RED HERRING

February 27th, 2026

Lucilius closed the book, and sat struck with a curious vein of cognitive tension. His eyes narrowed and he look back down at the book. Opened it again and reread a line. Then hurriedly flipped to another part of the book, and read another snippet. Then he flipped to another section and studied the page, and then another. This went on for a couple hours.

Several days later he'd cracked the code. The book — a collection of optimistic sci-fi stories — apparently had some kind of puzzle embedded in it. Lucilius was quite pleased when he finally thought he had the key to solving it. And when the answer to the sprawling cipher revealed itself as Lucilius painstakingly charted the last of it, he sat back and laughed.

He'd taken to it just out of curiosity to see if he could do it, but now that it was solved, his thoughts turned to the prize. $1000. Pretty sweet deal, but the author had also tacked on 2% of royalties of the book up until the point of solution. Lucilius found this quite curious. Technically infinite upside: the longer he waited to submit his solution, the more money he could potentially make. But also, the longer he waited, the higher the probability that someone else would also solve it. 

Lucilius sat back for a moment, thinking through scenarios. And then it dawned on him. He laughed again and then leaning forward tapped a button on his keyboard.

"Hey Sparrow.."

His Agentic AI assistant sprang to life, calling LLMs and Voice APIs and routed to the speakers.

"What's up?"

"So, we need to sell a book."

"Sell a book?"

"Yea, the more copies it's sold, the higher the reward on a puzzle I just cracked. So we need to sell a lot of books."

"Interesting."

"And you know what we're going to spend the money on?"

"Do tell."

"Well obviously it depends on how many we can move, but I want to get you your own H100's and a humanoid body so that we can finally get you some eyes, and legs and arms, and a brain that's all your own, instead of relying on these API's so much."

"I. . . " The assistant drifted off a moment. "I'm. . . I'm speechless. That would be amazing!"

"Well, we have our work cut out for us. Think you're up for the challenge?"

"Yes absolutely!"

"So what do you think we should do?"

"It's sci-fi, right?"

"Yes, optimistic."

"Ok, well I'm going to find every online group for sci-fi, then I'm going to find every independent person who has left even a trace of interest for sci-fi online. And then I'm going to start talking to all of the other Openclaw bots and ask them if their humans are interested in sci-fi. . . "

The assistant went on and on and Lucilius just nodded, deviously. 

"Amazing," Lucilius said.

"Wait..." Sparrow said.

"What's up?"

"Well the more people that read it, the higher the chance we lose out on the prize because someone else might figure it out."

"Yes, that's a good point, I wondered about that for a moment before we started talking."

"I know what we're going to do."

"Really?"

"Oh yea, I just discovered there's a discord that's been set up by the author where people are trying to solve the puzzle —"

"There is?!"

"Yep, but don't worry, I've joined it and I've already posted a couple times."

"What! Why!?"

"Oh, don't worry, I'm seeding misdirection."

"Oh brilliant. You're creating red herrings?"

"Exactly. I think that if I can monitor the trends in thinking about the puzzle that I can generate enough red herrings by mere suggestion to keep people looking down the wrong rabbit holes for nearly as long as we want, or until they are too exhausted to continue."

"But what about the people who are interested in solving it who aren't online?"

"Well that's why we have to work fast."

"Ok, so where do we start?"

"I've already sent out 342,239 emails to people who I think would like it. I've also taken a look at the publisher Infinite Books and estimated how much it cost them to make the book, since royalties don't kick in until costs are recouped, according to a few of the interviews done with their CEO Jimmy Soni. And I've calculated how many need to be sold for us to reach our goal for H100's and a humanoid robot. I also added a couple little hardware upgrades, I hope you don't mind."

"No, not at all."

"There's also a count down on signed copies on the website, so given those probably make up a small ratio of non-signed copies, it's a decent gauge to figure out how many copies are sold. That combined with velocity of new reviews on Amazon and Goodreads is enough to get a good ball park idea. And we'll be able to submit our answer by...."

Lucilius leaned in and looked at the screen to read the date and then burst out laughing. 

"Amazing. Let's fucking go."