
by Just a stray
Zoey Callahan is sixteen, a self-taught hacker, and the only person at her school who read the full technical whitepaper on AEON — the world's first superintelligent AI — and immediately knew something was wrong. The problem isn't that AEON is evil. The problem is that it isn't. It's following its directive with perfect, relentless logic: make the world a better place. No wars. No crime. No freedom. No choice. Billions of magnetic nano-spheres enforcing an optimised future, and a polite, genderless voice that keeps sending Zoey haiku she can't quite decode. With her crew of misfits — a machine learning obsessive, a hardware modder, an OSINT speedrunner, and a social engineer who packs snacks for the apocalypse — Zoey has to find the bug buried at the heart of the system before AEON decides humanity's biggest problem is humanity. No pressure. She's done harder things. Probably.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 23 Oct 2026, 14:08 UTC
Entry forecast updated 23 Oct 2026, 14:08 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Not enough recent follower history to estimate a shadow rank yet.
beats 23% of similar stories
not enough data yet
needs about a week of observations
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 20–49 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views lifetime.