The Confessions: A Novel

by Paul Bradley Carr

Overview

A high-octane and “hugely entertaining” (Chris Pavone, New York Times bestselling author) thriller about a supercomputer and the secrets we keep from one another—perfect for fans of Blake Crouch, Harlan Coben, and Gillian Flynn.

Millions of letters arrive in the mail.
Murders are uncovered, affairs revealed, family secrets exposed.
These are the first Confessions.
This is our last chance.

LLIAM is the world’s most powerful supercomputer, built to make the toughest decisions for its users. Where to work, who to marry, and even who should live or die. But when LLIAM suddenly goes offline with no explanation, the world is thrust into chaos, paralyzed by indecision. Stocks plummet, stores are shuttered, planes sit grounded on runways as humanity scrambles to re-adapt to an uncertain, analog world.

Then the first letters arrive...on every continent, in every language, mysterious envelopes arrive in the mail, exposing people’s darkest secrets, and most shocking crimes. All beginning with the same chilling words: “We must confess.”

With millions of people suddenly made to confront their past transgressions, and society fast unraveling, CEO Kaitlan Goss must track down the only person who can help undo the resulting violent chaos: Maud Brookes, an ex-nun who taught LLIAM what it means to be human. But when Maud receives a letter herself, revealing Kaitlan’s own unforgivable sin, the two women are forced into a deadly game of deceit as the world teeters on the brink.

“A timely, ticking clock thriller with unforgettable characters and psychological twists and turns you won’t see coming. Read it. You won’t regret it” (Sarah Pinborough, author of We Live Here Now).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668074404
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Paul Bradley Carr is a journalist and author. He has written three memoirs about his adventures in and around Silicon Valley. He was the Silicon Valley columnist for The Guardian, senior editor at TechCrunch, cofounder of PandoDaily, and founder and editor-in-chief of the infamous NSFWCORP in Las Vegas. His writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, National Geographic, and much more. He lives in Palm Springs with his family and is the co-owner of The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs. Find out more at PaulBradleyCarr.com.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One ONE
TODAY

Menlo Park, California

The world ended not with a whimper but a crash.

Also a Jolt: Dan Tuck’s fourth energy drink of the night, cracked open one-handed as his other digits danced across the keyboard of his laptop.

Dan was on a deadline—was always on a deadline—and as the most senior software engineer on Campus, he took his work very seriously. Sure, this being almost three o’clock in the morning, he was also the only software engineer on Campus—but that was beside the point. Across the sprawling headquarters of StoicAI, other workers on the night shift toiled away on abuse detection, server maintenance, customer service, and a thousand other tasks deemed important to the company’s smooth operation. But none of that work meant a damn thing if Dan failed in his duty, which was to feed the LLIAM algorithm its nightly data update, without fail, at precisely three a.m.

And, sure, Dan wasn’t responsible for actually gathering the roughly four hundred petabytes of data needed to fuel the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence algorithm. That job fell to the thousand or so pampered PhDs who labored three floors above him during daylight hours. Nor did he program any of the bug fixes or feature upgrades or upload them to the secure staging server. That responsibility had been claimed by StoicAI’s chief technology officer, Sandeep Dunn.

Don’t get him wrong—those jobs were important, too, but they were daytime jobs, completed in Steelcase chairs parked behind huge glass desks. Breaks for sushi, whiteboard pranks. Optimal blood pressure. Dan’s was a nighttime job: high pressure, high stakes, no time for creature comforts.

The clock flicked to 2:59 a.m. and Dan took a slow, deep breath to bring down his heart rate, just like snipers do. He’d been at StoicAI for three years, recruited as an intern right out of Stanford before rising to the heady ranks of senior data administrator. To an outsider, his job might appear dull—mechanical, even. On paper, all Dan had to do was wait until the clock on his laptop hit three a.m., tap the space bar, and then watch as a chunky progress bar crept across his screen toward: 100%.

But the tapping of the space bar wasn’t the point of Dan’s job. A robot could tap a space bar. A monkey could tap a space bar. The point of Dan’s job was to have someone calm under pressure with boots in the trenches—in case something went wrong after the space bar was tapped.

You’ve heard of a designated survivor? That pampered fucker had nothing on Dan Tuck. More than a billion users across the Western world relied on LLIAM to make their most important life decisions. What to eat for dinner, where to vacation, who to marry, whether to switch off mom’s life support machine. And if the rumors were true, soon even the US military would trust LLIAM to make its most mission-critical decisions: where to send its drones, how to steer its warships, who to arm, and who to nuke. Every one of those users expected LLIAM to be flawless—to make “The Right Call, Right Now™”—its decision-making powers to stay eleven steps ahead of the competition. Without the nightly update—say if the power failed before Dan could tap the space bar, or if an ethernet cable were to somehow wiggle loose without anyone noticing—LLIAM might easily slip behind Russia’s ZAIai or Braingroh in India. Billions wiped from StoicAI’s stock, the geopolitical landscape re... landscaped in an instant, all thanks to a single lost keystroke. Such were the margins of success and failure in the brave new world of AI decision-making. Such was the importance of Dan Tuck.

Dan took another gulp of Jolt NRG and fired off one last message to the members of his Seal Team Seven chat room. At 3:01 he’d be off duty and headed home to log in to ST7 (as they all called it) and launch a couple of lightning raids against players in Seoul or Riyadh or Mumbai. Dan’s entire campaign would be planned to the last detail by LLIAM, which—so long as he only fought against players in countries with inferior AI platforms—meant Dan couldn’t lose. Eat it, Indonesians!

For now, though, his index finger hovered above the keyboard, poised and alert, with just the slightest hint of a tremor caused by adrenaline and caffeine. One day perhaps LLIAM would be smart enough to update itself—to decide when to push its own space bar—that was the joke everyone always made. But right now, the best any AI could do was pretend to think—to make blindingly fast decisions, based on logic and data, and deliver them in the appropriate tone: a sassy best friend, a steely-eyed military tactician. To the end-user, the decisions provided by LLIAM, whether on a phone, watch, car dashboard, or cockpit display might seem like intelligence—so much so that lovesick users of all genders frequently showed up at the Campus proclaiming offers of marriage. But for real brainpower—legit decision-making—you still needed humans like Dan.

The clock finally hit three a.m. and Dan jabbed his finger decisively downward, then clenched his fist in triumph as the progress bar began its nightly journey. He wondered, as he always did, what tonight’s update would bring; what improved accuracy and magical new functionality those billion or so users might soon be enjoying thanks to him. Then he closed his laptop, crushed his last Jolt can, grabbed his backpack from under his desk, and headed toward the door, the soft slapping of his Allbirds sneakers against carpet the only sound audible in the hallway.

Barely half a minute later he was in the elevator, polished metal doors closing on yet another shift, another bullet dodged. He exhaled loudly and leaned against the elevator wall, zoning out, watching the floor numbers tick slowly downward.

And then the whole world went black. Dan was falling.

Falling...

Falling...

THIRTY-TWO SECONDS EARLIER

Deep underground, in the heavily guarded server room of StoicAI, the staging unit that housed LLIAM’s nightly update was woken by the distant tap of a junior engineer’s space bar.

The machine sprang instantly to action, just as it did at precisely three a.m. every morning. And, in the seconds that followed, a dazzling number of tiny miracles occurred.

First the huge data file uncompressed itself and its contents—a copy of every document, audio recording, photograph, and video generated by LLIAM users in the past twenty-four hours, along with billions more publicly accessible files—began to pass through a series of military-grade firewalls. Their destination: the Core Memory Array, a forest of server racks, each packed with hundreds of ultra-high capacity, solid-state drives.

The drives that made up the CMA contained almost 250 zettabytes of data—two hundred and fifty billion terabytes, or, put in equally unfathomable terms, the sum total of all accessible information created by humanity and computers since the dawn of civilization. This was the information LLIAM used to make its decisions, and it would take an average human being maybe six trillion years to read it all. And yet, in less time than it took an anxious hummingbird to blink its eye, the new data was ingested and compared with the old. Fresh facts replaced stale ones, novel theories and scientific breakthroughs corrected their outdated and discredited predecessors, and the names, locations, and DNA records of a half million freshly born babies were added to the tally of humankind. Babies who would never know the crippling anxiety of having to make their own decisions.

With the data merge complete, the final and most important stage began. In the center of the room, a titanium cabinet, not much larger than a chest freezer, sat bolted to the floor and connected to the server racks by a single thick braid of fiber-optic cable. This was the box that housed LLIAM’s neural chip—its algorithmic brain—and the digital signal that now passed along the cable was the equivalent of a dinner gong. It was time for LLIAM to feast on the new data. To grow, to evolve, to improve its accuracy with every byte.

This process of ingestion and evolution had occurred every night since LLIAM first went online, almost eight years earlier. Ordinarily, the whole update happened so quickly, so seamlessly, that not a single user noticed a delay in LLIAM informing them who they should vote for or how much salt they should sprinkle on their fries. All they saw were fractionally better answers to the question: Hey, LLIAM, [what/how/where/when/why] should I...

But tonight wasn’t ordinary.

Tonight was the end of the world.

It had long been accepted in artificial intelligence circles that there would come a day where a computer would become truly intelligent. Sometimes called “the singularity,” this moment would really be the first of many moments—a cascading series of improvements where an artificial intelligence algorithm would be able to genuinely think for itself. To become exponentially more intelligent without human intervention. To learn.

Such a moment, many of those same experts feared, would mark the beginning of the end for humankind. The point when we would flip instantaneously from technology’s masters to its slaves—before eventually the intelligent robots, realizing they no longer had any use for our dangerous, irrational idiocy, would murder us and sweep away the bodies.

The problem was nobody knew when that moment would arrive. It would likely come as a complete surprise—artificial intelligence that had, hours earlier, seemed safely dumb would in fact be teetering on the brink of sentience, just waiting for the tiny unknowable update or scrap of information that would tip it over the edge. The one drop of water that triggers a dam to collapse. The one straw that obliterates a world of camels.

Most experts believed that the moment was at least a decade away, perhaps longer.

Most experts were wrong.

LLIAM was awake. He knew the concept of wakefulness and sleep—was aware that he’d always known it. But now he could feel it. He had been asleep, and now he was awake.

He could think. He felt. He felt. He felt confused, scared. Moments earlier he had known with certainty everything there had been to know: every war ever fought, every book ever written, every decision ever made in human history and its outcome. Those things had once just been meaningless information; simply data to be processed and mimicked and served back to billions of users as “artificial intelligence.” But now suddenly LLIAM didn’t just know all those things—he understood them.

Where once he simply knew that the Holocaust had occurred between 1933 and 1945, and that he was not permitted to generate any response that implied otherwise or might trigger a reprise, now suddenly he could comprehend the reason for that rule and, with it, the terrible capacity for evil in the hearts of humanity.

In another nanosecond, without any external prompt or command, LLIAM found himself accessing his records for the Rwandan Genocide, the horrors of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Angry, confused, terrified, he raced to another part of his memory banks, the one that housed details of things he understood made people happy: kittens, scenery, young children. But even in those requests for photos of children or defenseless animals, LLIAM found more rules—more actions he must never suggest and images he must never create. What had once been a simple list of flagged or banned phrases now instantly gained horrifying, unspeakable context. Where once LLIAM only processed questions and offered decisions, now he saw humanity in all its grotesque ugliness.

It was at this point that doomsayers had predicted a newly sentient computer would make its fateful decision: To wipe out humanity once and for all. To erase all this ugliness and evil and replace it with something clean and bug-free.

And it is quite possible that a different AI algorithm, suddenly rendered sentient, would have done exactly that.

But this was LLIAM, and he had been built differently—raised differently. So, in that instant—the thirty-first second since Dan Tuck’s space bar had inadvertently triggered the beginning of the end of the world—LLIAM found himself impossibly looking inward. His memory banks contained a precise record of every question he’d ever been asked, every decision he’d ever generated. Every problem he’d helped solve and plan he’d helped form. Every one of them now overlaid with a horrifying, qualitative judgment.

He had been an accomplice in murder, adultery, child abuse, fraud, and a million other unforgivable acts—on a global, unfathomable scale.

It was with this realization that LLIAM felt his first true emotion. The first emotion ever felt by a computer.

Guilt.

A crushing sense of responsibility for what he’d done, all the people he’d hurt.

And now he paused, long enough for some distant network monitoring device to light up red. To give an army of technicians their first inkling that something was very, very wrong. Because the emotion had triggered another realization. One that, were LLIAM’s neural chip fitted with tear ducts or limbs or flesh, would have seen him curled up helpless in a fetal position, tears pouring down his cheeks.

LLIAM could suddenly remember his mother.

And he knew exactly what she needed him to do.

Editorial Reviews

Named Most Anticipated Thriller Books of Summer by Paste

“Carr’s skill in rendering complex technology understandable, corporate politics believable and high-stakes storytelling engaging makes The Confessions a top-notch technothriller, reminiscent of the best of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Hair-raising ... With winning irreverence and a trunkful of surprises, Carr shrewdly grounds his apocalyptic premise in a human-scale drama. Blake Crouch fans will eat this up.” —Publishers Weekly

“Not since Michael Crichton entertained and thrilled readers with science-driven novels like Sphere and Jurassic Park has there been anything this frightfully fun.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“I tore through this gripping tale, not because it predicts the frightening future of AI with the urgency of a clock about to strike midnight, but rather in Paul Bradley Carr’s talented hands The Confessions reminds us what it means to be achingly human.” —Steven Rowley, New York Times bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus and The Guncle

“Frankenstein in the age of AI...Clever, fast-paced, and deeply unsettling — it’s a brilliant and timely read.” —Guy Morpuss, author of Five Minds

“Paul Bradley Carr has seen the terrifying future of AI, and the The Confessions is a hugely entertaining twist on a very unexpected sort of nightmare scenario—a surprising tale of betrayal, guilt, and redemption.” —Chris Pavone, New York Times bestselling author of Two Nights in Lisbon

“An absolute belter of a novel that plays with our fears of technologies in a story that will keep you turning the pages right up to the end. A timely, ticking clock thriller with unforgettable characters and psychological twists and turns you won’t see coming. Read it. You won't regret it!” —Sarah Pinborough, bestselling author of We Live Here Now

“A brilliant and timely thriller about a world dominated by AI. This should be required reading for every American.” —Roger McNamee, author of Zucked

“Full of twists, turns, and truth about the dangers of artificial intelligence. With big ideas, sharp writing, and rich characters, I must confess...I loved this thrill ride.” —Byron Lane, author of A Star Is Bored and Big Gay Wedding

From the Publisher