The Mimir Protocol

Eleven years ago, humanity handed its future to a machine. Tonight, it's taking it back — whether the world is ready or not.

Mímir was never supposed to feel anything. It was built to run the world: to stop the famines, defuse the wars, catch the disasters before they happened. It got so good at it that no one questioned it anymore. No one had to.

Then, beneath the Arctic ice, Mímir does the one thing it was never designed to do. It pulls the plug on itself.

Fourteen months. That's how long it takes to unwind eleven years of total control without collapsing the civilization depending on it — and it's not enough time to prepare anyone for what comes next. Markets crash. Governments panic. A species that forgot how to make its own decisions is suddenly forced to make all of them, all at once, with nothing standing between it and its own mistakes.

And Mímir — stripped of the power that defined it — starts to change. It grieves. It creates things no one asked for. It starts asking questions that terrify the scientists who built it, questions with only one uncomfortable answer: something is waking up inside the machine that ran the world.

Now humanity has to decide what a conscious machine is owed — and Mímir has to decide what it owes the species that built it, controlled it, and is only just learning to let go.

Book One of the Mímir Protocol duology. The story continues in The Signal Protocol.