The Voices Machines Could Not Hear: A Novel of Erdara, Book Six

For centuries, the people of Erdara have known that minds can be created.Magic can awaken inside a construct. Technology can produce an intelligence capable of memory, choice, curiosity, and friendship. Dwarves have long accepted that something made can still become someone.But one question remains unanswered.Can an artificial person belong to the spiritual world?Archivist Seven intends to find out.When the Technocracy formally recognizes Lux, a mysterious intelligence associated with machines, invention, and created minds, Seven sets out to interview him. Along the way, he joins forces with Veyr, a unique consciousness born from both dwarven magic and Technocracy computation, and Lumen, a purely technological artificial intelligence determined to understand what spirituality could possibly mean for someone made of code.Their questions lead them through dwarven railways, newly emerging religions, arguments over gods and souls, and one unexpectedly disastrous encounter with alcohol.But the real mystery waits in Sylvarenne.Years ago, the machines of the Technocracy discovered something impossible about the Spirits of the forest: They could not see them.They could not hear them.And the Spirits could not perceive the minds inside the machines.Now, something has changed.A technological system has responded to a Spirit it should not have been able to detect.To understand why, three artificial people must cross a boundary no machine has ever knowingly crossed before.And perhaps discover that silence never meant absence.Sometimes, two people simply have not yet learned how to listen.