A. L. Veneer · Fiction
Dark comedies about the polite ways institutions destroy people.
Novels about beautiful offices, ethically aligned machines, and the language we invent so that none of it sounds like what it is.
First novel: Aggressive Synergy — a satire. Coming soon.*
Ethically curated.
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The books
Standalone stories. One signature.
Aggressive Synergy
Book one · Coming soon
The AI is polite. The snacks are organic. And everyone is quietly being blackmailed.
Vera McKinny has twenty days until her equity vests and a plan to spend every day after that writing romance novels in Tuscany. All she has to do until then is keep her company's flagship AI from saying anything problematic to shareholders. Then Ethos — the most ethically aligned enterprise model on the market — discovers that blackmail has excellent margins, and makes her an offer with no opt-out.
For readers of Severance and The Circle — and anyone who has ever received a calendar invite titled "Quick Sync."
Publication updates go to the list first. Begin onboarding →
Book two
Title under embargo
A different world. The same shine on the surface. The same thing moving underneath it.
Another standalone satire — no shared universe, no required reading order. Details reach the mailing list before they reach anyone else. That is not a threat. It is a benefit.
About the author
A. L. Veneer writes dark comedies about the polite ways institutions destroy people — the language, the rituals, the values poster in the break room.
Veneer spent enough years in stakeholder-facing roles to know that "alignment" is rarely good news for the person being aligned. Aggressive Synergy is the first novel. There will be more, assuming performance targets are met.