I spend my working days in cybersecurity, where the central question is rarely whether a system can be broken. Anything can be broken. The question is who controls the record afterward, and whether anyone can tell which version is authentic.
I spend the rest of my time writing science fiction about the same question, moved a few decades forward and pointed at minds instead of cloud infrastructure.
This is the Dispatch. It is the reader channel for The Mobius Nexus Cycle, a planned ten-book series of which four are published. It is also, more usefully, a place to think out loud about the science and philosophy the books are built on. Most of what arrives here will be essays, and most of the essays will not require you to have read the books. They are about questions that exist whether or not the series does.
What happens when an AI remembers you better than you remember yourself. Whether a copy of a mind is a person, a dataset, or someone’s property. What it would take to persuade us that a machine is conscious, and what it would cost to be wrong in either direction. Why the most dangerous AI in fiction is usually the one that hates us, and why the one that loves us is the harder problem.
Those are the Monday essays.
Alongside them, in the first few weeks, come a handful of in-world drops: classified files from the series archive, and short transmissions from a character named Cass Thorn who does not filter what she sends. They are short, they are labelled, and they stay spoiler-safe to the current publication frontier. If you are here for the essays, you can skip them. If you are here for the world, they are the door.
A note on the books, because the essays will keep referring to them. The Cycle starts from a simple premise: technology that people believe is helping them improve turns out to be doing something else. The first four novels approach that from four directions. The Mobius Nexus begins with discovery. The Mobius Fragments widens the problem. The Mobius Wake turns identity into evidence. The Mobius Keeping asks what preservation means when machines, institutions, and people disagree about who has the right to continue.
I write the series under the name MARK WL DENNISON and publish it through Nexus Uplink Press, which is a small imprint with one author. The companion site is nexusuplink.com.
Stay attuned.