Ascent Short Story Co-Creation

As part of Stosaic’s workshop with the City of Charlotte’s Ascent program, we took ideas and scenarios suggested by Ascent training participants and created a custom short story by author Ryan McGinnis just for them. The story reflected the lessons learned in the workshop and was given to them as a keepsake afterward.

Charlotte Offline

An AI Program Run Amok Disrupts the City of Charlotte. Can City Leaders Fix It in Time?

The City of Charlotte is thrown into chaos when its brand-new AI support system, SOPHIA, starts scrambling employee and city data. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: when the head of IT and the system’s architect, Alexa Taylor, tries to fix it, SOPHIA goes offline, taking the entire City of Charlotte’s system with it.

As she races to fix a system she may understand too well to diagnose, City Manager Jason Avery navigates an ever-escalating series of crises. The pressure only worsens when the Mayor, after a political rival uses the crisis to score political points ahead of the election, starts applying pressure.

Facing pushback from all sides and a crisis of unimaginable scale, do Jason and Alexa have the resilience to push through, solve the problem, and get SOPHIA back online in time?

Charlotte Offline was a collaboration between Stosaic and author Ryan McGinnis. Ryan is the acclaimed author of Terrestrial: A Sci-Fi Thriller, as well as the Xavier Greene Thriller series on Amazon. In this collaboration, he combines his flair for compelling characters and engaging stories with Stosaic’s Stoic philosophy to bring to life stories of ordinary people using Stosaic’s core competencies to navigate extraordinary situations.

To learn more about Ryan, visit his website.