THE CURRENT STATE
Fiction · A Kaethe Novel · Complete line-edited manuscript v0.3
By Michael S. Moniz. Created in collaboration with ChatGPT.
A long-lived specialist is asked to remove a ninety-three-year-old kaethe setting before surgery. What looks like a technical service call opens into questions of provenance, authorization, and what a system can safely conclude from the state it sees.
Read or download the complete PDF · Download the original DOCX · Choose a chapter
Complete manuscript · 24 chapters · about 82,000 words · 502-page PDF (3.2 MB).
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Chapters
These links open the complete PDF at the chapter’s starting page. The source has no printed page numbers, so the numbers below identify physical PDF pages. Navigation may depend on your browser.
- The Setting — PDF page 3
- The Required Harm — PDF page 32
- The Private Archive — PDF page 61
- The Return Distance — PDF page 96
- The Second Patient — PDF page 122
- The Operation — PDF page 141
- The Concordance — PDF page 159
- The Common Clock — PDF page 177
- The Clean Start — PDF page 204
- The Preserved State — PDF page 228
- The Same Parts — PDF page 260
- The Three Copies — PDF page 285
- The Same Curve — PDF page 313
- The Second Signature — PDF page 341
- The Release Condition — PDF page 361
- The Missing Cases — PDF page 378
- The Receiving System — PDF page 395
- The Return Path — PDF page 413
- The Interval — PDF page 428
- The Other Clock — PDF page 445
- The Decision Window — PDF page 457
- The Long Result — PDF page 469
- The Reference Material — PDF page 478
- The Current State — PDF page 491
From Chapter One
The Setting
The warranty on the sternum setting was eighty years.
The woman wearing it had owned it for ninety-three.
Neither fact was considered unusual.
The setting itself was less impressive than the warranty. Black ceramic collar. Two field wafers. A service seam small enough that the technician needed magnification to find it. The kaethe-matter inside weighed one point eight six grams and had been cut before the current ancestry standard existed.
I disliked all four facts.
“Still staring?” the technician asked.
“I am reading.”
“The mass is printed on the service tag.”
“I am reading the setting.”
“That is why I said staring.”
Her name was Miren Orr. She was a SUPO and had been licensed for intimate kaethe placement for fourteen years. The license plaque on the wall had more renewal stamps than the shop had chairs.
Behind her, a display offered twelve setting bodies in different materials.
Continue Chapter One in the complete PDF →
About this edition
This online reading edition preserves the authoritative full line-edited manuscript v0.3 completed on 5 September 2026. It was published here on 23 October 2026. No prose was rewritten for this release.
The DOCX is the unchanged source manuscript. The PDF is a reading export of that source, not a new typeset or illustrated edition. It uses Noto Serif in place of the source’s unavailable Georgia font; the complete text, contents and chapter order are preserved.
This is a prose novel, distinct from the illustrated Kaethe Death Kult setting book.
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