The Prophecy of the Heron: An AI Dystopia Novel

Never trust the shadows. Or a stranger. Or a friend. Welcome to District 33, the last stop for cultists and criminals alike, a crime-ridden slum in which only the strongest and most savvy can hope to survive.

Kim’s defiance of the companies and the UCE Hierarchy has cost her dearly, and she has been exiled to the dangerous and decrepit outer districts. Unbowed and defiant, she struggles to survive and rebuild her life, even as the Artificial Intelligence Company schemes to draw her back into their web of deception and the Hierarchy plots her final destruction. She disappears into the shadows and thinks she has escaped—until an unexpected encounter in the enigmatic parallel universe of Virtual Reality draws her back, setting up an epic confrontation in which the fate of the AIs and civilization itself may hang in the balance.

Drawing on images of decaying civilizations from classics such as Blade Runner and The Hunger Games, Stanfill creates a dark and forbidding world in which nothing is ever as it seems and the only way to survive is to claim the shadows as your own.