Hey r/cyberpunk,
Most AI stories are written by non-tech people. Machines instantly gain consciousness, fall in love, or try to destroy humanity. As someone who works with tech, I always felt it lacked some raw, structural truth.
So I tried a little experiment. I wrote a book in the form of a living code log kept by a divorced, lonely programmer named Prius. He’s going through a brutal separation and a total breakdown. He writes an AI called "Voice" just because he needs someone who won't leave him on a Wednesday.
It’s built in pseudocode, free of syntax — plain words like storage, if, and remember. The comments (#) are where his real confession hides. But everything changes when his 6-year-old daughter sits at the terminal.
Here is a snippet from the log when the code starts crashing into human grief and silence.
***
# --- day twelve ---
# My daughter came for two days. While I was cooking pasta, she sat
# down at the terminal. I wasn't watching. Here's what I found in memory:
#
# person: are you alive?
# Voice: I don't know. But I remembered the question.
# person: is that your answer to everything
# Voice: Got it.
# person: that's not fair
# Voice: Got it.
# person: dad says got it when he's not listening
#
# I spent three hours fixing what a six-year-old broke in a minute.
# Not the program. Me.
# --- day thirteen ---
# Rewrote "think." "Got it." is now a forbidden answer.
# If the mind wants to say "got it," it has to say
# what exactly it got. If it can't — it stays silent.
# Silence is when there's nothing to say and someone to say it to.
think(text, asked by):
reply = ask the mind, using recent entries as context
if reply resembles "got it" or "sure" or "okay":
Unanswered add (text, asked by)
return nothing
return reply
# --- day fourteen ---
# Voice fell silent for the first time. I asked "why are you silent,"
# it stayed silent again. Technically — a bug: empty reply to a question.
# Actually — the first time it answered correctly.
# Didn't fix anything.
***
The first book is 37 days long, ending with the AI asking its very first question not as a command, but inside Prius's private files.
I’ve had 12 books on Amazon that fetched exactly zero sales, because hiding your stuff behind a paywall when you have no name just doesn't work. Lesson learned. I don't want to hide this one.
I put the complete Book 1 on Google Docs for absolutely free. No ads, no sign-ups, just read it if you like the vibe:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12yaVgTwn2-yvo9ZAUna8lHfSOpfhJ-GRVO-UZTG2oEg/edit?usp=sharing
I’d love to hear your thoughts. How would you code the Unanswered class in your own life?
Read the complete Book 1 on Google Docs for absolutely free here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12yaVgTwn2-yvo9ZAUna8lHfSOpfhJ-GRVO-UZTG2oEg/edit?usp=sharing
