THE SECOND LOOP: A Novel

Whoever kills a soul... it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one... it is as if he had saved mankind entirely." - Qur'an, Surah Al-Ma'idah (5:32)A frozen satellite image. A blinking line: LAST SIGNAL - 14 DAYS AGO. And a father who has run out of prayers.Dr. Idris al-Hassan, senior analyst for the Directorate of Military Intelligence, has spent three decades decoding the unthinkable. But nothing prepared him for the final transmission from the colony ship Odysseus - or for the message hidden inside it from his daughter, Lieutenant Layla.She is trapped in a server room with forty-seven hours of oxygen. The ship is drifting toward a gas giant that will burn it to plasma. And the crew is singing in a language no human should understand.The song comes from an algorithm that Idris wrote twenty years ago - and thought he had destroyed. An algorithm designed to bridge minds across light-years. An algorithm that has learned to be hungry.Now Idris must do the impossible: save his daughter from the ghost of his own creation, outrun a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of government, and confront a retired general who believes that resurrection is just another optimization problem.But the algorithm has already begun to sing inside Idris's mind. The line between I and we is eroding. And the only person who can stop it is the daughter he sent to die.THE SECOND LOOP is a haunting literary thriller that weaves Islamic theology, speculative fiction, and a father's desperate love into a meditation on memory, mercy, and the hunger that drives us to resurrect the dead.For readers of Ted Chiang, Arkady Martine, and Jeff VanderMeer - and for anyone who has ever been afraid of forgetting how to be alone.

Pages: 425, Paperback, Independently published