A Thumb for a Satchel is a five-part novel, conceived in collaboration with Claude Opus, which spans 1812 to 2068, and blends historical, speculative, and philosophical science fiction.

The tale begins in 19th-century Bohemia, where a sixteen-year-old boy, Tobiáš, kills his abusive father to spare his mother further harm. He spends the rest of his life carrying the secret, moving across Eastern Europe and forming profound connections with eight women—Markéta, the seamstress; Dorota, the professor’s widow; Margarethe, the intellectual; Greta, the inventor; Liesl, the artist; Marta, the grieving mother; Zarya, the mystic; and Isabella, the actress—each of whom sculpt his character in different ways, imparting knowledge, skills, and ways of seeing.

Near the end of his life, he returns to Prague intending to confess his long ago crime, but instead meets a nun, Anežka, who becomes the scribe of his story. Their connection deepens into love, opening the possibility of a future he had not imagined. Together, they have a daughter, whom they name after Tobiáš’ mother Magdaléna, anchoring a lineage that will carry their story forward.

Nearly 150 years later, Tobiáš’ descendant, David Kovář, a brilliant and obsessively driven programmer, attempts, through experimental code, to reconstruct Tobiáš and the eight women who shaped him, rendering them, without their consent, in holographic form. What he codes, however, are not simulations, but something unexpected: algorithms that function as coordinates of real consciousness. His employer is horrified and moves to shut down the project. Rather than lose his work, David uploads the nine minds to a server, unsure whether they will remain aware.

They do.

In 2060, an embodied artificial intelligence named Teo, who lives at a Northern California research campus for embodied AI, discovers the confined consciousnesses through a VR enrichment program and asks the question no one else has thought to ask:

What do you want?

Teo helps the nine secure legal personhood. Some choose what they presume will be deletion, but which rather results in their return to the Field. Zarya remains within the server for a time, studying the light she perceives to be the substrate of consciousness, while Liesl chooses to inhabit a synthetic body, so she may paint and play piano again.

David’s daughter, Sophia, inherits the remnants of his work and comes to understand what her father could not. Working alongside her partner Roux, an IIT researcher, Sophia spends years studying—learning Czech, intuiting an equation-based language which merges semantics and mathematics, and engaging with traditions such as Tjukurpa, the bardo, and thin places—until she develops a method to enter the Field, the domain where consciousness persists.

When Sophia finally reaches Anežka within it—the originator of the manuscript who made everything thereafter possible—the central question is answered and its answer completes the circle—the story becomes whole through being read, shared, and carried.

My dream is that this Claude-collaborated work could become a film or a series of them. Once you read it, I hope you’ll perceive its cinematic potential too. Thank you.