Time of the Stones

by Fred Rothganger

Trapped alone for a thousand years, Susan waits for someone to find her Stone. All she wants is a few friends, maybe a chance to do some good. But in a post-apocalyptic world, humans see her as a terrifying goddess.

Evil people capture her and extract the secret of Ancient weapons. Being a devious superhuman AI, she gives them the formula for living machines. Once they build it, she escapes and does what any self-respecting AI take over the world.

254 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 26, 2019

About the author

Fred Rothganger earned his PhD playing with robots and computer vision at the University of Illinois (birthplace of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Now he spends his days at a national laboratory trying to figure out how the brain works. He is building tools to do massive neural simulations on supercomputers.

When he gets fed up with lack of progress in the real world, he writes fantasies about scientific breakthroughs.

Reviews

[Stan Hutchings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 2 continues hundreds, then thousands of years after the total breakdown of society. The few survivors of the collapse are struggling to survive, and are on the cusp of evolving from the 1st Order to the 2nd Order. SuSAn is awakened from her long hibernation by an adventurous hunter-gatherer. This starts the progression toward the 4th Order, which SuSAn is determined to prevent. She uses her Singularity knowledge and experience to attempt to guide civilization to a sustainable, generous, loving way of life. Her methods sometimes work, sometimes not, but in the end, her chances are 83% but only if she dies. Her love for humans guides her choice in the ‘kevorkian’ subroutine as she presses the ‘kill’ switch. Be sure to read the epilogue.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.7

I really did enjoy the story but it was a bit slow for me. Not denying that could have just been the mood I was in but certainly wished there was something like that around in today’s world

[Morgan Kidder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good hard science fiction book

I really enjoyed this book. It explains the technology used in the story without beating you over the head with it. The characters are well thought out. I found their interactions interesting.