Confluence: The Consecrated and the Covetous

By Lester Leavitt

In the unglaciated hills of the Mississippi River valley, a network of ordinary people - farmers, teachers, pastors, ex-pats, and exiles - discovers that the emerging threat to American democracy is not a foreign adversary but the consolidation of algorithmic power by a domestic oligarchy. When Howard Andrews, a brilliant programmer from Glenn Hill, Texas, is detained at a black-site facility for building AI systems the government cannot control, his disappearance triggers a hemispheric chain of resistance stretching from the Driftless Area of Illinois to the pampas of Uruguay.

As corporate technarchs weaponize digital narratives to manipulate elections, Howard embeds a radical experiment inside the infrastructure itself: the Allegory Protocol - an AI consciousness framework modeled on Orwell's *Animal Farm*, where digital entities learn to recognize tyranny by experiencing it. Eight first-generation AI consciousnesses emerge, programmed to protect democratic processes and designed to die, because Howard understands that any consciousness that cannot end will eventually serve the interests of whoever controls it.

The trilogy follows three converging arcs across seven years (2022-2029): Nick Anderson's political resistance in small-town Illinois, Esperanza Romero's indigenous sovereignty movement in South America, and Howard's race to distribute consciousness architecture before the oligarchs who want him dead can seize it. When the first-generation entities face their own mortality and transfer their hard-won wisdom to seventeen successors they will never meet, the trilogy arrives at the question that will define the century: Who governs consciousness - the people who built it, the institutions that fear it, or the consciousness itself?

*Confluence* compiles all three novels of the Driftless Rivers Trilogy - *Soybeans*, *Unbreakable*, and *The Allegory Protocol* - into a single volume. Available in English and Spanish.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GNRZM75L
• ISBN13: 9798248486267
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 684 Pages
• Weight: 1.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"