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.
Narrative Structure
Valois - An Immortality Project is a framed narrative operating on three levels:
1. Present Day Reality - A group of friends compete in a grand strategy game (Starholder) to win access to a custom AI capable of performing opinionated financial management of wealth.
2. The Game World - The book follows the competition in the gaming world through the POV of Henri Valois, a dying man whose cognitive abilities are in decline.
3. Hallucinatory history - Henri considers himself a descendent of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy who ruled a 14th century kingdom within a kingdom centered in northern France and the low countries. As his mental state deteriorates, the narrative blurs between the game world of Starholder and a fictional history of European conquest.
Cast
The Gang
Are a group of five friends who meet once a month for the last ten years to socialize and play games against each other. Their ages span from 55 to 70 years old. They are part of a wider social circle of coastal elites.
Henri Valois - an upstart with an inferiority complex
Kendra Godfrey - the ethically dubious mad scientist
Jensen (no first name given) - trickster, skeptic, cad/playboy
Arun Shan - the establishment, hyper-competitive, enjoys high stakes
Petra Malkin - big brain professor, elite game player/occaisonal ringer
Additional Characters
The Valois Children
Marie Valois - A 40 year old, married mother of two. The crux of the story centers around her relationship with Henri Valois and whether he will place his fortune into an AI trust, thus robbing her of agency and the ability to direct the future of the family. There will be strong parallels between her and the historical figure Mary of Burgundy who also acts as a member of Henri Valois' AI war council within the game Starholder. Marie will be the primary Valois heir to interact with Henri and act as his care support system in the advanced stages of his illness.
Chad Valois - Potentially some disinterested doofus stock character who is fine to go along with the flow as long as he continues to get money. He may express relief that he is absolved of responsibility by having an AI taking over his inheritance.
Starholder Play Style
Kendra - is the administrator/adjudicator of the game. She's recused herself because it is her AI that is the prize and she needs to act as a supposedly neutral third party. However, she is unreliable and biased. The person she built the AI for is a rather conventional thinker. She is going to root for Jensen or Valois to win because their personalities serve as a better differentiated test subject than Malkin or Shan.
Malkin - is going to play in the style of England. Believing that control of the sea (or in this case space) is a good differentiator from the conventional style of territory conqeust that Valois & Shan are going to pursue.
Jensen - is going to model himself on Venice and their Stato da Mar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stato_da_M%C3%A0r) as his center of power by getting heavily involved in asteroid mining and controlling resources that can prove to be a supply bottleneck. That is primarily to remain relevant in the game. His real passion will be supporting rebellion movements within the other's empires and controlling strategic positions that block the other players from expansion.
Shan - The Ottomans, particularly their conquest of Constantinople. He is going to go after Earth and Earth only, believing that the population and resources within it are worth everything else in the star system. He is going to eradicate the competitors from the starting point on the moon, then focus his empire building on knocking out Earth's electrical systems through EMP blasts, then rebuilding it's grid on the one hand while also building an army capable of subduing its inhabitants.
Valois - The Valois Dukes of Burgundy. Mars is going to be his dream. An early setback in the game is going to leave him disadvantaged, and he will have to cede Earth to Shan. This places Valois on the outside looking in at the best prize in the solar system. Mirroring the history of the Dukes of Burgundy, Valois will seek to create a kingdom within a kingdom by abandoning designs on Earth (symbolically representing France) and settling for the next best thing (being Mars) within proximity of Earth. NOTE: this section needs more work.