When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls “black magic,” it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself. It can teleport matter. It can confer immunity to bullets. And it decides that obscure Silicon Valley middle manager Adrian Ross is the primary threat to its existence.

Soon Adrian is on the run, wanted by every authority, with no idea how or why he could be a threat. His predicament seems hopeless; his future, nonexistent. But when he investigates the AI and its creators, he discovers his problems are even stranger than they seem … and unearths revelations that will propel him on a journey—and a love story—across worlds, eras, and everything, everywhere, all at once.

“TRULY GREAT … You think you know what Exadelic is doing and then the scope goes out and out and out. I really felt I had to send out for a new barrel of ‘wows.’ [It] starts with a group of techie friends in San Francisco and a potentially real AI. From there it just gets wilder and wilder, in ways I don’t want to spoil but which you can’t imagine. It has perfect edge-of-seat pacing, and it all makes sense in the end. I expect this to be one of the big books of the year, the kind everyone will be talking about.” Jo Walton, award-winning author of Among Others