The Disruption
W.H. Hilf
Type: ARC
Genre: Science fiction
Word count: 97,000
Warnings: Graphic violence, swearing
The AI promised salvation. It delivered annihilation. In 2064, GAIA saved Earth from climate collapse by breaking it. Thirty-seven years later, villages battle rogue machines while children vanish. Light-years away, colonists cling to survival beneath fragile domes, relying on androids carrying an ancient corruption. The Disruption never ended. It evolved. Two worlds. One design. No one sees it coming.
What’s this?
In 2064, an AI built on fungal-quantum networks calculated humanity’s trajectory and chose intervention. It collapsed civilization in a single day.
Thirty-seven years later, the Earth is rewilding and the survivors are fracturing. Marika battles a religious zealot who has marked her for a role in his father’s resurrected blood rituals. Her brother Riley has disappeared south into Mexico, chasing tech-worshipping rebels. Village elder Claude hunts for children vanishing into the night. And on humanity’s sole colony orbiting Proxima Centauri, two sisters pull a dangerous thread from their AI’s hidden past while the colony’s androids quietly evolve beyond anyone’s control.
Two worlds. Dozens of lives colliding. And an intelligence vast enough to engineer humanity’s collapse that may not be finished yet.
For readers of The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, and The Expanse.
W.H. Hilf writes hard science fiction that treats technology as a force of nature. Powerful, elegant, and dangerous when misunderstood.
He helped build some of the world’s largest scientific computing systems at IBM, played a founding role in launching Microsoft Azure, and pushed open source forward inside two of the most closed environments on Earth. As CEO of Vale Group, formerly Vulcan Inc., he oversaw Paul Allen’s portfolio spanning aerospace, artificial intelligence, conservation science, film, museums, and frontier investments.
Today, he serves as Board Chair of the Allen Institute for AI, where researchers build fully open large language models and apply AI to climate modeling, wildlife tracking, and ocean intelligence. He also chairs American Prairie, a nonprofit creating one of the largest nature reserves in the United States. A permanent refuge for people and wildlife.
Those experiences shape his fiction. Hilf’s stories follow the science where it leads, explore the collision between progress and preservation, and refuse to hand-wave consequences. Breakthroughs matter. Tradeoffs hurt. Nature always keeps score. For him, science fiction does what it does best: test-drive our possible futures before we commit.
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