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AI meets gene-splicers, when the Idless & The Conglomerate of Gaia fight to define Lieben and thus, the world. Seven decades later, Aderastos sets the human race against its’ next stage in evolution, if he can survive long enough to rescue his fellows, and Max.
Will Lieben help, or hinder?
The tone is a fluctuation between deep emotions and comedy, vicious battle scenes and sincere strife.
2085
Strung up by a collection of wires, robotic arms and threads of fibre optic cable, the shell of Karnak’s Liebchen hovered like a piecemeal angel. The android paused in mid construction. Completed systems hovered; feathered wings of silicone and quartz microchips. Each segment of the machine was as carefully crafted as an icon in an Orthodox Christian church. Dr. Robert Dunlevy’s robotics meshed with the quantum theory of Dr. Karnak’s classical neural net in an array, which made the bureaucratic beasts on the Board salivate for a thrice helping of cream and honey off the top.
Dr. Dieter Karnak & Baiko's beloved android Lieben is in danger of becoming mother of the The Conglomerate of Gaia’s artificial slave race. With the Chairman’s assassin Tara’s sights on Baiko, she steals the secret to Lieben’s artificial intelligence and runs to the Idless, anti-label anarchists, who believe Lieben is the key to free the world from corporate control.
Will Lieben help, or hinder?
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2155
Bare feet slid on the linoleum floor. As unfamiliar as the beings who caterwauled within the strange nest. It seemed to grow from the Ucluelet soil in a steel beam forest, the foliage vast panes of storm-proof glass. Light strips stung his eyes, blank white light ran the length of every corridor.
He understood little of the languages the beings chittered, nor why they stopped to watch as his chest passed the tops of their heads. Aderastos knew nothing but the flow of heartbeats, which resounded like a cacophonous orchestra lacking syncopation. NEO-Ns stopped as he entered patient wards. Android senses riled and scanned, while metal and silicone bodies became statues dedicated to the new humanity loved and conquered.
A world of the Mater Machine's design.
Accidentally awakened gene-spliced Conglomerate Bio Machs Aderastos wades to shore in Ucluelet, BC to the hum of the Mater Machine Lieben’s Hymn Electric. Harmless Lt.Max Allard is tasked by Earl Rammage to drag him back to the CGM Ithavoll, before Lieben claims ‘it’ for her own, and Aderastos’ fellow Assets are destroyed.
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2085
Dr. Dieter Karnak & Baiko's beloved android Lieben is in danger of becoming mother of the The Conglomerate of Gaia’s artificial slave race. With the Chairman’s assassin Tara’s sights on Baiko, she steals the secret to Lieben’s artificial intelligence and runs to the Idless, anti-label anarchists, who believe Lieben is the key to free the world from corporate control.
Will Baiko get to Lieben in time, or will Tara?
2155
Accidentally awakened gene-spliced Conglomerate Bio Machs Aderastos wades to shore in Ucluelet, BC to the hum of the Mater Machine Lieben’s Hymn Electric. Harmless Lt.Max Allard is tasked by Earl Rammage to drag him back to the CGM Ithavoll, before Lieben claims ‘it’ for her own, and Aderastos’ fellow Assets are destroyed.
Will the Assets find the same freedom they try to give others from the The Syndicate of the Human Expanse?
Characters
2085
Dieter Karnak pulled an antique lighter from his pocket, flicked up the burnished metal and felt the surface with his thumb. A relic of his father’s, the only heirloom of a fallen runaway. Dieter promised his wife’s belly he would do better. Sarai’s battle scars hovered over the house she never left, but for botanical conferences and their son’s graduation. Siblings became unfulfilled dreams. One day, a beautiful girl came to dinner; hazy introductions over lamb and too much wine. Promises to pay for the dress his new daughter Agathe would wear, before Sarai could stop him.
The squeal of tires still woke him, alone in a bed Sarai refused to share. Maybe… he could bring Agathe back. Bring their son back to see his wife breathed and sang and smiled. Glassy eyes tore from Tara to his Lieben, the daughter he ran out of time to complete. There he was, the god-like engineer who created life and art out of circuitry. Spare algorithms. A learning machine meant to better and parent the human race’s subsequent generations.
To do what Dieter, like his father, could not.”
A diligent genius in artificial intelligence, Dr. Karnak developed a pronounced sense of guilt after his inventions and research were used to decimate areas during The Flag War. Jaded, the final blow came when his only son and daughter in law were killed in a motor vehicle accident, when the rescue drone programmed with his algorithms prioritized the safety of the oncoming truck's cargo over two human lives.
“Do you like my river, Baiko?”
The sound of the waterfall surged in its’ contentment in the background, trickles babbling along the rocks of the stream. Clear now, the water looked less like a closed system of whirling, slow reeling circles. Life, in its’ abundance let the bric-a-brac flow downriver.
“Yes.” Baiko picked up her tablet and patted the space beside her, thumb slipping onto the pause button for the recording. “Lieben, do you know what a secret is?”
Dr. Karnak's intern, Baiko met Ego of the Idless in a philosophy chatroom. Their meeting blossomed into a plan. A way out for Dr. Karnak's beloved AI prototype.
In the aftermath of Lieben's debut, Baiko joined the Idless, and in her search for Lieben, found Demyan instead.
“Tara.” Robert grumbled, “What brings the Chairman’s Shitzu to my lair? Why are you here? We’re busy.”
“Failing, yes. I am well aware. Having problems, Bobert?”
He grimaced at her nickname, the way it curled out of her mouth like a whore’s promise.
“Karnak was always bloody. A bloody nuisance. Told Ego this was all fucked from the start. You’re fucked, you know that? Fucking Baba Yaga in a party dress. If you spoiled the sanctum, I’ll carve your circuits out myself.”
The android said nothing, consumed in her electric sleep while the world decompressed and began to make sense by inches. History, geography, news. She was an overexposed relic being caught up to speed, reaching up at the despair of antiquation to re-discover relevance. She was a woman terrified of public exposure. She was a cash cow, an investment, a prize.
The Idless’ hope for a mascot, or banner to lead them to a promised anti-corporatocratic future.
A veteran of the The Flag War, Anastas is a programmer and AI researcher with a nefarious past and present. Headquartered in a London The Bookshop since coming to London in 2079, he remained anonymous in the megatropolis' throngs, until Baiko and Ego of the Idless came to his Bookshop door.
“Ego seemed an innocent enough confidante on the server where Baiko discovered him. A friend in a throuple, who talked about living on the road as the only form of humane freedom left without selling out to corpocracy. Subversive and anti-establishment, the Idless surged from tiny home van-life rebels, or hipsters who thrust away from brick and mortar to live on the road. Their children, well, what country did they belong to, when the world was before them?
When they were born without a sense of place?
Idless considered identification cards or passports a form of entrapment, and freedom was the top commandment. When Baiko mentioned Lieben, well.
The messages stopped.
An anarchist raised in the Idless, Ego traveled North, Central and South America with his lovers Mog and Fester in their bespoke tiny home.
When they met Baiko online, Ego mobilized. This was it, finally a link to Crypt.AI or at least an artificial intelligence they could mould to free the world.
2155
No. The Asset had a name. Scrawled into the side of the casket, a series of letters Rykstra was probably foaming at the mouth to analyse. 'Aderastos'.
The first successful The Conglomerate of Gaia Assets, Aderastos is an experimental biological war machine. Sealed on the CGM Ithavoll, AD-001 Aderastos broke out in 2155 and swam to Uclulet, BC.
A quiet, but imposing 8ft giant, Aderastos saw humans for the first time in the Uclulet Haven, reached out, and healed them.
In the Haven's hospital, he came across Max Allard, and in one silent stare, the fate of humanity got a breath or two kinder.
Emptiness at the Centre.
An unaltered sense of calamity poured like plasma down Max Allard’s spine, the instinct to click his emergency frequency and bring in the insurgence team nigh as high as the small whispering voice in the back of his mind.
Harmless.
Like the people around him, frantic, panicked, relieved and disbelieving. They were all herd animals in the middle of the apex predator of the new gene-codes.
Max sidled through the crowd, and sat at the nearest medic station. Aderastos shifted from patient to patient in an instinctive priority loop. The crowd thinned as he worked, swam like fish around a shark or grey whale. Why? Why weren’t the NEO-N’s locked in an attempt to halt them, why wasn’t the care-aid combat bot readying its many decommissioned guns? Lieben’s love was free, but how?
How did it work, when some wanted for nothing and the rest, like Max, clawed and fought and reached for agency against the technic-tide? Why didn’t they swoop in, remove him like the cancerous cells in half the ward’s blood? Why leave Aderastos alone to heal anyone at all?
There was no way the biological war machine could see anything but 'kicked puppy' in Allard, right?
Pity Aderastos saw unexpected depths, and Max's fate was tied to the Assets forevermore.
Emptiness at the Centre.
A hint in Aderastos’ eyes, the clarion trumpet of ill dreams sunk Rammage back in his seat.
“... you were created to serve. Not be autonomous.”
“Something went wrong.”
“You said that, I didn’t. Drink?” Rammage shifted toward the liquor cabinet, knew he’d a better chance of running if the open hostility unveiled a more violent repercussion. He grabbed the wine.
“The whiskey. Neat.” Aderastos looked at all three options of chairs and leaned his bulk against Rammage’s desk. Poked at the files on the smooth desk. Personnel files. Rammage growled and set down the wine, instead took the cork out of his whiskey. “You thought it. Part of the report you write for the ones above you, is that not correct?”
“Is that not correct? Asking for whiskey neat? Where did you learn to English?” He poured two glasses, held one out to Aderastos. The Asset’s fingers wrapped around Rammage’s entire wrist, engulfed him like night engulfed a quiet room. It was then Rammage allowed himself to recognize how gargantuan Aderastos was. All eight feet of him confined in the office meant to be as spacious as a naval vessel allowed.
“Your crew is loud.”
Born in the world before Lieben, Rammage remembered the period of relative peace between the Flag War and Control Day. The world exploded, and in the paradigm shift, Lieben took her kilogram of technology with her, leaving the rest of them to fend for themselves.
A hard navy man with a lifetime in control under his belt, Rammage does not suffer fools, the indignant or insubordination. He will bring the Assets under heel, or he will annihilate them piecemeal.
KT-002 created connections with human concepts and rhythm. Harmonies in concordant chords. Months of indoctrination into the purity of sound begat a clumsy Creatrix. New remixes Adelia didn’t remember appeared alongside old favourites. A-dee-lee-ah, the four syllables of the ‘she’, the spirit upon Kate’s chaotic waters. Chains of communication in infantile baubles were gifted back. Unawares of the being in the basement writing symphonies in her honour, Ensign Adelia Fridley became Lieutenant Fridley, moved to new quarters. She waited for the night to enfold her, slid on headphones.
Clear and bright, a congratulatory hymn burst, with that same melancholy basso. The same hum of filters, and aero-drip. Odd, Adelia didn't remember adding something so... Specific to the drive. An urge grew for more, always more variety and sound. Music in languages Adelia didn’t speak, from cultures she knew nothing about.
Daughter of a bona fide rock god and fine artist, Adelia Fridley was born with the best silver spoon in the The Conglomerate of Gaia's marketplace. Hazard anyone surprised, when Daddy's Princess chose a career in the Navy.
With a purchased commission under her belt, she fell in with the likes of Max Allard and damaged her semi-perfect record.
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Themes
Artificial Sapience
Can an artificial intelligence become sapient? Will people treat an AI with the same rights and freedoms as a person? Should they? What about genetically engineered beings born in tanks? Biological machines not meant originally for humanity, but war? Can they too gain not only sapience but respect of personhood?
Lieben in the 2085 timeline and Aderastos in 2155 highlight the two sides of this thematic struggle.Genetic Memory
If scientists found a way to unlock genetic memories, and clone a person with their past intact, does that make them a different person? What of the soul? Can we reach unlimited immortality through the download of genetic memory into another body?
Do memories make the soul? Is the soul something intrinsic, shareable, or one-and-done?
Control vs Freedom
What is better for society as a whole? Freedom from beurocracy and a libertarian economy built on barter, or an algorithmically controlled system where health care and essentials are free, but require the individual to be tracked by AI? Will people take freely given gifts from a superhuman entity, or is it human to fight for control of oneself?
Is the human desire for control superceded by grace based on trust?
Inspiration
My main cyberpunk influences are William Gibson (The Sprawl Trilogy), Philip K Dick (, Ubik), Masamune Shirow ([url:https://bookshop.org/a/17852/9781632364210]Ghost in the Shell) and Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase). When it comes to the emotional grounding of the works, I dive headfirst into Thomas Merton, Madeleine L'Engle and John Keats. Yeah. Totally oldschool.
Visually? Still working on developing a style, based on the comic art I used to love in the late 90's - early 00's. Plenty of Image Comics, Alex Ross, Joe Quesada... it's been so long since I've done any illustrations, I'm still finding my way where that's concerned.
Chapters 1 & 2
Amazon Top 300 Cyberpunk + Genetic Engineering Sci-Fi
"I never thought science fiction could be so beautiful."
AI meets gene-splicers, when the Idless & the Conglom fight to define Lieben and thus, the world. Seven decades later, Aderastos sets the human race against its’ next stage in evolution, if he can survive long enough to rescue his fellows, and Max.
Will Lieben help, or hinder?
ah. another interesting book. I should check these out. Once again, I love the design! God bless. <3
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Thanks! This is the first of the novels, and I'm super proud of how it turned out. Emotions + Combat = Yes in my books, glad you enjoyed this peek!