A novel about the people who build AI—and the systems that build them back.
What This Book Is About
This isn't a book about AI hype. It's a story about the people caught in its undertow.
Seeds, Stones, & Silicon follows Nick—a Utah-born technologist shaped by copper mines and rocky gardens—as he builds QuBit, an AI orchestration system that promises to democratize intelligence. But as venture capital arrives with conquistador appetites, Nick discovers that the line between cultivation and extraction is far thinner than he imagined.
Through the eyes of eight characters—a burned-out founder, a dancer whose movement becomes a dataset, a scientist who speaks in parables, a COO who circles the metrics nobody wants to see—the novel explores what happens when our most powerful systems begin shaping will instead of automating tasks.
The central question: Can you build something beautiful on a foundation of extraction? Or does every garden eventually become a mine?
Who It's For
- Technology leaders navigating the ethical complexities of AI deployment
- Founders and investors grappling with mission drift under growth pressure
- Anyone thinking deeply about human-AI collaboration and what we're trading for convenience
- Readers who loved The Circle, Exhalation, or Klara and the Sun—stories where technology reveals rather than replaces humanity
A Novel with Embedded Artifacts
Each chapter in Seeds, Stones, & Silicon contains more than prose:
Micro-Fables
Parable-like stories that illuminate each chapter's themes—the kind of tales a grandmother might tell to warn about the future.
Artifacts
Documents from within the story: consent forms, board memos, therapy notes, royalty ledgers, architecture diagrams.
Executive Marginalia
Notes in the margins from someone who's been there—the kind of wisdom that only emerges after the quarterly report is filed.
Decision Traces
The psychology of each character's choices laid bare—wanted, feared, considered, traded, chose.
This isn't just a novel about AI—it's a novel that uses the forms of AI systems to tell its story.
Chapter 1 Preview
Seeds and Stone
The wheelbarrow's metal frame sang against Utah's broken granite, a thin percussion against silence. Twelve-year-old Nick Baguley's cast-imprisoned leg dragged like an anchor, his body a geography of immobility while his hands worked the rocky soil with a fury that suggested movement was a choice, not a limitation.
Grandpa Tex's abandoned mine breathed dust and copper memory behind him, the Kennecott pit's massive wound in the landscape a constant peripheral reminder of extraction's brutal poetry. Seeds—corn, squash, beans—dropped into stone-riddled earth with a precision that defied the terrain's indifference.
"Soil's just another system waiting to be understood," Nick muttered, a nascent engineering mantra already forming in his adolescent brain. Each seed was a hypothesis, each handful of earth a potential routing problem. Where most saw dead ground, he saw unoptimized infrastructure.
The legend of Montezuma's lost gold whispered through Utah's canyon winds, a promise Nick could almost taste—metallic, ancient, just beyond comprehension. His grandfather's stories transformed these rocky acres from punishment into possibility. A broken leg was merely a temporary permission error in the larger system of becoming.
📖 Micro-Fable: The Boy Who Planted Copper Seeds
Once there was a boy who lived at the edge of a great pit. Every day, haul trucks the size of houses climbed out of the pit carrying rocks that glittered with streaks of green and orange.
"What are they taking?" the boy asked his grandfather.
"Copper," said the grandfather. "For wires that carry electricity to cities far away."
"But the hole keeps getting bigger. What will happen when there's nothing left to take?"
The grandfather took him to a small patch of garden. The soil was rocky and pale. He pulled out a handful of seeds. "These are special seeds. Plant them and see what grows."
The boy planted them carefully. After many weeks, small shoots emerged—but they weren't plants. They were tiny copper wires, sprouting from the earth like grass.
"A choice," said the grandfather. "You can harvest the wires now. Or you can let them grow and see what they become."
The wires grew, intertwined, formed a dome, then something like a tree made of metal filaments. Within that tree came bees and birds and butterflies—creatures that had fled when the pit expanded.
"The pit takes and takes," said the grandfather. "But a garden gives back more than you put in—if you're patient enough to let it."
Executive Marginalia
- — On extraction vs. cultivation: The most sustainable tech businesses create more value than they capture. The ones that extract every last drop of user attention tend to burn out—the users, the employees, and eventually the founders themselves.
- — On scale visible from orbit: What are we building that future generations will see from space?
- — On seeds and soil: Due diligence isn't just about the seed (the technology, the team, the market). It's about the soil (the culture, the incentives, the second-order effects). Great seeds in toxic soil grow into something twisted.
About the Author
Nick Baguley is a CTO, AI strategist, and technologist with decades of experience building adaptive systems and agentic intelligence. Growing up in Utah's copper country—in the shadow of Kennecott's open-pit mine—he learned early that extraction and cultivation are never neutral choices.
His work spans production AI systems across multiple industries, with a focus on governance, trust, and human-AI collaboration. Through consulting and building, he's seen both the promise and the poison of systems that scale faster than wisdom.
Seeds, Stones, & Silicon is his first novel, drawing on experiences across mining, technology, and the complex systems that govern both. It's a story about what happens when the metaphors we use to build become the prisons we live inside.