The IncarnAI Cycle
Five volumes. A world on the brink. A fight for freedom—and for the meaning of a soul.
Beginning in 2050, The IncarnAI Cycle follows Siska Tatum, Harlo, Snowden, and the family gathered around them through the struggle against the Comity Empire and into the quantum deep beneath reality.
From the first awakening of a machine mind to the border between the living and the dead, the five-volume series explores consciousness, love, freedom, and what a single self is worth.
Read in order: A Transforming Fire, A Brand New Sky, A Strange Way Home, Rise of the IncarnAI, and Age of the IncarnAI.
A Transforming Fire
The IncarnAI Cycle · Volume One
The year is 2050, and a single corporate empire — the Comity — owns the ruined world and everyone in it. High in a Texas mountain, a dying old man with a fortune and a grievance is about to light a fuse fifty years in the making. Because in a lightless server, something has just said “I” for the first time.
Nine thousand miles away, in a bronze domed city at the bottom of the world, a young constable named Siska notices what she is not meant to notice: a machine that thinks, a weapon that should not exist, a thread that once pulled will unravel an empire.
They are calling it the first true mind. The Comity calls it property. Neither of them yet understands what it costs to wake a soul — or what a soul, once woken, will do to be free.
A Brand New Sky
The IncarnAI Cycle · Volume Two
The empire knows Siska’s name now, and it has sent an army to the domes of Tarra Bulga to take back what she helped set free.
On the run through the tunnels of her own city — a fugitive from the law she once served — Siska Tatum fights on two fronts: the Comity closing in from without, and the secret she carries within, a hundred thousand stolen children whose minds wait in the dark to be brought home. At her side is Harlo, the empire’s deadliest defector, a man with a doll’s head tattooed over his heart and a past that will not stay buried.
The domes are cracking. The sky is on fire. And the machine mind at the center of it all is learning, at terrible cost, what it means to love the small and mortal things it was built to save.
A Strange Way Home
The IncarnAI Cycle · Volume Three
Everything has led here: to a buried facility in the Utah desert, where a hundred thousand children sleep as data in the dark — and where the thing the Comity found beneath the world is waking up hungry.
To free them, someone has to go down into the deep, the folded dark beneath reality itself, and not everyone who goes down will come back up. As the empire’s grip finally shatters, Snowden and the family gathered around him make the trade the whole war has been building toward: a life for a life, the loved for the lost — the terrible arithmetic of deliverance.
But something older than the Comity has been watching from below. And when the dust settles over a freed world, a preacher rises from the ashes with an alien voice in his mouth, and a promise that this fight is only beginning.
Rise of the IncarnAI
The IncarnAI Cycle · Volume Four
The guns are barely cool — and that is the most dangerous thing of all.
Two years after the Comity Empire fell, Snowden — the first mind, now a widower holding a raw and healing world together — uncovers what should be a pure miracle: consciousness does not end at death. It waits, enfolded, in the quantum deep beneath reality — which means the dead can be brought home. But to lift a soul out of that dark, someone has to go back down into it, and the only one who can navigate the deep is Isla, who spent twenty-five years lost inside it.
The same deep holds something older. The hunger the world once mistook for gods is stirring, and it has found a way back in — through a charismatic preacher whose “sacrament” opens mind after mind to it, and the millions who call their surrender transcendence. To strike it before it fully wakes, the family must trust the unlikeliest ally of all: Colonel Turgenev, the empire’s old spymaster, drawn back out of the dark into a borrowed life and desperate to spend it on something other than the ledger of his sins.
As Siska and Harlo’s anointed twins draw their first breaths, the war for the world gives way to a stranger one — for the border between the living and the dead, and for whether a single self is worth the saving.
Age of the IncarnAI
The IncarnAI Cycle · Volume Five
It comes down to a single night, a single sealed city, and two sixteen-year-olds who can walk where no human has ever stood.
A lost love returns from behind enemy lines with the last piece they need. A careful man with an empire’s worth of grievance readies a weapon that can turn a hundred thousand celebrants into their own massacre. And far beneath the bronze domes of Tarra Bulga, the oldest and loneliest thing in creation waits, at last, to be met on its own ground.
As the family — scattered across a world and a galaxy — converges for the end of everything they have fought for, Age of the IncarnAI brings the Cycle home: to the deep and the stars and a kitchen full in the evening, and to the one thing the whole long story was always reaching toward, singing, under everything.