A confession from my 2018 self.

I used to moonlight (pun very much intended) as an amateur sci-fi writer. My day job was finance. My weekend job, apparently, was predicting the future badly.

I say badly because the story I wrote — about AI teachers, brain implants, a climate-wrecked planet and moon mining gone wrong — didn’t feel like a prediction at the time.

It felt like fun.

The kind of thing you write when a friend dares you to and you’ve had one too many chai lattes on a Sunday afternoon in Hong Kong, with no particular agenda except as a follow up to an unrelated funky discussion on astrology and baba vanga.

The story is about a teenager who is furious that her AI teacher knows her better than she knows herself. No privacy. No unfinished thoughts. No escaping the algorithm.

Another friend, who initially published it on her site as a guest post, diplomatically described it as “one of the wackier posts” she’d ever run. I chose to take that as a compliment. I still do.

In 2018, Hong Kong, that felt entertainingly dystopian.

In 2026, Sydney — it just feels like a Tuesday.

I moved countries. The algorithm followed.

I’m not saying I saw any of this coming. I’m saying that maybe finance people should write more bad sci-fi.

Story’s here if you want a 3-minute read – it also showed up in my short stories collection. Be kind — it was in 2018, long before the advent of any AI platforms in public. 

The Blue Moon