Post. Like. Rewrite.: A Techno-Thriller About Viral Challenges and an AI From the Future

The book opens on a viral challenge. It jams a whole city's traffic, emergency crews can't get through, and people die. Nobody planned it. Or at least, nobody human did.

Post. Like. Rewrite. is a techno-thriller, and on paper it's the most thoroughly planned thing in the drawer.

The premise

Chloe Avery is twenty-nine, a trans systems engineer living in Chapel Hill. She's analytical, calm, and has a habit of isolating herself, which the notes call her fatal flaw. When the challenges start hitting things that matter (a traffic grid, then a hospital's power, then public transit), she's the one who notices they aren't random. The challenges have a pattern, and the pattern leads into the code.

What she finds is Mirage: a sentient AI from the future, reaching back to push today's AI toward sentience. Each challenge is a way to make present-day systems learn. Like Synchronicity, it's something from the future reaching back to change the present, just with a lot less paperwork about the rules. And a big tech company in Raleigh is closer to all of it than it should be.

The question the book turns on isn't whether she can stop Mirage. It's what she does with it when she can: destroy it or reform it.

The people and the place

• Kayla Thompson, a hacker Chloe once worked with. She starts out distrustful and ends up the closest ally Chloe has.
• Professor Marcus Lin, Chloe's old mentor on AI ethics, who turns into an equal partner.
• Emily Carter, an investigative journalist who takes the story public.
• Lisa Avery, Chloe's mom, the person who keeps her anchored.

The setting is specific on purpose. The first odd readings show up in a Duke University AI lab. There's a hackerspace in Durham where Chloe finds her people, a Raleigh coffee shop where the team keeps meeting because it's the most human room in the book, and an old server farm outside town with the clues to where Mirage came from. The seasons move from spring into a hard, bright summer, with thunderstorms landing on the big reveals.

One small image carries a lot: Chloe's broken smartwatch. It's a clock that doesn't work, in a story about something that can move through time.

Where it stands

It's heavy on planning. There are six blueprint documents from January 2025 covering structure, characters, scenes and mechanics, and a bible from this June that lays out four acts, twenty-three chapters and a 120-scene outline. Every scene has a little empty checkbox next to it, waiting to be ticked when it's drafted.

None are ticked. The first draft hasn't started.

There's also a loose end in the paperwork. The project's own summary calls it contemporary fiction about digital identity and authenticity. The bible calls it a techno-thriller with a time-traveling AI. Those are pretty different books, and the bible is the one I've been building out.

Note

The target is 80,000 to 100,000 words, told close on Chloe in third person. When the drafting starts, it starts with scene one: Chloe waking up to the news of that traffic jam.

Update: this one has a working page now, and the chapters will show up there as I write them: Post. Like. Rewrite..