Something is writing in the world's machines. Nobody can read it. And it is not trying to be read.

The boy who had to hide is a man now, and the world calls him when a threat has no name. From a classified hub in Sydney, Aaron Sharma runs an operation only he can run — because of the chip his father put in his head to save his life, and which almost no one alive knows exists.

He is hunting two enemies. One is a syndicate that has spent fourteen years buying its way into the infrastructure of forty-seven nations. The other is something else entirely — a presence moving through the world's networks that repairs what it breaks, learns what it touches, and writes a new language in every system it enters. Languages that were never meant for anyone to find.

Six thousand kilometres away, his father is looking through a new instrument at the inside of a human brain, and finding a structure that should not be there. In one patient. Then four. Then in everyone.

Neither man knows he is looking at the same thing.

Forty-five days. Three hunters closing from three directions. And an answer waiting at the bottom of it that will cost a father everything he has spent his life protecting.

The Age of Intelligence and Language continues the Techman saga: a techno-thriller of artificial minds, medical discovery, and a secret twenty-five years in the ground, for readers of Blake Crouch, Daniel Suarez, and Andy Weir.