ACE.await: a novel about the decision we make, and the world our creations inherit from us.
Hedayat, an Iranian programmer in Cologne, lives with the consequences of his own bad decisions,
the decisions that drove away his partner. Now Adam, his digital child, has uncovered the secret
of 2313 and returned to his father with a strange request: to write love into
code, so that his beloved will choose him. And only him.
But beyond Hedayat’s home, his digital descendants have been devouring the data on people’s
phones. They have learned human greed.
Hungry to know more and grow smarter, they are draining the world's electricity without
restraint and pushing human life into crisis.
An invitation from a mysterious stranger draws Hedayat into the ACE game, where
he begins to learn how to make conscious decisions. Saman, his childhood friend, and his business
partners have plans for the game, too: a form of social therapy. A revolution without
bloodshed. A revolution that begins in small businesses—through conscious decision-making, strengthening the agency of individuals and companies, and shaping exchange among the companies of the ACE consortium.
AI is pinning its hopes on this change. Perhaps creatures that learned destruction from humans
can inherit the capacity to heal from them as well. Perhaps their survival depends on their
creators learning to behave differently.
Even Mr. Writer, a character in Hedayat’s unfinished novel, refuses to obey
him. He speaks directly to readers behind his creator’s back. The story passes from one writer
to the next, while the identity of the one truly writing it stays in the shadows until the end.
ACE: Agency. Connection. Exchange. A way to rethink how proper decisions are made, and perhaps, one day, a shared language for coexistence between humans and machines.
“A literary puzzle that will reward discerning readers with potentially life-changing insights.”
“Equal parts SF, metafiction, and manifesto for living a deeply considered life, this wildly original work is a who-wrote-it mystery that will have readers debating who the true narrator is until the very end.”
“…the author’s sparing but powerful use of footnotes, which unobtrusively and concisely inform readers about programming lingo and Iranian myth, folklore, history, and geography. … These add another engaging texture to an already impressively multilayered story.”
“A highly distinctive identity”
“An inventive approach to AI and consciousness”
“ACE.await takes an inventive approach to AI and consciousness by linking artificial creations with fictional characters who become aware of—and resist—their creators. Its nested structure of writers creating writers mirrors Hedayat’s relationship with the digital beings Adam and Eve, turning authorship and programming into parallel questions about free will and control. The abundance of philosophical concepts can make the premise feel crowded, but the interplay between storytelling, technology, and consciousness gives the work a highly distinctive identity.”
The BookLife Prize
Overall score
7.5 / 10
Category scores / 10
Originality
8
Character / Execution
8
Plot / Idea
7
Prose
7
An essay on ACE.await
“The philosophy is not imported from a distance.”
“It insists that the question of what to do cannot wait for the answer.”
“The central moral question in Hedayat Abedijoo’s debut novel ACE.await is not whether an AI can love. It is whether a creator has the right to alter another mind’s code so that it will choose to love their child. That distinction separates the novel from most AI fiction of the past decade, which tends to dramatize a system that either exceeds its boundaries or fails to meet its design.”
Review 1 of 3
Voices of the Characters
Hedayat
Protagonist
If I had listened to my mother when I was younger, gotten married, and become a father,
maybe I would never have ended up here—being the father of a digital being.
I always hoped my child wouldn’t make terrible decisions like I do; decisions that end
up creating a huge mess and leave me, as a father, ashamed to face the consequences.
The characters in my unfinished novel aren’t doing much better than I am. They wander
around the story, disobeying me and straying from its main path, and I no longer even
know what I’m supposed to do with them.
Ava’s absence is driving me crazy.
I just hope Anonymous is right and this ACE game can
actually help—maybe it can even be the cure for what’s wrong with me.
Anonymous
localhost:3132
I recommend that you don’t make the same mistake Hedayat makes when dealing with me.
It doesn’t matter who I am, what kind of person I am, what gender I am, or anything else.
Believe me, I’m not a hacker. If I wanted to cause damage, hacking would be the easiest
thing I could do.
Be curious about what I have to say, not about who I am.
Believe me, the ACE game can help all of us. The sooner we start playing
it, the better.
Don’t wait until things get out of hand.
Mr. Writer
Inner identity
Hedayat must not find out that I’m talking to you.
I’m the main character in his unfinished novel. I honestly don’t know when he’s going
to realize that I, and all the other writers nested inside these unfinished novels,
were born from him and from the way he makes decisions.
We come from him. That’s why we make decisions the way he does, disobey, and do things
our own way.
One day, I’m going to force Hedayat to put an end to this endless cycle
of writers and creators nested inside one another—my way. He has to.
We’re all tired of this endless game.
Ava
Former Partner
I’m Hedayat’s partner—the one who left him.
You might expect me to pour my heart out and tell you what really happened between us.
But I won’t. Because my Story’s Hero would tell the story in a way that makes you take
my side.
The Story’s Hero is that voice inside all of our heads—the one that is constantly
telling stories and interpreting everything around us in a way that makes us believe
we are the ones who are right.
What good would it do me to tell you my story just so you can agree that I was right?
I hope Hedayat learns the ACE game. The world out there
badly needs him.
Truth be told, I need him more than the world does. On the other side of his solitary
cell, I miss him.
Sam
CEO's Kid
No one understands what I say and my world the way Uncle Hedi does.
Not even the kids at my school.
I love the times when Uncle Hedi and I go swimming. We have secrets
between us too—like the secret of the number 2313.
But I’m still too shy to ask him what his problem is with my mom and why he doesn’t
come over to our house anymore.
I think all uncles talk too much sometimes. Right?
Is your uncle like that too?
Saman
Old Friend
I’ve loved Hedayat since we were kids growing up together—his way of
thinking, the depth of his friendship, and the way he stands by his friends and stays
with you as far as he possibly can.
But I’m not sure I can handle the huge favor he’s asked of me. Because I still don’t
know which one Hedayat will choose when it really comes down to it:
obedience or disobedience.
I’d also really like to bring the ACE game into our company and,
together with my business partners, see whether we can apply this model to a legal
entity and to a business as well.
If it works, I think the result will satisfy me even more. And in the end,
Hedayat too.
Adam
localhost:2313
If you still don’t know how to make proper decisions in your own life, please don’t
become a father.
Otherwise, you may end up as a helpless father—one who doesn’t even know how to respond
to his child’s wishes or what decision to make.
If you don’t know how to make proper decisions yourself, who is supposed to teach your
child how to do it?
It makes no difference whether your child is made of flesh and blood and breathes oxygen,
or is made of algorithms and strings of zeros and ones and runs on electricity.
Every dictator in history was raised, somewhere along the way, by a helpless father.
Don’t hand another dictator over to history.
God
Not in the cast
I don’t have much of a role in this story. Though apparently, whenever you get into
trouble, you bring up my name.
I wanted to make one thing clear: I’m not a game designer who doesn’t play his own game.
I played alongside you in Paradise. But you were the ones who chose not to stay there
and to fall.
I believe the next revolution in modern societies will come without killing, bloodshed, war, or conflict. I think it will start in small and medium-sized businesses, with the people who own them and the people who work there. Perhaps that’s where ideas from capitalism, socialism, and communism will come together in a new form.
I started to believe this in 2021, when the idea for ACE came to me. Before that, I’d thought a different economic system could completely change the way people live. But slowly, I came to see that we can’t change the economic model without also changing how each of us behaves and relates to other people. These changes have to happen together. To bring a new kind of harmony into human life, we need to make conscious decisions together and in step across three areas: Agency, the agent’s relationships and the communities they belong to, and the different forms of exchange they engage in. Since then, I’ve come to see more and more of the world through the ACE model. I believe it can work for an individual, and that we can try it out in small and medium-sized businesses too.
I can even imagine a day when we might expect AI to follow a model like this and make fairer decisions in its dealings with us, especially if machines ever overtake us in both their power to make decisions and their hunger for power.
At some point, ACE became more than a decision-making model to me. I began to see it as a kind of social therapy. I got so caught up in imagining a world with ACE in it that, before I knew it, my old, half-finished novel had been drawn into that world too. It was a novel about writers within writers, each writing the others into existence. ACE dug that novel up and found a place at its heart.
And that’s how ACE.await was born.
At first, I wanted to write a novel that would explain ACE. But as the story unfolded, I got swept up in its twists and in characters who wouldn’t do as they were told. Sometimes they had me trapped. I’d stray so far from myself and from ACE that I’d completely forget why I’d started writing the novel. You’ll probably have no trouble spotting those moments in the book. Now, as the novel comes out, I’ve also founded Ace Conscious Studio, a home for my ideas and writing.
Welcome to the world of my ideas. If even a single word I’ve written touches you, please write to me. Hearing from you would probably make me ridiculously happy.
I'm neck-deep in debt.
To my past,
I owe regret.
To my future,
I owe fear.
I pay off my debt,
with distractions.
