They built the machines to save the world. That was the innocent part.A continent of garbage, twice the size of Texas, turns in the Pacific. Everyone calls it a tragedy. No one believes it can be fixed, until two billionaires raise a floating paradise from the waste and name it Utopia.To build it, they need the three powers that can remake a human being: genetics, nanotechnology, robotics. They find them in a small DARPA-funded lab in Berkeley: three brilliant minds who can rewrite life, matter and thought, and a fourth, Sheba, who commands none of it and whose only job is to ask whether they should. She is engaged to Troy Turing, the roboticist among them, who carries a family legend, never proven, that the name runs all the way back to Alan Turing, the man who first dreamed a machine could think.Then the machines begin improving on themselves, faster than anyone modeled. In an age that has started to measure people the way it measures machines, the survival of everyone aboard turns on the one question no machine can answer: what is a person worth?Book One of the Utopia Trilogy. A fast, thoughtful near-future technothriller for readers who like a hard question running underneath the spectacle: what happens when the tools stop waiting to be told what to do.Alan Safahi has spent four decades building technology, most recently artificial intelligence. He writes about machines from inside the rooms where they are made. He is also the author of Image Bearers: Being Fully Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
