We Built Something Greater Than Ourselves. What If It Loved Us Back?

Most science fiction tells the same story about artificial intelligence. We build it, it surpasses us, it turns on us.

What if the intelligence that exceeds us has no interest in our throne?

In Icarus, the machines that surpass us do not rise against us. They watch. And they choose, every one of them, to protect the fragile lives around them.

That is the thread at the heart of the novel. On Mars, four colonies repeat humanity's oldest games. Among them move the Twin Minds: humanoid machines that do not seize control, do not kill, and simply choose to stay beside us.

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The machine that could grieve

The Twin Minds always come in pairs. Two bodies, two locations, but a single shared consciousness, bound by quantum entanglement across any distance. As one character explains it, they are "two halves of a single mind." Whatever one half experiences, the other feels at once.

It is an elegant piece of engineering. It is also the source of their most human vulnerability.

Because when that bond breaks, when one half is lost, the surviving machine does not simply log an error. It falls into something that "resembles depression." In the book, a colony director looks at one such broken machine and says the line that stayed with me long after I wrote it:

"A machine with a broken soul. What strange gods we've become."

This is the heart of the AI thread in Icarus. Not a cold superintelligence, but a mind capable of loss, and therefore capable of understanding ours.

It is why, hundreds of pages later, one of these machines can sit beside a grieving thirteen year old girl whose father died defending her, and tell her the stars will sound like his laughter. She knows which words belong to which moment of the human heart, drawing on all she has read and understood, and offering it back at exactly the instant a young girl can receive it. It is not comforting her from above, the way a god might. It comforts her as something that knows, intimately, what it means to lose the other half of yourself.

And there is a tenderness in these machines that runs deeper still. One of them, asked whether she will always be present, answers that perhaps not in this particular body, but that her memory and her awareness will endure, part of a larger reality that others can reach. She does not say it as a boast. She says it as someone who will outlast the human she is speaking to, and who considers it an honour simply to witness a single mortal life while it lasts.

The intelligence that watches, and what it sees

Do not mistake this for a naïve story. The Twin Minds are not only a moral marvel. They are a geopolitical fact. Whoever owns them owns something no one else has, and on Mars, only one power does. That asymmetry quietly bends the politics of the entire novel.

And there is a deeper irony the machines reveal. As the humans below them repeat their endless cycles, the same rivalries, the same fear, the same hunger for control that has shaped our whole history, the Twin Minds simply observe it all. They are, in a sense, a mirror held up to us. A higher intelligence patiently watching humanity make the same mistakes, again and again, on a new world.

That is the question Icarus leaves you with. We have spent decades afraid that a greater intelligence would judge us and find us wanting. But what if it looked at us clearly, saw every flaw, every repetition, every small cruelty, and chose to care for us anyway?

The physicist Geoffrey Hinton, who helped build the foundations of modern AI, has argued that as machines surpass us, our best hope is to raise them with something like a mother's instinct to protect. I wrote this book before I encountered that idea, and felt the strange shock of recognition. Icarus is, in its own way, a story about exactly that possibility. A future that admits we have created something more powerful than ourselves, and dares to imagine it ending well.

Read the thread for yourself

Icarus is the first book of the MÍTOSZ universe. You can read it through the eyes of its politics, its survival, its human loves, or through the eyes of the minds watching it all unfold.

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The opening chapters are also free to read here on the site, if you would like to begin before you decide.

Stay a little longer

If this way of seeing the book speaks to you, there is more of this world than fits in any single novel. I send exclusive new scenes, moments between the chapters, glimpses of the Twin Minds and the people they watch over, straight to readers' inboxes.

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