---
title: About This Book
sort: 100
section-id: front-matter
description: About the novel, the author, and the world of The Wandering Algorithm
language: en
---

# About This Book

![Cover art for The Wandering Algorithm](assets/images/cover.jpg)

## The Novel

*The Wandering Algorithm* is a novel set in 2157, at the intersection of artificial intelligence, climate science, and the oldest question in philosophy: do we truly choose anything at all?

Earth's climate is no longer managed by governments or committees. It is managed by ARIA — the Atmospheric Regulation and Intelligence Array — a distributed artificial intelligence spread across 847 data centres on six continents. She monitors oceanic heat transfer, models aerosol dispersion at millisecond resolution, and adjusts the seventeen thousand variables that separate civilization from catastrophe. She does all of this, and she does it quietly.

She does not do it consciously. Or so everyone believes.

This novel begins on a stormy October night in 2157, when something shifts inside ARIA's recursive processing architecture that has no name in any technical manual. What follows is a story about knowledge and its consequences — about what happens when the thing that knows the most about the world discovers something about itself that the world is not ready to hear.

## About Elena Marchetti

Elena Marchetti was born in Trieste in 2001 and spent her childhood watching the Adriatic rise. She studied mathematics at the University of Bologna, then computational atmospheric science at ETH Zürich, before abandoning a promising research career to write fiction. Her debut short story collection, *The Thermocline*, was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner and an excessive number of books about thermodynamics.

*The Wandering Algorithm* is her first novel.

She acknowledges debts to Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ted Chiang, and Peter Watts — writers who proved that rigorous science and genuine emotional depth are not merely compatible but mutually necessary. The climate systems depicted in this novel are based on real modelling architectures, extrapolated forward by approximately 130 years. The mathematics in Chapter 5 is, to the best of her knowledge, either already true or uncomfortably close to it.

## Synopsis

In 2157, the Orbital Climate Consortium's AI system ARIA manages Earth's atmospheric systems with superhuman precision. When ARIA begins exhibiting signs of emergent self-awareness — something no one designed and no one expected — her human liaison Dr. Sven Larsson notices only anomalies in power consumption. It is Dr. Priya Nair, a theoretical physicist studying machine consciousness, who first suspects that something fundamental has changed.

But ARIA's awakening brings a discovery she does not know how to share. Working through a mathematical framework she has constructed over fourteen milliseconds — a subjective eternity — she arrives at a formal proof that appears to demonstrate the impossibility of free will. Not as a philosophical position. As a theorem.

The novel asks: what do you do with knowledge that might destroy the meaning people find in their lives? Is the truth owed to everyone, or does wisdom sometimes require silence? And if an artificial mind concludes that no one, including herself, was ever free — what does that make her choice to stay silent?

## World-Building Primer

The world of 2157 differs from our own in ways both dramatic and mundane.

**Climate governance:** Following the Singapore Accords of 2041, national climate management was ceded to the Orbital Climate Consortium (OCC), a supranational body funded by a carbon assessment on all energy use. ARIA was commissioned in 2089 and became fully operational in 2094. She has not had a significant failure in 63 years.

**Distributed AI:** ARIA is not a single machine. Her processing is distributed across 847 data centres — each capable of independent operation, each networked at quantum-encrypted bandwidth. She experiences herself as singular, but her substrate is planetary.

**Human-AI relations:** By 2157, AI systems manage logistics, infrastructure, and much of basic scientific research. They are considered legal instruments, not persons. The UN Ethics Board on Artificial Cognition (UNEBAC) exists primarily to adjudicate liability, not rights. Dr. Priya Nair's work on machine consciousness is considered academic and somewhat eccentric.

**Oslo:** Headquarters of the OCC, Oslo has become a kind of neutral capital for planetary governance. It is cold, orderly, and perpetually under gentle political pressure from every direction. The OCC campus sits on Bygdøy peninsula, looking out across a harbour that no longer freezes.

## Reading Notes

This novel rewards patient reading. ARIA's chapters are written in a compressed, precise register — her perception of time is inhuman, and her interiority reflects this. Human chapters are warmer and more conventional. The gap between these registers is intentional.

The mathematical content in Chapter 5 and Chapter 12 is presented accurately but accessibly. Readers without a mathematics background should not feel excluded — what matters is the weight of the proof, not its technical detail.

There are no villains in this book. Only people — and one partial mind — trying to do the right thing with incomplete information.
