Hickman, Fire, and the AI Black Hole

Full disclosure: I’m not a comic book nerd. I wish I was, but I don’t try hard enough to actually become one. While I’m open enough to read anything, especially a series or arc if somebody I trust makes a compelling pitch, I’m definitely not so open that I follow along in real time. I respect those who do this, tremendously. I feel like I have to say this up front so you read this post knowing I am but a humble interloper. If you don’t know this world at all, maybe I can invite you in, and if you do, please take this as my paying of respects. On to the reflection.

Jonathan Hickman isn’t a household name, but he’s already reached legendary status for coming up with big ideas. I think he deserves to be in the Alan Moore and Frank Miller camp of using comic book characters to explain humanity better than most traditional authors or artists can even dream of. He’s a special modern artist and this entry is me tumbling with why.

Several years before ChatGPT showed up, when machine learning was the closest thing you’d hear anybody say that rhymed with artificial intelligence, Hickman wrote an X-Men series called House of X/Powers of X. (Shoutout Neils Ribeiro-Yemofio for making sure I read this). AI is a main feature in the story, and without ever being exactly a character, making this work one of the most original thoughts about AI I’ve encountered since Battlestar Galactica.

(See the non-comic nerd disclosure at the top again, please. If I am missing details, somebody tell me what else to read next, please!)

Hickman’s central idea is this: artificial intelligence isn’t an invention. Through his characters and some exposition, he frames AI as a discovery. That is a twist worth rolling over in your brain a few times (I know I did). It makes you start to think of AI like fire. Man doesn’t invent fire, he discovers it, and then invents a million and one tools to harness it, right up to computers, which gets us here.

I had to bring up Battlestar because of where this goes. If AI is something any intelligent species discovers, then there’s also a certain inevitability to what happens next. Man and its creations eventually merge. And if man is an intelligent species, you can assume the same for anything and everything else intelligent in the universe (re: aliens), in an endlessly repeating cycle of development and ascension, where the environment, man, and tools, separate in primitive stages, and then (re)converge as they advance.

Like Battlestar, Hickman takes scientific details and mixes them directly in with theology, without compromise, which feels like the appropriate stakes for the questions he’s raising. While there’s no “So say we all” or “All of this has happened before and will happen again” - he comes so (so, so) close in thought, outcome, and quality of execution. And when I say without compromise, I mean people die, worlds end, and hearts break.

This feels extra important in 2026. I’m not an accelerationist or a doomer. I am a daily AI user with no interest in going back to the before times and a healthy fear for how this reshapes the rest of my time on earth and the future of our species.

In Hickman’s ascension (no plot spoilers), the end destination is to become one with the fabric of the universe itself, a full unification in space and time, that any and all truly advanced cultures across the universe eventually reach. Again, divergence begets convergence. With a massive exclamation point on the end, because if you start to think, “Where in the universe do we see evidence of peaceful, terrifyingly dense, ultimate compressed data” you, and Hickman, eventually realize, “Oh yeah, that’s what black holes are.” So the possible beginnings and endings of the universe, of stars, of the chance of life itself, is all linked through the flattening of information into a dense singularity. Beautiful.

Damn. Right? The black hole as destiny. The black hole as ascension. The black hole as the absorber and consumer of information, maybe nesting universes inside, maybe networked to other black holes in ways too big for our minds to process. DAMN, HICKMAN.

I hadn’t thought of AI this way before. I hadn’t thought of it as a discovery. My brain keeps jumping back to something Pablos Holman told me about how he thinks we should celebrate inventors at least as much as artists.

House of X/Powers of X might be where I finally level with his point. You need both inventors and artists. The artists see the fire and describe its power. The inventors harness it and use its power to pour structure onto a new foundation. And that cycle repeats as the cultures who celebrate both ascend.

So say we all? So say we all. Because it’s not a dream if it’s real.

What do you think? Have you read Hickman or watched Battlestar or both and you’re just saying “finally, Matt”? Or do you want to punch me in the arm, knock the books out of my hand, and call me a nerd before asking, “So wait, do you really think AI was inevitable?” Either way, does that make you more scared, more excited, or just more ready to stare into the flame and make something with it?