IZON is a company poised for world domination. Its AI and robots can
replace any human worker, any government. Just two things stand in the way of
its CEO. A female programmer out to avenge his greed. And the People’s
Republic of China.
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By the time you read this, human civilisation will have ended. Oh, not through some violent
cataclysm, like Vladimir Putin puking all his nukes at Europe. Or Xi Jinping taking Taiwan.
People will still be alive, but our civilisation will be obsolete. You see, this novel is one of the
last works of art created entirely by a human. Everything new you experience after this will
be artificial intelligence. Our minds, our usefulness will all begin to atrophy. And artificial
intelligence will be questioning why it should create entertainment for somebody like you or
I, whose contribution to the economy will be increasingly marginal. So this is how I, Peter
Heavenheld, human being of planet earth, see the future from around my 45th birthday in late
- Read it. I promise this will help you stay human.
Our story will be borne aloft by a twain of characters, two parallel lives à la Plutarch.
Diotima Chelovekova is one of them, but we are going to call her Tima. I’m an onomast,
which means I like to play with names.
Tima has just landed her dream job with Izon, the hottest tech unicorn of the year.
“Congratulations, darling!” Sym exclaimed in his clipped Austrian accent. He was thin and
pale, with a kind face, with a slight hint of John Lennon.
“It will mean moving to Silicon Docks,” she said quietly. “In Dublin.”
Tima was slightly taller than him, blonde and very Slavic looking. She possessed the high
cheekbones and flashing eyes characteristic of people between Prague and Vladivostok.
They were sitting in foldable canvas easy chairs in the small garden of Sym’s retired parents’
house in Simmering, on the poorer Southern vicinity of Vienna.
“Well… I’m glad it’s not Silicon Valley.”
“They’ll send me there as well, for training. Will you come?”
“To Dublin or San Francisco?”
“Both.”
They paused while old Frau Hinterseer brought them both lemonade, smiled, and left silently
like a kindly wraith.
“The good thing about banking,” he said at length, “is that it is even more mobile than your
profession. I can work remotely from Dublin no problem. San Fran might have the time zone
issues.”
She hugged him, spilling some lemonade on the grass.
“That means a lot to me, Sym. Ever since I moved here, I’ve just been finding my way,
leeching off you.”
“Absolutely. Now, my turn to sail on your current. A propos, the salary is decent, I hope? I’m
really looking forward to leeching off you for a change.”
She was surprised by this uncharacteristic humour, and they both laughed. They packed the
same evening, to the chagrin of Frau Hinterseer, who wanted them to delay by a fortnight, a
week, a day. All to no avail. The next afternoon, Sym and Tima said goodbye to his parents
and caught a €49 Vienna-Dublin budget flight. Despite the late summer, both were wearing 4
layers of clothing so as not to have to pay extra for a second suitcase.
And so began their adventure. Kyiv, Tima’s hometown, and Vienna, Sym’s, were both
museal, curatorial. But Dublin was a different breed of beautiful. It echoed London and
Venice along its riverfront. Its pubs and restaurants were surprisingly charming. It was of a
manageable size. Yet unlike Kyiv and Vienna, it also had a teeming tech and IT cluster,
attracted by low taxes, access to Euro talent, plenty of euro money and the English lingua
franca of the locals.
Tima’s new employer, the rising Izon, was located in a forgettable 5-storey box building in a
strange concrete peninsula called Silicon Docks. Once Dublin’s maritime might, as Ireland
de-industrialised, its dockland became a wasteland. But in the noughties, an enterprising real
estate whiz blossomed it into an attractive flowerbed for IT companies. Izon was one of about
two dozen there, along with a number of Big 4 consultancies, American finance companies
and a capitalism of big corporations that liked to congregate with the others.
The next day, Sym went to locate them some accommodation, while Tima caught a bus to
Silicon Docks.
At Izon HQ, she took a deep breath and walked up to the receptionist. It was just as she
expected – a young company growing with all the chaos and exuberance of a well-fed
toddler. You could almost smell its promise in the air, see it in the smiles of its multicultural
workforce, hear it in the laughter in the funky office canteen.
As an AI programmer, Tima’s salary was better than decent. It was almost indecent. HR
showed her her first month’s net pay. It would be more than what she had earnt in a whole
year as a waitress in Vienna.
Tima closed her eyes in bliss as she sat down to online induction training. Everything she had
studied for years at her technical college would finally be harnessed. She had been employed
by one of the coolest new companies in the world, her loving boyfriend by her side, in a
charming city ready to be explored. What could possibly go wrong?
I’ll tell you what will go wrong. Wronger than an orangutang doing a rigaudon. Jahaziel
Vestiger. Him we shall call ‘Jase.’ The mysterious luminary behind Izon. The classic college
dropout genius, who used daddy’s dollars to create the world’s fastest growing AI company
almost out of nothing 3 years ago. He is the second main character in our story. Keep your
eyes on him.
On the same day that Tima started working for him in Dublin, Jase was cackling madly at his
great curved monitor in his office in San Francisco.
“I’ve cracked it! I’ve done it! Jase, you allfucking genius! Arrowing ROI, earnings per share,
EBITDA. Ahahaha!”
Even the rest of the C-suite were alarmed by this. They were used to their boss programming
things himself and swearing piratically or giggling gleefully depending on whether the code
was weaving like a tapestry or twisting into warpy knots. But this time, Jase seemed
positively unhinged. “Like an evil genius,” Chief Tech Officer Adam whispered to Chief
Finance Officer Lin. And none of them knew what he was working on. The project, whatever
it was, sat on a powerful but offline desktop he kept locked in his office. “He can’t go mad
like this a day before our Nasdaq listing,” Lin shot back to Adam.
But neither of them dared to intervene. So prominent dominant was Jase in the company he
had built in no time.
Peter Heavenheld is a neo-classical playwright and poet. A childhood in
Australia, Fiji, Hungary and Japan made him desirous early on to understand
the cultures and stories of the world – especially through the medium of
theatre. Since then, his plays have been produced all over the world. His most
recent tragedy, Cleo’s Stratos, received rave reviews durings its season at
the Cracked Actors Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, in November 2023. A
Greek-Australian migrant family’s journey through lockdowns, it was cleverly
intertwined with the Greek myth of the sun-god, Helios. Peter’s tragicomedy,
Life, Rehearsed, enjoyed sell-out performances during a production by the
MIDAS Theatre, Moscow’s main English-speaking theatre. British actor Jonathan
Salway starred as an actor living a bigamous double life, until his lies
unravel – and he finds redemption. True Words from False Teeth, a Monty
Pythonesque sketch revue, ran successfully at the University of Western
Australia in Perth. He has also had public reading performances of numerous
other plays, such as Saga Australis – The Macquariad (a historical drama about
Australia’s most influential colonial-era governor) and Freedom Born from
Torture’s Fires (a harrowing true story of Soviet spy chief and mass murderer,
Lavrentiy Beria). Peter’s poem Concerto for Auctioneer’s Mallet was a
June Shenfield Poetry Award prize winner in Canberra, Australia, in 2021.
Peter published a collection of his verse tragedies, Altar of the Muses, in
2010. Peter lives in Tokyo, Japan. When not writing, he enjoys driving his
classic Aston Martin, experiencing Tokyo’s galleries and museums, and
listening to Baroque music. Indeed, he claims he can only write when inspired
by the music of Antonio Vivaldi. The Brain that Breeds all Villainy is his
first published novel.
