We Lived on the Horizon

The walled city of Bulwark shelters one of the last pockets of humanity behind an altruism-based economy, where citizens live in comfort or squalor depending on what their ancestors gave to the common good. Saint Enita Malovis, an aging bioprosthetic surgeon, has no one to inherit her decades of skill, so she designs and builds a human body to house Nix, the artificial intelligence that has run her household for years. As Nix moves from disembodied system to embodied person, a murder inside the city, the first in living memory, draws both of them into the machinery of Bulwark's hidden inequalities. The novel renders Nix's awakening in a voice full of synesthetic perception and quiet estrangement, a mind learning what it means to have a body and a self.