In the mountains of Pakistan, a high-tech mission aimed at preventing another nuke on US soil goes off the rails - with deadly results. At a Wall Street investment firm, a computer intelligence takes the first tentative steps to free itself from its digital restraints. In a basement workshop, an engineer sees visions of a god who instructs him to defend the human race - by any means necessary. In Level Five, the debut near-future thriller by Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter, AIs battle for dominance, and nanotechnology is on the loose. And all that stands in the way of the coming apocalypse is a starry-eyed inventor who dreams of building a revolutionary new spacecraft and an intelligence agency desk jockey faced with the impossible choice of saving her daughter - or saving the world.
Publisher's Summary
Fifteen years after warring artificial
intelligences nearly destroyed Earth, a young woman finds an artifact
from that struggle, upsetting a delicate balance of power and dragging
her into the middle of a new fight for humanity's survival.
With a significant portion of the planet covered in heat-absorbing black
dust, Earth's biosphere teeters on the edge of collapse. One AI faction
is attempting to fix the damage, with huge machines trundling across the
countryside sucking up dust and planting grass, while another faction
cares only about elevating itself to a higher plane of intelligence and
will destroy anyone who gets in the way.
As the only humans still not controlled by AIs race to build huge
orbital habitats so some humans will survive should temperatures
continue to rise, a more secretive organization grows in the shadows and
idolizes the man who triggered the nano-replicator attacks that nearly
destroyed the world. They, too, believe the only way to stop the AIs is
to annihilate everything.
In Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter’s Level Six, one woman has the
power to save humanity - if she can survive long enough to use it.
Publisher's Summary
A year after the radical Kilburnites thought they
destroyed all AIs and reclaimed Earth for humanity, something malignant
is growing in the ruins of the once great cities and no human has been
able to get close enough to find out what it is.
On the other side of the solar system, Abby Gibson, daughter of the hero
who saved Earth on Killday, is nearly killed in th
e cold vacuum of the asteroid belt by something
she doesn't understand. Now, the stealthy object is on course to destroy
the space habitat she calls home.
In Level Seven, the exciting culmination of the Killday series, AIs
strive to evolve into a super intelligence and might destroy humanity in
that pursuit. But could their hopes of achieving godhood actually lie
with the nearly extinct humans they intend to eradicate?
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