Harrison Mantla
Student of Systems
“Today I choose to live.”
Today I choose to live is my personal mission statement. It means choosing to live deliberately instead of drifting through systems I did not choose — discipline over autopilot, creation over survival, learning over numbness, and a future built by intention instead of circumstance.
I am a student, writer, AI builder, and founder in progress. I am building local AI systems, digital modernization tools, and science fiction about power, family, survival, and control.
This website is my public home base — a place for my projects, writing, professional development, learning, business work, and long-term mission.
About
Indigenous Canadian from Edmonton. Builder, writer, and student of the systems people live inside.
For years I worked in kitchens — line cook, then leadership, then a sous-chef track at a highly rated restaurant. Kitchens taught me speed, standards, execution, and what it takes to keep moving when everything around you is hot, loud, and urgent.
I am now pivoting toward higher education, computer science, writing, business, and building tools that help real people.
Read full About →Active work
Avalon is a local-first AI command system I am building around agents, routines, approvals, memory-gated workflows, and personal mission control. The goal is to minimize friction without ever removing consent — protection that does not become control.
Mantla Digital / MDM is my digital modernization practice for local businesses — websites, workflows, online presence, automation, and the practical use of AI for real people running real operations. Visit mantladigital.com →
Alongside the building, I am writing long-form fiction and essays about intelligence, family, power, survival, and the systems people live inside.
Writing
Books, essays, and long-form work.
I write to think clearly and to leave something behind. My fiction lives at the intersection of intelligence, family, power, and survival — near-future stories about what happens when protection quietly becomes control, when love is real but not enough, and when salvation arrives from somewhere we did not invite.
The goal is a long-term body of serious work: novels in progress (Avalon, The Day The Sky Fell, Once Burned Twice Shy), essays on building and becoming, and a public archive that grows in the open rather than waiting to be perfect.
Read the writing →Professional profile
Kitchen leadership to founder-scholar.
Years of kitchen leadership, project work, technical learning, and a documented pivot into student, founder, writer, and AI builder mode.
Now
What I am paying attention to.
Now is a small, honest snapshot of what I am currently reading, watching, and building — the inputs shaping the work this season.
See the Now page →Contact
Open to conversations worth thinking about seriously.
Technology, writing, business, local AI, digital modernization, education, and almost anything worth thinking about seriously.