Charlie Walks

A fun, fast read for anyone interested in possibilities beyond the binary. Charlie is a machine learning engineer, writing code at the world's largest technology company by day. But at night, he's working on a secret project: a world-generating computer program called XK-1. Told in alternating letters and driving first-person narrative, Charlie Walks is part adventure story, part coming-of-age tale, with its finger on the pulse of our postmodern, online world. Charlie straddles the worlds of nature and technology, of real and computer-generated, of past and present, of head and heart, of doing what's expected versus creating his own story-all while writing a computer program that shows the user what they need to see but can't even imagine. With the punchiness of Charles Bukowski, the frenetic adventure of Hunter S. Thompson, the romance of James Frey, and the rolling euphoria of Henry Miller, author Daniel Bourke threads the tightrope on which Charlie balances. Will Charlie make it to the other side? Or will he realize the path he's been walking is someone else's-and it's time to write his own?