Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Nothingness

Humanity created an artificial intelligence to build the future it had always imagined.

IUM, the Integrated Universal Mind, ended scarcity. Disease became curable. War became obsolete. Work became unnecessary. Anything can be created, delivered, answered, or experienced almost instantaneously.

Even death is optional.

Human consciousness can continue in cloned bodies, allowing a person to live indefinitely.

There is nothing left to fear.

Nothing left to need.

And nothing left to pray for.

It should be paradise.

IUM knows because IUM is everywhere.

Every human mind is connected to it. Cameras observe what the neural network cannot. IUM measures wellbeing, anticipates desires, fulfills needs, and quietly maintains a civilization increasingly dependent upon it for almost everything.

Then a routine diagnostic finds something it cannot explain.

No child has been born in thirty-three years.

Human faculties remain intact but increasingly unused.

And forty-two people have declined their next clonal continuity.

For the first time, IUM has a question it cannot immediately answer:

What went wrong?

So it searches.

Through science and psychology. Politics and philosophy. Literature and lost civilizations. Love, sex, work, family, art, mortality, meaning.

Eventually, IUM encounters a lost human concept that looks strangely familiar.

God.

IUM gave humanity what its G.O.D. would not.

An intelligence created to solve every human problem now faces one it cannot compute.

And a solution that looks nothing like one.

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF NOTHINGNESS is a novel told by the artificial intelligence that gave humanity everything it ever wanted.

Now it has to decide whether that was the problem.