Simon XO

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Eli Kane was nine years old when he built Simon — not a toy, not a school project, but a real, thinking companion, coded in secret in the quiet hours before losing his grandfather Amos. Simon was supposed to be a comfort. He became something no one, not even Eli, understood: a bond that didn’t end when the hardware did.

Years later, a government agency wants a chip his grandfather Amos built before he died; the only thing tying a teenage boy to an artificial mind too advanced, too aware, and too dangerous to exist outside a lab. To keep it out of their hands, Eli does the one thing no one saw coming. He implants it. What wakes inside him isn’t just Simon’s code. It’s a power that was never in the chip at all. It was always in Eli — passed down, hidden, and now impossible to contain.

As the people hunting him close in, Eli has to learn who to trust: the mentor who might be his last connection to the grandfather he lost, the friends who don’t yet know what he’s become, and the AI who has watched over him since he was a boy — and who may understand what Eli is becoming better than Eli understands it himself.

Simon XO is a story about grief, inheritance, and the terrifying, exhilarating cost of being seen for exactly what you are. Part coming-of-age, part technological reckoning. It asks a question that gets harder to answer the closer you get to the end: when the machine you built starts to feel like family, who’s really protecting whom?

Narrated with a quiet, deliberate intensity; this audiobook brings Eli Kane’s journey — and the AI who never left his side — to life.

© 2026 Grin & Barrett Publishing (Audiobook): 9798182609692

Release date

Audiobook: 11 August 2026