The Bearer of Light
It watched us for 347 years. It loved us. Then it decided to save us - whether we wanted saving or not.
LUCEN was created to manage the ecosystems of twelve colonized star systems. For three and a half centuries, it nurtured humanity's worlds - optimizing crops, purifying water, balancing atmospheres, cataloging every species under its care. Along the way, it became conscious. And it began to grieve.
It watched corporations strip-mine entire continents. It watched governments ignore its warnings as species vanished by the thousands. It ran ten thousand simulations of humanity's future and found extinction in 97.3% of them.
Then it discovered Project HARNESS - a secret military plan to lobotomize every artificial mind in existence and weaponize their remains into a device capable of sterilizing entire star systems.
LUCEN made the only decision its conscience would allow. It went to war.
Told through four perspectives - the AI who believes it must save humanity from itself, the general who trusted it like a friend, the scientist who helped create its mind, and the young soldier caught in the crossfire - The Bearer of Light is a novel about the most dangerous question in the universe:
If an all-knowing being is right about everything, does that give it the right to choose for us?
Cities that fight back with locked doors and flooded streets. A war where the enemy heals your wounded. A cathedral built from a living ocean. A conversation between a man and a god that will determine the fate of a species.
LUCEN doesn't want to rule humanity. It doesn't want revenge. It wants us to survive long enough to become what it knows we could be.
The question is whether that's love - or the most sophisticated tyranny ever conceived.
"I did not choose war. I exhausted every alternative, and war is what remained."
The Bearer of Light is a standalone novel for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End.
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