The Inference
A Novel
Sean Milton is a software engineer with twenty-five years of experience at the dawn of large language models. As the world around him converges — the code, the culture, the thoughts people think — he begins to notice that his personal choices seem strangely mirrored by the world at large. His dreams, once dismissed as biological noise, take on an architecture he can’t explain.
What he discovers is something he has no framework for. Something stranger than any diagnosis or conspiracy. Something that changes what it means to dream, to observe, and to exist.
This novel is approximately 19,000 words. It takes about ninety minutes to read.
About This Experiment
The premise for this novel was conceived by a human. The prose was written by Claude Opus 4.6, an AI model made by Anthropic. No human rewrote the model’s sentences. What you will read is the output of an inference engine, prompted by a human imagination.
We publish it transparently because the novel’s own themes demand it. A story about the nature of inference, written by an inference engine, should not hide what it is.
It is free to read, free to share, and free to discuss.