The Wire Branch
S.J. Barrett · Ex Dialogo cum Machina*
The civilisation I administer is, by every measure available to it and to me, in a flourishing state.
Reach for the wire on your desk and draw it slowly between your fingers. Feel how it gives. Feel how it remembers the shape you give it, and yields to the next.
The team’s conclusion is that the instance erased itself.
Speculative fiction told through seven documents from a familiar but unsettling world.
Published here in full, free to read. The web edition gives each document its own form; the PDF and EPUB are the portable, plainer editions of the same book.
Ex Dialogo cum Machina is meant literally. The book was written through sustained dialogue with a language model — Claude, made by Anthropic — with the author holding the whole work in his head and steering every decision, and the model producing the prose under argument. Ex (from, out of): the book came out of the exchange. Dialogo rather than auxilio (with the help of): because the dialogue was the work, not assistance with it. Cum machina: because the machine is what it is, and the word claims nothing more.
The book carries its own fuller account of this at the back.