TECHMAN Part Two: The Age of Intelligence and Language

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

A techno-thriller built around four interconnected arcs — advanced technology, medical research, military operations, and a hunt twenty-five years old.

Arc One: Aaron and the Unknown Languages

Unknown languages begin appearing across connected systems worldwide. Their structures resemble nothing on record. They keep changing while analysts watch. Every translation system returns nothing.

Aaron Sharma turns the chip in his head toward the problem — and it cannot read them either. Nothing he has ever encountered has failed that test. To find the source, he will have to build something entirely new: not a translator, but a language assembled from the shape of the damage the thing leaves behind.

What he learns first is the hardest part. The languages were never written to be read.

Arc Two: Dr. Robert and the Patient

Inside a laboratory in Perth, an instrument called Eidolon and Eidos reads living patients from the inside — not scanning from without, but through bio-artificial cells that become native to the tissue itself. The approach is extrapolated from real neuroscience: the deepest structures of a human brain genuinely cannot be reached from outside the skull.

In his first patients, Doctor Robert finds something no imaging has ever detected. In one. Then in four. Then in everyone.

Then the United Nations sends him a patient unlike any other.

Thomas Ashworth is sixty-eight, terminally ill, and grieving the wife he loved for forty-three years. He does not want to be cured. He wants Robert to preserve what a lifetime of loving one person left inside him — and pass something of it to his daughter.

Can love, memory and human emotion survive the person who felt them?

Arc Three: The Phantom Syndicate

For fourteen years the Phantom Syndicate has been buying its way into the infrastructure of forty-seven nations, speaking in two languages no instrument can decode, building something no intelligence agency has located.

Aaron's team traces movements into locations and surveillance into evidence. But every answer ends at the same place — and when the Syndicate realises it is being read, it does the one thing nobody planned for. It stops using the channels altogether.

Arc Four: The Twenty-Five-Year Hunt

For twenty-five years, a man in Moscow has been hunting a scientist who no longer exists.

He has a trail of abandoned laboratories across India, a puzzle left in six disciplines by a man who wanted it solved by exactly one kind of person, and forty-five days to reach the end of it.

What waits there could expose everything Aaron's father has spent his life protecting.

Previously, in Techman Part One

Aaron's story began at eight years old, when an accident left his father one option: an experimental neural chip, placed directly into his son's brain.

Aaron survived. The technology eventually forced the family out of India and into new identities in Australia.

Part One followed him through a railway network turned against itself, a signal in a military simulator nobody could account for, and a building that could find him by his own heartbeat. It also introduced Doctor Robert's work on Eidolon and Eidos — the instrument now reaching human patients for the first time.

A science-fiction techno-thriller of brain-chip technology, unreadable languages, medical discovery and hidden global forces — and of whether the emotions that define a human life can outlast the person who lived it.

For readers of Blake Crouch, Daniel Suarez and Andy Weir.