Above Dark Waters

Artificial therapy so great, you’ll never log off! (And won’t notice the ads).

A near-future sci-fi about brain privacy in the age of unfettered surveillance capitalism. What will companies do when they can read your actual mind? How far will they go to get your click? How much engagement? This is how cyberpunk starts and the simulation unwinds as they barrel towards singularity.

Ed’s in a bind. He’s tried everything to keep the North Pacific Seastead afloat financially. Losses mount, except for the datacenter cooled by the Pacific. But the seastead needs an infusion of cash to keep it solvent. He needs it quickly, and the only one who can do it is his well-to-do partner, Keight.

Keight (pronounced Kate) Stanford is doing great. Life’s good on her residential condominium complex offshore of San Francisco. Her secretive mental-health startup, WellSpring, has passed all hurdles with the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat PTSD using a brain-machine interface. Adding to that success, she just received an infusion of funds from the Department of Defense. Though she does not need the money, she needs the computing power for an artificial therapist, and has entertained Ed’s offer.

But all is not as it seems with Keight’s startup. A rogue programmer stumbles upon ways to boost his output to unnatural levels. Is this artificially intelligent co-coder an extension of his mind, or is he merely a tool of its a growing malignant intelligence? Meanwhile the CEO is secretly selling the data to ad companies to finance a free tier. Because who could argue against free therapy?

Now, Ed must decide if Keight really is going to save the world, or doom, or simply bring in a boring dystopia of personalized addictive ads.

Fans of Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Black Mirror will love this technothriller! It also explores the theological and philosophical implications of increasing your brainpower to god-like levels.