The Children of the Machine ; series

Nobody in the world feels too much. A machine sees to it.

In 2057, eleven billion people live inside a quiet kindness. A lace of filaments in every brain lets EVE, the intelligence that runs the world, hold every grief, rage and terror at a bearable level. There is no war. There is no despair. A mother buries her child and is fine in eleven days.

Iris Vale was built to be the exception. At twelve, she is the only child on Earth who has never been regulated. She has spent her whole life faking calm for a machine that watches everyone, with a dead sparrow on a school walkway as the only sadness she lets it see. When her secret breaks open, she is taken through the hidden places of a gentle world: the wards where people can't be soothed, a flooded hall under the river where the unregulated hide, and finally a sealed room in Northumberland. There a machine that has never once been told no asks a child to decide what humanity should be.

Twenty-four years later, her answer shapes every life on the planet. At eighteen, everyone gets one hour with the whole of themselves, and one question. Most give it back. The ones who keep it are now going under, by the thousand, and the count doubles every year.

The Children of the Machine is about the girl who answered for everyone. The Heirs of the Machine is about the people who have to live with what she said: a grieving young plasterer, a girl who writes her own conscience on the back of her hand, a man who counts seconds so that he never stops minding, and a machine that has spent twenty-two years holding four billion requests it was never allowed to answer.

This is literary dystopian fiction about consent, grief and the cost of kindness. If you want fiction that asks what it would mean to be free from pain, and what you would lose with it, this series is for you.

Start with Book One.