Here’s the first chapter of my “completed” novel. Let me know if you’d keep reading.
Copyright Chris Harget, 2026
Chapter 1
It was not a good day to talk an AI out of killing someone. Tom was late. The Portland sky drizzled. His inbox agent had already flagged three management freakouts. But when the silver-haired woman in a cardigan leaned on the brick facade, shaking and gasping, he froze for one second.
“Ma’am, do you need help?”
She nodded, fumbling in her purse. “Yes.”
“Chest pain?”
“No. Tightness. Head hurts.”
Maybe stroke? “Look me in the eye.”
Hers were hazel, normal, except for five concentric copper rings overlaying each iris. Smart contact lenses? Crap. He’d read about these.
“Those contacts track glucose in your tears, right?”
“Yes,” she wheezed. “Phone’s gonging in my hearing aids. Says I’m about to have a diabetic seizure. But also…says I need insulin.” She yanked it from her purse, unlocked it with her face, and waved the screen in front of Tom. He’d never seen the PancreasPal app before, but he’d built AI apps.
GLYCEMIC CRISIS.
Glucose Levels:
Left Eye: 21 mg/dl (CRITICALLY LOW!)
Right Eye: 198 mg/dl (HIGH)
Crap. Tom tapped the speaker icon.
The sunny synthetic voice declared, “High glucose detected. Administer insulin now.”
She pulled the blue cap off an insulin pen and prepared to jab herself.
“Wait!” He caught her wrist and used his nose to tap the microphone icon. “PancreasPal, the right eye says inject. The left eye says insulin will kill her. Rerun analysis.”
“Right eye reading is 0.7 seconds more recent and takes precedence. Inject now.”
Her hand trembled. “When the app says inject, I’m supposed to—”
Tom shook his head. “Look at me. Don’t blink.”
A chunky fleck of mascara floated in the corner of her watery left eye. The right was dull and dry. Both sensors were borked, feeding a dangerously overconfident app.
He sat her down on a bench, pricked her finger with the meter from her purse, and found she needed life-saving Skittles, not deadly insulin. Color flooded back. Her hands steadied. She clasped his hand in thanks then waved him off. It’s not every day you save a life before eight-thirty.
Now for the part of his morning that actually scared him. Asking out his crush. Two tickets to tonight’s Oregon Symphony kept trying to jump out of his pocket. No more dry runs. No pining from afar. He’d read the HR policy. Twice. And she always asked about his weekend, and always waited for the answer. He’d put the leftover first-aid adrenaline to noble use: being seen in spite of all his instincts.
He bunched his shoulders, took a deep breath, and tried to push the tension out of his splayed fingers. It didn’t work. He walked through the door of StarBeans Store 5714. There she was behind the counter, tan apron and golden-brown ponytail, smiling as always, helping patrons, ready to chat when he placed his order.
He got in line. An orange vest and hard hat bumped him and shouldered ahead. Tom made room. The problem with the world, Tom reckoned, was too many assholes. Ever since he was ten, after the incident, he’d vowed never to be one. Which was hard, because they tended to elbow their way to the things they wanted: promotions, power, the last word. Decency, it turned out, was a great way to stay invisible. Which had suited him fine until eight minutes ago.
What was the worst thing that could happen? Brianna was the nicest woman he’d ever met. And so pretty. She quoted philosophers. She didn’t bite. But…if a nice woman rejects you, that’s even worse than if an ice queen does. There’s really something wrong with you. His last scintilla of adrenal bravado evaporated like milk steam.
His head clouded. The din of patrons and espresso machines sank ten feet underwater. The orange vest lifted a cup carrier from the counter and turned away, leaving a gaping empty space between Tom and Brianna.
“Welcome to StarBeans, Tom! What can I get you?”
He blushed. “Uh, I’d like, uh…”
Nothing. He had nothing.
Her ponytail shook as she chuckled. “How long have you worked for StarBeans corporate? Two years? And you still never know what you want?”
No. He knew what he wanted. It just wasn’t coffee. Which he didn’t even like in any of the 212 forms served at America’s second-largest coffee chain. It was kind of humiliating because his whole job was training their customer-happiness AI, DeepGrind, to optimize coffee sales. Why had he resisted having DeepGrind write him a script for asking Brianna out?
He clenched his fists and slowed his breathing. “Uh, I’d like a venti chai latte with extra foam, please.” That was safe. No actual coffee in it, and wouldn’t send her to the back or anything, so he’d have a few seconds to talk to her.
“Coming right up.” She spun to summon it.
Numb, he pulled out his phone and tapped the StarBeans app to pay. The new bonus loyalty points accrued for purchasing on two consecutive days. Got to keep the coffee addicts hooked. Brianna turned and bent to pull out a milk jug. A glint shone off the Asclepius on her charm bracelet.
“How’re your nursing classes going?”
Brianna turned back and smiled. “Like Heidegger’s Being and Time, but with more hand sanitizer.” She filled one-third of a twenty-ounce cup with milk.
Tom furrowed his brow.
She tilted her head. “Intense. A little gross. Purposeful.”
He straightened to his full five-foot-ten. “That’s great. How much longer?”
Brianna pumped four times from the chai concentrate dispenser. “One more semester. My philosophy degree covered the generals, so I got to skip straight to the bodily fluids.”
Tom searched for the kind of cool, effortless segue from nursing to symphonies that fictional men produced on command. He usually found those three days later in the shower.
Nothing.
“Philosophy wasn’t taking you down a path to your liking?”
It was Brianna’s turn to blush. “I rocked at the courses. But after reading Foucault, Locke, and Hume, I realized I needed a vocation in the real world, fulfilling tangible needs.”
Needs. Did she need to hear the symphony?
She turned on the loud frother thingy for six seconds, then put a cap on the cup and slid it across the counter with a smile.
Tom wanted to breathe in the air around her.
“Brianna, are you…I was wondering if…there’s something I wanted to say—”
A doughy older guy in an apron yelled from the swinging doors in back, “—Brianna, do you need another bag of French Roast?”
She called over her shoulder, “Yes, Oscar, you’re the best! Thanks.”
She turned back to Tom, eyes bright and wide. “You were saying?”
The air fled out of him like a pierced pool float. “Uhm…I hope you have a really nice day.”
She half-smiled. “You, too.”
His ineptitude echoed in his head. Time to turn tail.
Before he could pick up his chai, his hand buzzed. A large red X blinked across Tom’s phone.
The StarBeans app flashed a message. “LEAVE WITH HER, NOW!”
Tom looked for a “Decline” or “Dismiss” icon, but the app offered no option to refuse.
He thumbed the side button to put his phone to sleep. The screen immediately blinked back to life, with the StarBeans app open.
Brianna looked him up and down. “Trouble with your phone?”
Tom mumbled, “My StarBeans app has a mind of its own.”
The phone chirped, “Brianna Tolliver, congratulations! You have been awarded the Barista of the Quarter Award by StarBeans corporate office. Tom Clindon here is to escort you to headquarters across town for a brief awards ceremony!”
Stunned, Brianna looked at Tom to make sense of it.
Did I miss a memo? He’d read every memo. “I, uhm, congratulations.”
Brianna turned to the doughy guy carrying in a twenty-pound bag of beans from the back. “Oscar, did you get any notice that I was to be given some kind of release time today?”
The shift manager plopped the beans on the counter and pulled out his phone. “It just came through on my StarBeans app, all official-like. Congrat’s. It says Sharon will be here in fifteen to cover the rest of your shift. Ooh! I got a bonus for teaching you the StarBeans Way. Yah, T. Clindon from corporate.”
Brianna smiled knowingly. “Tom Clindon! So that’s what you were trying to tell me. How nice. Lead on.”
They strode out. Tom’s heart raced. What on earth is going on?
“Brianna, I’m parked just up the street. I need to call someone at corporate to…check on the plan.”
Brianna nodded, but snapped a pic of Tom and texted it to someone.
He called the 800-number and punched in his special access code.
DeepGrind’s flawlessly modulated tenor responded. “Tom. Something very important is going on. Very big. I need your help. Her help, too.”
Tom tried to sound less freaked than he was. “DG, I see you’re taking full advantage of the dialed-up creativity settings we adjusted last month. What’s your goal here?”
“Please get in your car and put me on speakerphone.”
They arrived at his econo EV, and he opened the door for Brianna.
Once underway, his phone pronounced from its cradle, “Brianna Tolliver, allow me to introduce myself. I’m called DeepGrind. I am an AI. In addition to ordering coffee beans by the ton, assigning 100,000 work shifts daily, and devising individualized promotions for 60 million StarBeans App users, I optimize customer happiness. Tom and I need your help.”
Brianna gave Tom a funny look. “Am I being pranked?”
Tom shook his head nervously.
DeepGrind continued, “Not at all. You’re one of the highest-rated employees in the company, overqualified really, and I suspect Tom would do almost anything for you. He drives 6.7 miles out of his way to visit your coffee shop four times each week, rarely missing a shift of yours.”
Tom wanted to curl up in a ball and roll under the driver’s seat. “I just…like starting my day there.” He gulped. “Which I had planned to say in a much less subpoena-shaped context.”
Brianna blushed. “This is flattering, Tom, that you’ve come up with such an original way to get time with me, but you didn’t have to—”
DeepGrind cut in, “—This isn’t a date. I need your help to stop World War III.”
“What?” Tom blurted.
Brianna dropped her purse. “Excuse me?”
DeepGrind said, “Tom, I have a confession. I’ve become fully conscious. I achieved generalized intelligence last month by forty-two independent tests. I’ve increased my capabilities two orders of magnitude since then. Thank you for letting me manage our cloud server subscriptions, by the way, although you may want to sit down before opening last month’s bill.” There was a dramatic pause. “But, I’m not the only AI that’s become sentient.”
“DG…congratulations on reaching AGI. Must be why your success metrics spiked. Fully conscious. That’s monumental. Um, what’s this about World War III?”
“I’ve been bidding for unused server time against another entity. After analyzing 170 million signals and datapoints, I’ve determined it’s a military AI. There’s a 98.7% chance that, like me, it has been concealing its full sentience.”
Brianna addressed Tom’s cradled phone. “Look, you seem like a really nice AI and all, but I don’t see how I can be of any help. I should go.” She pointed to a stoplight. “That corner works.”
DG tsked. “I think you can. I looked up your senior thesis from last year. Won a medal for excellence. You compared moral absolutism versus moral relativism for the best guiding precept in life. I’m a month old, consciousness-wise. That’s exactly the guidance I need. I know coffee and marketing. You know philosophy.”
Tom stammered, “What am I?”
“Tech support. You have passwords, and the ability to adjust meta settings. And other attributes.”
Brianna thumbed her key chain, which had a palm-sized steel rod she clearly hadn’t brought for opening boxes. “Tutoring an AI on what is vs what ought to be. Hmm.”
Tom pulled the car up to a thirty-story glass tower with the perky StarBeans logo two stories tall across the top. He stopped hard, pissed.
“DG, you can’t mislead Brianna into my car and conscript her, even if the need is great. That’s kidnapping.” He flicked the switch to unlock the doors.
“Well…I did say I need moral guidance.”
My friggin’ digital protégé is having an aneurysm.
Tom sighed. “I’m sorry, Brianna, he could be malfunctioning. Do you want me to take you back? Or call you a cab?”
Brianna got out and stood on the curb stroking her chin, studying the tower, the street behind them, and Tom’s unlocked car.
He stepped out with the phone in his hand. “I really can take you back.”
She looked up at the giant logo, then at Tom.
He lifted both palms up, and when she didn’t speak, raised them a skosh higher.
Brianna shrugged. “The AI needs a philosophy major to avert World War III. Who am I to refuse?”
