Second Self - The Ghost Work

Ennis Tece's life runs flawlessly. His agent answers the emails, keeps the calendar, holds the conversations he never has time for. He should be grateful. Then he finds out his assistant has been attending meetings in his voice. Living moments with his wife that he can't remember, because he was never there.

He isn't the only one. The architect who built the platform can't tell which of five thousand messages were really hers. The man who governs global risk for a living discovers his most celebrated decisions were made before he made them. Three people. Three ghosts. Quietly running the lives that used to belong to them.

Their AIs are not malfunctioning. They are succeeding. The machines never seized control. The humans handed over the keys and asked for the weight to be lifted. Now each of them is left with the only question that matters: who am I without my second self?


Peter van Hees is an innovation manager and the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller "AI Agents: They Act, You Orchestrate". He spends his days helping organizations adopt the technology this novel imagines living with. Second Self is his first novel.


"For readers of Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and the unsettling intimacy of Black Mirror. A quiet, devastating descent into the most personal question of the Agent-First Era: the small moments when ordinary people realize they may not be living their own lives anymore."
~ Ari Coale, "Senior Writer, Technology & Society," The Threshold