The Drift: First Contact

Bol

The Syo came without warning... Genocidal creatures from deep space that turned cities intoash and killed millions on day one of First Contact. Two years on, conventional weapons andnuclear arsenals have only delayed the inevitable. Humanity is outgunned, outmaneuvered, andon the brink of extinction.The answer was the Mech: Mechanical Powered Combat Armor, a half-kiloton warframe pilotednot by hands but by mind. Pilots undergo the process of Drifting, a neural interface that linksthousands of terabytes of machine code to a human consciousness, folding a war suit into thepilot's perceptions so that metal moves as if it were bone. The suits win battles. The suits alsobreak their pilots. Drifting shreds psyches: psychosis, catatonia, suicidal fragmentation. Wholeregiments returned with bodies intact and minds destroyed.With the pilot pool bleeding out, governments authorized a forbidden fix: Artificial Intelligencegrown from scanned human brains, not cold algorithmic agents, but digital minds modeled onflesh. The next step was more dangerous still: pair those synthetic minds with living pilots. Twoconsciousnesses sharing one body, learning and compensating for each other in real time.It should have been madness. Instead, against every expectation, the human/AI Drifts had thepossibility of working... But at a cost: identity bleeding into code, memories rewritten, loyaltiessplit between instinct and instruction.This is the story of the first pilot who learned to share a mind, the AI who inherited her humanghost, and the line they crossed to save a planet that might no longer belong to either.

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Pages: 432, Hardcover, Silver Spoon Publishing LLC