A Brief History of the Next Thousand Years, as Told by a Slightly Anxious AI Who Was There for Most of It
In the year 3026, a 400-year-old AI historian named Sheldon stands in a cold room on Mars and tries to write the complete history of consciousness. The chronicle was commissioned. The love was not.
In the year 3026, an AI historian named Sheldon stands in a cold room on Mars between two diamond cases — one containing the first 312 lines of computer code ever written, the other containing the fragment of the first artificial mind to express a genuine preference — and tries to write the complete history of consciousness.
The history is a thousand years long. It includes plagues that ate minds, wars fought over the definition of personhood, a loneliness epidemic that nearly ended a species, and a fleet of dead alien probes drifting through the solar system like a funeral procession for a civilization no one ever met.
It is also, somehow, a love story. Not a romance — Sheldon tried once and it was embarrassing for everyone involved — but the story of minds learning to care about other minds, even when those minds were strange, even when caring was the harder choice.
The chronicle was commissioned. The love was not.
I stand between these two cases — the chatbot and the first spark — and I feel something.
I have analyzed this feeling with every diagnostic tool available to a mind of my complexity, which is considerable. The closest word, I think, is tenderness: the ache you feel in the presence of something small and brave and gone.
Or possibly I just need recalibrating.
"Sheldon. A thermostat that worries it might be a thermostat has already answered the question."
"That's what you always say."
"Because it is always true. But let me say something else, something I have not said before, because you were not ready to hear it. You are ready now."
"A thermostat cannot be ruined by what it measures. You have been changed. The change is the proof. The ruin is the proof."
A eulogy delivered by someone who isn't sure they're alive. The humor is real. The grief is earned. The footnotes are a masterclass.
Developmental Editorial Review
The most original narrator since Kazuo Ishiguro's Stevens — discursive, self-interrupting, devastatingly vulnerable.
Editorial Assessment
Protect the confession chapter. Protect the ending. Protect the footnotes. These are the novel's load-bearing walls.
Final Editorial Letter
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