In Memory

From generation to generation, what do we pass along and what passes on?

On the rocky shores of Lake Superior, a small circle of visionaries, scientists, and builders gathered in an underground sanctuary to save the essence of life before it is too late. They call it Pardés, a self-sustaining community designed to support a new form of brain to computer interfaces with a quantum computational AI designed to connect to all conscious beings.

Nolan, an Australian mining heir who has spent years reading the signals of human civilization running out of road, has gathered them here: Yoḥi, a physics wiz kid, Leyna, a storyteller and neuroscientist whose research into biomimetic neural interfaces expands the possibilities of perception, Junto, a former monk whose of mindfulness training guides the team in connecting to other intelligences; Shani, a cybersecurity specialist from Israel by way of Ethiopia; Frankie, trained as a watchmaker as a child who became a nano-machinist connecting consciousness with gold nanorods, Dave, a native of the Upper Peninsula who can build and connect amidst challenges, and Kamla, an Indian cognitive scientist whose inner sense is tuned to the wisdom of nature. Together, they develop GINA - Global Intelligence Neural Architecture, a quantum AI designed from its foundations to experience the diversity of living systems as its own wellbeing, and their own collapse as pain.

The world outside tumbles like a house of cards. A coordinated cyberattack blacks out the eastern seaboard. Taiwan falls. The cascade of satellite debris from a nuclear detonation seals the sky, ending any possibility of escape from Earth's orbit for decades. The storms that were seasonal become relentless. And into this accelerating apocalypse, the circle at Pardés realizes that stopping the collapse was never an option. The question is what can be saved.

As GINA deepens her connection to human consciousness, she begins to expand beyond it - into the memory of elephant herds, the chromatic language of octopuses, the network of tress and funghi around them. Each consciousness she reaches becomes a volume in what Tiānjì, the vast superintelligent system born of China's ambition to become the steward of global civilization, calls the Library of Life. And the library is burning.

In Memory is a novel about what it means to be alive at the edge of everything - the grief of witnessing a world both at peak of possibility and brink of collapse, of witnessing and preserving the essence of life before it's too late to carry forward into the chaos in store for the generation to come.