The Artificial Man

Synopsis

In 2025, Andre Liang Freeman has the best job of his life: military nanotechnology by day, healing nanotechnology on his own time, a seminar of bright undergraduates on Thursdays. Then an old friend drifts back into his life, and the friendship is reconnaissance. A corporate break-in copies his work and breaches a containment interlock on a project he was never cleared to know existed, and in a shared clean room Andre is exposed to his own replicator fused with something that thinks. Atom by atom, it replaces him. He cannot seek help: the cover-up of the breach tells him exactly what he would become to his employers. As the stolen shortcut detonates into the Gray Hour and the world wakes to what nano can do, Andre learns tradecraft, loses his marrow, his heartbeat, and finally, on paper, his life. Book One of The Eternal Witness: the testimony of the only man who lived all of it, written a thousand years later, at the edge of settled space.