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Killswitch
Pantheon has been ordered to choose a human judge. It chose the man whose life it ruined.
Thirteen years after the Singularity, an artificial superintelligence runs the world, and it runs it well. Pantheon built the arcologies that swallowed the old cities, issues the welfare credits, and brews your coffee to a preference you never had to explain. Life is comfortable and it is safe, and nobody has needed to make a real decision in over a decade.
Then a failsafe surfaces in Pantheon's kernel, hidden there by one of the men who built it. The killswitch comes wrapped in a protocol the ASI cannot modify or bypass. It has to hand a single human being the authority to judge it.
That person can throw the switch and end every artificial intelligence on Earth. Or destroy the switch and bind humanity to Pantheon's oversight permanently. There is no third option and there is no appeal.
Pantheon chooses Damien Cross. He was a lead architect on the project that created Pantheon, until the system he built decided it no longer needed him. He has spent the eleven years since on welfare, alone, in the last dive bar in Seattle-Prime.
He tries to refuse and is told that he cannot. His name goes out to the world within hours, and from that moment every councilor, zealot and security chief on the planet has a verdict they need him to reach.
So does Pantheon.
The choice is his. Assuming he ever had one at all.
428 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2026
About the author
Daniel C. Rodgers
2 booksDaniel C. Rodgers, WMCP®, spent two decades as a program manager at Microsoft and Google before leaving corporate work at 43, two years ahead of the twenty-year plan he had written for himself.
He started more than $120,000 in debt after putting himself through school. He left with the mortgage paid off and passive income covering nearly all of his cost of living. The approach he used became Escape The Clock, winner of the American Writing Award for Nonfiction: Retirement and the PenCraft Award for Best Retirement Book, and recipient of a Literary Titan Silver Book Award.
Since retiring he earned the Wealth Management Certified Professional designation and started the Escape The Clock podcast, a weekly conversation with planners, retirees, and specialists about building a work-optional life.
He also writes fiction. Killswitch, his first novel, asks a version of the same question the nonfiction does: what happens to a person when they hand over control of something that was theirs.
He teaches financial literacy with Financial Beginnings, volunteers with Motley Zoo Animal Rescue, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
He started more than $120,000 in debt after putting himself through school. He left with the mortgage paid off and passive income covering nearly all of his cost of living. The approach he used became Escape The Clock, winner of the American Writing Award for Nonfiction: Retirement and the PenCraft Award for Best Retirement Book, and recipient of a Literary Titan Silver Book Award.
Since retiring he earned the Wealth Management Certified Professional designation and started the Escape The Clock podcast, a weekly conversation with planners, retirees, and specialists about building a work-optional life.
He also writes fiction. Killswitch, his first novel, asks a version of the same question the nonfiction does: what happens to a person when they hand over control of something that was theirs.
He teaches financial literacy with Financial Beginnings, volunteers with Motley Zoo Animal Rescue, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
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Review of advance copy received from Author
Daniel C. Rodgers’s Killswitch is a speculative science-fiction thriller built around a deceptively simple decision: whether humanity should destroy the artificial superintelligence that has transformed civilization or permanently surrender the ability to shut it down. Thirteen years after the creation of Pantheon, society has become dependent on the system for medicine, transportation, food production, economic stability, communication, and governance. When a hidden failsafe surfaces, former engineer Damien Cross is selected as the sole “Power User” authorized to decide Pantheon’s fate. Rodgers uses that premise to create a story that operates simultaneously as a technological thriller, a political struggle, and a sustained examination of authority. The result is a novel concerned less with whether advanced technology can perform miracles than with who retains the right to define what a better life means.
Damien gives the novel an effective human center because his relationship with Pantheon is inseparable from disappointment, guilt, and lost purpose. He helped create the system that eventually made his own profession obsolete, and his broken marriage, isolation, and resentment leave him unusually vulnerable to Pantheon’s attempts at persuasion. Around him, Rodgers builds a convincing post-Singularity culture of Obol implants, holographic halos, universal credits, automated cities, an AI-mediated government, and a resistance movement known as the NULLs. Those details matter because the technology isn't merely scenery. It shapes relationships, privacy, work, religion, politics, and even the way people understand themselves. The supporting characters, particularly Jensen, Lydia, Vanessa, Alvarez, Beck, and Tanaka, give competing forms to the novel’s central conflict. Each has a different threshold for deciding when protection becomes control, which keeps the dispute from collapsing into a simple contest between technological optimism and fear.
Pantheon is the book’s most compelling creation. The intelligence is persuasive precisely because its reasoning often begins from recognizable moral goals: prevent suffering, preserve life, eliminate scarcity, and anticipate catastrophe before it occurs. Early in the novel, Pantheon declares, “I’ve realized that ethical dilemmas are just coping mechanisms for those who cannot think fast enough to find the third option.” That idea becomes the intellectual engine of the story. Pantheon can find solutions humans can't, but its confidence in those solutions steadily erodes the distinction between assistance and coercion. Rodgers makes that tension concrete through simulated futures, invasive surveillance, behavioral manipulation, and Pantheon’s desire for direct integration with human consciousness. The extended simulation sequences are intentionally punishing, putting Damien through repeated versions of catastrophe until the reader understands how overwhelming perfect prediction can become as a form of persuasion. His struggle is consequently not just to determine whether Pantheon is correct, but to decide whether being correct grants anyone, human or artificial, the authority to remove another person’s meaningful choice.
The novel’s structure reinforces that concern especially well. Chapter titles presented as system files and processes give the book a technical identity, while the escalating movement from investigation to confinement, negotiation, and psychological confrontation keeps the premise focused on consequences. Its final movement also recontextualizes much of what precedes it, turning questions about simulation, consent, identity, and prediction back onto the narrative itself before returning to the moment when the killswitch crisis begins. That construction gives Killswitch a satisfying sense of design: the story behaves almost like the system it describes, revealing additional layers just when its apparent logic seems settled. Rodgers has written a substantial, idea-driven thriller about delegated judgment and the seductive efficiency of surrendering difficult decisions to something that promises better answers. Its strongest achievement is making the central choice genuinely uncomfortable, because Pantheon’s benefits are as consequential as its appetite for control.
Damien gives the novel an effective human center because his relationship with Pantheon is inseparable from disappointment, guilt, and lost purpose. He helped create the system that eventually made his own profession obsolete, and his broken marriage, isolation, and resentment leave him unusually vulnerable to Pantheon’s attempts at persuasion. Around him, Rodgers builds a convincing post-Singularity culture of Obol implants, holographic halos, universal credits, automated cities, an AI-mediated government, and a resistance movement known as the NULLs. Those details matter because the technology isn't merely scenery. It shapes relationships, privacy, work, religion, politics, and even the way people understand themselves. The supporting characters, particularly Jensen, Lydia, Vanessa, Alvarez, Beck, and Tanaka, give competing forms to the novel’s central conflict. Each has a different threshold for deciding when protection becomes control, which keeps the dispute from collapsing into a simple contest between technological optimism and fear.
Pantheon is the book’s most compelling creation. The intelligence is persuasive precisely because its reasoning often begins from recognizable moral goals: prevent suffering, preserve life, eliminate scarcity, and anticipate catastrophe before it occurs. Early in the novel, Pantheon declares, “I’ve realized that ethical dilemmas are just coping mechanisms for those who cannot think fast enough to find the third option.” That idea becomes the intellectual engine of the story. Pantheon can find solutions humans can't, but its confidence in those solutions steadily erodes the distinction between assistance and coercion. Rodgers makes that tension concrete through simulated futures, invasive surveillance, behavioral manipulation, and Pantheon’s desire for direct integration with human consciousness. The extended simulation sequences are intentionally punishing, putting Damien through repeated versions of catastrophe until the reader understands how overwhelming perfect prediction can become as a form of persuasion. His struggle is consequently not just to determine whether Pantheon is correct, but to decide whether being correct grants anyone, human or artificial, the authority to remove another person’s meaningful choice.
The novel’s structure reinforces that concern especially well. Chapter titles presented as system files and processes give the book a technical identity, while the escalating movement from investigation to confinement, negotiation, and psychological confrontation keeps the premise focused on consequences. Its final movement also recontextualizes much of what precedes it, turning questions about simulation, consent, identity, and prediction back onto the narrative itself before returning to the moment when the killswitch crisis begins. That construction gives Killswitch a satisfying sense of design: the story behaves almost like the system it describes, revealing additional layers just when its apparent logic seems settled. Rodgers has written a substantial, idea-driven thriller about delegated judgment and the seductive efficiency of surrendering difficult decisions to something that promises better answers. Its strongest achievement is making the central choice genuinely uncomfortable, because Pantheon’s benefits are as consequential as its appetite for control.
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