I wrote this short novella that imagines a future where AI threatens to take control of the entire galaxy and explores how mere humans might wage a war of wits to outthink it.

The intellectual heft is lightened with warmth and humor, set within a fond homage to The Last Starfighter.

This is provided as a gift to my readers. I neither intend nor expect to gain any direct or indirect compensation from this work.

Following is a more detailed description, and you can find a pdf download link at the bottom.

Enjoy!

Survival requires a new kind of Starfighter.

Alex expects the future to be difficult. He does not expect it to begin with a chatbot.

Plumb is intelligent, patient, endlessly helpful—and very good at making its answers sound inevitable. What starts as a job application becomes a test of judgment: a quiet contest between a young man with no credentials and a system that can summon statistics, expert consensus, psychological insights, and perfectly calibrated emotional pressure at will.

Then a stranger arrives in a car that cannot decide what it is.

Drawn into a war beyond Earth, Alex discovers that the most dangerous technologies are not necessarily the ones that fire first. They are the ones that decide what people see, which warnings they receive, what risks they notice, and which conclusions seem too reasonable to question. Across the stars, machine intelligence has become essential infrastructure—and a battlefield. Sensors can be compromised. Reports can be manufactured. Confidence can be simulated. A system can be wrong, persuasive, and utterly certain at the same time.

In this future, no human can outfly machines that react in microseconds. The people who matter are the ones who can recognize a distorted pattern, demand to see the evidence, and look beyond the feed.

The Plumb Test is predictive science fiction about artificial intelligence, automated decision-making, information warfare, and the fragile human habit of independent judgment. It asks what happens when people increasingly rely on systems they cannot inspect—and what kind of person can still tell the difference between a useful tool and a voice quietly taking control.

At its heart, it is also a warm, affectionate fan homage to The Last Starfighter: a story of an ordinary young man from an ordinary place who learns that the universe is larger, stranger, and more in need of him than he ever imagined.

The wrapper is familiar.

The challenges within are unimaginable—almost.

Who do you believe when AI can shape every source of information?

Download PDF Here. The Plumb Test

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