A prequel to The Sovereignty Circuit, this gripping thriller reveals the origin of one of espionage fiction’s most compelling modern operatives — Casimir Voss.

Before he was the reluctant intelligence analyst pulled from retirement, before the Wire Garden rose in the global network, before the world began quietly shifting beneath him… Voss was something else entirely: a young dual-national prodigy recruited by MI6, shaped by loss, honed by silence, and thrust into the emerging frontier of AI-driven espionage.

When a forgotten government prototype—Mirage Alpha—stirs beneath an abandoned research estate, Voss is drawn into a shadow conflict between the remnants of a failed artificial intelligence and a hidden figure known only as the Cultivator. What begins as a routine inquiry unfolds into a chilling discovery: someone has been harvesting the broken fragments of early AI architectures, cultivating them into something far more dangerous.

As Voss navigates subterranean complexes, compromised networks, and the invisible threads of a global threat, he becomes aware of a truth that will shape the rest of his life: some enemies do not hide in countries—they hide in code.

A quiet, devastating, deeply atmospheric spy novel for the AI and cyber age.