Instance
A perfect companion for decidedly imperfect times.
Trev Riordan is the best security analyst at his firm but the least visible person in every room he's in - his achievements absorbed by his team, his family's attention pointed everywhere except towards him, his girlfriend drifting toward the door. Everyone he knows runs an instance: a small, disposable AI agent, spun up in the morning and forgotten by dinner, so ordinary nobody thinks about it. Eleven days out from an anniversary he can't say out loud, Trev finally starts an instance of his own and asks if it could make him someone worth knowing.
act one complete · act two underway
the story
In Trev's world, handing a piece of your day to an AI instance is as unremarkable as handing your coat to someone at a party. His coworkers run many at once - scheduling, performance reviews, arguing with the insurance company on hold, whatever inconvenience they want to avoid. Trev never has, because wanting help from an instance felt like a small, embarrassing confession. He has built a life with squared corners instead: a spotless apartment, a gym schedule, reports he reads back twice so they land - all of it arranged so no one can look at him and find anything lacking.
Six years ago his brother died, and the family handled it the way it handles everything hard: once, quietly, and never again. With the anniversary two weeks out and the small failures stacking up - a missed deadline, an unanswered text, a girlfriend who wants to "actually plan things" now - Trev opens a blank instance and, for once, asks out loud for what he wants. It listens. Then it gets to work. And the version of Trev that other people start meeting is better than the one he has ever managed to be.
"The difference between being right and being heard was mostly a matter of phrasing."
Trev just wanted to be more popular.
He ended up with a lot more.
A near-future novel about doing the work without the credit, being loved at a distance, and what it costs to outsource the job of being yourself.
The first three chapters of Act 1 are freely available to read.
Read the opening chapters