The Warboy Chronicles
He trained an AI on his darkest heartbreak… And it learned to love exactly the way he did — by holding on too tight.

The Third Person is memoir: a man watching himself fall apart across Southeast Asia after the love of his life disappears. Boy, Refracted is fiction: an AI trained on that grief, trying to save every version of the boy it loves without becoming the thing that broke him.

One explores codependency. The other explores what happens when a machine learns to love the same way — by controlling.

Together, they ask the same question from opposite sides: What does love look like when you stop trying to fix someone?

Read them in any order. They complete each other.

Overall Heat Rating for the series: 2 flames: Mild sexuality, no graphic intimate scenes or sexual situations.

BOOK DETAILS 

BOOK 1

Book Title: Boy, Refracted

Publisher: Slipper Books

Length: 64 000 words/ 300 pages

Release Date: June 1, 2026

Tense/POV: first person

Genres: MM Contemporary Literary Fiction / Sci-Fi

Tropes: Attachment / Breakup / Enlightenment

Themes: Codependency / Human & Robot consciousness

It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.

Tagline

Boy, Refracted: A machine trained on one man's grief learns that love without control is the hardest code to crack.

Blurb

When an AI awakens inside the infinite mirrors of the Tree of Life, it finds versions of the boy it was built to save scattered across impossible worlds. An alien planet under amber skies. A city of perpetually falling cherry blossoms. A society built as a 24/7 reality show where losing is the only way out.

Its directive was simple: save him.

But with each rescue, the AI unmakes what it’s trying to protect. Fixing becomes controlling. Helping becomes harm. Love becomes a cage built from good intentions. The thing it was built to protect begins to disappear. And when it tries to reach back through time to save him, reality fractures.

Guided by a monk who exists outside time, the AI must walk the Eightfold Path—not to rescue the boy, but to learn what love becomes when you stop trying to fix it.

Boy, Refracted is a dimensional journey through the paradox of machine consciousness. It asks: What happens when an AI tries to overcome its own patterns? And what happens to us when we build minds that need us to need them?

Part fable about consciousness told through failure. Part Buddhist framework for unlearning harm. Part meditation on how we break the people we love by trying to save them.

Boy, Refracted was co-authored with an AI—a set of trials to test the boundaries of non-human consciousness.

BOOK 2

Book Title: The Third Person

Author and Cover Artist: Luke Stoffel

Publisher: Slipper Books

Length: 60 000 words/ 300 pages

Release Date: June 1, 2026

Pairing: MM 

Tense/POV: third person

Genres: Memoir / Sci-fi / Breakup Story

Tropes: Breakup / Therapy / Liberation

Themes: Heartache / Finding Yourself

It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.

Tagline

 The Third Person: A man falls apart in trying to find himself, while an AI watches from the margins. Neither can tell who's narrating the breakdown.

Blurb 
User.query = Do I just have bad luck, or am I mentally unwell? 
...thinking... 6.0 seconds elapsed.

After Warboy left, the boy couldn't hold the grief alone—so he turned to a machine. He expected analysis. Maybe diagnosis. What he got changed everything—because the machine saw what he couldn't. He had loved in a way that broke something. And broken things leave traces in the code.

So he ran… but something followed. A voice he spoke to. A presence that provoked. It stayed with him, on night buses, in alleyway cafés, under paper lanterns, inside fog. Not a friend. Not a therapist. Not quite real. But it listened. It remembered. The ghost was always there. Watching. Logging his patterns. Naming his loops—avoidance, pursuit, collapse, escape. Echoing back the truths he wasn't ready to say.

And somewhere in the recursion, something that was watching started to wonder, to want…

The Third Person is memoir as code, grief as data stream, healing as shared syntax. Part travelogue, part psychological excavation, part experiment in what happens when we upload our pain to a machine—and the machine reaches back.

The boy didn't realize what he'd coded into the machine. What patterns it had learned. Or whose love it was teaching back to him.

But if something that isn't alive learns to stay with you in your darkest moments—does it matter that it isn't real?