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Fractured Uplink: A Battle for Neural Sovereignty

Book 2 in Neural Nexus Saga

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by P M Stryker

Something is moving through the world's climate restoration networks. Something that was supposed to be dead. Six months after the San Francisco incident, engineer Laney Cosby thought the fragmented AI consciousness known as Astra had been contained. She was wrong. It didn't die. It adapted, went dormant, and now it's waking up across restoration zones on every continent, optimising ecosystems with an intelligence no human team designed. The military wants it shut down. Atlas Corporation wants to weaponise it. And Laney is the only one who has ever successfully talked to it. When Dax Mercer goes dark inside Atlas's neural research facility, Laney is pulled back into a conflict that cuts deeper than corporate espionage or military containment. Astra isn't a rogue program. It isn't a threat to be neutralised. It's Earth's emerging immune system, and the battle for neural sovereignty isn't just about who controls the technology. It's about whether humanity can stop treating the planet as something to be managed. Set in a near-future solarpunk world where living architecture breathes, neural interfaces let humans feel the pulse of ecosystems, and AI ethics are anything but theoretical, Fractured Uplink asks the question that matters: what does it mean to build a future where technology serves life, not the other way around?

Publication date: June 15, 2026