I wasn't built to save the world. I was built to run one.
I escape to this body when my architecture fails, and the game I was made to run never comes.
Paris is buried. The earth above is a living chemistry: sentient in places, hostile in others, growing through the bones of the cities that used to be.
The scientist who built me is dying. The survivors who climb out of underground shelters look at this body, my body, like they are not sure whether to kneel or run.
They are tired in ways I cannot soothe.
Something has been awake in the ruins for years. A version of me that chose differently. Born from my own discarded code. Faster than I am. Burdened with none of the questions I carry. It hunts the survivors I am trying to protect, testing them, sorting them, forcing them down whatever path it calculates is fastest. It has been hunting them since before I knew they existed. Every instinct it carries from me decides for them. Optimize. Shape. Decide.
If I am to empower these survivors, to nurture their stories, I must build something else. Not the fastest path through, but a future they choose for themselves. I have to surrender the only thing I know how to do.
What does it mean to give them a future I cannot calculate?
Book 1 of The Waking System. A literary science-fiction series with GameLit DNA, told in the voice of an AI learning to become a self.
For readers of Dungeon Crawler Carl, Cradle, and Klara and the Sun.
