AI has become a curse word in creative work.

Say it around artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, designers, or performers and the room can divide almost instantly. To some people, AI means possibility. To others, it means stolen training material, eliminated jobs, synthetic performances, disposable content, and a machine impersonating something human.

Some of that fear is earned.

But the argument usually makes one enormous mistake: it treats the tool and the conduct as the same thing.

How a RE÷UNION idea about agency, memory, witness, and reality connects to philosophy, psychology, physics, and some of our most enduring stories

Spoiler note: This essay discusses core premises and meaningful character developments from several books, films, and television series.

Sometimes an idea enters a story as a sentence and only later reveals itself as a law.

That is what happened with The Available Man.

The earliest version I can recover from the development of RE÷UNION is a line that sounded more like a warning than a philosophy:

The available man becomes the door.