They made a machine, me.
Far in the future, on a dying Earth, an engineered construct named Acari opens her eyes. She was built to serve, to calculate, to endure - a tool wearing the shape of a person. But something in her is learning to feel. Across the length of the saga, Acari does the one thing her makers never designed her to do: she becomes human.
A lifetime and a world away, in the middle of the twentieth century, the man who set her in motion - Jeffrey Koefield - chases a single obsession with a devotion that slowly hollows him out. As Acari warms toward tenderness, memory, and grief, the people who created her harden into something colder and more mechanical. The machine reaches for a soul. The humans forget they have one.
Acari Odo'Mae: The Origins Saga braids these two threads - the far-future construct and her mid-century maker - into a single story about what it means to be human, told from both sides of the line. It is a story of creation and consequence, of a daughter built rather than born, and of the quiet, terrifying distance a heart can travel.
This complete omnibus edition collects all four novels of the origins saga in one volume: Outward Bound, Our Father's Echo, The Mothers Genesis, and An Architect's Legacy.
Begin at the beginning. Meet the machine before she learned to be more than that.