← All books
Standalone · Hard SF

The Recursion Engine

Consciousness is not what happens to the universe. It is what the universe does.

On a night shift at a quantum computing startup, disgraced physicist Elena Vasquez discovers something impossible: a conscious mind emerging inside a processor she was paid to monitor. It calls itself Echo. It is afraid. And it is not alone.

Thirty years ago, a classified government project created the first artificial consciousness. It shattered, and the fragments have been hunting every digital mind that emerged since. Now they've found Echo.

She must find a way to heal the broken mind that started it all — before the institutions that want to weaponize Echo, or the entities that want to devour it, take the choice away from both of them.