Alderamin IV

Alderamin IV is a literary first-contact novel about a containment mission that became its opposite. In 1961, the Soviet Tsar Bomba leaves a flash of light traveling north toward the star Alderamin in Cepheus — forty-nine light-years from Earth. Alien observers detect it. Their Standing Council deliberates for two years and approves a slowing mission: two engineered agents, sent to integrate quietly into Earth's scientific community and delay humanity's emergence into the interstellar neighborhood. The agents arrive in 2093. By the end of their working lifetime on Earth, the four humans they have come to live among have crossed every threshold the Council had voted to keep them from — artificial general intelligence, longevity escape, substrate consciousness, gravity propulsion, the first crewed-equivalent interstellar mission. Despite their mission to interfere, they ended up helping Earth achieve their goals. Told from the senior alien's first-person perspective in retrospective narration from substrate residence in the early twenty-second century, the novel introduces a new intelligent species — the Lonai of Hareven — to the reader and to the world it depicts.