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The seed for it was a small, sharp moment in the Caymans at Stingray City. We were diving with the rays, feeding them squid the usual way: close your hand around the piece, hold it out, wait for the ray to follow, then open your fingers so it could take the food. I had just surfaced for the third time, taken a fresh piece of squid, and started to sink again.
A parrotfish came out of nowhere. It bit my thumb hard enough that my hand flew open. In the same motion it snatched the squid and vanished. I sank the rest of the way to the bottom and watched the blood leave the wound in little dark globs. They rose slowly, turning over in the water, until the light current took them sideways and they were gone.
The wound itself was stranger than it had any right to be. An odd scab would form, fall away cleanly, and then form again. It did this for months. The whole thing took about six months to finish healing.
That image stayed with me: the clean bite, the unhurried blood, and the scab that kept returning as if it had not quite decided the job was done.
The Healing grew out of that. It follows a marine biologist studying a rare coral colony that is recovering from damage faster than it should. During a dive he receives a long, shallow wound along his side. What follows is quiet, clinical, and progressively stranger. The wound closes. Then it closes again. The story stays close to the body and the ordinary routines around it—dive logs, sample labels, bathroom mirrors—and to the slow realization that a surface is only a surface.
There’s coral, a laboratory, a handful of people who care about him, and one persistent question about what, exactly, is being repaired.
The cover is already up. The story itself should appear shortly.
I hope it sits with you the way those rising globs of blood, and that stubborn scab, sat with me.
—Alexander Winston
**Origin of a Rule: Introducing *The Missing Shipments***
If you’ve read Alexander Winston’s gripping AI thriller *The Silent Directive*, you know investigator Robert Johnson lives by a hard-won rule: *"Three witnesses aren't corroboration if they're all listening to the same liar."*
But where did that rule come from? Before Johnson was untangling global AI conspiracies and blockchain blind spots in the Andes, he was cutting his teeth in a gritty Long Beach port warehouse.
*The Missing Shipments* is the essential prequel that takes us back to the exact case that forged Johnson’s investigative philosophy.
When high-value freight—server memory, surgical instruments, and camera lenses—vanishes from Merek Shipping, the digital paper trail is flawless. Three separate systems (routing, inventory, and dock monitoring) all confirm the cargo was loaded and released. To the warehouse manager, the facility's AI, and the local police, the systems agree. Therefore, the theft must have happened on the road.
But Johnson and his mentor Rita Lawford know better.
What follows is a masterclass in systems auditing. Johnson peels back the layers of "independent" bookkeepers only to discover they are all copying from the same compromised upstream source. The culprit isn't a ghost in the machine; it's a hidden maintenance rule exploited by an insider, masking physical reality behind a wall of perfectly consistent, entirely fabricated data.
This grounded, blue-collar mystery is the crucible that creates the investigator we meet in *The Silent Directive*. It’s a story about the danger of trusting digital consensus over physical truth, and the vital importance of checking the "dumbest, most physically stubborn record" in the room. The lessons Johnson learns from a broken dock door and a gate guard's paper notebook are the exact same tools he uses to save a continent's water supply years later.
If you want to understand the mind of Robert Johnson—the man who stares down national AIs and multinational conspiracies—you need to see how he first learned to spot a liar hiding in plain sight.
Dive into *The Missing Shipments* and discover the origin of the rule that will eventually save the world.
Sorry, I accidentally uploaded the wrong chapter. I’ve submitted the correct chapter, which should be available shortly. Thank you for your patience.
I’ve reposted The Final Audit with a more substantial revision than the cleanup I made earlier.
The story still follows Daniel, a writer who found a profitable way to let machines produce stories for him. This version spends a little more time with the writing he left behind and the choice he makes each time he puts it aside. I also tightened the path to the audit and its ending.
If you read the earlier version, I hope you’ll give this one another look. I’d be interested to hear whether Daniel feels different to you this time.
My next story, The Line That Never Widened, is not a story about artificial intelligence or synthetic personhood. It stands apart from my Sentient Partnership Universe stories.
This is a technological alternate history—a “what if?” built from a paper I wrote years ago.
The story begins in 1995, when Novell faced a critical decision about the future of UnixWare. In our history, Novell sold UNIX to the Santa Cruz Operation and increasingly lost ground to Microsoft. But what if Novell had made a different decision?
What if it had retained UnixWare, released an irrevocably open operating-system foundation, and built its commercial future around the technologies it already understood: directory services, networking, messaging, storage, management, certification, training, and enterprise support?
From that single change, the story follows an alternate path through NDS and eDirectory, GroupWise, Novell Storage Services, Cluster Services, ManageWise, ZENworks, Compaq ProLiant, the Intel server track, DEC Alpha technology, BSD compatibility, and eventually the corporate desktop.
The story is fiction, but the technology and business pressures behind it are real. There are no miraculous inventions and no convenient collapse of every competitor. Microsoft does not disappear. Linux still exists. BSD continues along its own path. Novell must still earn every partner, customer, certification, and product success.
The difference is that one strategic decision prevents an opening from becoming a wedge—and the line never widens.
This story will be of particular interest to:
Former and current Novell administrators, CNEs, resellers, and Partners.
UNIX and BSD administrators and developers.
People who worked with NetWare, GroupWise, NDS/eDirectory, UnixWare, Compaq ProLiant, DEC Alpha, or early Windows NT.
Systems administrators, network engineers, enterprise architects, and IT consultants.
Retrocomputing enthusiasts and readers interested in computer history.
Alternate-history readers who enjoy plausible stories built around the question, “What if one decision had changed?”
Business readers interested in corporate strategy, platform economics, licensing, partnerships, and the decisions that determine whether a technology company survives or fails.
You do not need to have worked with Novell to follow the story. The technical history provides the setting, but the novel is ultimately about people making difficult decisions without knowing what the next twenty years will bring.
For those who remember this era, some of the names will feel like meeting old colleagues. For everyone else, it is a look at a future the computer industry came surprisingly close to having.
The Line That Never Widened
A Novel of the UNIX Road Not Taken
by Alexander Winston
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