Memory, Myth and Machine: A Q&A with Igor Gallo, Author of Hallucination

What happens when the past is no longer remembered, but rewritten? And what if that rewriting lies in the hands of artificial intelligence?

Igor Gallo’s Hallucination is a philosophical novel woven with elements of speculative fiction, historical intrigue, and parable. Set in a near-future where a tycoon’s historical virtual reality project is on the brink of collapse, the story unravels into a mystery of malfunctioning code, theological questions, medieval conspiracies, and the fundamental tension between memory and control.

With echoes of Umberto Eco and the intellectual curiosity of sci-fi classics, Hallucination is as much a warning as it is a meditation, asking what is lost when humanity outsources remembrance to machines.

We caught up with Igor to discuss his inspirations, the deeper questions behind his novel, and the challenge of writing fiction that doesn’t give easy answers.

Hallucination explores the idea of history being preserved and experienced through virtual reality. What first sparked this concept for you?

Once, quite a long time ago, I was travelling to the town of Alba in northern Italy. It is famous for its white truffles, and even more so for the myth that only specially trained pigs can find these truffles. In fact, both humans and specially trained dogs are perfectly capable of finding them better than pigs.

I was intrigued by the local story that Alba was organised as a centre of the world for the Gauls, who founded a large settlement here, as well as for other Celtic peoples of Europe, who founded other Albas in other places. Including the British Isles. The city in northern Italy was named after the land of Albion in the mountains of Scotland. The citadel of such cities was located in the centre of a labyrinth of streets. To prevent the citadel from resembling a dead end, the inhabitants placed it on a hill and decorated it with a symbol of transformation and movement of the soul, mind, and perhaps even the body – an arch. The arch hinted at the existence of a portal in the citadel of the labyrinthine city, possibly with an underground passage leading somewhere into the forest.

In almost all small towns in northern Italy, formerly Cisalpine Gaul, you will find Vicolo dell'Arco, or Arch (backyard) Alley. The arch serves as a bridge between worlds and a defensive solution. The centre of Alba in northern Italy is not the cathedral square, as is usually the case, but the arch in Vicolo dell'Arco. This alley is now located next to the cathedral square.

While preparing for the trip, I typed 'Vicolo dell'Arco, Alba' into Google Maps – which had been around for several years at that point and was called Google Earth – and pressed Enter. To my surprise, Google Maps sent me to where the architects of the arch in the Celtic city surely wanted to go – to the mountains of Scotland, where no enemy could reach.

I thought it was some kind of mistake. I typed it in again and got the same result. Every time I typed in Vicolo dell'Arco, Alba, I ended up in the mountains of Scotland.

This mystical journey, connected simultaneously with geography, history, and a digital platform, seemed significant to me. When I found myself in that alley and stood under the arch, I certainly did not travel to Scotland. The arch was a vaulted passageway under someone's apartment. However, I continued to explore this place and discovered that Alba was a symbolic city for the Italian Carbonari Freemasons, supporters of the cult of purity, in the Kingdom of Savoy, when they began to liberate northern Italy from Austrian influence. This happened during Napoleon's famous Italian campaign. The revolution that swept across Italy to match the French one began in Alba, and this was a conscious decision by the conspirators.

In other words, for a person at the end of the 18th century, as for us now, a geographical point on the map was a point of search – not only to bring history back to life, but also to create it now.

It was then that I became fascinated by the idea of synthesising history and technology. People have always dreamed of such a synthesis, wandering in search of a time machine, and now it is about to become a reality in our day. Magic has become possible with the advent of artificial intelligence and the possibilities it opens up for generating virtual reality.

Then I had the idea for a book about alternative history, centred on Napoleon Bonaparte and a conspiracy involving his generals. I started working on such a book. But all my attempts to depict magic and move Napoleon from the present to the past did not convince me, as I did not want to repeat already known techniques and, in general, did not want to play with the time machine.

Most likely, I will finish the story about Napoleon, and it will be my next book on the theme of parallel history, the plot of my next hallucination.

As it happened, I became fascinated by completely different historical realities, which ultimately led to the completion of this book. These realities are related not so much to historical figures as to the problems of human cognition.

The novel raises big questions about memory, truth, and control. Were there particular philosophical or ethical ideas you wanted to interrogate through the story?

The first important thought that excited me concerns the ability of intelligence – both human and AI – to comprehend the mystery of the Trinity. The question of explaining and accepting the unity of the Trinity has driven the entire Christian matrix of humanity. Christian mystics such as Joachim of Fiore, the spiritual father of all those rejected by the Church, and scholastics, logicians of faith, primarily St Thomas Aquinas, have also dealt with the mystery of the Trinity. I am not entirely sure whether any of them succeeded in explaining the mystery of the Trinity in a convincing manner. The incomprehensible can only be described, but not proven, because it is a matter of faith.

One of the main limitations on the development of AI is its inability to "calculate" the formula of the Trinity with the power of its "almighty" mind. Since AI cannot believe, this mystery is inaccessible to it.

The second part of the general synthesis of my book is the parallelism and interconnectedness of human efforts to search for truth in different eras. Technologies have changed, but the goals have remained the same – the knowledge of the unattainable.

Does it have the same faith in the incomprehensible AI? For me, this is a big question, since the AI search algorithm is based on bypassing answers that have already been identified as fatal. However, it is precisely by delving into the error that the secret can be revealed and access to the truth can be gained.

The plot of the book references thinkers such as Roger Bacon, Joachim of Fiore, and Raymond Llull – they are all united not only by the era they lived in but also by their pioneering work on the path to incomprehensible truth. Bacon, for example, described some modern optical devices based solely on religious logic. Llull, reflecting on the structure of the world, proposed a model of a calculating machine, and this happened many centuries before the appearance of Turing's machine.

The third idea is the dictatorship of binary logic, transmitted to the world through its use in computer algorithms. We are constantly faced with a choice – yes or no, with no choice for "maybe" – and this dualism distances us from the truth. The idea of the hereticality of the binary logic is one of the main ones in the book.

I am also inspired by the old idea of the stupidity of the masses. On a small scale, that is, individually, we are much stronger than the masses. Truth is small, the size of a grain, while stupidity is huge, like big data, which any advanced calculating machine can easily navigate. Simple, aimless counting is as stupid as a lack of wisdom.

Artificial intelligence plays a key role in shaping the narrative. What interests you most about AI as a storytelling device?

The AI in this book is a shell, a gaming environment in which the narrative unfolds. Not a single line of this book was written using AI, but I felt it was important to stylise the reality described on behalf of AI. After all, the characters spend most of the book in virtual reality, and AI is the narrator of the story. Again, this is the idea behind the book, part of its architecture, and not just a literary device.

Everything else related to AI and our lives – moral aspects, the church's attitude towards AI, the danger of AI in everyday situations, ways of advancing AI based on quantum mechanics or combinations of new materials – these components of the AI issue are generally known and reflected in the book as inevitable.

The book weaves together elements of speculative fiction, historical inquiry, and philosophical reflection. How did you approach balancing these different layers?

I am a proponent of hermetic literature, where all the laws of the text are defined within the text itself, rather than in footnotes or references to real life. Synthesis plays a key role within the text. What you put into the flask is what you get out. The main thing is to put in ingredients that go together. Eclecticism also has a right to exist, but it is not hermetic.

Initially, I perceived the book as a postmodernist product, but then I managed to transform it into something else. This something else is reflected in the book's finale. The dragon is tamed when it bites its own tail.

Rather than offering clear answers, Hallucination leaves space for ambiguity and interpretation. Was that a conscious choice from the outset?

There is no truth in the virtual world, which means it should not claim to be a mentor and interpreter of reality. Programmes should show, not explain. Perhaps this feeling is reinforced by the use of several sequential endings in the book: different storylines end in their own way.Fans of historical novels will hopefully be satisfied with the book's interpretations of specific historical events and the solutions to several historical mysteries.

The main one, of course, is the version of Thomas Aquinas' death, in which I relied on the works of Carl Gustav Jung's disciples, who, in turn, analysed the text of a key historical document and diagnosed Thomas Aquinas' mental state at the end of his life. In the historical part, I did not want to invent anything; history is a rigorous science. Even when a dragon appears, it is not fiction but a logical consequence of blind spots in history. Gaps in history are the distance between one reliably established fact and another that is invisible to us.

AI uses these gaps and fills in the picture without violating the general scientific basis. Playing with gaps in history occurs, for example, in storylines about alchemy and dragons. In fact, AI hallucination is the result of processing blind spots – gaps.

The breakdown of the virtual simulation feels symbolic as well as literal. What does that collapse represent to you?

In addition to the unsolved mystery of the Trinity, there is another unsolvable problem for AI: it does not understand what the Apocalypse and the end of history are. More precisely, it does not know how to deal with this material. If you explain something about the post-apocalyptic world to it, it will probably generate an image.

Humans, on the other hand, have gone through the end of the world many times, from the Great Flood and the destruction of Abraham's tablets to the Y2K bug, and they have not disappeared. Humans can live after Hiroshima. Most AI is capable of overloading. Now I am talking about humans as a species and AI as a species, of course.

Some parts of the novel echo religious and theological themes. What role does belief - whether spiritual, technological, or ideological - play in the story?

Faith developed according to the laws of social technology, as did many aspects of human life. Faith transforms, but it has basic laws. Without adherence to the basic laws of faith, the whole technology breaks down, and people deprive themselves of faith.

That is why there has been such fierce debate about dogma throughout human history. One of the most fundamental disputes – whether sin came into the Garden of Eden from outside or was there from the beginning – occupies a fairly large place in the book. The AI hero is busy searching for many answers related to this problem.

From a historical perspective, it was precisely a misunderstanding of the place of paradise and the source of sin that led to the mistakes of the Crusades, which, incidentally, continue today under various false slogans.

We should not be too upset about this. Humans as a species are not prohibited from repeating mistakes, unlike artificial consciousness. Therefore, they will always strive to repeat their mistakes. Those who deny humans this right are apologists for the dead kingdom of AI.

Did the structure of the novel evolve naturally as you wrote, or did you have a clear framework in mind from the beginning?

I am a proponent of the supremacy of the idea over the plan. I followed the idea as I developed the narrative. I understood that there were genre limitations, and I could see the way out of the plot tunnel ahead of me. If I had had a clearer plan, I fear the book would have been twice as long.

Following the idea also led me to unexpected surprises. For example, at some stage in the book, it became clear that a significant number of the historical characters were contemporaries and heroes of Dante's Divine Comedy. This was a revelation to me. Because the central character of the narrative, William of Ockham, was the prototype for both Sherlock Holmes and William Baskerville in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, my AI character ended up becoming entangled in the interrelationships with that book. None of this was planned; it just happened during the process. This included the issue of the interdependence of history and literature.Once I understood how this worked in the plot of the book, I made one of the chapters intertwined with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

When you’re not writing, what kinds of books, ideas, or experiences tend to inspire or challenge your thinking?

I draw a lot of ideas from contemporary cinema, which has become the main factory of ideologies. Today, Guy Ritchie or Christopher Nolan tell us more about the world and the future than scientific research. Although, of course, I don't ignore important scientific works. I try to be a consumer of useful bytes of information, not a stream of informational mud.

I don't like to take ideas from life. I find writers who dissect and analyse the world around them boring; they are like dentists who come to a restaurant with their tools and start bragging about them. The best books are based on fiction, not observation. Sartre, Nabokov, and Lem show life better than access to all the surveillance cameras in the world.

An original idea gives the world no less than our perfect world.

Our perfect world needs to be treated correctly. It should be enjoyed, not broken down into components for analysis.

Where can readers connect with you or learn more about your work?

I would prefer to keep in touch with readers through my texts and through the platforms where they are discussed, and I will certainly try to be available if anyone needs me.

https://x.com/igorgalloroma