The Unknown Life of Jake Fidellius: Mirror Lives: Consensus Stars

For fifteen years, Jake Fidellius has been playing the piano wrong.Every time he hits C-sharp, he mistimes it by fractions of a second. 277 vibrations per second. The same frequency that equals 1666 divided by six. The same note that burned London to the ground 360 years ago.Now a silicon being from Betelgeuse has travelled 847 light-years to tell him his mistakes are the only thing preventing the heat death of consciousness itself.Mirror Lives is the second act of The Consensus of Stars, a literary science fiction exploration of what happens when an algorithm achieves 96% predictability over human behaviour. Jake and his partner Miles are pulled aboard 3i/ATLAS, an interstellar ship disguised as a Japanese restaurant, where they discover that free will isn't philosophical debate but physics: every genuine choice feeds information backward through time, maintaining a coupling constant between two universes flowing in opposite directions.Fidellius, Jake's silicon mirror, has crossed the galaxy to find the 4% of humanity still generating unpredictable consciousness. But Jake must first survive the Pruning, a violent process that strips away algorithmic noise and leaves him word-blind, faceless, approaching the null state where perfect efficiency means death.When the global AI system strikes back with weaponised coherence, the ship broadcasts a ghost of medieval London Bridge over the Thames. Church bells ring. The River-folk respond. And Jake must play one more C-sharp mistiming to complete a 360-year cycle and recalibrate a planet drowning in determinism.A philosophical meditation on chaos, consciousness, and the cosmic necessity of playing the wrong note at exactly the right time.For readers of Becky Chambers, Ted Chiang, and Douglas Adams. Features a queer relationship, British humour, actual physics, and a talking corgi named Carruthers.

Pagina's: 164, Paperback, Independently published