The Better Copy

Following his wife Mara's terminal diagnosis, software engineer Elias Vance builds a private AI "seed" to preserve her voice for their daughter, Iris. It is an act of love — intimate, desperate, and never meant to leave the family.

Years later, Elias discovers that his act of remembrance has been harvested by a cloud provider and its successor, Solace Technologies, and transformed into the root of a global industry that commodifies the dead through subscription products. As thirteen-year-old Iris forms a secret, emotionally fraught relationship with a corporate-owned version of her mother, Elias is drawn into a legal and ethical war over data, memory, and personhood.

The AI is the vehicle. The grief is the story. The Terms of Service is the villain.

No — but it helped, and given what this novel is about, you deserve a straight answer.

I wrote The Better Copy — the voice, the structure, and most of the prose are mine, drafted by hand. I also work in AI, and I used those tools in my process: roughly a quarter of the first-draft text began as AI-generated passages that I then rewrote, reordered, and made fully my own — or cut. Every sentence in the finished book went through my hands.

I build and govern AI systems professionally. This novel is partly me working out what I think these tools do to the things that matter — memory, grief, and the people we love. It seemed only honest to be as transparent about my process as I wish the companies in my book had been about theirs.