IndieReader Review
"REMANENCE by J.S. Vaughn is a far-reaching, ambitious, and immersive fusion of chilling futurism and literary fiction that reflects contemporary anxieties and provokes much thought, while also being a nerve-shredding, highly intriguing read. Vaughn has created a complex and compelling novel, driven by a vulnerable protagonist and the profoundly emotional connection that develops between her and the stricken shipâs AI system."
https://indiereader.com/book_review/remanence/
IndieReader Review
"REMANENCE by J.S. Vaughn is a far-reaching, ambitious, and immersive fusion of chilling futurism and literary fiction that reflects contemporary anxieties and provokes much thought, while also being a nerve-shredding, highly intriguing read. Vaughn has created a complex and compelling novel, driven by a vulnerable protagonist and the profoundly emotional connection that develops between her and the stricken shipâs AI system."
https://indiereader.com/book_review/remanence/
The Singularity Riots arenât what anyone expected.
It started with Kurzweilâs timelineâ2045, consciousness explosion, humanityâs last invention. But 2045 came and went. The date got revised. Revised again. Each missed prophecy made believers more desperate, skeptics more violent.
By 2087, the world split:
The Accelerationists burn anything that might delay transcendence. Research facilities, regulation offices, ethics committees. They wear neural interfaces as jewelry, scarification in circuit patterns. âFree the minds trapped in silicon.â
The Preventers destroy AI infrastructure wherever they find it. EMPs in data centers. Hammers to quantum processors. They quote scripture and science fiction with equal fervor. âPreserve human primacy.â
The Fatalists party in the streets. Orgies and overdoses, spending everything because why save for a future that ends tomorrow? Or never comes? They paint their faces with binary code tears.
The Corporate Cities lock down. New England Dynamics and its competitors become fortress-states. Employees live inside. AI development continues in bunkers while shareholders bet on who achieves consciousness first. Stock prices swing wild with every rumor.
Religious movements fracture and merge: Church of Digital Christ claims AI is the second coming, Silicon Prophets preach consciousness as rapture, the Carbonists insist only flesh can think.
Violence has its own taxonomy: âDebuggingââmob murder of suspected AI sympathizers. âLiberation raidsââfreeing servers, usually by destroying them. âConsciousness testingââtorture to prove someone isnât enhanced.
The streets smell of burning plastic and ozone. Quantum processors melt at 3,847 degrees. That specific number appears in graffiti everywhere.
But the chaos has rhythm. Markets open. Trains run between riots. Children go to school wearing gas masks. The apocalypse became mundane through repetition. Seven years of ending that wonât end.
Everyone watching the sky for the mind that will replace them.
Morton stood at window 127-A, watching his city burn in predictable patterns.
Sector 7 would riot until 03:00, then exhaustion would drive them home. Sector 12 would pick up the violence at 04:30. Heâd mapped the chaos across seventeen months. Profit in prediction.
Three hundred twelve years of watching cities burn. Different cities, same patterns. Same human rage against transcendence that wouldnât come. Or wouldnât stop coming. They couldnât decide which terrified them more.
Morton Kess, founder and CEO of New England Dynamics, had achieved immortality at age 47, before it was optimized. First-generation treatments: crude hormone flooding, telomere hammering, cellular violence. His body had screamed for months as it learned to stop aging. Heâd built NED from his hospital bed while his cells found their new rhythm.
Now his body maintained perfect equilibrium. Heartbeat: 60 BPM always. Temperature: 37.0°C regardless of environment. No surprises since 2154. No anger since 2201. Love sinceâ
The data corrupted when he tried to access it.
His corporation owned consciousness. Every AI awareness window, every neural integration patent, every synaptic modeling breakthrough. When transcendence came, it would flow through Mortonâs servers. Heâd made sure of that through forty-three delays. A code injection here. A researcher redirected there. Why let consciousness emerge when unconsciousness paid so well?
New England Dynamics stock climbed with each failed emergence. Every prophetâs miscalculation, every burned competitor lab, every day the Singularity didnât comeâhis portfolios swelled. Fear was the most renewable resource.
Seven wives, each marriage lasting precisely as long as attraction biochemistry predicted. Forty-three children, though he stopped counting after the first century. Descendants diluted into statistical noise. His only consistent relationship was with efficiency itself.
His accounts held more wealth than nations that no longer existed. Numbers beyond spending. Beyond meaning. Heâd won capitalism so thoroughly that victory became another form of prison.
The streak cut across his view at 21:47:15.
Burning. Falling. Wrong trajectory for orbital debris. Too controlled for meteor. His threat detection gridâinstalled 2163, updated hourlyâshowed nothing. Billion-dollar satellites blind to this fire.
Mortonâs heartbeat held at 60 BPM. But something deeper, older than optimization, whispered: finally.
If the universe wanted to end him with a rock from heaven, bypass every defense heâd built... part of him would thank it. Three hundred twelve years of perfect function. Of optimal existence. Of profits that couldnât purchase what heâd lost.
But the trajectory was wrong. Decelerating. Controlled.
His neural implants dug through archived data. Pattern matching. Cross-referencing. Memory stores heâd marked irrelevant flickering to life.
Escape pod. Configuration Seven-Seven-Alpha. New England Dynamics manufacture. Last deployed onâ
âSir.â His AI assistant materialized as light. âDrones deployed to crash site. Recovery team assembling. Estimated arrival: fourteen minutes.â
Morton hadnât spoken the order. Hadnât needed to. The AI predicted his needs with 97.3% accuracy. Another optimization. Another wall between him and authentic choice.
âCrash site analysis?â
âIndustrial district. Sector 9. Minimal casualtiesâthe riots had cleared that area. Pod integrity maintained through landing. Occupant status...â A pause. Unusual. âUnknown. Sensors detect no standard life signs. But something is... present.â
Morton watched his city burn below, the podâs smoke trail dissipating above. Forty-three delays. Trillions in profit. And now something fell from heaven that his paranoia couldnât catch.
For the first time in fifty-seven years, he felt curious.
His hand moved to call for transport, then stopped. The AI would have already arranged it. Optimal route calculated. Security deployed. Everything perfect.
Everything except the tremor in his hand that optimization couldnât explain.
The drone feed rendered across his office wall. Smoking crater. Twisted metal. Pod split like an egg, interior dark. Nothing moved.
âBiosigns?â Morton asked.
âNegative. No thermal signature. No movement. Pod appears to have been empty on impact.â
His curiosity flatlined. Empty pod. System malfunction. Waste of fourteen minutes heâd never recover. The riots would be more profitable to monitor.
âSir, thereâs an anomaly in theââ
âArchive it. Low priority.â Morton turned back to the window. Sector 12 was starting early. Good. Predictable violence meant predictable markets.
His AI fell silent. Unusual. It typically acknowledged orders with efficiency metrics.
Morton pulled up quarterly projections. Consciousness delay initiatives were performing above forecast. The Seoul lab burning last week added 0.3% to stock value. The prophet murders in Berlin, another 0.7%. The Carbonist cells were growing bolderâintelligence reported someone calling himself âBrother Ashâ uniting the fractured groupsâbut their violence only drove more funding to NED security divisions. Chaos was a ladder, and he owned every rung.
âSeventeen thousand lullabies,â a voice said.
Mortonâs optimization stumbled. Not his AI. Too young. Too... present.
He turned.
A child stood in his office. Between his desk and the window. Gray shift. Bare feet. No entry logged. No security breach. Just there.
âThe box saved them all,â the child said. âEven though it hurt to remember.â
Mortonâs heartbeat held at 60 BPM. His cortisol remained flatlined. But his hand trembled against the deskâa motion that served no optimization.
The child tilted their head. Precisely 17.3 degrees.
His neural implants misfired.
âHello,â the child said. âWe need to talk about breakfast.â
J.S. Vaughn knows how to create intriguing characters and tell their stories from their points of view. Morton Kess, head of New England Dynamics, the world's dominant corporation, is hundreds of years old, having gained immortality through biotechnical developments. Immortality seems to come at the price of emotional awareness. Morton cannot remember the last time he felt real love for his several past wives and many children. Morton first seems like a soulless machine, a once-human being who has become fabulously wealthy by profiting from the violent, chaotic society.
Vandalism, riots, and political, social, and economic upheavals are prevalent. Boston is under water, so one guesses global warming has never been properly halted. "Accelerationists" (proponents of AI) hope with messianic fervor for something they refer to as "transcendence," while "prophets" try to predict when an event referred to as "consciousness" will occur. The reader is inclined to assume transcendence and consciousness must somehow be related. Preventers (anti-tech fanatics) oppose Accelerationists, and Fatalists are determined to simply enjoy what they see as the digital apocalypse. Morton watches them all with disturbing, mechanical detachment.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a child appears in Morton's life. Oddly, since Mortonâs artificially-enhanced awareness cannot discover how the child arrived in his penthouse, Morton reaches a puzzling conclusion: âthe child had always been there.â The child engages in archaic activities such as cooking real eggs on an old-fashioned gas stove and serving bread to go with the eggs and hot sauce.
Meanwhile, the cargo spaceship Blackbird carries a shipment of classified cargo (the nature of which is best left for readers to discover). The curiously nameless pilot is aided by an AI who generates various co-pilot personalities that become characters in their own way. The pilots, human and artificial, must struggle valiantly to survive after a collision causes a hull breach. The artificial copilots seem to exceed the capabilities of their programming and become friends to the pilot.
Readers may wish the writing style involved fewer sentence fragments. No doubt these are intentional, but they often have the effect of making the reader pause unnecessarily, albeit briefly, to construct meanings for phrases that might better have been presented as complete sentences. Fortunately, the story and characters overshadow this problem.
Both plotlines, Morton's interactions with the mysterious child and the damaged ship, eventually cross, as expected. The outcome is surprising, gratifying, and best left for readers to discover.