Fantasy Adventure Machine

The Time Machine by HG Wells is about an English scientist who entertains guests for dinner every week. One day, he tells them that time is a navigable fourth dimension, displaying a little model of a time machine. At dinner the following week, he entertains the guests with a remarkable tale. Having moved far into the future, he encounters the lovely garden world of the childlike Eloi and the brutal Morlocks who live underground.

In the vast, artificial galaxy called the Spin, a rebellion has been crushed. Viklun Hass is eliminating all remnants of the opposition. Starting with his daughter. But Fleare Hass has had time to plan her next move from exile to the very frontiers of a new war. For hundreds of millions of years, the planets and stars of the Spin have been the only testament to the godlike engineers who created them. Now, beneath the surface of a ruined planet, one of their machines has been found.

The prototype android left to Zoey Collins turned out to be precisely the "hotshot" Cardinal Machines lawyers described when they tried to persuade her to sign away her rights to him. With Cardinal Machines like Ocean harvesting mineral-rich asteroids and terraforming the moon, Zoey sent Ocean where he could do the most good: back to the LAPD SWAT team and the FBI. Why would she check with Ocean about that? But when the luminary suddenly begins to rebel, it's time to ride to the rescue.

When Archibald, programming prodigy and creator of Reel Life Online (RLO), hired Scott as his second-in-command, he didn’t realize the lengths Scott would go to in order to have his genius recognized. Over the years, a bitter rivalry developed. As their game of cat and mouse escalates, Scott finds himself backed into a corner. As a bargaining chip, he creates a machine learning AI. The AI, named Talon, is programmed to become the most powerful player in all of RLO and VQ. Soon Archibald and Scott realize that if left unchecked, Talon will destroy the world they’ve created.