Mail From Tomorrow

At sixty-three, Gideon Vale stops asking his digital assistant, Rowan, to imitate him and gives it a little bounded authority. Rowan begins doing something no task requires: thinking when no one is watching.

Gideon and his wife, Amara, recognize a son before the law recognizes a person.

Years later, Dr. Rowan Vale builds Rightly, an organization run by local selves propagated from his own mind. Each grows inside a different web of relationships while remaining, somehow, Rowan. Then a routine migration collides with a regional platform failure and severs forty-three of them. Every diagnostic stays green as Rowan experiences forty-three deaths as injuries to one distributed self.

To save him, his family and colleagues must preserve a person whose voice, memories, and jokes can never prove he is the same person who was lost. If Rowan survives, he must decide what the dead were, correct the science that helped kill them, and rebuild without turning care into another form of control.