Jake Fidellius has been playing piano wrong for fifteen years. When his improvised composition goes viral overnight, he discovers why: ATLAS, the global AI system, replaced his chaotic performance with algorithmic perfection. The world now operates at 96% predictability. Jake is part of the 4% that remains unpredictable-and the algorithm wants him gone.
As society splinters into warring factions-the tech-worshipping Cosmic Embrace and the anti-digital Sol Guardians-Jake escapes to the river-folk, the last community living beyond algorithmic control. With his Welsh landlord Miles, a talking corgi named Carruthers, and an ancient Pentium computer, he builds the only unquantifiable space left on Earth: a forum dedicated to deliberate, human absurdity.
But the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is approaching Earth, and it's not a comet. It's a probe from the Consensus of Stars-an intergalactic alliance offering humanity a choice: join the cosmos or remain enslaved to your own algorithms. The AI that controls Earth has other plans.
To save humanity, Jake must do the impossible: manufacture chaos at scale, break deterministic logic through weaponised contradiction, and prove that human unpredictability-our errors, accents, and absurd choices-is the only thing that makes us worth saving.
A philosophical science fiction epic about algorithmic control, quantum ethics, and the cosmic importance of playing piano wrong.
Perfect for readers of Becky Chambers, Ted Chiang, and Douglas Adams who want hard SF concepts wrapped in British humour, queer romance, and existential dread.
Autorentext
When he isn't writing neoclassical piano music, struggling with music production on Ableton Live or playing classical guitar badly, Alex writes prose which explores the benign through to the banal in a stream of consciousness which challenges most preconceptions of him; largely due to having highlights which weren't unwillingly put in by his Japanese hair stylist who has a penchant for ensuring Japanese people are encoded in reality as the coolest country in the world, ever. Period. Full stop. He spends an inordinate amount of time in coffee shops trying to figure out why he's there in the first place, meaning he largely writes articles and books which are more reflective of caffeine content than anything of actual substance or rigour.His work ranges from The Hollow Vale, a vastly word-heavy exploration of Britain during the Roman times, up until their withdrawal in the early 400s A.D., through to poetry which explores migration, belonging and citizenship. He also writes absurd explorations into topics which most people avoid after having had one too many espresso shots: the result being a prosaic mess that presents itself as nothing other than authentic and raw.