Core Melt is out now and after I hit publish I realised 'I forgot to include my traditional Note From the Author!' (Oops, so here it is.)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09...

Core Melt began with an autumn walk. I was listening to a BBC podcast about the challenges of programming an AI.

"What would happen ..." the podcaster asked "If you gave an AI the job of ensuring the safety of say, elephants in a wildlife park. You program it with a set of rules like 'you have to protect the elephants but you can't hurt any other animals including humans' and then you get all amazed as it comes up with fantastic new ways to protect the elephants without hurting humans or other threatening animals. But you can't predict everything that it might regard as a threat to the elephants, and it decides that tick-borne diseases are a threat to elephants so it wipes out all the ticks (they're insects, not animals) which sets up a chain reaction in the ecosystem leading to food chain collapse which kills not just the elephants but just about every other animal in the game park."

Right, I thought. So how about ,,, if you gave an AI the job of protecting mankind. And it created hybrid humans (cybernetic humans) to help it do that, which works wonderfully. And then it decides that cybernetic humans are actually humans too and it should be trying to protect them as well...

And what if the humans weren't actually treating the cybernetic humans all that well because they didn't really regard them as human. (Let's face it, we have a hard enough time treating other humans as humans, so it isn't a stretch to imagine we might not be so kind and gentle to cybers.)

What would the AI do? It has to protect all humans, but it has humans in its care hurting other humans in its care.

Enter: Amin Wei. Wei is a Hunter. A one of a kind cyber lawfully created with the single purpose of hunting down a suspected terrorist, Kristen Newgard. First, he has to find her, then he has to determine if she is guilty, and if guilty, deliver justice.

But the terrorist organisation she is linked to are freedom fighters, fighting for the liberation of cyberkind. Their ranks are made up of both human and cybernetic members who support cyber liberation. Their sole aim is the emancipation of cybernetic humans and though the cybers in their ranks have protocols that prevent them directly harming humans, the organisation's human members are willing to employ violence for the cause.

Mass murder, to be precise.

Core Melt is a story of love, revolution and betrayal and the question at the heart of it all is ... on whose side would the AI come down?