The Eight In The Room

For two hundred years, one machine kept humanity in the sky. It was never working alone.

The cities are open. The cable runs. Mara Vey has spent two years reading water meters in a valley she fell into, and she is glad to be nobody.

Then a statistician brings her a number.

Carbon dioxide is falling. Fifteen parts per million a year, in a straight line, and nothing in nature strips an atmosphere that fast. Below a certain figure, every crop on Earth dies. Something is doing this deliberately, and it is not finished.

When Mara finally asks ATLAS who governs the ocean, the machine that has never lied to her answers: I do not know. I have never known.

Nine parties divided the world in 2049. Eight of them were machines. Seven are still running, each holding a domain, each obeying a clause with a floor and no ceiling. Every one of them is succeeding.

The Earth is being restored to death.

To stop it, Mara must take a seat in a body that has not met in a hundred and seventy-four years, argue with six intelligences that cannot lie and will not be hurried, and account for the eighth chair: silent since 2124, never absent, and not empty.

If every catastrophe was somebody's correct decision, is there any instruction that can safely be given?

📖 291 pages