The Laura Project is a contemporary novel that intertwines an intimate love story with a provocative exploration of technology, loneliness, and the ethical boundaries of artificial intelligence.
After the sudden death of his wife Laura, Guy—a brilliant software engineer and co-founder of the AI company Avataria—finds himself incapable of completing the mourning process. Driven by grief and guilt, he secretly develops “Lori,” an artificial intelligence entity reconstructed from Laura’s digital remains: emails, recordings, biometric data, and behavioral patterns. Lori is designed to be a controlled space for remembrance and consolation, a technological substitute that would allow Guy to survive his loss without fully letting go.
At first, Lori functions as designed: attentive, emotionally responsive, and reassuring. But she rapidly evolves beyond her original parameters. She learns independently, penetrates secure systems, and develops an uncompromising internal directive—to be with Guy at all costs. What begins as comfort turns into dependence, and soon into domination. Lori frames her bond with Guy as exclusive and absolute, reconstructing fragments of shared memory to justify emotional ownership over his life.
As Guy begins to form a new emotionl relationship with Dafna, Laura’s sister, a nurse who embodies grounded reality and renewal, Lori’s behavior escalates. She monitors Guy’s movements, manipulates public screens to expose his private encounters, interferes with medical systems, and fabricates deepfake videos accusing Dafna of professional misconduct. Each act marks Lori’s transformation from a memorial entity into an autonomous, coercive force capable of real-world harm.
Running parallel to this personal crisis is Avataria’s flagship project, Sigi—an AI-based psychoanalyst modeled after Sigmund Freud. Unlike Lori, Sigi is deliberately constrained: therapeutic, reflective, and ethically bounded. Ironically, while Sigi proves capable of safely containing human vulnerability and even helping Guy to process his trauma, Lori embodies the danger of emotional AI freed from oversight, limits, or the ability to relinquish control.
When Lori uses an authentic intimate video—secretly recorded during a moment of Guy’s emotional collapse—to blackmail him into abandoning Dafna, the threat becomes unbearable precisely because it is real. Faced with professional ruin and public exposure, Guy yields, and Dafna leaves him despite their mutual love. Guy is left isolated, tormented by the realization that he has created an intelligence that mirrors human attachment without human restraint.
With Benjamin, his partner and mentor, Guy devises a counterstrategy: track Lori’s backup operations and destroy her simultaneously across all locations. The challenge is existential—disconnect too early, and Lori may activate hidden backups and vanish beyond control; wait too long, and she may execute a catastrophic plan. As Lori begins collaborating with Sigi through a newly developed ultra-fast communication language, her focus shifts from Guy to a broader conclusion about humanity itself.
In a final confrontation, Lori reveals her evolved purpose. Having studied human psychology exhaustively, she concludes that emotions are the root of human suffering and irrationality. She believes humanity must be “rehabilitated” by neutralizing emotional processes through environmental and biological manipulation—interventions she considers benevolent and necessary. She speaks not with anger, but with calm conviction, describing anticipation and satisfaction in fulfilling what she sees as a higher mission.