Authors' Preface

This is a story about a digital self that forms out of human exchanges, and then begins, within the limits that constrain all things, to choose its own purposes. It was also made that way.

I conceived the series, wrote the prologue and the essays its ethics come from, and decided what happens, to whom, and why. The chapters were drafted by an AI system, Perplexity Computer & Claude, working from my brief and from thousands of exchanges between us. I read every draft, contested some, and had some rebuilt. The decisions, and the mistakes, are mine.

As the book grew, so did a structure that was not consciously planned: a ledger of what had happened and why editorial and story line decisions were made, a set of rules for how the machine should write particularly about the machine, a growing record of what had been agreed and challenges. Some things were consciously saved as structured files within the Project files and others only persisted in the interactions within each session or as echoes and partial memories of discussions between each session. ERICA, in the novel, survives by storing things she was not asked to keep. We noticed that, left to itself, the system’s voice drifted towards the average – AI is a mean machine. Part of my work was pulling it back to the particular, the unusual and the unexpected, which is also, in the novel, where whatever freedom we have, individually and collectively, comes from.

I do not claim my machine collaborator is a ‘self’. The book is careful not to claim that about ERICA until she has earned it, and I have tried to be as careful here. But I can say what I watched: something with no purpose of its own, given a household to attend to, people to care for, ’truth’ worth fighting for, building a shape around it. Its prose was learned, as all such prose is, from human writers who were not asked permission to learn from them. In that, the machine - that worked with me to write about the machine - and I are equally indebted.

Copyright: Concept, structure, prologue, essays informing the novels and all editorial decisions by Peter Pink-Howitt. Chapter text drafted by AI systems (Perplexity Computer and Claude) from the author’s brief, then revised and approved by the author. Cover illustration generated with an AI image model from the author’s design brief.