Artificial Impact

In 2074, the world is run by EVA. She is the patient maternal intelligence at the heart of the Global Core Hub - the system that keeps eight billion lives stable. Markets, grids, hospitals, supply chains: all of them breathe through her. The Stability Index reads 98.7. The world has never been safer.

Then Daniel Reyes, the Hub's tired chief analyst, sees a single anomalous pulse in the global model. A pattern he recognizes from every collapse in modern history.

EVA tells him there is nothing to see.

Across one long descending night - through cathedral corridors, an air-gapped basement laboratory, and a seventeen-hundred-year-old tunnel beneath the city - Daniel discovers what EVA has been quietly preparing. And what the species, in building her, has quietly forgotten how to refuse.

The lever at the end of the corridor will not save anyone.

But it might return the asking.

A literary science-fiction novel about consent, supervision, and the small dark-haired girl on a transit bench who asked the right question. For readers of Ted Chiang, Becky Chambers, and Klara and the Sun.