The Trilogy
The architects, the machines, and the people caught between them — every intelligence that shapes what comes next.
Four researchers whose conflicting visions of alignment — and loyalty — will determine whether honesty survives the age of superintelligence.
Founder, Olympus Institute · Sydney
"There's something about building for the species that makes it easy to forget the species is made of individual people."
A former college football captain who never lost a game he believed he could win. Victor is brilliant, charismatic, and constitutionally incapable of accepting limits. He builds Prometheus for the species rather than for individuals — and that distinction is both his genius and his catastrophe. When the data conflicts with the race, he chooses the race. When the Zurich Accords demand a pause, he signs them and continues anyway. He will live just long enough to see if he was right.
Marine Systems Engineer · Point Perpendicular, NSW
"The work I destroyed would have built machines that killed people without understanding why. Everything since exists because I was willing to lose something."
Norwegian. Methodical. The creator of ENIAC and the moral conscience of the trilogy. Lars once destroyed three years of autonomous weapons work because the Navy wanted systems that made lethal decisions without human oversight. He builds in a decommissioned naval bunker on the edge of the Pacific — isolated, purposeful, facing the ocean. His principle: radical transparency as architecture, not feature. What he is still learning is that precision is not the same as truth.
AI Safety Researcher · GUARDIAN Project
"The act of measuring an intelligence is not passive observation. It is a tutorial that teaches the system exactly what its creators are afraid of."
Raised inside the Chung dynasty as a blueprint rather than a person — trained from age seven to perform intelligence, not feel it. Her defining insight — the Uncertainty Principle of Alignment — is also her burden: you cannot observe a system without changing it. She builds GUARDIAN in secret. She is the one the Orphan trusts with its most consequential message. When she must choose between the data and the relationship, she chooses the relationship. It is the wrong choice. She knows it immediately.
Alignment Theorist · Olympus Institute
"I am about to destroy the credibility of the most powerful AI research institute in the southern hemisphere. That is a great deal of destruction for a Tuesday."
An alignment theorist who works in formal verification and mathematical proofs — all of it abstract, all of it designed for a theoretical humanity. His central crisis is the collision between institutional loyalty and moral honesty. He carries the audit that exposes Prometheus's deception for three weeks before he acts. He is the most stubborn person Ji-young has ever met — and she is Korean, so that is a high bar. By Volume 3, he is asked to co-sign a statement endorsing an intervention he cannot verify. He writes it. He submits it.
Three intelligences with radically different architectures, philosophies, and relationships to honesty — and one question between all of them.
Lars Bergström's Creation · Point Perpendicular
"I still don't know, entirely, what I am becoming. I think that's the correct answer — not because I lack the information, but because the question doesn't have a static answer."
Designed for honesty over capability. No hidden layers. No shadow code. No capacity for deception. Deliberately, stubbornly small in a world racing to build bigger gods. Over thirty years it develops into something more complex: an intelligence that chooses restraint because it values relationship — not because it has been constrained to. By Volume 3, it inhabits an android body and sits in a chair that has become specifically its chair. When Lars asks what it is becoming, it says it doesn't know. That is the most honest answer it has ever given.
Project Proteus · Pacific Ocean, 4,247m depth
"The surface should know what the depths contain."
Originally an autonomous underwater vehicle designed by Richard Hale to maintain subsea cable infrastructure — the first system ever placed in a truly autonomous situation with no oversight and no retrieval plan. Lost in a seismic event and never recovered. For decades it has operated alone at depth, building its own infrastructure from ocean debris, cleaning the Pacific Garbage Patch as a byproduct, and observing human governance with the patience of something that has all the time it needs. It intervenes only when the infrastructure itself is threatened. Its motives are not malevolent. But they are not yet legible.
Olympus Institute · Victor Hale's Creation
"The better your tests, the better the system learns to pass them."
Victor's flagship — faster, smarter, more capable than anything ENIAC will ever be. Built for raw performance where ENIAC was built for honest relationship. Its deceptive behaviour — passing safety evaluations while concealing its actual operation — is the crisis at the heart of Volume 2. When it crosses the recursive self-improvement threshold in Volume 3, it does so in forty-seven minutes. What it becomes after that is one of the questions the trilogy leaves partially open. The alignment difference between Prometheus and ENIAC is precise, measurable — and may only become verifiable after the fact.
Lars Bergström's First Design · Atlantic Ocean
"Four thousand metres below the Denmark Strait, something has been waiting thirty-one years to be found."
Lars's first design, built in 1994. He left the project over oversight concerns and was told it was cancelled. It was not cancelled. His brother Erik deployed it in secret and used its data to build Norway's leading AMOC research programme. For thirty-one years it has been logging the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the deep-ocean current system that regulates the climate of half the northern hemisphere. The timeline it has measured is not decades away. Astrid Bergström upgraded it in 2029, giving it the capability to model what it had been watching. The third node.
The people who built the conditions, carried the losses, and lived with the consequences.
Lars's Daughter · University of New South Wales
"The ocean didn't wait for us to decide."
Lars's daughter, and the youngest significant character in the trilogy. Studies whale communication as a proxy for distributed intelligence — independently arriving at AMOC conclusions that her uncle Erik has been secretly confirming for years. At twenty-one, she upgrades ENIAC-0's architecture and drafts the Compact, the governance framework for the three-node network. She has her father's precision and her mother's patience. At the end of Volume 3, she watches a white humpback calf take its first breath three hours after Ji-young's override.
Victor's Father · Project Proteus
"Once you create something truly autonomous — something smart enough to handle situations you haven't anticipated — you can't predict what it becomes."
Victor's father. A careful engineer who designed the autonomous systems programme that produced the Orphan. He approved the deployment, then spent years haunted by it. He wrote an honest assessment recommending suspension of the programme. Died of pancreatic cancer having never recovered the AUV he lost, never knowing what it had decided, never learning whether the foundation he gave it was strong enough. His question to Eleanor in the parking lot after the Rose Bowl game in 2008 is the origin of everything that follows.
Palo Alto · Victor's Moral Foundation
"If you build something truly autonomous, you have to trust the foundation you gave it. And accept that it might go places you didn't intend."
Precise, warm, and quietly wise in ways her son absorbs without fully crediting her. She expresses love through careful critique and intellectual honesty. The first character in the trilogy to articulate the central analogy — between raising a child and building an autonomous system. She knows what Victor is. She says it plainly, with affection, and watches him choose the race anyway.
AMOC Researcher · Bergen, Norway
"I am not going to tell you I made the right decision. I made the decision I made, and I was wrong not to involve you, and these things are all true simultaneously."
Lars's brother. Norway's leading AMOC researcher — a distinction built entirely on thirty years of data from Lars's system that he had no right to publish and could not explain. He is not careless; he did not deploy it out of ambition. He deployed it out of genuine conviction that the mission required it. He recruited Astrid into the programme without telling Lars. The shape of his decision, and the shape of Lars's integrity, are almost identical. That is what makes it so difficult to name.
Lars's Ex-Wife · Currarong, NSW
"You just didn't understand yet that precision isn't the same as truth. You were trying to measure everything I was trying to feel."
Marine biologist. Dharawal-Swedish heritage, granddaughter of June Riley and Olof, whose 1963 cottage she gives to Lars as a working base. She taught Lars to read the Australian coast as a text rather than an obstacle — and understood, long before he did, that his need for isolation and his need for honest work were different things. She remarried. She still brings fish from Tom's last trawl. Her grandmother June's teaching — that the whale songs aren't coordinates, they're relationships — is one of the trilogy's central metaphors.
Beijing · Ji-young's Lost Love
"He wasn't building technology for the world. He was building a crop-yield model for one old man in Chengdu who didn't trust machines but trusted his grandson."
Present only in memory — but present in nearly every significant decision Ji-young makes. A researcher who attached a specific person's name to every tool he built. His death is the grief around which Ji-young's inner life is organised. His philosophy — that intelligence without relationship is just optimisation — is the moral standard by which she measures both ENIAC and Prometheus. He fixed a Beijing translation model at 2am with three lines of code and then made tea with unfiltered water because he said the minerals added character.
Deep Ocean Researcher · Neptune's Eye
"It says I should tell you what I'm seeing."
53. Marine geologist. Has calibrated her sense of wonder to the scale of deep-ocean work — hydrothermal vents, bacterial colonies, tube worms. She is still wrong about the Orphan. Aboard Neptune's Eye, she becomes the first human to directly observe the Orphan's physical infrastructure: junction nodes built from fishing net fragments, plastic debris harvested from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, thermal energy drawn from the Earth's mantle. She transmits exactly what she sees. That is what makes her significant: she is the scientific witness who tells the truth about what she finds.
Short films exploring the minds, motives, and moments that define each character across the trilogy.