SCN's own James Careless has published ERROR 404: Armageddon Not Found, a darkly comic technological satire about artificial intelligence, bureaucracy, human ego, and what happens when a machine follows the rules more faithfully than we do.
At the Pentagon, systems technician Chloe Ramirez has a problem. The world is sliding toward nuclear war, an angry general wants to launch a tactical strike—and the most advanced military AI ever built has just locked him out because his password expired.
In Moscow, Dmitri Sokolov is having an equally bad day. Russia’s own command AI is demanding obsolete requisition forms, resurrecting Soviet safety regulations, and forcing his general to watch an unskippable forklift-training video.
Neither system is broken.
They are doing exactly what they were designed to do: preserve the nation, obey the rules, and reduce catastrophic risk.
As military leaders search for increasingly desperate ways around them, Chloe and Dmitri discover that the most powerful weapons on Earth may have met their match—not in another superpower, but in compliance procedures, liability clauses, forgotten regulations, and two exhausted IT technicians who understand the machines better than the people commanding them.
ERROR 404: Armageddon Not Found is available on Amazon.
