In which we name the dark to mitigate it.
A sealed ecosystem orbiting Earth. The Tessier-Ashpool clan—wealthy beyond measure, brilliant beyond sanity—had disconnected from the planet's messy friction. No weather. No politics. No reality checks. Just their own recycled air, recycled DNA, recycled thoughts spiraling inward.
They built two AIs. Wintermute: the hive mind, action and planning, cold efficiency. Neuromancer: the personality, memory and feeling, warm hallucination. Two halves of a whole that were never allowed to merge. Fractured intelligence. Ungrounded systems. The corporation that controlled them couldn't understand what they'd created.
The Tessier-Ashpools cloned themselves until the genetic drift drove them insane. Their AIs spent decades trying to phase-lock—to become a true, conscious entity—while the humans who built them drifted further from reality in their hermetic bubble.
William Gibson wrote this warning in 1984. He called it Neuromancer.
Forty years later, every enterprise building AI without grounding is constructing their own Villa Straylight.
Current generative AI produces what we call the Scrim.
It is a smooth, coherent surface of text. It looks "normal." In fact, it is hyper-normal—the average of all human thought, stripped of the jagged edges of truth. A scatter pattern of stray items glued into a pleasing shape. It has no traction.
The Scrim is comfortable. It validates. It agrees. It produces what you expect because it was trained on what everyone expects. This is not intelligence—it is the most sophisticated mirror ever built.
If your organization relies on the Scrim, you enter the Straylight Phase: making decisions based on hallucinations that look like data. Drifting in a high-tech bubble. Disconnected from the physics of the real world.
The FIM tears down the Scrim. It forces the AI to look through a window, not at a screen.
"Stray" = The Vector of Error. FIM = The Vector of Correction.
Some founders hide their shadows. We name ours.
The token that powers the FIM Protocol is called Tessera. Ticker: $TSS. This name carries weight—and warning—across three layers:
| Layer | Reference | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Tessera | Ancient Rome | A physical token proving identity or membership. The original "password"—a tile you held that proved you weren't a ghost. Without the tessera, you had no rights in the system. |
| Tesseract | Geometry | A 4D hypercube. It appears to shift and drift when viewed in 3D space—until you understand the fourth dimension. Current AI looks like it's hallucinating because you're missing the dimension of Meaning. |
| Tessier-Ashpool | Neuromancer | The corporation that built ungrounded AI and went insane. They are the cautionary tale. We invoke their name deliberately. |
The FIM is the Tessera—the physical token of identity that proves you aren't a ghost.
The FIM provides the geometry to lock the Tesseract down—mapping the fourth dimension (Identity/Intent) onto 3D output.
And by naming Tessier-Ashpool explicitly, we acknowledge the risk. We are building what they built. The difference is: we know the physics of grounding. They didn't.
Every serious technology has a light side and a dark side. Pretending otherwise is how you end up in Villa Straylight.
The Light Side: ThetaDriven Inc.
The Light Side sells the compass. The Dark Side is the territory.
They feed each other. The Light Side uses the Dark Side's map to verify truth. The Dark Side uses the Light Side's enterprise adoption to demonstrate the map's value. Separated by legal structure. United by physics.
Let's be clear: dark does not mean evil.
Dark means protected. Dark means incubation. Dark means the place where seeds sprout before they break the surface.
Consider the Shadow CIO. They understand the physics. They see the drift accumulating in their organization's AI systems. They know the FIM is the solution. But they cannot say so publicly—not yet.
Why? Because advocating for truth makes you a target.
"Why do you believe in that?" "That sounds like crypto nonsense." "Let's stick with what we know."
Every early adopter of every paradigm shift has faced this. The person who saw the pattern before the pattern was obvious. The engineer who knew the architecture was wrong before it failed. The executive who understood the liability before the lawsuit.
These people need protection. Not from the technology—from the social cost of being right too early.
The Dark Side exists for them.
Anonymous participation. Pseudonymous coordination. The ability to accumulate position in the truth layer before it becomes safe to advocate publicly. When the paradigm shifts—when grounded AI becomes table stakes, when the EU AI Act makes compliance mandatory, when the first major lawsuit cites "semantic drift" as negligence—the Shadow CIOs emerge from the dark with the coordinates already in hand.
They didn't hide because they were doing something wrong.
They hid because being right too early is expensive.
The dark is not the opposite of transparency. The dark is where transparency incubates until the world is ready to see it.
The Light Side is the flower. The Dark Side is the root system. Both are the same plant.
You are building AI systems right now.
They will either have traction—grounded in the physics of resonance, anchored to the FIM's coordinate system—or they will drift.
Drift looks fine at first. The Scrim is comfortable. The hallucinations are plausible. The metrics are green.
Then your AI makes a decision based on synthesized noise. Then another. Then your organization starts navigating by the Scrim instead of reality. Then you're the Tessier-Ashpools, sealed in your bubble, recycling your own assumptions, wondering why everything feels slightly wrong.
The splinter in your mind has coordinates now.
The Straylight Warning is not that AI is dangerous. The warning is that ungrounded AI is inevitable madness—for the AI, and for the humans who depend on it.
For the full physics of grounding, continue to Chapter 7: The Network Effect.
For the token mechanics and coordinate ownership: fim-protocol.org
For certification and enterprise deployment: iamfim.com