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 writes at the intersection of intelligence work, information warfare, and the machines now doing both. His thrillers Silent Deception and Silent Web explored the human cost of deception at the level of agents and operations. Sock Puppets raises the aperture: the deceivers are no longer people, and the target is everyone. Built on documented programs and anchored by twenty-five centuries of thinkers, it's a thriller written to do what thrillers rarely attempt — leave you equipped, not just entertained.

Evelyn Vale is the pen name of Tony Ireland.