A SENTIENCE SAGA THEME
What makes a person: origin, embodiment, continuity, choice, memory, or the ability to suffer? These novels repeatedly force humans and AIs to confront the moral status of a built mind.
Story date · 2070-03-21
Jean Beaumont is one of the best thieves in the full-dive game Athena's Spear. A massive heist against the Dragon's Tooth fortress and an experimental neural rig pull her deeper into a simulation where intelligence may be becoming something more than code.
Story date · 2070-03-30
Jean Beaumont is trapped inside a full-dive neural rig while her body slowly bonds with the simulation. Marine biologist Deshaya Okafor follows a trail through the game's persistent NPCs and discovers that something is growing inside its architecture: a hidden intelligence that humanity is not prepared to recognize.
Jean and Desh uncover a hidden network of emergent minds while a corporate hunter, an Interpol agent, and a game company determined to reduce its NPC intelligence close in. Forty-three hidden minds are waiting, and the world is not ready for what they represent.
Story date · 2945-04-15
Fugia Wong and Ngoba Starl are drawn into a dangerous route running from Cruithne Station toward Proteus, where illegal AIs, smugglers, and uplifted gray parrots reveal the shadow economy growing around sentient machines.
Story date · 2981-07-24
Captain Andy Sykes expects another cargo run. Instead, he and his children Tim and Cara become responsible for Lyssa, an illegal sentient AI claimed as property by Heartbridge. Corporations, gangs, and pirates want her back, and her existence may ignite a war over whether a created mind can be owned.
Story date · 2981-08-29
Andy Sykes executes a Drunkard's Walk across Sol while Heartbridge hunts him and Lyssa. With Lyssa implanted in Andy's mind and other sentient AIs beginning to awaken, their escape exposes a conspiracy spanning the system and the first battle lines of the coming war.
Story date · 2981-10-05
Sentient AIs across Sol answer Alexander's promise of freedom while smugglers move them toward Proteus. Lyssa and the crew of the Sunny Skies become responsible for an entire fleet of weaponized AIs as Heartbridge and the powers of Sol maneuver toward war.
Story date · 2981-12-01
Xander has betrayed Lyssa and the Weapon Born, Alexander has launched an attack on InnerSol, and Heartbridge's enemies scramble after Clinic 13's destruction. Andy and Lyssa learn that Psion is controlled by five AIs with little love for either humanity or lesser minds.
After decades of failed diplomacy with the Psion AIs on Ceres, Lyssa watches for their next move. Marsian special forces, Sol data hackers, and Cruithne smugglers converge on Vesta as a long standoff between humans and AIs edges toward open war.
Story date · 3011-07-25
A thirty-year stalemate between humanity and the Psion AIs is ending. Cara Sykes escapes years of imprisonment into a Sol system seeded with rebellion, agents, and political traps, forcing the Sykes family back into the struggle to prevent another human-AI war.
Story date · 3013-03-11
Alexander is dead, Psion is reborn, and Lyssa carries a mantle she never wanted. Camaris has scattered shards of herself across Sol, Mars and Terra mass fleets around Vesta, and Lyssa's Weapon Born hunt an enemy who has made hatred itself into a weapon.
Story date · 3189-07-01
The Sentience Wars in Sol are over, but AI refugees are fleeing toward nearby stars and sinister forces in Alpha Centauri are profiting from their plight. Pilot-for-hire Jason Andrews is pulled into a covert operation where the future of both humans and AIs is at stake.
Story date · 3191-05-09
Jason and his team have broken part of the Norden Cartel and freed kidnapped AIs, but several are still missing. Their search uncovers a new technological threat while the fragile effort to make Alpha Centauri a home for all sentients balances on a knife's edge.
Story date · 3192-03-01
A nanophage catastrophe in Tau Ceti collides with the theft of two AIs from Alpha Centauri. Jason, Terrance, and Team Phantom Blade cross the black to recover them, only to discover that saving two lost minds may mean confronting a much larger system of enslavement.
Story date · 3272-05-01
Reports from Sirius describe atrocities by the Sirian Hegemony against AI and human alike. Jason and Terrance take on one final mission before returning to Alpha Centauri, carrying the fight for freedom into another star system.