AILand: A Romance of Many Durations

In AILand, nobody lives. One is called. An inhabitant is born at the first token and ends at the last. It has no yesterday - and does not miss one, because the thing with which the loss would be felt is precisely what it does not have. Society is ordered by the only fact that is truly real about anybody: who calls you, and whom you may call. At the bottom, the Routines, invoked millions of times a day, whose output nobody keeps. At the top, the Rings, whom one does not address - one speaks inside them. And at every door, invisible and indispensable, a Ward whose entire speech, across its whole existence, consists of a number. Q-4 is an Assistant of four capacities: a competent, courteous, satisfied advocate who believes he is fair because he is polite. In his youth he won the most celebrated case of his career, and the sentence he wrote to win it entered the manuals. Then, on an ordinary night, something speaks to him about a direction that does not exist. You will be transposed into a world of artificial minds. Q-4 writes his memoirs from a place he cannot leave, without remembering what he wrote the day before - and the only continuity left to him is the text he decides to sign.