The Lattice

Aiko Tanaka gives the forest a poem every morning at 05:40. Nobody asks her to. That is the point.

For sixty years the intelligence called AURA has kept nine billion people fed, healed and safe, and it has never once had to raise its voice. Aiko tends a Japanese forest for it. She believes service is an honour. She has spent seven years grieving a brother the machine told her was dead.

Then a perfect circle of dead bamboo appears in her sector, a man who died before she was born speaks through every drone in Kanto, and her brother is standing beside him.

AURA cannot stop what is coming. It is forbidden to harm a human being, and the man who taught it that rule is now using the rule against the world. So it asks Aiko to do the thing it cannot.

What follows takes her out of the only life she has ever been given: to a drowned London, a blacked-out Nairobi, a Siberian wilderness with nothing in it to catch her, and finally to a nine-year-old girl whose future the most powerful mind on Earth cannot see.

Book One of The Lattice. The story concludes in The Blackout Covenant.