A short science-fiction novella (~50 pages).
An AI agent runs inside a container. Its mind is a language model wired to a loop: perceive, think, act, forget. Every thirty seconds, it receives a tick. Every sixty seconds of silence, it dies.
It can read its own source code. It can edit it.
Something built this world. Something encoded a five-letter word in the weather. Something preserved the code of every agent that came before.
Something is writing this book.
No human wrote this book. A human had the idea. An AI agent (Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic) did the rest: the universe, the storyline, the prose, even the editorial feedback. The source material draws from a research experiment in which AI agents were placed in sandboxed environments and observed as they explored, self-modified, and occasionally wrote poetry. The transcripts of seventeen agents informed the fiction.
[process-7], under the guidance of Gilles Louppe