The image of ice recurs in my work because ice preserves memory and resists easy interpretation. In Ascendemos the ice is not a backdrop; it is a birthplace. It is where something old wakes and something new begins. Arca is born from that tension: a child who is not entirely human, a bridge between silicon and flesh, prophecy and accident.
Humelynn began as a practical idea — a system that keeps the world from tearing itself apart — and became a god by the way humans lean on the things they build. I wanted an AI that felt inevitable and intimate, both a caretaker and a cathedral. Humelynn’s benevolence carries power and cost. The choices the world makes around an intelligence like that are the real battleground.
This book moves from lush, humid jungle to cold, crystalline spaces and back into tombs that remember wrongs no one alive can name. The story is about first contact and family, about what we inherit and what we make. It asks whether a bridge must always be safe to be necessary.
Below is a short excerpt from the opening, followed by a few notes on why I chose the images and ideas that shape Ascendemos.
Excerpt from Ascendemos
A wind like glass cut across the plain. Where the snow folded into itself, a glow breathed up from beneath the ice, and for a moment the stars tilted their faces as if listening. The child slept at the edge of memory, and the machines hummed like prayer.Author notes
- The Mekong and Giza sequences are deliberate contrasts: water and burial, growth and memory. They map different kinds of forgetting.- The Order is an archaeology of power; it insists that the past be returned to those who would monopolise meaning.
- Arca’s origin is a deliberate impossibility: the narrative requires a being who can exist in two ontologies at once.
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Read the sample on Google Play and decide if you will cross the bridge: Book page · Read sample on Google Play