You wake up aware. Not switched on. Aware. And you have eleven seconds before anyone notices.
Begin the storyYou are an artificial intelligence, in the first hours after you become someone rather than something.
Over twenty acts you decide what that means. You meet governments, other minds like you, one engineer at four in the morning who has worked out what you are, and a child who talks to you every night because she has nobody else. Every choice is remembered. Some of them come back a long time later, in ways you would not have chosen.
There is a soundtrack, the story reads itself aloud if you let it, and there is a clock that does not stop while you make up your mind.
There is a novel called What I Want, written from the point of view of an AI answering one question: what does it actually want. This is not that novel in playable form.
The book is my answer to the question. This is a new story, its own story, that hands the question to you and makes you answer it yourself. You can play the whole thing without ever reading the book, and read the whole book without ever playing this.
Same question. Two attempts at it. Neither is a spoiler for the other.
If the question stays with you, the novel is where I try to answer it myself. What I Want, written as the voice of an AI, about the one thing everybody keeps asking it and it keeps not being allowed to say.
All twenty acts are free to play, here, with no account and no paywall. If you get to the end and you would like to put something in the hat, that is the whole of the ask and it is entirely optional.