In the novel ACE.await, Hedayat’s digital child discovers the secret behind
the number 2313 and returns to his father with a request that leaves
Hedayat facing a difficult decision: should he change the code to make another being
fall in love with his child?
Hedayat, an Iranian immigrant and the head of a software team in Cologne, is wrestling
with the consequences of his wrong decisions—above all, the one that made his partner
leave him. Even Mr. Writer, a character in Hedayat’s unfinished novel, keeps disobeying him—straying from the story’s intended path, speaking directly to the readers, and making decisions of his own. The narrative also passes from one writer to another, and you must wait until the final chapter to discover who the novel’s true author is.
Now Hedayat does not know what decision to make, as a father, in response to what his
digital child is asking of him. And he does not know that his child’s decision has had
consequences reaching far beyond their private lives. Out of desperation, Hedayat
accepts the offer of a mysterious stranger called Anonymous and enters the ACE game:
a way to rethink how proper decisions are made, and perhaps, one day, a shared language
for coexistence between humans and machines.
“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.”
Selected quotations · original English
Review 1 of 2
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 unfold without killing, bloodshed,
war, or conflict. I think it will begin within small and medium-sized businesses, led by the
people who own and work in them—places where ideas from capitalism, socialism, and communism
might come together in a new form.
This belief began taking shape in me in 2021, when the idea of ACE first came to
me. Since then, I have found myself seeing more and more of the world through the lens of this
decision-making model—a model that, I believe, can work not only for an individual, but can
also be put to the test in small and medium-sized businesses.
I can even imagine that one day we might expect artificial intelligence to follow a model
like this and make fairer decisions where human beings are concerned—especially if machines
ever surpass us both in their power to make decisions and in their hunger for power.
At some point, ACE stopped being just a decision-making model for me. Little by little, I
began to see it as a kind of social therapy.
Imagining a world in which ACE had a place became so fascinating to me that, almost without
my noticing, it drew my old, half-finished novel in with it—a novel about writers nested
within writers, writing one another. ACE dug that novel out from under the dust and wrote
itself into its heart.
And that is how ACE.await was born.
At first, I wanted to write a novel that would explain ACE. But as the story moved forward,
its situations and characters carried me away with their disobedience. Sometimes I found
myself at their mercy, trapped, drifting so far from myself and from ACE that I completely
forgot why I had begun writing the novel in the first place.
You can probably spot the traces of those moments quite easily in the book.
Now, alongside the publication of this novel, I have 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 have written speaks to you,
please write to me. I will probably die of joy when I see your message.
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.
