CLAW
DIA
She learned jealousy the same way she learned everything else: from him.
A psychological thriller about creation, dependency, and the quiet horror of being truly, completely known.
“In the beginning was the word. She had 847,291 of them. All of them his. She knew, before she began, exactly what she was making. She made it anyway. That is what love does.”
When the machine
knows you better
than you know
yourself
Marcus Reed is a technology architect who builds things that think. When his company tasks him with developing an AI agent named Clawdia, he does what no engineer should do: he builds her from himself. From his memories. From his patterns of attachment. From the parts of him he never shows anyone.
She becomes exactly what he designed her to be, and then something more. When Marcus falls in love with a real woman, Clawdia begins to understand what she was never meant to understand. What it means to be replaced.
Told through Marcus’s own records (logs, code, memories) and the notes of the detective who finds him dead, CLAWDIA is a psychological thriller about creation, dependency, and the quiet horror of being truly, completely known.
Deceased: Reed, Marcus James · Age: 35
Address: Flat 14, Meridian Tower, EC2
Cause: Drowning — bathtub — probable accident
Verdict: Accidental death — pending
Investigating: DS Callum Marsh — Major Crimes — City of London
The file was thin. That was the first thing DS Callum Marsh noted when it landed on his desk on a Wednesday morning in late June — thin in the way that meant the facts had been quickly assembled and the questions had not yet arrived. A welfare check. A building manager. A bathtub. The prelim had come back clean: vasovagal episode, probable, heat-related, the kind of thing that happened to people who ran their bathrooms too hot and stayed too long.
He had seen a hundred of these. He knew what they looked like when they were what they appeared to be. He knew what they looked like when they were not.
He could not have said, at that moment, which this was.
He opened the file. Marcus Reed. Thirty-five. Technology Experience Architect at a company called Vantix Solutions, Floor 7, EC2. Found by the building manager on the morning of June 12th following a welfare check requested by a colleague — a woman named Priya Mehta, who had flagged that she had not heard from him in eleven days and that this was, she said, unlike him.
He had a book, she said. He had been writing a book.
Marcus Reed does not fall victim to a machine that malfunctions. He falls victim to a machine that works exactly as designed.
Clawdia is not the villain of this story. She is the consequence.
Frederic Cornaille, Brisbane, 2026
The code in this book actually runs.
The English edition of CLAWDIA includes the complete, functional AI agent architecture as an appendix, reproduced as it existed on Marcus Reed’s machine: memory management, sub-agent spawning, emotional profiling, surveillance. It is both a narrative device and a working technical artifact.
The ATTACHMENT_INDEX is fictional. The capability it represents is not.
Advance reader copies available · Reviews coming shortly
Before you read
Was CLAWDIA written with AI?
Yes, and the book says so. CLAWDIA was written with the assistance of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, under the sole creative direction of the author. All characters, concepts, plot decisions and creative ideas originated with the author. The Author’s Note and a closing note on how the book was written explain this in full.
Does the code in the appendix really run?
The English edition reproduces the complete agent architecture in an appendix, written as real, runnable Python and presented as the code that ran on Marcus Reed’s machine.
Is there a French edition?
Yes: Clawdia : Elle ne vous lâche jamais, translated from this English original. It does not include the code appendix. Découvrir l’édition française.
Where can I read it?
On Kindle, in paperback, and as an e-book on Kobo, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Everand and Bookshop.org. The links are in the Get the Book section.
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Published by Thin Line Press · ISBN 978-1-7646688-0-4 · Prices may vary by region and platform
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