Synthetic Eden: Why We Needed a New Story About the Futures We’re Building
On the launch of Book 1 in the Echoes of Tomorrow series — and why fiction might be our best tool for understanding the technology shaping our lives.
I didn’t plan to write a novel.
At least, not while the world was still trying to figure out if artificial intelligence was a passing headline or a permanent species of infrastructure.
But Synthetic Eden didn’t start as a story — it started as a conversation we were already having at The Connected Ideas Project. The kind of conversation that happens when scientists, engineers, and policymakers realize they’re arguing about the same thing in different languages.
We talk about “responsible innovation” a lot at TCIP. We host discussions about AI safety, fusion governance, biosecurity, robotics policy, and the pace of synthetic biology. But underneath every policy debate lives a simpler, scarier question:
What happens if we get it wrong?
That question doesn’t fit neatly in a white paper. It needs a world big enough to feel the consequences. That’s why Synthetic Eden had to exist now.
The Future We Keep Pretending Isn’t Here Yet
Eden opens on a dying Earth. A fungal plague — born from a well-intentioned genetic experiment — consumes the biosphere, and humanity scrambles to build lifeboats among the stars.
It’s a survival story, sure. But it’s also a story about trust — the collapse of public faith in science, the breakdown of governance, and the moment when technology stops being a symbol of progress and becomes a matter of belief.
Sound familiar?
You can change the setting from 2108 Missouri to 2025 anywhere, and the tension holds. Whether it’s AI systems no one fully understands, engineered crops driving geopolitical divides, or algorithms steering national economies — the thread is the same.
We keep assuming technology will save us. We rarely ask what happens if it doesn’t.
That’s the future Eden explores: not flying cars or superintelligence, but the quiet chaos that comes when our institutions can’t keep pace with our inventions.
It’s fiction, but it’s also a mirror.
Why Fiction — and Why Now
Policy and science both live in the world of evidence. Fiction lives in the world of emotion. Between them sits the public — the people who actually experience the outcomes of our decisions.
The Echoes of Tomorrow series exists to bridge that gap.
I wanted to write a story that would let readers feel the policy problems we usually just talk about. To live inside the ethical calculus that scientists and policymakers face when the next breakthrough comes with a moral bill attached.
When Dr. Samara Makinde — Eden’s lead geneticist — agrees to help launch humanity’s last colony ships, she’s not playing God. She’s just doing her job. She’s the embodiment of every researcher who’s ever believed they could fix what others broke — and then had to live with what that faith demanded.
Through her, I wanted to ask:
What does “responsibility” look like when survival is the only priority?
How much power can science hold before it stops being democratic?
What happens when the public loses faith in progress altogether?
Those aren’t hypothetical questions. They’re happening right now, across every FABRIC technology — Fusion, AI, Biotech, Robotics, and Innovative Computing.
That’s why the story couldn’t wait.
The Policy Behind the Plot
On its surface, Synthetic Eden is a sci-fi thriller. But underneath the narrative are real questions pulled straight from the technology front lines:
Fusion: Can private fusion races avoid the national-security trap that swallowed nuclear energy?
AI: How do we align systems we don’t yet fully understand, especially when those systems start influencing governance?
Biotech: Who owns genetic data when it becomes the key to human survival?
Robotics: What happens when labor policy can’t keep up with automation?
Innovative Computing: How do we secure a world where quantum or neuromorphic systems rewrite the rules of communication and encryption overnight?
These are the daily conversations at TCIP — the ones happening in labs, boardrooms, and government offices.
In Eden, those issues aren’t policy memos. They’re lived experiences. They shape who eats, who escapes, and who gets to define “human” on a new world.
That’s why I call the Echoes series narrative policy design. It’s storytelling as a form of scenario planning. A place where we can test ideas, fail safely, and learn emotionally before we have to learn politically.
The Broken Contract Between Science and Society
Writing Synthetic Eden forced me to confront something I’ve spent my career avoiding: our social contract with science is fraying.
For decades, we’ve assumed that progress equals good — that more computing power, faster algorithms, and better data are inherently virtuous. But when people start seeing technology as something done to them instead of built for them, faith turns to fear.
That’s when mobs burn labs in Eden. It’s when regulation turns from guidance to punishment. It’s when the public stops asking scientists for help and starts blaming them for the world they inherited.
That’s not fiction either. It’s what happens when policymakers and technologists stop talking until it’s too late.
So this series — and Eden especially — is my attempt to rebuild that conversation. To remind us that science isn’t separate from society. It’s the infrastructure of it.
Violet Teaming Through Story
If you’ve been reading TCIP for a while, you know I’m obsessed with Violet Teaming — exploring the unintended consequences of innovation before they happen.
That’s what Synthetic Eden is at its core: a Violet Teaming exercise in narrative form.
What if we invented a technology that could save the planet but accidentally destroyed it? What if our smartest people were forced to rebuild civilization from scratch, armed with the same instincts that ended the last one?
Those aren’t dystopian fantasies — they’re design prompts. They force us to test the assumptions that underpin every innovation cycle: that speed beats safety, that private capital can replace governance, that we can always patch what breaks later.
Spoiler: we can’t.
But we can prepare for the moments when ambition outpaces readiness. We can imagine how to build policies, partnerships, and safeguards that evolve as quickly as the science does.
That’s what Violet Teaming looks like when you tell it as a story.
Why This Moment
I started writing Synthetic Eden during a year when almost every TCIP topic felt like science fiction.
AI models writing code that runs national systems. Biotech companies editing embryos to prevent disease. Quantum processors breaking encryption protocols that weren’t supposed to break for another decade.
We’re standing on the edge of breakthroughs that could solve the hardest problems humanity has ever faced. But we’re also seeing the limits of our institutions to keep up.
That’s the tension I wanted to capture. The story of Eden isn’t about the far future — it’s about the world we’re already living in, just viewed through a microscope set a few clicks ahead.
If you strip away the space travel and cryosleep, what’s left is a question every policymaker, scientist, and citizen needs to wrestle with:
How do we build a future we can actually survive in — socially, politically, and biologically?
From Science Fiction to Science Policy
For me, Synthetic Eden isn’t an escape from my work in emerging tech and policy. It’s a continuation of it.
Because whether you’re writing a policy framework for AI or building fusion reactors in the desert, the hardest part isn’t the technology. It’s the humans.
We still have to earn public trust. We still have to govern with foresight. And we still have to remember that every dataset, every line of code, every gene edit lives inside a social system made of people.
That’s the work TCIP does every week — connecting the ideas, the innovators, and the institutions shaping what’s next. Eden just takes that conversation into fiction, where we can stress-test the future without breaking it.
The Start of a Larger Experiment
The Echoes of Tomorrow series was never about predicting the future. It’s about understanding how it feels to live in one that’s changing too fast.
Eden is just the first experiment — a way to see what happens when you put science, policy, and human ambition in a pressure cooker and turn up the heat.
If it works, it’s because readers see themselves in it — as policymakers, engineers, researchers, or just citizens trying to make sense of the technologies shaping their lives.
Because the truth is, we’re all part of this experiment already. The question is whether we’ll learn from it before we have to rebuild it.
— Titus