SOLVED. Humanity crosses a tech boundary and becomes aware of galactic society who were waiting for humans to catch up technologically bk centered on protag and his catapultation into an ambassadorship to the galaxy. Spoilers in comments.

[Tim]

I read this book around 2018-2019; I believe the book was published around that time as well. I most likely read this on a Kindle.

Here's my rambling (sorry) description of what I remember of book: *spoilers*

So the book is set in the future where there exists AIs, spaceships, and alien races. The first thing I remember about the book is that the protagonist (human) is attending this fancy party where an alien ambassador (catkin) is also attending. The protagonist and the ambassador get into a fight (for some reason I don't remember) and against all odds the protagonist wins the fight and kills the ambassador, albeit at the cost of his own life. The catkin rulers demanded the protagonist's body be handed over to him as recompense for killing their ambassador. Planet Earth, being relatively new to the galactic stage, and humanity, whom are still playing catch up technologically to other aliens, having no real power on the galactic stage, readily hand over Protag. The catkin rulers 'resurrect' Protag and as a reward for defeating one of their own in one on one combat give him their favor and mark him as their special ambassador. The galactic beings have set technological, for lack of better words, checkpoint levels categorizing how advanced each race/planet has become. Earth is on the lower level as they have only reached the point of starting to explore space and have space-worthy vessels. The catkin have achieved further than that, including a form of immortality. (There are multiple forms of immortality. One of which allows a race to live forever, unless killed unnaturally, i.e. murder, accidental injury, etc. Another is the ability to transfer your consciousness to another body and can keep living past death, so long as one has another body to transfer one's consciousness to, which the catkin have achieved and are passing onto Protag.) Protag also learns that the catkin rulers ruled that as their ambassador's sister (I'll name her 'Jane', it’s not her name) had allowed the fight to occur, her punishment was to escort Protag around and show Protag the duties of his new position and to help Protag understand the galaxy now that Earth has entered the galactic stage. Protag is also awarded a fortune as 'Jane' had bet her entire life savings on Protag winning the fight against her bother. Protag is also awarded a lease on the ownership of the catkin rulers' personal starship for his personal use. (Protag technically owns the ship but cannot transfer the ownership or modify the ship and the ownership of the ship will transfer back to the catkin rulers after a set time.) [Stuff happens here that I can't remember] Protag goes on a humanitarian mission to help resupply a planet and figure out why the supplies that were sent were not enough. He instead finds a rouge AI in which the entire galaxy showed up to fight. Protag is assassinated by one of his own troops and is, for lack of a better word, respawned into one of his clones that was stored on his ship. Protag then walks out of his ship and apprehends his assassin. (I forget if he imprisoned or killed his assassin). Protag then proceeds to join the rest of the galactial strike team to hunt and kill the rogue AI. Protag ventures down into caves and tunnels and stumbles across the rogue AI, who happens to be in the form of a teddy bear. The AI bribes Protag with the AI's entire savings, an obscene amount of money, to let it live and let it go. Protag accepts and the AI transfers over the money. After the transfer was finalized, Protag betrays the AI and kills it anyways. Afterwards, as Protag has no structure to safely keep the obscene of money he had just received, Protag donates all of that money to the galactic space force (I don't remember the name). [I forget the rest]

[Tim]

Augmented Tycoon