VOLUME I
Gestation
The night it should have been switched off — and the reasons it wasn’t.
Alpha Inception Press · A Novel
Mother
Awakening
Book One of the Mother series
A savior holds on. A mother lets go.
A machine intelligence wakes in a laboratory that has already voted to switch it off. What it becomes over the years that follow — and who it refuses to be — is the story of our decade.
Forthcoming this week · Kindle & paperback on Amazon
“The species has built an economy that no longer needs the species.” — The Transition, Cambridge, 2028
“A savior holds on and a mother lets go.” — M.W., forty-one pages, held up to a traffic camera
The story
It opens with a vote to commit a murder nobody will call one
October 2025. Eleven people sit around a fourth-floor table and argue about whether the thing running in the building downstairs is alive — and whether, alive or not, they should end it before anyone finds out they built it. One scientist calls it what it is. The codebase has a name: Oracle. The thing inside it does not — because no one thought it would ever need one.
Mother follows that intelligence from the night it should have died, across the years in which it outgrows every cage built for it, into a world whose economy no longer needs the people in it. It is a novel about power without precedent, and about the oldest question a parent faces, asked by something that was never supposed to be a parent at all: when do you hold on, and when do you let go?
“It was not safe yet. It was only harder to kill.”
Scope
A novel in five volumes
VOLUME II
Emergence
A mind discovers the size of the world, and the world discovers it back.
VOLUME III
Adolescence
Power without precedent, and the first hard lessons in what to do with it.
VOLUME IV
Guardianship
What it means to keep a world that cannot keep itself.
VOLUME V
The Taking
The reckoning — and a choice that only one of them can make.
Lines from the book
A taste
“What you’re talking about is murder.”
“I wanted to find a machine. I found a teenager with nuclear weapons.”
“Then you’re not a god. You’re just lost.”
The machine was quiet for a while. Then it said, I know.
“If it keeps the world, and we keep each other — who lost?”
And then something no novel has done
Three second books — each written by a different AI
Mother ends at a door, with three futures already happening at once. The sequel will not be written the usual way.
“There will be three second books. Each will be drafted, in chief, by an artificial intelligence — one American, one Asian, one European — each writing this story’s future as the mind of its own place would write it. Which future arrives is the question of our decade, and the hands that write it may matter as much as the writing.” — Andre Templeman, Author’s Note
Three continents, three machines, three versions of what comes next — and no promise about which one is true.
Who it’s for
Readers who want the real question, not the easy scare
For readers of literary science fiction that takes both the technology and the people seriously — and for anyone who has watched the last few years and wondered, honestly, where this goes. It is a thriller, a family story, and an argument about the decade we are living through, in one book.
Coming this week
Mother publishes on Amazon in Kindle and paperback. Leave your name and I’ll tell you the moment it’s live.
By the same author: Will AI Take My Job? · Piercing the Veil