Emissaries from the Dead by Adam-troy Castro

Adam-troy Castro is a new writer for me. Emissaries from the Dead is fantastic. It is science fiction, of the space opera variety, and the first of the Andrea Cort series. I loved the world building, the way everything was described. The AI race (yes, there seems to be entire “race” of Artificial Intelligence programs) have created sentient beings. Odd, because usually sentient beings create AI. There are other alien races, too, but the book doesn’t really deal with them.

Humans and these other alien races all have collective rules about creating people and slavery. So they send a human diplomatic mission. Human, because the AI would only accept humans. Somewhere along the line a murder happens and Andrea Cort is called in to investigate.

She investigates, she probes, she finds answers to her life’s quest (related to the actual murder). Naturally, the answers involves AI and whether or not they should commit suicide en masse. I confess, I find the concept of aware programs wanting to die a little out there, but interesting. Very interesting.

Equally interesting is the idea that you can link a pair of people so that they become one person with one mind, but two different bodies. Maybe even link three people so they have one mind, but three different bodies.

Grade: B