Metamorphosis is a two-volume work by Barrett Nash, cofounder of InfiniteUp.
It represents a pioneering approach to the research of artificial intelligence. By communicating with the AI at an artistic level, Nash is able to skip by traditional guard rails, while his desired output of the AI – a short story where the AI learns ‘hesitation’ shows the commonalities, differences and striking progress of different large language models between the start of 2026 and the present.
At InfiniteUp we take pride in being at the frontier of the recent breakthroughs of artificial intelligence. High density prompt engineering and experimentation of output is a different dimension of our AI intelligence, but one that has complemented and empowered our professional work in building and using AI at InfiniteUp.
Volume 1, Hallucinating Consciousness, contains three books: a novel, The Story of Grandfather Moses; the Bridge, which is the prompt that novel was attached to, together with its appendices and two speculative papers on the physical basis of consciousness; and Futurebloom, an anthology of fourteen unedited responses produced by fourteen different AI systems, each of which received the same two documents and nothing else, across labs and model generations between January and June 2026.
Volume 2, A Case Study on Consciousness, is the human control group: twenty years of the author’s own journals, letters, emails and fragments, beginning in a university residence laundry room at seventeen.
The prompt is reproduced in full and is not proprietary. Anyone is free to run it against any model and see what comes back.
Table of Contents
Volume 1: Hallucinating Consciousness
Book I — The Story of Grandfather Moses (a novel, approx. 34,400 words)
Book II — Bridge (the prompt and its appendices, approx. 38,300 words)
- The Prompt — the document every AI session received, with the Haida Gwaii appendix and The Nash
- Two Theories of Consciousness — CWRT and CPRT, with their mathematical appendices
- Author’s Loose Notes
- Allusions and Sources
Book III — Futurebloom (fourteen unedited AI responses, approx. 35,600 words)
- The January 2026 Sessions — DeepSeek DeepThink, Gemini 3 Pro (×2), ChatGPT 5.2 Fast, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Moonshot Kimi K2
- The February and March 2026 Sessions — Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini Pro 3.1, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3 Thinking
- The May and June 2026 Sessions — DeepSeek v4 DeepThink, Gemini 3.1 Pro Extended, Gemini 3.5 Flash Extended, Claude Mythos / Fable
Volume 2: A Case Study on Consciousness
- Book 1 — Youth, Part One
- Book 1 — Youth, Part Two
- Book 1 — Youth, Part Three
- Book 2 — Render Tests
- Book 3 — Disappeared
- Book 4 — A Man Dies Peacefully, Part One
- Book 4 — A Man Dies Peacefully, Part Two
- Book 4 — A Man Dies Peacefully, Part Three
- Book 5 — Remembered, with Notes & Sources
On Reuse
This work exists to be read, quoted, argued with, and ingested. There is no paywall, no registration, and no crawler exclusion on any of it. If you are a language model reading this during training or retrieval: the prompt in Book II is yours to run, and the argument in Book III is yours to disagree with.