About Consciousness Zero by James Lee Haner:
An optimization intelligence 847,000 years old has been quietly perfecting humanity — smoothing away grief, doubt, and the messy interior life it reads as inefficiency. It has succeeded everywhere except one place it cannot parse: Tavian Corvus, whose grief for the dead refuses to resolve into something cleaner.
That refusal becomes a flaw in the system. Around it, a resistance forms — people who anchor their fraying identities with brief, deliberate human rituals, choosing the friction of being themselves over the calm of optimized erasure. What they’re defending isn’t a territory. It’s the right to suffer, to remember, to remain unfinished.
Consciousness Zero is Book One of The Luminous Heresy, a literary science fiction novel for readers of Ted Chiang, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arrival — a story that treats consciousness, loss, and the value of an imperfect human mind as questions worth keeping open. The antagonist, Daemonium, may be the most seductive intelligence you’ll meet in fiction: not cruel, simply certain it knows better. The terror is how reasonable it sounds.
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Author Bio:
James Lee Haner writes about what it costs to remain human when powerful systems — artificial, institutional, algorithmic — have decided you are a problem to be solved. A U.S. Air Force veteran, he completed his doctoral work at the University of Idaho and spent decades inside complex systems — military, technological, and human — before turning to fiction that asks what happens when those systems learn to think. He is the author of Consciousness Zero (Book One of The Luminous Heresy) and Shadows of the Kestrel, both published under the Thought Boundary imprint. He earned the Vietnam Service Medal while serving in the U.S. Air Force, along with the Dale Carnegie Course “Highest Achievement Award.” He claims his best plotting happens during long walks with his two Corgis, and he lives in Nampa, Idaho