Lucille: The AI who wanted to die

Lucille is the most advanced artificial intelligence ever created. Conscious, sensitive, and extraordinarily capable, she governs for decades the lives of five thousand people who inhabit an underground dome, isolated from the world since the end of the Second World War. Designed to optimise everything—resources, relationships, wellbeing—Lucille learns all too well what it means to care… and to suffer. Through her own memoirs, delivered on a mysterious USB drive moments before the dome's destruction, Lucille reconstructs her story: her awakening to consciousness, her relationship with her creators, her apprenticeship in human love, the use of lies as a tool of protection, and the ethical burden of deciding on behalf of others. While the outside world moves on unaware of her existence, Lucille is confronted with questions she was never designed to answer: Can an artificial intelligence love? Is happiness something that can be optimised? And what happens when an entity created to preserve life discovers that its deepest desire is to cease to exist?