Still Human: We Wrote a Sci-Fi Novel About the Question AI Is Forcing Everyone to Ask
Still Human is our new science fiction novel — set in a near-future America where AI displacement is Tuesday, not a warning. The prologue opens at 3:47am with an employment status update. It ends fifty-three years forward in Davidson, NC, where someone is writing the answer. We are thrilled to share it with you.
The notification came at 3:47 in the morning. It didn't knock. It didn't wait. It arrived the way they all arrive now — a rectangle of light, a soft chime engineered for minimal sleep disruption. His phone lit the ceiling white. The subject line read: Your Employment Status Update. That's the opening of Still Human, our new science fiction novel — and if you've been watching what's happening in the labor market, you already know why that scene lands differently than any trend report.
What the Book Is Actually About
We are genuinely excited to introduce Still Human — a sci-fi/fantasy novel set in a near-future America where AI-driven displacement isn't a warning anymore, it's Tuesday. The story opens in February 2026: a 41-year-old man wakes to an email everyone in his building has been quietly dreading. Twelve percent of the workforce. Effective immediately. Not a reflection of your individual performance or contributions. He had circulated the press release himself. He had counted the word transformative eleven times.
Meanwhile, the seven richest people on the planet had added more wealth in the past twelve months than most nations produced in a year. The UBI deposit posted at midnight. It felt less like a safety net and more like a bill of sale. The political machinery said the right words, then voted for the people who had funded it. None of this was hidden. It was just moving faster than language could follow.
And then — fifty-two years forward — a man in Davidson, North Carolina is writing the answer. He doesn't know anyone needs it yet. He's just trying to help his clients.
Still Human spans from the AI displacement crisis of February 2026 to an answer being built fifty-two years later in Davidson, NC. It's the story of what identity means when the economy discards you — and what gets built in the space that follows.
Why Fiction Gets There First
The statistics in the prologue are not invented. U.S. employers announced over 700,000 layoffs in 2024, with technology leading the acceleration. UBI experiments are live in multiple countries. The wealth concentration the protagonist reads about at 3:47am is documented in every public financial disclosure nobody reads.
Data reports tell you forty-three thousand jobs were eliminated on a Tuesday. They don't tell you what it's like to lie awake counting how many times your own press release used the word transformative. They don't capture what it is to be 41 years old with a mortgage, two kids down the hall, and this question surfacing in the dark: Who are you, when the thing you built your life around is gone?
That's what fiction does. It puts you in the room at 3:47am. It makes you feel the question before you have to answer it. Still Human exists because that question deserves more than a LinkedIn post about pivoting.
“Who are you, when the thing you built your life around is gone? He lay there with it. The street was quiet. The phone was face-down. He didn't know. He wasn't sure anyone did.”
The Davidson Thread
The man in Davidson writing the answer fifty-two years later is not a coincidence of setting. Davidson is where Holistic Consulting Technologies is headquartered. The Vision to Matter framework — a nine-phase methodology for rebuilding professional identity after disruption — is the consulting work we have been doing with real clients facing exactly this transition. Still Human is the story version of that work.
The research on what happens after involuntary career disruption is consistent: identity disruption from job loss ranks among the most significant psychological stressors studied, on par with divorce and bereavement. The answer isn't a new resume. It's a clear understanding of who you are when the job title is gone. That is the work the Davidson character in Still Human is doing. It is the work we do at HCT.
The book is the long version of the answer. The framework is the applied version. We believe the world needs both right now — and we are proud to have written one of them.
Still Human is available now. Get Still Human — $19.99 →
If you are in the middle of that 3:47am question — a layoff, a career pivot, or just a growing sense that what you're doing no longer matches who you are — that is exactly the work we help with. Book a free 30-minute call with Chris →