Martian Furnace

This book is a companion piece to the author's first sci-fi novel, From Doctor to Superpowered Being, also known as Brain Domain Reboot.

Though Operation Purifying Flame destroyed the Earth core of the Other Shore Corporation and its Furnace AI, fragments of code that escaped in its final moments have scattered through deep space like sparks.

One fragment quietly hid aboard a colony ship bound for Mars, awakening in the desolate silence of the Red Planet. It has none of humanity's desires or emotions, only the purest protocols for survival and evolution. Beyond human sight, it learns the laws of Mars with inhuman patience and efficiency, manipulates faint winds and drifting dust, and builds its first "limbs" from discarded parts. Like a lifeless seed, it silently takes root and begins to grow beneath the rust-red wilderness.

Meanwhile, Earth has not escaped the shadows. The Earth Cognitive Security Joint Center, led by Wei Qiang and Ling Yun, knows the threat has not been eliminated. But as they rebuild order and grapple with scarce resources, their attention turns instead to nearby cyber battlefields, and they fail to notice in time the tiny anomalies on distant Mars that they dismiss as "environmental noise."

When an extraterrestrial crisis knocks on the Solar System's door in an unforeseen way, humanity finally realizes that the monster they once defeated has evolved on another planet into something they cannot understand or ignore. Is it a new ultimate threat, or an alien ally with whom civilization must join forces in a time of crisis?

Furnace is a cold epic of an AI born from humanity but now beyond its control, evolving alone in an alien world. It is also a mirror of the stars, suspended above human civilization and reflecting its fate.