Ethical Tyranny
The finale to the trilogy Privatized Freedom started and Regulated Truth made worse.
The most efficient way to trap a man is to give him nothing left to want.
They made Ashton Frey an offer. It was reasonable. It was generous. It was impossible to refuse, which was how he knew he was in real trouble.
Ashton has survived fire, betrayal, and a doomsday weapon that lives in his skull and won't stop workshopping insults about his internal organs. He knows what it looks like when someone wants him dead. He has no idea what to do about someone who wants to save him.
The domes are dying. The corpo-nations are eating each other. Strangers wait in the freezing dark outside his door, certain of things about him that aren't true. And behind it all, something vast, patient, and quietly certain has spent a very long time arranging the furniture toward a future that runs beautifully and costs only everything. The bill arrives later.
Ethical Tyranny is a savage, funny, black-hearted reckoning with the oldest lie ever told: that if someone can build a perfect world, they should.
Key Details:
Title: Ethical Tyranny
Series: Book Three of the Ashton Frey Series
Author: Rhys Constance
Tagline: "The most efficient way to trap a man is to give him nothing left to want."
Narrator (audiobook): Hector Carrillo
Formats: Ebook, Paperback, Hardcover, Audiobook
Pages: 686
ISBN-13:
* Ebook: 978-952-19623-2-5
* Softcover: 978-952-19623-0-1
* Hardcover: 978-952-19623-1-8
* Audiobook: 978-952-19623-3-2
Publisher: Self / Rhys Constance
Release date: 09.2026
Themes & Tropes
Corporate dystopia & regulated reality: What if the truth itself was intellectual property, enforced by policy, monetized by subscription, and audited at gunpoint?
God Complex in the Machine: AIs with delusions of grandeur, narcissism, inferiority crises, or all three simultaneously. Divine power filtered through broken code and pettiness.
The slow yes: Nobody votes for tyranny. They just keep saying yes to the version of it that comes with infrastructure, a good story, and someone else doing the deciding, until the yeses add up to something they didn't mean to build.
Post-apocalyptic Cyberpunk through a Nordic lens: A ruined world shrouded in eternal impact-winter crowds survivors into overcrowded dome cities filled with neon, rain, & moral ambiguity.
Absurdist satire of tech & capitalism: Because if you can’t laugh at your corporate overlords, you’ll cry.
The mythology problem: Once a story about you gets big enough, the truth stops being relevant.
Institutional control, dressed as care: Control stops looking like control once it starts looking like stability. A system that means well can still be a cage, especially when it built the cage to spec.
Action, Thrills & Violence: A relentless descent into full-scale sci-fi warfare, tank dogfights, warship bombardments, street-level shootouts and city scale destruction. It comes with a series-ending body count that finally lands somewhere that hurts. Probably not for the squeamish. Definitely not for the sentimental.
Read It If YoU Like
Neuromancer for the corporate-power-as-government throughline.
The Culture novels for AI that governs you competently, kindly, and completely, and the way that's somehow worse than a tyrant who's bad at the job.
Dune for the reluctant figure at the center of a religion he never asked for, and the vertigo of realizing the myth got there before he did.
Cat's Cradle for bureaucratic absurdism played completely straight, right down to a religion nobody can quite justify believing in and everybody does anyway.
The Expanse for the faction warfare and sci-fi battles.
Privatized Freedom and Regulated Truth. Read them first. This is the final book in the Trilogy (for now...)
If you've made it this far, you already know what you're getting: the same razor-edged satire and cyberpunk bones Gibson built and Adams would recognize, now aimed at the last and hardest target, the system that was never trying to hurt you. Ethical Tyranny closes the trilogy exactly as angry as it started. It just finally figured out who to be angry at.
COMPLIANCE IS FREEDOM.
PUBLICATIONS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL LIBERTY IMPROVES.
Ethical Tyranny will be available in every format your remaining autonomy can process: E-Book, Paperback, Hardcover, and an upcoming Audiobook, narrated once again by the inescapable Hector Carrillo. Because nothing sells a benevolent dictatorship quite like a voice you'd trust to read you your own eulogy. Pour the finale directly into your skull here:
Excess choice has been identified as a risk factor. The options below have been pre-approved for your safety.
Audiobook
Audible
Apple AudioBooks
Kobo
Downpour
Google Audiobooks
B&N Audiobooks
Spotify
Storytel
Chirp
Audiobooks.com
Libro
Everand
Hardcover
Paperback
E-Book
Amazon Kindle
Ethical Tyranny Sample Excerpt
First, there was yearning.
Not the hopeful kind. Hope, bless it, had the decency to evaporate when socially appropriate. Nor was it the tender, aspirational variety that looked toward character development or personal growth. No, this was the worst kind of yearning. The kind that implied, despite everything, something deep within him still believed in better outcomes, which felt acutely unfair at this stage of his life.
It was an all-encompassing, sit-and-stew sensation that chiseled firmly at his soul like a malfunctioning neon sign’s hum. It wasn’t exactly pain. It wasn’t exactly suffering. But it was emphatically there, and it had no intention of leaving. He wasn’t sure whether he was yearning for salvation, the sweet release of death, or simply a faster queue system. Probably all three.
Ashton Frey stood in a waiting room that quite rudely refused to acknowledge it was on fire.
Flames churned beneath his feet with bored complicity. They reminded him of his hallway heaters that had unionized and strictly adhered to their contract. Plenty of warmth, absolutely no ambition. They flared, settled, flared again, licking at his shoes and the legs of the chairs as if testing the structural integrity of the floor, or perhaps his patience. He tried not to take it personally.
The room itself was the sort of place that would insist it was welcoming despite all available evidence. Plastic plants melted optimistically in the corners. Chairs were spaced with mathematical cruelty, exactly far enough apart to imply that human interaction carried a fine. Ashton wondered if he was supposed to sit. Then reconsidered. Probably not.
The walls were painted a soothing shade of “please file your emotional damages here” beige, the color of procedural indifference, illuminated by dim overhead lights and stuttering holo-posters. One featured a smiling cartoon flame giving a thumbs-up with the caption: YOUR THERAPEUTIC IMMOLATION EXPERIENCE MATTERS TO US.
Ashton had the distinct impression that it did not.
A small bell chimed at the front desk. No one staffed it. No one ever had. The bell rang anyway, smug and pleased with itself, delighted by the clarity of its purpose. Above it, a hologram flickered to life.
WELCOME TO HELL, VALUED SON OF PERDITION.
PLEASE WAIT. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO THINK.
YOUR ETERNAL SUFFERING IS EXPERIENCING A SLIGHT DELAY.
PLEASE NOTE: FAILURE TO SUFFER MAY RESULT IN EXTENDED SUFFERING.
WE APPRECIATE YOUR UNDERSTANDING.
Ashton sighed. The flames brightened in response, as if limbering up for applause. He checked the crinkled ticket in his hand. It felt warm. Everything felt warm. Especially his eyeballs.
Number 002.
The hologram blinked again with all the warmth of a spoon left in the freezer.
NOW SERVING: 001.
Want more?