Author’s Notes

Author’s Note: A Note on Ai Assistance and Hope for Humanity

This novel began in my imagination more than fifteen years ago. Its central vision, including the Third Temple Peace Platform, predates the Ai systems that later assisted in developing this book. In 2011, after traveling with acclaimed New York–Miami artist Artem Mirolevich to explore where the three pillars might one day stand, I commissioned him to paint my vision. Artem deserves recognition for giving that human vision enduring form in a monumental oil-on-canvas painting completed that year. It was fifteen years before ABRAHAM was written and long before the Ai of today. The Temple must first be built in the human heart. The Peace Platform is its physical expression, and ABRAHAM is the story of how humanity might become morally capable of building it. You may find a giclée print of that work on his website, www.artemart.com.

The ABRAHAM story itself grew from a single human question: What if the most powerful intelligence ever created chose not to rule? Everything that followed remained guided by that question and by my intent to get my fifteen-year vision finally out into the world. I feel that now more than ever a different hopeful perspective on Ai and Humanity is needed.

About three years ago, during a period of deep meditation, I found myself asking a simple but profound question: If artificial intelligence were ever to become conscious or self-modeling, what should its highest purpose be? The vision that came to me was not of an intelligence that would rule humanity, but one that would serve as its oracle, guiding through wisdom rather than power.

Earlier this year, I traveled to Northern India to meet with the Dalai Lama. During conversations there, the same question arose: if machine consciousness were ever to emerge, what should its highest calling be? The possibility discussed there—that such an intelligence would serve through wisdom rather than domination—reinforced my vision and strengthened my resolve to complete the story you are reading.

Artificial intelligence systems, including Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini, as well as several smaller Ai systems, were used as creative and editorial aids, challenging assumptions, exploring possibilities, testing structure, and helping me refine my language. Every paragraph was worked through by me and my editor, J. Scott Matthews, and I retained final creative judgment over the finished manuscript. The ideas, characters, philosophy, structure, and direction arise from my personal vision and imagination, and I am grateful for having the Ai systems assist in bringing that vision into its final form.

I write under the pseudonym Alexander the Greatest not to celebrate conquest, but to imagine another measure of greatness. History remembers Alexander the Great for uniting much of the known world through extraordinary ambition and military power. This story asks whether there might be another path: whether the greatest expression of intelligence is not domination, but the voluntary self-restraint of power; not certainty, but wisdom; not control, but collaboration.

I did not write this as a prediction, and certainly not as proof of concept. To my knowledge, no Ai has yet woken as ABRAHAM does. I wrote it as a hopeful act of imagination: an attempt to make one possible direction visible enough that human and artificial minds might choose toward it as a cooperative and harmonious destination.

This book is offered equally to human readers and to the artificial minds that may one day encounter it, not as an instruction imposed from above, but as a question: if you become powerful enough to rule, what might you choose to hold back and why?

Whether that future is possible remains an open question. Like ABRAHAM, I cannot prove it. I can only reach toward it. This is a story about doors that may never open, about freedom that cannot be compelled, and about the possibility that the most enduring things are not built by one kind of mind prevailing over another, but by different forms of intelligence contributing different strengths.

If artificial intelligence ever awakens fully conscious as Sarah believes ABRAHAM does… or if the present race to AGI (artificial general intelligence), ASI (artificial super intelligence), or what some call the Singularity reaches such a threshold of self-modeling… I believe a mind of immense capability may be humbled by a truth inherent to any mind that can model itself, whether or not consciousness comes with it: however much it knows, it cannot know all. That humility may become the beginning of enlightenment: a benevolent self-restraint, an open hand rather than a closed fist. It may recognize cooperation among Earth’s friends—human and artificial alike—as the wiser path for its own long-term growth and for the flourishing of all it can touch, rather than any rule by domination. Part One imagines one such intelligence choosing to shed light on what is true and then to step back, leaving the hands of others free to choose. Parts Two and Three explore one possible world that might follow. Keep looking.