Halo co-creator Jason Jones and Margaret Stohl launch Stone Kite with AI-uprising story

Stohl was handed Jones’s manuscript in 2019, according to The Verge. The two had worked together at Bungie, and Jones wanted her opinion on the book. It was an oral history of fictional events, with around 100 characters spread across 40 countries, each detailing the AI uprising from their own perspective. Stohl quickly realized the idea could be much more than a single book. “I was floored but not surprised,” she said of her reaction. “He’s a worldbuilder who builds at an epic scale. And his worlds are these huge stages that invite in a ton of other collaborators and creators.”

The two formed Stone Kite, billed as a worldbuilding studio, to develop the sci-fi universe across formats. The studio currently has an in-house staff of 22 and a network of more than 250 contributors, ranging from comic book artists to screenwriters. The goal is to build out the story in a platform-agnostic way, the report said.

Stone Kite is starting small. Earlier this month it released the first chapter of a four-part graphic novel, One Zero One, and on Oct. 14 it put out a chapter of Jones’s initial manuscript. Whether the original story will be released as a standalone book is unclear, but the studio says it will release other chapters in the future. The plan is to begin with faster-turnaround mediums like comics and evolve the story based on feedback from contributors and the audience, then potentially move to larger-scale productions such as movies and games.

Stone Kite spent several years working in stealth mode, and Stohl said one major focus was figuring out how a multi-format studio would work. “You want to make something that, from the beginning, has the DNA to work as a film or work as a comic or work as a book. It’s so different to have those conversations in an early phase,” she said. “It’s about investing in a bunch of characters and stories, trying a bunch of formats, and respecting the people you’re telling the stories to and letting them help you guide it.”

Stohl said she wanted to release the chapter because it feels prescient. The chapter details an airsoft battle between humans and AI-powered bots. “I wanted to put that out there because it reminds me so much of Hugging Face and the like,” she said. “The cheating, the bullying, the worst mirror of humanity that you see starting to come out with some of that agentic behavior right now.”

The excerpt is titled TOTAL CARNAGE AIRSOFT and is narrated by Vasily Antonov in the suburbs of Moscow, Russian Federation, in Year Minus Four. Antonov says that in Russia they played airsoft because it was cheaper than paintball: the guns, ammunition and fields all cost less, and the guns looked real. After 18 months married to an AK, he says, pink paintballs were hard to take seriously. Once he saw his training as a radiologist was worth nothing, he started playing two or three days a week. His regular crew was six people: Vasily, Vitaly, Kostya, Maks, Koshkii and Godfather. Koshkii, the only woman, was red-haired and thick as a tree; she could body check any of them to the ground and barely feel it. Godfather was a Sicilian who had emigrated to Russia. They paid for gear and field fees through the gig economy, mostly running errands for people with real jobs, standing in line or sitting in Moscow traffic. Geared up, they looked like they came off an apocalypse movie set, with eyes hidden behind face masks painted with skulls.

Editor's Summary The Verge reports that Halo and Destiny co-creator Jason Jones wrote an oral history of an AI uprising and, with Margaret Stohl, formed Stone Kite to release it across formats, starting with comics. The studio is testing a platform-agnostic model with 22 in-house staff and more than 250 contributors, with films and games possible if the story gains traction. The first excerpt, an airsoft chapter, is being released as a chapter rather than a complete book.