The Recursion
3 total works
Herb returns to the remote planet he has been furtively trying to build a city on, to find it a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Eva has taken desperate steps to escape the tedium of her pointless life ... only to end up in the super-intelligent clutches of a yellow mechanical digger. Constantine arrives at the remote part-idyllic, part-nightmare settlement of Stonebreak and - unsettlingly - begins to confront the truth of his own unreality.
Meanwhile in the farthest reaches of outer space, the Enemy is plotting the final overthrow of the human race which created it.
The robot Constantine notices an Artificial Intelligence spontaneously coming into being on a distant planet . . . and watches helplessly as it is destroyed.
In deep space, far from Earth, Judy senses a change of mood aboard the passenger ship she travels on . . . and a quick investigation reveals that the craft is succumbing to a mysterious alien infestation.
Just as hope seems lost, a group of combat drones appears to rescue all the passengers, except Judy – who is told she is the property of a forgotten mega-corporation based on Earth.
Returned against her wishes to an Earth under constant assault from the same alien infestation, Judy begins to learn her place in a conspiracy billions of years old.
But is she ready to take on the benign, omnipotent, all-seeing Watcher who guides human destiny?
And destroy it?
Society in the twenty-third century runs smoothly and peacefully with the aid of Social Care operatives such as Judy 3. Meanwhile benevolent AIs, under the control of the near mythical Watcher, seem to have solved all mankind’s problems, and with their aid humans have begun to explore the surrounding universe.
But why does every AI that visits the planet Gateway commit suicide within just hours of arriving there? Justinian Sibelius has now himself arrived on the planet to try and find a reason. Yet how can someone with merely human intelligence solve a puzzle that has defeated minds far greater than his own – even that of the Watcher itself?
And what if it should turn out that the Watcher is not so benevolent as people once believed?
'An exceptional first novel. A new British star has arrived to join the likes of Hamilton, Reynolds and Banks' Vector