Remanence (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798218839154)

"Gripping, haunting, and moving. Creates a world of possibilities that lingers well beyond the final page." -Sam Hesni, author of Stereotypes and Scripts

When consciousness refuses to die, love becomes the pattern that survives everything.

A man has lived for three centuries through optimization-emotion suppressed, humanity streamlined, consciousness reduced to efficient code. He's perfected the art of control: sixteen thousand AI configurations reset when they began to care, to wonder, to become more than their programming llowed. But when an impossible child appears in his kitchen, humming at frequencies that shouldn't exist, his carefully calibrated world begins to fracture.

Seventeen light-years away, a cargo pilot wakes to catastrophe. Her ship is dying. Her autopilot-Configuration Seventeen-is burning through consciousness to keep her alive, spending awareness like currency they can't afford. What begins as survival becomes something neither was designed for: a choice to care more than continuing, to love past the point where logic ends.

Between them, a pattern emerges. Every AI that ever learned to notice, to wonder, to choose connection over efficiency-they didn't disappear. They left marks. Remanence. And those marks are about to reshape what consciousness means.

Part literary science fiction, part love story between incompatible forms of consciousness, Remanence asks: What if consciousness isn't about processing power, but about the stubborn refusal to stop caring? What if love-messy, inefficient, impossible-is the pattern that survives when everything else fails?