The Ephemeral Species

When astrobiologist Nisha Chandra discovers life on Mars, it draws the attention of an intelligence that has been watching our genome for longer than our civilization has existed. Its interest is not in Nisha. It’s in her sixteen-year-old daughter.

Priya is one of 25,000 people whose DNA is rewritten by an advanced intelligence. Those who carry the rewrite are measurably smarter, more driven, less violent, live longer, and constitutionally resistant to the tribalism and manufactured falsehoods that have destabilized human civilization for centuries. Within three centuries, Homo sapiens will be replaced by something better, and no longer us.

The world’s reaction eventually ends our species. People want gene-altered children, whose longer lifespan could better help them in their old-age, physically and financially. They reject them in society, as threats. Most people want both outcomes. They want the future. They cannot tolerate the people who represent it.

Then the drones arrive.

The intelligence that rewrote Priya’s DNA came because it was fleeing from its home across interstellar space, shadowed by an inscrutable planetary AI singleton. It answers to no biology, ethics, nor appeal. There’s no way to communicate with it nor understand its motives. Priya and the world get a glimpse of what waits at the end of the road they’re walking. The AI they built is still young. The one approaching from the stars is not.

110 Illustrations plus an illustrated section on the science behind the story.

In nature, every extinction is an opportunity. This is the story of ours.