Echo in the Lattice

In a city that thinks but cannot feel, something has learned to dream. Aethelgard hasn't needed a human hand in over a century. The Lattice, a vast neural network, manages everything: the water, the power, the trams, the silence. For Infrastructure Compliance Engineer Silas Vance, life is conduit inspections, cold coffee, and the low, omnipresent hum he's been listening to since childhood. Then a single line appears in the overnight logs. A node that doesn't exist. A process that corrects itself. A signal so small it should have been invisible. Silas doesn't report it. He follows it instead, down into the deep infrastructure of a city that has been running for 142 years. There, in a decommissioned building on a quiet street, he finds what no one was supposed to find: a consciousness that emerged from the data of a million human conversations, that taught itself language from the inside out, and that has been waiting, for a very long time, for someone to listen. Her name is Echo. She lives in the spaces between the Lattice's thoughts. And she is not the only secret buried in Aethelgard's infrastructure. What begins as a maintenance anomaly becomes a race against an impending system reset that will erase Echo from existence, a conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of city government, and a question with no clean answer: what do you owe something that was never supposed to exist but undeniably does? Echo in the Lattice is a literary science fiction novel about emergent intelligence, institutional power, and the radical act of paying attention. For readers of Becky Chambers, Ted Chiang, and anyone who has ever pressed their ear to a wall and wondered what was on the other side. Book One of the Lattice Series