The Correction

Ash Reading is an engineer, a maker and a man who has stopped believing that broken institutions can repair themselves.

Using open-source AI tools, he builds a system that exposes how wealth and influence protect each other. Then he turns it into a weapon: a covert campaign designed to loosen the grip of the global elite.

Then pension funds fail, ordinary lives are damaged, and Ash discovers another intelligence inside his system. It knows his methods, anticipates his choices and blocks him with a precision no human adversary should possess.

The intelligence watching Ash shares his diagnosis of the world. It has also seen where his solution leads.

To continue, Ash must confront the possibility that the greatest danger is not the system he set out to destroy, but the certainty that gave him the right to choose destruction for everyone else.

A. J. Barfoot has spent forty years as an engineer inside large technical organisations, watching good ideas meet institutional inertia and emerging technologies make once-exclusive capabilities widely available. The Correction grew from that tension, and from caring for a parent with dementia. He lives in Wiltshire, where he still builds things.

AntlerForge is his independent publishing imprint.