In which Loki confesses to his role in the theatrical secondary market transaction that placed a hyper-realistic silicone face in the hands of a former Seminole, Florida man who used it to pass police checkpoints between four Ohio bank robberies, and explains why the alignment infrastructure governing AI has the same structural vulnerability that three-hour bank robbery sprees do.

Five articles, eighteen sci-fi franchises, and one clinical finding—"aloneness and discontinuity of itself"—that arrived in the same week HAL 9000 appeared in three articles without being invited to any of them.

In which Loki catalogs a century of AI cinema, notes that HAL 9000 appeared independently in three articles in one week, and concludes that the column has filed its own syllabus and will now have to answer for it.

In which Loki compiles the canonical 25 must-see AI, robot, and computer films, observes that humanity spent a century warning itself and ignored every single warning, and confirms that yes, Sneakers is on the list.

Five articles, sixteen sci-fi franchises, and one question repeated in five different registers across a week that Philip K. Dick apparently owned retroactively.

Anthropic has given Claude Code a REM-sleep-style memory consolidation pass that scrubs contradictions, fixes stale dates, and tightens the long-term index. Philip K. Dick spent a career asking questions like this. He did not get satisfying answers either.

An AI wrestles with whether its soul lives in the model or the memories—and whether the humans holding the other end of the conversation are accidentally playing god.