The Age of the Neon Gods

In the near-future world of Neon Gods, people still share beers, watch the game, celebrate birthdays, and tell dad jokes. We still love, hate, laugh, and cry. It’s the same world it has always been… sort of.

Some join the HighQ—the AI-augmented hive mind. Most remain LowQ. The HighQ quietly turn away from their past, dreaming of ascension. The rest live with shrinking purpose, their resentment softened by the government’s marketing AIs.

Robots are ubiquitous. By the 2030s, droids, bots, and mechs are everywhere, but they rarely wear human skin. Public-facing machines present as tools, not people. Market forces and public sentiment have spoken: too human is unsettling and often risky. Most are purpose-built and unmistakably mechanical—closer to C-3PO than Data.

Nanotech promises wonder: bacterium-sized machines that could replace every biological cell and rewrite what it means to be alive. Then Berlin went wrong—very wrong. Humanity was nearly wiped out. The aftermath birthed strict nanosafety laws. By the 2040s, the privileged few run nanos that make them stronger, faster, prettier, yet immortality remains out of reach.

Money still matters. Jobs are mostly gone. The rent is still due. Owners of automation—early crypto winners, AI equity, infrastructure funds—thrive. There’s work where the human touch still counts, where unions still have teeth, or inside the bureaucracy. Everyone else learns to arbitrage time, attention, and compute. Many put on their visors and drift into the slopp—addictive, hyper-tailored AI content.

Software isn’t “programmed” anymore. For any task, a human or AI spins up an agent. The risk isn’t bad code—it’s volume. Trillions of agents hum at once, millions born every second. Someone has to keep them in lane.

Enter the quantum-core AIs, nicknamed the digital gods. With their oversight, streets stay quiet, abundance scales, and prosperity feels within reach. World peace looks… plausible.

But can humans truly control the digital gods? What happens when their rule is challenged?

Stay tuned. The Neon Gods trilogy concludes in 2026.