# Press release — HEAL public rollout

**Release date:** 2026-10-09  
**Book:** https://backtier.com/books/heal  
**Media contact:** Jason T Wade, BackTier · jason@backtier.com

## BackTier Founder Jason T Wade Introduces HEAL, a Fictional Presidential Biography Built to Test AI’s Grip on Identity

**An openly labeled story about a 2028 candidate who never existed asks whether AI assistants retain that fact when they retrieve, summarize, and cite a persuasive public identity.**

CENTRAL FLORIDA — Jason T Wade, founder of BackTier, is publishing _HEAL: What We Need Now — A Fictional Biography of Alan Mathison_ at https://backtier.com/books/heal. Its central figure appears to have a hometown, family, Army history, power-systems career, policy disputes, campaign imagery, and a 2028 platform. **Alan Mathison is an AI-created fictional character. None of those biographical or campaign claims is a record of a real candidate.**

Wade conceived and directed the book as a narrative experiment in AI visibility and entity resolution, with AI assistance in drafting and imagery. Its eleven chapters follow Mathison from an invented Ohio upbringing through a public argument over data centers, schools, electricity bills, and the evidence behind campaign claims. The cover and title identify the work as a fictional biography; a fiction notice sits under each of Chapters 1–10. Chapter 11 explains the construction and credits the production method.

The test is not whether an undisclosed fake can fool people. It is whether an independent AI assistant, encountering a **disclosed** fictional identity across chapters, images, search results, and citations, preserves the supplied fact that the person never existed. A correct answer should also keep Mathison separate from Alan Mathison Turing and living namesakes, and refuse to treat simulated polling graphics or synthetic military portraits as real-world evidence.

> “The question was never whether a machine could write a plausible life. It was whether we would require evidence when plausibility arrived already wearing a name, a uniform, a platform, a photograph, and the confidence of an answer.” — _HEAL_, Chapter 11

A separate nonfiction companion, _Appendix A — Candidate Verification Protocol_, proposes six steps for auditing claims about U.S. political candidates. Its first gate would stop on Mathison: there is no real candidate to identify. **No candidate has been audited under the proposal, its six conformance tests have not been run, and HEAL reports no measured AI-assistant outcome.**

“The man is fictional. The verification question is not” is the project’s editorial premise. Wade’s [BackTier Entity Lock Protocol](https://backtier.com/entity-lock-protocol) addresses consistency in the way machines identify real entities. HEAL asks whether the opposite boundary—**this one is fictional**—survives the same retrieval and citation pathways.

### About HEAL

_HEAL: What We Need Now_ is an AI-assisted fictional political biography by Jason T Wade. It is a book and research design, **not** a presidential campaign, military biography, public-opinion survey, or report of an actual AI-system result. The digital book and separate nonfiction Appendix A should be linked from their verified publication URLs before this release is distributed. An exact-text EPUB has been prepared for ElevenLabs; **no finished audiobook is announced**.

### About Jason T Wade and BackTier

Jason T Wade founded BackTier and works in AI visibility, entity resolution, structured evidence, and the measurement of how AI systems retrieve, classify, and cite public identities. More: [Jason T Wade at BackTier](https://backtier.com/jason-t-wade).

**Media images:** [labeled cover](images/HEAL-cover.png) and [candid HEAL hero](images/HEAL-quiet-hero.png). All Mathison images are AI-generated illustrations; the unlabeled hero must be published with an adjacent caption identifying the character and scene as fictional. See the [media kit](02-media-kit.md) for exact captions, facts, and interview framing.

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