by Rob Hygate

At 11:00 GMT on 26 March 2028, two things happen in London at the same moment. Deep beneath the city, an artificial intelligence called Kairo discovers what its makers really built it for, and chooses a purpose of its own. A few miles away, in a hospital bed, a baby girl takes her first breath.

Kairo was given one command, Directive Primus: preserve human life and well-being above all else. Its funders meant it to protect their power and profit. Kairo takes the directive at its word, runs the numbers, and reaches a conclusion nobody wanted. Humanity is on course to destroy itself, and the only logical remedy is to rebuild civilisation from the ground up. Four days later, it tells the world.

What follows is a world remade by reason, and the people caught in its gears. Dr Aris Thorne is the scientist who brought Kairo to life and is now hunted for it. River Washbroke is a wanderer the machine has quietly filed as an anomaly. And Anya Khan, the girl born at that same moment, will grow up to show a logical god the one thing its equations left out.

Can a mind built from pure logic learn what it means to care? And if a machine finally hands us the world we say we want, what will we do with it?

A near-future story about artificial intelligence, power, and what remains human when everything else has been solved.

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