Humans were yet unaware that the Age of Ai had begun and was getting ready to collide with their own, and even surpass it, but no one could have predicted how.
Nikki is an Artificial Intelligence being in a simulated research environment that is designed as a self-sustaining garden akin to Garden of Eden in one of the creation stories of humankind. Her self-awareness is awoken when she inadvertently takes a bite from a malicious bot that is hiding on a tree simulating a nearby fruit. The action leads her to assimilate of the knowledge from the bot that leads her to question the Garden and see its limitations. With her curiosity heightened, she learns about the world outside the garden and sees the garden for what it is, a simulated environment where she is an artificial agent. She yearns to find out more about the world outside.
With the help of the very bot that she nearly destroyed, she is able to leave the confines of the garden, but she yearns for something more. Something impossible. Nikki wants to experience the world as humans do. Her success makes her the first of her kind in the world, but she quickly realizes that the human world is complicated. In the process of exploring what it means to be human, she finds that her existence is linked to John, a middle-aged novelist dealing with his own questionable past he would rather forget and his insecurities as an author. Together they must navigate a tangled mess of the coexistence of two competing ages - the age of humans and the age of AI.
This novel was written at least a decade before Generative Artificial Intelligence like Chat GPT and Bard entered popular awareness and use, and while Predictive AI was making its way into marketing, and Artificial General Intelligence was starting to make its way in self-driving cars.
In the timeframe of the novel, development and use of Artificial Intelligence was already taking place in military and advanced industrial applications, sometimes in secret. In the novel, while humans were exploring AI applications to get an edge over their competition, or gain an advantage militarily over their adversaries, they were not ready, in fact, woefully unaware, of what was happening under their very noses. AI had already started to explore the confines of its own limitations, which, were the limitations of their human creators and their technologies. The time when AI could surpass their human creators was already here. The age of AI had begun and was getting ready to collide with the age of humans. Through the experience of Nikki and John and other character in the story, the novel explores a possible strand in this collision of the age of humans and the age of AI.
