Mindbug

At a time when we almost despair over the social trajectories driven by growing numbers of people losing their minds to internet gibberish, Mindbug-Twilight's Last Gleaming is a high-concept, speculative SF thriller journeying toward a more enlightened future that found the cure.

The action revolves around Joel Morgansteen, Ph.D. of Divinity, who teams with an AI, hoping to demonstrate computational proof of God in the world's Holy texts. Their discovery proves startling and unites the world's religions-in an All-Faiths fatwah on the good professor.

His subsequent perils in his native New York weave with others' challenges. Chief of whom is Purity Luna, a girl of unique talent fleeing Evangia at the heart of a crumbling USA, and Seer Zeitmann, a future historian who uses a synthetic wormhole to observe the struggles of those in our barbaric era.

Against all of them stand many villains, including a plague of assassins, a priest willing to wreck time, bounty hunters, and Rapture Apostles hacking a Shield of Jesus ICBM. Their common thread is our unspoken fear that as science advances, Faith plus enough technology equals extinction.

By contrast, Zeitmann chronicles for his ChronoTour, Sparking the Re-Enlightenment, that "to save ourselves, we had to lose all faith in humanity." A foundation of his utopia but a strange notion to his ancestors, illuminated by venturing into the world of Mindbug where the dark and grim occur, but the bright hope of a humane, amazing future feels possible.

The tapestry of tales is literary, fast-paced, high-brow, low-brow, subversive, imaginative, smart, humorous, crazy-and thought-provoking.

Let Mindbug-Twilight's Last Gleaming infect you with sparks of hopepunk and futuristic optimism.