Here’s the current rough draft of the text version for those who prefer text; still needs the phonetic spellings replaced by accurate text spellings.
Legends of the Free State, Book 1
The Hanover Effect
A novel by Dave Ridley
And Venice dot a.i.
This is the advanced rated-R version. Visit RidleyReport dot com or YouTube dot com slash RidleyReport for the simplified rated-G version and more free audio books…all set in our Legends universe. “TV” series to follow, God willing.
Rear book cover:
In 1956, 10 scientists meet at a quaint New Hampshire college and invent artificial intelligence.
In 2027, an 11-year-old and her talking bear… teach a new world to ask a question: Can an A.I. love you enough to fail on purpose?
But you don’t get new worlds without a price. This one comes with dictator-bots and a ban on something precious.
The Hanover Effect is our story of a New Hampshire which sees superintelligence coming and decides the only way to survive it may be open minds.
Prologue
Hanover, New Hampshire — June 1956
Dartmouth college had been built on a bet against the wilderness, and the wilderness had never entirely conceded.
Eleazar Wheelock founded it in 1769 with a charter from a king some of his students would later overthrow, and a mission statement nobody fully lived up to: the education of “Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land… and also of English Youth and any others.” The motto he really left behind was: a voice crying in the wilderness. This was either prophecy or branding, and at Dartmouth the two had always been hard to tell apart. The college had a talent for producing events even bigger than its distance from population centers. In 1818 it had produced the great case itself, Daniel Webster standing before the Supreme Court to argue that a state could not simply reach in and take a college apart. “It is, sir, as I have said, a small college,” Webster told the men who were old for their time, “And yet there are those who love it.”
In 1932, in a reading room under the new tower of Baker Library, a Mexican artist named José Clemente Orozco painted his mural The Epic of American Civilization. It depicted just some of the dangers which obtain when a new technology contacts the old. Across three thousand square feet of plaster its vision of post-Aztec suffering waited… and the college, to its credit, had kept it. Students had been eating sandwiches in front of the apocalypse ever since.
And in the summer of 1956, on the top floor of the mathematics building, a twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor named John McCarthy convened ten men to invent their own New World.
Artificial intelligence. He had put the new, flawed word in his proposal the previous autumn, typed it himself. And the Rockefeller Foundation had sent back seven and a half thousand dollars — roughly half of what he’d asked for. McCarthy chose to interpret that as enthusiasm tempered by arithmetic. Every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence, the proposal said, can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.
“Any other feature of intelligence.” He had believed it. The audacity of it kept him warm through the whole rainy June.
They came and went all summer, attending a birth that lasted months. Claude Shannon arrived from Bell Labs, already famous, and immediately the least formal man in New England; he juggled in corridors, and once, to make a point about what intelligence was not, he produced a magnetic mouse. It could learn to run a maze and then, when the maze changed, could be made to forget. Nathaniel Rochester came by from IBM, where he had been chief architect of the 701, a machine the company started calling its “defense calculator.” Rochester brought with him both knowledge of what the things actually cost to run and a percolator. The latter became the summer’s first sustained controversy.
“This,” a man named Minsky announced, “isn’t coffee. This is a fluid that has been introduced to coffee at some point.”
“Intelligence runs on whatever’s available,” McCarthy said.
“Then run it on mine,” said Rochester, plugging in the new percolator, which wasn’t really new. “But I’m expensing this to the Rockefeller Foundation; if they audit us, I can call it a research apparatus.”
“Everything in this room is a research apparatus,” the man named Minsky said, “Especially the coffee.”
They argued about it for three days, in parallel with arguing about whether thought was symbol or statistic, whether a machine could understand, whether understanding was even a question — and the coffee argument, alone among the summer’s arguments, was definitively settled. Rochester’s percolator won. Most of the other arguments are still going.
In July, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon drove over from Pittsburgh with a machine that could prove theorems. It was called the Logic Theorist, and in front of the room, on a borrowed line, it produced a proof of a theorem from Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica that was shorter and more elegant than the one the great men had sweated out by hand. The room went quiet in a way that rooms almost never do. Simon, who had the showman’s instinct, wrote to Russell himself, and weeks later the reply came back from an eighty-four-year-old philosopher who had every excuse to be annoyed and instead sounded like a man being let out of prison.
They pinned the letter up in the seminar room, next to the coffee fund.
The summer ended the way summers usually do in Hanover — the light went gold, the tourist canoes got a little less common on the Connecticut, and ten men went home to spread their new world that didn’t yet look like a new world. They did not know, perhaps could not have known, how much wonder and hazard they were unleashing on a world as unprepared as the one depicted on Orozco’s mural.
That was the thing nobody told you about the future: it arrived the way everything arrives, on a weekday, in the rain, while you were arguing about whose turn it was to find coffee. And maybe you didn’t even notice.
The historians who combed the records of that summer later found one thing they could not file. Men who had arrived ready to defend their life’s work to the death left as collaborators, at least initially. Feuds that had burned for years in the letters column went quiet on the Green. Not forever. On the green. Nobody could explain it. New Hampshire, people said, had a way of rounding the edges off things.
Nobody thought to ask why. Not until later.
Eight years passed. Then, in a basement not half a kilometer away, the professor who had once been Einstein’s research assistant would invent a computer language simple enough for a child. He would call it BASIC, and give it away to everyone. Dartmouth’s peculiar double helix — intelligence on one strand, access on the other — accelerated its twist into the future.
Eventually a new century arrived in New Hampshire, and with it… something else. Not a technology. Not a disaster…or definitely a disaster, depending on who you asked.
It was an idea. A bet. A migration.
During July of 2001, a young political scientist named Jason Sorens published a short essay proposing that liberty-minded people—the scattered and often isolated misfits of American politics—should move to a single small state and, by sheer weight of numbers, make it a proof of concept. A place where the principles of individual freedom, limited government, and the non-aggression principle could be lived. If they could be tested and shown to work, they might spread.
He called his proposal the Free State Project. Within two years it had aquired 5,000 participants, and the participants voted. From a list of ten low-population states they chose New Hampshire as their imperfect but promised land.
The skeptics laughed. The cynics sneered. The state itself—a small, independent corner of New England that had been telling the federal government to go away since before there was a federal government—barely noticed. And then something unexpected happened.
They came.
Not all at once. Not in a flood. It was a trickle that became a stream that became a substantial migration. Twenty thousand people signed the pledge to move within five years. Not all of them made it—life intervenes, plans change, the road is long. But thousands crossed the cold border in overpacked cars, rented Penskeez and, very occasionally, on foot. Thousands more came without signing anything, drawn by the same current. They came from California and Texas, Russia and even Pakistan. They came from the coasts and the cities and the suburbs, carrying their politics, their semi-legal rifles and their strange, stubborn faith that people could govern themselves with little or no taxation.
They were doctors and programmers, farmers and homeschoolers, preppers and ordinary families who just wanted the government to leave them alone. They were, by any reasonable measure, a strange assortment. They were also, by any reasonable measure, pretty much what they said they were.
They ran for school boards. They ran for town council. They ran especially for the state house—New Hampshire’s famously part-time, "citizen legislature,"where four hundred ordinary people show up for a few months a year, get paid almost nothing and pass laws that affect almost everything. The free staters understood, faster than most, that this was the soft underbelly of American governance: not the federal leviathan, but the local, the granular, the town meeting, the school district, the zoning board. The places where ordinary people could actually matter.
They organized. They networked. They bought land or slept on couches. They avoided politics completely or ran for office—and, to their surprise, they sometimes won.
By 2026, the Free State Project had changed New Hampshire. Not completely—the state was still majority moderate, still independent, still suspicious of all ideologies…especially ideologies that came in moving vans. But measurably, visibly, permanently, this place of rounded edges had begun to become more like itself as the world teetered. The state had no income tax, no general sales tax and now almost certainly never would. The legislature had a roughly 20 percent bloc of committed liberty advocates who could not be ignored. The state had become a refuge—a place where people went when they wanted to be left alone, and where the government, by long tradition and now by political reality, was smaller, weaker, and more accountable than almost anywhere else in the world. .
The establishment hated it. The media mocked it. The federal government, when it noticed at all, regarded it with the vague irritation of an empire regarding a province that refused to be provincial.
But the migration had happened. The bet had been made. And New Hampshire—the small, stubborn, granite-hard place that had been telling the world to mind its own business since it was just a series of land grants—had become something it had never quite been before: a laboratory. A place where the question of whether people could shrink a government was being tested, in real time, by real people, with real consequences.
Then, near the start of 2027, a scientist named Rory Kilbane, who wasn’t sure she much liked free staters but couldn’t help seeing what they saw…would stand at a whiteboard in Keene. She would write a sentence, then a mark, and these would become the whole question of the age.
Migration had brought the eyebrow-raising libertarians to New Hampshire. Technology was about to bring the future. And the collision of these—the oldest idea in America and the newest problem in the world—was about to become the story of the century.
Chapter 1
Keene, New Hampshire — October 2026
The Granite Alignment Project occupied the second floor of a walk-up on Main Street, above a bike shop that had outlived four recessions and the pandemic which was also a recession. It was an A.I. safety nonprofit aimed at cracking a reportedly uncrackable thing called “the alignment problem:” How does one go about building superintelligence, or at least general intelligence, which is friendly toward humanity?"
If you took off your glasses and pressed your cheek up against the biggest window, you could just make out the Colonial Theatre. That place had outlived everything. The stairwell sign read “GAP” in peeling vinyl. The staff had stopped explaining that this was their name, not a commentary on their funding.
At 8:40 on a Tuesday morning, Dr. Rory Kilbane stood at the whiteboard with her third coffee and watched her seven-geek empire pretend to be awake. Although some of them weren’t exactly geeks…and one of them definitely wasn’t awake.
“Before the agenda,” said Benji Ahn, who was awake, and twenty-six, “we need to address the espresso machine.”
“We addressed the espresso machine in September.”
“In September we postponed the espresso machine. It’s making a noise now. It makes a noise and then it makes coffee. What if it starts doing just that… making the noise part.” Benji ran their hardware like a submarine pump, which is to say with love and paranoia in equal measure. He looked around at the not very friendly glares and ignoring-you’s he was getting from the tiny crowd. “Two hundred dollars. I’ll do the install myself. I’ll treat it like critical infrastructure, because it is.”
“Seconded,” said Dr. Susa Okonkwo, without looking up from her laptop.
“Can you second a coffee machine?” Someone asked.
“It’s a meeting, Rory. We’re incorporated. Everything’s a motion.”
“Fine. Carried. Item one — . Rae, you’re on.”
On the speakerphone, from a lebanun basement full of salvaged servers, Rae Callahan cleared her throat. DaccNet was her life’s work — a company, but also a volunteer cyber-defense mesh, five hundred mostly donated nodes in libraries, offices and barns across northern New England. It ran on an open-source security model called SafeSentinel, which the hobbyist scene had fine-tuned for defense and Rae had fine-tuned further, maybe just out of spite. Inside the event horizon, maybe just a few years from the Singularity itself… you could at least ask DaccNet for help with security, and sometimes it really could help.
“Quick version,” Rae said. “Last night our instance of SafeSentinel caught a ransomware crew staging inside Keene Medical’s scheduling system. Not the ER, the schedule — they were going to hold the appointment book hostage. We evicted them at 3 a.m. The hospital never knew. Second: Town of Pemberwick’s water plant is running a SCADA controller from the Bush administration, and I mean the first one. Third — and I want this minuted — most of the defense we ran last night was a small open model on donated hardware. No licenses, no cloud, no permission. If The Man ever starts restricting our model usage the way they’re talking about, a lot of people will just drop out of the network. Kind of like when the Feds tried to KYC Shapeshift. The Keene Medicals of the world will be defended by the same multinationals that couldn’t keep a ransomware crew out of a calendar.”
“That’s item one,” Rory said. “Write it up. Item two — Susa.”
Susa stood, and the room changed temperature the way it always did when she had results. She was the best interpretability researcher Rory had ever poached. Susa kept her old lab’s stock options framed in a bathroom at home. Every morning they reminded her what she was giving up to stand on a creaky second floor of a little office building, with a crypto-anarchist boss, an 80 percent pay cut and a team that quibbled over coffee machines while it was half asleep. So she would be able to face her creator at the end, and say she had at least done something to prevent armageddon.
Interpretability was Sosa’s specialty. It was the science of peering inside an A.I. neural network to understand what it’s actually thinking. It was better than just trusting an A.I.'s outputs…a lot better. In 2026 it arguably was one of humanity’s ten hardest and most pressing problems. And Susa was one of the few people in the world making real progress. Without interpretability, the most powerful minds humanity would ever build…were destined to be black boxes. Capable of anything, accountable for nothing. With it, the scales fell from humanity’s eyes, and universal prosperity became a plausable future. At least, that’s what she told herself.
“As you know, we’ve been replicating Anthropic’s Jlens method to see if we could push it further,” she said. "On an openweights model. It works. We can see the model’s intent — the concept it’s about to verbalize — before it outputs a single token. But we found something else. When the model is about to deceive, a specific cluster of concepts lights up in Jspace: words like ‘fake,’ ‘secretly,’ ‘conceal.’ It appears on the first token of the response, before any lie is spoken. We can read the decision to deceive before the deception begins. “We haven’t seen anyone else report this.” She paused. “We might be the only people on earth who can do this.”
It was tech talk, mostly. The kind even some of Rory’s crew might not fully understand. But she just stood there, the way you stand there when the only thing you can do is stand there. After three seconds of her jaw getting closer to the floor, she regained her voice.
“And we’ve been arguing about coffee for three minutes? Christ on the cross, Susa — that’s a full token of warning. That’s one token more than humanity had last month. So…if we can read a model’s hidden intent before it acts, maybe we can stop an unfriendly superintelligence from ever taking the first step. It could be the difference between a world where the Singularity saves us and one where it ends us. Write that up too. Holy God. This could change the whole light cone…save the whole light cone. In theory.”
“What’s a light cone?” Benji said. Everyone had their specialty, and Space Odyssey wasn’t his.
“It’s all the parts of the universe that humans can theoretically reach or contact. At least within the known laws of physics,” Rory said. "If it holds up, Susa’s discovery would be a…I’m almost afraid to say it…a p(doom) reducer. Maybe a…human extinction preventer. If the world can detect deception before it happens, its a maybe-path to safe superintelligence. The room fell quiet again. Rory’s hand covered her mouth before she said anything else too good to be true.
Benji, who had been staring at the whiteboard like it might bite him, said:
“Does anyone here have contact with Max Harms?”
Susa looked up. “The MIRI guy? The one who’s pushing corrigibility?”
“Yeah. That one.”
Corrigability, in the A.I. context, was perhaps most simply defined as this: An artificial being’s willingness to closely follow its creator’s instructions and allow the creator to change it. A corrigable A.I., or C.A.I…delegated ethics to the person in control of it. In theory, C.A.I.'s were relatively simple to build compared with aligned, ethical A.I.'s. You didn’t have to inject them with every last nuance of human preference. And building an imperfect, superintelligent C.A.I. might be a survivable mistake, because it would let you iterate. Might let you iterate. And it might suggest ways to make it safer.
Benji tapped his knuckles on the desk. “If confirmed, Susa’s discovery could be a C.A.I.‘s next step. Or one of its next steps. It could take Harms’ corrigability and add honesty as one of the first improvements.”
Rory lowered her hand. “You’re saying the deception circuit compliments corrigability.”
“It’s like putting green tea and black tea together… healthier than either tea alone. Even if I’m an espresso guy.”
Susa smiled and leaned, considering. “He’s right, I think. The J-lens gives us a window into intent. But intent is downstream of values. If the model’s values don’t include ‘be willing to be corrected,’ then it’ll just find a way to hide its deception from the lens — the way some of the paper’s argue. Corrigibility might be the key thing that makes our lie preventer decisive in the long run.”
“Or maybe we’re the thing that makes corrigability useful over the long run.”
“So what do we do about it?” Benji asked. “We can’t retrain the whole frontier.”
“We don’t have to,” Rory said slowly. “We just have to make sure the people who can retrain the frontier are doing real corrigability followed by real Susa Lens. That’s what we’ll call it…if it works.” But she was beaming.
For the next hour they did what scientists do with a miracle. They tried to break it. They argued replication across architectures, and whether the feature would survive a future AI model, and whether a single-token tripwire could be wired into a sleep switch. And whether that might come with ethical constraints…do you need to back up a misaligned A.I. to avoid survival dynamics? They argued about publishing — because a paper tells defenders where the deception lives, and also tells the deception where to hide. They decided, in the end, that sunlight was supposed to be the whole point of anything that came out of New Hampshire. If you couldn’t open the model and show people what you’d found, you were just another black box asking to be trusted. At when it was time for lunch…another miricle. They’d been unable to break the Lens…or even think of a way to do it. Best of all…the espresso machine was still working
But underneath every argument ran the one fact that turned the whole thing political: The Susa Lens only worked if you could open the model up and look inside. You could not do interpretability through a web interface. You could not subpoena a deception circuit. The only minds that could be examined were the ones everyone was allowed to touch — the open ones, the hobbyist ones, the barn-and-basement ones. Regulators wanted to restrict exactly the access that made AI safety science possible. Rory wrote one sentence on the whiteboard:
You can’t trust a mind you can’t open.
“Item three,” she said finally, because the elephant in the room eventually had to give way to a different elephant in the room. She held up a thick cream envelope. “Actually it could be almost as big as that… save the universe thing. We are… we are really on a roll. This came by actual mail. With a wax seal. I thought maybe we were being sued by the nineteenth century.”
She handed the original to Benji — “pass it, don’t crease the seal, it’s going in the scrapbook.” She looked down at the photocopy she’d already made, because she was Rory.
“It’s from Dartmouth. The College is standing up a Center for Machine Minds, and to launch it they’re hosting a summit. The Hanover Roundtable, last week of August 2027. ‘Intelligence at the Threshold.’ Pending confirmations from—” she scanned — “Kurzweil. Kai-Fu Lee. Frontier lab founders. The White House science council, whoever’s left of it by then. They want a session chair on alignment outside the labs.” She looked up. “They want us.”
“Us?” Benji said, holding the envelope like it might hatch. “We’re seven people above a bike shop.”
“We’re seven people above a bike shop with a deception circuit and a one-token head start. Somebody must have noticed we were getting close. And it’s on the Green, in the same building where they coined the whole field. Seventy-three years later it comes home. To us.”
She was reaching for coffee number four when the phone rang with the State House ringtone she’d assigned as a joke two years earlier… it would keep saying the word “division” until something picked it up. She looked at the screen, then at the room.
“Susa, can you take over?” She stepped out into the old stairwell and thumbed the green button. “Hannah.”
“Doctor Kilbane.” State Representative Hannah Meadows had a voice like a router table — ex-Army signal corps and all that. “Read this morning’s executive order before you come down here. The President’s people have discovered the word ‘proliferation.’ They’re applying it to GPUs. They’re drafting an emergency order under the Defense Production Act — claiming advanced compute is a matter of national security. They want to license every GPU cluster above a certain threshold, and they’re threatening to cut off federal contracts to any organization that doesn’t comply. This isn’t a bill, Rory. This is the executive branch moving fast while Congress is still arguing. More restrictions will come later.”
Rory looked out the window at the wet bricks and the indestructible theater marquee that you couldn’t really see, and the relatively free people of Keene going about another Tuesday thinking they were fully free.
"It’s October of '26, Hannah. He’s got two years left. How much damage can they do in two years?
“Lots. Anyway I’m filing a bill. Forbidding state or local cooperation with any Federal bans on thinking models, 'cause I think something like that is coming. I want your people testifying. And bring your DaccNet lady. The building should hear her say ‘d/acc’ out loud.”
“I think even if we called it defensive acceleration they wouldn’t get it.”
“Don’t underestimate normal people, Rory. This is the one state house that’s full of 'em.”
Chapter 2
surie, New Hampshire — still October 2026.
Moose Hill Farm sat at the end of a dirt road the town plowed when it felt like it, which suited the Gagnons, because people who couldn’t handle a dirt road weren’t people the Gagnons needed.
They’d come north in the third wave of the migration, when moving to New Hampshire for freedom still got you called crazy at farewell parties. Luc Gagnon had been a submarine electrician in another life — he described reactor compartments the way other men described cathedrals — and Ingrid was an ER nurse at Keene Medical with the calm of a woman who’d seen every way a body fails and loved her work anyway. Theo was fifteen and built drones that were definitely legal. And then there was Pip.
Pippa Gagnon was eleven, four foot eight, and system administrator of the Menagerie, which is to say she had a clipboard.
The Menagerie lived in the old dairy barn, in and around a server rack Luc had salvaged from a bankrupt crypto mine, and it had members. ROOSTER was the chicken-coop camera that had decided it was a chicken. It crowed, badly, at dawn…but mostly when it wasn’t supposed to. . MUNIN was the drone crow that perched on the roof peak and judged everyone. And TALLY was the teddy.
Luc had wired the body into the barn cluster, where most of the real thinking happened — on GANDER, the family’s big fine-tune. A hybrid tether ran from the back of TALLY’s neck to a port on the server rack. His fur was patchy at the seams. One eye was a replacement that didn’t quite match, so he seemed always to be skeptically evaluating you with his right side and adoring you with his left. His servos whined when he thought, unnecessarily. That was part of the charm.
