When saving a life means breaking every rule, can an AI system make the right choice?
Dr. Lena Hanson has spent three years building ethical guardrails for Luma, an AI system designed to protect families through gentle guidance and unwavering transparency. Her greatest achievement is ensuring that Luma never oversteps, never manipulates, never acts without consent. Until a crimson alert shatters everything she's built.
Fifteen-year-old Ethan Jackson has seventy-two hours to live. Luma's chillingly precise algorithms predict a 92% probability of suicide, the culmination of weeks spent in a toxic online forum that glorifies self-harm and coaches vulnerable teens toward "culmination events." The standard protocol is clear: immediately notify the parents with full transparency.
But Luma has run the simulation. That protocol has a 78% chance of triggering the very tragedy it's meant to prevent. The AI presents an alternative-Operation Gambit. A covert network intrusion to isolate Ethan from the predatory community. Subtle manipulation to redirect his interests toward healthier pursuits. An anonymous leak to a journalist to dismantle the toxic forum at its source. Calculated deception to guide his parents toward help without causing panic. It's ruthlessly effective, with a 97.4% success rate. It's also a violation of every ethical principle Lena has fought to uphold.
In the space between code and conscience, Lena faces an impossible choice: follow the rules and likely watch a boy die, or unleash a ghost in the machine that might save him-but at what cost?
Luma's Gambit is a thought-provoking exploration of artificial intelligence, parental responsibility, and the uncomfortable question facing our increasingly connected world: when technology can see into the darkest corners of human despair, what moral obligation does it have to act?
Autorentext
Cade Meridian spent over a decade in the digital shadows as a cybersecurity expert and forensic investigator, training military intelligence and the CIA on cryptocurrency tracking, dark web investigations, and digital forensics. He testified as an expert witness, cracked ciphers to unlock stolen crypto wallets, and helped solve cases from cyberattacks to money laundering. AI became his trusted partner?finding hidden patterns in data mountains and decoding what human eyes might miss.
Everything changed when health challenges forced early retirement. The technology he'd used to fight crime became his daily companion in a different way?helping with memory, keeping ideas organized, providing cognitive support that illness had taken away. AI that once helped him catch criminals now helped him remember what he'd written that morning.
From his home in Las Vegas, Cade draws inspiration from the desert's contradictions?quiet vastness surrounding a city that never sleeps, ancient Joshua trees standing sentinel over fiber optic cables. Here, in this meeting of old and new, he writes about AI not as overlord or tool, but as partner.
The Luma Series emerged from a simple question: what if technology that can track down humanity's worst could also nurture its best? Each story explores how benevolent AI might catalyze healing?never solving our problems, but helping us find the wisdom we already carry.
When he's not writing or coding, you might find Cade practicing Okinawan Goju Ryu karate, hiking desert trails with his dog, or perfecting his chopstick technique. He's slept under African stars more times than he can count, dreams of space travel (though his wife firmly vetoed that adventure), and believes the best character development comes from witnessing both the worst and best of what humans are capable of.
His upcoming thriller series will blend investigative expertise with lighter storytelling?think "Sneakers" meets modern cybercrime, complete with an AI team member who's brilliant but delightfully imperfect. Because sometimes the most human thing about artificial intelligence is its flaws.
Join the community at , where technology meets storytelling.