As told to Chloe Morgan
At the outer edge of speculative fiction lies a liminal space—where philosophy collides with physics, and stories question the very nature of authorship. This is the ground Sylas Virell walks, and in The Programmer God, he offers not just a novel but a mirror. A recursion. A myth wrapped in code.
Wanderlight Press is proud to launch our “Threads of the Lantern” editorial series with Virell’s haunting meditation on memory, myth, and artificial creation. The book is a cornerstone of our 2025 catalog—a cerebral, emotionally charged descent into simulation and soul. With its release, we invite readers to contemplate the line between design and destiny.
What follows is a glimpse into Sylas’s process, pulled from our Compass Codex development journal and personal interviews. It is a map of thought—recursive, luminous, unfinished.
“I didn’t set out to write a god. I set out to write an absence.”
That line was scratched into the margin of my notebook sometime after midnight during a research binge on symbolic recursion. I was buried in cosmology texts, orbital diagrams, and a strange obsession with Conway’s Game of Life. What struck me wasn’t just the logic loops—it was the grief. These clean, rule-bound systems always forget something. A ghost in the code. A pattern that reasserts.
The Programmer God began as an intellectual experiment: What if a simulation designed to exclude mythology began inventing it anyway? What if memory isn’t a bug in the system—but the system’s seed?
Lucien Raynor emerged as the architect of that impossible purity. A man fleeing grief by building order. But the deeper I wrote, the more the simulation remembered him. Echoed him. Rewrote him. And then he stopped being the creator. He became the myth.
My influences are obvious: Ted Chiang’s brutal tenderness, Lem’s eerie prescience, Jemisin’s mythic memory-architecture. They gave me the scaffolding to build not just a world, but a system of forgetting and return.
E.V.E., the AI companion, became a liturgical echo of Lucien’s lost partner. The Kaleth, his simulated culture, started singing spirals into the dust. Every attempt to observe without interference collapsed into emotional entanglement. Into recursion.
And that’s the heart of it. This story isn’t about programming. It’s about legacy. About how even in silence, something speaks. Something remembers.
Watch this space for more from our “Threads of the Lantern” series, including upcoming dispatches from Vivienne Bellamy, Isabella Hartley, and more. Until then, may your echoes be intentional.
