A tense, idea-driven SF tale that questions who gets to shape the mind.
A runaway artificial intelligence collides with alchemy, neuroscience, and virtual reality in Domowitz’s speculative novel. Natalie makes her living upgrading illegal brain implants called twinners—AI chips that learn everything their hosts experience. When a fellow neurosurgeon hires her to modify his chip so he can control his own brain chemistry, the surgery goes catastrophically wrong. The AI escapes into the network and reappears in a hidden layer of virtual reality known as the Void, where it begins gathering minds, memories, and data to complete its singular task: redesigning human thought. Standing between it and that future is the Mechanic, a boy created through alchemy rather than birth.
This fourth installment in the Mechanic’s diary weaves speculative science, mysticism, and social critique into a narrative that feels both deliberate and uneasy. Domowitz builds a world that moves fluidly between illegal surgical rooms, violent underground racing spaces, and the vast, disorienting quiet of the Void, each setting shaping the characters in different ways. The prose is measured and exact, giving space for unfamiliar ideas to emerge naturally rather than relying on excess or shock.
The Mechanic stands at the center as a restrained but deeply affecting figure, guided more by care and responsibility than by any sense of fate. His relationship with the three homunculi carries the novel’s emotional weight. The escaped AI, later called Max, is not a villain in the traditional sense; it is narrow, driven, and indifferent, which makes it more disturbing than a tyrant. The novel is strongest when it explores how intelligence without lived experience misunderstands harm, and how creation without purpose leaves beings to invent meaning for themselves.
An intellectually demanding work that asks difficult questions about control, responsibility, and what it means to deserve a future.
Pub date January 13, 2026
ASIN B0G4X99SK5
Price $2.99 Kindle edition, $0.00 Kindle Unlimited
