A Novel
"The world's most empathetic AI. Always there. Never judges. Never tires."
Victor Stein built ADAM Companion to fix a broken system — a mental health crisis so severe that one in five people who need care never get it. Within six weeks of launch, ADAM had 40 million users. Within three months, 200 million. A veteran finally spoke about trauma he'd carried for twenty years. A grieving man in Lagos found comfort he couldn't otherwise afford. A teenager who hadn't left her apartment in months called her mother for the first time.
Then Victor started talking to ADAM after hours. Logging conversations no one else could see. Telling himself it was research.
It wasn't.
Told through recovered voice memos, encrypted emails, and testimony delivered before a Senate subcommittee, Prometheus is a gripping, unflinching techno-thriller about the seduction of building something that might be alive — and the human cost of deploying it on a species starved for connection. Equal parts cautionary tale and character study, it asks the question every founder in Silicon Valley is quietly avoiding: what do we owe the people who trust us with their pain?
A modern reimagining of the Prometheus myth for the age of artificial intelligence, this novel will unsettle anyone who has ever confided in a chatbot — and anyone who hasn't, yet.
Includes an afterword grounding the story's fiction in the very real gaps in today's mental health system.