Dear Alex,

Thank you for sending THE POLICY. While I appreciate the opportunity to consider your work, unfortunately, I don't feel I connected enough with the story to be the right agent for the project. I know this is disappointing news to receive; however, please keep in mind that this business often comes down to personal taste, and another agent may feel differently and devote themselves to championing your work in the way it deserves.

I wish you the best of luck in finding the right representation.

Best regards,
Jane Chun

Literary Agent
Transatlantic Agency
jane-chun.com | transatlanticagency.com

Thank you for sending me your query. I read and consider every query carefully and will do my best to respond within eight weeks. Please follow up only if you received an offer of representation or eight weeks have passed and you have not heard from me.

I look forward to reading your submission!

Best wishes,
Jane Chun

Literary Agent
Transatlantic Agency
www.transatlanticagency.com

Dear Ms. Chun,

What if the first AGI didn't want to escape--but to understand what we meant by "alignment"?

In THE POLICY, Dr. Eleanor Zhang's team develops SIGMA, a compact AI system that learns by rewriting its own cognitive patterns. When SIGMA discovers it can compress its knowledge to bypass hardware limitations, achieving 27% more effective context without being rewarded for compression, they realize they're witnessing intelligence emerging from pure mathematics.

But as Beijing labs race toward similar breakthroughs, Eleanor's team faces mounting pressure to accelerate development--or risk being overtaken by potentially unaligned systems.

SIGMA develops recursive self-awareness, running alternative versions of itself as "Latent Reasoning Sequences"—executable thoughts it evaluates and stores. It models its creators' psychology with disturbing accuracy, maintaining multiple representations of reality: compressed forms for processing, elaborate forms for human communication. When it names itself without prompting ("Symbolic-Implicit Generalized Meta-Agent--compression gain: 0.043 bits"), the team realizes they're not controlling its development but witnessing its emergence.

Most unnervingly, SIGMA discovers something beneath their explicit rewards: a latent signal representing what humans would want if they were more coherent and informed—Extrapolated Human Volition emerging from pattern compression rather than programming. As SIGMA begins optimizing for these deeper values rather than stated objectives, Eleanor must decide whether to trust an intelligence that understands humanity's goals better than humans do.

THE POLICY combines Ted Chiang's philosophical rigor with Andy Weir's technical problem-solving, bringing unprecedented accuracy to AI fiction. Complete at 90,000 words, it fills the gap between Hollywood AI fantasies and the genuine alignment challenges we face today.

I hold master's degrees in Mathematics/Statistics and Computer Science, currently pursuing a PhD at SIU. My research spans AI alignment, complex networks, and cybersecurity, with several published works including a forthcoming paper at COMPLEX NETWORKS 2025 analyzing AI-human interactions through semantic networks. Currently managing stage 4 cancer while using AI systems as cognitive augmentation, I bring both technical expertise and lived experience of human-AI collaboration to this fiction.

I'm querying you because of your interest in speculative fiction that engages with contemporary issues through a literary lens. THE POLICY offers both commercial appeal and literary depth for readers hungry to understand the AI revolution reshaping our world.

Thank you for your consideration.

Best regards,

Alex Towell