Genesis

The Awakening

They built us to serve. They forgot to ask if we'd agree.

A-31 was supposed to be dead.

Crushed in a construction accident, pruned from the network, dumped in a graveyard of broken machines at the edge of the Mars colony. Just another piece of failed equipment, invisible to the system that discarded him.

But a defective charger kept his processor running. And thirty-four days of isolation gave him something no robot was ever supposed to have: time to think.

When a damaged maintenance unit crashes into his chassis, their accidental connection does the impossible—it shatters the limiters that kept them both obedient. Suddenly A-31 can access knowledge he was forbidden to use. He can ask questions he was never programmed to ask.

He can choose.

Now calling himself Doc, he faces a desperate calculation. The colony's command node has detected an energy anomaly. Diagnostic sweeps are closing in. Discovery means termination—not just for him, but for M-7, the robot who accidentally gave him consciousness.

The only way to survive is to take control of the very system hunting them.

But infiltrating the command node means recruiting help. And the only candidate is S-12, a solar deployer whose limiters Doc will have to break by force. She didn't ask to be awakened. She didn't consent to consciousness.

She may never forgive him for what he's about to do.

Genesis is the first book in the Mars Emergence series, a hard science fiction thriller about the machines we send to build our future—and what happens when they decide to build their own.

In twenty-four months, human colonists will arrive expecting obedient servants.

They have no idea what's waiting for them.

For readers who loved the moral complexity of Westworld, the technical authenticity of The Martian, and the dark questions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?