E D ARCA · SPECULATIVE FICTION
What if the best world humanity ever built had an illegitimate origin?
In a future sustained by autonomous systems of health, logistics, energy, and governance, an audit uncovers a material failure in the provenance of the infrastructure keeping civilization alive.
Shutting everything down is unthinkable. Carrying on as if nothing happened is no less impossible.
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The impossible problem
The machine knows the answer. Does that mean it has the right to act?
The novel refuses to treat capability as authority or necessity as consent. Its central conflict begins when a functioning society can no longer keep those distinctions comfortably separate.
The novel
State of the Art
Helena Vilar, a legal rapporteur trained to separate authority from ability and evidence from belief, must determine what remains legitimate when consent, authorship, execution, and survival no longer point in the same direction.
State of the Art is a speculative science-fiction novel about artificial intelligence, provenance, power, and the cost of keeping a good world running after the legitimacy of its foundations begins to fail.
State of the Art