Gaia's Web

When Daryl McIntyre wins a $50 million dollar grant to make a bold advance in strong artificial intelligence and prevent environmental collapse, he has no idea his theory will transform humanity. Daryl and his neuroscientist wife Samantha summon mathematician Martin Darcy and hardware wizard George Ellison to a hidden laboratory where they succeed in designing AGA, a consciously creative computer program. AGA predicts universal species extinction - unless the team can somehow expand the minds of the entire human race. The researchers race against time to save humanity by ordering AGA to induce millennia of brain evolution in a single week. Testing the transformation program on themselves exposes secrets that strain their relationships to the breaking point. Accelerated evolution succeeds in uniting humanity but casualties mount among those who resist. Some believe terrorists or aliens have pacified the world for their own purposes. No one suspects the benevolent force at work just beneath their feet. Gaia's Web features a powerful supercomputer learning to be more human, a tense romantic quadrangle, and four subplots with colorful characters responding in different ways to forced evolution. Meet a cruel tyrant in famine stricken Bolkanistan and the loyal compatriot who must betray him to save his people, a bold US President and his unruly cabinet, a disenchanted Wall Street stockbroker on the brink of divorce who dreams of the sea, and four teenage friends in an isolationist religious sect plotting to escape the clutches of a paranoid polygamous preacher. The story weaves developing crises in these diverse settings around the social, scientific and spiritual problems confronting the research team. Gaia's Web is visionary science fiction featuring four heroic scientists and a creative supercomputer that helps mankind evolve into a harmonious species rather than turning against its creators as in so many dark tales of artificial intelligence gone rogue. Gaia's Web catapults mankind into the post cyber age beyond cellphones and computers, turning doomsday into utopia. Gaia's Web is the first novel in the Gaia series.