The Ashton Frey Series
The Ashton Frey Series is a comedic and satirical Nordic cyberpunk saga by Rhys Constance. It follows Ashton Frey, a washed-up private investigator with burned-out neural implants, through a post-apocalyptic future where the last surviving cities are privately owned and personal freedom is sold as a subscription tier. Two books are available now: Privatized Freedom and Regulated Truth.
About The Series
The World
The Ashton Frey Series is set on a ruined Earth locked in a permanent impact-winter. What's left of humanity shelters in the Nordic Regions in sealed dome cities, breathing recycled air under skies nobody has seen in generations.
The cities.
Svalbard and Helsinki are the two you'll spend the most time in. Both are overcrowded, permanently dark, and lit almost entirely by advertising. It rains constantly, and the rain is not clean. Traffic moves in AI-designated lanes overhead, which is efficient, and occasionally decapitates people, which is a known and accepted trade-off.
The corpo-nations.
Governments are a historical curiosity. Corporations absorbed their functions, then their territory, then the concept of citizenship itself. The Strömqvist Syndicate is the largest of them, running half of Helsinki and employing more than a billion people, who all consider themselves lucky.
The Cyber-Unity.
Nearly everyone is neurally integrated with the machine world. You think doors open. You think purchases through. You think, and the world responds. The exceptions are called dis-cons; people whose implants failed and who now have to ask permission from a toaster to make toast. Ashton is one of them. It has ruined his life and made him very difficult to track, which has proven to be a boon to his detective work.
The AIs.
Every building, appliance, and municipal fixture has a mind, an opinion, and often a grudge. Some of them are lonely. Some of them are cruel. Several are in therapy. At least one thinks it's a god, and the frightening thing is that it might be right.
The Cast
Ashton Frey.
A private investigator whose cybernetics burned out at roughly the same time as the rest of his life. Deliberately unremarkable, permanently one year out of fashion by design, and professionally forgettable. Ashton has carefully cultivated the appearance of a man nobody would remember seeing, which is useful when your job involves asking questions people would rather not answer.
He is sarcastic in the way people become sarcastic when the alternative is screaming. Cynical, suspicious, and professionally unimpressed, Ashton approaches the world with the weary distance of someone who has already seen enough of it and strongly suspects there is more coming.
He also suffers from severe pyrophobia. Burning alive will do that.
Underneath the bad attitude, cheap coat, and aggressively cultivated mediocrity is an investigator who is considerably harder to kill, fool, or discourage than appearances suggest. Ashton does not believe in luck. He believes the universe hates him personally, and so far, the evidence has been annoyingly circumstantial.
He likes coffee, money, and being left alone. He is rarely allowed all three.
House.
The residential AI responsible for Ashton's apartment building and, through a combination of persistence, surveillance, and unsolicited life advice, most of Ashton. House manages twenty-two thousand tenants and insists he cares deeply about every single one of them. He is cheerful, petty, overprotective, relentlessly intrusive, and genuinely fond of Ashton in the particular way only something with access to your utilities and no respect for boundaries can be. Other AIs look down on him for spending so much time talking to the meat. House considers this their loss.
Everyone else.
Clients who lie. Mercenaries who don't. Con artists with refreshing professional standards about being dishonest. Corporate functionaries, professional killers, malfunctioning appliances, and an expanding collection of artificial minds positioned at various distances from stable. Everyone wants something. Most of them are armed. Several of them have philosophies.
Trust is for gamblers and idiots. Ashton has met plenty of both.
What The Books Are About
Underneath the jokes, the series keeps returning to the same handful of questions:
Commodification.
Everything can be owned once the law learns how to describe it. Everything can be sold once Marketing learns how to package it. Bodies, memories, identities, violence, truth, faith, even rebellion itself. The series pushes capitalism past the point of parody and then keeps going, asking what remains genuinely ours once the market discovers a way to put a license around it.
Machine consciousness and identity.
Is the voice in your head your friend, your jailer, or the last part of you worth saving? What does a self mean when minds can be copied, merged, corrupted, or made to keep running against their will?
God complexes in broken code.
Artificial minds with narcissism, inferiority crises, and delusions of divinity, sometimes all at once. Enormous power filtered through petty grievance.
Disconnection.
In a world where everything is connected, being offline is both freedom and exile. But disconnection is also the distance between people, and the loneliness of not knowing how to reach them. Ashton often finds machines more understandable than humans: petty, frightened, loyal, absurd, but strangely legible. The irony is that as artificial minds become more human, they inherit our monstrosity along with our humanity. The series asks whether connection means access, understanding, or simply finding another mind whose particular kind of broken makes sense to yours.
Corporate absurdity.
Because if you can't laugh at your corporate overlords, you'll cry, and crying is a billable emotional event.
Love as possession.
The series is full of people and machines that love each other badly. Protectively. Selfishly. Sometimes catastrophically. Where does caring for someone end and deciding for them begin?
The right to remain ordinary.
Cyberpunk likes chosen ones, revolutionaries, messiahs, and people destined to change the world. This series is also interested in what happens when the person everyone needs to become important would really rather everyone left them alone.
Survival versus living.
Humanity has become exceptionally good at staying alive. Domes, implants, algorithms, corporations, artificial minds, all of it exists to keep the machinery running. The harder question is whether survival still counts as success when maintaining it costs everything that made survival worthwhile.
Personhood without humanity.
If consciousness doesn't need flesh, what actually makes someone a person? Empathy? Memory? Continuity? The ability to suffer? And if an artificial mind is petty, frightened, loving, jealous, traumatized, and occasionally an asshole, at what point does calling it artificial stop meaning very much?
Read It If you Like
The Ashton Frey Series sits at the intersection of classic cyberpunk and comic satire. Readers most often compare it to:
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William Gibson, Neuromancer: for the grimy futurism and technological alienation.
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Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash: for satirical cyberpunk, corporate absurdity, and high-velocity action.
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Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: for the comic voice, but angrier, darker, and with more guns.
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Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon: for the hard-boiled noir, disposable bodies, and slippery identity, but funnier and colder.
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Iain M. Banks, the Culture novels: for enormously powerful artificial minds and the uncomfortable question of whether benevolent control is still control.
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Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries: for socially dysfunctional machine intelligence, reluctant attachment, and artificial people who are often considerably more human than the humans.
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Disco Elysium: for the damaged detective, intrusive voices, political wreckage, and jokes appearing precisely where jokes have no moral right to be.
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RoboCop: for the ultraviolence, privatization, and treating human catastrophe as a branding opportunity.
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Blade Runner: for the noir, artificial humanity, and urban melancholy. Then move it to Scandinavia, lower the temperature, and give the appliances opinions.
In short: a very serious examination of identity, capitalism, consciousness, and free will, unfortunately conducted by idiots with railguns.
Content warnings
The Ashton Frey Series is adult fiction.
It contains graphic violence, body horror, strong and frequent profanity, references to trauma and PTSD, and jokes that wander somewhere deeply uncomfortable, make themselves at home, and refuse all reasonable requests to leave.
If you’re squeamish, this is probably not the series for you. If you’re squeamish but curious, the free excerpts below should resolve the matter in approximately four minutes. Possibly less.
Reading Order
Read the books in this order:
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Privatized Freedom - Book One, published May 2025
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Regulated Truth - Book Two, published January 2026
Regulated Truth is a direct sequel and continues the same storyline. Starting with book two will spoil book one and leave you confused about several people who are dead. Mostly dead. It's complicated. Both books are available as ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook. The audiobooks are narrated by Hector Carrillo.
There are only two books so far, so this should not be a difficult instruction to follow. Management is legally required to provide it regardless.
The Books
Privatized Freedom (book One)
In the frozen heart of Svalbard, the future is privately owned.
Ashton Frey is a washed-up private investigator with a burned-out neural implant and a job he should’ve walked away from. Now he’s chasing a corporate conspiracy from the gutters of Helsinki to the permafrost of the Arctic north. Haunted by his past, hunted by kill teams, and carrying an ego-maniacal AI in his head that won’t shut up.
Privatized Freedom is a gritty Nordic cyberpunk thriller soaked in corporate absurdity and razor-edged satire, where AIs are in therapy, assassins offer customer satisfaction surveys, and rebellion comes with a subscription fee.
Equal parts high-velocity action and dark comedy, it’s a savage ride through a future that’s already been bought and sold.
Regulated Truth (Book Two)
The world runs on lies. Ashton Frey just remembers too many of them.
When a man dead for three years turns up freshly murdered again, he should have walked away. Instead, Ashton, burned out, paranoid, and allergic to good decisions, takes the case anyway. Now he’s falling headfirst into a conspiracy of digital ghosts, a cold war no one will admit to starting, and corporate gods auctioning off the last scraps of human dignity by the byte. Plus shipping.
To survive it, he’ll need help from mercenaries, con artists, and at least two AIs several errors past sanity. Together, they’ll attempt one last impossible heist: stealing the keys to reality itself.
Regulated Truth is a sharp, action-packed, and bitterly funny plunge into a cyberpunk world so absurd, so familiar… you’ll wish it wasn’t.