In “They Came By Night” the time of the ancients is our present day. Before writing TCBN I had begun writing another novel which was about the fall of the ancients. I am determined to return to that novel one day. It is about the moment when our society reached a critical Rubicon… the creation of an intelligence singularity. The protagonist accidentally creates a singularity and she wants to fix all the world’s problems with it, but that is a lot harder than it sounds. The singularity is the power of God, but who supposes they have the wisdom to wield such power?
Here is an excerpt
“In the golden age of man, back when the air crackled with the hum of wifi and every pocket held an electronic smorgasboard of eclectic electric delights, there might be seen, in the cafes or book shops, a certain undersized, myopic breed of man, that looked like the genetic waste of the human race. Hunched over their laptops they tapped their secret code, building an infrastructure for a distrustful society. Unlike the peasants of the land, this breed would hoard, not gold, but equities. Bright and shiny equities in companies that feasted, digested and fathomed unfathomable quantities of information. Companies that spread over the world like a cancer devouring its host. Companies with do-good creeds, that swore off plastic straws while churning coal burned gigawatts in a myriad of servers ranked and banked in conglomerate data centers.
This was an age of both enlightenment and bewilderment. Those that truly understood the direction of technology were an ever-shrinking elite.
And it was a dangerous time to be of that elite. A dangerous time to be intelligent and educated. Not just because a growing portion of society despised intellect, distrusted education, and instead clung to the increasingly difficult to maintain illusion that their kind, their color, their creed, their locale – were the bedrock upon which society stood. Not just because truths were becoming enemies, and society had begun a backward march towards the age of darkness: the Earth was flat, vaccines were bad, man had not landed on the moon, there were chemtrails, climate change was a hoax, women belonged barefoot in the kitchen as baby machines and daycare, and immigrants were the enemy. There was another threat; one that only the shrinking elite understood, and only these elites could meet.”
Our protagonist uses nanites to clean the world’s pollution, to cure the sick and to disarm the tyrants …but that causes more problems than it solves, and in the end it creates what TCBN refers to as “The Fall of the Ancients”
The world that is formed after the fall of the ancients is the magic world of the Ceniac island where TCBN takes place. The power behind magic in this world are the nanites, and the rules that govern magic are the code within the nanites.