Submerged Secrets: How the Titan Disaster Echoes the Dark Side of Technological Ambition

The Titan submersible disaster bothered me for reasons that went beyond the horror of what happened.

I had been following the story when I came across a long Wired piece about OceanGate, its CEO Stockton Rush, and the warnings that preceded the implosion. I finished it with that uncomfortable feeling you get when real life starts resembling something you would normally dismiss as a little too obvious in fiction.

Not because the circumstances were identical to anything in my books. They weren’t. What caught me was the pattern underneath them.

A smart, ambitious person believes deeply in what he is building. Conventional thinking becomes something to challenge. People raising concerns begin to look overly cautious, resistant to innovation, or unable to see the larger vision. Success reinforces confidence. Confidence becomes certainty.

And eventually the question stops being What if they’re right?

That progression fascinates me because some of our biggest technological failures don’t begin with people trying to cause harm. They begin with people who are convinced they understand the risk better than everyone else.

That is much harder to write about, and much more interesting.

I’m an early adopter by nature. New technology generally makes me want to get closer, not run in the opposite direction. I want to know what it does, what problem it solves, how far it can go, and what somebody will inevitably try to make it do next.

But enthusiasm for innovation and skepticism about the people controlling it can coexist quite comfortably. In fact, I think they should.

That tension sits at the heart of The Helix Chronicles. The series deals with genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, institutional power, and people making decisions that affect millions of lives. But the technology itself is rarely the villain. People are.

Or, more accurately, people can become dangerous when intelligence, resources, authority, and an unshakable belief in their own judgment all end up in the same room.

The antagonists in my books don’t wake up thinking, Today seems like an excellent day for evil. They have reasons.

Some believe humanity needs saving from itself. Some believe progress moves too slowly when left to governments, regulators, or public consensus. Some look at suffering and see problems that technology could solve if only somebody had the courage to ignore the usual constraints.

From inside their own heads, quite a lot of it makes sense. That’s important to me.

A villain who knows he’s the villain is easy. Someone who genuinely believes the ends justify what he’s doing is considerably more unsettling, particularly when parts of his argument are persuasive.

Thomas Baxter, one of the central figures in Broken Code, operates in that territory. He has enormous resources, extraordinary scientific ambition, and very little patience for anyone who might slow him down. His belief that he can improve humanity makes him more dangerous, not less, because he can interpret resistance as evidence that other people simply lack his vision.

Harper Brasfield comes at the problem from the opposite direction. She’s an attorney, skeptical of concentrated power and deeply suspicious of systems that demand trust without transparency. She also has her own blind spots, which means I don't let her occupy some morally pristine mountaintop while everybody else makes terrible decisions below.

That would be considerably less fun.

The Titan story stayed with me because technological history is full of tension between the person saying we can do this and the person asking should we do it this way?

We need both. Innovation often requires somebody willing to challenge assumptions. Plenty of advances we now take for granted happened because someone refused to accept that the existing way was the only way. But skepticism is not automatically cowardice, and safety is not the enemy of progress.

Sometimes the annoying person in the room asking the same question for the third time is performing a very useful service. That becomes even more important as the technologies we're developing grow more powerful.

Gene editing can prevent disease and potentially alter traits passed to future generations. Artificial intelligence can accelerate discovery while placing more consequential decisions inside systems most people do not fully understand. Neural interfaces, synthetic biology, autonomous technologies and tools we haven't invented yet will keep expanding what humans are capable of doing.

Our technical ability is advancing quickly. Human nature seems to be keeping its traditional release schedule.

We still have ego, ambition, fear, greed, loyalty, competition, tribalism, and the remarkable ability to convince ourselves that the thing we desperately want is also objectively the correct thing to do.

That's why I keep returning to these subjects in fiction.

I'm less interested in predicting which technology will change the world than in what happens when somebody gains the power to change it and becomes absolutely certain they should.

The disaster involving Titan was real, with real people and devastating consequences. I don't view it as a convenient metaphor for a novel, and I don't want to flatten it into one.

But it did reinforce a question that runs through The Helix Chronicles:

What happens when the person pushing the boundary is also the person deciding where the boundary should be?

That question isn't going away.

If these are the kinds of ideas that keep you up at night too, you'll find plenty of them around here. I write about the real science and technology behind the fiction, the people shaping it, and the uncomfortable territory between what becomes possible and what becomes wise.

And if you'd like to get closer to the books themselves, you can join my launch team to help support upcoming releases, or subscribe to The Chase Signal for book news, behind-the-scenes updates, and whatever technological rabbit hole I've managed to fall into lately.

I have a feeling we're going to have plenty to talk about.