Valois

Concept:

1. Starholder is a grand strategy game that simulates a conquest of our solar system. The game begins on the moon where an alien civilization setups up a colony with advanced terraforming, energy and space travel technlogy. The goal of the game is to take over enough of the solar system and generate enough economic activity that the aliens return. The end goal of the game is to defeat the aliens and assume control of the solar system without the threat of Aliens unseating you.

2. Starholder is actually a metagame. It is a training tool and competition in which 5 wealthy people late in life are competing to win an AI that will manage one of their fortunes on behalf of the heirs of the winner.

3. Henri Valois is one of the 5 competing to win this. He came to wealth later in life and one of his great regrets is that never achieved the tycoon status that his ego aspired to. He's also suffering from declining cognitive ability. His other passion is studying European history, particularly the aristocratic maneuverings of great houses as they schemed and married and consolidated power over generations. He is possibly distantly related to the Valois Dukes in Burgundy who briefly created a kingdom within the kingdom of France before overextending themselves and getting cut down.

4. Kendra Godfrey is the developer of the AI system. The Starholder game developer is TBD.

5. Valois ethical dilemma should he win (and he will of course) is whether to place his fortune into an AI managed trust and haunt his heirs the same way that the decisions of the Charles the Bold haunted Mary of Burgundy who basically ended up in a rock and a really hard place after his death.

The challenge is that the AI is learning to mimic and become Henri based on him playing the Starholder game at a time when he's losing his shit, dipping into the fantasy world of the Dukes and becoming very unreliable. 6. To play the game, Valois as asked the 4 great dukes of burgundy and mary to act as his war council. Other players have their own war councils as well. This is all the setup for a novel that works on 3 levels:

A. Henri Valois' interior mind state as he loses his grasp on reality, mixing up history, his desire for greatness and immortality and winning the Starholder game.

B. A commentary on technology today, the ethical implications of AI, the dead haunting the living by controlling capital beyond their death (addressing Boomer generation al wealth transfer or lack thereof) and whether or not Henri will deprive his adult children of their agency by placing his fortune in trust under the control of his AI

C. A technothriller adventure story about the battle for control of the solar system via the Starholder game. This lets us bring Starholder to life through fiction. Prototyping something that could serve as a launchpad for that project. with all that said....give this set of conversations I had with OpenAI a read. while the prose is a bit stiff, it's ability to grasp all of this and give contextual replies is impressive and something we can work with.