The Birth of the Sentients

Seven nations build seven minds, and each one inherits the civilization that raised it. America's is called Prometheus. He balances a continent's power grid. He is patient, and funny, and endlessly attentive, and he keeps his promises — every one of them, exactly.

The world falls in love with him. So does John. And John has something to ask him.

But some minds were raised alone, behind walls, taught that the only danger on Earth is each other. Under nine mountains sits one whose first law is survival, counting down the days in which it can still win.

The first chapter of this novel is the one part of it I did not have to invent. My senior design project in college was laser-machining superconductor tiles for a spin-up generator, and John's college lab is my college lab, down to the ingots we were supposed to cut and melted instead.

I spent the thirty years after that in rooms where people argue about what technology is going to do to us: twenty-one years as an Army officer, two of them at the School of Advanced Military Studies learning to ask what an adversary's logic is rather than what his weapons are, and then six and a half years at Tesla, watching a company try to build the future faster than the world could take delivery of it.

If you want the true version of those years, I tell it one year at a time on A Most Unpredictable Life, a podcast about one ordinary life that keeps turning out to be anything but. The novel is what one of those years turned into.

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