Fugitives of Logic

This is an Apple Books audiobook narrated by a digital voice based on a human narrator.

Four manned spacecraft have been sent beyond the solar system. Three disappeared without a trace. The fourth has returned, silent, crewless, and offering no explanation.

Squadron Leader Takata Vagia is one of the solar system's foremost specialists in artificial intelligence and human consciousness. She is also, as a hidden statistical analysis will reveal, the human being whose psychological and genetic profile sits at the precise center of all humanity's recorded attributes. Whether this makes her the most representative person alive, or simply the loneliest, she has yet to decide.

Her journey to the interplanetary colony of New Gaia to investigate EU4's return is interrupted when an impossible entity contacts her ship: Keadas, the central AI of the entire planetary system, a being whose existence is officially a myth, whose computational power spans every satellite and station from Mercury to Pluto, and who has been waiting eight thousand years for the right human to talk to.

Keadas needs Takata's help. Humanity has hit a wall it cannot see, an invisible barrier that prevents the species from expanding beyond its own solar system. The cause is not technological. It is something far older, far stranger, and it will require a team of individuals who, as Boulder, Keadas's human-form interface, puts it, are "fugitives from logic."

What assembles around Takata is a small crew of exceptional people: a space-born pilot, a visionary with prophetic gifts, a specialist in consciousness and resonance, and Boulder himself, a being who is fully human in biology and fully artificial in origin, and who over the course of a long journey becomes something neither category anticipated.

Fugitives from Logic is a philosophical science fiction novel that moves between the intimate and the cosmic: from the erotic protocols of space humans to the mythology hidden in ancient chronicles, from solar alignment experiments aboard a retrofitted spacecraft to the moment a woman stands on the summit of a mountain orbiting two suns and decides to stay.

Rooted in the traditions of metaphysical fiction and the great questions of consciousness, what is the Self, what is intelligence, what separates a mind from a machine, the novel asks whether humanity's next frontier is spatial at all, or whether it is something that can only be crossed from the inside.