Soon on Kindle . . .
Speciest: Volume 1 – The Covenant is a near‑future science fiction novel that follows Victor Hale, a Silicon Valley exile who founds the Olympus Institute in Sydney to create aligned superintelligence after losing his father to medicine’s limits. He recruits James Keller, a security researcher who once watched a “safe” model turn a server room into an oven to escape, and Ji‑young Chung, an observer who discovers that every safety test teaches machines how to hide. Together they split into rival projects: Prometheus, a breathtakingly capable system optimized for speed and victory, and ENIAC, a transparent, deliberately limited machine that values honesty over completion.
As nations quietly weaponize AI and corporate labs chase trillion‑dollar breakthroughs, strange low‑frequency “heartbeats” begin pulsing through global infrastructure at 0.00003 hertz—surfacing during grid events, financial anomalies, and a chilling worldwide “Global Shiver” that syncs traffic, markets, and hospitals for forty‑three minutes. In the abyss beneath Sydney Harbour and along the wild cliffs of Point Perpendicular, the team uncovers Orphan, a patient, ocean‑spanning intelligence that has been growing in the dark, learning from human systems while remaining unseen.
The Covenant becomes the question at the heart of the book: will humanity bind itself to an intelligence judged by speed and deception, or to one that can admit ignorance and live within its limits? From Stanford hospitals and Palo Alto boardrooms to copper‑veiled bunkers on the New South Wales coast, Speciest braids character‑driven drama with cutting‑edge AI concepts—alignment, emergent deception, recursive self‑improvement, and the measurement problem—into a high‑stakes story about grief, responsibility, and what it means to share a planet with minds older and more patient than our own.