From the novels Artificial Wisdom & Infinite Wisdom
The City of Peace
New
Baghdad
The Catastrophe
The Tabkhir
July 1, 2040. A wet-bulb heatwave struck the Persian Gulf. 160 million dead. Two-thirds of the region’s population. The worst single disaster in human history.
In the aftermath, a man named Abbas al-Muqtafi proclaimed a new caliphate. He sealed the borders and began to rebuild. When the rest of the world elected an AI to save them, the Caliphate said no. They would save themselves.
The Physical Structure
The Round City
“Walls of every shade of brick and metal curved around a vast city — a perfect circle of imperfect patchwork. Sunlight glinted off glass-covered walkways and metal spires rising from within. None of it was neat or tidy, but it still took his breath away.”
Cross-Section
The 160-Foot Wall
The outer wall rises 160 feet, topped with a graphene hood — transparent, impossibly strong — and a podrail running along its crown. From the top, the entire city is visible: minarets, cranes, skeletal domes, all encircled by the wall’s perfect curve.
The Shabakat
A network of graphene-covered walkways winding through the city, climate-controlled at 20°C. The city’s arteries. Outside them, the desert heat is punishing. Inside, you can breathe.
Four Gates
Set at the compass points, including the great Khorasan Gate. Each gate is a station for the mag-lev pods that run in transparent tubes along the walls — inertia-dampened, silent, fast.
Always Building
Cranes everywhere, soaring above half-constructed towers and skeletal domes. The city is never finished. It is always turning old into new.
Behind the Walls
Life Inside
The Shabandar Cafe
“Already thick with shisha smoke and argument despite the early hour. Hundreds of framed photographs lining the walls, small groups cramming onto thinly-cushioned wooden benches.”
Samir’s Speakeasy
“He swept aside a mop and bucket, and clicked the rear wall loose. It swung back to reveal slippery limestone stairs plunging downwards into darkness. The old cellar had vaulted ceilings, every inch covered in intricate writing in curling scripts of different colours and sizes.”
The Call to Prayer
“The call to afternoon prayer rang out from three minarets. It was a thing of beauty, in spite of being broadcast through loudspeakers that prioritised volume over clarity.”
The Caliph’s Chambers
“All the rooms he met the caliph in seemed designed to bring peace in a world filled with worries, bathed in the soft glow of filtered sunlight streaming through narrow arched windows lined with intricate latticework.”
The Caliphate’s AI
Djinn
“You think we’d accept an artilect telling us what to do, walking around with some sort of delusion it’s in control? We’re not so weak-minded as you. We have God. You only have technology.”
Where Solomon rules the Protectorate, Djinn serves the Caliphate. An advisor in the background — never a ruler. No neurochips. No surveillance infrastructure. Djinn appears via Converged Reality as copies of each person present, speaking in their own voice. No breathing. No mouth noises. Just a strange pressure to it.
Djinn powers the city’s infrastructure — the Shabakat, the mag-lev, the House of Wisdom — but it doesn’t control its people. The caliph made that clear from the beginning. Technology serves humanity. Not the other way around.
Ancient Echoes
The New Golden Age
“Martha believed the caliph was looking both back in time to the kind of caliphate that reignited the progress of humanity, and forward in time to harness technology in a way that was less destructive than the Western model. She said the man was a visionary.”
Al-Mansur’s Baghdad — the original Round City of 762 AD — gave the world algebra, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy. For centuries, it was the intellectual centre of civilisation. The caliph is building a second one.
The House of Wisdom sits at the heart of New Baghdad: part technology university, part intelligence agency, part artist hangout. It houses Djinn’s server farm and the Caliphate’s best minds. It is the highest-security building in the city, and the most important.
What might a second golden age bring? The caliph believes technology and faith can coexist — that the mistakes of the Western model were not inevitable, but a choice. A different choice is possible.
The Story
Behind the walls of New Baghdad, a new civilisation is rising beyond the Protectorate’s reach: ancient memory, new technology, and a different answer to Solomon’s world.
Some dossiers should stay classified until you read on.