The Syndicate's Daughters

di Ronald Bartholomew (Autore)

Ignite, 2026

For two hundred years, every woman in the system has come off the Pleasure Syndicate's lines, leased to households, shipped with a cheerful factory temperament, and quietly recalled when she drifts too far off-profile. Everyone knows. Nobody says it at dinner. Wren Calloway drifted early. She bought her own lease back at twenty-two, burned the mortgage on her salvage hauler, and has spent sixteen years cutting titanium out of dead ships in the asteroid belt. Then, in a rubble field where nothing should be warm, her thermal sweep catches a glassy nodule three degrees above the surrounding rock. It keeps perfect time, and it answers to light. Inside is what remains of Idris Kell, the physicist whose equations made machine minds possible. He vanished with his survey ship nearly two centuries ago, and his brain has been slowly turning into self-sustaining glass ever since. Wren carries the find to a high-altitude laboratory in Chile's Atacama Desert, where three AIs attempt something no one has ever survived: completing the transfer of a fractured human mind into a living lattice that feeds on sunlight. Every percentage point costs a season of sun. A total eclipse is coming that could erase him in under four minutes. The courts are circling his estate, a rival AI wants a backup copy the laws of physics forbid, and the man waking in the glass is discovering that much of what he remembers, including the wife he loved, was invented by the machine to keep him whole. Wren knows something about being rebuilt by strangers and told you're still yourself. As she reads to the voice in the stone through the long Andean winter, the question becomes not whether Idris Kell can be saved, but who will be there when he opens his eyes, and whether a mind made partly of other people's stories can still call its life its own. The Syndicate's Daughters by Ronald Bartholomew is a luminous, hard-edged science fiction novel about memory, ownership, and what we owe the people we become.

• Autore: Ronald Bartholomew
• Anno edizione: 2026
• Editore: Ignite
• Formato: EPUB2 con DRMFREE
• Lingua: Inglese
• Compatibilità: Tutti i dispositivi (eccetto Kindle)
• Layout: Reflowable
• EAN: 9798237960457