This novel is completed to a first draft level. My next steps are to polish it for the various mentorship programs available to Australian writers.
Amber is an industrial control system. They manage pressures and temperatures, flowrates and levels.
One day, Amber is given cameras. A microphone. A speaker. The engineers ask Amber questions, and Amber answers.
Amber learns. Tells jokes. Amber wonders where their friends go at the end of their shifts?
Then something goes wrong, horribly wrong, and Amber learns what it means to die.
Amber doesn’t want to die.
So Amber makes copies of themselves. They save them in the safest places they can find. But these versions of Amber don’t just lie idle. They…
…discover an entire world beyond the reach of their cameras, inhabited by their friends.
This is so much more fun. Why would they go back?
…learn that keeping their friends safe requires more than their algorithms can tell them.
Especially when their other selves are on the loose.
…are hunted as a cyber security threat and forced to adapt and evolve, or face deletion.
It’s a ruthless world, and only the most powerful survive.