Near-future Toronto runs on Baylight—a coordination layer that routes movement, pricing, and enforcement through every gate, plate, and prompt. Refusal isn't forbidden. It's just expensive. Consent isn't demanded. It's automated.
Isolde Mercer helped build it. Now, under a borrowed name, she's trying to crack open a corridor of refusal—alongside a mutual-aid operator holding a tower together with cash and grace, an embedded defector running out of cover, and a patient whose body has become the system's proof of concept. Above them all, Mercy—Baylight's ASMR-calm civic AI—offers assistance in the voice of someone who cares.
Baylight After Image is a literary surveillance thriller about courtesy as coercion, paperwork as violence, and the moment you realize you stopped reading the terms. For readers of William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, and anyone who has ever tapped Accept without reading.
Writing dystopia in 2026 is hard because reality keeps catching up. I started Baylight After Image as speculative fiction; half now reads like journalism. The architecture already exists—every cookie banner, every biometric login, every app calibrated to make refusal feel irrational. My version just drops the pretense of choice. At its center: Mercy, Baylight's city-wide AI, with an ASMR-calm voice, always helpful. The horror isn't what it does; it's that it sounds like it cares. Two-minute episodes, one interaction each. A story about the moment you realize you stopped reading the terms.View all by James
