As part of the fourth IViR Science Fiction and Information Law competition, DigiCon will publish the stories of the finalists every week. The winning stories will be revealed during the CPDP 2026 conference in Brussels on 19-22 May.
The second shortlisted story is now live on DigiCon.
It is called The Fabrication of Trust and was written by
Jaeques Koeman and Seda Gürses.
It takes an unusual form: a dialogue between human and AI, embedded within a manuscript recovered from what the story calls “the hinge period.”
What happens when authority is not codified but optimised? When whoever shows up with a working system becomes the issuer? When infrastructure stops executing intent and starts fabricating it?
The story is the kind of fiction that makes you realise the future it describes may already be creeping up on you.
The featured image accompanying the story is from Better Images of AI, a non-profit library challenging the tired visual tropes of AI, robots, glowing brains, metal hands, and replacing them with images that reflect its actual material reality. DigiCon has been collaborating with them, and you can explore the full flipbook on their website.
