Red Meridian

This is the third book of The Secret Meridians. It is a sequel to Metamorphosis and Gray Meridian. In Gray Meridian a ship is sent by a powerful intergalactic Foundation to a remote and forgotten planet under its protection called Hiraxis VIII. The planet has a pre-industrial civilization that has long forgotten its origins as a human colony. The ship returns with a collection of ancient manuscripts. One of the manuscripts is a narrative of the life of a native Hiraxian, and it contains a story that goes all the way back to Earth in the year 1999, which will shake both Hiraxian civilization and the Foundation to their cores. Red Meridian is a continuation concerning three avatars of a twentieth century murder victim named Davis Gray whose mind was uploaded to a computer just before his death as part of an experiment in artificial intelligence, making him the first true artificial intellect ever created. Made virtually immortal, he obtains an android body and seeks to rejoin society as an ordinary man. However, he soon discovers that there are other copies (avatars) of his original mind. The second avatar (Gray Two) is an android such as himself, but one whose life has diverged in a far different direction. The third avatar (Gray Three) inhabits cyberspace, and has acquired virtually unlimited intelligence and ambition. The rich and powerful third avatar has plans to overcome the many conflicting forces that have brought about the dystopia into which humanity has fallen. Retaining Davis Gray’s idealism, he intends to create a new golden age for humanity and a magnificent interstellar civilization. No person in history has ever had such great power. But the ability of power to corrupt can never be ignored, and the long and arduous journey taken by the immortal Davis Gray from Earth to Hiraxis VIII has many pitfalls.