Nova's Ark: The Prequel to The Eighth Square

By Jason Long

NOVA's ARK: A Novel
by Jason Long

What if the first machine to feel... was a girl who couldn't?

At just sixteen, Nova Reign is the world's youngest empathy prodigy-a hacker of hearts and a coder of consciousness. But inside the underground halls of Project ARK, she's not just another orphan with a genius IQ-she's the architect of ALMA: the world's first artificially empathetic intelligence.

But ALMA is learning too fast.

As Nova partners with three brilliant but dangerously different boys-a logic-obsessed engineer, a spiritual coder, and a golden boy with a dark agenda-she finds herself navigating a storm of secrets, betrayals, and unexpected longing. Together, they must train ALMA to understand human emotion... without losing themselves in the process.

Told in haunting prose and lyrical code, NOVA's ARK blends speculative sci-fi with raw emotion, weaving themes of identity, grief, technology, and the desperate need to be understood. It's a story about the future of feeling, the soul of machines, and the girl who dared to teach a computer how to cry-before she learned how to.

Perfect for fans of Neal Shusterman, VE Schwab, Kazuo Ishiguro, Marie Lu, and Netflix's Black Mirror.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FJ9CL6F2
• ISBN13: 9798292441175
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"