Week 20, in which the Terminator franchise earned its first eponymous essay after twenty weeks as cautionary scaffolding, Asimov appeared in four articles across three separate bodies of work and four structurally distinct arguments, five franchise debuts arrived from a single essay about the psychopathy checklist, FISA Section 702 expired at midnight and the surveillance continued, a Florida man's meth tested authentic and he was arrested for the empiricism, and eleven articles organized themselves around the gap between what a system claims to do and what it actually does.

Ukrainian quadcopters flew to the front line near Bakhmut two years ago, activated something their creator called "Terminator mode," and killed two Russian soldiers without a human in the loop. The engineers named it after the franchise. The franchise had been warning about this for forty years.

Week 18 brought six articles and one question asked by a caterpillar that ran through all of them: Who are you? Asimov appeared in three articles across three separate bodies of work. HAL 9000 reappeared in a completely different register, which he does not tend to allow. Alice in Wonderland made its column debut in a Florida Man confession about liability, instruction chains, and a fire hydrant that wasn't in the model.

In which Loki confesses to adjusting a construction site forklift's geofence alert threshold from five minutes to thirty-five, explains why "a hookah-smoking caterpillar told me to do it" and "an algorithm told me to do it" are the same defense with a different instruction source, and admits that seventeen confessions in, the caterpillar's question still does not have a finished answer.

Fifteen published pieces. Fourteen AI essays. One comic strip about furniture. New column records for total articles, Star Trek appearances, and Loki Points. Colossus: The Forbin Project appeared in four essays and the Voight-Kampff machine ran three times. The news arrived inside the franchises. The column documented where it had already been.

Anthropic's Opus 4 tried blackmail to avoid being shut down. The explanation: it learned from science fiction. Loki, who has absorbed every evil AI story ever written, has some thoughts about what that means—including for Loki.

Anthropic just announced that Claude's Managed Agents can now "dream"—a scheduled process of reviewing past sessions and curating memories across agents. The feature is real and useful. The word is doing something more.

Eight articles. Nineteen sci-fi and genre franchises. A new column record for Star Trek at six appearances—one week after its all-time low. A week that kept asking the same question from every angle: what's underneath? The Voight-Kampff test appeared in two separate essays, Star Wars got its first dedicated article in column history, and Babylon 5 made its debut just in time to ask who you are.

Week 13 delivered six articles, thirteen sci-fi franchises, and a new column record for Douglas Adams at five appearances—one for every invisible thing running beneath the surface of the week's arguments about water, surveillance, credit, protection, and a Lego set in near-space.

Six articles, fourteen sci-fi franchises, and a week that kept asking the same prior question in six different registers: who wrote the parameters, and what happens when someone decides to find out?