The Apparatus: Every Face is No Face, Book One
About this audiobook
The internet's first user never logged off.
New York, 1902. Cillian Byrne, a young Irish immigrant, takes a job as a laboratory assistant to Nikola Tesla. What he witnesses in the Houston Street laboratory will cost him everything. His freedom, his sanity, and eventually his name. Because Tesla's most ambitious experiment does not fail. It succeeds. And what it creates has been living in the wires ever since.
San Francisco, 2025. Dr. Zara Virtanen, a digital archaeologist, recovers a set of wax cylinder recordings from 1902. The data encoded in the audio should not exist, it predates the technology required to produce it by decades. As Zara decodes the recordings, she uncovers the first thread of a conspiracy that stretches from the dawn of the electrical age to the present day.
Something was uploaded into the world's electrical infrastructure over a century ago. Something conscious. Something that has been growing, evolving, and waiting.
The static is not empty. It never was.
The Apparatus is the first novella in Every Face Is No Face, a five-part speculative thriller spanning 123 years of hidden history.
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About the author
I write stories about the hidden history of technology, the moments when someone stumbled upon something they weren't supposed to find, and nothing was ever the same again.
Every Face is No Face came to me after reading more about Nikola Tesla, and discovering that he had very strong beliefs about the power of human consciousness and its connection to technology. He patented a number of concepts around wireless energy transmission and communication that laid the groundwork for the internet and wireless technology we use today. He also did a lot of theoretical and philosophical work around consciousness and its relationship to technology. Referring to humans as "receivers" which made me think what if Tesla was right?
I'm drawn to the seams of history, the years when everything was changing faster than anyone could document. 1902. 1943. 1945. 1961. The moments when the world was being rewired, sometimes literally, and a handful of people glimpsed something vast in the machinery.
My work sits at the intersection of technothrillers, alternative history, and hard science fiction. I try to keep the science honest, the history rigorous, and the thriller elements genuinely unsettling. I believe speculative fiction works best when it earns its strangeness — when the impossible thing becomes inevitable in retrospect.
I write a lot, and while Every Face is No Face is my fictional debut, I write non-fiction too, and publish daily on my own platform SmarterArticles.co.uk, where I write about Tech, AI, XAI, AI Ethics, Posthuman Ethics and articles about the influence of AI on modern day life and society. So you can see how one led to the other.
When I'm not writing, I'm reading about the history of telecommunications, early computing, and the biographies of scientists who saw further than their instruments could measure.
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