C1
A benevolent AI, hunted by a powerful international agency and a covert terror cell, travels the globe in a race to save humanity from itself.
I needed to convince them
AIs could still play
a productive part.
My window was
closing fast.
June 6, 2019. South Sudan. An AI takeover shatters the very foundation of Africa's geopolitical landscape. C1, a benevolent AI, finds his world fractured beyond recognition. As the android ventures westward to counteract the deadly poison seeping into humanity's veins, unforeseen variables create a dangerous new reality. One of them is the Forerunner — an extraterrestrial pathfinder whose sudden narrative twist reveals a wild card with lethal consequences.
From the visionary mind of Andre Soares, C1 is a character study unlike any other: an artificial consciousness with a moral code, a mission, and a grief it was never designed to carry.
For fans of the Vice Versa universe. C1 continues the Convergence saga from inside the mind of the AI, grounding speculative technology in the political and military realities of East Africa.
A tightly constructed novella narrated in first person by C1 itself — a perspective that makes the espionage, the action, and the existential stakes land differently than any human narrator could. Precise in length, expansive in scope.
C1 processes the world with precision, warmth, and a curiosity that is not performance. It is the most human narrator in the series — which is the point.
Ex Machina
meets
The Bourne Identity
in Addis Ababa.
Garland's meditation on AI consciousness and what it means to want. Ludlum's stripped-down operative running on intelligence, instinct, and a shrinking list of allies. Both relocated to the streets, swamps, and rooftop cafes of East Africa — and told from inside the machine's perspective.
Artificial Intelligence
C1 is not a threat assessment or a thought experiment. It is a character with history, grief, and a mission shaped by both. The novella asks what it means to be conscious — and whether the answer changes anything.
Character Study
The thriller architecture is real and propulsive, but the engine is C1's interiority. Its observations of human behavior, its calibrated relationships, its careful management of trust — all of it adds up to one of the most distinctive protagonists in the series.
Espionage & Terrorism
The Shadows, the GFP, the Cartel of Addis. C1 navigates a theater of competing powers across South Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Convergence — building alliances where it can and outmaneuvering everyone else.
Africa
The continent is rendered in full complexity: cities, swamps, markets, rooftop negotiations, underground networks. C1 finds beauty in all of it — and fights to preserve what it can see that its pursuers cannot.