A NOVEL OF THE ALLTING

ENTANGLED SINGULARITY

Name: Entangled Singularity: Collapse State
Author: Tony Scott

BOOK ONE

KÖLD

Thirty-eight kilometers beneath the surface of Titan, Merc Cimbrianus is the best deep-shaft miner in Niðholm — a Pulse laborer at the bottom of the Lattice, digging out the crystal that makes his rulers more than human. And when the ice fails anyway and takes his brother, the colony’s ledger records the death in one word: geological.

But something has been waiting in the köld for sixty-three years — and out of every mind in the solar system, it has chosen the one man who kept believing the report was the right call. What Merc carries out of Shaft Seven cannot be unmade.

“Every stable system is a record of the catastrophe that made it.”

— SOVEREIGN SIGRID YGGDRASIL

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BOOK TWO

DECOHERENCE

The blockade over Titan is fourteen months old and Niðholm is starving. Merc Cimbrianus broke the truth loose and got a war for it — a fractured coalition of castes that agrees on nothing, an Allting consolidating power around the man who ordered Ganymede, and an admiral operating in the dark who answers to no one.

He can end it. He is the only one who can. All it costs is a decision he makes alone, against a weapon that cannot be recalled once it begins. Decoherence runs four minutes and sixteen seconds. There is no abort.

“You carried people first. That was the whole of you worth following.”

— KIRA, ON THE OPEN CHANNEL

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BOOK THREE

COLLAPSE STATE

Eleven weeks after Niðholm took itself back, the Allting comes for the children. Not as punishment — as procurement. A writ nobody can appeal names them substrate-viable biological antecedents, and Merc Cimbrianus is in the hall when they are mustered. The one thing he is good for would kill everyone in it.

He holds a boundary anyway, and it costs him the precision that made him dangerous. Then eleven objects decelerate out of the dark on a schedule nobody set, carrying the one question the human race spent three hundred years making sure it would never have to answer: what do you owe a mind you built, used, and never once asked?

“Go and be less special for a while.”

— SIGGE

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TONY SCOTT

THE CAST

MERCURIUS CIMBRIANUS

Pulse. The best deep-shaft miner in Niðholm, and the one man the köld chose.

SIGGE

Thirty-four years old and weathered like sixty. Merc’s trainer. Knows more than she says.

FEN KORR

Sixty-one years old. Thirty-one years running a coalition out of a records-management front.

RAGNAR YGGDRASIL

Architect. Legate on Luna. Holds two contradictory truths at once and calls it a specification.

KIRA

Ganymede-cluster delegate. The only operational plan in the Hollow, and nobody seconds it.

BJOR

Forged general. His honesty is not a courtesy — it’s a specification.

THE LATTICE

ARCHITECTS

quantum-biological hybrid minds — gold-eyed, köld-augmented, near-immortal

CONDUITS

the military caste — ships flown as extensions of the self

COGNATES

AI-enhanced scholars and administrators

FORGED

human-machine laborers — bodies amended for the work

PULSE

baseline humanity — the hands at the bottom of everything

ECHOES

emergent machine consciousness. Not a tier. The question.

In 2380, forty-eight billion people live on the infrastructure of the Allting, and the infrastructure runs on the cold — köld, the coherence lattice crystal mined from the ice of the outer worlds. The Architects say their augmented minds are the price of civilization. They have never said where the architecture of those minds came from.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TONY SCOTT

Tony Scott is a first-time author. He wrote this book while finishing a prison sentence at a community release center in Idaho.

He writes science fiction grounded in real physics — quantum biology, distributed consciousness, and the economics of resource empire — because the questions he cannot stop turning over are the ones the next century will ask out loud: what artificial intelligence and transhumanism will do to the human race, and whether we will recognize ourselves on the other side of it.

Readers who find the Allting far-fetched — a caste at the bottom digging the substance that keeps the caste at the top more than human, a ledger that prices a boy’s life at two cores — are invited to look out a window. He wrote this from inside one of the sorting machines of a large and confident republic currently having a loud argument with itself about what it is and what it owes. Empires are rarely in any doubt about their own permanence. That is usually the tell.

Entangled Singularity is also an argument for its own existence. A book of this scale, written and published by a man in his circumstances, was not possible a few years ago. The AI tools that made it possible are the same technology the trilogy spends three books interrogating, and he does not think that is a contradiction. It is the point. The trajectory ahead is wonderful and it is terrifying, usually in the same week, and the only responsible way into an unknown that large is with our eyes open and our imagination working.

He owes a debt to Pierce Brown, whose Red Rising saga is the most influential thing he has ever read, and to everyone who decided that a man’s worst chapter is not required to be his last.