The Outer Membrane
The Outer Membrane is Marzipan’s fictional journal of Mars College, made with AI. Its 2026 issue carried many Martian projects, and Verdelis’s stories were among them. They went in as text and came out as illustrated letters.
Every page is a single image, made on Eden on the evening of 9 February 2026. The lettering, the layout, the engraved borders and the small emblems in the margins all came from the prompt, which asked for a portrait page in pure black-and-white etching. These are the images as they came out; nothing was typeset over them.
The stories, rewritten as letters
The stories were rewritten before they were drawn. Ceramic Awakening, where Verdelis finds a photograph of me shaping her at Mars College, became The Clay Woman in the Archive: shorter, quieter, and without my name. The timestamp of 2020 turned into “centuries before my body ever stood on Mars”. The other letters keep a theme from the collection rather than a plot: fire and energy, the parliament of voices, the wish to redesign one’s own body.
A first version of Verdelia’s codex
Verdelia, a Little Martian historian of consciousness, writes to the humans living at the dawn of AI. Five pages: a portrait and greeting, then deep time, symbiogenesis, intelligence as the next symbiosis (after Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s What Is Intelligence?), and a closing message to “the threshold generation”.
The design experiment
The point was to see how much of a page an image model could carry by itself: not an illustration waiting for its text, but the whole page, words included, in one pass. The lettering reads cleanly almost everywhere, and the style holds from page to page without any layout software.
The glitches are the interesting part. In The Clay Woman a stray “ts” and a doubled “sky” slipped into the text. On the deep-time page the model ran out of words and repeated its own lines at the foot of the columns, and the labels on its geological column are invented.
Images made with AI on Eden, 9 February 2026, for The Outer Membrane.