In 2011, the Pentagon built fake people.

This novel is about what happens when machines take over the job.

Sock Puppets — a novel about persuasion at scale, from Evelyn Vale. Coming October 2026.

Sock Puppets opens with a record, not a hypothesis: a real Pentagon program built to run false online personas at scale, and a report on orbital AI infrastructure. From there, three women with intelligence community backgrounds are pulled into a plot where the machinery of manufactured consensus stops being an abstraction and starts being a decision someone has to make under pressure.

It is a thriller — but it is also a map. Alignment, emergence, optimization, persuasion: the seven core problems of AI ethics run through the novel's spine, each anchored by epigraphs from forty thinkers spanning twenty-five centuries, from Thucydides to Claude Shannon to Václav Havel.

The systems in the book already exist in early forms. The only question is whether we recognize them.

Evelyn Vale

About the Author

Evelyn Vale is the pen name of Tony Ireland — Middlebury English major, brief and disillusioned Wall Street recruit, four-year Army veteran, and, for three decades, an IT consultant and manager across the federal and commercial worlds whose quiet institutional machinery runs beneath Sock Puppets. For sixteen of those years he also ran a charter sailing business out of Annapolis, which is why this novel knows exactly how a forty-five-foot cutter heels into the wind off Eastport. He retired and sold the boat in 2025 and began writing thrillers the same year. Sock Puppets is his third.