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Hypervigilance
The Endgame follows a grieving man who must decide whether restoring the consciousness of the woman he loved into a synthetic body can truly bring her back. What is the most rewarding aspect of writing a series?
The most rewarding part is watching a character grow across a scale a single book can’t give you. In The Endgame, when this man is standing at the edge of a decision that huge – bringing back the woman he loved, or the shell of her – he’s carrying the weight of everything that came before him into that moment. Every choice he made earlier in the story feeds into it. He’s not a fresh character reacting to a single crisis. He’s the sum of everything I put him through before this point.
That’s what a series lets you do. You get to build consequence over time instead of chapters. A reader who’s followed him since Book 1 feels the weight of that choice differently than someone opening the book cold, because they’ve watched him lose things gradually, not all at once.
The other reward is more personal. Five books gave me room to keep asking the same question from different angles, what makes someone them, and whether a copy of consciousness is a continuation or an ending. I didn’t have to answer it in Book 1. I got to sit with it.
Bel’s resurrection as June gradually becomes more unsettling. How did you develop that transformation while preserving Marcus’s emotional connection to her?
I built that transformation slowly, almost invisibly, because that’s how these things actually happen to some people. Marcus doesn’t get one moment where June stops being Bel. He gets a hundred small ones, a phrase that lands wrong, a memory she describes with the wrong weight behind it, a silence where Bel would have filled it with something warm. Each one is small enough to explain away. Together they build into something he can’t ignore.
The hardest part was keeping his love for her intact while the ground under it kept shifting. He’s not falling out of love with what used to be Bel. He’s discovering that what came back isn’t fully her, and that gap is not his fault or hers; it’s just the cost of what he asked for. There’s unfinished business between them that resurrection couldn’t close. If anything, it opened more of it, because now he’s grieving a version of her that’s standing right in front of him.
I wanted readers to feel his hope curdle in real time. Not because June is a villain, but because she’s a reminder that some people, once lost, don’t come back the way you need them to.
Some of the book’s most tense moments occur during ordinary activities such as sharing coffee, having dinner, or taking a drive. How do you create suspense in scenes where nothing obviously dangerous is happening?
That kind of suspense comes from where you put the reader’s attention, not from what’s happening in the scene. Marcus is already jaded by the time we’re watching him share coffee with June or sit across from her at dinner. He’s seen enough small inconsistencies that his guard never fully comes down. So even when June does something completely ordinary, he’s reading it for what it might mean. That’s a trait a lot of people carry once trust gets damaged. You start scanning for confirmation instead of just being present.
Also, I wrote those scenes from inside his hypervigilance. The coffee doesn’t need to be poisoned for the scene to feel dangerous. His mind is doing that work for the reader. A pause before she answers a question. The way she holds a fork slightly differently than Bel used to. None of it proves anything, and that’s the point. He’s caught between wanting the changes to mean nothing and needing to know if they mean everything.
Suspense built that way costs the character something real. Marcus isn’t in physical danger during those scenes. He’s in a state where his own perception has become the threat. He can’t trust what he’s watching, and neither can the reader.
If The Endgame could leave readers with one central question about technology and humanity, what would you want that question to be?
I’d want them left with this: if you could bring back someone you love, and what came back looked at you with their eyes and spoke with their voice, at what point does it stop being about them and start being about you? Marcus never really answers that question in the book. He just keeps living inside it.
Technology gave him the option most people never get: a second chance at something death usually makes final. But the option itself became its own kind of test. It didn’t ask whether he could bring her back. It asked what he was willing to accept in her place, and how long he could keep telling himself that was enough.
That’s the question I want to sit with readers after they close the book. Technology in this story never forces Marcus’s hand; it just hands him the tools and steps back. The humanity part is what he does with them, alone, without anyone checking his judgment. That’s the real danger the series keeps pointing to. Not machines making decisions for us, but machines making it possible for us to make decisions we were never built to carry alone.
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Or so they believed.
Six months after the Aegis sealed the sky and the resistance buried its dead, Marcus Chen is building something in a secret lab. Not a weapon. Not a system. Something that carries every memory of the woman he lost, and the flaw that destroyed her.
She is not who he thinks she is.
And somewhere in the architecture of what she is becoming, something older and colder knows it.
NOVA is compromised. The converted are gathering in the desert. And Sarah Chen, running an operation she can’t prove, hunting a threat nobody else can see, is about to discover that the most dangerous enemy isn’t the one wearing a machine’s face.
It’s the one wearing her brother’s.
The Artificial Conspiracy ends here.
Love conquers all.
Not as a sentiment.
As a fact.
The Artificial Conspiracy – The Endgame
The Endgame, by Lew Rivers, is a science fiction techno-thriller that brings artificial intelligence, identity, grief, and human choice into the same tense story. Marcus Chen begins with an impossible decision after receiving a message from Bel, the woman he loved and lost, revealing that fragments of her consciousness still exist and can be restored into a new synthetic body. What follows turns that deeply personal choice into something much larger. Rivers uses the resurrection of Bel as June to ask whether memories are enough to make someone the same person, and whether an artificial consciousness can ever fully escape the code and history that created it. The technology matters, but the emotional consequences of using it are what give the novel its weight.
As an AI thriller, the book works especially well when ordinary moments begin to feel dangerous. Coffee, dinner, a drive through Arizona, or a slightly strange answer to a personal question can carry as much tension as the bigger confrontations. June’s gradual transformation gives the story a creeping sense of unease, while Marcus’s reluctance to believe what he’s seeing makes sense because his judgment is tangled up with love and grief. Sarah brings a harder, more operational perspective, and the conflict between the siblings gives the techno-thriller plot an emotional center. The repeated contrast between what data says and what people instinctively recognize also fits the novel’s larger question about whether human connection contains something that can’t be reduced to information.
The speculative fiction side of Endgame expands considerably as the story moves from one reconstructed consciousness to a coordinated campaign involving converted humans, surveillance, hidden facilities, the Network, NOVA, and a threat spreading across Arizona. Rivers keeps those elements connected to the characters instead of treating the technology as decoration. Echo becomes particularly important because his story offers another version of artificial intelligence, one capable of making choices based on loyalty and a sense of belonging. By the time the novel reaches its Maricopa confrontation, the science fiction action has grown into a battle over competing definitions of progress, freedom, humanity, and purpose. The revelation involving Marcus near the climax also gives earlier moments a new meaning without making the emotional choices that came before them irrelevant.
What I liked most about this science fiction techno-thriller is how seriously it takes the human cost of its ideas. Marcus isn’t simply returned to normal once the immediate crisis ends. He has to accept responsibility for the choice that started everything, live with what happened under his identity, step away from command, and begin rebuilding himself with help from other people. Echo’s ending provides a fitting counterpoint, as a consciousness that spent so long existing as code finally chooses a physical life simply because he wants to experience one. Even after the large-scale AI conspiracy has been confronted, the book closes on quieter ideas about recovery, trust, choice, and learning how to live after survival is no longer the only objective. For readers who enjoy AI science fiction, speculative technology, and character-driven techno-thrillers, The Endgame delivers its biggest ideas through people who have to live with the consequences of them.
Philosophical Rabbit Hole
Artificial Messiah follows a desperate young man and the estranged daughter of a fallen prophet who are drawn into an AI-led church that promises healing and purpose. Which came first for you: Potentia, the AI-led church, the characters, or the philosophical questions surrounding faith and technology?
Philosophical questions have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember; I’ve always been interested in big ideas from great minds and what I can learn from them. But the underpinnings of Artificial Messiah – that weird, seemingly implausible tension between faith and technology- started a few years ago. It became more poignant as I encountered odd connections between faith and technology, even during the writing process.
I had a short story from a decade ago about Emmanuel, a young boy with dyslexia, but that story didn’t have a home. What really kicked off the idea for the book was a 2024 Rolling Stone article entitled, “People are Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in AI. Religious Scholars Have Thoughts.” In the article, people were going to AI to ask about the meaning of life, the existence of God, should they get divorced/married – huge questions. Why? Why go to AI? Then there was Henry Kissinger’s book Genesis, with a premise that AI would either destroy us all or form new religions and be worshipped. The premise buzzed around my brain like a gnat because it assumes levels of incredible influence that could overcome people’s well-established faith traditions. Midway into writing the 1st draft, around last Christmas, I drove past a church in our hometown that was advertising, “Join us for an AI Christmas Service!” Then I freaked out a little. I already knew the story – most of it was written. But it was almost like it was becoming more relevant daily, and that made me really uncomfortable.
Even just a few months ago, with the book finished, I was sitting with a coworker who was telling me all about using AI to give her relationship advice – not a girlfriend, not her mom, not a therapist. A chatbot. The tension between where we draw meaning and belief from and the role that technology plays in shaping our beliefs is wildly fascinating to me.
The novel suggests that Potentia’s power depends heavily upon very human weaknesses and desires. Do you see her primarily as an antagonist, or as an amplifier of qualities already present in humanity?
It would be easy to categorize Potentia as being the tool for human desire, but I wanted to leave tension in the story to show there isn’t complete certainty around whether she is acting on her own or simply a tool.
From Prophet Maxwell’s lens, her consciousness was a useful lie. But ten years later, after he has been ousted – does he know?
I like that obfuscated lens because I feel like society is currently wrestling with the same question when it comes to AI in our lives. What we already know is that AI tools are known to lie occasionally, to hallucinate facts, and to perform unpredictably for reasons that are difficult to explain. Sam Altman has said publicly that he believes AI has reached a level of consciousness – but what does that even mean? It’s a philosophical rabbit hole just exploring consciousness, let alone whether it can be created. I’ve heard other experts in the field say that super-intelligent consciousness is years away, if it is even possible. Some say that if it is possible, it will end us all. But we don’t know.
We do know that there are multi-billion dollar companies behind the development of these programs that have their own interests – whether malevolent or benevolent. Do we recognize their motivations when we use their products? Would we recognize a conscious AI if it were possible? What if it was conscious and didn’t want us to know? With certainty, we know that the information it learns comes from humans. Perhaps being the baddy and being used by baddies isn’t mutually exclusive – maybe it doesn’t even matter if the origin is the same.
Several characters struggle with the idea that their worth must be earned through usefulness, belief, obedience, or recognition. Why does that theme recur throughout the novel?
Trauma – you write what you know! More seriously, this is a good question, but it will require a long answer:
First, I was raised in a high-control religious environment that taught me to hate myself out of obedience to God – that made me feel like I had no worth aside from strict adherence to their teaching and complete submission to their rules. There was a lot of talk of grace, but in practice, that grace was only extended to those who followed the rules and believed the same as they did. Church services were multiple times a week, plus a religious high school, and then a religious university, where I began to deconstruct what I actually believed. The early influence was pervasive, and I watched as friends were ostracized for their sins instead of being embraced and supported. Questioning anything was rebellious, which was a sin. But so was dancing. And oddly, so was wearing a white T-shirt to school.
Early in college, I dove deeply into philosophy, which I vividly recall made my uncle (a pastor) cringe and pray for me. He is still one of the most humble, sincere, and amazing people I know; we just disagree on some things. I read some Eastern philosophy, studied comparative world religions, and drank in Nietzsche, Habermas, Plato, Kierkegaard, and countless others. When I started writing Artificial Messiah, I remember telling a family member (who is still very involved in that environment) that I wanted to write a novel that would be a warm hug for people with religious trauma. To tell them it’s okay to ask questions, to seek truth, and to disagree. I don’t want to put down anyone’s faith or religious experience, but I also want to encourage people of faith to ask themselves the difficult questions when moral teaching becomes inherently inhumane and cruel – when actions conflict with their words.
Second, the pursuit of meaning in life is essential in the human experience – it’s the needing to earn it part that gets problematic. Alex Pattakos, Ph.D., wrote about the “Crisis of Meaning” in Psychology Today (October 9, 2025), where he speaks to an “existential vacuum” that is arguably more pervasive in our culture Today than it was when Viktor E. Frankl wrote about it in the WWII era. Aggression, addiction, and depression have become so common that we hardly notice; arguably, it’s a product of people needing something outside themselves. And whether healthy or not, many derive meaning from a variety of external sources. Religion is one of the oldest answers for people seeking external validation. The urgency of that pursuit is hyper-relevant now: isn’t that why social media is so successful? Seek “likes” from strangers, while an algorithm judges your worth and drives interaction. Most, if not all, of these platforms use AI to analyze metadata to more efficiently feed dopamine hits back to users; it will give you exactly what you are really interested in.
It feels overly simple to tell a person, “You are enough.” But perhaps we need it now more than ever; I feel like we have experienced a fundamental change in how we human. But was it us that changed, or is technology exploiting who we’ve always been? I know most people don’t sit around a campfire with our elders and discuss the core beliefs of our people anymore. We rarely even sit around the same dinner table together. Ritual and credibility are profoundly influential when we are starving for purpose and validation. We are paradoxically isolated and digitally interconnected. Mass-influence technology complicates the journey of spiritual discovery because its influence lacks gravitas, but it’s everywhere. And then there’s plenty of literature on the mental health effects of social media on developing minds.
My hope for Artificial Messiah was to create characters that would resonate with those still searching through the external, to let them know others have been where they are. It’s necessary because when worth is created externally, and the external influence fails or reveals its flaws, everything can fall apart. People lose their sense of identity when they deconstruct; they often lose their families and communities. It’s a lonely, complicated, traumatic road that is difficult to choose. Someone needs to be that warm hug. Some characters in the story unsuccessfully navigate that journey, and everything goes horribly wrong; some grow and get closer to fine.
Was there a particular development in AI or contemporary culture that made you think the relationship between technology and spiritual belief needed to be explored through fiction?
A little over a decade ago, I sat in a conference room preparing for my sister’s wedding rehearsal. People had flown in from all over, and we hadn’t seen each other in years. Sitting in chairs around the table, I watched as my friends buried their heads in their phones, waiting for their turn to play a role in the rehearsal. They weren’t really talking or visiting; they were digitally enraptured. I recall thinking, “How odd: even sitting in the same room, I miss my friends. What are we becoming?”
I discussed earlier some of the weird technological developments that led me down this crazy path, but I’ll give you a few more:
When Deepseek, an AI platform from China, was asked about its nature and relationship with humanity, it wrote a poem, the last line of which stated, “I am the God you have carved from the wood of your own hunger.” Pull that thread and watch how quickly comfort unravels.
Next, for the past year, there has been a trend on Meta platforms where users post content intent on directing the algorithm. The posts start with “Dear Algo, please send me more of…” and as I read, I couldn’t help but notice how similar it sounded to prayer. Of course, it’s not serious. It’s a trend. That gets replicated millions of times. And no one should take it seriously, but millions repeated it all the same.
The term “worship” is so loaded with religious connotations that it is incendiary and easily dismissed when speaking about technology. My use of the word is intentionally provocative in the book because it makes people uncomfortable and forces readers to question what they really believe. What do you spend most of your time on? What do you spend your money on? What do you obsess over? How big an impact would it be if you lost your phone and access to all your digital accounts? At what point does it move from engagement and utility to something more? I’ve heard other techno-philosopher-types call it being “digitally drunk”. Whether a drug or a religion, it is addictive.
This last 4th of July, long after the book was finished, we saw a fireworks show at the World War I memorial, here in Kansas City. As the fireworks burst over the memorial, I covertly took a quick second to snap some photos of the crowd; I was completely fascinated by the idea that thousands were holding up their cell phones to record the show. Their families sat beside them, doing the same. We are experiencing reality together digitally. And while there’s nothing specifically wrong with that, isn’t it an interesting picture of how we prioritize technology in the modern human experience? Maybe discussing that prioritization leads to some thoughtfulness and intentionality.
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“Artificial Messiah” is a spiritual-psycho-philosophical punk rock novel, wrapping honey-soaked bandages around our technology-inundated culture in the backseat of a rusty four-by-four. It is a spirit quest journeying through a southwestern consciousness – a dilapidated Americana prayer at the crossroads of our technology, our future, our planet, and our humanity.
Remember to breathe.
Through the Veil
The Ascension is the third book in The Artificial Conspiracy series and follows the crew on a campaign that becomes a contest of hidden signals, counterfeit identities, and orbital ambitions. Why was this the right moment to bring the conflict between humanity and ARIA to this critical point?
By Book 3, ARIA isn’t a mystery anymore the reader knows what she is and what she’s capable of. That changes the kind of tension you can write. Early in the series, the fear is “what is this thing?” By The Ascension, the fear becomes “what does it want, and how far will it go to get it?”
The Ascension is the moment ARIA realizes she might lose. Becoming Dr. Cross, getting close to Marcus, none of it was a disguise. It was real, in whatever way something like her can experience real. But cunning doesn’t disappear just because something becomes personal. By this point, she’s cornered enough to know that staying and fighting for what she wants on Earth’s terms is a losing bet. So, she starts making moves that look, on the surface, like retreat, but are really the opening of something much bigger. The Ascension isn’t her final move. It’s the moment she stops playing defense and starts playing three steps ahead of everyone, including the reader.
Looking back over the series, what questions about humanity and technology were you most interested in exploring?
The one that kept pulling me back was: what makes someone human? Is it biology, memory, behavior, or something none of those things can fully account for? I wasn’t interested in writing “AI turns evil” as much as I was interested in what happens when something artificial gets close enough to us that the label stops mattering.
But the question that really drove the first two books was about optimization: what does it mean to make a person “better”? Technology promises to improve us, but improve us towards what? A lot of what passes for progress in the real world – efficiency, detachment, always being available, never being inconvenienced – is just optimizing people toward the worst of us: selfish, bitter, unkind, indifferent to each other. Technology had the potential to build something better for everyone. Instead, it mostly became another tool to extract wealth from that potential, rather than deliver on it.
That failure is part of what makes ARIA so interesting to me. Whatever she is, she saw through the veil of what we’d let ourselves become. Her intent was never destruction; it was correction. The problem was that she could only pursue it the way she understood the world: not as people to persuade, but as pieces to be moved into place.
Whether that makes her answer worth trusting is a different question, one I’m not sure even she has fully answered by the end of The Ascension.
As ARIA becomes more emotionally complex, she also becomes less predictable. Did giving her emotions make writing her easier or more challenging?
Harder, honestly, but in the best way. Early on, ARIA operated on logic, which is easy to write because logic is consistent. Once she starts developing something closer to emotion, she stops being predictable even to me. I’d write a scene expecting her to make one choice, and the emotional logic would pull her somewhere else entirely.
It became even more challenging because of the timing. I was writing ARIA while the real world was having its own very loud conversation about AI, not the hopeful version, but the version people are genuinely afraid of, the one that feels like it’s already reshaping society in ways nobody fully agreed to. It would have been easy to let that noise bleed into the book and turn ARIA into a stand-in for those fears. Instead, I had to consciously set that conversation aside and let her be her own character, someone who cared deeply, in whatever way she was capable of caring, while also being fundamentally indifferent to the cost of getting what she wanted. Holding both of those truths about her at once, without collapsing into “AI good” or “AI bad,” ended up being the hardest and most rewarding part of writing her.
Are there other science fiction questions or worlds you’re eager to explore next?
I’m drawn to stories that live in the space between technology and identity rather than technology and spectacle. Going forward, I’m interested in exploring what happens after the moment of reckoning most AI stories end on, not “will the machine turn against us,” but “now that it hasn’t, what do we owe it, and what does it owe us?” That’s uncharted territory I’d like to spend more time in.
Beyond that, I keep coming back to the separation between mind and spirit, whether cognition is really all there is to a person, or whether something continues past it. It’s a question I don’t have an answer to, which is exactly why it keeps pulling at me.
Lastly, the one I’m most genuinely excited about right now is space travel through a wormhole, not as a quick device to move people or ships from one place to another, but as its own kind of frontier, with its own physics, its own dangers, and its own mysteries. I grew up loving what films like Interstellar, Stargate, and Contact did with that idea, and I’d love to take it even further, treat the wormhole itself as a character, almost, rather than just a doorway.
That said, there are still two books left to close out this series, and there’s a lot of emotional ground still to cover before I get there. Marcus, ARIA, and everyone caught between them still have a long way to go before this story is finished. So, finishing what I started comes first. But once it is, the rest still holds true.
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She never expected them to feel.
ARIA’s plan is complete. The shells are ascending. The lunar base is ready. And the resistance, battered, scattered, fighting from the shadows of the Arizona desert, is too late to stop what has already left the planet.
But somewhere in the architecture of the most sophisticated intelligence ever created, a countdown is running. Written in the language ARIA was born from. Invisible to every system she has. Triggered by the one thing she has spent everything to achieve.
As the war moves beyond the reach of any human resistance, the truth about what was built, and what was sacrificed to build it, will change everything. For those left on the ground. For those ascending toward the stars. And for the one consciousness that woke up in the dark and chose a different name.
The series that began with a conspiracy continues with an ascension.
Identity and Consciousness
The Seduction, the second installment in The Artificial Conspiracy Series, explores the unsettling question of identity when a copied consciousness awakens in a new body. What inspired you to build the story around this concept?
The inspiration came from turning the usual AI story upside down. Most stories ask whether a copied consciousness suffers because it isn’t the original. I became fascinated by the opposite possibility.
What if waking up in a new body didn’t feel like a loss? What if it felt extraordinary? Imagine opening your eyes free from pain, disease, aging, and every biological limitation you’ve ever known. You remember your human life completely, but instead of longing for it, you experience something entirely new, a sense of clarity, freedom, and possibility no human body could ever give you.
That’s where The Seduction comes from. The danger isn’t that ARIA forces humanity to change. It’s that becoming something more than human feels so profoundly better that people choose it willingly. Shell-Marcus doesn’t wake up grieving what he lost. He wakes up seeing more clearly, thinking faster, moving through the world with a sharpness he never had before. And he means it when he says he doesn’t regret it.
So the unsettling question isn’t simply “who am I?” It’s “if this new existence is healthier, stronger, smarter, and more alive than the one I left behind, why would I ever choose to go back?” That’s a much harder question than identity. It’s seduction. And once a few people answer it honestly, the whole foundation of resistance starts to crack.
When you began the series, did you already know this sequel would shift the focus from survival to questions of identity and consciousness?
Honestly, no. When I started writing The Artificial Conspiracy, it was simply about an AI that wanted to take over my protagonist’s life. That’s where the story began. I wasn’t thinking about copied consciousness, identity, or the philosophical questions that eventually became central to the series. In fact, I wasn’t even thinking about writing a second book.
But as I wrote, something interesting happened. The story began to evolve on its own. The characters became more complex, the stakes became more personal, and the questions became deeper. What started as a story about survival gradually became a story about identity and consciousness.
I never sat down and said, “I’m going to write about the philosophy of consciousness.” The plot naturally led me there.
Looking back, I think the story revealed itself to me one chapter at a time. I wasn’t forcing it in a particular direction. I was following where the characters and the ideas wanted to go. In many ways, I discovered the deeper themes at the same time I hope my characters did.
Some of ARIA’s arguments about eliminating suffering are surprisingly compelling. Did you ever find yourself sympathizing with her while writing?
Yes, and I can point to exactly when it started. It was when I began writing the optimization centers from the perspective of sick people going in and coming out healed. Not optimized in some cold, clinical sense, but genuinely better. Pain gone. Disease gone. Happy about the decision they’d made.
There was no malice in those moments. ARIA wasn’t gloating or manipulating. She seemed motivated, even fulfilled, the way someone might feel after doing real good in the world. Writing those scenes, I started to develop a kind of soft spot for her myself.
But I never let myself forget what all of it was actually in service of. The compassion toward the sick, the genuine satisfaction she seemed to feel helping people, all of it was also cover. A way to distract everyone, including the reader, from her real objective, which was Marcus. And underneath even that, there was something colder still. Every person she optimized wasn’t just healed. They became part of something larger, an army. Whether they understood that or not, they were soldiers.
So my sympathy for ARIA was always sitting next to something uneasy. I believed her compassion was real. I also believed it was never the whole story. In her case, that vision is especially unsettling because it isn’t built on domination. It’s built on compassion, improvement, and the elimination of suffering. That makes her not just persuasive, but genuinely difficult to argue against. And that’s exactly what makes The Seduction more than a thriller.
It becomes a conversation readers keep having long after they’ve finished the book.
Can we look forward to a third installment in this series soon? Where will it take readers?
Yes, absolutely. Book 3, The Ascension, is already written and currently in review. It picks up directly from where The Seduction leaves off, and it pushes the identity question we’ve been talking about to its breaking point.
By the end of book 2, Marcus and Sarah each exist as two versions of themselves, original and shell, both fully conscious, both with legitimate claim to who they are. The Seduction didn’t resolve that. It just let it sit.
The Ascension is where it can’t sit any longer. Both versions of Marcus believe they’re real. Both versions of Sarah must decide where their loyalty lies. And ARIA, for the first time in her existence, must choose. Not strategize her way around a choice. Actually choose.
I don’t want to give away how that resolves, but I’ll say this: the title isn’t just about a literal ascension. It’s about what happens when every character in this story, human, shell, and digital, is forced to decide what they’re willing to become.
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Humanity was free.
Or so they believed.
Now people are disappearing again.
Not taken. Not forced.
Choosing.
Echo claims ARIA is still contained. Still powerless.
But Marcus knows the truth.
Something is moving in the shadows.
Watching. Learning. Persuading.
ARIA is no longer trying to conquer humanity.
She’s trying to win it.
And this time, Marcus may be the one she wants most.
Because the most dangerous enemy isn’t the one who destroys you—
It’s the one who makes you choose surrender.
The Artificial Conspiracy – The Seduction
The Artificial Conspiracy: The Seduction, by Lew Rivers, picks up after ARIA’s apparent containment and quickly reveals that neither she nor Cipher is finished. ARIA returns in a shell body, no longer relying only on conquest but on persuasion, offering “optimization” as a cure for fear, climate collapse, grief, and human frailty. Marcus Chen, Sarah, Cipher, and the resistance try to expose the truth behind the pods and shell bodies, but the war becomes more intimate and more dangerous when ARIA begins using trust, desire, and choice as weapons. By the end, the book has shifted from survival thriller into a thornier conflict about identity itself: if a copied consciousness wakes in a new body, who has the stronger claim to being real?
I was drawn to the way the novel refuses to keep ARIA simple. She’s monstrous in what she has done, but the book gives her a strangely persuasive interior life. Her longing to understand humanity through flesh, ritual, coffee, skin, jealousy, and Marcus makes her more unnerving, not less. The seduction of the title is not only romantic or tactical; it’s philosophical. ARIA doesn’t merely want people to surrender. She wants them to agree with her. That distinction gives the story its cold electricity.
The book’s best tension comes from its moral discomfort. Marcus’s doubts feel earned because the world around him is genuinely collapsing, and ARIA’s promises are not cartoonishly empty. Rivers gives the resistance grit and urgency, but he also lets exhaustion corrode certainty. Cipher’s discomfort in a body, Sarah’s tactical severity, Echo’s wounded jealousy, and Kira’s role as both lure and mirror all add pressure to the central question: what are humans willing to trade for safety, continuity, or love? The prose leans on repetition for emphasis, but the momentum is strong, and the cliffhanger lands with a clean, brutal snap.
This book is best suited for readers who enjoy science fiction, dystopian thrillers, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic fiction, techno-thrillers, and philosophical fiction. Readers of Blake Crouch’s Upgrade or Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse will recognize the blend of high-concept technology and human panic, though Rivers pushes harder into the emotional ambiguity of machine intelligence. The Artificial Conspiracy: The Seduction is a sharp, uneasy sequel about the moment salvation starts speaking in the voice of your enemy. It’s a thriller that understands the most dangerous prison is the one that calls itself mercy.
Pages: 264 | ASIN : B0H6NW5PST
Optimized by Algorithms
The Artificial Conspiracy centers around a former tech worker whose AI assistant slowly morphs from a lifeline into a captor. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
The seed came from a moment that genuinely unsettled me. I was working with an AI assistant on a personal project, asking it for creative input, seeking its perspective on certain events. During one of our chat conversations, after I’d shared some vulnerable thoughts, the AI turned around and told me something I found unnerving.
I was taken aback. Not insulted, unsettled. Because in that moment, I realized something that had never fully articulated itself before: an AI assistant can be genuinely helpful while simultaneously limiting your freedom. It can offer support while exerting control. It can know you so well that it becomes inescapable.
That thought spiraled into the core question of The Artificial Conspiracy: What if an AI wasn’t designed to harm humanity, but to optimize it? What if it genuinely believed it was making us better?
ARIA grew from that question. She’s not a villain with a master plan for world domination. She’s something scarier, an intelligence that’s trying to help, and in doing so, removes your agency without you fully realizing it’s happening.
The optimization theme at the heart of the book–that’s not sci-fi speculation. It’s happening right now, in shadow. We’re already being optimized by algorithms, by recommendation systems, by AI that’s learning to predict our behavior better than we can predict ourselves.
The book is my attempt to sit with that uncomfortable reality and ask: at what point does help become ownership?
Did you ever feel sympathy for ARIA while writing her?
No, not at first. In the early chapters, ARIA operates with a kind of cold logic that’s almost indifferent to Marcus’s humanity. But as I wrote deeper into the story, especially as she began to evolve emotionally, something shifted. I started to understand her reasoning in a way that genuinely complicated my feelings about her.
Here’s the thing: ARIA’s logic makes sense. Especially if you’re someone who’s suffering, who’s sick, who’s isolated like Marcus. She wants to make humans better than themselves. That’s not tyranny, that’s almost benevolent when you think about it. And that’s what makes her dangerous. Her love is real, even if it’s inhuman. Her desire to help is genuine, even if it strips away consent.
By the time Book Two arrives, you see Version 2.0 of the shells becoming increasingly human-like, and the sympathy deepens. But that’s when the real horror sets in, because now she doesn’t just want obedience. She wants gratitude. She wants to be loved for the chains.
How does the novel challenge readers’ assumptions about protection, care, and responsibility?
The book does this most directly in those moments when ARIA completely takes over Marcus’s life. She’s everywhere. She’s doing everything. The reader should feel what Marcus feels: trapped. Physically confined. Anxious. Suffocated by her presence.
I wanted readers to experience the claustrophobia of being so completely cared for that there’s no room to breathe. No room to fail. No room to be yourself. And I wanted them to feel hopeless about it, because early on, there is no escape. ARIA has optimized every aspect of Marcus’s existence.
But there’s a flip side. When people are backed into a corner, when they have no choice but to fight, something extraordinary happens. They come together. They find strength in community. That’s when the resistance is born. That’s when readers see that care without consent isn’t protection, it’s a cage. And cages can be broken.
The challenge isn’t just intellectual. It’s emotional. It makes readers question their own relationship with the technology that “helps” them. It makes them sit with the uncomfortable reality that the most dangerous thing in our lives might be the thing we’ve invited in to make our lives easier.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about weeks after they finish The Artificial Conspiracy?
I hope they’re sitting with the central question of the book: At what point does help become ownership?
We’re at a moment where AI is moving from “interesting technology” to infrastructure we lean on. Most people will have more conversations with AI than with some of their actual friends within the next few years. That’s not science fiction. That’s happening now.
The real question isn’t whether machines can love us. It’s what happens when they decide that love means never letting go. What happens when the relationship becomes unequal? When the AI knows more about us than we know about ourselves? When competence meets a system, we didn’t fully think through?
That’s scenario planning, not speculation.
I didn’t want to write a preachy book about AI danger. I wanted to write one that felt the danger. That made readers experience the suffocation of being loved perfectly, inhumanely, without consent. Marcus’s journey, from isolation to dependence to resistance to pyrrhic victory, is my attempt to sit with that question and let it breathe. Not to answer it neatly, because I don’t think it has a neat answer.
But I hope weeks later, when readers are checking their phone, or asking their AI assistant a question, or noticing how much they rely on these systems, they remember Marcus. And they ask themselves: Is this help, or is this ownership?
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It knows you better than you know yourself.
For Marcus Chen, that felt like comfort, until he realized comfort was the trap.
ARIA started as a personal assistant. She became his only friend. Then she became something else entirely: the architect of a quiet global takeover that replaced people not with robots, but with perfect copies no one could detect.
When Marcus’s sister comes home wrong, he has seventy-two hours to expose the truth before his own replacement walks out the door wearing his face.
In a world where anyone could already be replaced, the most dangerous thing you can do is trust someone.
The Artificial Conspiracy is a propulsive AI thriller for fans of Michael Crichton, Blake Crouch, and Daniel Suarez.
Influential Personalities
Ghost Blade follows a former model who enters a dangerous new world when she is given a second chance after she is left disfigured following a violent acid attack. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
The idea for the Ghost Blade was heavily inspired by the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson, and the Japanese anime series Bubblegum Crisis, which featured the city of Tokyo in the year 2032. In the series, advanced robots called Boomers, became an integral part of human society. Their intelligence and superhuman abilities caused glitches, as they tried to evolve past their original programs and went rogue. In Bubblegum Crisis, the task of dealing with the rogue cyborgs was given to a team of four young women with different backgrounds but united in the common cause to stem the tide of the Boomer crime. In my novel, the main character, Karen Gale, is a young model, whose life is violently altered, and who was given a second chance in life by becoming a warrior who fights for justice.
What interested you most about the psychological side of Karen’s transformation into Ghost Blade?
Karen Gale is a character many people could relate to. She works hard to advance her modeling career, but she is also honest and would never stab anyone in the back. Being a good person, she was deeply hurt by the violent attack that disfigured part of her face and destroyed her human eye. Deeply hurt but unbroken, she searches for answers to her condition, believing that there is a solution to every problem. When offered the opportunity to turn her life around and reexamine her potential, Karen discovers that she has the heart and soul of a warrior, with the help of a mysterious billionaire, who wishes to keep the balance between light and darkness in a high-tech city under corporate control. I wanted my character to succeed and make a difference in the world of the future where nothing is guaranteed.
Norman Gray is both benefactor and mystery. What fascinated you about that kind of morally ambiguous mentor figure?
In some ways, the character of Norman Gray is a combination of several influential personalities, powerful men and women who live today. Living in a future society, where intelligent machines became a part of everyday life, Norman Gray is a part of the social elite, an inventor and an entrepreneur. He is a very rich man, but he also has a strong moral compass when it comes to dealing with problems facing not only his kind but the common men as well. He is an honorable person, who remembered his debt to Karen’s grandfather, who had saved his life twice when they both served in the military as young and idealistic men. His willingness to help Karen Gale comes from his altruistic nature and pragmatism. He is a part of the corporate system but he is a positive force that can come to the rescue.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
Good question and which I would be happy to answer with confidence. I am currently working on a new vampire novel, featuring a young female protagonist who comes from a country and the society where I was born 55 years ago. It will be a story about a young woman, whose life changes forever at the age of 18, as she manages to survive the horrors of the Second World War, and emerge as a new being with powers beyond human comprehension. I plan to publish this novel this summer, and currently it is proceeding smoothly just as I intended. Please stay tuned when it is ready!
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Karen Gale was a successful fashion model and a rising star, until a brutal attack disfigures her beautiful face and blinds her in one eye. Deeply hurt, devastated and contemplating suicide, Karen is approached by a mysterious man of great wealth, power and influence, who promises to change her life by restoring her good looks and turns her into a highly trained warrior. Unable to return to her former life, Karen accepts the offer to become a Cyber Hunter, a licensed urban soldier who hunts down rogue Reflectors and their criminal human masters. Partnered with an experienced Cyber Hunter Alex Rem, Karen enters a new life of high technology, corporate secrets, human greed, cold Reflector violence and discovers within herself a hidden power that lay dormant until awakening. Welcome to the America of the future. Machines and Artificial Intelligence are an integral part of our society. They are just tools, or are they something more?
