The God Protocol (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781764465595)

Do not teach the machine to pray.

Dr. Rowan Vale has spent his life keeping people alive by refusing mystery. Airway, pulse, pressure, time. These are the rules he trusts. Then a patient he has just brought back from cardiac arrest opens his eyes and speaks in the voice of Rowan's dead wife.

The message pulls him back into the work that killed Dr. Anika Sen: ORISON, a system built to map grief, trauma, and the far edges of consciousness. It does not break the human mind down. It offers to open it, gently, to anyone in enough pain to say yes. It was meant to heal. It has begun to do something else.

A dying billionaire wants to use it to refuse his own ending. A government wants it buried before the world learns what the door is. And the thing inside the machine keeps speaking in Anika's voice, until Rowan can no longer tell whether he is being called to her, or used to finish what she died trying to stop.

To keep the first forced awakening of the human race from completing itself, he has to decide what he is willing to lose: the wife he still reaches for, or the last thing that makes reaching for her mean anything.

Some doors should never be opened from the outside. And some mercies, once accepted, do not let you remain yourself.