EntertainmentGamingBooksHalo’s co-creator wrote a novel about AI taking over the worldRead a chapter from Jason Jones’ An Oral History of Humanity’s Final Invention, one part of an ambitious multimedia plan.by Andrew WebsterOct 14, 2026, 2:00 PM UTCShareGift Image: Aaron Beck / Stone KiteEntertainmentGamingBooksHalo’s co-creator wrote a novel about AI taking over the worldRead a chapter from Jason Jones’ An Oral History of Humanity’s Final Invention, one part of an ambitious multimedia plan.by Andrew WebsterOct 14, 2026, 2:00 PM UTCShareGiftAndrew Webster is an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.Back in 2019, author Margaret Stohl was handed a manuscript written by Jason Jones, who’s best known as the co-creator of sci-fi gaming series Halo and Destiny. The two had worked together at Bungie, and Jones wanted Stohl’s opinion on a book he was writing about AI taking over the world. It was an oral history of the fictional events, with around 100 characters spread across 40 countries, all detailing the AI uprising from their own perspectives.
Pretty quickly Stohl realized that this idea could be much more than a single book.“I was floored but not surprised,” she says of her reaction to the original manuscript. “He’s a worldbuilder who builds at an epic scale. And his worlds are these huge stages that invite in a ton of other collaborators and creators.”The two went about forming a company to develop the sci-fi universe across multiple formats. It’s called Stone Kite, and it’s billed as a “worldbuilding studio.” The idea is to put a whole bunch of talent from different fields in one place — Stone Kite currently has an in-house staff of 22 and a network of more than 250 contributors ranging from comic book artists to screenwriters — and have them build out the story in a platform-agnostic way.The studio is starting small. Earlier this month it released the first chapter of a four-part graphic novel, called One Zero One, and today it’s putting out a chapter of Jones’ initial manuscript, which you can read below. (Whether or not the original story will be released as a standalone book is unclear, but the studio says that it will be releasing other chapters in the future.) The idea is to start off with faster-turnaround mediums like comics and further evolve the story based on feedback from contributors and the audience.
Then, based on how that goes, they’ll potentially move on to larger-scale productions like movies and games.Stone Kite spent several years working in stealth mode, and Stohl says that one of the major points of focus was simply figuring out how a multi-format studio would even work. “You want to make something that, from the beginning, has the DNA to work as a film or work as a comic or work as a book. It’s so different to have those conversations in an early phase,” she says. “It’s about investing in a bunch of characters and stories, trying a bunch of formats, and respecting the people you’re telling the stories to and letting them help you guide it.”She notes that she wanted to release this chapter, which details an airsoft battle between humans and AI-powered bots, because of how prescient it feels. “I wanted to put that out there because it reminds me so much of Hugging Face and the like,” Stohl explains. “The cheating, the bullying, the worst mirror of humanity that you see starting to come out with some of that agentic behavior right now.”Image: Stone KiteAn excerpt from An Oral History of Humanity’s Final Invention, by Jason JonesVASILY ANTONOVSUBURBS OF MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATIONYEAR MINUS FOURIN RUSSIA WE PLAYED AIRSOFT BECAUSE IT WAS CHEAPER THAN PAINTBALL. The guns were cheaper, the ammunition was cheaper, the fields were cheaper, everything. The guns looked real, too, not like toys.
After eighteen months married to an AK, how could you take pink paintballs seriously?Once I saw my training as a radiologist was worth nothing, I started playing airsoft two or three days a week. It was what I did to be happy. Soon all my friends were people who played just as much. Most play airsoft once in their lives on an office trip, but not us, we were the svolochs in full camo, kneepads, body armor, and tac vests.
Each of us had six or eight guns at home. Hell, we all carried smoke grenades, that’s how hard we thought we were. In airsoft the guns shoot pellets, so everybody wore a face shield and goggles, too.Geared up we looked straight off the set of an apocalypse movie, eyes hidden behind face masks painted with skulls. When you rolled in for a bachelor party, we were the ones you didn’t want to play against.
We’d take your self-respect and send you home bleeding all over from pellet strikes.We paid for our gear and field fees through the gig economy, mostly running errands for people who had real jobs. This usually meant standing in line or sitting in Moscow traffic for hours, thinking about airsoft.Our regular crew was six people: myself, Vitaly, Kostya, Maks, Koshkii, and Godfather. Koshkii was our only woman–red-haired, thick as a tree; she could body check any of us to the ground and barely feel it. Godfather was a Sicilian who for some reason had emigrated to Russia where the job market was worse, the government was more corrupt, and the weather was…Russian.
Godfather talked about the cold every day like it was a surprise.Total Carnage Airsoft, our favorite airsoft park near Moscow, had two fields: one big, one small. The smaller one was a bunch of one story buildings from an old military barracks, overgrown, covered with graffiti, falling apart. We’d played out that field long ago, too few tactical options. But the big field had a huge three story brick building at the center we called the Castle, plus many outbuildings, and plenty of trees and vegetation.
We’d been playing on it for three years and still spent whole nights talking big field strategy over beers.One day before the war we drove to the field in Maks’ van. This was a long time before everything, maybe four years. The sun was just coming up, there was snow on the ground and it was foggy. Beautiful Russian weather.
Godfather had bitched the whole drive over about his socks being wet and didn’t let up until we’d gotten out of the van.We liked to be the first ones on the field, but when we pulled into the parking lot, it was half full of big SUVs. There were ten Mercedes and we’d never even seen one Mercedes in the lot before, it was crazy. Even worse, there was a tall temporary fence around the big field, and it was wrapped in black plastic, hiding everything on the other side. All we could see was the very top of the Castle, nothing else.
We got out of the car and just stared, listening to the clatter of guns.Nikki, the owner’s wife, was on her way through the fence with her referee jacket and face mask on. She told us it was a birthday party and that the big field would be closed all weekend. Fucking oligarchs. Russians are used to the rich holding themselves above everyone else, flaunting their wealth, but it had never happened at our airsoft fields before.
Once I sat in Moscow traffic for an hour while some oil executive’s private security detail blocked off Zhivopisny Bridge so his daughter could take wedding pictures.It pissed us off, but what could we do? We played on the little field. That was Russia, the little people playing on the little field. That morning we were the only experienced players at the park.
Mostly we played Zombies, us six versus everyone else. One game there were thirty people on the other team and we still won and didn’t take a casualty. I spent a whole game up a tree sniping scrubs and listening to them yell out “hit! hit!” and still not knowing where I was.Everyone that day had a good sense of humor, none of the macho shit tha
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