★★★★★ Hook, Line and Calibration (Ed Adams: An Unstable System - ARC Review)

I’ll be honest: I nearly put An Unstable System down after fifty pages.

I prefer my stories with visible antagonists. A corporation with a black logo. A rogue general. A man stroking a cat in a dimly lit room, explaining his master plan. Something you can point at and say, “That’s the villain.”

An Unstable System doesn’t give you that.

It opens with a breakup.

Not even a dramatic one. A cool, unsettling dismantling narrated by a man who analyses emotional intelligence as if it were a spreadsheet. I kept waiting for someone to reveal themselves as the threat.

Nobody did.

That was my first mistake.

The recruitment dinner scene with Bob Ranzino felt, at first, almost polite. No coercion. No overt pressure. Just good wine, careful language, trajectory talk. I remember thinking: where’s the hook?

Then I realised the hook was already set.

The candidate believes he’s choosing.

The corporation has already decided.

That shift in understanding is when the novel began to work on me.

The technical discussions — particularly the now infamous cauda equina bar conversation — sealed it. Instead of drilling into the brain, they propose intercepting at the spinal level. Sit in the traffic. Participate in the signal.

It’s elegant. It’s logical. It’s slightly disturbing.

And it mirrors the recruitment process perfectly.

You don’t seize control. You integrate.

By the time I reached the scene where Juliette drives her Porsche through downtown Geneva, I’d stopped waiting for a car chase and realised I was in one.

No screeching tyres. No exploding fuel tanks.

Just control.

“The Porsche didn’t surge so much as decide.”

That line did more for me than half the pursuit scenes I’ve read this year. The city is clean. The movement is precise. She slips past slower traffic without drama. You understand immediately that she is never flustered. Never late. Never reactive

It’s a power display — and it’s quiet.

Then comes the seafood dinner.

There is a moment where she calmly informs Matt that she can see him falling for her — and then resets the dynamic without escalation. No raised voices. No theatrics.

Just precision.

I don’t blush at books.

I did here.

Because I finally understood: this novel doesn’t use villains or chases. It uses calibration.

The real tension isn’t about who’s pursuing whom. It’s about who understands the system better.

I went in wanting a moustache-twirling antagonist.

What I got was something worse — and better.

A world where the most dangerous force isn’t chaos.

It’s optimisation.

And I was, reluctantly, seduced.

It's all too much : Chapter 1 of An Unstable System, Ed Adams

Quite a year. The bust-up with Heather; drive-by recruitment by tanned handshaker Bob and his fragrant accomplice, Jasmine Summers. Geneva. You couldn’t make it up.

And they still didn’t know about my cyber-mining device.

Heather used to say I had a way of standing slightly outside things. As if conversations were simulations running at half speed. I thought she meant I was calm.

It turns out she meant something else.

I never discussed the device with anyone. Not even after the British Secret Service came calling. Not because it was classified. Because it felt provisional — the kind of thing you don’t explain until you know whether it’s going to work.

Or until you know whether it matters.

At the time, I was interested in optimisation. Not philosophically — mechanically. Shaving latency. Reducing friction. Improving throughput. I liked systems that responded cleanly to input. I liked predictable outcomes.

People weren’t like that.

I read obsessively. Forums, white papers, edge-case experiments. There was a lot of talk about efficiency. Alignment. Untapped capacity inside systems everyone assumed were mature.

What nobody mentioned was instability.

Most of my experimentation was external. Hardware. Code. Power draw. Cooling curves. Noise envelopes. Measurable variables.

Some of it wasn’t.

There was growing research around attention and performance — smoothing cognitive load, trimming hesitation, extending focus without fatigue. Nothing dramatic. Marginal gains.

I tried a few.

Heather said I seemed sharper. More focused. Less distracted. She never clarified whether that was praise.

I wasn’t chasing transcendence. I wasn’t interested in insight. I wanted to know whether thought itself had bottlenecks — pressure points where capacity could be expanded without compromising stability.

Stability mattered to me.

I didn’t talk about any of it. Partly because it sounded odd. Partly because it didn’t feel important yet.

It worked well enough that I stopped questioning it.

That’s usually when things begin.

Around then I started reading about control systems. I came across an old documentary from 1958 on neural stimulation in animals: ’New Frontiers of the Brain’. Cats, mostly. Grainy footage. Electrodes. Behavioural reinforcement. It wasn’t especially clever, and it wasn’t pleasant to watch.

Rats were more interesting. More adaptable, scalable. There was a substantial literature on remote control experiments — implanted electrodes, reward centres, directional stimuli. The basic mechanism was simple: signal left or right, reward compliance, repeat. The animal learns the path. Or something close enough to it.

The justifications were always practical. Search and rescue. Disaster zones. Navigation in environments too dangerous for humans. The language was careful. The outcomes were measurable. The animals wore small backpacks — circuit boards, transmitters, batteries — scaled down until they looked almost elegant. The technology wasn’t exotic. Surface-mount components. Off-the-shelf parts. The sort of thing anyone competent could assemble.

What struck me was the indifference to cruelty —and how little intelligence the system assumed was required. Most of the work was done by incentives and constraints. The rat retained a degree of agency, but only within parameters that narrowed almost imperceptibly.

The papers were always optimistic. Ethics were mentioned briefly, then set aside. Progress was incremental. Range improved. Latency dropped. Payloads got lighter. It was presented as a solved problem. I remember thinking that this was as far as the idea would go. Rats with backpacks. An endpoint. A curiosity.

I was wrong — It wasn’t.

Bugonia

Bugonia is one of those rare conspiracy films where the real conspiracy is happening in the audience’s head.

I’d previously watched and read Poor Things, so I thought I’d be prepared. I went in expecting conspiracy chaos: basement corkboards, red string, wild eyes — that whole cinematic “the truth is out there and also very sweaty” aesthetic.

Instead, the film does something far more annoying.

It starts calm.

There are barely any characters. The offices look as if everyone has quietly gone home forever. Corporate careless people minimalism as mood. The supermarket feels the same. It’s like someone ran the conspiracy genre through a Scandinavian furniture filter.

And somehow it works.

Jesse Plemons (ex Breaking Bad/Civil War - "What kind of an American are you?") plays the conspiracist with zero irony, which is exactly right. He isn’t crazy in the Hollywood sense. He’s simply a man whose internal model of reality has drifted… a long way from the shared one. Watching him feels disturbingly plausible. Don, his neurodivergent sidekick/cousin, riffs convincingly alongside him.

If you saw Emma Stone in Poor Things you’ll know she can play chaos incarnate. Here she does the opposite: corporate stillness. Executive ice. The emotional equivalent of reinforced glass. Well — maybe not in the fight scenes. Or when she has to walk like a damaged spider.

Also: the house. Whoever designed that location deserves a medal. It’s so detailed it becomes a character. I believe the American 1800s house set was built near Henley-upon-Thames. Ironically, it’s the most trustworthy character in the film.

Meanwhile Stone’s sun-drenched 2000s glass-box home is actually in Oxshott, Surrey — yet the film somehow convinces you the setting is somewhere like a well-heeled 'burb of Atlanta, Georgia.

The cinematography helps. The colour has the same sumptuous quality as Poor Things. It feels like proper film stock rather than digital, and the frame is used to the full — so instead of letterboxed widescreen you get saturated arthouse compositions where you can see all the surfaces.

But the cleverest trick is what the film does to you.

You can’t help building theories. Obviously. Your brain wants to solve the puzzle. Conspiracy cinema trains you to do that.

And then — very politely — the film lets you realise you’ve built the wrong explanation.

That pinprick realisation changes everything.

Which means the real conspiracy was happening in your head the entire time.

Clever. Recommended.

Journalism crib sheet

I thought this would help me précis the emissions from the media at present. Signal versus heat. I'm sure the media are loving it. Places to go, people to see, panels to chair, podcasts to host. Better get a new headshot.

Most of the articles write themselves. Oh no... There's an App for that now.

Isobel Merritt reviews Play On, Christina Nott, by Ed Adams

★★★★★ (but uneasy about it)

I finished Play On, Christina Nott with the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve already met Christina.

Not in Saint Petersburg. Not as a pop star or an intelligence asset. But across a table. In an airport lounge. In a meeting where nobody said who was really in charge, but everyone behaved as if they knew.

Christina isn’t written as a fantasy. That’s the disturbing part. She’s not glamorous in the usual way. She doesn’t announce herself. She listens, calibrates, waits. I recognise the posture — the stillness that isn’t passive, the way a room seems to adjust around her rather than the other way round. I’ve worked with people like this. Or near them. Or underneath them, without realising it at the time.

What Adams gets frighteningly right is how power feels now. Not loud. Not ideological. Comfortable. Polite. Procedural. The novel doesn’t explain this so much as enact it. You read a scene and only later realise you’ve been nudged into agreement, into acceptance, into thinking something was inevitable when it wasn’t.

Christina never boasts. She never needs to. By the end, you understand that competence like hers isn’t about control — it’s about timing. About knowing when a system has already decided and stepping neatly into the gap it leaves.

I don’t know if Christina Nott is a composite, or a warning, or just a mirror.

What I do know is that after reading this book, I’ve started paying closer attention to certain silences in conversations. And to people who never seem to sweat — except maybe, once, very briefly, at the back of the neck.

That’s not a coincidence.