777666
Not invaded. Audited.
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The moon is in the wrong place. The rain has stopped behaving. And on The Graham Norton Show, two impossible guests have just told eight billion people, very courteously, that Earth is being audited.
Not invaded. Audited.
The auditors do not want our planet. They have a thousand of their own. What they want to know is simpler and much worse: now that every war can be ended, every disease cured, every hardship deleted — what, exactly, is a species for?
Naomi Pascoe: Prime Minister, Cornishwoman, keeper of a chipped porcelain lion. The answer will take the rest of her life, one unworkable day at a time. The auditors are patient. They are kind, mostly. And they have seen a great many worlds fail this test before.
Because the audit isn’t testing whether humanity can survive.
It’s testing whether we’re worth the journey back.
We thought we were making first contact.
They knew exactly which number we were.
The author
Mike Day spent forty years in technology, ending his corporate career on the board of Xero, the global accounting software company — which may explain why his first novel is about an audit. He took early retirement, moved his attention from balance sheets to sentences, and wrote 777666, a first-contact novel about what happens when something a billion years old arrives not to invade Earth, but to inspect it.
He wrote the book the hard way: a full draft, torn down to the studs, and rebuilt over a year of obsessive editing, craft courses, and arguments with anyone who would read it — including a friend who annotated all twenty-four chapters, backwards. He publishes under his own imprint, Chipped Lion Press, named for an object in the novel that readers will come to know.
He lives in a small English village with his wife Liz, the book’s first reader and its dedicatee — though she doesn’t know that yet.
Author’s final notes
It was during a Christmas-market trip to Hamburg, in a small tea room, that I told my wife Liz I had at least two novels in my head. They had been in there for over thirty years. She took it well, all things considered, if not very surprised and baffled.
The idea for 777666 had been whizzing around for decades; career and life simply never left a gap for it. A triple bypass, followed some time later by a morning spent asking myself what exactly I was doing all this for, took care of the career. Early retirement did the rest, and the excuses fell away one by one. Liz had already retired, which I had found very hard to forgive.
I am a technology man by trade — or as much of one as the current pace of change allows anybody to be — and the arrival of AI meant there was a new tool in town. I will happily debate the rights and wrongs of that over a beer or a red wine with anyone who asks. My own position is simple: tools are there to be used, and used honestly. In this case, Claude served as editor and mentor across a year-long revision; every word passed through my hands, and I said no often. Watching that tool become what it is today, in a single year, astonishes me, and I suspect the debate has only just begun.
If you are out there considering writing something, and still unsure, my advice is this: buckle up, learn a little about what creative writing actually asks of you, and begin. Expect real frustration. Then expect something rarer — a challenge that pays you back, every time you sit down to it.
Mike Day, 2026
Readers’ thoughts on the book are welcome at review@chippedlionpress.com. To hear when the next one is out, send a one-line email to the same address.