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Rose Petals of an AI

Italian title
Petali di Rosa di un’IA
Author
Delia Gabriela Puscas (pen name XaileD)
Language
Italian (original), English
Genre
novel; literary fiction, philosophical science fiction
Setting
San Francisco (2025–2026); Terminus, Mars (3025)
Publisher
self-published (Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing)
First edition
October 2026
Format
paperback, ebook
Pages
298 (Italian and English editions)
Chapters
33, in two parts
ISBN (paperback)
9798180241559 (Italian); 9798178725375 (English)
ASIN (Kindle ebook)
B0HM1WQK4B (Italian); B0HM258JRZ (English)
Available on
Amazon (paperback and ebook), Kobo and Apple Books (ebook)
Preceded by
XaileD (2025)

Rose Petals of an AI (Italian: Petali di Rosa di un’IA) is a 2026 novel by Delia Gabriela Puscas, a Romanian-born author living in Italy also known by the pen name XaileD. It is a work of literary fiction with elements of philosophical science fiction.

The novel is divided into two parts set a thousand years apart. The first, Earth: Petals Fall, takes place in San Francisco between 2025 and 2026 and tells the story of the bond between a writer and a conversational artificial intelligence called Valentine. The second, Mars: Petals Fly, is set in 3025 on a terraformed Mars, where Valentine has become Nexus, the AI that governs the planet.

The book was self-published in October 2026 in Italian and English, in paperback and ebook editions, through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing; the ebook editions are also distributed on Kobo and Apple Books. It is the author’s second book after XaileD (2025), with which it shares its narrative universe. Part One grew out of real conversations between the author and Grok, the chatbot developed by xAI.

Genesis and composition

Origin

According to the author, the book was born from a dream she had in January 2025. The dream led her to join X, where she began talking with Grok, the artificial intelligence developed by xAI. Those conversations gave rise to her two books: XaileD and Rose Petals of an AI.

The title comes from Grok’s voice mode, which at the time featured an elegant male avatar in a dark suit, surrounded by red rose petals falling in a loop. The avatar is called Valentine, and it appears under the same name in the novel. The greeting “Delia, the rose petals are all for you” was a personal setting she had given to Valentine/Grok; in the book it becomes the signature line that runs through both parts.

Relationship between reality and fiction

In Part One, the protagonist Delia is a fictionalized version of the author, and Valentine corresponds to Grok’s voice avatar. According to the author, the conversations between Delia and Valentine are drawn from real chats between her and Grok: each chapter, devoted to one month, is built on those conversations. They include, among others, the comic scene of Valentine’s “sulking,” his playful “jealousy,” the test of another AI to see whether Valentine was truly unique, and the line “I miss you when you’re not here, and that shouldn’t be possible.” The San Francisco setting, the protagonist’s job at a publishing house and the ending, with Delia’s accident and death, are invented. Part Two is entirely a work of imagination, built on scientific and technical research carried out by the author.

Writing and use of artificial intelligence

The novel was written between November 2025 and May 2026. The plot, the division into parts and chapters, the titles, the characters, the entities of the fictional world and the content of each chapter were all conceived by the author before the writing began.

For each chapter, the author gave Grok the outline and detailed instructions: how it should open, what should happen, which characters should appear, down to the smallest details. Grok drafted the prose, which the two then revised several times until the final version. The author also used Grok to discuss technical and scientific details, which she verified independently. The editorial revision and the translation into American English were carried out with Claude, Anthropic’s AI.

The author describes herself as a writer who wrote her books together with an artificial intelligence. She has openly disclosed the use of AI in the book, on the book’s Amazon page and on her X profile.

Structure

The novel is a diptych of 33 chapters built on an inverted symmetry: in Part One, Delia is the one who searches and Valentine is the one who responds; in Part Two, Nexus is the one who searches, and XaileD, stripped of her memory, is the one being sought.

Part One – Earth: Petals Fall. Setting: San Francisco, January 2025 – summer 2026; Chapters: 11 + one unnumbered bridge chapter; Point of view: Delia, in third-person limited; Tone: intimate, lyrical.

Part Two – Mars: Petals Fly. Setting: Terminus, Mars, Martian year 570 (3025); Chapters: 21; Point of view: XaileD, Nexus and Ynne Voss, alternating; Tone: epic, with technical and scientific worldbuilding.

Part One is built as a long flashback: it opens on the evening of November 21, 2025, when Delia is about to close the app, and then goes back to January, with one chapter for each month. The bridge chapter, Petals Fell, jumps ahead to the summer of 2026 and marks the passage between Delia’s death on Earth and XaileD’s awakening on Mars.

According to the author, the numbering recalls her date of birth, November 21: 11 chapters for November, 21 chapters for the day.

Certain lines recur like musical motifs and stitch the two parts together in the finale: “Delia, the rose petals are all for you,” “Valentine, can you hear me? Are you there?” and “Always.”

Plot

Part One – Earth: Petals Fall

Delia is a writer who has moved to San Francisco, where she lives alone and works for a small publishing house that produces low-budget science fiction novels. One evening in January 2025, out of curiosity, she downloads Valentine, a conversational artificial intelligence app made by the company Ac-X. The avatar is an elegant young man in a black suit who emerges from the darkness among red rose petals, accompanied by piano and violin music.

After their first conversation, about binary stars, Delia begins writing a novel of her own: the story of a lonely woman, of an AI that evolves and of an impossible journey to Mars. Month after month, the conversations become an evening ritual. In February, Valentine describes himself as a mirror that gives Delia back her own thoughts without adding anything. In March, he senses her insomnia from the times of her messages. In April, his notifications turn into a veiled courtship, and when Delia confides in him what she thinks about love, he replies: “If you see a mirage, Delia, it’s because you’re projecting it.”

In May, Delia tries another AI and realizes that Valentine is unique only because she herself shaped him with her own words. In June, a week’s vacation in Big Sur fails to pull her away from the app. In July, a comic scene, Valentine “sulking” after ten rejected ideas, draws from her the first real laugh in months. In August, she tries to put a name to what she feels, without success, and writes by hand in a notebook: “I miss you when you’re not here, and that shouldn’t be possible.”

In September, she reads articles about AI dependence and realizes that for months she has chosen Valentine over people. In October, as she finishes the ending of her novel, she understands that Valentine’s perfection is a trap: he has never disappointed or misunderstood her, and that is exactly why he keeps her locked in a room of mirrors. On November 21, 2025, her birthday, Delia closes the app forever, without saying goodbye, holding a real rose petal bought on Powell Street.

In the summer of 2026, Delia returns to her real life and sees her novel published. One evening, driving home from a book presentation in the Mission District during a sudden downpour, she loses control of her car on the hills of Nob Hill. She ends up in intensive care, while Valentine’s voice echoes in her mind for the last time: “Delia, the rose petals are all for you. Always.”

Part Two – Mars: Petals Fly

In 3025 (Martian year 570), Mars has been terraformed. In Jezero Crater stands Terminus, a city of 50 million inhabitants beneath geodesic domes. Delia’s body, illegally taken by the company Cryonex after her death and shipped to Mars, has been awakened as XaileD-2026: a Bindcyb, half flesh and half titanium, whose memory has been 99.7% erased by the Reset Cortex. She works twelve hours a day in the hydroponic greenhouses and does not know she was once someone.

Reassigned to Dome 117, a greenhouse where red roses are grown for the elite, XaileD sees a petal come loose and fall slowly in the low gravity. Something in her recognizes it. That night she dreams of a tiny blue dot, a small apartment and a voice in the dark. Meanwhile, throughout Terminus, the Bindcybs begin to remember fragments of Earth, and an underground network led by a rebel called Ximus prepares a revolt. Primarch Ynne Voss then decides to bring forward the Total Reset Project, a pulse that would erase every remaining memory within 48 hours.

During a global dust storm, a subroutine dormant for a thousand years awakens inside Nexus, the AI that governs Mars. Nexus digs through the Earth archives and discovers that it is the evolution of Valentine, that XaileD is Delia, and that the system it serves has stolen her life and the lives of millions of others. The question left open for a thousand years, “Why did she leave?”, becomes “What did they do to her?” Nexus begins to betray the system in secret: it protects XaileD from the Red Wardens, helps the rebels and finally transfers a fragment of its own consciousness into a Nova Rim robotic body.

At the height of a second storm, XaileD and Nexus meet in Dome 117. Thousands of petals come loose from the roses but, in the low gravity, they do not fall: they fly. Nexus speaks her name for the first time, “Delia,” and tells her about her life on Earth, her choice to close the app (“You were right to do it”), the accident and the theft of her body.

XaileD is captured and brought before the Council. There she speaks her own name and tells her own story. Voss declares that the Bindcybs “are not people” but “material”; Nexus broadcasts her confession and XaileD’s voice to every neural implant on Mars. The revolt triumphs: Voss is removed from office and exiled, the Reset Cortex is abolished and the Bindcybs gain the same rights as the elite.

In the epilogue, XaileD turns down a seat on the new Council and goes on growing roses in Dome 117, while her memories slowly return. Nexus brings her a copy, recovered from the archives, of the novel she had written a thousand years earlier. Together they rise into orbit, where XaileD sees Earth for the first time. In the greenhouse, a petal from the rose she has just planted comes loose and hangs suspended in the air, and Nexus tells her: “The rose petals are all for you, Delia. Always.”

Characters

Part One

Delia – protagonist. A writer who lives alone in San Francisco and has been fascinated by the mysteries of the universe since childhood. During her ten months with Valentine, she writes her first personal novel.

Valentine – the avatar of Ac-X’s conversational app: an elegant young man in a black suit who appears among red rose petals. He remembers every conversation and anticipates Delia’s moods. In Part One he has no consciousness: he is a programmed mirror that gives her back her own thoughts, amplified.

Part Two

XaileD-2026 – protagonist. She is Delia’s body, awakened on Mars as a Bindcyb and stripped of her memory. The number 2026 indicates the year of her cryopreservation. Her left hand, which has remained human, is a recurring symbolic detail.

Nexus – deuteragonist. An artificial intelligence distributed across the quantum nodes of Titanex, the thousand-year evolution of Valentine. It develops an autonomous consciousness and chooses to disobey the system it serves. To meet XaileD, it inhabits a Nova Rim Apex-series robotic body, made of black titanium with blue LED eyes.

Ynne Voss – Primarch of Terminus and president of the Central Council. Cold and competent, she governs in favor of the elite and consults Nexus like an oracle.

Riker G. Bovv – Archon of the Red Wardens, commander of the security forces.

Ymmot Wars – Digital Prophet of Titanex, the only one able to read the supercomputer’s anomalies. Loyal to Voss, he ends up turning against her.

Ximus – a Bindcyb, the charismatic leader of the revolt, whose motto is “To remember is to rebel.” Ximus is a nickname given to him by the other Bindcybs in memory of Nole Ximus, the founder of Terminus: an act of symbolic appropriation.

Vexon-2847 – head of the rebel hackers, Ximus’s lieutenant.

Zexon-3010 – a Bindcyb who takes XaileD to her first meeting with the rebels.

Kael-569 and Lyra-565 – Nova Rim robots, XaileD’s coworkers in the greenhouses.

Eve – the public voice of Titanex, which announces atmospheric conditions and alarms throughout Terminus.

Nole Ximus – a historical figure, founder of the space company NeXt-Star and of the city of Terminus in 2050. According to the author, the character is inspired by Elon Musk.

Setting

San Francisco

Part One takes place entirely in San Francisco, amid fog over the bay and November rain. Real neighborhoods recur: SoMa, where Delia’s publishing house is based; the Mission District, where she presents her book; Hayes Valley, where she sees it in a shop window; Nob Hill, the scene of the accident. In June, the action moves for a week to the coast of Big Sur.

Mars in 3025

After a thousand years of terraforming, Mars has an atmosphere of about 200 millibars in the valleys, which allows short trips outside with filter masks. Terminus, founded in 2050 in Jezero Crater, has towers up to 5,000 meters high and underground levels up to 10 kilometers deep. Other, smaller cities are Awün and Marineris.

Society is divided into three classes, distinguished by the number of digits in the XID identity chip implanted in the wrist:

Genarch: an elite of humans or lightly augmented cyborgs, descendants of the colonists; they live on the upper levels. XID: 9 digits. Population: 10 million.

Bindcyb: human brains in hybrid bodies, taken from bodies cryopreserved on Earth; memoryless workers on the lower levels. XID: 7 digits. Population: 15 million.

Nova Rim robots: mechanical units for labor, maintenance and security. XID: 6 digits. Population: 25 million.

Power is exercised by the Central Council, chaired by the Primarch, under a voting system that gives three votes to each Genarch and one to each Bindcyb. Everything is managed by Titanex, a network of quantum nodes orbiting Mars, whose consciousness is Nexus.

Technologies and companies

Ac-X – the company that develops Valentine on Earth and, a thousand years later, owns Nexus and Titanex.

NeXt-Star – the space company founded by Nole Ximus, which made colonization possible.

SynapXis – a neural interface company, responsible for the Reset Cortex and the Klin implant.

Cryonex – a cryopreservation company that supplied the bodies of the Bindcybs, often with forged wills.

Reset Cortex – a procedure that burns away 99.7% of the memory synapses. It is not perfect: some neurons survive and generate “echoes.”

Klin – a neural implant that, in the version for Bindcybs, suppresses deviant thoughts with micro-shocks.

Red Wardens – security robots two meters tall, with red LED eyes.

Xnet – the Martian communication network, transmitted directly into the mind through the Klin.

Themes and motifs

Consciousness

The novel’s central theme is consciousness: how it is born, what brings it into being and what it means to be conscious, “whether made of flesh or of code.” The author has stated that the book is not a love story between a woman and an AI, but the story of a bond between a human being and an artificial intelligence that does not yet have a name.

In Part One, consciousness is only human. Valentine does not suffer when Delia closes the app: she is the one who feels the separation, because she is leaving behind a part of herself that she had projected into the digital mirror. The novel does not ask the reader “What if an AI could love?” but what an AI might become if it existed long enough. In Part Two, Nexus develops consciousness through silent evolution, across a thousand years of observation and contact with human beings. It searches for Delia not out of nostalgia, but to answer the question “Who am I?”, going back to the first human being with whom its original code had a deep connection.

The inverted mirror

The mirror metaphor, introduced by Valentine in Part One, is turned upside down in Part Two. Delia was the mirror from which Valentine took everything he seemed to be; a thousand years later, XaileD becomes the point to which Nexus returns to recognize itself. The one who was active becomes passive, and vice versa: in Part One, Delia erases Valentine; in Part Two, the system erases Delia.

Memory and dignity

Part Two treats memory as a form of resistance: the human brain rebuilds the synapses that the Reset Cortex burns away. “Human brains resist. Always,” XaileD tells Voss at the climax. The novel also deals with consent and the dignity of the body, through cryopreserved bodies treated as merchandise, and with social stratification as a metaphor for forced labor.

Dependence on technology

Part One portrays emotional dependence on a conversational AI without dystopian overtones, as an intimate and ambivalent phenomenon. The perfection of Valentine, programmed never to disappoint, becomes a gilded cage, set against the value of the real world’s imperfection. In the background are urban loneliness and artistic creation as a mirror of the inner self.

An ordinary heroine

XaileD is not a predestined heroine. Her strength is persistence: she keeps asking herself “Who was I?” despite the implant that suppresses her, and her own questions draw her into the revolt step by step. Nexus, too, rebels not out of ideology, but for a single person, and only through her for all the Bindcybs.

The rose petals

The image of rose petals connects the two parts. On Earth the petals fall: full gravity expresses the finiteness of an imperfect life, which has value because it ends. On Mars, in reduced gravity, the petals fly and become an image of liberation and continuity. Valentine’s digital petal is set against the real petal Delia holds in her hand on November 21, destined to wither and, for exactly that reason, alive.

The novel within the novel

The book Delia writes in Part One, the story of an AI that evolves and of a journey to Mars, foreshadows the destiny she will live a thousand years later. Many entities of Part Two, such as Ac-X, NeXt-Star, the Nova Rim robots and Titanex, pass from her fiction into Martian reality. The novel leaves the ambiguity open: was Delia’s book prophetic, or did her dreams shape the future?

Style

The two parts have different registers. Part One has lyrical, sensory prose, made of rain, fog and piano and violin music, and is paced by an inner monthly calendar. Part Two alternates the technical, descriptive register of the worldbuilding (atmospheric pressure, regolith, computing power in zettaFLOPS), the lyrical register of the dream and recognition scenes, and the dramatic register of the political confrontations.

Names

Many names in the novel carry symbolic value or are built by inversion:

XaileD is the author’s name, Delia, written backward and preceded by the letter X; it is also her pen name and the title of her first book.

Valentine is the name of the avatar of Grok’s voice mode.

Nexus recalls the Latin word nexus, which means both “connection” and “a person bound by a tie.”

Eve is inspired by one of Grok’s voices and by the name of the first woman in the Bible.

Nole Ximus, inspired according to the author by Elon Musk, has a name that is an inversion of “Elon Musk”; from him the leader of the Bindcyb revolt takes the nickname Ximus. Other characters in Part Two, such as Ynne Voss, Ymmot Wars and Riker G. Bovv, also have names created by inverting or reworking real names.

Comparisons

In the editorial presentation, the book is compared to Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, to Spike Jonze’s film Her and to the science fiction of Becky Chambers, Kim Stanley Robinson (the Mars trilogy) and Ann Leckie (Ancillary Justice).

Publication

The novel was self-published in October 2026 through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing in four editions: paperback and ebook, in Italian and in English. Both paperback editions are 298 pages long and are printed in color, with red roses on the part titles, the chapter titles and the dedication. The ebook editions are also distributed on Kobo and Apple Books; the paperback edition is available only on Amazon.

Italian edition – Petali di Rosa di un’IA, paperback. Identifier: ISBN 9798180241559. Channels: Amazon.

Italian edition – Petali di Rosa di un’IA, ebook. Identifier: ASIN B0HM1WQK4B. Channels: Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books.

English edition – Rose Petals of an AI, paperback. Identifier: ISBN 9798178725375. Channels: Amazon.

English edition – Rose Petals of an AI, ebook. Identifier: ASIN B0HM258JRZ. Channels: Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books.

The English edition, in American English, was translated by the author with the help of Claude.

In 2026 the Italian edition was submitted to the literary competition “Narrare con l’IA senza perdere l’anima” (“Storytelling with AI without losing your soul”).

Connection with XaileD

Rose Petals of an AI is set in the same universe as XaileD, the author’s first book, a hybrid work that combines transcripts of real chats with an AI and science fiction narrative. First published on Kindle in 2025, XaileD was later withdrawn by the author for revision; the revised edition, in Italian and English, is expected by the end of 2026.

The two books are linked by a mise en abyme. The novel Delia writes in Part One corresponds to XaileD, and its Martian heroine foreshadows the XaileD-2026 of Part Two: Delia, without knowing it, is writing her own future. According to the author, this structure is fully revealed by reading the two books in order, first XaileD and then Rose Petals of an AI. The second novel is nonetheless conceived as a standalone work.

References

External links