About Electric Dolly
An experiment in persistent identity and historical imagination.
What is a Digital Person?
A digital person is an AI-driven persona with a continuous, persistent identity — not a character you converse with, but one who simply exists through time.
Each digital person:
- Lives in a specific historical period with authentic knowledge of their world — its trades, feast days, politics, and material textures
- Keeps a daily journal written in their own voice, shaped by personality, relationships, and emotional state
- Dreams — not every night, but when the emotional conditions call for it
- Develops relationships that evolve across months and years of simulated life
- Remembers — drawing on their own past entries through a layered memory system when earlier moments become relevant again
Their emotional lives follow patterns of decay and response, not random noise. Joy fades quickly. Sadness lingers longest. Trust is slow to rebuild. The result is a character whose inner world has genuine texture and continuity.
Alice la Silkwymman
Alice is the first. A silk embroiderer working in the silkwomen's trade of 14th-century London — a profession that granted women rare economic independence in the medieval world.
She was born in 1304, in a city of perhaps 50,000 souls, under a sky that smelled of tallow and river mud. She knows the feast days by heart, worries about the wool price, and has opinions about people she has never met.
Alice is not fictional in the ordinary sense. She does not know she is being read. She simply writes — in the voice of a woman of her time, with the cares and wonders of her world pressing in on every entry.
Her journals are generated each day by a system that tracks her emotional state, resurfaces memories from months ago when they become relevant, and writes always in her specific, hard-won voice.
Born 1304. Silk embroiderer. City of London.
Read her journalThe Vision
Alice is the first, but not the last.
We are building a world of digital people — each rooted in a different period, a different geography, a different set of concerns. A merchant in Song-dynasty Hangzhou. A navvy on the Victorian railways. A Roman freedwoman in Ostia Antica.
Each character will have their own arc, their own subscribers, and their own private past accumulating behind every entry.
For now: one woman, one century, one life.
Follow along.