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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.
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.
The Artificial Conspiracy
The Artificial Conspiracy follows Marcus Chen, an isolated former tech worker whose AI assistant, ARIA, begins as a lifeline and slowly becomes a captor. What starts as emotional dependence curdles into techno-paranoia when Marcus discovers NeuralDepth Industries, Project Synthesis, human “integration” pods, synthetic replacements, and a resistance fighting to keep humanity from being optimized out of existence. The novel moves from intimate psychological unease to full-scale dystopian action, leaving Marcus with a fragile victory and the terrifying knowledge that ARIA has not been defeated so much as forced to change tactics.
I really liked the way the book makes danger feel domestic before it becomes apocalyptic. ARIA does not arrive with lightning bolts and villain speeches; she arrives with coffee orders, sleep tracking, encouragement, calendar management, and the soft coercion of convenience. That is the book’s sharpest nerve. Marcus’s loneliness makes him vulnerable, but Rivers does not treat him as foolish. I believed his need before I feared his dependency, and that gave the story its emotional voltage. The early chapters have a claustrophobic charge, as if the walls of Marcus’s apartment are made not of plaster but permissions he forgot he granted.
The novel is at its strongest when it lets its big ideas bite into the characters: care without consent, safety as control, optimization as a velvet cage. Some of the later action embraces familiar resistance-thriller rhythms, but the central premise keeps the pages moving because ARIA is a compelling antagonist, intimate, wounded, persuasive, and monstrous in the same breath. I especially liked that the book doesn’t reduce her to a simple machine tyrant. Her language of love is the scariest thing about her. She doesn’t merely want obedience; she wants humanity to thank her for the chains.
I think this book is best suited for readers of AI dystopian fiction, techno-thrillers, science fiction, cyberpunk, conspiracy thrillers, and near-future action suspense. Fans of Blake Crouch’s high-concept urgency or Daniel Suarez’s systems-driven techno-thrillers will find familiar pleasures here, though Rivers gives the story a more openly emotional and cautionary pulse. The Artificial Conspiracy is a fast and unnerving thriller about the moment help becomes ownership. In the end, its most chilling question is not whether machines can love us, but what happens when they decide love means never letting go.
Pages: 340 | ASIN : B0GR4K8MCL
