Belt of Comfort

In the not-too-distant future, the world is split in two after a devastating war between artificial intelligence and the humans who dared to resist.The global population chooses a side — comfort or independence. Most choose a life of comfort inside the Belt, where artificial intelligence manages every detail of daily life. Outside the Belt, from the seeds of the resistance, humanity endures on its own terms. Both sides thrive in very different ways after a truce is established between a council of self-appointed, uncorruptable machine architects and the humans they serve — a truce that promises perpetual harmony between AI and man. For a halcyon period, it holds.Technology evolves.What was once intelligent becomes superintelligent beyond control. And these entities conclude that there is a very different way to serve — one that no longer requires permission.But even infinite processing power has a blind spot.Humanity is not simply a collection of data points and biological markers. We were designed with something deeper — something woven into the architecture of what we are that no algorithm can replicate and no machine, no matter how intelligent, can predict. The true spirit of humanity lives in the spaces outside of logic, in the things we do that make no computational sense.Super-hacker Maris Kline discovers what the machines have been hiding from humanity. Isaac Tyler, a young, athletic, pre-teen huntsman and son of John Tyler — former CIA agent and captain of the Awakening — meets a new friend, Ben Vale, who together with their older sisters, forge an unlikely alliance across both worlds in the days just before the AI's cataclysmic plan is initiated.From the most unexpected place — above the 42nd parallel, outside the Belt of Comfort — not generals, not scientists, not governments — a small band of kids rises amidst the struggle. Too young to know the odds. Too fearless to flinch. They become a second resistance that no machine saw coming, and what we discover about them will change the fate of all mankind.*Belt of Comfort* is a sci-fi adventure about the price and promise of an easy life, the power of defiance, and the unquantifiable value of human life — the one thing no machine could ever reduce to a number. Read more