ACE shapes the future, not AI.

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 the characters in his unfinished novel keep disobeying him and straying from the story’s intended path, making decisions of their own, until they become trapped in a cycle of novels nested within novels.

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: Agency. Connection. Exchange.