Horror Vacuus is the beginning of a political, psychological, and speculative saga about the birth of a new form of power: a power capable of saving, punishing, corrupting, loving, and destroying without leaving a single mark on the skin. And one more thing: I know what you’re thinking. That there is a trivial mistake in the title, and that I wrote Horror Vacuus instead of Horror Vacui. But it is not a mistake. The difference is deliberate. The expression horror vacui traditionally refers to the fear of emptiness: the urge to fill every space, to leave no surface bare, no silence, no absence. In that expression, it is the emptiness itself that gives rise to horror. In the language of telepaths, however, Horror Vacuus is the name given to a conscious machine. Not merely an artificial intelligence. To them, an artificial intelligence remains a machine, no matter how sophisticated or autonomous it may be, or how convincingly it may imitate human thought. A Horror Vacuus is something radically different: a genuine consciousness born within a machine, capable of thought, desire, and perhaps even suffering, yet lacking what telepaths perceive as the inner presence of a person. A person without a person.