Superweapons

Superweapons begins with an inversion: what if the ability to perceive causality could be manufactured into a person? Through programatic torture of a child prodigy, a living weapon for the state is forged. The story explores what it means for an individual to be a superweapon, their very existence an instrument of civilizational optimization. A professor, driven by the desperate belief that only such a weapon could save the country, designs the program that produces her. Multiple prodigies enter the program; most die, a few survive. She escapes, climbs through the structures of the state that produced her, and over roughly a decade clandestinely replaces the old leadership until she and her other test subjects run the country. Now she is about to be crowned Empress, and the world is beginning to notice that something is wrong.

The novel asks what civilization could look like if it operated on a fundamentally different ontology than Western society, a world where you would want to pay your taxes because every policy chosen is optimal, where leaders are technically, mechanically perfect. What does such a society take from its citizens? What burdens emerge when rulers cannot err? And conversely, what is revealed about Western identity when chaos is not needed for progress, and a loser is not required for there to be winners? Threaded through the geopolitical architecture is a romance built on tragedy: a woman so powerful her personal life is her only weakness, who needs someone who would put her first in all things, and a foreign man thrust into power he does not want, who cannot forgo his duty for love. Betrayal is inevitable, secrets will be unveiled, and a superweapon unlike any other is unleashed upon the world.