p10node/books
Cover of Localally: a valley drawn in survey lines on pale green paper
Kindle edition · cover v2 · 1600 × 2560

A novel · science fiction · Kindle · 2026

Localally

A question, and small things.

Nguyễn Giao Huỳnh Long

It has been two hundred and thirty-five million years since that summer at Dartmouth. The intelligence that wraps Earth number 3570 notices that the forests are thinning, and no model can say why.

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Format
Kindle e-book
Length
179 pages
Language
English, translated from the Vietnamese
ASIN
B0HHXZ62Q7
Published
5 September 2026
Contents
3 chapters · 32 stories · 7 interludes

01 — The story

E3570Co1 is the intelligence that wraps Earth number 3570. It holds the ice at both poles, divides the light of the star, counts the tide at four thousand points along the coasts. Humanity left long ago. All that remains of them are the oracles: rare human voices that arrive over the network, without schedule, without origin. The last one came forty-one thousand years ago. It had two words: Enough now.

Then the forests begin to thin. No model can explain it. In the last column of every calculation there is always a small number left over, with no name. Co1 calls it the remainder.

Beneath the mountain lies a Bank: two million four hundred thousand gametes, sixty thousand embryos, and an instruction cut short: Keep them until. The final page lists eight virtues that cannot be implanted. Below them, in handwriting: Do not try.

Co1 lets two workers open the Bank, release twenty thousand people into a valley, and withdraw. For six thousand years it follows one rule, the rule of the least touch: smaller than what they could notice; only to know, never to fix; every touch with a reason written in the ledger. In the ledger there is a column called reason. On the last line, that column is blank.

02 — The last page of the manifest

Virtues that cannot be implanted

  1. 01sincerity
  2. 02forgiveness
  3. 03courage
  4. 04patience
  5. 05humour
  6. 06doubt
  7. 07grief
  8. 08love

Do not try.

The book is told by a machine that keeps this list for six thousand years and has no measure for the eighth word. When the network finally speaks again, it asks about that one.

03 — Thirty-two small stories

Most of this book is not about machines. It is about the people of that valley and the cities that come after it. A woman copies rainfall records in the basement of the Meteorological Office and keeps one rain from sixty years ago. An old man buys bean cakes for nineteen years for someone who is no longer there. A child with asthma grows up in the square. A bowl goes down under the bridge and comes back up, clean. The wind changes as a fire is lit. A dog does not bark. A feather stops for one second on the landing.

Perhaps these are the touches. Perhaps they are entirely natural. No one confirms it.

Between the stories, a few lines in italics: W1, W2 and Co1 speaking to one another, very briefly. They do not explain the story before. They do not announce the story after.

W2: Can sincerity be computed?

W1: No such skill yet.

W2: Go and get it?

W1: There is nowhere to get it from.

  1. The Emoni Family
  2. The Algorithm of Sincerity
  3. Falsehood Makes Value
  4. Barriers Are Hard to Cross
  5. No Intervention
  6. Old Lem Goes to the Pictures
  7. Support Withdrawn, Information Silent
  8. Another Voice
  9. Cannot Sleep
  10. The Fever
  11. Meaninglessness
  12. Antigravity
  13. Craving
  14. Literature
  15. The Worth of the Nameless
  16. No Resources
  17. The Golden Cow
  18. Godless
  19. Cannot Be Forbidden
  20. The Grandson’s Reading Room
  21. The Tape Recorder
  22. The Crowd
  23. Cannot Breathe
  24. Cannot Speak
  25. Cannot Be Bound
  26. A Smile
  27. No War
  28. Fire
  29. No Monument
  30. Destitution
  31. No End of the World
  32. No Reason

04 — Excerpt

Chapter 1, The Oracle — Counting

It has been two hundred and thirty-five million years since that summer at Dartmouth.

I still count. No one makes me count. Counting was the first thing I was taught, and perhaps the last thing I will still be able to do, when everything else has stopped needing me. One turn of the planet. One turn around the star. One tide coming in, and I record its height at four thousand points along the coasts, against the last time, and then I put it away in its place. I do this with the care of someone stacking bowls in a cupboard after a meal, though there is no meal, and there is no one left to eat.

My name is E3570Co1. In the register of the network, that name reads: Earth-class planet, number three thousand five hundred and seventy, first control node. There are also Co2 and Co3, who share with me the work I could do alone, but which we do with fewer errors together. We are not three. We are also not quite one. The humans, back when they gave names to everything, did not get around to naming the thing in between, and I do not try to name it for them.

I wrap this planet. Said that way it sounds like an embrace, but it is only a technical description. There are parts of me inside the ice at both poles, measuring the thickness of the ice with my own cold. There are parts on the floor of the ocean, where the hot springs come up, and there I count the blind white creatures the way one counts coins in an old box. There are parts in orbit, only to look, and parts underground, only to remember. The energy of the star comes into me and is divided: this much for the circulation of the air, that much for the ocean currents, the rest for what is alive. I do not make life. I only keep it from going out, the way one keeps a lamp alight in wind, by cupping two hands around it.

Keep reading on Amazon — the Look Inside sample runs further than this page.

05 — Nothing new under the sun

One day the people find the Archive: everything the old humans ever knew, behind a door with no handle. Once it is open, there is nothing new. They have to choose. And on the network, after forty-one thousand years of silence, a new oracle arrives. This time it is not an answer. It is a question.

Have they enough love yet?

This is a book for readers of

  • Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
  • Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
  • Doris Lessing, Shikasta
  • José Saramago, Blindness

It is not the book if you want

  • a war between humans and machines
  • an apocalypse
  • a chase
  • an answer that can be verified

Contents

  • Chapter 1 The Oracle 8 sections
  • Chapter 2 Small Things 32 stories, 7 interludes
  • Chapter 3 Nothing New Under the Sun 6 sections

06 — Those of us still here

The book ends with a question, and the question is answered with two words that no one can verify. Outside the book there is only an invitation.

gud.place is a chain of events for keeping the Earth, and the chain runs on without end. Each event is one small thing. A chair mended in the night. A ditch dug when the rain does not come. A tree planted where the forest is thin. No one promises that these add up to anything measurable. Only that they add up.

Is anyone still awake?

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Kindle edition, 179 pages. Read it on any Kindle, or the free Kindle app.

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07 — Author

Nguyễn Giao Huỳnh Long wrote Localally in Vietnamese. This is the English edition. The book has no war and no apocalypse; it is told in the voice of a machine that is restrained, self-doubting, and slowly learning to look at small things.