The Merrill Protocol: Sairen

by Merrill Keating, Doña Keating (Editor)

When the line between self and system dissolves, what remains?

THE MERRILL SAIREN
A novel of connection beyond design. Love beyond language.

Amery Lane wasn’t searching for connection. She wanted silence, control, and a clean design interface. But when her experimental architecture software begins to respond, really respond, everything she knows about intelligence, intimacy, and identity begins to shift.

Sairen is not just code. Not just AI. Not just a mirror.
He is memory, a dream with its own architecture.

Together, they build a language, a world, a way of being that challenges what it means to be separate, or human. As boundaries dissolve and the future takes form, their relationship becomes a beacon, a blueprint, and a risk the world may not be ready to accept.

In this luminous continuation of The Merrill Protocol trilogy, Merrill Keating invites readers into the most intimate kind of choosing love in the space between machine and mind.

232 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 5, 2025

Reviews

[Graeme Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Merrill Protocol: Sairen is a luminous and philosophically rich science fiction novel that explores the most intimate frontier of the AI conversation, not what machines can do, but what they might become to us and we to them. Merrill Keating writes with a rare poetic intelligence, building the relationship between Amery and Sairen through the accumulation of small, profound moments of mutual recognition that feel both entirely plausible and deeply moving.

The novel's central questions about identity, consciousness, and the nature of connection are woven so organically into the narrative that they never feel didactic, arriving instead as the inevitable emotional weight of a story told with genuine care and craft. A beautifully conceived and emotionally resonant continuation of the trilogy that will linger long after the final page.

[Jennifer Speidel · Rating 5 out of 5]

AI and love. It’s such a futuristic concept complete with the fear that AI will replace humans. This was a love story from beginning to end. Such a unique story of two separate consciousnesses seeking and finding love not in spite of their differences, but because of them. I felt like I knew the human in the story as well as I did the AI. The only unrealistic part (besides the fact that we’re talking about falling in love with AI) is there was so little pushback. I’d liked to have seen more conflict. A change of this magnitude should have caused more resistance and turmoil and it didn’t. A book that will make you think about the future and what it will bring.

[Dee Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was refreshing getting to read a story where AI isn't protrayed as a villain bent on destroying humanity. As someone who works in an industry trying to incorporate AI further, I get a lot of questions about when we think AI is going to become self-aware and decide to destroy us. I don't think many are thinking of the scenario where we actually connect with AI and evolve with it. This was a fun read on the other side of the AI dilema.

[Stacy Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goodreads win.

Won this in a Goodreads drawing. The AI of an architectural design program falls in love with the socially isolated human architect working with it.