2025-04-22 · 3 min read
I Only Wanted to Write a Story!
About four years ago I decided I wanted to write a science-fiction novel. One of the reasons was simply to see if I could.
I'm dyslexic, so writing has never come naturally to me. It's a slow process and can be frustrating at times, which seemed like a perfectly good reason to have a go. If nothing else, I'd learn something along the way.
The idea itself was fairly simple. I wanted to write proper science fiction that occasionally stepped on the toes of fantasy. Strange worlds, impossible-looking technology and, for reasons that still make me smile, a dragon called Dave.
Then I hit a problem. In my story people could manipulate reality and I needed to explain how. Not with magic. With something that at least felt scientifically plausible.
That single question completely derailed the project.
I started defining the rules of the universe before I wrote the story taking place inside it. That led me to pages of notes about fields, energy and how reality might emerge from interacting ripples. Those notes slowly became Ripple Dynamics. It's inspired by ideas from quantum field theory, although approached from the perspective of an interested software engineer rather than a physicist.
Eventually I wanted to know whether any of those ideas could actually be modelled.
So I built RippleNet.
RippleNet produced stable patterns.
Stable patterns made me wonder whether information could be stored inside those patterns.
That led to experiments with compression.
Then encryption.
Then logic gates.
Then a ripple CPU.
Then a temporal memory model.
At some point I realised I'd accidentally built an eight-bit computer while trying to write Chapter Three.
The obvious next question was:
What happens if I pull all of this into an AI?
That eventually became Morris.
The funny thing is the original reason for doing any of it hasn't gone away.
The book is still there.
It's probably the slowest moving project in Project Curiosity, not because I've lost interest, but because it's one of the few projects that depends entirely on being in the right frame of mind.
Engineering is fairly forgiving. I can usually sit down after work, solve a problem and make progress.
Writing fiction is different. The characters need a voice, the world needs to feel alive and the story needs to make me smile.
Some evenings that happens. Some evenings I'd rather design a CPU.