When Quentin Farmer was getting his startup Portola off the ground, one of the first hires he made was a sci-fi novelist.

The co-founders began building the AI companion company in late 2023 with only a seed of an idea: Their companions would be decidedly non-human. Aliens, in fact, from outer space. But when they asked a large language model to generate a backstory, they got nothing but slop. The model simply couldn’t tell a good story.

But Eliot Peper can tell a good story. He’s a writer of speculative fiction who’s published twelve novels about semiconductors, quantum computing, hackers, and assassins. Lucky for the Portola team, he likes solving weird tech problems. So they hired him.

Naturally tech inclined, Peper had experimented with AI to write prose, but ultimately found it unu

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