VERA and Rourke is a series of AI generated short stories about a crime-fighting AI. It’s sort of a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. The first story, that I’m now calling the pilot, was generated by ChatGPT in response to a very loose prompt in which I laid out, in broad terms, the basic scenario. The result turned out to have some disturbing aspects that I wanted to redirect. Instead of revising the first story I decided to start over with another LLM. The subsequent stories are/will be generated by Claude in response to the first story and a fairly comprehensive, human-generated, creative brief. As the stories unfold we will learn more about VERA and her creator-turned-operator Daniel Rourke. You, dear reader, will find about them as soon as I do. The question at the heart of this experiment is: can an LLM generate compelling fiction with little or no human contribution?