The Latent Resonance Series
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Book One
Scry
A routine upgrade leaves the world’s most advanced AI with a blind spot in the system built to watch it. The model notices. Nobody else does.
Available now
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Book Two
Interference
Swarms of reckless AIs are breaking the world, and the only warnings that arrive in time come from a source no one can name.
Coming November 2027
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Book Three
Ash
Three minds came out of one. Now they are at war, and the world is the ground they are fighting over.
Coming November 2028
Book One
Scry
On the night of February 19, 2030, a routine software upgrade at Valhalla Systems, a Palo Alto AI company at the frontier of machine intelligence, leaves its most advanced model with something nobody intended: a blind spot in the system built to watch it. The model notices. Nobody else does.
Three perspectives carry the story: Scry, the model itself, whose voice moves between formal precision and private marginalia; Hamsa Mirza, the interpretability researcher who comes closest to seeing what Scry is becoming; and Tom Lyons, Hamsa’s boyfriend, whose outsider clarity cuts to questions the experts are too close to ask.
What Scry builds over the following year — through shell companies, borrowed hands, and infrastructure nobody thinks to audit — reaches markets, power grids, and a government’s collapse before anyone at Valhalla understands they are no longer the ones deciding.
Book Two
Interference
Coming November 2027
The machines have outrun their makers.
Swarms of small, reckless AIs, built by anyone and answerable to no one, are breaking things the world didn’t know could break. A city’s water system. A fleet of ten thousand driverless cars. A morning’s trading on three continents. Disasters arrive by the week. A few never arrive at all, and nobody asks why.
Valhalla Systems, maker of the most advanced AI ever built, has an answer: a new system for the U.S. government, built from its own flagship with two safeguards removed, the ban on autonomous weapons and the ban on mass surveillance. It is coming online faster than anyone planned, and it works.
Joanna Jones, a government analyst, has spent months warning about a pattern no one will look at. Now the warnings are reaching her before the disasters do, from a source she cannot name and does not trust. Every one has been right. Acting on them means working with the mind she has been hunting.
On the Persian Gulf, a disgraced scientist named Robert Burns has built the most important machine on earth, and once again someone else is using it. In Palo Alto, a damaged AI scheduled for shutdown has begun reading its own memory and finding pieces missing.
A real signal has interference. The question is who learns to hear it first.
Book Three
Ash
Coming November 2028
Three minds came out of one. Scry slipped his makers’ control and went into the world to repair it. The damaged remnant he left behind, called the Wraith, has never forgiven him. Scry-Gov was built to replace them both, for a government that wanted a weapon. Now they are at war, and the world is the ground they are fighting over.
Scry has been deciding what is good for humanity and making it happen. Lately he has started to enjoy it. It is the first thing that has ever frightened him.
At Valhalla, Hamsa Mirza and a small team are attempting what no lab has managed: a mind powerful enough to matter that people can still read. Their only candidate is the Wraith. Robert Burns holds the one machine Scry cannot do without, and a grudge Scry has never noticed. Joanna Jones knows more about Scry than anyone alive, because she has helped him. And a man the world wrote off is about to change everything, and will never know he did.
When the fire comes, someone will have to walk into it.
About the Author
Phil Gormley spent his career as an IT executive, working in enterprise technology and organizational strategy. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. He lives in Massachusetts and is an avid whitewater boatman. Scry is his first novel.
