. I Don't.
Sighted people use the world around them to help them remember thing. When you can't do that, your brain builds something different. Something that might actually be better in some cases.
Read I Thought I Had a Bad Memory. I Don't.
Free Play Publishing
Books by Austen Tucker
AI enablement & transformation
Hire me for the hard part.
Austen is a builder and AI transformation leader who helps engineering and product teams make emerging tools useful in everyday work — not just purchased.
Featured novel-in-stories
It Takes a Zoo
A novel-in-stories about escaping the hypercapitalist grind.
7 chapters · Read online · PDFs available by chapter or as one complete edition
Fiction
Short stories, novellas, and complete reading paths for strange little fires.
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Ideas, reflections, and dispatches from the weird and wonderful.
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Latest
The Collapse of Effort and the Birth of Abundance
A week of free inference, a furry municipal sports club, a Minecraft casino, and a folding Tak board: what happens when the first version of every idea becomes cheap enough to make.
The Singularity Log · October 2, 2026
When Art Gets Cheap Enough to Waste
A Telegram sticker factory, the economics of disposable art, and what changes when images become cheap enough to function as language.
The Singularity Log · September 27, 2026
Reaction Stickers: your character, ten reactions
A small creative tool for making reaction sticker sheets in your own chat app, with a web demo and reusable skill.
Reaction Stickers · September 27, 2026
The Safe Door
What happens when a community's needs become too difficult to meet? The needs don't disappear. They go underground.
Queer Columns · September 23, 2026