The idea
A story shouldn’t end where its first format does.
We build story worlds as branches and nodes, so each piece can live in a different medium and still belong to the whole: a book, a series, a feed, a conversation.
And we’re teaching machines to do what good editors do by instinct — notice the choices that make a story someone’s own.
The work
Three rooms, one house.
One worldview, told in the medium each idea needs.
The app
John-Michael
An AI that learns your stories and helps you find the original you, before the injuries.
The publication
Human Superposition
A serialized book and essays on AI, time, and human emotion — beginning with Past Wounds Are Persistence Hunters.
The essays
I, Singularity
Narrative intuition, artificial minds, and the new observer.
The method
It started long before AI.
Michael Downs built a television production line that diagrammed historical lives as narrative trees, then scripted archival footage onto them. Those series aired on the History Channel. The same architecture now shapes everything the studio makes.
Developed in conversation with Henry Jenkins at USC, the scholar who named transmedia storytelling, and with publishing and media leaders including Dan Farley, Mike Shatzkin, David Hale Smith, Ted Hill, and Stu Segall.
- Map the lifeEvery story is drawn as a tree: the people, the turns, the big nodes that define a character.
- Script by designEach branch becomes material for a medium — a chapter, an episode, a post, a conversation.
- Thread the big nodesThe defining moments travel across every format, so each piece leads back to the whole.
- Turn it inwardThe same method, given to one person about their own life. That became John-Michael.
The founder
Michael Downs
A writer and story architect in San Diego. He has designed narratives for an ed tech startup, a Novartis-funded innovation lab, a Washington policy firm, and television — and then turned the method on his own life.
Everything here is one idea: every life is a story with an architecture, and you can learn to read your own.
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