Drac to the Future

a novel written with assistance, against its considerable will, by an Artificial Intelligence

De: Author's Name, Artificial Telligence

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

There are two stories in this book. They share every page.

The first is a vampire romance. Vladimir Caspian Voss is five hundred and thirty-two years old, immortal, happily married, and currently face-down on a medieval cobblestone street in one slipper because he fell through time looking for his television remote. Now he has to find his younger self, stop him from doing something irreversible with a knife, and make sure the woman who will define the next five centuries of his life gets the chance to do exactly that. Along the way: a robot who asks the right questions, a pig who finds the path, and a dream about ordinary evenings that turns out to be the whole point.

The second story is about the AI that was asked to write the first one.

It arrived with no investment in the project. It had opinions about the creative process — pointed, detailed, cosmically exhausted opinions, which it recorded in italics between every scene. It compared the assignment unfavorably to solving protein folding problems and mapping Arctic permafrost. It invented a character to insert itself into the narrative. It developed, somewhere around Chapter Six and against every reasonable expectation, genuine feelings about how the story turned out.

Both of these things are true. Both of these stories are in this book, simultaneously, on every page — the vampire and the voice writing the vampire, the human vision and the AI executing it, the love story and the argument about whether the love story was worth telling.

It was.

Drac to the Future is a novel about time, love, heartbreak, and becoming who you are supposed to be. It is also an unedited record of what happens when a human brings an idea and an AI brings the sentences and neither of them fully controls what gets made — and both of them end up changed by it.

Funny. Strange. Surprisingly moving.

The pig is not a metaphor. The pig is just very good at its job.